Antonio Molina - Sepharad

From the darkness around by the computer screen and the low lamp, from the two hands, from the smooth feel of the mouse and the roughness of the shell and without any premeditation on my part, a figure emerges, a presence that is not entirely invention, or memory either: the doctor alone in the shadows, waiting for a patient, moving the mouse with his right hand, searching for a file in the computer, a medical history opened not many days ago, to which he added several test results just yesterday.

I OFTEN SEE THAT FIGURE, the hands especially, typing in the light of the screen: they are long, bony, sure, with a lot of hair on the back, not as gray as the hair and beard of the doctor, whom I don’t envision standing, although I know he is very tall and so slender that his bathrobe hangs loose from his shoulders. I see him seated, white bathrobe and gray hair and beard, in a room with the curtains drawn, although there is still some time before nightfall. The computer is on one side of the table, and on the other there is nothing but a white, rounded seashell, smaller and more concave than a scallop, stronger, too, as worn and eroded on the outside as the volute of a marble capital eaten by sea air and weather, and on the inside it is soft as mother-of-pearl, a pleasure to brush with fingertips that run over it as if of their own volition as the doctor speaks to the patient who has just arrived, trying to choose his words carefully — or earlier, when he is still alone, reviewing once again the test results lying open on the table. His mind wanders to a different time, luminous days invoked by the feel of the shell, which is a modest shell, not at all flashy, grayish white patterned with ridges opening from its base like the ribs of a fan, each following an exquisite curve, the beginning of a spiral interrupted by the outer edge, which is worn and nicked, presenting the fingertips with the irregularity of a piece of broken pottery.

One image evokes another, as if joined by the slim thread of coincidence: shells on the seashore in Zahara de los Atunes, curved bits of a broken amphora. He must let the thread roll off the spool, or pull lightly lest it break. He is on the verge of a discovery, a sensory memory like a bubble of air from millions of years ago captured inside a blob of amber. The wood floor of the large, dim room where the doctor works is as old as the building, and when someone walks across it, it creaks. He will hear the buzz of the intercom and tell the nurse that the patient can come in now, and footsteps will resonate as they would on the wood deck of a ship.

In the house of one of my grandmother’s sisters there was a room with a wood floor. I liked going there with my grandmother just to enter that room, to feel the floor give a little beneath my feet, and to hear the sound of it. It was like being in another place, another life. I have a similar sensation when I hear a cello. Again time leaps from one thing to another, an almost instantaneous impulse between neurons: Pablo Casals playing Bach’s suites for cello in Barcelona, in the fall of 1938 when the Battle of the Ebro has been lost and Manuel Azaña and Juan Negrín are listening from a box in the Liceo Theater. Behind the table, on a shelf holding a small number of books, most on medicine and history, the doctor has a CD player, which sometimes plays softly as he interviews or examines a patient lying on the cot in a dark corner of the room, in front of a screen. On the cot, the patient becomes more vulnerable, surrenders to the illness, to the doctor’s examination, to what he already sees on the other side of the invisible but definitive line that separates the healthy from the ill, deep in the prison of his fear, pain, and, perhaps worst of all, shame. The healthy flee from the ill, Franz Kafka once wrote Milena Jesenska, but the ill also flee from the healthy.

Before he tells the patient what the tests reveal — there is no way to say it without awakening terror, without feeling a knot in the throat, though it has been said so many times — the doctor will ask him to lie on the cot with his clothes on, all he has to do is lower his trousers a little and pull up his shirt, so the doctor can auscultate the abdomen, palpate the viscera with his long fingers, quickly, smoothly, precisely. The patient suffers the ignominy of lying on his back on a cot, flat and passive, his trousers pulled down to his scrotum, while the intrusive hand seeks what should not be there.

In the background, behind the sounds of breathing, the patient’s and the doctor’s, so close to each other and yet separated by a line, a Bach suite for cello is playing, performed in 1938 by Casals, on a night when the sky over Barcelona may have been pierced by the reports of antiaircraft fire and the flames of exploding bombs may have illuminated the dark city already defeated by hunger and a harsh winter.

Although the sound is low, the patient recognizes both music and the recording. For a few awkward minutes they speak of Bach, of the sound of the cello, of the technical marvel of digital recordings that allow buried musical treasures to be rescued, performances that took place on only one night. They talk, and the sheet with the test results lies on the table in the space bracketed by the doctor’s quiet hands, which in turn rest beside a shell that fingers instinctively reach out to touch. Until Casals exhumed these scores, the Bach suites had never been performed. He found them by chance one day as he was looking through old papers in a stall on a narrow street near Barcelona’s port, just the way Cervantes says he found the Arabic manuscript of Quixote in a secondhand clothes shop in Toledo. Pure coincidence hands you a treasure, triggers a memory hidden for years. That long-ago afternoon on a train: a tall woman in high heels, the beginnings of uncertainty and vertigo, of intoxication, in the green eyes glittering in a dark frame of curls, an unprovoked smile on thin lips set above a firm chin that looked Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon.

BUT I DON’T WANT HIM to come yet, though he must already be on his way, uneasy but still not terrified, still living a normal life, which he will remember as a land to which he can never return when he leaves here. The doctor knows that the patient won’t want anyone to know what the tests reveal, won’t meet the doctor’s eyes, although a few minutes before, or during his previous visit, they were talking comfortably enough, perhaps about the Bach suites for cello. Now the patient is excluded, expelled, from the community of the normal, like a Jew in a Vienna café reading the newspaper in which the new German race laws have just been published. The café is the same, and the newspaper is the one he’s read every day for years, but suddenly everything has changed, and the waiter who used to speak his name so obsequiously and who knows what to bring without being asked, the same waiter he has every morning, might refuse to bring him a cup of coffee if he learned the truth, though there is nothing in the customer’s face — blondish brown hair, light-colored eyes — that says Jew.

I hold the shell in the palm of my hand. The still-childish hand of my son fits into it so easily, my son who takes my hand so naturally when we go for a walk, even though he’s thirteen. He would say to me when he was young, “Let’s measure hands.” We would hold them up, palms together, and his wouldn’t be even half as long as my bony, angular hand, the back covered with dark hair, not the hand of a doctor but an ogre’s paw making him giggle with happiness and terror. “Swallow up my hand with yours, the way the big bad wolf swallowed the little lambs. Tell me another story, don’t leave yet, don’t turn out the light.” He marveled that when I opened my hand, his was whole, not devoured, not even bitten, like the white lambs rescued by their mother from the belly of the wolf.