Antonio Molina - Sepharad

As a boy I obeyed my parents and teachers happily, and the fact that I got excellent grades and was considered an exemplary student filled me with pride. I was the envy of my friends’ mothers, and if a teacher favored me, I felt literally paralyzed with satisfaction. I wasn’t pretending, as I later invented, wasn’t striving to get good grades so I could escape the hidebound life of work in the country that my origins foreordained. I studied because I was supposed to and because fulfilling obligations gave me as much pleasure as living by religious precepts. Until I was fifteen, I went to mass faithfully, and confessed and took communion without once feeling I was performing a ritual alien to me, and for a time I entertained the possibility of becoming a priest.

I have actually had very few outbursts of true rebellion in my life, and most of them were clumsy, senseless, leaving nothing but a memory of humiliation and failure. Once, when I was twenty-two, I gave up everything, my sweetheart and my respectability along with any consideration for my parents or her parents, who had already accepted me as a model son. I had fallen in love with another woman, and when she went off to Madrid I couldn’t get along without her. One night at the end of term, I caught the express train and showed up the next morning at the supermarket that belonged to my lover’s family. From the way they looked at me I realized that what had happened between us was over for her, and had never really been very important, never reached full bloom. I returned that same night, feeling ridiculous and that I had learned a lesson. I made up with my fiancée, and when she put her arms around me, weeping and saying she had always been sure I would come back to her, I thought, with a flash of miserable lucidity, that I was fooling myself, but I did nothing, and for many years I did nothing but drift, and do everything expected or demanded of me.

For a long time, while I worked in that office in the provincial city I had moved to, I remembered a phrase of William Blake that I’d read somewhere, something like “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” I was a mass of aspirations unacted on, of fantasies as unreal as those that kept me company in the quiet solitudes of my childhood. I was always wanting to go somewhere, a misfit never pleased with anything, and suddenly I found myself settled down, paralyzed, in a rut at the age of twenty-seven, making payments on an apartment, receiving good bonuses at work, going from house to office, office to house, imagining trips, daydreaming, escaping through books, hazily surrounded by family and fellow workers, and every morning from nine thirty to ten, during that half hour for breakfast, sharing thoughts with my friend Juan.

Wild sexual interludes with the women we passed in the street, with clerks in the shops, models in magazines, and the satiny, totally untouchable stars of black-and-white movies, that is what my friend and I dreamed about, hopelessly, that and travel, places it was unlikely we would ever be and women who would never go to bed with us and in fact never gave us a second look when we passed them in the streets near our office, the alleyways of the centro, the downtown business district, the cafés where we went for breakfast every morning, always at nine thirty, nine thirty-five, newspaper tucked under one arm, bought every morning at the same kiosk, the mineral water and café con leche and toast the waiter brought without our asking. We had become habitual presences in the morning routine of other people, figures circling round and round like the mechanical dolls that march out to mark the hour on clocks in German squares.

Every morning we walked past the large window of a travel agency featuring a huge poster of New York. We liked that agency because of their posters of faraway places and because a very pretty woman worked there, whom we never saw outside her office or even away from her desk. She was blond and slender, with an extraordinary profile; every morning she was talking on the phone or working at her typewriter, almost always wearing a turtleneck sweater, her back straight yet inclined slightly forward like the wooden bust of Nefertite I saw years later, when I did do some traveling, in the Egyptian museum of Berlin. This girl had a narrow face, large mouth, large, slanted eyes, and a nose with that pronounced tip some admirable Italian noses have. As she talked on the phone, head tilted to clamp the earpiece to her shoulder, she would gesture with a slender hand holding a pencil as she turned the pages of a schedule or catalog with the other, and we would watch with furtive passion, pausing only a moment every morning at the window, afraid of attracting her attention. We saw both her and her reflection, because facing her in the agency office was a large wall of mirrors. Each time we liked to observe some new feature of her beauty: her hair might be loose, or she had pulled it back into a ponytail to emphasize the purity of her profile, or maybe into a bun that revealed the splendid line of her throat and the back of her neck. Behind that glass window, facing the mirror that multiplied the plants adorning her desk and the posters of foreign cities and views of beaches or deserts, she belonged both to the everyday life of the city and to the exotic places of her profession, and part of her appeal to us were the names of foreign countries and cities, and the large color photograph of New York in the window added luster to her image. She may have been no less deskbound than we were, but as she spoke on the telephone and read schedules and made hotel reservations, jotting down things in her agenda, she seemed endowed with a dynamism that was the opposite of our dull work as minor officials; without moving from her desk, she took on the golden tones of East Indian beaches and the bold freedom of the most beautiful women on the Via Veneto, or Portobello Road, or Calle Corrientes, or Fifth Avenue. We fantasized about walking into the agency one morning and asking in a normal way for a brochure, some information about hotels or flights. But of course we never did, and we never saw her going in or out of her office, never met her in the streets we walked. She existed only inside the travel agency, behind the glass window and in the mirrored wall, just as Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth lived in the black-and-white world of movies; she was as unchangeable and distant as they, and so we watched her a few seconds every morning and continued our brief half-hour routine, the newspaper kiosk, the café con leche and toast in the Café Suizo or the Regina, maybe a stop at the post office, for Juan to mail a letter, and then back to the office before the time clock we had to punch reached five after ten.

There was a sweetness in that routine, in the predictable familiarity of street corners and plazas, the sunlit clarity of Bibrrambla and the shadows of the narrow little streets leading to it, the repeated faces, the synchronized appearances, the same girl in dark glasses who arrived every morning at the same hour to raise the iron shutters of a shop with mannequins and mirrors, the officials and the clerks, the woman in the Olympia Travel Agency, whom we’d named Olympia after the Greek goddess and Manet’s nude, the lottery-ticket vendors, even the beggars and bums were there every day, following a routine similar to mine, each with his own life, with his secret novel, background figures in the novel I was living or inventing for myself, not the novel of what I did but of things that didn’t happen, the trips I never took and the plans my friend Juan and I postponed for a future neither of us much believed in but that served as an excuse for our present inertia.

Our friendship itself was routine and habit: meeting every morning at the same place, walking to a café, hands in our pockets and newspaper tucked under one arm, talking with no obligation to say anything new or too confidential. We were both crushed by the same docility and indolence, shyness or cowardice or lack of drive. Our friendship was surely based on that dismal reality, and it cost us nothing to share the irony with which we viewed the mediocrity of our lives and the deterioration of our ambitions. Each saw in the other the mirror of his insufficiency. We were united by the person neither of us dared to be. With identical correctness, we carried out our duties as employees, husbands, and fathers, rarely dropping the neutral sarcasm of our conversations for a true complaint. Many mornings during our walk to breakfast, Juan dropped a letter in the box at the post office located in the arcade of Calle Ganivet. Like everyone absorbed in his own melancholy, I was not too observant then. I had some vague idea that those letters were office business, until I noticed one that had a stamp for foreign mail. Juan gave no indication that he was trying to hide them from me, but there was something in his attitude that kept me from asking about them. Once, when we were having breakfast at the Suizo, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, leaving his newspaper behind on the bar. I picked it up, and two letters slipped out. One of them was from New York, addressed to him, but at his home address, not his office. The other letter he had written, and it bore the name of the woman who had written him from New York. In a couple of seconds I put the letters back inside the folded newspaper, and when Juan returned I said nothing but thought, with a certain desolation, that in my friend’s life, which I’d thought was an open book, there was a part he chose not to reveal.