Antonio Molina - Sepharad

THERE’S NO LIMIT TO the surprising stories you can hear if you listen to the novels in people’s lives. The woman came about six in the evening, the old hour for making calls, and brought with her the air of a caller from a different time. There was an affectionate formality visible in the care she put into dressing, and also in the pastries she brought, just like the ones from her youth. She’s in her sixties, appears to belong to a comfortable though not opulent middle class, but there is a working-class vitality in the gleam of her eyes and the openness of her manner. She no longer lives in her old neighborhood, the one where she went when she married and where her children grew up. She’s farther away, in a development on the outskirts, and you can see that she would have preferred not to move, that in recent years the change of address has involved a number of bitter adjustments: her husband’s retirement means a decrease in his earnings, which once allowed them to enjoy good cars, good schools for the children, and trips to other countries. But she is strong, a large, solid woman with an open gaze and energetic hands, and has a positive outlook on the world, on whatever life still has to offer, unlike her husband, she says, who hasn’t learned how to adapt and is driving her out of her mind because he would like to pull her into his depression, keep her beside him every minute in their small apartment. Suspicious of the world, he has no taste now for traveling or even going out, only nostalgia for what they’ve lost, both the money and the years. Things wear down, times change, you have less business, suddenly you’re retired and must live on a pension, and your savings have shrunk like your energy, the money’s gone and time’s run out.

So he’s at home, she says, sitting on the sofa with the thermos of coffee I left for his lunch, and when I told him where I was going, he perked up a little, and I think he was just about ready to come with me, but laziness got the upper hand, and cold as it is these days, a person has to be careful about going out, he tells me, particularly at eighty, and he’s always complaining about how far out we live and how long we have to wait for the bus, not like it used to be, when you could be in the heart of town in fifteen minutes. I just cut him off, “All right then, you stay here,” and he asks me again where I’m going, as if he’s afraid I’ll be gone a long time. By now he’ll be worried, checking his watch, wandering around the house in his bathrobe and slippers. “You dress like a sick person,” I tell him, but he doesn’t care, he’s lost his dignity, like so much else he once had.

She looks at her little gold watch, a trinket from the old days, like the bracelets and ring with the precious stone on a hand that’s no longer young but still has strength. I must be going, she says, or call him, because he’ll be nervous, what a trial the man is. But I can’t complain, in forty years of marriage he’s never given me any cause, he’s been so good that I almost want to murder him, and when I get impatient with him I immediately feel guilty.

She doesn’t want to go, you can see she’s enjoying the visit. She clearly doesn’t have the habit of drinking tea yet makes a show of savoring each sip and takes pains to hold the cup just so and praises everything around her, her eyes clear and radiant with appreciation, accustomed as they are to judging the price and quality of objects: the porcelain of the tea service, the fabric of the curtains, the red roses in the middle of the table. If she’s comparing this house with hers, she does it without resentment, more with admiration. Just as there are people blind to what’s around them, like black holes absorbing all light without benefiting from it, there are others who reflect any brightness near them, beaming it back as if it were their own. Aye, child, how your mother would love this house if she could see it, if only she hadn’t died when she was so young. This woman who has known better times is renewed in the presence of youth, in the spaciousness of a house much larger than hers, in the porcelain and roses she can’t afford now, and if she sees a painting she doesn’t like or tastes a Japanese tea that’s strange and bitter, the spur of curiosity in her is more powerful than the reflex of dismissal. She went to school only a few years, but she speaks like a sensible and cultivated woman, and if in the 1960s she lived in domestic servitude to her husband and children, she has the elegance and aplomb of one who can manage on her own. She reads books, loves the movies, has attended night school. I remember your mother, how angry she was that we were so enslaved to our husbands, the effort she made to see that you and your sister studied. She was very clever, realized that times would change, and that’s why she suffered even more when she knew she wouldn’t live to see you or your sister as adults, independent, not bound as we were.

