Sepharad (47 page)

I considered the other people in the tearoom in the light of the chandeliers glittering in gilded moldings and multiplied in
the mirrors, and I imagined every face, man's or woman's, as it might have been fifty or sixty years back. The transformation was at first disquieting, then threatening: those placid features became young and cruel, the mouths sipping chocolate or tea opened in cries of fanatic enthusiasm, the hands with age spots and knuckles deformed by arthritis so elegantly holding teacups shot up like bayonets in an unanimous salute. How many of those around me had yelled
Heil Hitler
? What was on their conscience, in their memories? How would they have looked at me had I been wearing a yellow star stitched on my overcoat? Had I been in this same pastry shop, would one of those men, in a black leather coat, have approached me and asked for my papers? The stranger with the southern European look draws sidelong glances; cupping his tea in his hands to warm them, he doesn't know that some conscientious citizen has already called the Gestapo. So many people called in those days, without anyone forcing them, they called out of a sense of duty, and maybe one of these elderly people in the tea shop made such a call, a denunciation like the ones in the archives, proof that the crime was nearly universal, that a multitude of individuals supported the bloody edifice of tyranny. More eyes are focused on me, and my face in the mirror that expands space and multiplies people has also been modified: I am odder, darker. My discomfort grows. I wish I had a book or newspaper, something to distract me and occupy my hands. I feel through the pockets in my overcoat, but I haven't brought anything except my passport and wallet. Tired of waiting, I gather my courage and stand up to leave, but immediately sit back down—I even think I blush—because the waitress has arrived with the tray and a paper-doll smile, saying something I don't understand. I pay her before she leaves, drink a little tea, and nibble the overly sweet tart. Dizzy from the excessive warmth, I go outside and am grateful for the solitude and the cold, clean air. I start off through a park, believing it's the one I walked through on my
way from the hotel, but when I come out of it along a high railing and see the lights of a modern street I don't remember having seen before, I realize, with all the sudden lucidity of waking from a dream, that I am lost.

 

ONE SOLITARY WALK
blends into another, like a dream that leads into another, and the German night dissolves into a rainy afternoon ten years later on the other side of the ocean, but there is the same penetrating odor of wet vegetation and soaked earth, and the person doing the walking is not the same man he was then. At some moment in that interval of time, he has discovered what everyone knows and yet no one accepts: that he is mortal. Having been on the verge of dying, he also knows that the time he is living now is a gift half of chance and half of medicine. That this midafternoon stroll through the tree-lined, tranquil streets of New York might never have taken place. That if he were not this minute, slightly dizzy, crossing Fifth Avenue at Eleventh Street, going west, wearing his raincoat and carrying his umbrella, it would make absolutely no difference, no one would notice his absence, there would not be the slightest modification in the world, in the redbrick houses with high stone steps that he likes so much, in the lines of gingko trees with their fan-shaped leaves, still young and tender green, as shiny as the green of the wisteria climbing up the house fronts to the cornices, sometimes curling around the metal geometry of the fire escapes. He might never have come back to this city, it could easily have happened, and since it is only one or two days before he leaves it, he fears this may be the last time, and his awareness of the fragility of his life, the so easily cut thread of any person's life, makes this walk he is taking now that much more valuable. Among the names of cities and women his life and mind have gifted him with, there is a new name, scrabbling up like a scorpion in his vital lexicon. Just as Franz Kafka never wrote the word
tuberculosis
in his letters, he
never speaks the word
leukemia,
he doesn't even think it or say it silently, lest with that mere pronunciation he feels the poison of its sting.

He walks west, letting his footsteps lead where they will, looking for the hidden, cobblestone streets close to the Hudson River, on the edge of the vast desolation of the port and the abandoned wharves where transatlantic steamers used to berth. Now the huge pilings are rotting in the gray water, and thick weeds grow in the cracks of the piers as if among the crumbling columns of a ruined temple. Some of the piers have signs forbidding entrance. Others have been converted into children's parks or playgrounds. Countless people fleeing Europe walked across these broad wooden planks, and from here they looked toward the city with fear and hope. Along the river runs a path for runners and bladers, for people who come to quietly walk their dogs. On the other side he can see the New Jersey coast, low lines of trees interrupted by ugly industrial hangars, an apartment tower, a gigantic brick building that from a distance looks like the merloned door of a walled Babylonian or Assyrian city and that has its exact equivalent on this side of the river. Those constructions seemed the more mysterious to me because they had no windows and I couldn't imagine what purpose they served. They were like the towers of Nineveh or Samarkand, erected not in the middle of the desert but on the banks of the Hudson; later I learned that they contain ventilators for the Lincoln Tunnel, which runs beneath the river and is so long that when you drive through it in a taxi you have the sensation that you will never reach the end and soon will run out of air.

