Sepharad (27 page)

 

WHEN THE DOCTOR RETURNS
to the hotel, he will show his wife the physical marks the fingernails made as proof of what happened, the things he will tell her with such relief, still feeling a trace of revulsion. He wants to leave but can't, even though he doesn't know if it's his duty as a physician that holds him there or some form of malevolence he can't shake, no more than he can free himself from the perhaps dying man's fingernails digging into his hand. Time crawls. His wife will be awake by now and wondering why he isn't back. She'll fear suddenly that something happened to him, and be irritated about his mania for running and walking at dawn. We two are most alike in our fear that everything will fall apart, that our life will go down the drain. He needs to pull away from the old man's hand and call the hotel to calm his wife, but he doesn't know the number, and the task of finding it seems too great an obstacle.

The old man's pupils are again visible in the slit of his eyelids and fixed on him. The doctor looks away and makes a sign as if to get up, but two skeletal hands stop him, tugging at his T-shirt. He hears the old man's breathing, smells it, becomes conscious of the monotonous roar of the sea at the foot of the cliff. Between the murmuring and prayers of the woman planted like a monolith and the barking that hasn't let up for an instant, he thinks he can hear, still far in the distance, the wail of an ambulance.

THE LETTER FROM THE
German embassy must have arrived when we'd been living in the new house for less than a year. I noticed the postmark, that it was dated several months before, and that the address on the envelope was the old one, the one in the apartment building in the Las Ventas barrio where I was born just as the war broke out, and where I saw my father for the last time, the day before the Nacionales entered Madrid, although I was too young to have any memory of that. The letter had been going from place to place for a long time, and the mailman who handed it to me said it was hard work to find us because at that time everything in the barrio where we were living was new and many of the streets didn't have names yet, and sometimes there weren't even streets, just open lots that became mud pits whenever it rained. Now you go to the neighborhood and that seems impossible, everything's so well arranged, so established, and the trees are tall, as if they were planted a long time ago, but then, when we arrived, they were as rare as street lamps, and the first blocks of buildings were far apart, separated by embankments and empty lots, and the country was only a step away. There were wheat fields, orchards, and flocks of sheep, and you could see
Madrid in the distance, looking prettier than ever, with its tall white buildings, like the capital of some foreign country in a movie. People said, mockingly, “You've gone to live in the country,” but that didn't matter to me, I actually preferred it. I liked going out on the balcony of my new apartment and seeing Madrid in the distance, liked roaring into the city on my husband's new Vespa with my arms around his waist. For the first time we had rooms with ventilation and a bathroom, and hot and cold water, and as soon as I became pregnant my husband bought me a washing machine, and before long he got his driver's license, which at that time seemed almost better than if he'd had a profession. One morning I heard a horn and went out on the balcony and there was a new car in front of the house, a light blue Dauphine, and my husband was driving. He made the down payment and they gave it to him, just as they gave us the apartment and washing machine with only a down payment. The very words
down payment
scared me, but they pleased me too, and they still sound good if I stop to think about it, because we had the feeling we were starting a new life, exactly as when we walked into the new apartment and smelled fresh plaster, and when I got into the car the first time, it smelled a little like that, new and clean, because where we'd come from everything smelled old, the houses, streetcars, clothes, corridors, closets, dresser drawers, the toilets on the landings, everything was old, dirty, used, sour. Life had been so hard for so many years, everything in short supply, and suddenly it seemed that all you had to do to get something was want it, because they handed it to you with just that down payment, the way they gave us the keys to the apartment even though it would take us more than twenty years to pay it off. The patio of our old building in Las Ventas, near the bullring, was always crowded and cramped, and there were always people around: the neighbor women who listened even though you weren't talking loud and who seized any excuse to
come
in and snoop around your place, some with no good in mind, so that when I walked into my new apartment in Moratalaz for the first time, it seemed enormous, especially when I opened the living-room window that looked out on wide-open country, with Madrid way in the background: it was like a movie screen in Technicolor. Everything new: my kitchen, which I didn't have to share with anyone, my washing machine that didn't stink of plumbing or other people's filth, my bathroom, with the white ceramic tile, and a toilet and bidet so white that the fluorescent light was dazzling when it reflected off them, a really good light, not those sickly bulbs we had when I was a girl. My mother complained because she'd lived all her life in Las Ventas and couldn't get used to being away from her neighbors and the shops she knew, and in the new barrio she got lost the minute she stepped out the door, she said it was like being an invalid, always at the whim of whoever would take her and bring her back, because in those days neither the metro nor the bus went as far as our barrio, it wasn't even on the maps of Madrid. I didn't want to show my mother the letter. But since she was so suspicious, she shot out of her room to ask who knocked, and when I told her it was the mailman, she wanted to know who'd written us, but I said it was the wrong address and went into my bedroom to open the letter by myself. My heart was pounding, because by that time we'd got over being hungry, but we still had the fear that we'd fall on hard times again, that they'd take my mother away again, the way they did after the war, when it was days before she came back and my grandmother went around to all the police stations and women's prisons asking about her. My father told her, if you don't come with me something so bad will happen to you that you'd be better off hanging yourself or jumping off the balcony, but she wouldn't budge, she didn't want to leave Spain, although she knew perfectly well what lay in store for her, not because she'd done anything, because politics had never mattered to her and
she
