Antonio Molina - Sepharad

WHAT WAS IT REALLY LIKE, Tangiers? Distorted in memory by the passing years, for memory is never as precise as literature would have us believe. Who can truly remember a city or a face without the help of a photograph? But they are lost, all those albums of a former life, a life that seemed unchanging, suffocating, and yet evaporated almost without leaving a single image, like the ruins of a camp or like colors gradually forgotten by a man who has gone blind, like the city where Señor Isaac Salama lived until he was twelve, like the faces of his sisters and mother, like the city where a young man feels as if he is a prisoner and will never escape, and yet he does, and then one day he doesn’t come back to the office, never again sits at the desk where, in one of the drawers, among official and now useless papers, there is a packet of forgotten letters that someone will throw out during the next cleaning: the letters from Milena Jesenska that Kafka didn’t keep.

Ships’ horns and the muezzin’s call at dusk, heard from the terrace of a hotel. A Spanish pastry shop like those in the provincial cities of the sixties, a Spanish theater called the Cervantes, now in near ruins. Large cafés filled with men only, thick with smoke and humming with conversations in Arabic and French. Gilt teapots and narrow crystal glasses filled with steaming, very sweet, green tea. The labyrinth of a market redolent of the spices and foods of his childhood. A blind beggar wearing a ragged brown hooded cloak that seems made of the same cloth as Velázquez’s Water Seller of Seville ; the beggar wields a cane and murmurs a little chant in Arabic, and beneath the hood all you can see of him is a chin covered with a scraggly white beard, and a shadow hiding his eyes like a mask of melancholy. Idle young men loiter on street corners near the hotels, and as soon as they spy a foreigner they besiege him, offering their friendship and help as guides, trying to sell him hashish or provide him with a young girl or boy, and if he says no it doesn’t discourage them, and if he’s embarrassed and ignores them, pretending not to see them, they still don’t give up but trail behind this person who doesn’t know how to elude them but at the same time, plagued with the bad conscience of the privileged European, doesn’t want to seem arrogant or offensive. Pasteur Boulevard, the only street name that sticks in his memory: bourgeois buildings that might be found in any city in Europe, although the Europe of a different time, before the war, a city with streetcars and baroque facades, maybe the Budapest in which Señor Salama was born and where he lived until he was ten but never returned to and of which he has only a few sentimental impressions, like postcards colored by hand. The most beautiful city in the world, I swear, the most solemn river — pure majesty, none can compare with it, not the Thames or the Tiber or the Seine — the Duna, and all these years later I still can’t get used to calling it the Danube. And the most civilized city, we believed, until those beasts awakened, not just the Germans, the Hungarians were worse than the Germans, they didn’t need orders to act with brutality, the Arrow Cross bands, Himmler’s and Eichmann’s pit bulls, the Hungarians who had been our neighbors and who spoke our language, which by now I have forgotten, or nearly, because my father insisted on never speaking it again, not even between the two of us, the only ones left of our entire family, two alone and lost here in Tangiers, with our Spanish passports and the new Spanish identity that had saved our lives and allowed us to escape from Europe, which my father never wanted to return to, the Europe he had loved above all else and of which he had been so proud, the home of Brahms and Schubert and Rilke and all that great cultural dreck that made his head spin, rejected later in order to turn himself into a zealous Orthodox Jew, isolated and reticent among Gentiles, he who never took us to the synagogue when we were children or celebrated any holiday, who spoke French, English, Italian, and German, but knew scarcely a word of Hebrew and only one or two lullabies in Ladino — although when we lived in Budapest he took pride in his Spanish roots. Sepharad was the name of our true homeland, although we’d been expelled from it more than four centuries ago. My father told me that for generations our family kept the key of the house that had been ours in Toledo, and he detailed every journey they’d made since they left Spain, as if he were telling me about a single life that had lasted nearly five hundred years. He always spoke in the first person plural: we emigrated to North Africa, and then some of us made our homes in Salonika, and others in Istanbul, to which we brought the first printing presses, and in the nineteenth century we arrived in Bulgaria, and at the beginning of the twentieth one of my grandparents, my father’s father, who was involved in the grain trade along the ports of the Danube, settled in Budapest and married the daughter of a family of his own rank, because in that time the Sephardim considered themselves to be above the eastern Jews, the impoverished Ashkenazim from the Jewish villages of Poland and Ukraine, the ones who had escaped the Russian pogroms. We were Spanish, my father would say, using his prideful plural. Did you know that a 1924 decree restored Spanish nationality to the Sephardim?

THE ATENEO ESPAÑOL, the Galerías Duna, the lights of the Spanish coast shimmering at night, so close it seemed they weren’t on the other side of the Mediterranean but on the far shore of a very wide river, the Danube, the Duna that Señor Salama saw in his childhood, the river into which in the summer of 1944 the Germans and their lackeys threw the Jews they’d murdered in the street, in broad daylight, hurriedly because the Red Army was approaching and it was possible that the rail lines would be cut and there would be no way to keep sending convoys of the doomed to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or to those lesser-known camps whose names no one remembers. Spain is a stone’s throw away, an hour and a half by ship, witness those lights visible from the terrace of the hotel, but in a conversation with Señor Salama, in the Galerías Duna or in the Ateneo Español, Spain seems thousands of kilometers away, across oceans, as if one were remembering it from the Hogar Español in Moscow one waning winter day or in the Café Madrid in Washington, DC. Spain is so remote that it is nearly nonexistent, an inaccessible, unknown, thankless country they called Sepharad, longing for it with a melancholy without basis or excuse, with a loyalty as constant as that passed from father to son by the ancestors of Señor Salama, the only one of all his line to fulfill the hereditary dream of return, only to be expelled once again, and this time definitively, because of a misfortune that he no longer considered just another injustice of chance as the years went by, but a consequence and punishment for his own pride, for the self-indulgence that had pushed him to be ashamed of his father and to reject him in his deepest heart.

If he hadn’t been driving that car so fearlessly, he thinks day after day, with the same obsessive mourning his father had devoted to the wife and daughters he didn’t save, if he hadn’t been going so fast, wanting to get to the Peninsula as quickly as he could, to go up to Madrid not on one of the slow night trains that scored the country from south to north like dark, powerful rivers but in the car his father gave him as a reward for completing the two degrees he’d studied for concurrently and completed with such brilliance. By now neither father nor son maintained the fiction that these university diplomas were going to help the business on Pasteur Boulevard prosper. Tangiers, Señor Salama told his father when he went home after his last courses, would not much longer be the lively and open international city it had been when they arrived in 1944. Now it belonged to the kingdom of Morocco, and little by little foreigners would have to leave—“we first,” said the father with a flash of the wit and sarcasm of old. “I only hope they throw us out with better manners than the Hungarians, or the Spanish in 1492.”