Sepharad (22 page)

Those trips were so rare that the administrative monotony of the tasks I had to perform at my destinations didn't affect my intense and childish sense of adventure. But I traveled seldom not only because so few opportunities presented themselves. Sometimes I sacrificed a trip in order not to upset my wife, who didn't like my being away from home, and who was exhausted from her own job and from caring for our child and didn't always want to understand that my stays in Madrid weren't some capricious escapade but required by my administrative position and that carrying them out well could be to my advantage when eventually it came time for promotion.

Whenever I agreed to go, I had difficulty telling my wife, I would keep putting it off, until in the end I was forced to break
the news with insensitive haste, or, worse, she would get wind of it from someone who called from the office or the travel agency that handled the ticketing. I didn't have to be unfaithful, my natural state was guilt, and the innocuous secret of the upcoming business trip would be as much of a strain on me as an actual affair. I helped weave the entangling web of reproaches and resentment with my cowardice. And up to the last minute I was never sure I was going, because our son might get a fever, or my wife might suddenly be under the weather with a lumbago attack or a difficult period, complaints it seemed I was entirely responsible for, and that would become much worse in my absence, my desertion.

Finally I would leave and still couldn't believe it, and as the taxi took me to the station I would get a rush of happiness mixed with panic, the fear that I might not get to the station on time because the road was blocked, or because I'd waited too long disentangling myself from my family and my life, from the stifling conjugal heat of my apartment, from the irritation and accusation radiating from my wife as she stood with her arms around my son, who would cry even harder when he saw I was leaving; the two of them would be there in the doorway as I waited for the elevator, and my wife's face would be pale, her eyes sad.

 

ONE WINTER MORNING,
on one of those trips to Madrid, I finished my errands at the Ministry of Culture early and found myself with nothing to do for the rest of the day. My train didn't leave until eleven that night. Disappointment was quick to come in Madrid, a vulnerable feeling of being alone in such a big city, where I didn't know anyone, where there was uncertainty and danger everywhere. When you crossed one of those broad avenues, the light always turned red before you could get to the other side, and when you went to a movie at night, you ended up in a
labyrinth of dark streets where you could easily be attacked by someone with a knife, one of those pasty drug addicts who loitered on the corner of the Gran Vía and Calle Hortaleza. I was dazed with loneliness, not because I didn't know anyone anymore, but because I was a nobody, a lowly provincial official who was pulling back into his shell like a snail only three days after fleeing in search of greener pastures and richer air, wandering in circles around the city, carrying his depression with him as if it were a fever that made him long for the shelter of his home and the familiar narrow streets in which he lived his life.

Walking around in a dense fog with no idea of where I was, I ended up at the Retiro, crossing streets that seemed not to be in Madrid, not even Spain, streets with noble buildings and luxuriant trees, the blacktop wet with drizzle, the sidewalks yellow with the newly fallen, broad leaves of plane trees and horse chestnuts. The Prado Museum, the Botanical Garden, the Cuesta de Moyano. At the peak of a wooded hill was a building that resembles a Greek temple: the Observatory. Things opened before me as I approached them through the fog: motionless statues, threatening or serene, a statue of Pio Baroja or Cajal or Galdos, alone in the groves of the deserted park, lost and melancholy in an ostentatious oblivion of bronzes and marbles.

I remember my amazement at the sight of a glass building on the other side of a pond, with columns and filigree of white-painted iron, a white liquefied in the translucent grayness of the morning mist, in the motionless, dark green of the water. I had read in the newspaper that there was an exhibition dedicated to the exile of Spanish Republicans in Mexico in the Crystal Palace of the Retiro. It all comes back, after so many years, an ordinary day of an uneventful trip to Madrid, a walk that by chance led to the Retiro, where amid fog and trees I came upon the Crystal Palace, like one of those enchanted houses that materialize before lost travelers in storybook forests.