didn't even know how to read or write, but just because she was married to him. I was three years old when the war ended, the day my father showed up one morning in our building in Las Ventas to take us with him. I don't remember anything about it, but I can imagine the scene perfectly. Knowing how hardheaded my mother was, she would have been sitting in a corner, very serious, head down, and no one could have budged her. I can imagine my father, talking and talking and telling her that we all had to go to Russia, trying to convince her, promising her things, arguing just the way he did at his political meetings, where it seems he always won, which was why he rose so high. He had a golden tongue, my grandmother told me, the only person he couldn't convince was his wife, he'd never been able to get her to come to any protest, she was never interested in his meetings and politics and didn't believe a word of anything he promised her, didn't admire him for the higher and higher positions he held during the war, or for the stars he wore on his cap and cuffs. He would go away, leave in the morning and come back maybe that night or not till after a week or a month, he'd come back from jail or from the front, disguised so the police wouldn't find him, or dressed in his military uniform, and she never asked where he'd been, listening without a word to his explanations, which she probably didn't understand. But she always kept a clean house for him and the kettle on the fire, and sometimes she treated his wounds or fixed him bowls of broth or hot coffee at every hour of the day or night to ease his hunger, and when what little money he'd given her ran out she would go out on her own and try to make a living by scrubbing floors or selling water in the Plaza de Toros with a clay jug and tin cup, and if she had to she would go to the parish church to ask for clothing for us, although she hid that from my father, who would never allow any priest to help him. The last time I saw him must have been that night he came looking for us, already in hiding, because if the
war
hadn't ended it was close to it, and he told my mother that he had a car with its motor running waiting at the door, that he was going to take us that very night, I don't know whether to Valencia, where there would be a boat, or to an airport, and that we'd go straight to Russia and would never be hungry again and have every comfort. In the meantime the car with the driver was at the door, and Franco's troops were at the edge of the city, and my mother sat there as if she were listening to it rain, I can see her so clearly, shaking her head, staring at the floor, saying no, no, he could do what he pleased, he always had, but he wasn't going to take her and their children anywhere, least of all to Russia, so far away, because going was easy, but whoever saw anyone come back from so far? And he paced the room; I have no memory of him, but I can see him, tall, handsome in his uniform, the way he looks in one of the photographs they gave me at the embassy and that later my mother tore into tiny pieces and burned in a pile with all his papers, letters, drawings, and documents, things I'd like to have now as a reminder of him. “Then I wash my hands of anything that happens to you, and to the children,” he would have said, and she would have leaped up like a lioness, “As if you haven't always washed your hands of us, you with your politics and adventures and revolutions, if we'd depended on you, your children would have gone begging in the street.” Or they'd be in Russia, well fed and cared for, not having to pay the price they had to pay here because of her contrariness, because one other time, when I was two, my father wanted my older brothers to go on one of those expeditions of Spanish children to Russia, but my mother refused then too. She told me that I was sleeping in the room beside theirs, that the shouting woke me up and I came out crying, that when I saw my father I didn't recognize him at first and ran to bury my head in my mother's skirts when he tried to hug me. But there was another woman in the room; as I tell you this, it's as if I remembered it, I see her so clearly, a
tall,
dark woman, vigorous, beautiful, dressed in black as if in mourning, she had been a neighbor of ours and had a daughter who sometimes looked after me and played with me, a daughter even more beautiful than she was, and she also had a strapping son who was in Russia two or three years. The woman picked me up and sat me on her knees, my mother told me, and said to her, “Please, if not for yourself, at least do it for this child, who isn't to blame for anything.” The woman rocked me so I would go to sleep, and sang a song in a low voice while my father kept pacing and arguing with my mother, and all the while you could hear cannons in the distance, but less and less frequently, because the war was in its last hours and everything was lost by then. “And do you know who that woman was?” my mother would ask me, lowering her voice the way she did when she was telling about the things that happened that night. “She was La Pasionaria, who followed the same politics as your father, and she told me that her children already spoke Russian and were getting along stupendously in the Soviet Union, just as we would if we went that night.” My mother didn't answer, just sat with her head down, staring at the floor, and my father lost control: talking to you is like talking to a wall. “Whatever happens is on your head,” he yelled at her, and again he said that he was washing his hands of it: you'd be better off throwing yourself into a well, because they're ready to take over the city and won't show any mercy. And it was true, because they shaved my mother's head and gave her terrible beatings, just for being the wife of an important Red, and my uncles, his brothers, were all put in prison, and they shot two of them. Every night you could hear shots from the Del Este Cemetery from our house, and as soon as they stopped my mother and grandmother would throw shawls over their heads and go with the other women to look through all the corpses and see if they found anyone from our family. That I do remember, because I was a little older: the two women with their black
shawls over their heads, starting off down the street, and me not sleeping until they came back, when the sun was already up, but the part I didn't see I also seem to remember, those two in the light of early dawn moving slowly among the dead bodies, rolling one over in order to see his face. My mother took us to her village, believing that we would eat better and they would pay less attention to her there, but the minute she arrived they arrested her and made her scrub the church floors every morning for two years, and she got so cold scrubbing those paving stones on her knees that she had trouble with her bones for the rest of her life.

