Sepharad (23 page)

Just as when I was so much in love with her, I can't concentrate on what she's telling me, I'm too absorbed in the fantasy of love, of the contemplative, paralyzing, adolescent passion that reaches its tortuous culmination in impossibility, that nourishes the desire for powerlessness, for the suffering and cowardice of literature. “I left medical school when I got pregnant, you remember? I tried to go back when my daughter was a little older, but then I got pregnant again, and now I'm thinking about entering nursing school. It doesn't take as long, I can handle the assignments, and I'm pretty sure it will be easy to find a job. Imagine, with my experience they could make me head of Maternity.”

She gets up because the boy has started crying again, very loud, and when she comes back, he is in her arms. His face is red, and his eyes shine with fever. Suddenly I'm jealous, looking at the boy, recognizing his father's features, the man I begged her to leave and come away with me. From the next room the girl calls to her, because something has fallen to the floor with a crash. As she leaves the room again, I observe her from the rear. Her face is the same, but her body has filled out, she has lost that sinuous line I loved so much when she was twenty. When she handed me my coffee I noted, furtively, that her breasts are larger and heavier now, the breasts of a woman who has had two children, and nursed them, and not taken very good care of herself afterward. I remember her tight-fitting jeans and her soft shirts buttoned low, blouses with a liquid, silky touch that felt like her skin the few times I dared caress her. I invited her out for dinner one night in early summer, and she came downstairs wearing sandals and a
dress of a fine plaid material with her hair caught back in a pony-tail and two curls at her cheeks, so sexy and desirable that it was a torment not to grab her.

“But don't go, tell me something about yourself, you haven't said a word, you haven't changed a bit in that regard.” The boy isn't crying now, and I can hear the television again in the next room. She sits down across from me and asks me to tell her about my life these days, and I notice, with a glowing coal of satisfaction, that she's combed her hair and dashed on some lipstick. “I heard that you got married too, to your old sweetheart.” “Like you,” I find the courage to say, and for a moment we are truly ourselves and the void between us is a narrow void, we crossed it only once a long time ago but it never entirely closed. We smile, shaking our heads politely, acknowledging the objective vulgarity of real life. “At least you did something, finished your degree. I remember how much you liked art history, how excited you were about it, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, Picasso, Bosch, Velázquez, Giotto. I still have the postcard you sent me from Florence.”

And a lot of good that did. I remember that card, the exact moment I wrote you sitting on the steps of Santa Maria del Fiore; how I loved you. I explain to her that I found a temporary job as an administrative assistant, and that the next year I took the competitive exams, “although I don't plan to stay in that office forever. As soon as I can I'll go back and work on my thesis in earnest, or I'll start taking my exams to teach at an institute.” “That's what Victor is doing, he's studying for exams for the post office. We'll see if he has as much luck as you.” Victor. She says that name so casually. If she'd stayed with me, she'd be saying my name as easily as my wife does; maybe she'd have some loving nickname for me.

The telephone rings at the far end of the room. She speaks in a low voice, not looking at me, telling someone that she will take the child to the doctor, although she thinks his temperature has
stopped going up. “Ciao,” she says, “come soon.” What am I doing here? A ghost, a visitor, not even an intruder. Ciao, come soon. People say words without stopping to think what they mean; entire lives fit in the simplest phrase, and a personal insult can hide in a polite formula of courtesy: “What a shame you didn't run into Victor, he would have enjoyed seeing you.”

This time when I get up, she doesn't ask me to stay. I notice the smell of domestic life in the hallway, which she doesn't: the funk of a sick child, kitchen odors, a whiff of sheets and bodies, of a not very well ventilated apartment, these are made up of the everyday events of her life, her real life, which for me is as foreign as this large, disorderly, somber house. There must be a particular smell to the small apartment I bought through a government program, and it must be similar: stale milk and talcum powder. She walks me to the door, holding her son in her arms again. He is red-faced and bawling, his chin wet with slobber. She gives me two kisses, one on each cheek, not touching the skin, barely stirring the air between us. “Will you be in Madrid long? Why don't you come see us if you're going to be here awhile?” Perhaps she says that to eliminate any hint of our old relationship. This isn't the woman who loved me and was ready to live with me; now she speaks in a plural that includes her husband, offering me the kind of matrimonial friendship that is the worst offense to an ex-lover. “I don't think I'll have time, I'm going back tonight and I still have things to do.”

