Antonio Molina - Sepharad

What would it be like to arrive by night at the coast of an unfamiliar country, to jump into the water from a boat in which you have crossed the ocean in darkness, hoping to leave the coast far behind even as your feet are sinking into the sand? A man alone, with no documents, no money, who has come from the horror of illness and slaughter in Africa, from the heart of darkness, who knows no word of the language of the country to which he’s come, who throws himself to the ground and crouches in a ditch when he sees the headlights of a car, maybe the police, coming toward him.

IT SEEMS WE ENJOY reading travel books more when we are traveling. At the beginning of the summer of 1976, after wrapping up my courses, I took a train from Granada and during the trip read Proust’s account of a journey to Vienna in Remembrance of Things Past. Two years later, on a September evening, I went to Venice for the first time, and remembered Proust and his painful propensity for disillusionment as I visited places I had wanted so long to see. Talking with Francisco Ayala about the pleasure of reading Proust, I discovered that he, too, connected it with the simultaneous pleasure of a journey. In nineteen forty-something, when my friend was living in exile in Buenos Aires, he taught at the provincial University of Rosario. He traveled once a week, first by train to Santa Fe, then in a bus that ran along the banks of the Paraná. He always carried a volume of Proust, and it seemed to him that reading Proust now was even more delicious than the first time, because when he looked up, he saw vistas from the other side of the world, was instantly whisked from the streets of Paris in 1900 and from the cloudy beaches of Normandy to the immense uninhabited spaces of South America he was passing through by train and bus. Suddenly the book was his only tie with his previous life, with a Spain lost to him, a Spain he might never return to, and a Europe that still had not emerged from the cataclysm of war. He was reading Proust on a bus traveling along the sealike vastness of the Paraná, and the volume he held in his hands was the same he’d read so often on streetcars in Madrid.

Once, at one of the stops, he looked up and saw a white-haired old man who had just got on, wearing a worn overcoat and carrying an equally worn briefcase. He was struck by his air of melancholy and poverty; the face reflected illness and exhaustion, the face of an old man whom the years had not spared life’s bitterest dregs. In an instant of shock, disbelief, and embarrassed compassion, he recognized in this old man riding a bus in a remote town in Argentina a man who had once been president of the Spanish Republic: Don Niceto Alcalá Zamora. Afraid that Alcalá might recognize him as well, he turned his face toward the window and buried himself in the book. When he looked up again, after the next stop, the man was no longer on the bus.

ON A JOURNEY YOU HEAR a story or by chance find a book that sends out ripples of concentric rings that affect succeeding discoveries. Once on a train to Seville, at a time when I was very much in love with a woman who fled from me when I most desired her and who pursued me when I tried to break away, I was reading The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and bestowed on Giorgio Bassani’s beautiful and ungovernable Jewish heroine, Micol, the features of the woman I loved. The final failure of the novel’s protagonist sadly anticipated mine, which I saw with a clearsightedness I wouldn’t have been capable of on my own.

I remember a cheap, dog-eared copy of Herodotus’s Histories that I found in a street stall in New York, and also Captain John Franklin’s journal of his trek to the North Pole that I had leafed through by chance in a secondhand bookshop and then read ravenously in a London hotel, a narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom of perverse geometry and a dressing room scarcely larger than an armoire but writhing with angles of expressionist decor. In 1989, having arrived in Buenos Aires during the southern hemisphere’s autumn, I spent hours lying on the bed in my room listening to the rain drumming against the windows, the same rain that prevented me from going outside to walk the streets I wanted so badly to explore. For hours, to offset the claustrophobia of my confinement, I read the first book I had discovered by Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia. Now I know that precisely during the time I was reading Chatwin’s book, the author was dying of an illness whose name he did not want to divulge to anyone. A rare infection contracted in Central Asia through food or an insect bite, his friends said, to conceal his disgrace and avoid speaking the word that was already akin to the sore that centuries ago announced the horror of the plague.

So I read Chatwin in Buenos Aires as he was dying in London. My journey through Argentina was thus part truth and part literature, because as I read I was traveling to the great desolate spaces of the south, though my itinerary had ended in the nation’s capital, in the room of a hotel I seldom left because of the rain. What a rest for the soul, to be far from everything, completely isolated, like a monk in his cell, a cell with every comfort: a firm bed, a telephone within reach, a remote control for the television. The rain absolved me from the exhausting obligation of touring and provided the perfect excuse for spending hours doing nothing, lying or half sitting propped up on two pillows, with a book in my hands that told of a journey to the ends of the earth and in which other, much older journeys were recalled: that of Charles Darwin in the large sailing ship Beagle, that of the Patagonian Indian who traveled with Darwin to England, learned English and English ways, visited Queen Victoria, and after a few years returned to his southern clime and to the primitive life he had left, now forever an alien wherever he lived.

IN COPENHAGEN, a Danish woman of French and Sephardic heritage told me of a journey she had taken as a child with her mother through recently liberated France, toward the end of autumn 1944. I met her at a luncheon in the Writer’s Club, which was a palace with double doors, marble columns, and ceilings with gilded garlands and allegorical paintings. At a window I watched as one of the tall ships passed, looking as if it were gliding down a street: it sailed along one of the canals that lead deep into the city and suddenly give a street corner the surprise perspective of a port.

That was early in September, about eight years ago. I had spent a couple of days wandering the city, and on the third an editor friend invited me to lunch. My memory is filled with cities that have greatly pleased me but that I visited only once. Of Copenhagen I remember especially images from my first walk. I left the hotel and started walking at random, and soon I came upon an oval plaza circled with palaces and columns; in the center was the bronze statue of a horse, the color bronze acquires because of humidity and lichen, a grayish green like the sky or like the marble of the palace I was told was once the Royal Palace.

In all the cold and baroque space of that plaza cut through from time to time by a solitary car (as I heard the sound of the motor, I heard also the whisper of tires on the cobblestones) there was no human presence other than mine and that of a soldier in the red coat and high furry shako of a hussar who was unenthusiastically standing guard with a gun over his shoulder, a gun with a bayonet as anachronistic as his uniform.

Not knowing which way to go, I let the streets lead me, as I let myself be led by a trail in the country. Across from the bronze horseman began a long, straight street that dead-ended at a dome, also verdigris bronze, of a church adorned with golden letters in Latin and a variety of statues of saints, warriors, and individuals dressed in frock coats along the cornices. The church resembled those baroque churches of Rome, one just like another, that give the unpleasant effect of being branch offices of something, maybe the Vatican or the financial offices of God’s grace.