Antonio Molina - Sepharad

ONE DAY THE PIANIST TOLD ME — I don’t know whether it was in my office or one of the bars on the side streets where we lower-echelon employees ate breakfast, possibly he had invited me to have a cup of coffee or a tot of rum to celebrate modestly, that he finally got a contract for a concert.

He told me how he was coming back to Spain from Paris on a night train scheduled to reach the border at Irún by dawn. He had gone to play in a festival benefiting exiled artists of his country, and this was the first time he had traveled with his new Spanish passport. He couldn’t sleep all night because of the discomfort of his second-class seat and the added aggravation of rude passengers, and at nearly every station the French conductors forced him to get up because his ticket, the cheapest available, gave him no right to claim a specific seat. And he was nervous: it was the first time he would enter Spain with the new identity papers, which he had been given only a short time before. In the darkened compartment, among the snoring passengers, he kept touching the pockets of his jacket and overcoat, checking again and again for his ticket, passport, ID, and each time it seemed that he’d lost them or that he had one document but not the others, and he kept putting them in a more secure place, inside a lining or in the zippered pocket of his travel case, and when he dozed off and his eyes jerked open, he would forget where he’d put them, this time sure that he’d lost them or that one of those thieves who roam the night trains had taken them. After hours of anguish at border posts in Communist countries, the laborious review of papers and the flash of alarm each time some bureaucratic flaw in a document held him up, he decided not to go back to sleep. He tried to see what time it was by the pale violet light in the car ceiling, and at the stops he noted the names of the stations, calculating how much farther it was to Irun, eager to get there but also increasingly afraid as the train neared the border. Meanwhile the Spanish and French passengers slept tranquilly in his compartment, sure of the order of things and perfectly allied with their world, unlike him, an intruder who took nothing for granted and always feared the unexpected.

Finally, exhausted, he fell into a deep slumber, only to be awoken by a great screeching of brakes. At first, still trapped in the web of a bad dream, he thought the train had arrived at his native country and that gray-uniformed guards would arrest him because he was not carrying the proper identification, his old passport, which he also showed me, a relic of a dark past.

He got off the train, tightly clutching his travel case in one hand and in the other his Spanish passport. He had been told earlier to have all the documents relating to his naturalization easily available in his pocket, in case he needed to produce them. He took his place in the line, on the Spanish side of the border, in front of the guard post manned by two guardias looking bored or sleepy. “My legs were trembling, and when I tried to say good morning, my mouth was so dry I could barely speak.” Then, as he walked toward their booth, his palms sweaty and his knees weaker by the minute, something happened that he still remembers with amazement and gratitude. One of the guards came toward him, and he thought the man was returning his gaze with suspicion and distrust. But he summoned his courage, as he had the time he jumped out the window of the washroom, and, as naturally as he was able, held out his passport, carefully opened to his photograph, prepared to explain the discrepancy between his nationality and his name and to produce all the necessary papers. But the guard, without even glancing at the passport, without looking at his face, waved his hand and told him with a Spanish obscenity to move on, and that rude gesture and word seemed to the pianist the most beautiful welcome he had ever received. For my benefit he imitated the guard’s wave with his slender, white, musician’s hand, still stunned by a gift that none of the other weary passengers appreciated, repeating like a spell the guard’s expression, “for shit’s sake,” joder with a strong aspirated “j,” which he pronounced precisely and with pride.

THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE in the waiting room, or on the other side of the desk in my office, came and went, and I paid little attention to them, half listening to their petitions or demands for things that weren’t in my power to grant and that meant nothing to me, although I had learned to pretend to listen carefully, professionally, sometimes taking notes while I gave information about the necessary forms or explanations about delays of payments or the suggestion that a timely word to the manager might help, busy as he was with larger responsibilities. I was waiting, sheltered in my parenthesis of space and time as in a lair, but what I was waiting for beyond the next letter was unclear to me, and I made no effort to dispel the mist of my indecision. I sat quietly and waited, as one who has heard the alarm clock and knows he must get up but allows himself a few minutes more before he opens his eyes and jumps out of bed. Would the woman writing me come back or not? When she lived on this side of the ocean and in the same city, her interest in me did not last very long. I never felt more distant from her than those few times I held her in my arms. If I sought her out, she fled from me, but if I grew discouraged and gave up the chase, she came to me, always full of promises, erasing the resentment and uncertainty from my soul and making me want her again.

The truth is, she was no more tangible to me than the women in the black-and-white movies who seduced me into a kind of hallucinatory love: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Tierney, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth. In Gilda, which I saw many times, Rita Hayworth runs away from Glenn Ford and Buenos Aires, and in a cabaret in Montevideo, dressed in white, she sings and dances a song called “ Amado mío. ”

Amado mío

Love me forever

And let forever

Begin tonight.

In the film, Montevideo is just a name, not even a set or one of those false panoramas they use when the actors are pretending to drive a car. But the woman who showed up one morning in the waiting room of my office with a child in her arms and a large bag filled with puppets had fled from Montevideo to Buenos Aires in 1974, and four years later from Buenos Aires to Madrid, pregnant, though she didn’t know that yet, carrying the child of a man who had been taken away one night by the military or the police and was not heard from again. As we were talking, the child sat on the floor of my office playing with his mother’s wooden dolls. She watched him out of the corner of her eye with an uneasiness that never lessened. A little over thirty, she had very dark hair and eyes; the hair was a silky mane, the eyes large and heavily outlined with kohl. Her nose and mouth suggested Italian blood. Her strong, slightly masculine hands were perfect for manipulating the puppets, a few of which she unexpectedly took and began to maneuver in front of me, after first starting a cassette player she also pulled from her peddler’s pack. On the gray metal of the desk and atop the confusion of my papers, Little Red Riding Hood, skipping to the rhythm of the music on the tape, entered the forest where the Wolf lay in wait behind a pile of documents, and in her strong River Plate accent the woman narrated the story and reproduced all the voices, the high voice of the little girl, the big deep voice of the Wolf, the quavering, grumbling voice of the Grandmother. The little boy, as if mesmerized, got up and came over to the desk, which was about at his eye level. Bewitched but terrified, as if the Wolf were also waiting for him, he was completely unaware of his mother’s hands or the strings dangling from her fingers.