Antonio Molina - Sepharad

“That bowl holds memories for me too,” says the woman we saw smoking outside. She apologizes for interrupting, for having listened. “I recognized your accent, I lived in that town a long time ago.” Her voice is almost as young as her eyes, unrelated to the age inscribed on her features and to the American carelessness of her clothes. “I work in the library, and if you’re interested I’ll show it to you. There are so many treasures, and so few people know about them. Professors come from time to time, very learned people doing research, but weeks can go by, even months, when no one comes to ask me about a book. Who’s going to come all the way up here? Who would think that we have paintings by Velazquez, El Greco, and Goya, and that being almost in the Bronx, we would have the first Lazarillo and the first Quixote and the 1499 La celestina? Tourists go up to Ninetieth Street to visit the Guggenheim, and they think that everything that lies north of that is darkest Africa. I live near here, in a neighborhood of Cubans and Dominicans where you never hear a word of English. Downstairs from my apartment is a little Cuban restaurant called La Flor de Broadway. They make the best ropavieja stew and most delicious daiquiris in New York, and they let you smoke in peace at the tables, which have checked oilcloth covers, like the ones they had in Spain when I was young. What luxury, smoking a cigarette as I drink my coffee after dinner. You know how rare that is here, that they let you smoke at your table in a restaurant? I love my cigarettes. They’re good company, and help when I’m talking with a friend or to pass the time when I’m alone. When I was young, I wanted to run away from Spain and come to America because here women could smoke and wear trousers and drive cars, all the things we saw in the movies before the war.”

The woman spoke a fluid, clear Spanish, the kind you hear in some parts of Aragon, but there were sounds of the Caribbean and North America in her accent, and the timbre of her voice became totally Anglo-Saxon when she said a word in English. She invited us to have a cup of tea in her office, and we accepted, partly because we felt that physical exhaustion you get in museums, partly because there was something hypnotic in her way of talking and looking at us, even more in that empty, silent place on the gray morning of the last day of our trip. She still hadn’t given us her name, yet she seduced us, speaking in that Spanish from so many years ago and examining us with eyes much younger than her face and figure. Her office was small, cluttered, and smelled of old paper, the office furniture was from the 1920s, like something you would see in a painting by Edward Hopper. She took three cups from a filing cabinet, along with three tea bags, set them on the papers on her desk, and with a totally North American gesture of apology went to get hot water. We looked at each other wordlessly, smiled at being in such a strange situation, and the woman returned.

Her glasses hang from a black ribbon. She looks like a university department secretary who is about to retire, but her eyes question me unabashedly, they are not the eyes of a woman pouring hot water into teacups. She regards at me as if she were thirty and evaluated men only by their looks or sexual availability; and she regards you as if to determine whether we’re lovers or married and whether there is desire or distance between us. And while those magnetic eyes study our faces and our clothes, her old woman’s hands are involved in the ritual of academic hospitality, serving tea and offering envelopes of sugar and saccharin and those little plastic stirrers that so disagreeably substitute for spoons in the United States. Her clear voice, ancient Spanish with influences of Cuban and English, recounts details about the megalomaniac millionaire who built the Hispanic Society on the corner of Broadway and 155th Street, believing that this part of Harlem would soon be in vogue among the rich, and about how strange it was to spend a life so far from Spain and yet be surrounded by so many things Spanish. She gestures toward the window from which you can see a common, ordinary sidewalk that is nonetheless Broadway, a row of redbrick houses crisscrossed by fire escapes and with water tanks on the roofs, and, in the distance, the gray of a horizon and the large blackened towers of public housing complexes in the Bronx.

“I left Spain more than forty years ago and have never been back, and I don’t intend to go now, but I remember some places in your city, some of the names, Santa María Plaza, where the wind blew so hard on winter nights, and Calle Real, wasn’t that what it was called? Although now I remember it was called José Antonio then. And that street where the potter’s studios were, I’d forgotten the name but when I heard you talking to your wife about Calle Valencia, I realized you meant that street. There’s a song we used to sing:

On Calle Valencia

The potters, each day,

Make cooking pots

From water and clay.

“When I was still young I took some Spanish-literature classes at Columbia University with Don Francisco García Lorca, and he liked me to sing him that. He would repeat the words for the class so we could see there wasn’t one that wasn’t ordinary, and yet the result, he told us, was both poetic and as informative as something out of a guidebook, just like the old romances, those ageless ballads.”

She is talking a lot, mesmerizing us, but we haven’t really learned anything about her, not even her name, although we realize that only later, and not without surprise, after we’ve left. We wonder what the apartment is like where she lives, undoubtedly alone, maybe with a cat for company, hearing voices and Cuban music from La Flor de Broadway below, where she regularly goes to eat, where she orders beans and pork and rice and maybe gets a little tipsy from a daiquiri, alone at a table with a checked cloth, smoking as she finishes her coffee and watches the street, appraising with unwavering eyes the men and women passing by. What does she do during all those hours and days when no one comes to consult a book in her library, the buried treasures that she catalogues and checks with a look of severe efficiency on her withered face, her eyes half closed behind the glasses on the black ribbon? Unique books that now can be found only here, first editions, entire collections of scholarly journals, seventeenth-century folios, autograph letters — all of Spanish literature and all possible knowledge and research concerning Spain gathered in this one great library that almost no one visits. But she doesn’t need to open the poetry volumes of the Clásicos Castellanos collection to recite, because while she was studying with Professor García Lorca, she told us, she had acquired, at his urging, the habit of memorizing the poems she liked best, so she knew by heart a large part of the Romancero, and the sonnets of Garcilaso and Góngora and Quevedo, and especially of Saint John of the Cross, and almost all of Fray Luís de León and the Romantics Bécquer and Espronceda, who had been passions of hers during the fantasy and literary adolescence she shared with her brother, who was a little older than her and with whom she had read aloud Don Juan and Fuente Ovejuna and Life Is a Dream. Thanks to her professor, she devoted all the years she worked in the library of the Hispanic Society to memorizing Spanish literature, to reciting it silently or in a low voice, moving her lips as if praying, as she walked to work every morning along the Caribbean sidewalks of Broadway or traveled to lower Manhattan on slow buses or crowded subway cars, as she tossed nights in the insomnia of her solitary bed or walked through the rooms of the museum, almost without noticing the paintings and objects that were etched in her mind, as their layout was, and the names and dates typed on their labels.