Sepharad (30 page)

 

THERE ARE OTHER FIXTURES
on the street corners of the neighborhood, their faces as familiar as that of the woman in the bakery or pharmacy, or the woman-man at the newspaper kiosk; the police from time to time force one of them to put his hands against the wall and frisk him, or they'll ask a Moroccan dealer for identification and take him away in a patrol car, and he might be back in the barrio shortly afterward, or disappear and never be seen again in this squatter's city on the outskirts of Madrid.

Some of those who arrive maintain a certain dignity, manners from a life they still haven't completely abandoned; they are recent converts to the sweet stupor of the barrio. Young boys with new clothes and name-brand shoes, who from a distance seem undamaged but who at closer range show signs of deterioration, usually succumb after a few months, aged, part of a process in which each of them is both vampire and victim. Their arms and neck marked by needles, they tell the boy never to touch the syringes that crunch beneath pedestrians' feet in the park, never to bend down and pick up anything off the ground.

Where did the new arrivals come from? What was in those eyes that were both intense and vacant? A young woman looked like a secretary, dressed in a suit and dark stockings and heels and carrying a leather purse and a folder. She could have been an employee in any of the nearby offices, maybe the manager of a small lawyer's office who had agreed to meet someone on this corner; from time to time she glanced at her watch. Well filled out, rosy-cheeked, and discreetly dressed, ignoring the others who were also waiting, the habitual ones who could barely stay on their feet,
who leaned against a wall where they dozed or seemed in a faint, slowly slipping down the wall to the ground. But after a few days, you might notice that her heels were scuffed and worn, or there was a run in her stocking or a hole in her shoe, or her hair needed care and you could see the lighter roots in her part, or that the rosiness in her face wasn't from good health but from makeup, and she no longer had a wristwatch to consult as if she were waiting for an appointment.

As time passed, she clutched the folder with black covers, the last vestige of her dignity, or a laughable attempt to disguise herself from the people she knew or the police who patrolled the barrio, or simply not to feel embarrassed when she saw women she had resembled not long ago, secretaries of small businesses, employees in pharmacies or hair salons.

As she grew paler she applied more color to eyes and lips and used a more strident rouge on her cheeks. Now she wobbled on her run-over high heels, and her blouse was unbuttoned to show off a pouter pigeon bosom, against which she pressed the ubiquitous file (now with the plastic torn along the edges, revealing the cardboard beneath) that spilled out sheets of paper like forms or memorandums collected haphazardly off the ground and shoved in hit or miss.

Sometimes a man came with her: tall, thirty-something, more distinguished-looking than she, maybe an inexperienced and benevolent boss, wearing a sport coat, wool trousers, and leather shoes, with a studied, three-day growth of beard and tousled hair, a man you would guess to be a journalist or architect. Both of them disappeared, and after a few weeks or months she alone returned, her hair more badly dyed, her eyelashes blacker, the look in her round, protruding eyes more anxious, her lips more clumsily reddened. She wore the same high-heeled shoes and perhaps the same stockings, and the same black folder was in her arms.

The next time I saw her, the last, wasn't in the barrio, it was maybe a year later, as I was walking down Calle de la Montera. She was leaning against the corner of a building, and I was slow to recognize her, she was so much like the other miniskirted women with heavy thighs and scuffed heels who clomp up and down those sidewalks, smoking on street corners, watched over by pimps nearly as moribund as they, surrounded by the sex shops and gaming parlors at the mouths of narrow streets where the air is foul with bad plumbing.

 

PEOPLE LONG FORGOTTEN
rise to the surface with a shudder of memory. Recently I walked by the entry of our building now inhabited by others, and from below I could glimpse, through the balcony railing, the ceiling and upper portion of a wall we had painted pale yellow. It was one of those long May afternoons with a hint of summer and pollen in the air, and on the balcony across the street sat the sickly old man in his slippers and pajamas, elbows on the railing, mask over his mouth, and plastic tube in his nose. He was looking down at the street, and he may have seen and remembered me, or maybe not, after all these years in which I have rarely walked down our old street.