 

THE REST OF THE DAY
I walked around Madrid, weary and bored. I chose a restaurant to eat in, after much looking and hesitation. The minute I went in, I realized I'd made a bad choice, but a waiter in a dirty red jacket was already coming toward me and I didn't have the courage to leave, so I ate a fillet that smelled slightly spoiled. In a large bookstore on the Gran Vía I got dizzy looking at titles and ended up buying a novel I wasn't interested
in and have never read. I went to a movie, and it was dark when I came out, but I still had several hours to kill before the train left. I called home with a touch of guilt, although I'd been gone less than three days. The minute my wife picked up the phone, I knew there was a problem. Our son had woken up that night with a new cough, and choking, and she'd taken him straight to the emergency room, where they said he had laryngitis.

A few minutes before the express pulled out, I saw a young woman running along the platform. It had occurred to me, as I waited, that she might come to say good-bye, that that was why she'd asked me what time the train left. Five years before, that other time, I'd waited till the last moment on this same platform, watching the clock and the faces of the people pushing through the glass doors. I'd looked for her when I arrived at dawn and again that night—on the same train I'd come on—and she hadn't been there either time. Subconsciously, I'd repeated the wait, not because I thought it was likely she would come, not even that I wanted her to, but out of a sentimental inertia.

Now, shivering, incredulous, almost frightened, I watched her come running toward me, five years too late, and the person who was excited was the person I was then, revived, not as yet humiliated by surrender, by the excessive price of work and family life, but unfortunately not improved with time either, as bewildered and foolish as ever.

Then I saw it wasn't she, although the woman kept looking toward me as she came nearer and smiled at me and held her arms open for a hug. She was tall, slender, with curly hair. But she went past me and threw her arms around a man standing behind me. I boarded the train and watched them through the window. The man was carrying a large suitcase, but neither of them looked up when the whistle blew. I watched them grow small in the distance as the train pulled away, arms around each other and alone in the darkness of the platform.

A DARKENED WORKROOM,
abstract as a cell, with white walls, wood floor, and a table of sturdy, rough wood, like the tables you used to see in kitchens, in our kitchen when I was a boy. Places become echoes, transparencies of other places, they rhyme with austere assonance. Walking into the room at this indeterminate hour of the winter afternoon, I am reminded of García Lorca's room in Huerta de San Vicente, and of the one he had in Madrid, in a student dormitory, and from Madrid and García Lorca and the set of transparencies and assonances of places my thoughts go to Rome, to the room in the Spanish Academy where I slept a few nights in March or April of 1992, where I imagined long industrious days of solitude and reading, monkish days of work and tranquillity of mind, the retreat it seems one carries imprinted in one's soul, is always dreaming of and looking for, the room with only a few necessities: bed, bare wood table, window, perhaps a bookcase for a few books, not too many, and also one of those portable CD players. I would spend the whole day walking around Rome in a state of intoxication, a trance accentuated by solitude, and at night I fell exhausted onto the narrow bed in my room at the academy, and in my agitated
dreams, powerful and dark as the waters of the Tiber, I continued my wanderings through the city, seeing columns and ruins and temples magnified and blurred as if in a delirium. I would wake up exhausted, and in the cold, olive-green light of dawn my newly opened eyes would focus on the cupola of the small temple of Bramante.

Another place rises before me as shadow begins to turn to darkness lighted only by the phosphorescence of the computer and the lamp that illuminates my hands on the keypad. The hand resting beside the mouse isn't mine any longer. The other hand, the left, distractedly rubs the worn white shell Arturo picked up two summers ago on the Zahara beach, the afternoon before we left, one of those luxuriously long afternoons at the beginning of July when the sun goes down after nine and the sea takes on the blue of cobalt, slowly retreating from the still-golden sand where the footprints of homebound bathers become delicate hollows of shadow.

