Sepharad (46 page)

And those who didn't leave, who chose to convert out of fear or for convenience, assuming that once they were baptized they would be accepted? But that didn't work either, because if they couldn't be persecuted because of the religion they had abjured, now it was their blood that condemned them, and not just them but their children and grandchildren after them, so that those who stayed behind ended up as alien in their homeland as those who left, perhaps even more so, for they were scorned not only by those who should have been their brothers in their new religion but also by those who remained loyal to the abandoned faith. The most heinous Christian sinner could repent, and if he fulfilled his penance be freed of guilt; the heretic could recant; original sin could be redressed thanks to Christ's sacrifice; but for the Jew there was no possible redemption, his culpability long predated his being and was independent of his acts, and if his behavior was exemplary, he became even more suspicious. But in this respect Spain was no exception, it was no more cruel or fanatic than other countries in Europe, contrary to common belief. If Spain stood out in any way, it wasn't for expelling the Jews but for being so slow to do so, since Jews had already been expelled from England and France in the fourteenth century and not, to be sure, with any more consideration, and when many of the Jews who left Spain sought refuge in Portugal in 1492, they obtained it in exchange for one gold coin per person, only to be expelled again six months later, and those who converted in order to stay had no better life than the converts in Spain; they, too, were tagged with the vile name Marranos, pigs. Some marranos emigrated to Holland after several generations of subjection to Catholicism and, as soon as they were there, professed their Jewish faith: the family of Spinoza, for example, who was too rational and freethinking to conform to any dogma and was in turn officially expelled from the Jewish community.

“To be Jewish was unpardonable, to stop being Jewish was impossible,” Emile Roman said, burning with a slow and melancholy wrath. “My true name is Don Samuel Béjar y Mayor, and I am not Jewish because of the faith of my ancestors, for my parents never practiced, and when I was young I cared about religion as much as you cared about your grandparents' belief in the miracles of the Catholic saints. No, it was anti-Semitism that made me a Jew. For a time my Jewishness was like a secret illness that doesn't exclude a person from contact with others because it isn't revealed in external signs, not like the lesions or pustules that condemned you as a leper in the Middle Ages. But one day in 1941 I had to sew a yellow Star of David on the upper chest of my overcoat, and from then on the illness could not be hidden, and if I forgot for an instant that I was a Jew and couldn't be anything but, the looks of people I met in the street or on a streetcar platform (while we were still allowed to travel by streetcar) reminded me of it, made me feel my illness and my strangeness. Some acquaintances turned their heads so they wouldn't have to say hello, or be seen talking with a Jew. Others walked far out of their way, as you would make a wide berth to avoid a filthy beggar or someone with a horrible deformity. As I was walking down the street, anyone at all might insult me, or push me off the curb, because I had no right to be on the sidewalk.

“Have you read Jean Améry? You must, he's as important as Primo Levi, if much more despairing. Levi's family emigrated to Italy in 1492. Both men were in Auschwitz, although they didn't meet there. Levi didn't share Améry's despair, nor could he accept his suicide, though he, too, ended up killing himself—or at least that's how it was reported by the police. Améry's name wasn't
really
Améry, or Jean. He had been born in Austria and was legally Hans Mayer. Until he was thirty, he thought that he was Austrian and that his language and culture were German. He even liked to wear the Austrian folk costume of lederhosen and kneesocks. Then one day in November of 1935, sitting in a café in Vienna, just as you and I are sitting here, he opened the newspaper and read the proclamation of the Nuremberg race laws, and discovered that he wasn't who he had always thought he was, who his parents had taught him to believe he was: an Austrian. Suddenly he was what he had never considered himself to be: a Jew. He had walked into the café taking for granted that he had a country and a life, and when he left there he was stateless, and worse, a possible victim. His face was the same, but he had become another person. In 1938 he escaped to the west, to Belgium, while there was still time, but in those days the borders in Europe could change into barbed-wire traps overnight, and the person who had escaped to another country woke up one morning hearing a loudspeaker blasting the voices of the executioners he thought he'd left behind. In 1943 Mayer was arrested by the Gestapo in Brussels, tortured, and sent to Auschwitz. After the Liberation, he repudiated the German name and language and decided to called himself Jean Améry. He never again set foot in Austria or Germany. Read the book he wrote about the hell of the camp. After I finished it, I couldn't read or write anything. He says that at the moment your torture begins, your covenant with other human beings is lost forever, that even if you are saved and live many years more, the torture never ends, and you will never be able to look anyone in the eye or trust anyone. When you meet a stranger, you wonder if he has been a torturer. If an old and well-mannered neighbor says hello when she meets you on the stairway, you think that she could have denounced the Jewish man next door to the Gestapo, or looked the other way when he
was dragged downstairs, or shouted
Heil Hitler
until she was hoarse when German soldiers marched by.”

