Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Greetings from America.

YOU ARE NOT AN isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable. Every morning you wake up thinking you are the same person you were the night before, recognizing an identical face in the mirror, but sometimes in your sleep you’ve been disoriented by cruel shards of sadness or ancient passions that cast a muddy, somber light on the dawn, and the face is different, changed by time, like a seashell ground by the sand and the pounding and salt of the sea. Even as you lie perfectly motionless, you are shifting, and the chemistry that constitutes your imagination and consciousness is altered infinitesimally every moment. Whole scenes and perspectives from the distant past fan out, open and close like the straight lines of olive groves or plowed furrows seen from the window of a racing train. For a few seconds, a taste or a smell or some music on the radio or the sound of a name turn you into the person you were thirty or forty years ago. You are a frightened child on his first day of school, or a round-faced young man with shy eyes and the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip, and when you look in the mirror you are a man over forty whose black hair is beginning to be shot with gray, whose face holds no traces of your boyhood, though a sort of unfading youth accompanies you as an adult, through work and marriage, your obligations and secret dreams and responsibility for your children. You are every one of the different people you have been, the ones you imagined you would be, the ones you never were, and the ones you hoped to become and now are thankful you didn’t.

And your room is different, the city or the countryside you see from the window, the house you live in, the street where you walk, all of it growing more distant, disappearing as quickly as it’s seen through the glass, there one moment, gone forever. Cities where it seemed you would live forever but left, never to return, cities where you spent a few days only to preserve them in memory like a clutter of old postcards in bitter colors. Or cities that are little more than their beautiful names, divested of substance by the passing of time: Tangiers, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Göttingen, Montevideo. You are who you were when you walked through them, sinking into the anonymity they offered you.

PERHAPS WHAT CHANGES LEAST, through so many places and times, is the room you take refuge in, the room that according to Pascal one should never leave if one is to avoid disaster. “Being alone in a room is perhaps a necessary condition of life,” Franz Kafka wrote Milena. There is a computer in it instead of a typewriter, but my room today is much like any of the many rooms I’ve lived in throughout my life, my lives, like the first one I had when I was sixteen, with a wood table and a balcony that overlooked the valley of the Guadalquivir and the blue horizon of the Mágina Sierra. I would lock myself in to be alone with my typewriter, my records, my notebooks, my books, feeling both isolated and protected. The balcony allowed me to look out upon the vastness of the world, the world I wanted to run to as soon as I could, because my refuge, like almost all refuges, was also a prison, and the only window I wanted to look through was the one on the night train that would carry me far away.

Laura García Lorca, who was born in New York and spoke a careful and proper Spanish that sometimes had a trace of English, showed me her Uncle Federico’s room in Granada, in Huerta de San Vicente, the last he had, the room he would leave one July day in 1936, looking for a refuge he wouldn’t find. All human miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone. I saw Lorca’s room, and I wanted to live sometime in a room like that. The white walls, the floor of large flat stones like the ones in my boyhood home, the wood table, the austere but comfortable bed of white-painted iron, the large balcony open to the Vega, to the sweep of groves dotted with white houses, to the bluish or mauve silhouette of the sierra with its snowy peaks tinted rose in the sunset. I remember van Gogh’s room in Arles, just as sheltering and austere, but with its beautiful geometry already twisted by anguish, the room that opened onto a landscape as meridional as the Vega of Granada and that contained only the bare necessities of life, yet it, too, failed to save the man who took refuge there from horror.

I wonder what the room in Amsterdam was like where Baruch Spinoza, a descendant of Jews expelled from Spain and later Portugal, he himself expelled from the Jewish community, edited his lucid philosophical treatises and polished the lenses from which he earned a livelihood. I imagine it with a window that lets in a clear gray light like that in the paintings of Vermeer, whose rooms warmly protect their self-absorbed inhabitants from inclement weather but always contain reminders of the expanse of the outside world: a map of the Indies or Asia, a letter from a distant spot, pearls found in the Indian Ocean. One Vermeer woman reads a letter, another gazes seriously and absently at the light falling through the window, and perhaps she is waiting for a letter. Closed in his room, perhaps the only place he is not stateless, Spinoza shapes the curve of a lens that will allow him to see things so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. With no aid other than his intelligence he wants to encompass the order and substance of the universe, the laws of nature and human morality, the rigorous mystery of a God that is not that of his elders, who have disavowed him and excommunicated him from the congregation, but neither is it the God of the Christians, who might well burn him at the stake if he lived in a country less tolerant than Holland. In a letter to Milena, Kafka forgets for a moment whom he’s addressing and writes to himself: You are, after all, completely Jewish, and you know what fear is.

Then Primo Levi in his bourgeois apartment in Turin comes to mind, the house where he was born and died, throwing himself, or accidentally falling, into the stairwell. He lived there all his life except for the two years between 1943 and 1945. Before September of 1943, when he was arrested by the Fascist militia, Levi had left his safe room in Turin to join the Resistance, carrying with him a small pistol he scarcely knew how to use and in fact never fired. He had been a good student, earning a degree in chemistry with excellent grades, profiting from what he learned in the laboratories and lecture halls, as well as from literature, which for him always had the obligation to be as clear and precise as science. A young man, slim, studious, with glasses, educated in a renowned bourgeois family in a cultured city, hardworking, austere, accustomed from childhood to a serene life, in harmony with the world, without the least shadow of the difference that would separate him from others, since in Italy, and even more in Turin, a Jew, in the eyes of society and his own, was a citizen like any other, especially if he came from a secular family that didn’t speak Hebrew or follow religious practices. His ancestors had emigrated from Spain in 1492. He left the room in which he had been born, and as he walked out the door he was probably struck by the thought that he might not come back, and when he did come back two years later, thin as a ghost, having survived hell, he must have felt that in truth he was dead, a ghost returning to an untouched house, the same door, his room in which nothing had changed during his absence, in which there would have been no change had he died, had he not been spared the cadavers’ mudpit in the concentration camp.