From the darkness around by the computer screen and the low lamp, from the two hands, from the smooth feel of the mouse and the roughness of the shell and without any premeditation on my part, a figure emerges, a presence that is not entirely invention, or memory either: the doctor alone in the shadows, waiting for a patient, moving the mouse with his right hand, searching for a file in the computer, a medical history opened not many days ago, to which he added several test results just yesterday.

 

I OFTEN SEE THAT FIGURE,
the hands especially, typing in the light of the screen: they are long, bony, sure, with a lot of hair on the back, not as gray as the hair and beard of the doctor, whom I don't envision standing, although I know he is very tall and so slender that his bathrobe hangs loose from his shoulders. I see him seated, white bathrobe and gray hair and beard, in a room with the curtains drawn, although there is still some time before nightfall.
The computer is on one side of the table, and on the other there is nothing but a white, rounded seashell, smaller and more concave than a scallop, stronger, too, as worn and eroded on the outside as the volute of a marble capital eaten by sea air and weather, and on the inside it is soft as mother-of-pearl, a pleasure to brush with fingertips that run over it as if of their own volition as the doctor speaks to the patient who has just arrived, trying to choose his words carefully—or earlier, when he is still alone, reviewing once again the test results lying open on the table. His mind wanders to a different time, luminous days invoked by the feel of the shell, which is a modest shell, not at all flashy, grayish white patterned with ridges opening from its base like the ribs of a fan, each following an exquisite curve, the beginning of a spiral interrupted by the outer edge, which is worn and nicked, presenting the fingertips with the irregularity of a piece of broken pottery.

One image evokes another, as if joined by the slim thread of coincidence: shells on the seashore in Zahara de los Atunes, curved bits of a broken amphora. He must let the thread roll off the spool, or pull lightly lest it break. He is on the verge of a discovery, a sensory memory like a bubble of air from millions of years ago captured inside a blob of amber. The wood floor of the large, dim room where the doctor works is as old as the building, and when someone walks across it, it creaks. He will hear the buzz of the intercom and tell the nurse that the patient can come in now, and footsteps will resonate as they would on the wood deck of a ship.

In the house of one of my grandmother's sisters there was a room with a wood floor. I liked going there with my grandmother just to enter that room, to feel the floor give a little beneath my feet, and to hear the sound of it. It was like being in another place, another life. I have a similar sensation when I hear a cello. Again time leaps from one thing to another, an almost instantaneous impulse between neurons: Pablo Casals playing Bach's
suites for cello in Barcelona, in the fall of 1938 when the Battle of the Ebro has been lost and Manuel Azaña and Juan Negrín are listening from a box in the Liceo Theater. Behind the table, on a shelf holding a small number of books, most on medicine and history, the doctor has a CD player, which sometimes plays softly as he interviews or examines a patient lying on the cot in a dark corner of the room, in front of a screen. On the cot, the patient becomes more vulnerable, surrenders to the illness, to the doctor's examination, to what he already sees on the other side of the invisible but definitive line that separates the healthy from the ill, deep in the prison of his fear, pain, and, perhaps worst of all, shame.
The healthy flee from the ill,
Franz Kafka once wrote Milena Jesenska,
but the ill also flee from the healthy.

Before he tells the patient what the tests reveal—there is no way to say it without awakening terror, without feeling a knot in the throat, though it has been said so many times—the doctor will ask him to lie on the cot with his clothes on, all he has to do is lower his trousers a little and pull up his shirt, so the doctor can auscultate the abdomen, palpate the viscera with his long fingers, quickly, smoothly, precisely. The patient suffers the ignominy of lying on his back on a cot, flat and passive, his trousers pulled down to his scrotum, while the intrusive hand seeks what should not be there.