Sepharad (29 page)

“Don't look at me like that, as if I were robbing you of what's left of your father.” Her voice was clear and dry, toneless, maybe the same voice of a quarter of a century before when she quietly stood her ground as the mustached, uniformed man and the tall, black-clad woman tried to persuade her, predicting disaster. “Your father is alive, and he doesn't want to know anything about you or any of us. At the end of the war, the French government gave him a decoration and a large payment, but he never bothered to send us one centime. The last time he wrote me was to tell me that he had begun a new life and was therefore ending all contact with us. I didn't want you to see that letter. You were still a little girl and always fantasizing about him. He lives in France and has another family, he even changed his name. He's a French businessman now, that's why the Germans couldn't find him. If you want to see the man who was your father, take a train and get off at a French border town called Cerbère.”

THE NEW HOUSE,
recently occupied, sparely furnished, still echoing empty, the paint fresh on the walls, wood floors smelling of varnish, all trace erased of those who lived there until a few months before, presences of long years' standing abolished overnight, like the rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung. Only one thing defines the austere utility of each room, now that it is stripped of decoration: in the bedroom a large iron bed, in the office a table and chair.

The new house, the new life, recently begun in a different city, far from the dreary provinces, in a Madrid neighborhood unknown until now, a small enclave in the heart of Madrid, where the streets are poorer, hidden, working-class, with a blur of strange people of uncertain sex, of skin tones and facial features denoting faraway places, languages heard in passing that carry the sound of Asia, of Muslim settlements and African markets and Andean villages.

Going outside every morning was a journey of discovery, and the customary errands often ended in aimless ambling, in the simple inertia of walking and looking, of hearing indecipherable tongues spoken in telephone booths on Augusto Figueroa, words
of the circular and sinister vocabulary of heroin, the ringing, timeless voices of neighborhood women yelling back and forth, of elderly ladies who come to their doors in their bathrobes and look with resigned amazement at what they see or choose not to see, the way their barrio has changed, the affected voices of men transformed into women, although not completely, as sometimes a manly beard shows on cheeks puffed with silicone, or a male bald spot through a blond, tempestuously back-combed mane, or feet much too wide and sinewy in high-heeled patent-leather shoes.

On every street corner stand the living dead, so pale that the veins snaking up their forearms stand out beneath transparent skin. So habitual and quiet in their waiting are these specters that you quickly learn not to see them, to pass them as if they were already in the world beyond. They stare into space or keep their eyes fastened, vigilant and expectant, on the nearest corner, where sooner or later a dealer or a police car will show up. Then they move, slowly, with the lethargy of saurians, trying without conviction to act natural before the police who ask for IDs, as if their identity weren't known, their dead faces and names not radioed from patrol car to patrol car. Led off in handcuffs, they go with the weariness of actors in a bad play.

A man or woman follows an individual with dark glasses and a scrawny beard. Shoulders back, hands in the back pockets of his jeans, the individual hurries so that the follower must struggle to keep up, though bent over and abject as an old beggar, holding out a dirty and insufficient amount of money, which the dealer slaps to the ground with one hand, not even turning to the person who is now on his knees, scrambling to pick up the bills and coins scattered beneath cars or in the filth of the sidewalk.

At first they are disturbing strangers, these figures who appear on a street corner or at the end of a sidewalk, huddled between cars, defecating or shooting up, curled up in the shelter of a stairway or entryway. But soon they became familiar presences, as
common in the barrio as the transvestites and old ladies in bathrobes and knife-thin silhouettes of the dealers. The dealers walk with a swing of the shoulders, looking to the side, disappearing into an entryway or kneeling behind a hedge in Chueca Plaza, in the miserable garden at the mouth of the metro. They return with what they never show, speak words that cannot be heard, and there is a quick and secret contact of hands, a little packet in the palm of one hand and dirty bills in the other, and they move on, bend down to a car stopped with its motor running, throw the driver a glance, rest reluctant elbows in the open window.