In the distance, to the south, rises the cliff of the newest skyscrapers in the lower part of Manhattan, the ones that have grown up around the Twin Towers, which have a certain beauty only when surrounded by fog or when the sun at dusk gives them the splendor of copper prisms. On this afternoon of cloud and
mist the waters of the Hudson are as gray as the sky, and the tops of the skyscrapers are lost in the large, dark, swiftly moving clouds in which the red lights of lightning conductors glow like coals beneath a light layer of ash. Almost lost in the fog are the Statue of Liberty and the slim brick towers of Ellis Island.

I have returned to this city and am already saying good-bye to it. I want to treasure every foot of it, every minute of this last evening, the red brick of those hidden streets, the fragrance of the purple blooms of the wisteria, the scent of the small jungle-like gardens you sometimes glimpse between two buildings, behind a wooden fence, where dank shade and thick vegetation remind me of the garden in the Church of Santa María on afternoons of heavy rain, when the water spilled from the gargoyles between the arches of the cloister and echoed within the vaulted ceilings. Between Fifth Avenue and Sixth, almost at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, I have found the Sephardic cemetery my friend Bill Sherzer once showed me. I never noticed it before, although I am often in this neighborhood, the lower end of the avenues, which become more open and bohemian at the juncture of Chelsea and Greenwich Village, with its street stands of books and secondhand records and shops of outlandish clothing, its sidewalk café tables and showcases of fabulous Italian specialty groceries. We had often gone to one of them, Balducci's, to shop, but never noticed that shaded, narrow garden with the iron fence that at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the cemetery of the Hispano-Portuguese Jewish community, information confirmed by a plaque. Bill pointed it out to us. Fugitives from Russia, from hunger and the pogroms, his grandparents came to Ellis Island at the turn of the century.

Among the trees, ferns, ivy, and weeds are a few headstones so worn that you can barely read the inscriptions: Hebrew or Latin characters, an occasional Spanish name, a Star of David. The fence is closed, so we can't get inside the tiny cemetery, but if you
could touch the stones you might make out something more than slabs whose corners have rounded with time, eroded to the point that almost all trace of human labor has been erased, like the broken columns and fragments of capitals returning to a primitive mineral state in the forums of Rome. Who is there to rescue names that were carved two hundred years ago, names of people who lived as fully as I do, who had memories and desires, who perhaps could trace their lineage back through successive exiles to a city like mine, to a house with two Stars of David on the lintel and to a barrio of narrow streets that lay deserted between the spring and summer of 1492? On this foggy, misty afternoon in New York, standing at the fence of a tiny cemetery locked between the high walls of buildings, I reencounter my ghostly compatriots, and sadly say farewell, because I am leaving tomorrow and may not return. There may be no future afternoon when I stand in this place, before these stones with eroded names, lost like so many others to the immemorial catalogue of Spanish diasporas, to the geography of Spanish graves in so many exiles throughout the world. Gravestones, tombs without a name, infinite lists of dead. On the outskirts of New York there is a cemetery of rolling green hills and enormous trees called the Gates of Heaven, with lakes where in autumn large flocks of Canadian geese gather. Among the thousands of headstones, in the midst of a geometry of graves with Irish names, there is one that is Spanish, so modest, so like the others, that it is difficult to find.

 

FEDERICO GARCÍA RODRÍGUEZ
1859–1945

 

How could that man have imagined that his grave would be not in a cemetery in Granada but on the other side of the world, near the Hudson River, or that his son would die before him and not have a grave, no simple stone to mark the exact spot in the ravine where he was executed? Modest burial places and common
graves line the highways of the great Spanish diaspora. I would like to visit the French cemetery where Don Manuel Azaña was buried in 1940 in the midst of the great upheaval in Europe, and read the name of Antonio Machado on a tomb in the cemetery of Colliure. Legions of other dead who have no tomb or inscription endure in the alphabetized archive of names. On one Internet page I found, in white letters on a black background, a list of Sephardim the Germans deported from the Island of Rhodes to Auschwitz. You would have to read them one by one, aloud, as if reciting a strict and impossible prayer, to understand that not one of these names can be reduced to a number in an atrocious statistic. Each had a life unlike any other, just as each face, each voice was unique, and the horror of each death was unrepeatable even though it happened amid so many millions of similar deaths. How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, can one attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives?

