Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Now and then I glimpsed the silvery body of an enormous German-made car through the bars of an iron fence. I turned a corner, and before me lay the vertiginous expanse of beach and sea. The hotel looked like a scale model, or one of those cutouts my son liked to put together when he was younger: a picture-postcard blue pool, the line of windows. Behind one of them, my wife was still peacefully asleep in a night preserved by drawn curtains.

I found no path that would take me to the top, to the cave containing the Neolithic paintings. I abandoned the asphalt road, striking out through thick clumps of rockrose in which I thought there might be a path. I came to the road again, which narrowed between rocks and weeds before ending abruptly at a wall with a tall metal door painted a military green. Several dogs were barking behind it. I recognized the high terraces and arched windows we had seen from the beach: the house on the highest point of the hill. Beside the door, on a ceramic plaque, was a name in Gothic characters: berghof. I had read that name somewhere, in some book, but I didn’t remember which one.

I turned back. I was tired. When I reached the hotel, it was no later than 9:00 A.M., but it was already beginning to get hot, and the first German tourists, red from the sun and stuffed from breakfast, were beginning — with careful deliberation — to claim the best chairs, the reclining loungers arranged on the shady side of the pool. I opened the door of my room cautiously and listened in the darkness to my wife’s breathing, and smelled the shared scents of our lives. I sat on the bed beside her; she was wearing nothing but her panties and was sleeping on her side, curled up and hugging her pillow. To see you naked is to remember the earth. I brushed the hair from her face and saw that her eyes were open and that she was smiling at me. I remembered that word: Berghof.

I wish I could hold every detail of those July days in my mind as completely as I hold this white shell, because if any of it, essential or trivial, is lost, the equilibrium of things may tip out of balance. In my student encyclopedia I read the story of how for want of a horseshoe nail, an empire was lost. How many small coincidences were needed for Pablo Casals to find Bach’s suites for cello in a stall in Barcelona filled with old manuscripts? This shell is dragged by waves for a year or for two hundred, and is thrown so hard against a rock its outer edge is nicked, then it lies buried in the white sand of a beach that fades into the horizon toward the west so that one July afternoon Arturo can find it, and so that I in turn may have it here now within reach of my hand, as part of the familiar kingdom of the sense of touch: the plastic of the computer keyboard, the rough wood of the table, the porcelain of the coffee cup, and paper shining in the light from the lamp where I am writing words that are indecipherable to anyone except a pharmacist.

THE DOCTOR IMAGINES he is speaking with a friend, telling him the story, he who confides in no one but his wife, the story of those two summers, of the second summer, the one of repetition, the return two years later. If there is something I truly yearn for, it isn’t youth, it’s friendship, the mutual affection that joined me to others when I was fifteen or twenty, the ability to talk for hours, walking around my deserted city on summer nights, recounting every detail of who you are, what you want, what you suffer, to do nothing but talk and listen and be together, because often we didn’t have money to go to a bar or a movie or play billiards. Hands in our empty pockets and heads sunk between shoulders, we leaned toward one another to share thoughts and conspirings. I miss that bashful male tenderness, feeling accepted and understood but not daring to express gratitude for it — not the rough male camaraderie, that boasting or poke of the elbow or drooling wink at the sight of a desirable woman.

He imagines he’s talking now to a friend from thirty years ago, they’ve kept in touch and maintained the old loyalty, strengthened and improved by time and by the experiences and disappointments of their two lives. He invented friends when he was twelve or thirteen and found himself alone, no longer a child but not yet an adolescent, not a youth, as they used to say — too bad such a beautiful, precise word isn’t used anymore.

Now my son is at the point of entering his youth, beginning to be independent of me, though he isn’t aware of it. He would tell his friend this, if he had one, if he hadn’t lost the ones he had because of distance or negligence or a slightly bitter current of skepticism that the years have accentuated and from which only the core of his life is safe, his wife and son, and maybe also his work in this darkened consulting room. It is calming to tell things to a friend, though words are imprecise, and it is worth the effort to transmit an experience in every detail in order to make it intelligible, free of the melancholy and self-pity that slip into a memory that hasn’t been shared. When I go home and my wife notices I am self-absorbed and asks me if something is the matter, and I say nothing — the strain of work, the oppressive persistence of illness on those new faces that keep showing up every day, faces of the newly exiled — it is a silent betrayal.

We went back that summer, the doctor recounts, or he would if there were a friend to listen. We had only ten days there, and did almost nothing but swim and sunbathe, read on the beach or by the hotel pool, go out occasionally in a rented car to have dinner or drive around the town. I got up early, ran a few effortless kilometers along the hard sand near the shore where the tide had just gone out and the sand stretched smooth and shining in the first light of day. I liked coming back to the hotel and waking my wife and son, having breakfast with them by a window in the restaurant that overlooked the palm trees in the garden. In everything we did there was perfection, a harmony among the three of us that corresponded to the external beauty of the world, to the full moon and the wind at sunset the first night we walked down to the beach and huddled together to protect ourselves against the cold, corresponded to the purity of the form of a shell, and to the taste and aroma of fish roasted over coals that we ate on the terrace of a restaurant beside the sea. My wife and I, my son and I, my wife and my son, my son watching as we hugged or kissed, my wife watching the boy and me as we walked with our heads close together along the beach, looking down, searching for shells and crabs, I watching the boy as he dribbled sand over his mother’s feet.

Two summers later, they return to the same hotel, during the same days of July, with afternoons that stretch with golden laziness toward the dinner hour. Everything is the same, and yet he catches himself spying on himself, looking for some flaw in the repetition of his earlier enjoyment, uneasy, disheartened without reason, irritated by inconveniences that he knows he should attach no importance to, the room that this year doesn’t look out over the sea but onto a patio with palm trees and the windows of other rooms, the east wind that keeps them away from the beach the first few days, provoking a bad mood in his son, who turns surly and locks himself in his room to watch television hour after hour. He’s thirteen now, and the shadow of a mustache darkens his upper lip. He has lost his child’s voice; it changed without our noticing, and we will never hear it again. Two years in our lives as adults are nothing, but in his life they are a leap from larva to butterfly. His big eyes, crinkled in laughter, the expression so like his mother’s, don’t look the way they used to. You look into them, and he isn’t there. His father must convince himself not to feel desolation and resentment. “The boy misses his friends in Madrid,” his wife tells him, smiling with a benevolence he envies. “Don’t you realize that he’s going to be fourteen? I wonder what you were like at that age.” He watches himself as carefully as he examines the face of a patient or palpates his abdomen or listens to his breathing through the stethoscope, looking for symptoms.