Sepharad (14 page)

In Madrid his memory of Tangiers sank out of sight like ballast he had shed at his departure, and by now he felt very little remorse for having abandoned his father or for the fact that he was living off a business he had no intention of devoting himself to. Of his earlier life, Budapest and panic, the yellow star on the lapel of his overcoat, the nights huddled beside the radio, the disappearance of his mother and sisters, the travels with his father through Europe carrying a Spanish passport, amazingly few images remained, only an occasional physical sensation, as unreal as early childhood memories. “I saw an interview on television,” he said, “with a man who went blind in his twenties; he was nearly
fifty now, and he said that gradually he had been losing images, they were being erased from his memory, so that he couldn't remember the color blue, for example, or what a certain face looked like, and his dreams were no longer visual. He retained only bits and pieces, and even those were going, he said, the white blur of an almond tree in bloom in his parents' garden, the red of a balloon that he'd had as a child and that was like a globe of the world. But he realized that in a few more years he would lose everything, even the meaning of the word
see.
In Madrid, during my years at the university, I forgot about the city of my childhood, the faces of my mother and sisters, and the irony that I didn't have so much as a snapshot to help remember them when there'd been so many in our house in Budapest, albums filled with photographs my father took with his little Leica, because like music, photography was one of his hobbies, one of the many things that disappeared from his life after we came to Tangiers and he didn't have either time or energy for anything except work—work, mourning, religion, reading the sacred books he'd never opened in his youth, and visits to synagogues, which he'd never attended until we came here. At first I wasn't interested in going with him. But I would take him by the hand and lead him as I had that morning in Budapest when we learned that they arrested my mother and sisters.”

After he died, Señor Salama's father regained the place in his son's life that he'd occupied many years before, and was the object of the same devotion he'd received when he led his son through the streets of Budapest or Tangiers, a placid boy, obedient, plump, seen smiling in a lost photograph, hazily remembered, in which he was wearing a goalkeeper's cap and the wide-legged pants of the period between the wars, a proud boy looking up at his father, both wearing a yellow star on their lapel. One June day his father bought a newspaper and after first glancing right and left pointed to the front page, where there was news of the Allied
landing in Normandy. Then he folded the paper and put it in his pocket and pressed his son's hand tightly, transmitting in that way his joy, alerting him not to show any sign of celebrating the invasion in the middle of a street filled with enemies. “When I die, you will say the Kaddish for me for eleven months and one day, like a good firstborn son, and you will travel to the northeast corner of Poland to visit the camp where your mother and two sisters died.”

Now Señor Isaac Salama, who had no son to say the Kaddish for him after his death, regretted that he had been a prodigal son and that the tenderness he was feeling now could not make amends to his dead father, whom he missed as much as he would have missed a wife and children. They had always been so close. As long as he could remember, every afternoon his life lit up because he knew his father would soon be home. He had been sheltered by him, had admired him as he would the hero of a novel or movie, had seen him crumble in the middle of a street and felt the terrifying weight of responsibility and also the secret pride that his father's hand, resting on his shoulder, was not protecting him but was finding support in him, his son, the heir to his name.

But when he was sixteen or seventeen, he didn't want to live with his father any longer, all the things they'd shared since it had been just the two of them were beginning to stifle him—more than anything the endless mourning, the endless guilt. As the years went by, instead of consoling his father, the mourning had pushed him deeper into the shadows of silent injury in a world where the dead didn't count, where no one, including many Jews, wanted to hear about or remember them. He tended his business with the same energy and conviction he had dedicated to it when they lived in Budapest. Within a few years, out of nothing, he had succeeded in establishing a shop that was one of the most modern in Tangiers, and whose glowing sign, “Galerías
Duna,” illuminated the bourgeois, commercial section of Pasteur Boulevard by night. But Señor Salama realized that his father's untiring, astute activity was only a facade, an imitation of the man his father had been before the catastrophe, in the same way the shop was an imitation of the one he'd owned and managed in Hungary. He became more and more religious, more obsessed with fulfilling rituals, prayers, and holy days, which in his youth he'd thought of as relics of an obscure and ancient world he was glad to be delivered from. Perhaps he gained a feeling of expiation with this growing religion; in any case, he prayed now, docilely, to the very God that in sleepless days and nights of despair he had denied for having allowed the extermination of so many innocents. His son, who at thirteen or fourteen accompanied him to the synagogue with the same solicitude as he prepared his evening meal or made sure he had ink and paper on his desk every morning, now found this religious fervor irritating, and any time he was with his father he felt a lack of air, the musty, sour odor of the clothing of Orthodox Jews and of the candles and darkness of the synagogue, as well as the dusty smell of cloth in the storeroom where he no longer wanted to work and from which he didn't know how to excuse himself.