 

I REMEMBER THE MORNING
of that next-to-last day in New York, when you and I were already a little dazed by the imminence of the trip. We were in that strange nontime of the eve of departure, when a person is not completely in the place though he hasn't left it yet, when the things that seemed to accept him for a while now remind him that he is only a stranger passing through. We were shaken by the realization that no trace would remain of our presence in the apartment we occupied for such a brief time but in which, nonetheless, day after day, we had accumulated the signs of domestic life: clothes in the closet, which when I open it smelled of your cologne, just like our closet in Madrid, our books on the night table, your creams and my brush and shaving cream on the bathroom shelf—the part of us we brought on this trip, the part we must take with us again like nomads, erasing all the marks of ourselves before we go, even the
scent of our bodies on the sheets, which we drop off at the laundry on the morning of our departure.

The least gesture casts the shadow of farewell. I was hoarding the count of the days we have left, and this morning I am thinking back on them, completely awake in the bed that belongs to others but has been ours for a few weeks. Still lazy and relaxed, my arms around you as you lie there as though still asleep and drawing pleasure from the deep pool of dream, I am also thinking that we still have this day, and I want very much to keep it whole and enjoy it slowly, like those moments we grant ourselves in bed after the alarm clock has gone off. Later I turn on the radio as I fix breakfast, but despite the announcer this is not a day like any other, and my routine of getting the coffee can from its precise place in the cupboard and the carton of milk from the refrigerator is false, like the ease with which I open the drawer with the spoons or turn the knob for the gas or put the filter in the coffeepot. False because tomorrow afternoon we will be two ghosts in this place, unknown and invisible to the new renter, whom we will not see and for whom we will leave an envelope with the concierge that contains the key to the apartment. The new renter is already an invading shadow, usurping the space of our intimacy, not just the bed where we've slept and made love and the table where every morning before you get up I have set out the coffee cups for breakfast, he also is present in the humid early-morning light that sifts through the glass doors to the terrace, and in the view we saw when, elbows propped on a fourteenth-story cornice as if on the railing of a great transatlantic steamer, we looked out over the city, especially at night. Those May nights of wind and lightning, storms with the fury of a monsoon, lightning bolts cutting across the large black clouds that blocked out the skyscrapers or that turned them into ghosts rising radiant through the downpour in the distance and disappearing suddenly in fog tinted the colors of
the spotlights illuminating the highest floors of the Empire State Building, violet at times, red and blue, intense yellow. How reluctant we are to return to our country, for we have received almost daily accounts of obscurantism and bloodshed. We long to remain in exile.

There is still one day to pretend to ourselves, to each other, that our presence in this house, in this city, is real, as real as the doorman who gives us a cordial good morning in his Cuban accent or the Bengali at the shop on the corner where every day I buy a newspaper and telephone cards. I have spent so much of my life wanting to leave the place where I am, but now, when time is moving so swiftly, what I want most is to stay put, to cling like a limpet to the cities I like, to enjoy the calm of habit and familiarity, as when I think of the years you and I have been together. Never, except when I was a child, have I been tempted to collect anything, but now I like to slip ordinary mementos between the pages of a notebook or book: matchbooks with the name of a restaurant, theater tickets, bus tickets, any minimal document that records a date and time, our presence at some site, the itinerary of a brief trip. I'm not attached to things, not even to books and records, but I am to those places where I have known the mysterious exaltation of the best of myself, the fullness of my desires and affinities. What I treasure like an avaricious and obsessive collector are the moments I spend listening to music or looking at paintings in the galleries of a museum, the pleasure of walking with you one afternoon along the banks of the Hudson as the sun tints the glass of the skyscrapers with gold and copper. That captured light continues to glow in a photograph. I treasure the restless sense of adventure and uncertainty that invaded us that next-to-last morning in New York as we watched the last opulent houses of the Upper East Side slip past the bus window and gradually be replaced by the first vacant lots and ruined blocks of Harlem.