Antonio Molina - Sepharad

I sat quietly at my desk waiting, and hours could go by before anyone came. Some mornings there might be only one or two visitors beside the person who brought the mail, perhaps a clerk asking me to consult a file in my archives, in which I had arranged the dossiers that came in the mail or were handed to me by the artists alphabetically, and the records of past performances chronologically. I saved every piece of paper in manila folders: posters, tickets, press clippings, should there be any, the count of the house, a number that often was misleading, depending on the reputation and attractions of the acts I booked; they were not for the important theaters in the city but for community centers in the barrios, little more than halls for school plays, or open-air stages in plazas or parks during the summer months, where it was also my responsibility to organize some festival or other that always featured the adjective popular on the posters advertising it, shows with lights and local rock groups, and merry-go-rounds and puppet shows.

My office occupied the narrowest angle of a triangular building that had a pastry shop on the ground floor and a small legal office on the first. Sweet, warm aromas wafted up from the pastry shop, and from the legal service came the sounds of voices and telephones and a lot of tramping back and forth that contrasted with the quiet prevailing in my office most of the time. There were two windows, one that looked out over the Plaza del Carmen and the other onto Calle Reyes Católicos, but the entry was on a narrow street with little traffic, so it was easy, when I came to work every morning, to feel that I was entering a secret observatory, as appropriate for spying as for getting away. I would come and go without being seen by anyone, and from the windows I could note who went by at that central crossroads of the city. The people I knew, who walked with no idea that they were being watched, looked different. Who is the person, really, when he is alone, temporarily free from others, from the identity others give him?

LIKE MANUEL AZAÑA when he was a fat, nearsighted adolescent, I wanted to be Captain Nemo. Closeted from eight to three between those walls were Nemo in his submarine and Robinson Crusoe on his island, and also the Invisible Man and detective Philip Marlowe and Fernando Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares and any of Kafka’s office workers in that company in Prague for preventing workplace accidents. I imagined that I, like them, was a secret exile, a stranger in a place where I had always lived, a sedentary fugitive who hid behind an appearance of perfect normality, who, seated at an office desk or riding in a bus on the way to work, could conjure up amazing adventures that would never happen, voyages that would never be made. In his office at the water plant in Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy imagines the music Mark Antony heard the night before his damnation, the retinue of Dionysus abandoning him. In a cheap restaurant in Lisbon, or riding a streetcar, Pessoa pensively scans the lines of a poem about a sumptuous transatlantic voyage to the Orient. A bespectacled, self-absorbed man arrives at a hotel in Turin, peaceful, well dressed, although with a hint of oddness that prevents his being taken for the usual traveler; he registers for that one night, and no one knows that it is Cesare Pavese and that in his minimal luggage he is carrying a dose of poison that within a few hours he will use to take his life. I imagined the suicide in morbid detail. From a literary point of view, was shooting oneself or killing oneself slowly with alcohol a form of heroism? I watched the hopeless drunks in the dark taverns of the side streets with both admiration and disgust, for each hid a terrible truth whose price was self-destruction. I walked past men with scowling faces and unsettled behavior and imagined Baudelaire in the final delirium of his life, wandering lost in Brussels or Paris, and Soren Kierkegaard cast adrift in the streets of Copenhagen, composing biblical diatribes against his countrymen and friends, mentally writing love letters to Regina Olsen, whom he left behind, perhaps frightened to death when he found himself betrothed to her, though he never forgives her when she later marries another man. Closeted in my office, I read his letters, diaries, and notebooks, and learned in Pascal that men never live in the present, only in their memory of the past or in their desire or fear of the future, and that all our miseries outlast us because we are not able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Did Milena’s letters reach Kafka at his home, or did he prefer to receive them at the office? He sent hers to general delivery in Vienna so her husband wouldn’t see them. Reading many books did not tell me that she was something more than the shadow to whom he wrote letters or who occasionally appeared in the pages of his diary: she was a real woman who obstinately, courageously shaped her destiny in the face of hostile circumstances and a tyrannical father, who wrote books and articles in favor of human emancipation. She passionately loved several men, and continued to write when the Nazis were in Prague. Arrested and sent to a death camp, she died twenty-two years after the man whose letters I read in my office.

I surrounded myself with shadows that were more important to me than people, shades that whispered the names of cities I had never visited — Prague, Lisbon, Tangiers, Copenhagen, New York — and the place in America those letters came from bearing my name and the address of my office and written in a hand that became not the anticipation but the substance of my happiness. I kept Letters to Milena in a desk drawer, and sometimes I carried the book in a pocket to read on the bus. It nourished my love for the absent beloved, and for the failed or impossible loves I had learned of through films and books. Dispensing hand of happiness, Kafka writes of Milena’s hand.

I LIVED IN WRITTEN WORDS, books, letters, and drafts of things that never saw the light of day, and in an office that was more in harmony with me than my own house and was, in a strange and oblique way, my intimate dwelling; the outside world was a blur, as if I didn’t live in it, just as I performed my job so casually that it might have been someone else doing it. My life was what didn’t happen to me, my love a woman who was far away and might never return, my calling a passion I did not devote myself to in real life, although I had begun to publish an article or two in the local newspaper, using a pseudonym, then felt they were letters not addressed to anyone except a few readers as isolated as I was in our melancholy province, so remote from anything reported in the newspapers of Madrid.

I read in Pascal: Entire worlds know nothing of us. I read eagerly, with the same will for oblivion that makes Robert De Niro yearn for the opium pipe in the Sergio Leone film that was playing then, Once upon a Time in America. I emerged from books as muddled as from the movies, when you come out of the darkness of the theater into bright sun. Some evenings I took on work I didn’t need to, or invented an excuse to go to the office for a few hours, then sat at my desk staring at the door of the small waiting room, imagining I was a private detective, as childishly, though nearly thirty, as when at twelve I imagined I was the Count of Monte Cristo or Jim Hawkins, or when I would look down on the street, with no danger that anyone would see me from below or that any visitor would come to interrupt me. I had read in Flaubert: Every man guards in his heart a royal chamber: I have sealed mine. My head was filled with phrases from books, films, songs, and those words were my only consolation in the exile to which I was condemned. I read Pavese’s diary, poisoning myself with his nihilism and misogyny, which I took for lucidity, just as I sometimes took the effects of too much alcohol for clearheadedness and enthusiasm. Death will come, and she will have your eyes. To write and read was to weave a protective and airless cocoon, to drink a potion that would allow me to flee invisible, to take a tunnel that no one knew, to scratch the wall of my cell with the patience of Edmond Dantes. With a silken line of blue ink I spun a world filled with imaginary men and women who softened the harsh edges of reality. The light scrape of pen on paper, the tapping of the keys of the typewriter, which was manual and noisy like the machines of fabulous screenwriters, the ones Chandler and Hammett used, literary gods, drunk, original, solitary men who could not be bought. The alcohol fumes and tobacco smoke of the 1980s, in retrospect as embarrassing as most of my alienated life then, as distant as the memory of that office and the woman to whom I wrote the letters, not realizing that I loved her not despite the fact that she lived on the other side of the ocean and with another man but precisely because she did. Had she returned, leaving everything to go with me, I would have been paralyzed with terror, I would have fled as Kafka fled before the determined and earthy passion of Milena Jesenska, preferring the refuge of letters and distance.