 

I WAS INVITED TO GERMANY
once, some years ago, to give a talk in a very beautiful city, a storybook city with cobbled streets, Gothic rooflines, parks, and hundreds of people riding bicycles: Gottingen, the home of the Brothers Grimm. I remember the silken sound of the bicycle tires as they rolled over the wet cobbles at night, and the sound of the bicycle bells. It had been a sunny day, and I'd been up since early morning, taken from one place to another all day, always by very helpful and friendly people whose sole concern was to organize the immediate satisfaction of any desire I could dream up, with an efficiency that became oppressive. If I said I was interested in visiting a museum, they immediately began telephoning, and in a short time I had information pamphlets, hours, and possible means of transportation at my disposal. In the morning they took me to give a talk at the university, then agonized over various places to have lunch. Did I prefer Italian food? Chinese? Vegetarian? When I said that I liked Italian, they discussed which of several possibilities would be the best.

That afternoon, drowsy as I was from the food and the accumulated exhaustion of the trip, they took me to a bookstore to give a talk there. I read a chapter from my book, and then a translator read it in German. I became depressed thinking of all the pages I had to go, and I was disgusted and irritated by my own words. I looked up from the book to swallow, to take a breath, and saw serious, attentive faces, an audience listening with great discipline but without understanding a word. I was embarrassed by what I'd written, and felt guilty for the boredom those people must have been experiencing, so to shorten their agony I read as fast as I could and skipped entire paragraphs. I closed my eyes
when my German translator began to read, and tried to sit up straight and be attentive, as if I understood some of it, and in the slightly less inanimate faces of the audience I looked for reactions to what I'd written some time ago in a language that had no similarity at all to what they were hearing. I would detect a smile, an expression of agreement with something I'd written, but had no idea what it was. At the end I felt so relieved that it was of no consequence that the applause was enthusiastic, though I smiled and bowed my head a little, with the usual insincerity of a person being praised. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and not have to sign another book or show interest in another explication, and to be free of the crushing politeness of the organizers, who were already plotting my next steps, looking at the clock and calculating how long it was before the museum I wanted so much to see would close, discussing whether it would be quicker and more comfortable for me if they took me in a taxi or by streetcar.

They were completely undone, and I felt inconsiderate and ungrateful telling them that I would rather go back to the hotel, I would just get a bite to eat there; there was no need to call a restaurant and have the menu read to me so I could make my decision. I wasn't hungry and would be happy with a beer and a bag of potato chips from the minibar in my room. Finally they left, saying good-bye at the steps to the hotel with a friendliness I didn't deserve, they being so amiable and I cursing them inside, longing for the moment when I could lie down on the bed, do nothing, not speak to anyone, take off my shoes and fluff up the pillow and stare at the ceiling, enjoying all the hours ahead when I could be alone, take a walk at my pleasure, wherever I pleased, with no one beside me to subject me to implacable courtesy.

I luxuriated for a while in the German comfort of the room, which was small, with beams in the ceiling and a floor of polished wood, like an illustration in a story. I pulled up one of those
warm, light eiderdowns that you don't find in any other part of the world, but I didn't want to fall asleep because it was early, even though it was growing dark, if I slept now I might be wide-awake at two in the morning and spend the rest of the night in one of those miserable bouts of hotel-room insomnia. So I went down to the lobby, first looking to see that none of my hosts was about, and when I went outside, I also looked both ways, like a spy in the John Le Carré novels I read as a youth, ordinary-looking men in glasses and overcoat who walk through small German cities, turning from time to time to look in the side mirror of a parked car to be sure they're not being followed by an agent of the Stasi. There was a cold mist in the air, the dampness and smell of a river and wet vegetation. As I walked I began to recover from my exhaustion and drowsiness, and the euphoria began that tends to animate me when I go outside in a strange city and have no obligations to meet and nobody knows me.