She takes a sip of tea, nibbles a pastry, chats about a film or conveys a mild piece of gossip, looks at her watch and says it’s time for her to go, you must have so many things to do and here I am taking your whole afternoon, besides my husband must be very nervous by now, afraid I won’t get home in time to make dinner, he has to have dinner at nine o’clock sharp, not a minute before and not a minute after, he says it’s because of his stomach, that any deviation makes his ulcer worse. He’s always had this mania for punctuality. My mother told me when she met him, “Daughter, you surely didn’t choose him on purpose; your father was exactly the same, his life was governed by the clock.”

I saw my father the last time when I was three. Sometimes I think I remember him, but what I probably remember is a photograph in which he’s holding me in his arms. When I mention my father, something happens, a shift in her gaze, inward, and the smile disappears. A casual comment is enough to make the woman very different, fading from the room where nothing else has changed. The new silence is like a blank page on which words are being printed, the novel of an ordinary life, leaping from one epoch to another, from an apartment building near the Del Este Cemetery in the bloody Madrid of the early postwar years to a recently constructed neighborhood of the 1960s, spanning the Civil War and the vicissitudes of a man who disappears one night, never to return, climbing into an automobile that’s been left running, waiting for him. It’s learned that he was in Russia but later slipped into France and fought in the Resistance against the Germans, and was arrested and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp from which he sent brief letters and drawings to his children, because he had a great talent for drawing. He escaped from the camp, again joined the Resistance, and again was captured and again escaped. His trail seemed lost forever until one day, more than twenty years after the end of the war in Europe, his daughter, who didn’t remember him, receives a notification from the German embassy. She is afraid to open the letter, with its official letterhead, because ever since she was a little girl official letters have announced only misfortunes. She is also afraid to show it to her husband, who never wants to know anything about politics and is doing very well working hard to pay off the bills for the apartment and the car and the washing machine, take her and their small children to the beach during summer vacations, and enroll the children in the best private school. He doesn’t want to know about the old days, he never asked about the father who disappeared so many years ago, but it’s also true that he fell in love with her even though she lived in a poor neighborhood and was the daughter and niece of Reds.

IF YOUR MOTHER HAD been here, of course, I would have told her about the letter, but we hadn’t moved to the barrio yet, and although I was already friendly with a few neighbor women I wouldn’t have wanted them to learn about my family’s past, not because I’m ashamed of it, don’t think that, but as a precaution, because we were still afraid in those days. Your mother, so distinguished, so young, I always remember her that way, not how she was at the end, although even when she was ill she never lost her elegance, but long before that, the first time I saw her, when your family came to the barrio and you were so small they still carried you in their arms or in the buggy. I remember the minute you arrived. I heard the sound of a car and I went out on the balcony and saw the big black automobile your father had then, the 1500, and when I saw all of you get out I was happy because there were so many of you, and there weren’t many people in the building or the barrio at that time. You children filed out of the car, bundles came out of the trunk, then your mother got out in a light-colored dress and stood on the sidewalk, maybe a little tired from the trip, and I didn’t get the impression she much liked what she saw, the open land with ditches and cranes and Madrid so far away, the broad streets and the trees like lamp poles. She took you in her arms and looked up, and I waved, so very pleased that she was pretty and young and moving into the apartment right above mine. She wasn’t sick yet, or at least she didn’t know it, paying no attention to the first symptoms, but I remember she was pale, more fragile than the other neighbors our age although she worked in her house and was kept busy with all of you, just like anyone else, and she wore that same smile of enjoying life that you have today. Often in the stairwell I would hear her singing as she worked in the kitchen or laughing out loud at something your father was saying in a low voice. I did tell her about my life and what happened to my mother at the end of the war, and even that La Pasionaria had held me in her lap and sung me a lullaby, and how afraid I’d been when the letter came from the German embassy, several months late, after being sent all over Madrid. I was afraid my husband would be angry if I showed it to him, but your mother laughed when I told her about it several years later: “My dear, why would he be angry, as good-natured as he is?” I didn’t dare hope that the letter would tell me my father was alive. As soon as my husband came home from work that evening, I closed the bedroom door and showed him the letter, and he calmed me down right away; it couldn’t be anything bad coming from a foreign government, because the only government we had to fear was our own. “It’s best, though, not to say anything to your mother until we know for sure what it’s all about.”