Sepharad (33 page)

 

I GET LOST IN MADRID
more than I did in Moscow, and I don't like to ask people because they look at me in an odd way, probably because of my accent, or because I look like a foreigner, like a Russian. So to avoid problems I don't go out, I spend the day here, puttering, it's such a pleasure having a whole apartment to myself, and my central heating never breaks down. The place is so small I don't know where to put all my things, but I can't make up my mind to throw anything away, I'm so fond of every item and the memories they bring. After all a person goes through life losing so many things, you want to keep what's left. Look at those little doilies my mother used to crochet whenever we could find white thread in Moscow, which wasn't always, though she could make them from anything, she was good with a needle and could make something beautiful from any old scrap. I didn't take after her that way; she used to say, “What pretty hands you have, and so useless, they look like a bourgeois girl's hands,” and it was true, they got rough and red with the smallest task, and I also suffered from chilblains, but now I can take care of them, although painting my fingernails makes me feel ashamed, because my hands do in fact look bourgeois.

I break things and don't know how to mend them, I drop them, for example one of the knobs came off the television when I tried to turn it on, and you can't imagine the trouble I had finding the knob on the floor, since there's little space and I get around so poorly after I was thrown to the ground when they mugged me. I spent days looking, because without it I couldn't turn on the TV, and when I put it back on, it fell off again, so finally I used adhesive tape, and if I'm careful it works and doesn't fall off. How can I throw anything away when everything has its own story? I tell stories to myself when I'm alone, as if I was a guide in a museum. That Lenin on top of the television set is bronze, pick it up and you'll see how heavy it is, and just look what a good likeness, though friends tell me, “Woman, put that somewhere not so obvious, it will offend people,” but no one comes to see me here, and if someone does come and gets offended, well I'm sorry, so be it, as they say in Madrid, don't they have their crucifixes and virgins and portraits of the Pope? Well I have my Vladimir Ilyich, right there on the doily my mother crocheted for me one birthday, ah, look how yellow it's getting, and think of the kilometers it's traveled, for I had it with me when my husband was assigned to Arkhangelsk, and it got so stiff from the cold that it might as well have been tin. Those dolls in the little Siberian dresses we brought from there, and the coat rack too, let me move the coats and show you, those are real hooves, they come from those big reindeers they have. And those little paintings? I've seen how you can't take your eyes off them, they're drawings Alberto'Sánchez did with what he had on hand, sheets of paper and school crayons. I remember watching him drawing at the kitchen table in the apartment where we lived in Moscow, the last winter of the war, if you go over you'll see how perfect the details are, and the little squares on the paper. He talked about the days of the siege in Toledo where he lived, and as he was talking he drew what he was telling us, and it seemed as if we were in Spain and not in Moscow, and we could feel the summer heat and the tickle of wheat chaff in our throats. Look at those white shirts, how the harvesters have their sleeves rolled up, and their straw hats and scythes and the cords they wear to hold up their pants, and the sheaves of wheat. And that town in the distance, Alberto told us, you could see it as you came out of a curve, with the bell tower of the church and its nest of storks, and those blue mountains in the background, what we would have given to see them then, because we thought we would never return to Spain, and for many it was true, they never did, like poor Alberto, who is buried in Moscow. A woman friend who knows what she's talking about said I should sell those drawings, I'd get good money for them, she's always overwhelmed when she sees all the stuff I have. “Before long you won't be able to move around in here,” she tells me, “get rid of it all, wipe the slate clean.” But I can't part with any of it, not even that painting that drives my friend crazy, “Who in the world would think of framing the top of a cookie box?” she says, but it brings back so many memories, Red Square with its colorful onion domes and that blue the sky has on certain summer mornings, and it's in relief, I can touch the towers on the Kremlin wall, the cathedral of Saint Basil, Lenin's tomb. I had that cookie box for years, and I was so fond of it that before leaving Moscow I cut off the cover and framed it.