 

THERE'S NO LIMIT TO
the surprising stories you can hear if you listen to the novels in people's lives. The woman came about six in the evening, the old hour for making calls, and brought with her the air of a caller from a different time. There was an affectionate formality visible in the care she put into dressing, and also in the pastries she brought, just like the ones from her youth. She's in her sixties, appears to belong to a comfortable though not opulent middle class, but there is a working-class vitality in the gleam of her eyes and the openness of her manner. She no longer lives in her old neighborhood, the one where she went when she married and where her children grew up. She's farther away, in a development on the outskirts, and you can see that she would have preferred not to move, that in recent years the change of address has involved a number of bitter adjustments: her husband's retirement means a decrease in his earnings, which once allowed them to enjoy good cars, good schools for the children, and trips to other countries. But she is strong, a large, solid woman with an open gaze and energetic hands, and has a positive outlook on the world, on whatever life still has to offer, unlike her husband, she says, who hasn't learned how to adapt and is driving her out of her mind because he would like to pull her into his depression, keep her beside him every minute in their small apartment. Suspicious
of the world, he has no taste now for traveling or even going out, only nostalgia for what they've lost, both the money and the years. Things wear down, times change, you have less business, suddenly you're retired and must live on a pension, and your savings have shrunk like your energy, the money's gone and time's run out.