Antonio Molina - Sepharad

The man’s entire life is watching and waiting. He monitors his breathing, fearing a blackout, where he would lie motionless on the balcony in his flannel slippers and pajamas, the mandatory uniform of the terminally ill, perhaps already excluded from the realm of the living like the pale shadows that slip along the street, always hunched over in pain, always worried and hurrying after a scornful dealer.

The man, woman, and boy disappear from view at the end of the street at the corner of Calle San Marcos, which is the limit of his field of vision. After a few minutes the man returns alone, calling a name that must be the dog’s, trying, inexpertly, to whistle. The puppy is so little it’s probably lost forever, run over by a car. But they don’t give up, they go back and forth all afternoon, passing beneath his balcony, and go inside only when it grows dark, while at the corner of Augusto Figueroa, the pink neon sign of the Santander Bar has been turned on, a pink as soft as the blue sky above the roof tiles, as the dusk reflected in the windowpanes of the highest apartments when it is already night down in the street.

It’s too cold to stay out on the balcony, but the man with the mask over his mouth keeps watch through the window, his back to a room of which all that can be seen from across the street is murky lamplight and occasionally the bluish wink of a television through sheer curtains that have the same fatigued look as the man’s pajamas or the neck of his T-shirt. What would it be like to go into that house? Half behind the curtains, the man breathes through his mask and watches the lit balconies of the house across the way, which still have no curtains, and the now nearly dark sidewalk filled with passersby both living and prematurely dead, each seeing what the other cannot. Someone stands in the middle of the street, but the watching man can’t see who it is, so when he hears the sharp, short barks of the puppy, he pulls the curtains back and presses his face to the glass to get a better view.

It’s the drunk, huge, his face turned up toward the balcony of the new neighbors, weaving slightly as he holds the black-and-white dog, who is barking hoarsely and struggling to escape from the suffocating rags and hands. The drunk does not approach the door or the intercom, he stands waiting for something to happen with the dull patience of an animal. The sickly man knows that one of those balcony doors will open and reveal a recently painted pale yellow interior, that the boy will come out, the first to hear and recognize the barking, and that the vestibule light will go on.

Father and son come down, and the young woman runs out to the balcony, so focused on the street that she doesn’t glance once at the building across the street. The boy, containing his impulse to run to the dog, holds tight to his father’s hand. The drunk does not walk one step toward them. Slow and bulky, he bends to the ground and sets down the puppy with great delicacy, without a word, and already the boy is hugging his dog and the man is saying something to the drunk and offering him something in an extended hand. The drunk’s eyes are very light, colorless like certain Slavic eyes, his round face is purple with bruises and sores, and though he is less than a meter away, he looks at them from a much greater distance. He is like a castaway who has forgotten the use of language and ended up mad. It occurs to the father that when his son is a little older he will help him read the novels about shipwrecks and desert islands that inspired him in the best years of his own childhood.

THERE ARE OTHER FIXTURES on the street corners of the neighborhood, their faces as familiar as that of the woman in the bakery or pharmacy, or the woman-man at the newspaper kiosk; the police from time to time force one of them to put his hands against the wall and frisk him, or they’ll ask a Moroccan dealer for identification and take him away in a patrol car, and he might be back in the barrio shortly afterward, or disappear and never be seen again in this squatter’s city on the outskirts of Madrid.

Some of those who arrive maintain a certain dignity, manners from a life they still haven’t completely abandoned; they are recent converts to the sweet stupor of the barrio. Young boys with new clothes and name-brand shoes, who from a distance seem undamaged but who at closer range show signs of deterioration, usually succumb after a few months, aged, part of a process in which each of them is both vampire and victim. Their arms and neck marked by needles, they tell the boy never to touch the syringes that crunch beneath pedestrians’ feet in the park, never to bend down and pick up anything off the ground.

Where did the new arrivals come from? What was in those eyes that were both intense and vacant? A young woman looked like a secretary, dressed in a suit and dark stockings and heels and carrying a leather purse and a folder. She could have been an employee in any of the nearby offices, maybe the manager of a small lawyer’s office who had agreed to meet someone on this corner; from time to time she glanced at her watch. Well filled out, rosy-cheeked, and discreetly dressed, ignoring the others who were also waiting, the habitual ones who could barely stay on their feet, who leaned against a wall where they dozed or seemed in a faint, slowly slipping down the wall to the ground. But after a few days, you might notice that her heels were scuffed and worn, or there was a run in her stocking or a hole in her shoe, or her hair needed care and you could see the lighter roots in her part, or that the rosiness in her face wasn’t from good health but from makeup, and she no longer had a wristwatch to consult as if she were waiting for an appointment.

As time passed, she clutched the folder with black covers, the last vestige of her dignity, or a laughable attempt to disguise herself from the people she knew or the police who patrolled the barrio, or simply not to feel embarrassed when she saw women she had resembled not long ago, secretaries of small businesses, employees in pharmacies or hair salons.

As she grew paler she applied more color to eyes and lips and used a more strident rouge on her cheeks. Now she wobbled on her run-over high heels, and her blouse was unbuttoned to show off a pouter pigeon bosom, against which she pressed the ubiquitous file (now with the plastic torn along the edges, revealing the cardboard beneath) that spilled out sheets of paper like forms or memorandums collected haphazardly off the ground and shoved in hit or miss.

Sometimes a man came with her: tall, thirty-something, more distinguished-looking than she, maybe an inexperienced and benevolent boss, wearing a sport coat, wool trousers, and leather shoes, with a studied, three-day growth of beard and tousled hair, a man you would guess to be a journalist or architect. Both of them disappeared, and after a few weeks or months she alone returned, her hair more badly dyed, her eyelashes blacker, the look in her round, protruding eyes more anxious, her lips more clumsily reddened. She wore the same high-heeled shoes and perhaps the same stockings, and the same black folder was in her arms.

The next time I saw her, the last, wasn’t in the barrio, it was maybe a year later, as I was walking down Calle de la Montera. She was leaning against the corner of a building, and I was slow to recognize her, she was so much like the other miniskirted women with heavy thighs and scuffed heels who clomp up and down those sidewalks, smoking on street corners, watched over by pimps nearly as moribund as they, surrounded by the sex shops and gaming parlors at the mouths of narrow streets where the air is foul with bad plumbing.

PEOPLE LONG FORGOTTEN rise to the surface with a shudder of memory. Recently I walked by the entry of our building now inhabited by others, and from below I could glimpse, through the balcony railing, the ceiling and upper portion of a wall we had painted pale yellow. It was one of those long May afternoons with a hint of summer and pollen in the air, and on the balcony across the street sat the sickly old man in his slippers and pajamas, elbows on the railing, mask over his mouth, and plastic tube in his nose. He was looking down at the street, and he may have seen and remembered me, or maybe not, after all these years in which I have rarely walked down our old street.