 

IN MOSCOW I REMEMBERED
Madrid, and now in Madrid I remember Moscow, what can I do? If I carry Spain in my heart, the Soviet Union is my country too, why wouldn't it be when you consider that I lived there more than fifty years, and it hurts me when people say bad things about it, when I turn on the television and see what is happening there, and read what my son tells me in his letters, which are much cheaper than phone calls. Every day I
get up early, even though I have nothing to do, and I spend hours cleaning and setting my house in order. It's small and if you're not careful everything gets cluttered and covered with dust, then I think how lucky I am to be here, with my central heat and hot water, my refrigerator and television, my rug in the bedroom so my feet don't get cold when I get up in the wintertime. My brother and parents never had a chance to enjoy any of these comforts, and it turns out that the silly one among us—why should I deny it, I'm the one who had the least to offer—is the one who gets everything. I sit here in the afternoons and sometimes don't turn on the TV, don't even turn on the light when it gets dark, and there are hours and hours of silence, of not doing anything, unlike my mother, who always had some work in her lap. I sit with my hands folded, listening to the cars on the expressway, and I remember, it isn't as if I do it on purpose, the memories come and link together like a chain, like the beads of the rosary in my fingers when I was little and I went to catechism without telling my parents. I see people's faces, hear their voices as it grows dark, and they walk in that door and sit down here beside me, and I hear music too, the Internationale that a band made up of the Party faithful played in our mining town, Chopin's funeral march on the day of Stalin's funeral, and another march I liked a lot, one they always played in Moscow on May Day. It seems I'm walking down the street and hearing it, the triumphal march from
Aida,
and my eyes fill with tears, it must be that I've turned as sentimental as the Russians. But the music I like best of all is
Scheherazade,
that's what played when I opened the little mother-of-pearl box my father brought me when he came home from his first trip to Russia, when I didn't dare look up at him because I hadn't seen him for five or six months and he was like a stranger to me, he even had a black mustache. I kept the box beneath my pillow and would open it very slowly, and the music would begin, and I would close it fast, because I was afraid it would wear out if I let
it play too long, like those perfumes that evaporate if you leave the bottle open. Somehow I lost my music box, who knows in what move. But things last longer than people, and someone must still have the box, like those antiques that sit in the flea market for a long time and then are sold, and when that person opens it, she will hear
Scheherazade
and wonder whom it belonged to.

I WOULD WAIT IN MY ROOM
with the lights off until the bells in the tower of El Salvador Church struck midnight. Cautious, though I hadn't gone outside yet, cloaked so no one could recognize me on the street, although at that hour and on those raw winter nights there weren't many people venturing out to face the wind or rain that beat down on the large open plaza. I would walk across swathed in my cape, which was very heavy and warmer than an overcoat, with a cap pulled down over my eyes and a muffler covering half my face. You have never known winters like those, or nights so dark. There were weak lightbulbs on some corners, and metal-shaded lights strung from cables over the plaza, which shook with the wind so that the light and shadows moved as they do when you walk through a room carrying a candle. On windy nights, the plaza seemed to toss like a ship in a storm. Night was a different world. There were not many radios then, and it was rare to find electric lights in every room of a house. You took a few steps away from the brazier and the light and were immediately in cold and darkness. We would pass the lightbulb and cord from one room to another through an open hole in a corner of the wall. But the current frequently cut off, the bulb would
begin to glow yellow, like a candle guttering, and soon we'd be in the dark. The children had a little song for those occasions:

 

Let there be light
so we can be fed.
We'll have a nice salad,
fried eggs and fresh bread.

