Antonio Molina - Sepharad

You will see the plain, green as an oasis, and above it the hillsides with houses clinging to steep streets, supported by vertical buttresses or rocks where ivy and brambles clamber and figs sprout. You used to climb there with your cousin, always behind her, frightened but spurred by her boldness, and both of you would end up sweaty and panting, your knees as raw as those of the boys. You will hear the gurgling of unseen water in the ditches, and your eyes will search out the cypresses that line the road toward the bare peak of the hill, ending at the walls of the cemetery, which are the same harsh brown as the naked earth that suddenly is like desert, though only a short distance from the water and the green of the valley: desert and oasis, the peaks scored by dry gullies, stained rust red, the highest house already eroded by the dryness, the other houses abandoned many years ago, their shutterless windows empty of glass, their roofs caved in, their walls the color of clay, like adobe ruins in a desert slowly returning to dirt and sand. And at the top, above the last almond trees and ruined houses, at the end of the winding cypress-lined road where an occasional light is visible at night, that is where I want you to bury me, with my family and lifelong neighbors, among names I’ve heard since I was a little girl, in a cemetery so small that we all know one another, with a sweeping view of the hillsides and the valley and the overhanging houses of the village that makes your head swim.

You are on your way, and long before the name you loved so much when you were a girl appears on a sign at the side of the road, you will be excited, hypnotized by the pull of return, by the strong current of time that carries you back at a speed greater even than that of the car on the flat, straight highway, still barely out of Madrid, still near your present life and several hours and hundreds of kilometers from your destination but rushing toward it. Your face changes without your noticing, making you look like the person you were at four or five — the age of your first memories of that trip — and also the person you were when you were sixteen and your mother died. She pressed your hand on the mussed sheet of the hospital bed and said something you couldn’t understand, and with the words barely out of her mouth, her moist hand softly released yours, with a kind of delicacy, and then it wasn’t at all your mother’s hand, the one you’d known and stroked so many times, pressed during those nights of agony and sleeplessness, it was the hand of a dead woman, neutral and inert when you held it to your face. Exhausted and in tears, you called to her for the last time, refusing to accept that she had left with no warning, in a few seconds, like someone slipping away to avoid the pain of a long farewell.

I keep sneaking glances at you, observing you. Driving, I turn toward you and see a new expression in your face, a look developing as we drive, and from that I get some hint of what you were long before I met you, a secret archaeology of your face and soul. I had handed you the telephone, which rang at a strange hour, almost midnight, and as you nodded and listened, your face became different from any face I’d seen in the years I lived with you.

Your previous life is a country that you’ve told me many things about but that I will never be able to visit: your past, your previous lives, the places you left behind, never to return, summer-vacation photos. The ring of the telephone broke the silence, the calm of the house, and when you hung up, after listening and nodding and asking questions in a low voice, the long ago erupted into your present, into mine, and enveloped us both — though I didn’t yet know it — in its mist of sweetness and distance, of loss and regret. “You remember my mother’s sister, who took such good care of us after Mother died? Now she has cancer, less than a week to live, a few days, he said, my cousin who’s the physician, the brother of that cousin of mine who died so young.”

You are grateful for your sadness, because it atones a little for the remorse you feel over how long it’s been since you went to see her… really, since you even thought of her. It was enough for you to know that you loved her, that she had been the one warm, strong presence in your life for many years, your slender mother, or shadow of your mother, whom she closely resembled although without half her charm, a less attractive version of her younger sister. You didn’t have to go see her, even call her, because she was with you, planted almost as deeply as the memory of your mother, but it never occurred to you that she was receiving no sign of that love from you. You realized too late that you made no effort to be with her during the last bitter years of her lonely life, in the large house where no one came to spend the summer. In all the hustle and bustle of life there had always been other things to do, more demanding things, like creditors. As if she would always be there, in that house, which changed as little as she, always ready to welcome you no matter how much time had passed. She, the house, the town belonged to a realm unaffected by your forgetfulness and long absences. If you were careless about your job, some misfortune might overtake you; if you failed to see a friend, you might lose him; you left nothing to chance either in love or in looking after yourself, never let things become routine, in all your actions, feelings, desires there was an edge of anxiety. You had been stripped so bare when your mother died, and overnight the daily order of your house was broken, so you could no longer trust in the permanence of things. Even as you enjoyed what you had, you knew how temporary it was, how inevitable loss was; and when you succeeded at something — a job, a friendship, a house — you never believed it was truly yours or that you deserved to celebrate it calmly. Which was why you always did things with vehemence, as if it were the first and last time, why you liked to decorate the places where you lived with carefully chosen objects, so that wherever you were, it seemed you’d lived there forever, given their careful arrangement and intimate relationship to you, except you felt that you had just arrived and might leave at any moment. In you, and in everything that had anything to do with you, one saw the sure hand of carefulness as well as the fragility of all that could be shattered or lost, all that was subject to chance.

Only the distant past was stable, a foreign country that long predated my arrival on the scene, a place you told me many things about but could not be found on any map, but only in the forbidden land of time. The three Moorish syllables of its name did not describe a location, they were merely a sound, a call that was familiar to you but had no resonance in my memory. All it took was the telephone ringing at midnight, and now haste, death, and guilt have invaded our static kingdom, and you realize that every day, every hour, every minute holds a threat, and you glance at the speedometer out of the corner of your eye, at the clock on the dashboard, calculating the kilometers yet to go, the days or hours of life left to your aunt, whom you imagined as safe from old age as she was in that black-and-white photograph taken in her youth, where she wears a summer dress and stands arm in arm with your mother, the two of them so much alike, yet one is striking and attractive and the other isn’t; both laugh, innocent, for in their future no illness or death exists, and you and I are not even possibilities.

The place-names along the highway invoke your childhood, space transmuting into time as the signs mark the kilometers. You gaze out the window, recognizing the landscapes you saw long ago, and your eyes take on a faraway look. It’s the beginning of summer vacation, and your excitement and impatience to get there are much more powerful than the weariness of so many hours in the car. Each roadside name and each number are a promise repeated every year, and yet it never loses its glow of happiness. You can’t remember the sequence of the summers, though you might organize them according to the episodes of your childhood, but the sequence has come to a sudden conclusion in a hospital room on a chokingly hot day in July, as you observe the waxen face of the woman who has just died and is already losing her resemblance to your mother. In your mind all those summers become one broad and serene river, and all the trips are variations on the theme of approaching paradise. Sitting in the front seat, in your mother’s lap, looking at the highway and gradually falling asleep as you gaze at the profile of your father, who was driving and smoking, or back toward your brother and sister, who were fighting in the backseat and surely resentful of you because you were the smallest and in the arms of your mother, who was still young and in good health, or didn’t yet know she wasn’t, or at least didn’t let your brother and sister and you find out. But maybe even then, as she held you in her arms and let her thoughts roam, she was feeling in her breast the labored thudding of her heart and thinking that she might die and never see you grow up, never know what would become of you, that this summer trip to the town where she was born just might be her last. When the car made the final turn, and as you beheld the paradise of the orchards on the plain and the stair-stepped houses on the hillside, maybe she was looking up toward the sere, reddish peak where the cemetery was and thinking, “That is where I want to be buried, with people I love and who know me, not in one of those cemeteries in Madrid filled with nameless dead.”