Antonio Molina - Sepharad

That’s what he said, the Spanish, as if he didn’t consider himself one of them anymore, even though he held that citizenship and during a period in his life had felt such pride in belonging to a Sephardic line. Señor Salama realized that his father was calculating the possibility of selling the business and emigrating to Israel. But the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to change countries again. “I should have paid attention to my father,” he says now, in another of his episodes of repentance, “because Spain doesn’t want to know about anything Spanish in Tangiers — or about those of us Spaniards who are still here. In Morocco there is less and less room for us, but they don’t want us in Spain either. With the pension I’ll get when I close this shop, from which I get next to nothing now, when I retire I won’t have enough to live on the Peninsula, so I’ll stay here to die in Tangiers, where we are less and less Spanish and more and more old foreigners. I could go to Israel, of course, but what would I do at my age, in a country I know nothing about, a place where I have no one?”

If he had paid attention to his father then, if he’d had a little patience, if he hadn’t been driving so fast along one of those Spanish highways of the 1950s, so full of himself, he says, his fleshy lips twisted in a sardonic smile, believing he could do anything, in control of his life.

A little before dawn, as he came out of a tight curve, his car drifted to the left of the road, and he saw the yellow headlights of a truck coming toward him. “I should have died right there,” Señor Salama says, and realizes he is reprising the words he heard his father speak so many times, the same desire to go back and correct a few minutes, a few seconds — if we hadn’t left them at home alone, if we’d returned just a little earlier — an entire life shattered forever in one fraction of a moment, an eternity of remorse and shame, the horrible shame Señor Salama felt when he found himself paralyzed at the age of twenty-two, walking with crutches and dragging two useless legs, knowing he could never stand on his own again, that he lacked not just the physical strength but the moral courage to pursue the life he had wanted so much and thought he had right at his fingertips.

“I didn’t want anyone to see me, I wanted to hide in the dark, in a cellar, like those monsters in the movies. It was years before I went outside with any feeling of normality, or walked through the shop on my crutches.” He noticed that gradually he was becoming deformed, the way his legs grew weaker and his torso more massive, his shoulders unnaturally broad and his neck sunken between them. He would fall in the shop in front of some customer — in those days when there were still a lot of them — and when the clerks came running to pick him up, he despised them even more than he despised himself, and he would close his eyes as he had in the hospital and want to die of embarrassment.

“How can you understand — forgive me for saying so — when you have two good legs and both arms? When you don’t, it is like having a grave illness, or a yellow star sewn to your lapel. I didn’t want to be a Jew when the other children threw rocks at me in the park in Budapest where I went to play with my sisters, who were older and braver and defended me. At that time in my life, being a Jew gave me the same sense of shame and the same rage I felt after I was paralyzed, crippled — none of this ‘impaired’ or ‘disabled’ drivel, which is what those imbeciles say now, as if changing the word could erase the stigma and give me back the use of my legs. When I was nine or ten, in Budapest, what I wanted was not for us Jews to be saved from the Nazis. I say it now, to my shame: what I wanted was not to be a Jew.”

A WARM BREEZE WAFTS through the open window of Señor Salama’s small office, the breeze of a May afternoon, though the visit came in December and he can hear the clear call of a muezzin, amplified by one of those rudimentary loudspeakers dangling precariously from a few wires, as well as the hoarse blast of a ship’s horn entering or leaving the port. With an expression of annoyance, he has called the shop to ask if there’s anything he should know, and in French told someone who took a long time to answer the telephone that he can’t come before closing time because the concert begins at eight in the recital hall of the Ateneo. Spanish Culture Week was inaugurated yesterday with a lecture on literature, and there was a respectable audience, but today Señor Salama is worried because the pianist scheduled to perform is not very well known and may not be very good either. If he were, why would he come to Tangiers to give a concert for so little money? It’s frightening, and depressing, to picture the hall with only a few seats occupied, the Andalusian white stucco wall arching above the stage, and the pianist in a travel-rumpled dinner jacket making an overly emphatic bow before an unenthusiastic public, the locks of a romantic mane covering half his face when he stands back up. There weren’t funds to print enough posters or send invitations in time. Besides, it’s Wednesday, and there may be an international match on TV. In the large, dark cafés of Tangiers, which assault the nostrils with the stale odor of male sweat and black tobacco reminiscent of Spanish bars thirty years before, you sometimes see a mass of dark faces raised toward a television screen, unshaved cheeks and unblinking eyes: a soccer match on Spanish television or one of those competitions of miniskirted airline stewardesses leaning against late-model cars. “That’s the cultural contribution Spain is leaving here,” rages Señor Salama, “television and soccer, while the language is being lost and our Ateneo goes without any help, eaten up by debts while on the Peninsula thousands of millions are wasted on that Babylon of the Seville Expo. Look at the French, in contrast, compare our Ateneo with the Alliance Française, their opulent palace, the film series they organize, the exhibitions they bring from the Continent, the money they spend on advertising — which they paste over all our posters, the few we can afford. You’ve noticed that French flag on high, haven’t you? I go there because they’re always inviting me, and I die with envy. The French invite me, yes, but the Spanish forget, I don’t matter, I’m no one. But the Ateneo itself… The people at the embassy and the consulate shove us aside every chance they get, as if we didn’t exist.” Señor Salama breathes heavily, his elbows propped on the desktop, his broad torso spread over the papers, his hands searching among the disorder: concert programs, letters, unpaid bills, invitations. It’s getting late, and he can’t find what he’s looking for; he checks his watch and verifies that it’s only a few minutes before the concert begins: the piano recital performed by the acclaimed virtuoso D. Gregor Andrescu, works by F. Schubert and F. Liszt, open to the public, please be punctual. Panic that almost no one has shown up, torture at the thought of being seated in the first row and seeing at such close range the disappointment and obligatory smile of the pianist, who according to Señor Salama was a figure of the first magnitude in Romania before escaping to the West and finding political asylum in Spain.

Señor Salama has found what he was looking for, an invitation written in French and printed on stiff, shining stock bearing the gold seal of the republic and, at the bottom, on a dotted line, his name written in exquisite calligraphy with China ink: M. Isaac Salama, directeur de L’Athénée Espagnol, the invitation unmistakable proof that foreigners have more consideration for him than his compatriots. “This exhibition was unforgettable,” he says, taking back the card, which he looks at again as if to check that his handwritten name and title are still there. “We will never be able to do anything like that: Baudelaire manuscripts, first editions of Flowers of Evil and Spleen, proofs with corrections and deletions made by Baudelaire himself. How strange it is, I thought, that these very personal things have survived so long, that they’re here and I can see them.” And his eyes nearly mist over when he remembers the emotion of seeing, copied cleanly by the hand of the poet, the sonnet to the unknown beauty, “A une passante,” which of all Baudelaire’s poems is the one Señor Salama likes best, the one he knows by heart and recites in the admirable French he learned from his mother in childhood, pausing with delight and a certain melodrama on the last line: