Antonio Molina - Sepharad

I REMEMBER THE MORNING of that next-to-last day in New York, when you and I were already a little dazed by the imminence of the trip. We were in that strange nontime of the eve of departure, when a person is not completely in the place though he hasn’t left it yet, when the things that seemed to accept him for a while now remind him that he is only a stranger passing through. We were shaken by the realization that no trace would remain of our presence in the apartment we occupied for such a brief time but in which, nonetheless, day after day, we had accumulated the signs of domestic life: clothes in the closet, which when I open it smelled of your cologne, just like our closet in Madrid, our books on the night table, your creams and my brush and shaving cream on the bathroom shelf — the part of us we brought on this trip, the part we must take with us again like nomads, erasing all the marks of ourselves before we go, even the scent of our bodies on the sheets, which we drop off at the laundry on the morning of our departure.

The least gesture casts the shadow of farewell. I was hoarding the count of the days we have left, and this morning I am thinking back on them, completely awake in the bed that belongs to others but has been ours for a few weeks. Still lazy and relaxed, my arms around you as you lie there as though still asleep and drawing pleasure from the deep pool of dream, I am also thinking that we still have this day, and I want very much to keep it whole and enjoy it slowly, like those moments we grant ourselves in bed after the alarm clock has gone off. Later I turn on the radio as I fix breakfast, but despite the announcer this is not a day like any other, and my routine of getting the coffee can from its precise place in the cupboard and the carton of milk from the refrigerator is false, like the ease with which I open the drawer with the spoons or turn the knob for the gas or put the filter in the coffeepot. False because tomorrow afternoon we will be two ghosts in this place, unknown and invisible to the new renter, whom we will not see and for whom we will leave an envelope with the concierge that contains the key to the apartment. The new renter is already an invading shadow, usurping the space of our intimacy, not just the bed where we’ve slept and made love and the table where every morning before you get up I have set out the coffee cups for breakfast, he also is present in the humid early-morning light that sifts through the glass doors to the terrace, and in the view we saw when, elbows propped on a fourteenth-story cornice as if on the railing of a great transatlantic steamer, we looked out over the city, especially at night. Those May nights of wind and lightning, storms with the fury of a monsoon, lightning bolts cutting across the large black clouds that blocked out the skyscrapers or that turned them into ghosts rising radiant through the downpour in the distance and disappearing suddenly in fog tinted the colors of the spotlights illuminating the highest floors of the Empire State Building, violet at times, red and blue, intense yellow. How reluctant we are to return to our country, for we have received almost daily accounts of obscurantism and bloodshed. We long to remain in exile.

There is still one day to pretend to ourselves, to each other, that our presence in this house, in this city, is real, as real as the doorman who gives us a cordial good morning in his Cuban accent or the Bengali at the shop on the corner where every day I buy a newspaper and telephone cards. I have spent so much of my life wanting to leave the place where I am, but now, when time is moving so swiftly, what I want most is to stay put, to cling like a limpet to the cities I like, to enjoy the calm of habit and familiarity, as when I think of the years you and I have been together. Never, except when I was a child, have I been tempted to collect anything, but now I like to slip ordinary mementos between the pages of a notebook or book: matchbooks with the name of a restaurant, theater tickets, bus tickets, any minimal document that records a date and time, our presence at some site, the itinerary of a brief trip. I’m not attached to things, not even to books and records, but I am to those places where I have known the mysterious exaltation of the best of myself, the fullness of my desires and affinities. What I treasure like an avaricious and obsessive collector are the moments I spend listening to music or looking at paintings in the galleries of a museum, the pleasure of walking with you one afternoon along the banks of the Hudson as the sun tints the glass of the skyscrapers with gold and copper. That captured light continues to glow in a photograph. I treasure the restless sense of adventure and uncertainty that invaded us that next-to-last morning in New York as we watched the last opulent houses of the Upper East Side slip past the bus window and gradually be replaced by the first vacant lots and ruined blocks of Harlem.

Going north, there were fewer and fewer passengers on the bus, and almost imperceptibly the white Anglo-Saxon faces disappeared, and instead of pale old ladies with an air of fragility the passengers now were young mothers, black or Hispanic, holding babies in their arms or leading small children by the hand, fat ladies with the bleach-blond hair, long fingernails, and impudent mouth of the Caribbean, black grandmothers sitting in their seats with the majesty of Ethiopian matrons but moving with great difficulty when they got up at their stop, weaving from side to side in their untied sneakers, their bodies misshapen and twisted as if by a painful bone disease. And as the passengers on the bus ceased to be white, the city changed outside the window, it became wider, emptier, deteriorated. There was less traffic, fewer shopwindows along the almost deserted sidewalks, there were unpopulated spaces, perspectives of properties with wire fences and buildings burned or in ruins, lots with razed houses where maybe one wall still stood, its empty windows boarded up, sinister as blinded eyes. Occasionally we drove through a stretch of street where for some reason there remained a vestige of neighborhood life, a sidewalk, a row of houses spared from destruction, with a moderately prosperous store on the corner and solitary men sitting on the steps, with young mothers leading small children by the hand and pots of geraniums in windows. The last tourists had got off the bus many stops ago, the ones going to the uptown museums, the Metropolitan or Guggenheim, and we no longer saw the trees of Central Park on our left, topped in the distance by the towers of apartments on Central Park West with pinnacles like an expressionist film set: crests and gargoyles, ziggurats, temples of remote Asian religions, lighthouses, cupolas.

The nearly empty bus made much better time, and the conductor turned to look at us, or he studied our strangeness in his rearview mirror. We passed a square that featured a garden in the French style, with a bronze statue of Duke Ellington in the center. The pedestal was like the edge of a stage, and Duke Ellington, dressed in a tux, stood against a grand piano, also cast in bronze. It had been more than an hour since we got on the bus at the Union Square stop. But we’d come so far and moved so slowly that it seemed we’d been gone much longer, and there was no sign that we were near our destination: 155th Street.

Our stop was on the corner of a wide avenue lined with not very tall, widely spaced buildings, and its air of solitude and of being at the end of something was accentuated by the gray day and the low walls of the empty lots. There was no one around to ask directions of. Run-down houses, churches, closed shops, an American flag flapping above a brick building that looked both shabby and official. We were discouraged, afraid we were lost, maybe even in a dangerous area: two foreign tourists you could spot a mile away, who don’t know where they are and who realize with apprehension that among the few cars in the streets there’s no bright yellow of a taxi.