 

When the current failed you had to light a candle or oil lamp to go to bed, feeling your way upstairs to a bedroom so icy that when you crawled in between the sheets, your feet never got warm all night. How you would yearn to press yourself against the warmth of a naked woman! Day was day and night was night, not like now, when the two get confused, as so many things get confused, at least for us, who are too old to adapt to these times. The long winters and endless nights, black as the inside of a wolf's mouth in the alleyways I slinked down after I left the house, going out of my way to avoid Calle Real, where someone might recognize me, just after the clock in the plaza struck twelve, and then the bronze bells of El Salvador, always a little slow, a deeper tone in their tall belfry with the narrow windows making the tower look more like that of a castle than of a church. The minute I heard the first peal, my heart would lurch in my chest. Alone and in the dark, I waited in my room so no one would suspect me, listening to the ticking of the clock, which was so loud it often made me open my eyes in the middle of the night, thinking I heard footsteps. But the thudding of my heart was louder than the clock, and I was so impatient I would start walking in circles around the room, quietly so no one in the room below would hear my footsteps. I would sit on the bed, wrapped in my cape and wearing my cap yet feeling the cold rising from my feet, waiting for the hour to come, for the bells to ring, just as she had told me, rather, ordered me: not one minute before midnight, and not down the main street but through the alleyways, because
no precaution could be too great. One or two hours before I was ready, waiting, dying to see her, already as hard and stiff as the bolt on a gate, and from being hard so long I was almost in pain; it seems impossible today, the vigor you had when you were young. “If you love me,” she would say, “don't be early, and don't let anyone see you.” The first peal of the bells was like a magnet pulling me, and I couldn't resist, I would leave my room and slip down the stairs without lighting the candle, feeling along the walls, careful not to wake anyone, and draw back the bolt. How strange it is that everything that was normal for us has disappeared, big iron bolts and door knockers, house keys so enormous that when I was a boy I imagined they were Saint Peter's Keys to the Kingdom.

 

SNEAKING THROUGH THE
narrow streets, I would come out on the vast dark plaza of Santa María, a solitary figure trying to pass unnoticed along the walls, stopping on the corner of the Ayuntamiento, the government palace, the only inhabitant of the city awake at that hour—almost the only one, because across the plaza, in one of those colossal and somber buildings that at night was reminiscent of a fantastic engraving or opera set, someone else had been counting the minutes and the sound of the bells: every night, after twelve, she slipped back the bolt on a little side door and three times lit and extinguished an oil lantern in the highest window of the tower. That was the signal her lover waited for to cross the plaza and push open the door—the hinges carefully oiled—and then secure it from inside without making a sound.

He climbs slowly: no light, not even a cigarette lighter or a match, count three landings and forty-five steps, on the third landing there will be a large window to the left and a door on the right, knock softly three times so I will know it's you, push it open and I will be waiting for you.

So many memories have been erased, so many itineraries, obligations, and words forgotten, but from time to time a precise voice comes to him, superimposed on the voices of a present in which he often does not know where he is, as if he suffered not so much from amnesia as from sleepwalking, awaking suddenly not in a plaza in his beloved town but in the heart of Madrid, dressed in clothing he is slow to recognize as his, a visitor in an aged, leaden body that can't be his.

“Ave María Purísima,” the voices say to him, and he answers, “Conceiving without sin.”

He heard two voices, with the sound of the glass door opening, but he didn't look up immediately or interrupt his work, accustomed to this same apparition nearly every morning, to the differences in the two voices and the two accents, as much a contrast as between the figures they belonged to, though seen from a distance the figures seemed identical: two nuns in the same habit, brown robe and black wimple, one taller and younger than the other, both wearing sandals that must have left their feet freezing, feet as white as their hands and faces. One face was translucent, the other dead and muddy, one voice clear, with an accent of the north, the other hoarse, as if from bronchitis, with a rough country intonation. One of the nuns pushed open the door with the badly fitting glass panes, and he didn't have to look up to know immediately what expression he would see on each face: friendly supplication, ill-humored demand. Both stood before his cobbler's bench, asking almost every day for a donation to the poor, a pair of old shoes he couldn't use anymore, a few centimos for altar candles or to buy medicine for an ailing mother. So different, yet identical as they came toward you from the end of Calle Real any morning that winter, a deserted morning, because the olive harvest had begun and half the city was in the country picking the crop, so the street became busy only as dusk fell.