I remember glass display cases with newspaper clippings and ration cards, TV monitors showing old films of soldiers wrapped in rags fleeing along the highways toward France, clustered at the border crossings at Port-Bou and Cerbère after the fall of Catalonia. I remember a blackboard and a desk that had been in the first school for Spanish children in Mexico, and a navy-blue student smock with a white celluloid collar, which shook me with unexpected anguish, as did the pages of penmanship exercises written in pencil by children forty years before, and the boxes of paints identical to ones I'd had in school. The smock, too, was very similar to those we wore, and there were the same creased, colored oilcloth maps of Spain that I saw the first time I walked into a schoolroom, except that on these the flag was tricolor: red, yellow, and purple. There was a large photograph of people crowding onto a steamship in a French port. A woman of about fifty was standing next to me, staring at it, murmuring something in a Mexican accent, although there was no one with her. She was breathing hard; I looked at her and saw that she was crying.

“I was on that boat, señor,” she said, hiccuping. She had large eyeglasses and dyed hair and was the only person besides me that morning in the glass building enveloped in fog, as if padded with silence. “I am one of the persons in this picture. I was eight and trembling, afraid my papa would let go of my hand.”

 

NOW I AM IN A
different past, a different morning, not the one in which I walked through the Retiro and fog to the weightless shape of the Crystal Palace, the beautiful and melancholy purple of Republican flags on the shelves of an exhibition, insignia of a country I had lost before I was born. I leave the Ministry of Culture on Plaza del Rey and start walking aimlessly, disheartened before I begin by the hours ahead, in which I have nothing to do and no one to talk to, hours in which I will slowly become infected with the unreality of being alone in a large, unfamiliar city,
of turning into a ghost that from time to time stares back at a stranger reflected in a shopwindow. I look at my watch and calculate that at this hour my friend Juan will be finishing breakfast, reading his newspaper in the Suizo, or maybe he will already have used the pedestrian crosswalk to the post office to mail one of those letters he doesn't want me to know about. Instead of walking back toward the office beside him, both of us dragging our feet, I am wandering around Madrid, leaving to chance the route and choice of streets, and after half an hour I am totally lost, or maybe I've let myself be guided by an old memory independent of my consciousness, rising from the blind and persistent impulse of my feet.
On a certain street there is a certain heavy door,
says one of Borges's poems. I walk along streets with narrow sidewalks and recessed doors, with fish markets and fruit stands and old-fashioned stationery shops and stores selling groceries and notions more antiquated than the ones in the city where I live, with a pullulating mass of cars and people and the strong, working-class voices of Madrid. Remembering, drifting, I head toward a place I shouldn't go, a place I visited only once: Fernando VI, Argensola, Campoamor, Santa Teresa. At some moment, unknowingly, chance has become purpose, and the sequence the street names trace upon the city in which I am a stranger is a coded map, a wound that hasn't hurt for a long time but can still be felt as a slight scar.

Calle Campoamor, at the corner of Santa Teresa; it was here, five years ago, in that time when the years seemed to last much longer, not slip away as they do now. Half a lifetime fit within those five years. I recognize the white shutters on the second-floor balcony. If she comes out on the balcony, she will recognize me, and if I climb the two flights of wooden steps and press the button, the bell will ring not in a dream but in reality, intruding upon the lives of other people, an unwanted surprise. I've heard
almost nothing about her all this time, we barely know each other, we were together only briefly, long ago.

My thoughts and actions are not in sync, just as there is no correspondence between this place and my being here. I walk back and forth, looking up at the balconies, thinking at one point that I see a figure behind the windowpanes. I walk into the foyer, which is open and has that strange smell of damp and old wood that doorways have in Madrid. On one of the mailboxes I see her name, handwritten, beside that of her husband. The name that once made me shiver as I spoke it, and in which are codified every degree of tenderness, uncertainty, pain, and desire, is a common name written by hand on a card on a mailbox, among the names of neighbors who meet her every day in the foyer or on the stairs, and for whom her face is part of the same trivial reality as these streets and this city, where I, the traveler, float among mirages of loneliness.

The bravery of cowards, the strength of the weak, the daring of the faint-hearted: I have come to the landing and without hesitation ring the doorbell. An old door, large, painted dark green, with a brass peephole. Every detail falls back into place, and my agitation and the weakness in my legs are the same as then, even though I am a different person. “Maybe she isn't home,” I think with both hope and disappointment. A few seconds pass, and I don't hear anything, not footsteps, not voices, only the resonance of the bell in silent rooms.

