Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Everything at my office proceeded at an administrative crawl, and several months would pass before the Department of Internal Affairs installed the appropriate plaque beside the entrance and above the door, that is, assuming there was not an unexpected move to yet another place, another rented suite in the same area or a vacant office in the main building, and I would have to get settled all over again, the desk and metal filing cabinet with the documents and typewriter and folders with drafts that never reached final form, the books that filled the hours of waiting and daydreaming, the letters kept under lock and key in a desk drawer and judiciously reread.

My life had only past and future. The present was a parenthesis, an empty space, like the spaces that separate written words, the automatic touch of thumb to the long bar of the typewriter, the line that separates two dates on a calendar, the pause between two beats of the heart. I lived from one letter, among the ordinary envelopes on my mail tray, to the next, recognizing it from afar, the moment the clerk came through the door with the large folder of correspondence under his arm, unaware of the treasure he was bringing me.

Real life evolved on a distant plane, the space of separation between the remembered and the desired, a space as empty and neutral as the small reception room where someone occasionally waited, hoping for a part or an interview with one of my superiors, the manager if possible.

He was the one who made the decisions and the one to whom I submitted my reports but who rarely appeared, since he was devoted to tasks of greater importance, such as public relations, over in the main building where he welcomed the eminent personalities visiting the city, the first-class artists whose performances were booked in the best theater, the largest auditorium: managers of Catalan avant-garde companies, celebrated soloists, orchestra conductors. First thing in the morning, I would read the arts section of the newspaper, looking for notice of the arrival of these personalities, their interviews and the photographs in which they often shook the hand of one of my superiors, especially the manager, who always wore a big smile and leaned toward the celebrity to make sure he wasn’t left outside the frame. I cut the photographs out and put them in a folder after I pasted the clipping onto a page with a typed notation of occasion and date.

The artists I booked rated no more than a small box in some easily overlooked corner of the paper, pieces that were anonymous or signed with initials, sometimes mine, because more than once the editor on duty just reproduced the note I’d sent in. Thespians, many of them called themselves. The word made me think of limited talent, shabbiness of costumes and sets, the weariness of the itinerant ham actors of other days, except now updated with hippie schlock, improvisation, audience participation. They painted their faces and dressed in rags like clowns and played the drum or walked on stilts in their parades and street theater. The women wore sweaty tights, didn’t shave under their arms, and moved sexlessly. They were paid almost nothing, and that little money took a long time to reach them. Every morning they would show up at my office, listen to my explanations, not understanding much, probably not believing much. All the forms they had to fill out, the obscure progress of paperwork from office to office, from Administration to Auditing and then to Disbursements, the delays, the carelessness and neglect, which could mean more weeks of waiting, and the lies at which I had become expert: “They told me at Administration that today they’re sending the check request to be signed, and tomorrow without fail I myself will take that form to Auditing.”

Like me, they lived in unfilled time, in the small waiting room of my office, as grim as that of a backstreet doctor or one of those private detectives in novels. They brought their portfolios, their sorry assortment of photocopies, their mediocre or invented résumés, and I cared nothing about them, indifferent to their lives and their art, though it was my job to give them hope, invent excuses for delays, confuse them with administrative procedures and administrative language. There was a Gypsy poet with sideburns and a thick head of white, curly hair who claimed he had translated the complete works of García Lorca and part of the New Testament into Caló, Gypsy Spanish, and as proof he brought the entire manuscript of his translation with him in a huge satchel, but he opened it only long enough to show me the first page, afraid he would be plagiarized or the translation would be stolen, and he refused to leave the bundle of pages to which he was dedicating his life in my office, lest they get lost among all the other papers or lest a ire break out in the oven of the pastry shop on the ground floor and his Lorca in Romany go up in flames. I asked him why he didn’t make a photocopy, saying it would be a good idea for him to have a spare just in case, but he didn’t trust the employees at the copy shop either, they might carelessly scorch the pages of his book or make another copy without his knowledge, and sell it or publish it under another name. No, he wouldn’t part with his manuscript, clutching it in his arms as he sat across from me at my desk or waited in the reception room for the manager to arrive, because he couldn’t rest until it was published, with his name in large letters on the cover and his photograph on the back so there would be no doubt about the author’s identity, his Gypsy face recognized by everyone in the city.

I can still see that dark, rustic face and white hair, and suddenly an unexpected detail surfaces, the large iron rings the Romany translator wore on his fingers, adding to the force with which his two hands fell on my desk or on the bulging satchel he was always protecting from the world, from adversity, theft, indifference, and the administrative lethargy he encountered every day in the waiting room or wandering outside the main building with the hope of catching the manager or some superior with greater influence than mine and in that way, by assault in the middle of the street, achieve what patience never accorded: the interview in which he would be granted money to publish his masterwork or at least a part of it, maybe the Romancero gitano, which he recited to me first in Spanish and then in Romany, closing his eyes tight, holding up his right hand with the index finger extended like a flamenco singer in a trance.

I watched him from my window, as I watched so many people, men and women, known and unknown, figures that passed across the unreal diorama of my life in those days. I watched him at the pedestrian crossing, walking with a resolute stride, his satchel held in his arms as if to prevent a blast of wind or a thief from seizing it, and somehow that man was not the same one who a few minutes later entered my office and asked if I thought the manager would be in that morning.

I pretended to pay attention to him, and then I pretended to be very busy sorting papers on my desk or checking figures in a financial report. I wanted to be alone, to go back to the book or letter the visitor had interrupted, and my impatience turned to irritation, although I tried not to show it. No, the manager won’t be in this morning, he called and had me cancel all his appointments, he has a very important meeting, and the man closed his satchel again, stood up, pressing it between the huge stonemason’s or smith’s hands adorned with rings in crude Asiatic splendor, and a minute later he had left the office and I could see him crossing the street, deep in thought and walking a little more slowly, though no less decisively, not yielding to dejection, perhaps reciting in his restless imagination lines from Lorca and evangelical sermons in Spanish and Romany. But now, as I am writing this, I wonder how I would have appeared if someone observed me from a window without my knowledge as I walked through those same streets, as intoxicated with words and chimera as the Gypsy poet: a strange man who sees nothing around him, his city inhabited with the dark ghosts of desire and books. They didn’t see Philip Marlowe, the Invisible Man, Franz Kafka, or Bernardo Soares, only a serious and ordinary thirty-year-old employee who left the office every day at the same time and read a book at the bus stop, and who once a week, always at the same hour, slipped a letter into the “Foreign-Urgent” slot of the mail drop on one side of the Post Office Building.