Antonio Molina - Sepharad

One night while he is waiting for his wife to get ready for dinner, as she is talking to him from the bathroom, combing her hair before the mirror, trying a new lipstick, he sees a blond woman lying on a bed in a room on the other side of the patio. It’s too far away to be able to make out her features, to tell whether she’s young or attractive or just a figure his imagination is crystallizing, the blond, barefoot foreigner on the steps of a train one early summer night long ago. She is gesticulating, talking to someone he can’t see. A man’s silhouette appears in the window. The man bends down to the woman, and something slow and hazy takes place. The doctor presses to the window, to see more clearly, excited, because the movements of the two bodies in the room across the patio are rhythmic; his mouth is dry, like that of a teenager choked with desire.

It lasts only an instant. He turns away from the window when his wife comes out of the bathroom; he fears being discovered by her, or blushing and causing her to ask the reason, which would make him blush even more. The two figures in the other window dissolve like fragments of a dream in the clarity of waking up. His wife wears a form-fitting black dress and black high-heeled sandals; she has put on eye shadow and painted her lips a new, softer shade of red that goes with the deep tan of her skin, and she smiles, offering herself to his male scrutiny, seeking his approval. Now the troubled, secret inspector finds no flaw in the quality of his emotion, he hears no false note, senses nothing feigned or forced; his delight in looking at his wife is the same as it was two summers ago, or twelve years ago, it hasn’t waned, hasn’t been contaminated by habit. He looks at her dark, bare legs and is as captive to desire as the first time, in another hotel room, and he drinks her in with all the lust women have always kindled in him. Even when he was twelve he would stand bewitched after school, watching the girls in the first miniskirts, and once one of his young and beautiful aunts bent over him to set down his dinner and before his eyes was the white, trembling flesh of her breasts in her low-cut dress, perfumed, shadowy — the delicate female flesh he now smells and strokes and gazes at as he puts his arms around his wife, trying to pull down the zipper of her dress, to run his hands up her thighs with urgent need.

She bursts out laughing and tries to draw away, flattered and annoyed, always amazed at the suddenness of male desire. “My lipstick is all over your face, we’re late for dinner, and our son’s waiting.” “Let him wait,” he says, breathing through his nose as he kisses her neck, and when, as if invoked by their words, their son knocks at the door and tries to turn the doorknob, he sighs, “It’s a good thing we locked the door.” That will give them time to compose themselves, to calm down, and when they come out, the boy gives them a look that may be slightly censorious, or maybe it’s only questioning, even a little mocking. “What took you two so long to open the door?”

THERE ARE RAPIDLY blinking lights in the darkness beyond the broad white band of waves breaking on the sand; with the new moon, the speeding launches of the tobacco and hashish smugglers breast the foam, along with emigrants coming from the other side, from the darkest line of shadow, the coast of Africa. Aesthetic contemplation is a privilege, but sometimes a lie: the beautiful, dark coast we are seeing this night from the restaurant terrace, the scene onto which we project tales and dreams, adventures from books, is not the coast seen by those men crowded into boats rocked by the sea, on the verge of capsizing and dying in waters murkier than any well, dark-skinned fugitives with glittering eyes, pressed against one another to protect themselves from cold and fear, trying to conquer the feeling of being impossibly distant from those lights on the shore they have no guarantee of reaching.

Some are returned by the waves, swollen and livid and half eaten by fish. Others you see from the highway, dashing across open land, hiding behind a tree, or flattening themselves against the bare ground, terrified, tenacious, looking for the road north taken by those who preceded them, beleaguered heroes of a journey no one will speak of. When we drive back from the restaurant toward the hotel, we come upon two Guardia Civil jeeps beaming their spotlights on the dunes near the highway; with his face against the back window, the boy, as excited as if he were at a movie, watches as we pass silently whirling blue warning lights and the silhouettes of two armed guardias. What would it be like to hide in this moonless night, wet and panting, lying in a ditch or one of those cane fields, a nobody with no belongings, no papers or money or address or name, not knowing the highways or speaking the language, the doctor thinks later, in bed, lying close to the woman sleeping with her arms around him, both of them exhausted and drained by the greed of love.

He wakes with the first light, clearheaded and rested, but doesn’t get up, he barely moves in order not to leave her arms. He watches the gradual dawn like a silent and patient witness, drowses with eyes half closed, then feels the spirit and energy to get up and put on his running clothes: a favorable sign that their happiness will be repeated, that things will be exactly the same, his wife’s and his son’s love, the fullness of every sensation, as strong as his pleasure in thrusting deep within her. That memory is so vivid that he gets out of bed with an erection.

At that hour of morning, the colors on the seashore have the faded tones of an old postcard, the blues, grays, greens, and roses of a hand-colored photograph. He begins running along the highway curving up the cliff, at a fast pace, with long, energetic strides, pumping his arms rhythmically, noting in his Achilles tendons the effort of the climb, his lungs expanding in the sea air, his whole body weightless, moving with a physical joy he never experienced in his youth. With every curve the precipice is more dizzying and the view more sweeping: Tangiers in the distance to the west, a white line in the fog-free blue, the Rif Mountains, where flat-roofed villages cling to ravines just as they do in Alpujara de Granada.

Large silver German-make cars, dogs barking behind the walls of houses isolated amid rock gardens and palm trees. In the hotel they’d told us that the Germans arrived when there was nothing at all along the coast, except the bunkers erected against a possible invasion that happened much farther away: first in Sicily, in the south of Italy, then in Normandy. The Germans began coming at the end of the war, their war; they chose to build their houses and plant their gardens on those heights battered by the winds, where no one ever climbs and where there is nothing but that cave with the black drawings of animals and archers and buried amphorae in which the skeletons of Phoenician travelers were later discovered.

This time he is determined to reach the peak, to find the grotto. He’s been told that after he passes a certain curve where a large pine twists out above a ravine, he should leave the highway and follow a path that winds upward through thickets of rockrose and a kind of acacia with sharp thorns and clusters of yellow flowers whose seed, he’s heard, has been carried by wind or birds from across the water, because it’s a variety that grows in the desert. If he had a friend, he would tell him that almost as soon as he took what he thought was the path, he realized that he was mistaken, because it quickly became overgrown by brush. He made his way through harsh branches that raked his skin, through the sticky leaves of the rockrose, trying not to become disoriented, although soon he could see only a few steps ahead. He could hear the sea crashing against the cliff but didn’t know the direction it was coming from. He stumbled over fallen branches and feared he might loose his footing, get too near the edge of the cliff. But he kept going and fought the feeling he was lost; soon he would come to a clearing, find one of those rocks that rose above the vegetation, and climb up on it to get a sighting of the road.