I remember a few things clearly: a cobblestone street, houses with peaked roofs on both sides, slate roofs, wood beams crisscrossing the facades, small windows with carved wooden shutters, and through them scenes of well-lit, paneled rooms lined with books. I would hear the sharp sound of a bicycle bell behind me and be overtaken by a placidly pedaling man or woman, not necessarily young, sometimes a white-haired lady in an out-of-style hat, sometimes an executive wearing a navy-blue suit beneath his raincoat. I saw Gothic towers with gilded clocks and streetcars that floated across a street in a silence almost as ghostly as that of the bicycles. On a street corner my attention was caught by a bright pastry shop and busy sounds—though they, too, were muted, as if wrapped in the general quiet of the city—of jovial conversation and the clink of teaspoons and cups, along with the warm, pungent aroma of baking, and of cocoa and coffee, on the cold air. Because I was hungry and I'd grown cold during my long walk, I overcame the timidity that so often keeps me from
going alone into a place filled with locals, that Spanish diffidence that becomes more pronounced when I'm in a foreign country. It must have been a shop from the turn of the twentieth century, preserved intact, with stucco and gilding reminiscent of the Autro-Hungarian baroque, mahogany-framed mirrors and ballroom chandeliers, and marble-top tables and slender columns of white-painted iron that gleamed with touches of gold on the capitals. There were racks holding thick German newspapers, the print heavy and black, as if from early in the century, the First World War. The waitresses wore low-cut white bodices and old-fashioned skirts, their blond hair a wheel of braids or curls secured over the ears and their round faces pink from rushing among tables crowded with people, one hand high above their heads skillfully supporting a tray laden with teapots, porcelain jugs of coffee or chocolate, and tarts—the same copious, exquisite tarts so temptingly displayed in the showcases in greater variety than I had ever seen, or have since.

I took a seat at a small corner table and waited for my tea and the cheese-and-blackberry tart I had succeeded in ordering, using sign language. I entertained myself looking at the faces around me, enjoying the warm room and the tranquillity of not having to pay attention to a language I didn't understand. Most of the clientele were older, prosperous retired couples or groups of ladies in hats and coats, and the general tone was one of solid and civilized pleasure, heads nodding and hands with extended pinkies lifting teacups, prudent laughter, lively conversation. Pairs of light eyes sometimes registered my presence with a slight flicker of curiosity, or perhaps rejection. I was undoubtedly the only stranger in the place, and in the mirror in front of me I suddenly saw myself as if from the outside—as the waitress bringing my tea and tart must have seen me, or the man with very blue eyes and very white hair who had turned slightly and was examining me as he continued talking to the lady with gold earrings, jet-black-dyed hair, and
white gloves sitting next to him, whose excessive makeup accentuated the countless creases that ringed her crimson lips. I saw my own black hair, dark eyes, white shirt—no necktie—and the five o'clock shadow that gave me the appearance of a Bulgarian or Turk. My suit jacket, wrinkled after several days of travel and neglect, looked like the jackets immigrants wear, the ones you see in 1960s photographs of Spaniards in Germany.

I was tired; professional trips wear me out, and new acquaintances make my head spin, and I sleep badly in hotels. I was beginning to see the faces and objects around me as through a fog, although no one was smoking in the pastry shop and the only vapor came from the cups and the breath of people walking in from the cold. How strange I hadn't noticed earlier that everyone except the waitresses was old, the men and women as carefully preserved as the decor and the plaster molding of the tearoom, and equally decrepit: false teeth, canes, toupees, blond or white-powdered wigs, bi- and trifocal eyeglasses, orthopedic shoes and stockings, Miss Marple hats, and parchment-skinned, arthritic hands tremulously conveying forkfuls of tart and delicate porcelain teacups. Even the rosy, plump waitresses were somehow ancient despite their ballooning skirts, braids and curls, bodices and lace-filled décolletages. I looked at the man who had been examining me a moment before, and it occurred to me that he must be over seventy, maybe eighty. His face and hands were ruddy, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors, and he had the haughty air of a retired military man. In 1940 he wouldn't have been more than thirty. I saw him in a uniform, those light eyes shaded by the visor of a silver cap. In the Germany of the 1930s and later, during the war, what would he have been doing, where would he have been? I must have been staring at him, because I caught an expression of irritation when his eyes met mine.