So many voices, lives, and worlds juxtaposed in a narrow space, even the rarest and most sinister things soon become ordinary, each inhabitant an unwritten novel: the young man roaming in search of heroin who on the narrow sidewalk crowded by parked cars passes the neighbor woman who's come down in slippers and robe to buy bread and has learned not to look at him. The women-men babbling away with little squeals and hands flipping; the blind men tapping the ground and walls with their white canes; the Chinese packed tightly into dark apartments and unventilated cellars; the small Native Americans who at three or four in the morning congregate by the telephone booths and hold long conferences in Aimara or Guarani or Quechua with who knows what relatives left behind on the Altiplano or in the jungle. The man in pajamas who sits every evening on a balcony, in a wicker chair beside a butane burner, watching without expression and suffering fits of coughing that bend him double and force him to rest his damp brow on the iron railing.

He was gone for a while, and when he reappeared, in the same pajamas, sitting in the same wicker chair beside the butane burner, he had a white mask across his mouth, and a thin plastic tube emerged from one of his nostrils. He didn't cough now but still sat looking down at the street, at the people passing, the
neighbor women, unshaven transvestites, countless Chinese, An-deans with their babies bound in shawls on their backs, the new couple with a baby and a dog who just moved into the apartment across the street. Sometimes after midnight, when the barrio was deserted, a carefully dressed and made-up old woman ventured out. She always carried a chair that looked as if it had been found at the dump and a plastic bag tied in a knot. She would choose one of the garbage pails lined up along the sidewalk and set her chair before it; then, very serious and neat, she would undo the knot of her plastic bag and pull out a checked tablecloth, the remnants of a meal, crusts and crumbs, a plastic glass, a knife and fork, and finally a large, dirty napkin that she tucked beneath her chin. She sat down at her table as if sharing a distinguished meal with someone, sipping water as if savoring a fine wine, and dabbing at the corners of her mouth, smearing crimson and grease across her chin. When she was finished dining, she collected everything and put it back into the plastic bag—empty sardine tins, bakery wrappers, glasses, plates, and silverware—removed the napkin, folded the cloth she used to cover the garbage pail that served as her table, and left with her bag and chair, not be seen outside until the next midnight.

Gradually you become familiar to the stranger watching you, though no words are exchanged, only a glance from balcony to balcony, or a moment when you brush against each other on a narrow sidewalk of the barrio: the man, the woman, the boy, the dog, the workmen who completely emptied the house across the street, erasing all traces of those who lived in it for years, the trash bin by the door, then the new walls painted soft, luminous colors, to eliminate efficiently the marks of the previous neighbors, the way the pavilion of a hospital is painted white for reasons of hygiene.

You are neither your consciousness nor your memory but what the stranger sees of you. Who was the neighborhood drunk
whose name no one knew, though we saw him constantly and were no longer afraid of him, who was suddenly there when you turned a corner one night, with his filthy lank hair all tousled and his heavy bearlike body wrapped in rags stinking of piss and vomit? At times his small, watery blue eyes would seem to focus, but he never spoke to anyone or asked for charity, wandering through our streets like the hide-clad Robinson Crusoe depicted in old lithographs, and just as alone. He fashioned his shelter from cardboard, newspapers, and plastic bags in the entry of a building or slept stretched out in the middle of the sidewalk like a Calcutta beggar, his territory marked by the stench he emitted. What are the episodes of one's life seen through the eyes of an indifferent but attentive witness? Every afternoon the man in pajamas on the balcony watched the new boy go into his building carrying his schoolbag, then come back outside a few minutes later, eating a snack and leading the dog, pulling him or trying to hold him back, never able to control him, this outlandish puppy that must have been as new to his owners as the recently painted house, as the new barrio and the new life and the school the boy was attending for the first time.

