Antonio Molina - Sepharad

ONE SOLITARY WALK blends into another, like a dream that leads into another, and the German night dissolves into a rainy afternoon ten years later on the other side of the ocean, but there is the same penetrating odor of wet vegetation and soaked earth, and the person doing the walking is not the same man he was then. At some moment in that interval of time, he has discovered what everyone knows and yet no one accepts: that he is mortal. Having been on the verge of dying, he also knows that the time he is living now is a gift half of chance and half of medicine. That this midafternoon stroll through the tree-lined, tranquil streets of New York might never have taken place. That if he were not this minute, slightly dizzy, crossing Fifth Avenue at Eleventh Street, going west, wearing his raincoat and carrying his umbrella, it would make absolutely no difference, no one would notice his absence, there would not be the slightest modification in the world, in the redbrick houses with high stone steps that he likes so much, in the lines of gingko trees with their fan-shaped leaves, still young and tender green, as shiny as the green of the wisteria climbing up the house fronts to the cornices, sometimes curling around the metal geometry of the fire escapes. He might never have come back to this city, it could easily have happened, and since it is only one or two days before he leaves it, he fears this may be the last time, and his awareness of the fragility of his life, the so easily cut thread of any person’s life, makes this walk he is taking now that much more valuable. Among the names of cities and women his life and mind have gifted him with, there is a new name, scrabbling up like a scorpion in his vital lexicon. Just as Franz Kafka never wrote the word tuberculosis in his letters, he never speaks the word leukemia, he doesn’t even think it or say it silently, lest with that mere pronunciation he feels the poison of its sting.

He walks west, letting his footsteps lead where they will, looking for the hidden, cobblestone streets close to the Hudson River, on the edge of the vast desolation of the port and the abandoned wharves where transatlantic steamers used to berth. Now the huge pilings are rotting in the gray water, and thick weeds grow in the cracks of the piers as if among the crumbling columns of a ruined temple. Some of the piers have signs forbidding entrance. Others have been converted into children’s parks or playgrounds. Countless people fleeing Europe walked across these broad wooden planks, and from here they looked toward the city with fear and hope. Along the river runs a path for runners and bladers, for people who come to quietly walk their dogs. On the other side he can see the New Jersey coast, low lines of trees interrupted by ugly industrial hangars, an apartment tower, a gigantic brick building that from a distance looks like the merloned door of a walled Babylonian or Assyrian city and that has its exact equivalent on this side of the river. Those constructions seemed the more mysterious to me because they had no windows and I couldn’t imagine what purpose they served. They were like the towers of Nineveh or Samarkand, erected not in the middle of the desert but on the banks of the Hudson; later I learned that they contain ventilators for the Lincoln Tunnel, which runs beneath the river and is so long that when you drive through it in a taxi you have the sensation that you will never reach the end and soon will run out of air.

In the distance, to the south, rises the cliff of the newest skyscrapers in the lower part of Manhattan, the ones that have grown up around the Twin Towers, which have a certain beauty only when surrounded by fog or when the sun at dusk gives them the splendor of copper prisms. On this afternoon of cloud and mist the waters of the Hudson are as gray as the sky, and the tops of the skyscrapers are lost in the large, dark, swiftly moving clouds in which the red lights of lightning conductors glow like coals beneath a light layer of ash. Almost lost in the fog are the Statue of Liberty and the slim brick towers of Ellis Island.

I have returned to this city and am already saying good-bye to it. I want to treasure every foot of it, every minute of this last evening, the red brick of those hidden streets, the fragrance of the purple blooms of the wisteria, the scent of the small jungle-like gardens you sometimes glimpse between two buildings, behind a wooden fence, where dank shade and thick vegetation remind me of the garden in the Church of Santa María on afternoons of heavy rain, when the water spilled from the gargoyles between the arches of the cloister and echoed within the vaulted ceilings. Between Fifth Avenue and Sixth, almost at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, I have found the Sephardic cemetery my friend Bill Sherzer once showed me. I never noticed it before, although I am often in this neighborhood, the lower end of the avenues, which become more open and bohemian at the juncture of Chelsea and Greenwich Village, with its street stands of books and secondhand records and shops of outlandish clothing, its sidewalk café tables and showcases of fabulous Italian specialty groceries. We had often gone to one of them, Balducci’s, to shop, but never noticed that shaded, narrow garden with the iron fence that at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the cemetery of the Hispano-Portuguese Jewish community, information confirmed by a plaque. Bill pointed it out to us. Fugitives from Russia, from hunger and the pogroms, his grandparents came to Ellis Island at the turn of the century.

Among the trees, ferns, ivy, and weeds are a few headstones so worn that you can barely read the inscriptions: Hebrew or Latin characters, an occasional Spanish name, a Star of David. The fence is closed, so we can’t get inside the tiny cemetery, but if you could touch the stones you might make out something more than slabs whose corners have rounded with time, eroded to the point that almost all trace of human labor has been erased, like the broken columns and fragments of capitals returning to a primitive mineral state in the forums of Rome. Who is there to rescue names that were carved two hundred years ago, names of people who lived as fully as I do, who had memories and desires, who perhaps could trace their lineage back through successive exiles to a city like mine, to a house with two Stars of David on the lintel and to a barrio of narrow streets that lay deserted between the spring and summer of 1492? On this foggy, misty afternoon in New York, standing at the fence of a tiny cemetery locked between the high walls of buildings, I reencounter my ghostly compatriots, and sadly say farewell, because I am leaving tomorrow and may not return. There may be no future afternoon when I stand in this place, before these stones with eroded names, lost like so many others to the immemorial catalogue of Spanish diasporas, to the geography of Spanish graves in so many exiles throughout the world. Gravestones, tombs without a name, infinite lists of dead. On the outskirts of New York there is a cemetery of rolling green hills and enormous trees called the Gates of Heaven, with lakes where in autumn large flocks of Canadian geese gather. Among the thousands of headstones, in the midst of a geometry of graves with Irish names, there is one that is Spanish, so modest, so like the others, that it is difficult to find.

FEDERICO GARCÍA RODRÍGUEZ

1859–1945

How could that man have imagined that his grave would be not in a cemetery in Granada but on the other side of the world, near the Hudson River, or that his son would die before him and not have a grave, no simple stone to mark the exact spot in the ravine where he was executed? Modest burial places and common graves line the highways of the great Spanish diaspora. I would like to visit the French cemetery where Don Manuel Azaña was buried in 1940 in the midst of the great upheaval in Europe, and read the name of Antonio Machado on a tomb in the cemetery of Colliure. Legions of other dead who have no tomb or inscription endure in the alphabetized archive of names. On one Internet page I found, in white letters on a black background, a list of Sephardim the Germans deported from the Island of Rhodes to Auschwitz. You would have to read them one by one, aloud, as if reciting a strict and impossible prayer, to understand that not one of these names can be reduced to a number in an atrocious statistic. Each had a life unlike any other, just as each face, each voice was unique, and the horror of each death was unrepeatable even though it happened amid so many millions of similar deaths. How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, can one attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives?