Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Calle Campoamor, at the corner of Santa Teresa; it was here, five years ago, in that time when the years seemed to last much longer, not slip away as they do now. Half a lifetime fit within those five years. I recognize the white shutters on the second-floor balcony. If she comes out on the balcony, she will recognize me, and if I climb the two flights of wooden steps and press the button, the bell will ring not in a dream but in reality, intruding upon the lives of other people, an unwanted surprise. I’ve heard almost nothing about her all this time, we barely know each other, we were together only briefly, long ago.

My thoughts and actions are not in sync, just as there is no correspondence between this place and my being here. I walk back and forth, looking up at the balconies, thinking at one point that I see a figure behind the windowpanes. I walk into the foyer, which is open and has that strange smell of damp and old wood that doorways have in Madrid. On one of the mailboxes I see her name, handwritten, beside that of her husband. The name that once made me shiver as I spoke it, and in which are codified every degree of tenderness, uncertainty, pain, and desire, is a common name written by hand on a card on a mailbox, among the names of neighbors who meet her every day in the foyer or on the stairs, and for whom her face is part of the same trivial reality as these streets and this city, where I, the traveler, float among mirages of loneliness.

The bravery of cowards, the strength of the weak, the daring of the faint-hearted: I have come to the landing and without hesitation ring the doorbell. An old door, large, painted dark green, with a brass peephole. Every detail falls back into place, and my agitation and the weakness in my legs are the same as then, even though I am a different person. “Maybe she isn’t home,” I think with both hope and disappointment. A few seconds pass, and I don’t hear anything, not footsteps, not voices, only the resonance of the bell in silent rooms.

The door opens, and she is looking at me. At first she doesn’t recognize me; she wears the suspicious and questioning expression of someone expecting a door-to-door salesman. I realize that I am much heavier now, and I don’t have my beard, and my hair is shorter than it was five years ago, thinner too. In her arms she holds a large child with dark skin and curly hair who has a pacifier in his mouth and a dirty bib over his pajama top. A little girl wearing glasses peers cautiously from behind her, peering at me with her mother’s eyes. The boy has stopped crying and is staring at me intently, sniffling and making a slurping, sucking noise with his pacifier.

I recognize the slender face and light gray eyes, the two locks of almost blond hair framing her face, but I can’t associate the girl I knew with this carelessly dressed woman who holds in her arms a child so big that he must exhaust her, and who has a little girl who looks so astonishingly like her.

“What a surprise,” she says to me. “I wouldn’t have recognized you,” and she smiles a smile that lights up her eyes with the gleam of old times. I apologize. “I was just passing by, and I thought I might as well see if you were in.” I hear my own voice, hoarser than it should be, a voice that hasn’t spoken with anyone for hours. “It’s a miracle you caught me at home, I was going to take the boy to the doctor, but since I don’t have anyone to leave my little girl with I was going to take her too. He’s not sick,” she explains, “at least not really sick. As soon as his tonsils get a little inflamed, his temperature shoots up, and I shouldn’t get frightened, but I always do.” I am a little deflated by the natural way she’s talking, with no trace of surprise, as if I were an ordinary acquaintance. She feels the boy’s forehead. “I gave him an aspirin, I think his fever is coming down.” We give aspirin to my son too, and the same thing happens. I’m about to tell her that but don’t, held back by a strange shyness, as if to hide from her that I’m married too and a father, that my son is more or less the same age as hers and also sick, according to what my wife told me last night on the phone.

I make some show of getting ready to leave, having been so flustered that I didn’t kiss her when I first saw her. “But come in, don’t stand there in the doorway; since you’ve come to see me, I’m not letting you go without at least giving you a cup of coffee.” Her apartment has long hallways, high ceilings with elaborate plasterwork, and wood floors. It must have been very luxurious once, but now it’s half empty and looks almost abandoned; maybe it belonged to her parents, or her husband’s, and now they don’t have the money to keep it up. She didn’t give me the impression of money, or at least she wasn’t taking care of herself as she did when I knew her, she wore old jeans and canvas shoes with no laces. Her skin had lost its transparency, and her hair was messy, like that of a woman who doesn’t get out of the house all day and, worn down by her children, doesn’t have the time or the energy to put on makeup.

She clears toys, scribbled papers, and colored pencils from a large, old chair and asks me to have a seat while she makes coffee. I find myself alone in a living room dominated somehow by both emptiness and disorder. On the table is a blender just like the one my wife and I use to blend fruit for our son, a dirty bib, a jar of liquid soap for babies, and a disposable diaper that smells strongly of urine. Street noise comes through the two balconies where sheer curtains filter the wan light of a cloudy day. In an adjoining room I can hear the little boy crying, accompanied by the loud strains of a morning cartoon show. What am I doing sitting here? Absurd and correct as a visitor, rigid in this armchair, not daring to so much as cross my legs, waiting for her to appear in the doorway, as I once waited, eager yet frightened of her presence, covetous of her every feature and gesture, the way she dressed — a little extreme for a provincial city — and her Madrid accent.

She comes back carrying coffee on a tray, and as she sets it down on the table, she sees the dirty diaper and looks away with an expression of annoyance and weariness. “I forgot the sugar, I don’t know where my head is.” She takes away the diaper, the pacifier, and the blender, and I hear her say something to the little boy, who has stopped crying, and she appears again, smiling with a look of “Sorry!” and brushing a lock of hair from her eyes. Then, as if in a painting, I see her as she was five years ago, as precisely as the clear view you get after you clean a cloudy pane of glass, and I think she looks a lot like someone I know, although it takes a while to realize whom: the woman in the travel agency, the Olympia my friend Juan and I are so crazy about. The same foreshortening as she lifts the hair from her face, the same chestnut hair, the large mouth, the line of her chin and jaw, the glint in her light-colored eyes.

Just as when I was so much in love with her, I can’t concentrate on what she’s telling me, I’m too absorbed in the fantasy of love, of the contemplative, paralyzing, adolescent passion that reaches its tortuous culmination in impossibility, that nourishes the desire for powerlessness, for the suffering and cowardice of literature. “I left medical school when I got pregnant, you remember? I tried to go back when my daughter was a little older, but then I got pregnant again, and now I’m thinking about entering nursing school. It doesn’t take as long, I can handle the assignments, and I’m pretty sure it will be easy to find a job. Imagine, with my experience they could make me head of Maternity.”

She gets up because the boy has started crying again, very loud, and when she comes back, he is in her arms. His face is red, and his eyes shine with fever. Suddenly I’m jealous, looking at the boy, recognizing his father’s features, the man I begged her to leave and come away with me. From the next room the girl calls to her, because something has fallen to the floor with a crash. As she leaves the room again, I observe her from the rear. Her face is the same, but her body has filled out, she has lost that sinuous line I loved so much when she was twenty. When she handed me my coffee I noted, furtively, that her breasts are larger and heavier now, the breasts of a woman who has had two children, and nursed them, and not taken very good care of herself afterward. I remember her tight-fitting jeans and her soft shirts buttoned low, blouses with a liquid, silky touch that felt like her skin the few times I dared caress her. I invited her out for dinner one night in early summer, and she came downstairs wearing sandals and a dress of a fine plaid material with her hair caught back in a pony-tail and two curls at her cheeks, so sexy and desirable that it was a torment not to grab her.