Antonio Molina: Sepharad

BUT I DON’T HAVE TO GO far in order to undergo this transformation. Sometimes, as soon as I leave the house and turn the first corner or walk down the steps of the metro, I leave my persona behind, and I am dazed and excited by the great blank page my life has become, the space where the sensations, places, people’s faces, the tales I may hear, will be printed with more brilliance and clarity. In literature there are many narratives that pretend to be stories told during a journey, at a chance encounter along the road, around the fireplace of an inn, in the coach of a train. It’s on a train that one man tells another the story Tolstoy recounts in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” In Heart of Darkness, Marlow tells of a journey toward the unexplored territory along the Congo as he is traveling up the Thames on a barge, and when he sees the still-distant glow of the lights of London through the night fog, he recalls the bonfires he saw on the banks of the African river, and he imagines much older bonfires, fires the first Roman sailors would have seen when they sailed into the Thames for the first time more than two thousand years ago. On the train on which he was being deported to Auschwitz, Primo Levi met a woman he had known years before, and he says that during the journey they told each other things that living people do not tell, that only those who are on the other side of death dare say aloud.

In a dining car, traveling from Granada to Madrid, a friend told me of another trip on the same train when he met a woman he was kissing within the hour. It was summertime, in broad daylight, on the Talgo, which leaves every day at three in the afternoon. My friend’s fiancée came to see him off, but shortly thereafter he and the stranger had locked themselves in a rest-room, with a terrifying urgency and joy and desire that neither cramped quarters nor problems keeping balance nor the pounding on the door by impatient travelers could disrupt. They had thought they would say good-bye forever when they reached Madrid. My friend, who was fulfilling his military service, had no profession or income, and she was a married woman with a small child, a little unstable, given to both fits of reckless excitement and black spells of depression. My friend told me that he liked her very much although she frightened him, but also that he had never had such pleasure with any woman. He remembered her with the greatest clarity and gratitude because with the exception of his wife, whom he married soon after returning from the army, she was the only woman he had ever slept with.

They continued seeing each other in secret for several months, repeating the sexual intoxication of their first meeting in boardinghouse rooms, the darkness of movie theaters, several times in her home in the bed she slept in with her husband, watched from the crib by the large, tranquil eyes of the child clinging to the bars to hold himself up. When my friend was discharged they agreed that she would not come to see him off on the midnight express that was to carry him back to Granada. At the last moment the woman appeared. My friend jumped from the train and as he put his arms around her felt such a surge of desire that he didn’t care if he missed the train. But he took it the next day, and they never saw each other again. “It frightens me to think what must have become of her, unstable as she was,” my friend said, his elbows propped on the bar of the Talgo diner, sitting before the coffee he still hadn’t touched and staring through the window at the desert landscape of the northern Granada province, or turning toward the slamming door that led to the other cars, as if with the impossible hope that the woman would appear all these years later. Listening to him, I was envious, and sad too that nothing like that had ever happened to me, that I had no memories of such a woman. She smoked joints, took pills, sniffed coke, he told me, and he was afraid of all those things, but he followed her through all her strange behavior, and the more frightened he was the more he desired her. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that she ended up on heroin,” he told me. “Some mornings I wake up remembering that I’ve dreamed of her. I dream that I meet her in Madrid, or that I’m sitting on this same train and see her coming down the corridor. She was very tall, like a model, and she had curly chestnut hair and green eyes.”

TODAY’S TRAINS, whose seats aren’t arranged so we’re forced to sit face to face with strangers, are not conducive to travel stories. Instead, there are silent ghosts with headphones covering their ears, their eyes fixed on a video of an American film. You heard more stories in those old second-class coaches, which had the flavor of a waiting room or a room where poor families eat. During my first trip to Madrid, as I dozed on the hard, blue plastic seat, I listened in the dark to my grandfather Manuel and another passenger tell each other tales of train trips during the winters of the war. “In the battalion of assault troops I served in they marched us all up to a train in this same station and made us get on, and although they didn’t tell us where they were taking us, the rumor spread that our destination was the front along the Ebro River. My legs trembled at the thought all night, there in the dark of the closed coach. In the morning they made us get off and with no word of explanation sent us back to our usual posts. A different battalion had been dispatched in our stead, and of the eight hundred men who went no more than thirty returned. Had that train taken us to the front,” my grandfather said, “I wouldn’t be telling you this story,” and suddenly I thought, half asleep, if that journey along the Ebro hadn’t been canceled, my grandfather probably would have died and I wouldn’t have been born.

Everything was strange that night, that rare and magical night of my first trip; it was as if when I got on the train — or earlier, when I arrived at the station — I had abandoned the everyday and entered a kingdom very much like the world of films or books: the insomniac world of travelers. Almost without leaving my home I had been nourished by stories of travels to far-off places, including the moon, the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific, the North Pole, and that enormous Russia that Jules Verne’s reporter named Claudius Bombarnac traveled through.

As I recall, it was a June night. I was sitting on a bench on the train platform between my grandmother and grandfather, and a train, not yet ours, arrived at the station and stopped with a slow screech. In the darkness it had the shape of some great mythological beast, and as it approached, the round headlight on the engine reminded me of Captain Nemo’s submarine. A woman was leaning against the railing of the observation platform; I was instantaneously overwhelmed with desire, the innocent, frightened, and fervent desire of a fourteen-year-old boy. I wanted her so badly my legs trembled, and the pressure in my chest made it difficult to breathe. I can still see her, although I don’t know now whether what I remember is in fact a memory: a tall blond foreigner wearing a black skirt and a black blouse unbuttoned low. I looked at her windswept hair and the brightly painted toenails of her bare feet. A deep tan brought out the gleam of her blond hair and light eyes. She moved a knee forward, and thigh showed through the slit in her skirt. The train started off, and as I watched she moved away, still leaning on the rail and watching the disappearing faces observe her from the platform of that remote station. Midnight in a foreign country.

In shifting tatters of dreams, the woman appeared again as I dozed and my grandfather and the other man kept talking in the darkened coach. Through half-opened eyes I could see the tips of their cigarettes, and when my grandfather or his companion took a drag, their country faces were visible in the reddish glow. Oh, the acrid black tobacco that men smoked then. As I watched those faces and listened, their words dissolved into sleep, and I felt myself on one of the trains they were telling about, past trains of defeated soldiers or deportees who traveled without ever reaching their destination, stopped for whole nights beside darkened platforms. Shortly before he died, Primo Levi said that he was still frightened by the sealed freight cars he occasionally saw on sidetracks. “I served in Russia,” the man said, “in the Blue Division. We got on a train at the North Station, and it took ten days to reach a place called Riga.” And I thought, or half said in my sleep, Riga is the capital of Latvia, because I’d studied it in the atlases I liked so much and because one of Jules Verne’s novels is set in Riga and his books filled my imagination and my life.