Sepharad (21 page)

Every morning we walked past the large window of a travel agency featuring a huge poster of New York. We liked that agency because of their posters of faraway places and because a very pretty woman worked there, whom we never saw outside her office or even away from her desk. She was blond and slender, with an extraordinary profile; every morning she was talking on the phone or working at her typewriter, almost always wearing a turtleneck sweater, her back straight yet inclined slightly forward like the wooden bust of Nefertite I saw years later, when I did do some traveling, in the Egyptian museum of Berlin. This girl had a narrow face, large mouth, large, slanted eyes, and a nose with that pronounced tip some admirable Italian noses have. As she talked on the phone, head tilted to clamp the earpiece to her shoulder, she would gesture with a slender hand holding a pencil as she turned the pages of a schedule or catalog with the other, and we would watch with furtive passion, pausing only a moment every morning at the window, afraid of attracting her attention. We saw both her and her reflection, because facing her in the agency office was a large wall of mirrors. Each time we liked to observe some new feature of her beauty: her hair might be loose, or she had pulled it back into a ponytail to emphasize the purity of her profile, or maybe into a bun that revealed the splendid line of her throat and the back of her neck. Behind that glass window, facing the mirror that multiplied the plants adorning her desk and the posters of foreign cities and views of beaches or
deserts, she belonged both to the everyday life of the city and to the exotic places of her profession, and part of her appeal to us were the names of foreign countries and cities, and the large color photograph of New York in the window added luster to her image. She may have been no less deskbound than we were, but as she spoke on the telephone and read schedules and made hotel reservations, jotting down things in her agenda, she seemed endowed with a dynamism that was the opposite of our dull work as minor officials; without moving from her desk, she took on the golden tones of East Indian beaches and the bold freedom of the most beautiful women on the Via Veneto, or Portobello Road, or Calle Corrientes, or Fifth Avenue. We fantasized about walking into the agency one morning and asking in a normal way for a brochure, some information about hotels or flights. But of course we never did, and we never saw her going in or out of her office, never met her in the streets we walked. She existed only inside the travel agency, behind the glass window and in the mirrored wall, just as Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth lived in the black-and-white world of movies; she was as unchangeable and distant as they, and so we watched her a few seconds every morning and continued our brief half-hour routine, the newspaper kiosk, the
café con leche
and toast in the Café Suizo or the Regina, maybe a stop at the post office, for Juan to mail a letter, and then back to the office before the time clock we had to punch reached five after ten.

There was a sweetness in that routine, in the predictable familiarity of street corners and plazas, the sunlit clarity of Bibrrambla and the shadows of the narrow little streets leading to it, the repeated faces, the synchronized appearances, the same girl in dark glasses who arrived every morning at the same hour to raise the iron shutters of a shop with mannequins and mirrors, the officials and the clerks, the woman in the Olympia Travel Agency, whom we'd named Olympia after the Greek goddess and Manet's
nude, the lottery-ticket vendors, even the beggars and bums were there every day, following a routine similar to mine, each with his own life, with his secret novel, background figures in the novel I was living or inventing for myself, not the novel of what I did but of things that didn't happen, the trips I never took and the plans my friend Juan and I postponed for a future neither of us much believed in but that served as an excuse for our present inertia.

