Sepharad (26 page)

One night while he is waiting for his wife to get ready for dinner, as she is talking to him from the bathroom, combing her hair before the mirror, trying a new lipstick, he sees a blond woman lying on a bed in a room on the other side of the patio. It's too far away to be able to make out her features, to tell whether she's young or attractive or just a figure his imagination is crystallizing, the blond, barefoot foreigner on the steps of a train one early summer night long ago. She is gesticulating, talking to someone he can't see. A man's silhouette appears in the window. The man bends down to the woman, and something slow and hazy takes place. The doctor presses to the window, to see more
clearly, excited, because the movements of the two bodies in the room across the patio are rhythmic; his mouth is dry, like that of a teenager choked with desire.

It lasts only an instant. He turns away from the window when his wife comes out of the bathroom; he fears being discovered by her, or blushing and causing her to ask the reason, which would make him blush even more. The two figures in the other window dissolve like fragments of a dream in the clarity of waking up. His wife wears a form-fitting black dress and black high-heeled sandals; she has put on eye shadow and painted her lips a new, softer shade of red that goes with the deep tan of her skin, and she smiles, offering herself to his male scrutiny, seeking his approval. Now the troubled, secret inspector finds no flaw in the quality of his emotion, he hears no false note, senses nothing feigned or forced; his delight in looking at his wife is the same as it was two summers ago, or twelve years ago, it hasn't waned, hasn't been contaminated by habit. He looks at her dark, bare legs and is as captive to desire as the first time, in another hotel room, and he drinks her in with all the lust women have always kindled in him. Even when he was twelve he would stand bewitched after school, watching the girls in the first miniskirts, and once one of his young and beautiful aunts bent over him to set down his dinner and before his eyes was the white, trembling flesh of her breasts in her low-cut dress, perfumed, shadowy—the delicate female flesh he now smells and strokes and gazes at as he puts his arms around his wife, trying to pull down the zipper of her dress, to run his hands up her thighs with urgent need.

She bursts out laughing and tries to draw away, flattered and annoyed, always amazed at the suddenness of male desire. “My lipstick is all over your face, we're late for dinner, and our son's waiting.” “Let him wait,” he says, breathing through his nose as he kisses her neck, and when, as if invoked by their words, their son knocks at the door and tries to turn the doorknob, he sighs,
“It's a good thing we locked the door.” That will give them time to compose themselves, to calm down, and when they come out, the boy gives them a look that may be slightly censorious, or maybe it's only questioning, even a little mocking. “What took you two so long to open the door?”

 

THERE ARE RAPIDLY
blinking lights in the darkness beyond the broad white band of waves breaking on the sand; with the new moon, the speeding launches of the tobacco and hashish smugglers breast the foam, along with emigrants coming from the other side, from the darkest line of shadow, the coast of Africa. Aesthetic contemplation is a privilege, but sometimes a lie: the beautiful, dark coast we are seeing this night from the restaurant terrace, the scene onto which we project tales and dreams, adventures from books, is not the coast seen by those men crowded into boats rocked by the sea, on the verge of capsizing and dying in waters murkier than any well, dark-skinned fugitives with glittering eyes, pressed against one another to protect themselves from cold and fear, trying to conquer the feeling of being impossibly distant from those lights on the shore they have no guarantee of reaching.

Some are returned by the waves, swollen and livid and half eaten by fish. Others you see from the highway, dashing across open land, hiding behind a tree, or flattening themselves against the bare ground, terrified, tenacious, looking for the road north taken by those who preceded them, beleaguered heroes of a journey no one will speak of. When we drive back from the restaurant toward the hotel, we come upon two Guardia Civil jeeps beaming their spotlights on the dunes near the highway; with his face against the back window, the boy, as excited as if he were at a movie, watches as we pass silently whirling blue warning lights and the silhouettes of two armed
guardias.
What would it be like to hide in this moonless night, wet and panting, lying in a ditch
or one of those cane fields, a nobody with no belongings, no papers or money or address or name, not knowing the highways or speaking the language, the doctor thinks later, in bed, lying close to the woman sleeping with her arms around him, both of them exhausted and drained by the greed of love.

