Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Since I was going somewhere, I wasn’t myself; I luxuriated in the intoxication of being no one. I dissolved into the moments I was living, into the pleasure of being borne away by the train and looking out the window of my compartment at the lights of highways and cities, cheerful windows where stay-at-homes lived, at that hour watching television or going to bed in miserably hot bedrooms beneath a suffocating conjugal blanket, the “watered-down coffee of married life” referred to by Cernuda, a poet I was reading a lot at the time, his disciple and apprentice in the bitterness of the distance between reality and desire.

Those trips were so rare that the administrative monotony of the tasks I had to perform at my destinations didn’t affect my intense and childish sense of adventure. But I traveled seldom not only because so few opportunities presented themselves. Sometimes I sacrificed a trip in order not to upset my wife, who didn’t like my being away from home, and who was exhausted from her own job and from caring for our child and didn’t always want to understand that my stays in Madrid weren’t some capricious escapade but required by my administrative position and that carrying them out well could be to my advantage when eventually it came time for promotion.

Whenever I agreed to go, I had difficulty telling my wife, I would keep putting it off, until in the end I was forced to break the news with insensitive haste, or, worse, she would get wind of it from someone who called from the office or the travel agency that handled the ticketing. I didn’t have to be unfaithful, my natural state was guilt, and the innocuous secret of the upcoming business trip would be as much of a strain on me as an actual affair. I helped weave the entangling web of reproaches and resentment with my cowardice. And up to the last minute I was never sure I was going, because our son might get a fever, or my wife might suddenly be under the weather with a lumbago attack or a difficult period, complaints it seemed I was entirely responsible for, and that would become much worse in my absence, my desertion.

Finally I would leave and still couldn’t believe it, and as the taxi took me to the station I would get a rush of happiness mixed with panic, the fear that I might not get to the station on time because the road was blocked, or because I’d waited too long disentangling myself from my family and my life, from the stifling conjugal heat of my apartment, from the irritation and accusation radiating from my wife as she stood with her arms around my son, who would cry even harder when he saw I was leaving; the two of them would be there in the doorway as I waited for the elevator, and my wife’s face would be pale, her eyes sad.

ONE WINTER MORNING, on one of those trips to Madrid, I finished my errands at the Ministry of Culture early and found myself with nothing to do for the rest of the day. My train didn’t leave until eleven that night. Disappointment was quick to come in Madrid, a vulnerable feeling of being alone in such a big city, where I didn’t know anyone, where there was uncertainty and danger everywhere. When you crossed one of those broad avenues, the light always turned red before you could get to the other side, and when you went to a movie at night, you ended up in a labyrinth of dark streets where you could easily be attacked by someone with a knife, one of those pasty drug addicts who loitered on the corner of the Gran Vía and Calle Hortaleza. I was dazed with loneliness, not because I didn’t know anyone anymore, but because I was a nobody, a lowly provincial official who was pulling back into his shell like a snail only three days after fleeing in search of greener pastures and richer air, wandering in circles around the city, carrying his depression with him as if it were a fever that made him long for the shelter of his home and the familiar narrow streets in which he lived his life.

Walking around in a dense fog with no idea of where I was, I ended up at the Retiro, crossing streets that seemed not to be in Madrid, not even Spain, streets with noble buildings and luxuriant trees, the blacktop wet with drizzle, the sidewalks yellow with the newly fallen, broad leaves of plane trees and horse chestnuts. The Prado Museum, the Botanical Garden, the Cuesta de Moyano. At the peak of a wooded hill was a building that resembles a Greek temple: the Observatory. Things opened before me as I approached them through the fog: motionless statues, threatening or serene, a statue of Pio Baroja or Cajal or Galdos, alone in the groves of the deserted park, lost and melancholy in an ostentatious oblivion of bronzes and marbles.

I remember my amazement at the sight of a glass building on the other side of a pond, with columns and filigree of white-painted iron, a white liquefied in the translucent grayness of the morning mist, in the motionless, dark green of the water. I had read in the newspaper that there was an exhibition dedicated to the exile of Spanish Republicans in Mexico in the Crystal Palace of the Retiro. It all comes back, after so many years, an ordinary day of an uneventful trip to Madrid, a walk that by chance led to the Retiro, where amid fog and trees I came upon the Crystal Palace, like one of those enchanted houses that materialize before lost travelers in storybook forests.

I remember glass display cases with newspaper clippings and ration cards, TV monitors showing old films of soldiers wrapped in rags fleeing along the highways toward France, clustered at the border crossings at Port-Bou and Cerbère after the fall of Catalonia. I remember a blackboard and a desk that had been in the first school for Spanish children in Mexico, and a navy-blue student smock with a white celluloid collar, which shook me with unexpected anguish, as did the pages of penmanship exercises written in pencil by children forty years before, and the boxes of paints identical to ones I’d had in school. The smock, too, was very similar to those we wore, and there were the same creased, colored oilcloth maps of Spain that I saw the first time I walked into a schoolroom, except that on these the flag was tricolor: red, yellow, and purple. There was a large photograph of people crowding onto a steamship in a French port. A woman of about fifty was standing next to me, staring at it, murmuring something in a Mexican accent, although there was no one with her. She was breathing hard; I looked at her and saw that she was crying.

“I was on that boat, señor,” she said, hiccuping. She had large eyeglasses and dyed hair and was the only person besides me that morning in the glass building enveloped in fog, as if padded with silence. “I am one of the persons in this picture. I was eight and trembling, afraid my papa would let go of my hand.”

NOW I AM IN A different past, a different morning, not the one in which I walked through the Retiro and fog to the weightless shape of the Crystal Palace, the beautiful and melancholy purple of Republican flags on the shelves of an exhibition, insignia of a country I had lost before I was born. I leave the Ministry of Culture on Plaza del Rey and start walking aimlessly, disheartened before I begin by the hours ahead, in which I have nothing to do and no one to talk to, hours in which I will slowly become infected with the unreality of being alone in a large, unfamiliar city, of turning into a ghost that from time to time stares back at a stranger reflected in a shopwindow. I look at my watch and calculate that at this hour my friend Juan will be finishing breakfast, reading his newspaper in the Suizo, or maybe he will already have used the pedestrian crosswalk to the post office to mail one of those letters he doesn’t want me to know about. Instead of walking back toward the office beside him, both of us dragging our feet, I am wandering around Madrid, leaving to chance the route and choice of streets, and after half an hour I am totally lost, or maybe I’ve let myself be guided by an old memory independent of my consciousness, rising from the blind and persistent impulse of my feet. On a certain street there is a certain heavy door, says one of Borges’s poems. I walk along streets with narrow sidewalks and recessed doors, with fish markets and fruit stands and old-fashioned stationery shops and stores selling groceries and notions more antiquated than the ones in the city where I live, with a pullulating mass of cars and people and the strong, working-class voices of Madrid. Remembering, drifting, I head toward a place I shouldn’t go, a place I visited only once: Fernando VI, Argensola, Campoamor, Santa Teresa. At some moment, unknowingly, chance has become purpose, and the sequence the street names trace upon the city in which I am a stranger is a coded map, a wound that hasn’t hurt for a long time but can still be felt as a slight scar.