Antonio Molina - Sepharad

COMING OUT OF THE small lane where the Club Taurino used to be, we sometimes ran into our friend and office mate Gregorio Puga, who also worked as acting associate director of the city band, after having lost a much more prestigious job in the band of another city, and who even at that early hour was always a little drunk, smelling of stale alcohol and nicotine despite the coffee beans he sucked. Gregorio was the first friend I made when I started working, maybe because everyone had given up on him and he had to latch onto new employees when he wanted company at breakfast or for having a few beers or glasses of wine in the little hideaway taverns in the centro. It was said that were it not for his fondness for drink he would have been a major composer and conductor. He had a different version of his failure, which he would deliver with the whining monotony of a drunk: people had pushed him over the edge, they’d made him give up his promising career, begun under the best auspices in Vienna, and all in exchange for what, a pittance, the petty security of a steady job. He would sit with his elbows propped on the bar, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, held between the yellow tips of his second and third fingers, the languid, soft fingers of an old office worker, although I don’t think that he was more than forty-five at the time.

“They bait you with the promise of security, and you get used to the money coming in every month, and then you don’t have the will to keep studying, even less when your wife burdens you right off with kids and is always going on about how you’re useless and why don’t you stop all this foolishness and dreaming and do something to get ahead in the office or go out and look for a job in the evening. At first you don’t, of course, your evenings are sacred, you have to keep writing, rehearsing with other musicians until you get out of them what not even they know they have inside, and you want to direct an orchestra, not a city band, that was my life’s dream, but you get depressed, and besides it’s true, you need money, so you agree to give private classes, or you get a place in a school, and before you get paid at the end of the month you’ve already spent or budgeted the money, it’s clothes for the kids, and books and uniforms for school, because of course we had to take them to a Catholic school. Midafternoon you leave the office, and because you dread going home you stop for a couple of glasses of wine, you get a bite of something and go to your evening job, and when that’s over, well, it’s the same: Gregorio, let’s go have a drink. At first you say no, then all right, just one rum and that’s all, the old lady will be pissed if she hasn’t seen the whites of my eyes by dinnertime, so you have two rums and one for the road or to help you face the uproar you know is waiting at home, and you forget to look at the clock and when you go outside to the Plaza del Carmen, it’s striking eleven and there’s hell to pay. I’ll buy some cigarettes and pull myself together, but you don’t have coins to put in the machine, and you’re too tired to ask for change for a bill, so you ask for a glass of wine, and maybe if you’re lucky you run into a friend who’s alone at the bar, and he treats you to the next one, or it’s the waiter who invites you, because all his life he’s been seeing you come in and out, he’s served you the coffee, or coffee and cognac, at dawn, the rums for an aperitif, and coffee and drinks after dinner — though in all honesty you haven’t eaten, just nibbled to fill your stomach.”

I remember Gregorio with affection and pain, Maestro Puga, whom I haven’t seen for several years now, and I wonder if he’s still making the rounds of the bars in the centro where the office workers go, whether he’s still alive and clinging to the dream of a symphony premiere, elbows on the bar, wearing his suit that is getting more and more frayed and dirty, a cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers, a glass of wine held loosely in the other hand, and maybe a coffee bean sucked in a mouth now missing a few teeth. Some mornings Juan and I met him as we turned a corner and didn’t have time to avoid him, so we had to stand and listen to his whining and persistent invitations to come have a drink, just a quick cognac or anisette in the few minutes left of the half hour allotted for breakfast. When I was less cautious, I agreed to have a rum with him after work, and didn’t get away until eleven, ending up so drunk that the next morning I didn’t remember anything we talked about all those hours. I remember only one thing, and I’ve never forgotten it, because since then Gregorio has repeated it many times, grabbing my arm, pulling me toward him, enveloping me in a cloud of stale wine and black tobacco as he pierces me with those reddened eyes and says:

“Don’t get stuck in this rut, don’t let what happened to me happen to you, get out while you can, don’t cave in, don’t let yourself be bought.”

I avoided Gregorio, as everyone did, because he was a bore and a drunk, and even if you were fond of him you couldn’t take his bad breath or the tedium of his increasingly disjointed stories, his detailed account of the intrigues and tricks he was victim of in the office, or about the city band, where another man with fewer qualifications but more connections had been named director. But I also avoided him because I was ashamed to have him see the fulfillment of his prophecy about me: the years went by, and I went to work every morning punctually at eight o’clock, I had obligations now, was married with a child and making payments every month on a car and an apartment, and although my wife earned more than I did, the money didn’t always stretch to the end of the month, so I was considering looking for a second job. In this way I’d gradually given up all the plans that seemed so courageous when I started working: preparing myself for a better career, say, university professor, or researcher in art history, or even geography teacher in some institute. But I didn’t have the time or the will, and my free evenings got away from me without my noticing, and besides there were only a few openings every year for a history professor and thousands of university graduates, many of whom I’d gone to school with and who were desperate after years of being unemployed, and looked with envy at even a job as unappealing as mine. I would occasionally meet Gregorio in the corridor, each of us carrying a briefcase loaded with files, or I would see him at a corner of the alleys dotted with bars where office workers escaped at midmorning for a quick coffee, but my repugnance for his bad breath and shabby air was more powerful than any gratitude I felt for his friendship. I would look away, or slip through a side door to escape his red eyes, not wanting to hear again what I knew he would say: “What are you doing? Why haven’t you got out of here? How many more years are you going to take it?”

ONCE IN A WHILE I did go somewhere, but only for a few days; they would send me to Madrid to get papers signed in a ministry or to place an order for supplies I was charged with inspecting. The trips were brief, the per diem insufficient, and my low rank limited me to moderately priced hotels and meals in modest restaurants, yet the anticipated departure acted as a stimulant, pulling me toward the future like a giant magnet, giving me back the childish happiness of looking forward to an outing.

Several days before the train pulled out of the station, I had already left in my mind. The night express with its blue sleeping cars that reminded me of the Orient Express would be sitting there when I arrived with my suitcase a little before 11 P.M., filled with the heady relief of being alone, of having temporarily freed myself from the oppressive sameness of office and home, from the schedules and scares and bad nights that go with having a very young son. The preparations for this short trip contained all the excitement of a real journey, of any one of the journeys I’d read about in books or seen at the movies or imagined for myself as I studied maps and glossy guidebooks. In the midst of such a low-key, shallow life, the trip was an almost physical pleasure, a sensation of freedom and lightness, as if leaving the station would free me from all the obligations and habits that weighed me down. With the slam of the door of the taxi that would take me to the station, my old identity would be entirely sloughed off.