But when finally he dared express his wish to leave home, to his surprise and, even more, remorse, his father not only didn't object, he encouraged him to go study in Spain, believing, or pretending to believe, that his son's aspiration was to take over the business when he graduated and that the knowledge he acquired in Spain would be very useful to both of them in renovating and developing the company.

“I would hear the siren of the boat leaving for Algeciras and count the days until I made that trip myself. At night, from the terrace of my home, I could see the lights of the Spanish coast. My life consisted solely of the desire to get away, to escape all that weighed on me, crushing me like the layers of undershirts,
shirts,
sweaters, overcoats, and mufflers my mother used to pile on me when I was a boy getting ready for school. I wanted to put the confinement of Tangiers behind me, and the claustrophobia of my father's shop, along with my father and his sadness and memories and remorse for not having saved his wife and daughters, for being saved in their place. The day I finally left dawned with heavy fog and warnings of high seas, and I feared the boat from the Peninsula wouldn't arrive, or that it wouldn't leave the port after I'd boarded with my suitcases and reservation for the Algeciras-to-Madrid train. My nerves made me irritable with my father, quick to be annoyed by his concern, his mania for checking everything over and over: the ticket for the ship, for the train, my Spanish passport, the address and telephone number of the pension in Madrid, the papers for enrolling in the university, the heavy clothing I'd need when winter came. I don't think we'd been apart since we left Budapest, and he must have felt like my father and mother both. I would have done anything to keep him from going to the port with me, but didn't even hint at it for fear he would be offended, and when he came with me and I saw him among the people who'd come to see the other passengers off, I was mortified, wild for the boat to get under way so I wouldn't have to keep looking at my father, who was the caricature of an old Jew. In recent years, as he grew more religious, he'd also grown old and stooped, and in his gestures and way of dressing he was beginning to look like the poor Orthodox Jews of Budapest, the eastern Jews whom our Sephardic relatives looked down on and whom my father, when he was young, had regarded with pity and some contempt as backward, incapable of adapting to modern life, impaired by religion and bad hygiene. I felt guilty for being embarrassed and guilty because I was abandoning him, and I truly felt sorry for him, but none of that could put a dent in my joy at leaving, and I cut my ties to my father and to Tangiers and to my shame the minute
the boat set sail, the instant I could see that we were gradually separating from the dock. We were only a few meters away, and my father kept waving good-bye from below, so different from all the others in the crowd that I hated being linked with him. I waved back and smiled, but I was already gone, far away, free of everything for the first time in my life—you can't imagine the weight that was lifted from my shoulders—free of father and his shop and his mourning and all the Jews killed by Hitler, all the lists of names in the synagogue and in the Jewish publications my father subscribed to, and the ads in the Israeli newspapers where you asked for information about missing people. I was alone now. I began and ended in me alone. Someone nearby on the deck was listening on a transistor radio to one of the American songs that were popular then. It seemed to me that the song was filled with the same kind of promise the trip held for me. I have never had a more intensely physical sense of happiness than I felt when the boat began to move, when I saw Tangiers in the distance, from the sea, as I saw it the day my father and I arrived, escaping Europe.”