The door opens, and she is looking at me. At first she doesn't recognize me; she wears the suspicious and questioning expression of someone expecting a door-to-door salesman. I realize that I am much heavier now, and I don't have my beard, and my hair is shorter than it was five years ago, thinner too. In her arms she holds a large child with dark skin and curly hair who has a pacifier in his mouth and a dirty bib over his pajama top. A little girl
wearing glasses peers cautiously from behind her, peering at me with her mother's eyes. The boy has stopped crying and is staring at me intently, sniffling and making a slurping, sucking noise with his pacifier.

I recognize the slender face and light gray eyes, the two locks of almost blond hair framing her face, but I can't associate the girl I knew with this carelessly dressed woman who holds in her arms a child so big that he must exhaust her, and who has a little girl who looks so astonishingly like her.

“What a surprise,” she says to me. “I wouldn't have recognized you,” and she smiles a smile that lights up her eyes with the gleam of old times. I apologize. “I was just passing by, and I thought I might as well see if you were in.” I hear my own voice, hoarser than it should be, a voice that hasn't spoken with anyone for hours. “It's a miracle you caught me at home, I was going to take the boy to the doctor, but since I don't have anyone to leave my little girl with I was going to take her too. He's not sick,” she explains, “at least not really sick. As soon as his tonsils get a little inflamed, his temperature shoots up, and I shouldn't get frightened, but I always do.” I am a little deflated by the natural way she's talking, with no trace of surprise, as if I were an ordinary acquaintance. She feels the boy's forehead. “I gave him an aspirin, I think his fever is coming down.” We give aspirin to my son too, and the same thing happens. I'm about to tell her that but don't, held back by a strange shyness, as if to hide from her that I'm married too and a father, that my son is more or less the same age as hers and also sick, according to what my wife told me last night on the phone.

I make some show of getting ready to leave, having been so flustered that I didn't kiss her when I first saw her. “But come in, don't stand there in the doorway; since you've come to see me, I'm not letting you go without at least giving you a cup of coffee.” Her apartment has long hallways, high ceilings with elaborate plasterwork, and wood floors. It must have been very
luxurious once, but now it's half empty and looks almost abandoned; maybe it belonged to her parents, or her husband's, and now they don't have the money to keep it up. She didn't give me the impression of money, or at least she wasn't taking care of herself as she did when I knew her, she wore old jeans and canvas shoes with no laces. Her skin had lost its transparency, and her hair was messy, like that of a woman who doesn't get out of the house all day and, worn down by her children, doesn't have the time or the energy to put on makeup.

She clears toys, scribbled papers, and colored pencils from a large, old chair and asks me to have a seat while she makes coffee. I find myself alone in a living room dominated somehow by both emptiness and disorder. On the table is a blender just like the one my wife and I use to blend fruit for our son, a dirty bib, a jar of liquid soap for babies, and a disposable diaper that smells strongly of urine. Street noise comes through the two balconies where sheer curtains filter the wan light of a cloudy day. In an adjoining room I can hear the little boy crying, accompanied by the loud strains of a morning cartoon show. What am I doing sitting here? Absurd and correct as a visitor, rigid in this armchair, not daring to so much as cross my legs, waiting for her to appear in the doorway, as I once waited, eager yet frightened of her presence, covetous of her every feature and gesture, the way she dressed—a little extreme for a provincial city—and her Madrid accent.

She comes back carrying coffee on a tray, and as she sets it down on the table, she sees the dirty diaper and looks away with an expression of annoyance and weariness. “I forgot the sugar, I don't know where my head is.” She takes away the diaper, the pacifier, and the blender, and I hear her say something to the little boy, who has stopped crying, and she appears again, smiling with a look of “Sorry!” and brushing a lock of hair from her eyes. Then, as if in a painting, I see her as she was five years ago, as precisely as the clear view you get after you clean a cloudy pane of
glass, and I think she looks a lot like someone I know, although it takes a while to realize whom: the woman in the travel agency, the Olympia my friend Juan and I are so crazy about. The same foreshortening as she lifts the hair from her face, the same chestnut hair, the large mouth, the line of her chin and jaw, the glint in her light-colored eyes.