Antonio Molina - Sepharad

They started back after the tide began to rise. Small, translucent fish fled between their feet as they splashed through the clean water. They walked along a smooth outcropping of rock that was slippery with seaweed or else covered by a dark, spongy moss that was soft beneath their feet. A wave retreated and left behind a pool in which tiny creatures worked busily, and father and son knelt to watch them more closely. The immediacy of human action shifts to the inconceivable slowness of natural history. Primary organisms dragging themselves from the sea to the land, teeming in pools, in the dense fertile ooze of salt marshes, armoring themselves in order to survive, developing valves and shells over millions of years, feet and pincers that leave a faint trail in the sand, a trail no more fleeting, though, than the marks our footsteps leave, our lives, the father thinks with no drama or melancholy, a fortyish man walking along a beach holding his son’s hand in a state of perfect and tranquil happiness, of gratitude, of mysterious harmony with the world, on one of those long early-July afternoons when the heat is not yet overwhelming and summer is still a perfect gift for a child.

The boy let go of his father’s hand to dive into the waves, and the father veered away from the shore and walked through warmer sand toward his wife, of whom he also has a photograph in the darkened consulting room: wide smile, fine lips always red with lipstick, even that afternoon at the beach, sunglasses like the ones film stars wore in the forties. I liked to think she watched us from a distance, the boy and me, easy to pick out on the beach that was nearly empty at that hour but still warm and bright, a time when there are already puddles of shadow in the footprints and on the sides of the dunes: the two of us kneeling, heads together, observing something in a brilliant sheet of water left by a retreating wave, then walking hand in hand along the shore, the pale, thin man and the plump, dark boy with the embers of a setting sun glistening on his wet skin and rolls of a little boy’s tummy showing above the elastic of his bathing suit. The two so different, separated by more than thirty years, and yet astonishingly alike in some expressions, in the complicity of their gait and their lowered heads, although the boy resembles his mother more, not only in skin tone, but also in the way he laughs, in the strength of his chin, in his hands, in the unruly hair curling in the damp sea air.

There is a salty taste on her lips and a more carnal feel to her kisses when I caress her beneath the slightly damp cloth of her bikini during the siesta, behind the drawn curtains. Her breasts and lower torso are white against her dark tan. I put my hand on the fuzz between her thighs and am reminded of the damp moss along the shore that my toes sank into until they touched the smooth rock. We couple slowly, desire building with the gradual tide, then our two bodies are used and exhausted by love, mutually fondled, gleaming in the shadow.

As a young man he’d believed like a religious fanatic in the prestige of suffering and failure, in the vision of alcohol, and the romanticism of adultery. Now he could conceive of no deeper passion than what he felt for his wife and son, a love that enfolded the three of them like a magnetic field. Shared fluids, chromosomes mixed in one cell, the recently fertilized egg, the saliva exchanged and digested, saliva and vaginal secretions, saliva and semen sometimes glistening on her lips, dissolved into the nutritive current of her blood, mixed odors and sweat impregnating skin and air and the sheets they lay on, sated, asleep, while from beyond the drawn curtains came the splashing and cries of the children in the hotel swimming pool, and, farther still, if one listened carefully, the powerful roar of the sea, the wind lashing the tops of the palm trees.

WILD PALMS WAS THE TITLE of the novel his wife had been reading on the train and had carried to the beach in her large straw beach bag. He often asked her to tell him about the novels she was reading, and those summaries, along with a few movies, also chosen by her, satisfied his appetite for fiction. To him reality seemed so complex, inexhaustible, labyrinthine, that he didn’t see the need to waste time and intelligence on invention, unless it was filtered through his wife’s narrating or endowed with the ancient simplicity of fairy tales. In art he was moved only by forms in which something of the harmonic unity and functional efficiency of nature shone through. The ruins of Greek temples in the south of Italy or of the spas of Rome awakened in him an emotion identical to what he felt in the huge forests he had visited in New England and Canada. In a classic column, a great fallen capital, he found a correspondence with the sacred majesty of a tree, or with the precise symmetry of a seashell. He showed his son the spiral of a small shell and then, in a book on astronomy, the identical spiral of a galaxy. He led him to the bathroom and showed him the spiral the water made as it flowed down the drain of the sink. He caught a gleam of intelligence in his son’s dark eyes, which had the same color and oblique slant as his mother’s, and identical to hers in expressing, without pretense, wonder or disappointment, happiness or sadness.