Our friendship itself was routine and habit: meeting every morning at the same place, walking to a café, hands in our pockets and newspaper tucked under one arm, talking with no obligation to say anything new or too confidential. We were both crushed by the same docility and indolence, shyness or cowardice or lack of drive. Our friendship was surely based on that dismal reality, and it cost us nothing to share the irony with which we viewed the mediocrity of our lives and the deterioration of our ambitions. Each saw in the other the mirror of his insufficiency. We were united by the person neither of us dared to be. With identical correctness, we carried out our duties as employees, husbands, and fathers, rarely dropping the neutral sarcasm of our conversations for a true complaint. Many mornings during our walk to breakfast, Juan dropped a letter in the box at the post office located in the arcade of Calle Ganivet. Like everyone absorbed in his own melancholy, I was not too observant then. I had some vague idea that those letters were office business, until I noticed one that had a stamp for foreign mail. Juan gave no indication that he was trying to hide them from me, but there was something in his attitude that kept me from asking about them. Once, when we were having breakfast at the Suizo, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, leaving his newspaper behind on the bar. I picked it up, and two letters slipped out. One of them was from New York, addressed to him, but at his home address, not his office. The other letter he had written, and it bore the name of the woman who had written him from New York. In a
couple of seconds I put the letters back inside the folded newspaper, and when Juan returned I said nothing but thought, with a certain desolation, that in my friend's life, which I'd thought was an open book, there was a part he chose not to reveal.

 

COMING OUT OF THE
small lane where the Club Taurino used to be, we sometimes ran into our friend and office mate Gregorio Puga, who also worked as acting associate director of the city band, after having lost a much more prestigious job in the band of another city, and who even at that early hour was always a little drunk, smelling of stale alcohol and nicotine despite the coffee beans he sucked. Gregorio was the first friend I made when I started working, maybe because everyone had given up on him and he had to latch onto new employees when he wanted company at breakfast or for having a few beers or glasses of wine in the little hideaway taverns in the
centro.
It was said that were it not for his fondness for drink he would have been a major composer and conductor. He had a different version of his failure, which he would deliver with the whining monotony of a drunk: people had pushed him over the edge, they'd made him give up his promising career, begun under the best auspices in Vienna, and all in exchange for what, a pittance, the petty security of a steady job. He would sit with his elbows propped on the bar, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, held between the yellow tips of his second and third fingers, the languid, soft fingers of an old office worker, although I don't think that he was more than forty-five at the time.

“They bait you with the promise of security, and you get used to the money coming in every month, and then you don't have the will to keep studying, even less when your wife burdens you right off with kids and is always going on about how you're useless and why don't you stop all this foolishness and dreaming and do something to get ahead in the office or go out and look for a
job in the evening. At first you don't, of course, your evenings are sacred, you have to keep writing, rehearsing with other musicians until you get out of them what not even they know they have inside, and you want to direct an orchestra, not a city band, that was my life's dream, but you get depressed, and besides it's true, you need money, so you agree to give private classes, or you get a place in a school, and before you get paid at the end of the month you've already spent or budgeted the money, it's clothes for the kids, and books and uniforms for school, because of course we had to take them to a Catholic school. Midafternoon you leave the office, and because you dread going home you stop for a couple of glasses of wine, you get a bite of something and go to your evening job, and when that's over, well, it's the same: Gregorio, let's go have a drink. At first you say no, then all right, just one rum and that's all, the old lady will be pissed if she hasn't seen the whites of my eyes by dinnertime, so you have two rums and one for the road or to help you face the uproar you know is waiting at home, and you forget to look at the clock and when you go outside to the Plaza del Carmen, it's striking eleven and there's hell to pay. I'll buy some cigarettes and pull myself together, but you don't have coins to put in the machine, and you're too tired to ask for change for a bill, so you ask for a glass of wine, and maybe if you're lucky you run into a friend who's alone at the bar, and he treats you to the next one, or it's the waiter who invites you, because all his life he's been seeing you come in and out, he's served you the coffee, or coffee and cognac, at dawn, the rums for an aperitif, and coffee and drinks after dinner—though in all honesty you haven't eaten, just nibbled to fill your stomach.”