There was another witness to everything, I remember now, a large old man with a broad smile and chubby red cheeks, one of those gallant fellows whom age seems to make more compact and sturdy. He always took a slow morning stroll through the neighborhood streets between Chueca and Vazquez de Mella Plazas, looking larger than he really was in his old-fashioned and opulent overcoat and with his singularly small head covered by a Tyrolean hat, complete with a green feather. I always noticed that hat and his enormous shoes, and his perfect complacency toward the world, the way he took levelheaded pleasure from everything around him, sometimes pausing to enjoy the first ray of sun that lit one
corner
of Chueca Plaza on winter mornings or to contemplate, with interest and approval, the maneuvers of a dump truck in the middle of interrupted traffic or the arrival of the police car or ambulance to pick up someone lying stiff in a doorway. He stopped a moment, observed, then continued his walk, as if the richness of things yet to come on his walk prevented him from staying as long as he would have liked. Satisfied and absorbed, he lifted a finger to his hat brim in greeting to Sandra at her newspaper stand, helped a blind man walk between badly parked cars on the sidewalk, admired the bags of oranges hanging from the stand of a fruit merchant, even devoted a vaguely compassionate glance to the ghosts on the corners, giving equal attention to stern policeman and furtive dealer. The admiring and magnanimous curiosity of the man in the Tyrolean hat was part of the small business activity of the barrio. How strange to meet him every day and suddenly not see him and yet be unaware of his absence. You go away and forget the habits and figures of that little enclave in the heart of Madrid, and years later remember, for no reason, a place, a face, a fragment of a story with no beginning or end, a novel we each carry but never tell anyone. What kind of life did the old woman have who spread her dinner tablecloth over the lid of a garbage can every midnight? Or the young man and woman who came to the barrio looking for heroin and pushing a baby buggy, their child sleeping despite the clatter and jolting, pacifier loose at one side of its half-open mouth, eyes placidly closed? Or, if the child was red and rigid from crying, they didn't hear it, both focused on the corner where the tranquil shadow they were waiting for would appear at any moment. They must be somewhere around there this very minute, if they're still alive, and the child, who wasn't yet two, would be eight or nine by now, and maybe poisoned by the same disease the parents carried in their blood, the disease that has killed so many of the specters of the barrio. The living dead have disappeared from the corners of Augusto Figueroa. A few may survive in hospitals and jails or are dragging themselves like zombies along the footpaths that wind through the open land leading to the tin-and-cardboard shacks on the outskirts of Madrid, where police have been herding them since the order came down to clear the addicts off the city streets. A flower shop in the arcade has replaced the kiosk where Sandra sold her newspapers in slippers and a track suit, or in a flannel bathrobe and knit cap on winter days, and if some mornings she didn't shave, her eyes were always carefully outlined in the manner of Sara Montiel, her idol.

Other figures drift back from oblivion, the forlorn drunk who brought back our puppy and the tall, slender woman who was with him for a few months and then disappeared.

She was like a model, with Asiatic cheekbones, a large, fleshy mouth, long legs, and a spring to her step as she walked. From the back, or from a distance, you saw a tall figure and long curly hair. Only when she came near did you see her pallor, the cloud over her large eyes, the bruises on her beautiful legs, now too thin, and the black gaps of lost teeth. She went from one end of the barrio to another like a great disoriented bird beating against walls, not knowing how to get out. She lurched along with the stride of a model, still straight-backed, taller than anyone in the barrio, her curls and mannerist neck above figures hunched in councils cooking up schemes or hunched in doorways where the flame of a cigarette lighter heated a square of aluminum foil on which a shot of heroin was turning liquid and smoky. Sometimes she stopped and stood motionless, her body silhouetted against a building, watery eyes gleaming through dirty hair, a drunken, demented smile on her ruined mouth, a cigarette held in her long fingers and smoke seeping from her lips in a photographic pose.

She began sleeping in the entryways of shops and closed bars, where the indigent set up their burrows of rags and cardboard. In
winter she wore a tattered jacket of fake fur over the usual T-shirt and light miniskirt. On cold mornings her white face had a violet hue. Her hair was thinning, and her eyes had lost their color. She begged for cigarettes; she would take one in her hand, slowly put it between her lips, and wait for someone to give her a light as well.