He doesn’t remember having asked the patient whether he has children. Probably he does, because the man carries an old-married or fatherly look, there is a certain physical wear and tear, a burden of responsibility on his shoulders, of worry. It was the weariness, the vague overall exhaustion, that brought the patient here. The doctor didn’t tell the man that in the blood test he was ordering a specific analysis would be included. He didn’t want to alarm him, to offend him. “Who do you take me for?” the patient might have said. “What kind of life do you think I live?”

The man will be there in a few minutes, and the doctor will have to say those words, the name of the illness, spoken cautiously, with clinical objectivity, using the euphemism of the initials. Of course we will repeat the test, but I must also tell you that the chance of error is small.

Those words, spoken so many times, always neutral and yet horrible, the panic and the shame, and so much predictable anguish, and the never-mitigated bitterness of the doctor’s impotence. That is almost another form of contagion, a fatigue like the one his patients suffer, a vague, persistent, and inexplicable malaise, the awakening in certain specialized cells of the unnoticed guest, hidden for years, but also obedient to genetic codes that even now no one knows how to decipher, just as the ultimate nature of matter is not decipherable, the whirlwind of particles and infinitesimal forces of which all things are made, the light of my computer screen and the lamp above the keypad illuminating my hands, the shell I am feeling this moment, remembering a summer, two summers to be exact, alike and yet so different.

You will not swim twice in the same river, nor will you live the same summer twice, nor will there be a room that is identical to another, nor will you walk into the same room you left five minutes ago, the same darkened doctor’s office where you were only once, sitting across from a doctor who spoke slowly and asked shocking questions, and who nodded as he listened to your answers, attentive, fingering a white shell on his desk at the left side of his computer keypad, symmetrical with the mouse he touches almost secretively with long, white, hairy fingers as he looks for a file, the data the patient gave by telephone to the nurse when he called the first time asking for an appointment.

FROM THE BEACH we could see a row of white houses on the cliffs to the east, half hidden in the foliage of their gardens and surrounded by high whitewashed walls, their large windows and terraces facing south, toward the bluish line of the coast of Africa. We were told that high up in the naked rock, where no vegetation grew, was a cave with Neolithic paintings and the remains of Phoenician sarcophagi. I got up very early one morning, just as it was getting light, quietly put on my clothes and running shoes, trying not to wake my wife, and left the hotel, cutting through the deserted garden reflected in the mauve, motionless water of the swimming pool. In the restaurant, beneath unflattering electric light, the waiters on the first shift were setting up trays for the buffet, arranging china and silver on the tables, silent as sleepwalkers. I noticed with pleasure the spring in my step, the comfort of the running shoes in which I’d walked and run hundreds of kilometers. The cool air numbed me in my T-shirt, so I began jogging slowly, breathing easily, but instead of heading toward the beach, as I did every morning, I followed the highway curving up the hill. Because the hill was so steep, I quickly grew tired and slowed to a walk. Seen at close range, the houses we had viewed from the beach were even more imposing, protected by walls topped with broken glass, by security company warnings, and by dogs that barked from gardens as I passed and that sometimes hurled themselves against the gates, rattling bars as they stuck their muzzles through and growled. Except for the barking and the sound of my steps on the gravel, the only thing I could hear was the methodical click of sprinklers watering lawns that I couldn’t see but that emitted a strong aroma of sap and well-fertilized soil.