He wakes with the first light, clearheaded and rested, but doesn't get up, he barely moves in order not to leave her arms. He watches the gradual dawn like a silent and patient witness, drowses with eyes half closed, then feels the spirit and energy to get up and put on his running clothes: a favorable sign that their happiness will be repeated, that things will be exactly the same, his wife's and his son's love, the fullness of every sensation, as strong as his pleasure in thrusting deep within her. That memory is so vivid that he gets out of bed with an erection.

At that hour of morning, the colors on the seashore have the faded tones of an old postcard, the blues, grays, greens, and roses of a hand-colored photograph. He begins running along the highway curving up the cliff, at a fast pace, with long, energetic strides, pumping his arms rhythmically, noting in his Achilles tendons the effort of the climb, his lungs expanding in the sea air, his whole body weightless, moving with a physical joy he never experienced in his youth. With every curve the precipice is more dizzying and the view more sweeping: Tangiers in the distance to the west, a white line in the fog-free blue, the Rif Mountains, where flat-roofed villages cling to ravines just as they do in Alpujara de Granada.

Large silver German-make cars, dogs barking behind the walls of houses isolated amid rock gardens and palm trees. In the hotel they'd told us that the Germans arrived when there was nothing at all along the coast, except the bunkers erected against a possible invasion that happened much farther away: first in Sicily, in the south of Italy, then in Normandy. The Germans began coming at the end of the war, their war; they chose to build their
houses and plant their gardens on those heights battered by the winds, where no one ever climbs and where there is nothing but that cave with the black drawings of animals and archers and buried amphorae in which the skeletons of Phoenician travelers were later discovered.

This time he is determined to reach the peak, to find the grotto. He's been told that after he passes a certain curve where a large pine twists out above a ravine, he should leave the highway and follow a path that winds upward through thickets of rockrose and a kind of acacia with sharp thorns and clusters of yellow flowers whose seed, he's heard, has been carried by wind or birds from across the water, because it's a variety that grows in the desert. If he had a friend, he would tell him that almost as soon as he took what he thought was the path, he realized that he was mistaken, because it quickly became overgrown by brush. He made his way through harsh branches that raked his skin, through the sticky leaves of the rockrose, trying not to become disoriented, although soon he could see only a few steps ahead. He could hear the sea crashing against the cliff but didn't know the direction it was coming from. He stumbled over fallen branches and feared he might loose his footing, get too near the edge of the cliff. But he kept going and fought the feeling he was lost; soon he would come to a clearing, find one of those rocks that rose above the vegetation, and climb up on it to get a sighting of the road.

He was so absorbed in the task of pushing through the thorny brush that he was slow to hear the ferocious barking of dogs. A few meters in front of him, invisible till that moment, was a high whitewashed wall topped with jagged glass. He followed it, without coming to a door or window, until he turned a corner and immediately froze. In terror and vertigo he pressed his body to the wall: only one step away was the edge of the cliff and, far below, the splendor and roar of the foam crashing upon the rock that was the base for the bunker.

He stood motionless against the wall struck now by the sun, his eyes closed, not daring to open them and look into emptiness. Then he stepped back, moved away from the precipice, and again heard the dogs. Clinging to the rough wall, he advanced in the narrow space between it and the brush.

He reached an open area in front of the main gate of the house just as a heavyset blond woman came running toward him, sobbing and saying something in a language he didn't understand. Even before he saw the writing on the ceramic plaque, he remembered that he'd been in this place before. Berghof.

He thought at first that the woman was scolding him for having invaded her property. But she didn't have the look of the owner of the house, more that of a servant, the hands she was waving so frantically as she shouted to him were the large, reddened hands of a domestic, a scrubbing maid or cook from a different epoch. She screamed and pulled him toward the half-opened iron gate, where the barking was louder. With dreamlike naturalness, he accepted that the woman knew he was a doctor and was asking him to help someone who was ill.

But she can't have known I was a doctor, she can't have been waiting for me to come. From the moment he enters the house, dragged in the woman's tight grip, he imagines he is telling his wife this adventure, telling her later this morning when he is back at the hotel, sitting beside her on the bed, bringing her a story as he would breakfast: I wish you could have seen what happened to me, what I saw.

