Antonio Molina - Sepharad

O toi que j’eusse aimé! O toi qui le savais!

He sits as if swamped in tragic silence, in an inscrutable pose of penitence. Eyes fixed and moist, he seems about to say something; he opens his mouth, taking a breath to speak, but just as he begins there is a knock at the office door. A thin older woman enters, eyeglasses hanging from a chain around her neck: the librarian and secretary of the Ateneo. “When you gentlemen want to come down, Maestro Andrescu says he’s ready.”

ONE DAY THEY DISAPPEAR, dead or not, they are lost and fade from memory as if they never existed, or have become something different, a figure or phantom of imagination greatly changed from the real person they were, from the real life they may still be living. But sometimes they rise up again, leap from the past, you hear a voice you haven’t heard for years or someone casually speaks the name of someone dead or a character in a novel. Far from Tangiers, many years later in another life, at such a great remove in time that memories have lost all precision and nearly all substance, on a train where a group of writers and professors are traveling through green hills and mist, someone mentions Señor Salama’s name, followed by an expression of mockery and a deep laugh.

“Don’t tell me you knew him, too, old Salama? It’s been years since I thought of him. What a mess the guy got me into. If someone had just warned me, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Tangiers, especially for the shit they paid, the place was falling apart, you know. Very accommodating that Jew was, almost to the point of fawning, didn’t you think? And an awful bore; he just kept at you. He’d pick you up at the hotel first thing in the morning and take you everywhere, practically to the bathroom too, and all the while the same thing, that song and dance about how no one in Spain paid any attention, and those long-winded stories about how he arrived in Tangiers, wasn’t it in the forties? It seems he came from a moneyed family, from Czechoslovakia or somewhere like that, and they had to pay an enormous sum to the Nazis to get out. I can’t remember the details, it was a thousand years ago. That was in the days when you had to travel, give performances wherever people asked you. Tedious as he was, he was very pleasant on the phone, lots of flowery talk, right? What an honor it would be, although unfortunately the emolument couldn’t be very generous, but on and on about how important it was to support Spanish culture in Africa…. What a drag, that Jew, all day long, back and forth with the crutches — from an automobile accident, I think. I am not disabled or impaired, he would say, I am crippled. And speaking of crippled, did he tell you about his train trip to Casablanca, when he met this dame? That’s strange, he told everybody after he’d had a couple of drinks, and he always began the same way: some Baudelaire poem, didn’t he recite that to you?”

Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life, episodes you think you’ve kept in a sealed chamber of your memory and yet are told by people you may not even know, people who have heard them and repeat them, modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for a certain comic or slanderous effect. Somewhere, right this minute, someone is telling something very personal about me, something he witnessed years ago but that I probably don’t even remember, and since I don’t remember I assume it doesn’t exist for anyone, erased from the world as completely as from my mind. Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives, rooms you lived in that others now occupy, photographs or keepsakes or books that belonged to you and now someone you don’t know is touching and looking at, letters still in existence when the person who wrote them and the person who received them and kept them for a long, long time are dead. Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you’re a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another person’s life.

If the details are lost, the easy thing is to invent them, falsify them, profane what was a painful part of another human being’s experience by claiming it as your own. On a train in Asturias, on the way to a writers’ conference, to while away the time of the journey, or for the simple vanity of telling with appropriate irony something that doesn’t matter to you at all, or to anyone listening, the writer who has spoken Señor Salama’s name aloud, although he can’t remember whether it was Isaac or Jacob or Jeremiah or Isaiah, begins a story that will last only a few minutes, but he doesn’t know that he is compounding an affront, aggravating an insult.

Isaac Salama boards a train bound for Casablanca, where he’s going for reasons of business. He’s in his forties and for several years, since his father’s retirement, has been managing the Galerías Duna, which is going downhill, like those large department stores in Spanish provincial capitals that were fashionable at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, but after that seemed to be frozen in time like archaeological relics. When he travels by train, Señor Salama likes to be at the station early, that way he can take his seat before the other travelers and avoid having them watch him — so clumsy, so exhausted-looking — struggling along on his two crutches. He tucks them beneath his seat or stows them unobtrusively in the overhead net for the luggage, if possible behind his suitcase, although not without first calculating what moves he must make to recover them without difficulty, and leaving the things he will need during the trip well within reach. He also tries to wear a lightweight raincoat and throw that across his legs. This is during the time when trains still had small compartments with facing seats. If someone takes a seat next to his, Señor Salama will sit the entire trip without getting up, hoping the other person will get off before he does, and only in an extreme case will he rise and collect his crutches to go to the lavatory, braving the risk that people will see him in the corridor, step aside and watch him with pity or derision, or offer to help him, hold a door for him or hold out a hand.

It is almost time for the train to leave, and, to Señor Salama’s pleasure, no one has come into his compartment. Which is frequently the case when he travels in first class. Just as the train has begun to move, a woman bursts in, perhaps agitated because she had to run to catch it at the last minute. She takes the seat facing Señor Salama, who pulls up his inert legs beneath the raincoat. He has never married, in fact he has scarcely dared look at a woman since he was injured, as embarrassed by his stigmatizing plight as he was as a boy obliged to wear a yellow star on the lapel of his jacket.

The woman is young, very pretty, cultivated, clearly Spanish. Despite his reticence, in only a short while after beginning the trip they are chatting as if they had known each other forever, because the woman has the gift of expressing herself clearly and easily, but also of listening with flattering attention to what is said to her, and then, without prying, asking further details. Without realizing it, they lean toward each other, and it may be that their hands brush as they gesture, or their knees — hers naked, bare of stockings, his pulled back and hidden beneath his raincoat. As they speak, their heads, profiled against the window, never turn to observe the rapidly passing countryside. Señor Salama is strongly attracted to her but also shivering with tenderness, the physical promise of happiness that he believes he sees reflected and returned in the woman’s eyes.

Both wish that the journey would last forever: the pleasure of being on the train, of having met, of having so many hours of conversation before them, and of discovering mutual affinities never shared with anyone until then. Señor Salama, whom the accident has left arrested in the tormented timidity of adolescence, finds an ease of conversing he never knew he had, a hint of seductiveness and audacity that after all these years restores the fun-loving impulses of his first days in Madrid.