Things repeated every day seem to have been happening forever. The boy with the schoolbag, the yips of the dog in the house where the balcony doors are always open, the boy tugging at the dog's leash, undoubtedly taking him to Vázquez de Mella Plaza, which is the only open space in the barrio, a large, ugly concrete expanse, nothing but a large platform built above a parking lot, where the locals walk their dogs while neighborhood boys play soccer and the girls jump rope and play hopscotch and the junkies shoot up and none of the groups seems to see the other, although how can you not see the bloody syringes carelessly tossed aside, the squeezed-dry lemon slices, the scorched squares of silver wrap? The plaza is ringed by buildings occupied by questionable hostels and very elderly people who haven't been able to leave. At night,
high above the rooftops, the most visible landmark is the telephone tower, its enormity reminiscent of a Soviet skyscraper, topped with the yellow sphere and scarlet hands of a clock that on foggy winter nights emits a gold-and-red phosphorescence.

One afternoon the boy comes running home and doesn't have the dog, and even from his balcony on the second floor the man in pajamas sees that the boy's face is covered with tears as he pushes the button on the intercom panel. The door opens, but the boy doesn't go in, the man and the woman come down, and the boy throws his arms around his mother, barely waist high and crying as if he were much younger; he points toward the corner and wipes his nose with the handkerchief his mother has given him.

The man's entire life is watching and waiting. He monitors his breathing, fearing a blackout, where he would lie motionless on the balcony in his flannel slippers and pajamas, the mandatory uniform of the terminally ill, perhaps already excluded from the realm of the living like the pale shadows that slip along the street, always hunched over in pain, always worried and hurrying after a scornful dealer.

The man, woman, and boy disappear from view at the end of the street at the corner of Calle San Marcos, which is the limit of his field of vision. After a few minutes the man returns alone, calling a name that must be the dog's, trying, inexpertly, to whistle. The puppy is so little it's probably lost forever, run over by a car. But they don't give up, they go back and forth all afternoon, passing beneath his balcony, and go inside only when it grows dark, while at the corner of Augusto Figueroa, the pink neon sign of the Santander Bar has been turned on, a pink as soft as the blue sky above the roof tiles, as the dusk reflected in the windowpanes of the highest apartments when it is already night down in the street.

It's too cold to stay out on the balcony, but the man with the mask over his mouth keeps watch through the window, his back
to a room of which all that can be seen from across the street is murky lamplight and occasionally the bluish wink of a television through sheer curtains that have the same fatigued look as the man's pajamas or the neck of his T-shirt. What would it be like to go into that house? Half behind the curtains, the man breathes through his mask and watches the lit balconies of the house across the way, which still have no curtains, and the now nearly dark sidewalk filled with passersby both living and prematurely dead, each seeing what the other cannot. Someone stands in the middle of the street, but the watching man can't see who it is, so when he hears the sharp, short barks of the puppy, he pulls the curtains back and presses his face to the glass to get a better view.

It's the drunk, huge, his face turned up toward the balcony of the new neighbors, weaving slightly as he holds the black-and-white dog, who is barking hoarsely and struggling to escape from the suffocating rags and hands. The drunk does not approach the door or the intercom, he stands waiting for something to happen with the dull patience of an animal. The sickly man knows that one of those balcony doors will open and reveal a recently painted pale yellow interior, that the boy will come out, the first to hear and recognize the barking, and that the vestibule light will go on.

Father and son come down, and the young woman runs out to the balcony, so focused on the street that she doesn't glance once at the building across the street. The boy, containing his impulse to run to the dog, holds tight to his father's hand. The drunk does not walk one step toward them. Slow and bulky, he bends to the ground and sets down the puppy with great delicacy, without a word, and already the boy is hugging his dog and the man is saying something to the drunk and offering him something in an extended hand. The drunk's eyes are very light, colorless like certain Slavic eyes, his round face is purple with bruises and sores, and though he is less than a meter away, he looks at
them from a much greater distance. He is like a castaway who has forgotten the use of language and ended up mad. It occurs to the father that when his son is a little older he will help him read the novels about shipwrecks and desert islands that inspired him in the best years of his own childhood.