Led by the woman, he crosses a patio of white walls and marble paving and arches where sheer curtains flutter, offering a view of the sea and the coast of Africa, those same arches we've so often seen from the beach, wondering who had the privilege of living there. There is a marble fountain in the middle, but the sound of the water and our footsteps is masked by the barking that becomes even fiercer as I step inside the house. The woman
is sobbing and rubbing her hands on her voluminous bosom, looking much older now: the blue eyes, light hair, pug nose, and round, rosy face made her look young, but now I realize she must be over sixty. With tear-filled eyes she gestures for me to hurry. The place is a pastiche of Andalusian and German decor, with huge iron grilles at all the windows and dark, paneled doors. But I see all this very quickly, blurred by confusion. We enter a large room where the woman points to the floor, waving her arms, crying openmouthed, tears streaming down her round, withered cheeks, but my eyes, accustomed to sunlight, are slow to adapt to the shadow, and see nothing.

The moan is the first thing I hear, although not clearly because of the woman's screams and the barking dogs, who must be penned up nearby, since I also hear them clawing. A moan and the whistling breath of a sick person's lungs, then I see the figure on the floor, an old man in a silk bathrobe, his yellowish pallor in sharp contrast with the bright red of his gaping mouth and the tongue waggling in search of air, thrust out like a grotesque marine creature struggling to escape a crevice in which it has become wedged. He is clutching his neck with both hands, and when I bend down to him, he grabs the front of my T-shirt, his eyes as wide as his mouth, the color so light that it's difficult to say whether they're gray or blue. He pulls me to him with fanatical strength, as if grabbing on to me to keep from drowning, as if he needs to tell me something. His face is so close to mine that I can see his long yellow teeth, the red tear ducts and tiny veins in his eyeballs, and his breath is like a sewer.
Bitte,
he says, but it's a death rattle more than a word, and the woman who is sobbing beside me repeats the word, shakes me with her big red hands, urging me to do something, but the man has pulled me closer to him, and I can't free myself to listen to his chest or attempt in some way to revive him. Beside him on the dark, polished wood
floor is a puddle I had thought was urine, but it's tea. I also see a broken cup and a spoon.

“This man is choking,” I tell the woman, absurdly spacing the words, as if she would then understand me better, and I point to a telephone: You must call an ambulance. What I want most, however, is to leave, get away from there, go back to my hotel room before my wife wakes up. I manage to get to my feet, and when the old man lets go, his breathing is somewhat improved, although his eyes are turned back in his head.

On the telephone table is a small red tray with a swastika in the center, inside a white circle. I haven't looked around the room since I came in, only now, while I'm waiting for the emergency call to go through. On one wall is a large oil painting of Adolf Hitler, bracketed by two red curtains that turn out to be two flags with swastikas. In the illuminated interior of a glass case is a black leather jacket with the insignia of the SS on the lapels and with a large, dark-stained split on one side. In an ostentatiously framed photograph, Hitler is bestowing a decoration upon a young SS officer. In another glass case is an Iron Cross, and beside it a parchment manuscript written in Gothic characters and with a swastika pressed into the sealing wax.

I see all this in one second, but the number of objects around me is overpowering, they make the room seem crowded although the space is enormous: busts, photos, firearms, burnished, sharp-pointed shells, flags, insignia, paperweights, calendars, lamps, there's nothing here that isn't connected with the Nazis, that doesn't commemorate and celebrate the Third Reich. What I first perceived as confusion is actually in a perfect order that suggests museum cataloging. Meanwhile, the man lies gasping on the floor, calling out to me in a voice so hoarse it seems scarcely to escape the cavern of his chest.
Bitte,
he says when I hang up the telephone and again bend down to him; he stares at me, terrified.
“Be calm,” I tell him, although I'm not sure whether he's learned any Spanish in all the years he's lived as a refugee on this coast. An ambulance is on the way. Saliva drools from one side of his mouth. He feels my chest, my face, as if he were blind; he asks me something, orders me to do something, in German. Now he is breathing a little more regularly, but his eyes are still turned back and half closed. When I check his wrist for a pulse—skin and bone and a sheaf of twisting blue veins—he digs his fingernails into the back of my hand.