Antonio Molina: Sepharad

But it was another emotion that moved us most, especially when our illusions about the new life awaiting us in the capital began to wane, or when we simply began to get used to that life, the way you get used to everything and, as you do, lose your taste for it, the way liking turns into boredom, tedium, hidden irritation. We preferred the emotion of that other arrival, the slow approach to our home country, the signs that announced it to us, not kilometer markers on the highway but certain familiar indications seen from the small window of the train or bus: a roadside inn, the red color of the soil along the banks of the Guadalimar River, and then the first houses, the isolated street lamps on the corners, if we arrived at night, the sensation of already being there and the impatience of not quite having arrived, the sweet feeling of all the days that lay ahead, of vacations begun and yet still intact.

There was in those days one last house, I remember now, where the city ended on the north, the last one you left behind as you traveled toward Madrid and the first you saw on the return, an ancient little hotel with a garden, called La Casa Cristina, which was often the meeting place for the crews of olive pickers and also the place where we bade the Virgin farewell when at the beginning of September her image was returned to the sanctuary of the village from which she would be brought the following year, at the time of the busy pilgrimage in May, the Virgin to whom, as children, we came to pray on late-summer afternoons.

Maybe the limits of things were drawn more clearly then, like the lines and colors and names of countries on the maps that hung on the schoolhouse walls: that small hotel with its tiny garden and its yellow street lamp on the corner was precisely where our city ended. One step farther and the country began, especially at night when the lamp glowed at the edge of the darkness, not lighting it but revealing it in all its depth. A few years ago, when I was on a trip with my children, who were still small — I remember that the second one was holding my hand — I tried to take them to see La Casa Cristina, and along the way I was telling them that it was near that hotel that the owner of the olive groves would hire my mother and me to work as pickers. I told them how icy cold it was as we walked through the dark city in heavy wraps: I wearing my father’s corduroy cap and wool gloves, my mother in a shawl that completely enveloped her and covered her head. It was so cold that my ears and hands were frozen, and my mother had to rub my hands with hers, which were warmer and rougher, and blow her warm breath on my fingertips. I would get choked up when I told them about those times, and about my mother, whom they had scarcely known. I made them see how much life had changed in such a short time, because it was nearly unimaginable for them to think that children their age had to spend the Christmas vacations earning a daily wage in the olive groves. Then I realized that I had been talking for a long time and wandering around without finding La Casa Cristina, and I thought I’d lost my way because of all the talking I was doing, but no, I was right at the place I’d been looking for: what wasn’t there was the house. A man I asked told me it had been torn down several years before, when they widened the old Madrid highway. Whatever the case, even if La Casa Cristina had still been on that corner, the city wouldn’t have ended there: new neighborhoods had grown up, monotonous block after brick block, and there was a multisports complex and a new commercial center the man showed me with pride, as if pointing out impressive monuments to a foreigner. Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who remained faithful and that we, in a sense, are deserters.

My wife says that I live in the past, that I feed on dreams like the idle old men who hang around playing dominoes at our social center and attend the lectures and poetry readings that Godino organizes. I tell her that I am like them, more or less, as good as unemployed, almost permanently “between jobs,” as they say now, no matter how hard I try to start business deals that don’t come to anything, or accept nearly always short-lived, often fraudulent jobs. What I don’t tell her is that at this point I would really like to live in the past, to sink into it with the same conviction, the same voluptuousness, that others do, like Godino, who when he eats morcilla stew, or remembers some joke or the nickname of one of our paisanos, or recites a few lines from our most famous poet, Jacob Bustamante, flushes with enthusiasm and happiness, and is always planning what he’s going to do when Holy Week comes, and counting the days till Palm Sunday, and especially till the night of Ash Wednesday, when it’s time for the procession he participates in as a member of the brotherhood and also as director. “Just like our renowned Mateo Zapatón, who’s retired now in La Villa y Corte,” says Godino, who knows an unbelievable number of our paisanos by their proper names and nicknames although he has lived his whole life in Madrid, and calls everyone “illustrious,” “esteemed,” “distinguished,” hitting that uished so hard, the way they do in our town, that more than once he’s sprayed saliva as he says it.

It’s true, many of us would like to live in the immutable past of our memories, a past that seems to live on in the taste of some foods and those dates marked in red on the calendars, but without realizing it we’ve been letting a remoteness grow inside us that no quick trip can remedy or increasingly infrequent telephone calls ease — forget the letters we stopped writing years ago. Now that we can make the three-hour trip swiftly and comfortably on the expressway, we go back less and less. Everything is much closer, but we’re the ones drifting farther away, even though we repeat the old familiar words and stress our accent and though we still get emotional when we hear the marches of our religious association or recite poems by the “distinguished bard who gives meaning to the word,” as he is introduced by Godino — who is flattering and admiring him but at the same time pulling his leg — the poet Jacob Bustamante, who apparently paid no attention to the siren song of literary celebrity and chose not to come to Madrid. He’s still there, in our city, collecting prizes and accumulating benefits because he’s a civil servant, as is another of our local glories, maestro Gregorio E. Puga, a composer of note who also ignored the siren song scorned by Godino in his day. They say (actually, Godino says) that maestro Puga concluded his musical studies in Vienna brilliantly, and that he could have found a position in one of the best orchestras of Europe had the pull of his hometown not been so strong, but he returned instead with all his diplomas for excellence in German, in Gothic lettering, and very quickly and very easily, in a competitive examination, earned the position of band director.

WE LIKED TO COME BACK with our children when they were small, and we were proud to find that they were fond of the same things that had enchanted us in our childhoods. They looked forward to Holy Week, when they could wear their costumes as little penitents, the child’s cape that left the face uncovered. Almost as soon as they were born, we enrolled them as members in the same associations our fathers had enrolled us in. When they were a little older, they would get antsy in the car, asking, from the moment we left, how many hours till we got there. Born in Madrid, they spoke with an accent different from ours, but it made us proud to think, and to tell one another, that they belonged to our land as much as we did, and when we took them by the hand on a Sunday morning and led them down Calle Nueva, just as our parents had led us, and lifted them up as a float passed so they could get a better look at the donkey Jesus rode as he entered Jerusalem, or the green, sinister face of Judas on the Last Supper float, we were consoled by the sense that life was repeating itself, that time didn’t pass in our city, or that it was less cruel than the nerve-racking and jumbled pace of life in Madrid.