Antonio Molina - Sepharad

We would go outside the hotel and take a sidewalk lined with palm trees and hedges, and soon we would be at the Atlantic, dazed by the light, by the breadth and depth of the horizon, which didn’t end at the sea but farther out, at a line of blue mountains that were North Africa. At night we would watch the flickering lights of Tangiers through the ocean fog. I was in Tangiers once, many years ago, in another lifetime. As the doctor squeezes the curve of the shell, he is squeezing the hand of his son two summers before. His wife is pressed to his other side, to protect herself from the west wind off the sea, blowing from the direction of the dark mass of Africa and the lights of Tangiers, a wind smelling of seaweed. Every night, somewhere along that enormous beach, furtive emigrants disembark, or boxes of contraband tobacco and bricks of hashish are unloaded stealthily. Sometimes the powerful tides of the Atlantic carry cadavers of Moroccans or blacks swollen by the water and nibbled by fish, or bits of old rusted metal or rotted wood from the ships they went down on.

ONLY WHEN THEY REACHED the beach that first afternoon were they aware of the weariness they had brought with them, of how light they felt after shedding it, like leaving their luggage back in the room, along with the sweaty clothing they’d worn that morning as they left Madrid. So many months closed up in that dark room, waiting for visitors, for test results, seeing the faces of men and women marked by illness, chosen by the cruel hand of fate. The boy ran ahead, impatient to get to the shore, kicking across the sand the seemingly weightless blue-and-white ball the wind kept blowing away from him. The sun was still up, but there were few people on the beach, or else it was its length that made it seem bare, almost deserted, offered to them alone. He was a little reluctant to take off his shirt, he was so pale and skinny in that golden light, so resistant to tanning, unlike his wife and son, who had the same cinnamon skin, one of the primary genetic traits the mother transmitted to her son. I wonder what you inherited from me, child of my heart, leaping so intrepidly that afternoon into the first high wave crowned with summer’s foam, tumbled by it, jubilantly rising from the sea with the gleam of water and sun on skin not yet abused by time.

As I dropped facedown onto the sand, I felt, like a tangible plenitude, the curvature and solidity of the world. Jorge Guillén wrote: And walking, my foot knows / the roundness of the planet. I examined the tiny grains, the infinitesimal bits of rock and shell, glass, broken amphorae, worn and pulverized through geological spans by the monotonous force of the sea, which was working this very moment, resonating like a drum in my ear, in my body weak with fatigue, gnawed by months of work, anxiety, insomnia, emergencies, remorse, months of witnessing the pain and infirmity of others, the panic, the progress of their deaths. I took a handful of sand then opened my fingers to let it trickle away in a thin thread. First it was something solid inside my closed fist, closed like the valves of a mollusk to the small fingers of my son, who tried to pry it open but couldn’t; if he managed to pull up one finger, breathing hard, the finger would lock back into place. Then the hand would open, slowly, and the sand that had been so compact would dissolve, leaving nothing but a few tiny grains on my broad, open palm, mineral dots glinting in the sun. Eleven years old but still enjoying that game, still futilely challenging his father, struggling and panting as he tried to pry open a fist where sometimes he found a caramel or a coin. Defeated, he would throw himself on his father and hug him with all his might, with a rough, deep-seated tenderness, and rub his hand against the grain of his beard to feel the prickles. And I had only to touch two fingers to my son’s side, just below his ribs, to make him fall to the sand, laughing and kicking his feet in the air.

“What a pain, you two, as big as you both are now.” Stretched out beside us, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses, my wife brushed off the sand the boy’s kicking had sprayed over the magazine she was reading. Hours of idleness on the beach and in the hotel pool and siestas in the cool darkness of the room had removed all the fatigue from her face, and she wore the same smile of happiness that had dazzled me the first few times we saw each other. So desirable and young, as if twelve years hadn’t gone by, as if it weren’t her son who had sat down near her and slowly buried her red-toenailed feet, pouring from his half-opened fist a thread of sand that slipped across her arch and between her toes like a caress.

But I didn’t want to deny time, it had been kind as it went by, bringing us so many blessings, which were right there before me in those July days. My wife’s body pleased me more than ever, because for twelve years I had been learning it, with a desire that only familiarity can give, and also because it had sheltered and given birth to my son. I remember the rich threads of milk it spilled in drops from her breasts after the baby finished nursing. The same hand that felt the abdomen of the patient lying on the cot, searching for disease, twelve years earlier caressed that taut, round belly crisscrossed with powerful currents and quivering from the heartbeat of the child about to be born; I felt its planetary curve on the tips of my fingers. Who knows whether a physician can leave his profession behind the way he leaves his white coat in the darkened consulting room and walks toward the exit? My footsteps echo on the polished wood that glows with the luster of things well cared for over time, and I am blinded when I reach the street by the still-summertime brightness of the sun, forced to put on dark glasses and remember that my wife had bought them two years ago, two summers ago, in the same hotel shop where as soon as we arrived we made all the necessary purchases for our days at the beach: bathing suits and sandals, sun cream with maximum protection, a cap for the boy bearing the emblem of Zorro, a large inflatable rubber ball, so light that the breeze from the sea was always carrying it away, frogman goggles and fins, because the boy wanted to spear-fish as he had seen it done on a television documentary.

Now, in the half-light of the consulting room, there is something more. I didn’t see it until this moment, on the shelf with the CD player: the photograph of a child who is still a boy but growing out of boyhood, mussed hair and delicate features, goggles pushed up on his forehead and laughing so hard his eyes squint, with dabs of sand on his nose and in the black hair falling over his forehead.

TO THE WEST, THE BEACH stretched toward the white blur of houses in the town, mist blending the whitewashed walls and the sand into a single sunlit dazzle. Only with the first light of day, or at sunset, did colors show clearly and the forms of things come into focus. To the east, an abrupt hill covered with wild growth stood out sharply above the sea, framing the bay. In the setting sun the windows of expensive homes glittered half hidden in the dark green of hedges and palm trees, enclaves surrounded by high white walls interrupted by the strong purple of bougainvillea. We were told that multimillionaires, primarily German, spent their summers in those houses. At the foot of the cliff, on a large rock that became an island when the tide was in, was a concrete bunker that stood like a mineral cancer on the landscape, as resistant to the assault of the sea as the rock onto which it had been fused. For the boy it was an adventure to hold his father’s strong hand, climb up to the bunker, and through a corridor with a sand floor reach an interior room illuminated by the dusty, slanting ray of sunlight that fell through the narrow embrasure cut into the concrete, where guards could keep watch with their binoculars and rest the muzzles of their machine guns. On a cloudless morning, through the slit, you could see the coastline of Africa in great detail. The father took delight in explaining everything to his son, observing his concentration, pleased by his interest, the courteous and attentive way he listened. In 1943 the Allies defeated the Germans and Italians in North Africa and began preparing for the invasion of southern Europe. Look how close they would have been had they wanted to land on this beach instead of in Sicily; imagine the poor Spanish soldiers cooped up in this bunker, waiting for the American warships to appear.