Once she asked the barrio drunk for a smoke. He shrugged, grunted, walked on, but that night, when she was shivering in her fake-fur jacket in a doorway on Calle San Marcos, a shadow stopped before her, it was the drunk offering her a cigarette, holding it delicately in his thick, grubby fingers as if it were the stem of a flower. The woman brushed the hair from her face and put the cigarette between lips purple with cold, and the drunk, whom no one had ever seen smoke, lit it, his living-dead face visible in the brief flare.

People in the barrio soon knew what had happened: he had bought the cigarettes and lighter at the same small shop where they stocked his cartons of white wine, and where the next day, contrary to his custom, he bought some custard and chocolate-filled doughnuts. The druggies lived on that kind of food; mixed in with their syringes and scorched sheets of foil were always candy wrappings and empty custard containers.

He began to carry things every night to the doorway where she took shelter, sometimes not waking her in her shivering delirium. He would cover her with his jacket, older than the one she wore, and one night he was seen dragging a filthy, torn comforter down Calle Pelayo, which he must have found in a trash barrel. He began to move with diligence, concentration, like Crusoe on his island preparing a hut or cave in which to spend the winter. During the day he was never far from her, although he didn't approach her or make himself too visible, watching from a corner where he could duck behind a building. Indifferent to the
people passing him, who gave him a wide berth because of his smell, he was focused on the tall, young, skinny woman who walked with a long stride past people and cars or huddled pale in arcades or doorways late at night after no one was left in the dark streets except the most persistent dead, those who at three or four in the morning were still waiting for something.

She probably spoke to him first, asking him imperiously to bring her cigarettes again, or yogurt or doughnuts from the shop where he went when no one else was there and wordlessly laid money on the counter. He always paid and was never seen to beg. The shop owner's story was that the drunk was the firstborn of a wealthy family in the north, that a tyrannical father threw him out, disinherited him, yet took care to see that his son had what he needed to survive, enough food and clothing to keep him from dying of cold in the streets.

No one will ever know the true story, just as no one knew his name, unless he told the woman with whom little by little he began to share nightly encampments in the most sheltered nooks of the barrio. No one ever saw them walking together, but they must have kept each other warm during the icy nights of that winter. He wrapped her up and protected her, stayed awake to be sure she was covered, constructed her bed of cardboard and newspapers with an expert hand, and then cocooned her in rags and garments scavenged from the trash. You would see a flickering glow in the dark expanse of Vazquez de Mella Plaza: the drunk had started a fire where the tall, skinny woman warmed herself like a sphinx, smoking the cigarettes he brought her and lighted with a quick gesture every time she put one to her lips, and eating the yogurt or custard he bought for her at the same time he bought his cartons of wine.

Now he did turn to begging. He never said anything, just held out his hand, looked at you, made the gesture of putting a
cigarette to his mouth. He begged for money and tobacco and seemed to become more aware of other people, no longer in the solitude of his desert island. He didn't share the woman's tobacco or heroin, and there probably was nothing sexual between them, but he did pass her his liters of white wine, which she poured into her wide, fleshy mouth, her eyes gleaming.

You would see them in the shadows like two animals deep in their den, two untouchables who had regressed to the savagery or innocence of an irreparable damnation, so remote from those of us passing by in our overcoats and normalcy, on the way to our new house and warm, stable life. They truly did live in a different world, in one of caves and hollows in the rock where primitive man and castaways found shelter.

After weeks or months, the woman disappeared, and we would have forgotten her fleeting existence had the drunk not stayed in the barrio, subdued and sedentary, again withdrawn into a seamless self-absorption, apparently not seeking in the haunts of the living dead the figure of the tall woman who looked like a model from a distance. But we did not pay that much attention to him, so accustomed were we to his presence, just as we did not follow closely what happened every day in the barrio, our neglect including the man, the woman, and the boy who now went to school by himself, who came out every afternoon with his snack, tugging at the leash of the ungovernable dog that no longer was a puppy.