I remember Gregorio with affection and pain, Maestro Puga, whom I haven't seen for several years now, and I wonder if he's still making the rounds of the bars in the
centro
where the office workers go, whether he's still alive and clinging to the dream of a symphony premiere, elbows on the bar, wearing his suit that is
getting more and more frayed and dirty, a cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers, a glass of wine held loosely in the other hand, and maybe a coffee bean sucked in a mouth now missing a few teeth. Some mornings Juan and I met him as we turned a corner and didn't have time to avoid him, so we had to stand and listen to his whining and persistent invitations to come have a drink, just a quick cognac or anisette in the few minutes left of the half hour allotted for breakfast. When I was less cautious, I agreed to have a rum with him after work, and didn't get away until eleven, ending up so drunk that the next morning I didn't remember anything we talked about all those hours. I remember only one thing, and I've never forgotten it, because since then Gregorio has repeated it many times, grabbing my arm, pulling me toward him, enveloping me in a cloud of stale wine and black tobacco as he pierces me with those reddened eyes and says:

“Don't get stuck in this rut, don't let what happened to me happen to you, get out while you can, don't cave in, don't let yourself be bought.”

I avoided Gregorio, as everyone did, because he was a bore and a drunk, and even if you were fond of him you couldn't take his bad breath or the tedium of his increasingly disjointed stories, his detailed account of the intrigues and tricks he was victim of in the office, or about the city band, where another man with fewer qualifications but more connections had been named director. But I also avoided him because I was ashamed to have him see the fulfillment of his prophecy about me: the years went by, and I went to work every morning punctually at eight o'clock, I had obligations now, was married with a child and making payments every month on a car and an apartment, and although my wife earned more than I did, the money didn't always stretch to the end of the month, so I was considering looking for a second job. In this way I'd gradually given up all the plans that seemed so courageous when I started working: preparing myself for a better career, say, university professor, or researcher in art history, or even geography teacher in some institute. But I didn't have the time or the will, and my free evenings got away from me without my noticing, and besides there were only a few openings every year for a history professor and thousands of university graduates, many of whom I'd gone to school with and who were desperate after years of being unemployed, and looked with envy at even a job as unappealing as mine. I would occasionally meet Gregorio in the corridor, each of us carrying a briefcase loaded with files, or I would see him at a corner of the alleys dotted with bars where office workers escaped at midmorning for a quick coffee, but my repugnance for his bad breath and shabby air was more powerful than any gratitude I felt for his friendship. I would look away, or slip through a side door to escape his red eyes, not wanting to hear again what I knew he would say: “What are you doing? Why haven't you got out of here? How many more years are you going to take it?”

 

ONCE IN A WHILE
I did go somewhere, but only for a few days; they would send me to Madrid to get papers signed in a ministry or to place an order for supplies I was charged with inspecting. The trips were brief, the per diem insufficient, and my low rank limited me to moderately priced hotels and meals in modest restaurants, yet the anticipated departure acted as a stimulant, pulling me toward the future like a giant magnet, giving me back the childish happiness of looking forward to an outing.

Several days before the train pulled out of the station, I had already left in my mind. The night express with its blue sleeping cars that reminded me of the Orient Express would be sitting there when I arrived with my suitcase a little before 11
P.M.,
filled with the heady relief of being alone, of having temporarily freed myself from the oppressive sameness of office and home, from
the schedules and scares and bad nights that go with having a very young son. The preparations for this short trip contained all the excitement of a real journey, of any one of the journeys I'd read about in books or seen at the movies or imagined for myself as I studied maps and glossy guidebooks. In the midst of such a low-key, shallow life, the trip was an almost physical pleasure, a sensation of freedom and lightness, as if leaving the station would free me from all the obligations and habits that weighed me down. With the slam of the door of the taxi that would take me to the station, my old identity would be entirely sloughed off.

Since I was going somewhere, I wasn't myself; I luxuriated in the intoxication of being no one. I dissolved into the moments I was living, into the pleasure of being borne away by the train and looking out the window of my compartment at the lights of highways and cities, cheerful windows where stay-at-homes lived, at that hour watching television or going to bed in miserably hot bedrooms beneath a suffocating conjugal blanket, the “watered-down coffee of married life” referred to by Cernuda, a poet I was reading a lot at the time, his disciple and apprentice in the bitterness of the distance between reality and desire.