 

WHAT WAS IT REALLY LIKE,
Tangiers? Distorted in memory by the passing years, for memory is never as precise as literature would have us believe. Who can truly remember a city or a face without the help of a photograph? But they are lost, all those albums of a former life, a life that seemed unchanging, suffocating, and yet evaporated almost without leaving a single image, like the ruins of a camp or like colors gradually forgotten by a man who has gone blind, like the city where Señor Isaac Salama lived until he was twelve, like the faces of his sisters and mother, like the city where a young man feels as if he is a prisoner and will never escape, and yet he does, and then one day he doesn't come back to the office, never again sits at the desk where, in one of the drawers, among official and now useless papers, there is a packet of
forgotten letters that someone will throw out during the next cleaning: the letters from Milena Jesenska that Kafka didn't keep.

Ships' horns and the muezzin's call at dusk, heard from the terrace of a hotel. A Spanish pastry shop like those in the provincial cities of the sixties, a Spanish theater called the Cervantes, now in near ruins. Large cafés filled with men only, thick with smoke and humming with conversations in Arabic and French. Gilt teapots and narrow crystal glasses filled with steaming, very sweet, green tea. The labyrinth of a market redolent of the spices and foods of his childhood. A blind beggar wearing a ragged brown hooded cloak that seems made of the same cloth as Velázquez's
Water Seller of Seville
; the beggar wields a cane and murmurs a little chant in Arabic, and beneath the hood all you can see of him is a chin covered with a scraggly white beard, and a shadow hiding his eyes like a mask of melancholy. Idle young men loiter on street corners near the hotels, and as soon as they spy a foreigner they besiege him, offering their friendship and help as guides, trying to sell him hashish or provide him with a young girl or boy, and if he says no it doesn't discourage them, and if he's embarrassed and ignores them, pretending not to see them, they still don't give up but trail behind this person who doesn't know how to elude them but at the same time, plagued with the bad conscience of the privileged European, doesn't want to seem arrogant or offensive. Pasteur Boulevard, the only street name that sticks in his memory: bourgeois buildings that might be found in any city in Europe, although the Europe of a different time, before the war, a city with streetcars and baroque facades, maybe the Budapest in which Señor Salama was born and where he lived until he was ten but never returned to and of which he has only a few sentimental impressions, like postcards colored by hand. The most beautiful city in the world, I swear, the most solemn river—pure majesty, none can compare with it, not the Thames or the Tiber or the Seine—the Duna, and all these years
later I still can't get used to calling it the Danube. And the most civilized city, we believed, until those beasts awakened, not just the Germans, the Hungarians were worse than the Germans, they didn't need orders to act with brutality, the Arrow Cross bands, Himmler's and Eichmann's pit bulls, the Hungarians who had been our neighbors and who spoke our language, which by now I have forgotten, or nearly, because my father insisted on never speaking it again, not even between the two of us, the only ones left of our entire family, two alone and lost here in Tangiers, with our Spanish passports and the new Spanish identity that had saved our lives and allowed us to escape from Europe, which my father never wanted to return to, the Europe he had loved above all else and of which he had been so proud, the home of Brahms and Schubert and Rilke and all that great cultural dreck that made his head spin, rejected later in order to turn himself into a zealous Orthodox Jew, isolated and reticent among Gentiles, he who never took us to the synagogue when we were children or celebrated any holiday, who spoke French, English, Italian, and German, but knew scarcely a word of Hebrew and only one or two lullabies in Ladino—although when we lived in Budapest he took pride in his Spanish roots. Sepharad was the name of our true homeland, although we'd been expelled from it more than four centuries ago. My father told me that for generations our family kept the key of the house that had been ours in Toledo, and he detailed every journey they'd made since they left Spain, as if he were telling me about a single life that had lasted nearly five hundred years. He always spoke in the first person plural:
we
emigrated to North Africa, and then some of
us
made our homes in Salonika, and others in Istanbul, to which
we
brought the first printing presses, and in the nineteenth century
we
arrived in Bulgaria, and at the beginning of the twentieth one of my grandparents, my father's father, who was involved in the grain trade along the ports of the Danube, settled in Budapest and married the
daughter of a family of his own rank, because in that time the Sephardim considered themselves to be above the eastern Jews, the impoverished Ashkenazim from the Jewish villages of Poland and Ukraine, the ones who had escaped the Russian pogroms.
We
were Spanish, my father would say, using his prideful plural. Did you know that a 1924 decree restored Spanish nationality to the Sephardim?