Gates to Tangier (15 page)

The problem is we can't imagine a Mu
­
slim in the world that supports Israel or is against the Arabs. That wouldn't be interesting. They say that Zionism is justified, that the Arabs don't understand anything about the twentieth century and that a Jewish country is the best that could have happened. But who would believe that? One can imagine hundreds of Jewish professors against Zionism, but not a single one Muslim in favor, not even I believe in it.

We, the Jews, we're the biggest criti
­
cs of our people after the
goyim
, and befo
­
re us, we believe that if we are critical they'll understand, but what happens in the end is that they cit
­
e us at anti-Semitic meetings as proof of how bad we are, it started with Jesus, and before, with the prophets... I'm coming back to the Jewish topic, I really need a logical idea for this Yusuf. Maybe he finds out he is Jewish, he goes back to see his mother before she dies and she tells him that his father was Jewish, and suddenly he feels that he can't stand his life in Casablanca anymore and decides to emigrate to Israel, he becomes a captain in the Israeli Armed Forces.

I wonder how many there are, how many half-Jews in Morocco, how many descendants of Jews? Most of them would have converted, if not how could there be so few, or maybe the Musli
­
ms exterminated entire communities, like in the Dar valley, where they say there was a Jewish kingdom that was destroyed?

Or maybe he simply died, that's it. None of us tried to see his grave, maybe not even his mother and grandmother know where the grave of the one-year-old boy is, or maybe they didn't ha
­
ve money for a burial and he's in a common grave, those things do exist in Morocco. Well, something about Tétouan, something about family, the Je
­
ws, but everything is in my head now, I have everything in there. I feel it, I feel the book, from the expulsion of the Jews in Spain, from my grandmother who brought us all the
Pessaj
from Castilla, from which we drink our wine. I can remember how and who were are, we drink from the same pi
­
tcher in Spain, with the fear that there would be another story of a Christian boy whose blood we drink, we prayed that no Chri
­
stian boys would die this week, we prayed for the children of our enemies, I remember everything, how we went to Lisbon, the easier years in Ladino and Portuguese, the journey to Tangier, escaping to Tétouan, I travelled those journeys, all of them, to Oran, I did that myself, tri
­
ps to Brazil, Venezuela, Israel, Tanta, Madrid, I did them all and they are somewhere in my being, in my mind. But going to Israel? Whose idea was that? Who could think that things would go well there? What could follow the four hundred years of melancholy life after being expelled from
Sefarad
?

When we finally began to overcome this expulsion, Zionism arrived, and was suc
­
h a blow - confronting a world that was so far away from us, understanding that we no longer had the strength to be a Jewish people, such that even now the
Ashk
­
enazim
are the ones that define us. But, why do we keep giving in? Why do we keep going after they ste
­
al our children, our story, and our money? Is it that we don't know any other way, we can't conceive of rebelling, keeping the Jewish people together is so important to us that we ar
­
e always ready to pay the price for this? Every time they ask for a finger we give it to them, and in the end we have no fingers to sa
­
y here we are. We are mute now. They've amputated our memory and above all, our childrens' memories.

And so, what does Yusuf represent? The union between Jews and Mus
­
lims? And he died at the age of one. What would we say to that professor analyzing it from a psychological point of view, or sociological point of view? He won't be able to find any liter
­
ary value in this writing, like what happened with
Keys to Tétouan
, in the end they'll l
­
ike
A Parisian Month
best because that's when you showed them you could write.

Now that you know that, why do you keep talking about Morocco? They won't be teaching my books in the literature departments, but there was that thesis by the girl who came to interview me, about Sephardi writ
­
ers, a sociology thesis. They were an
­
alyzing the Indians, they succeeded. How do you fe
­
el, do you feel discriminated against? But for me it is fine, more than what I expected, or is it the case that publishing poems all over the world is worthless? More than maybe any other Israeli poet I am turning into the most well-known Israeli poet since Amijai, they've even translated me into Chinese, Urdu. I've been published in Pakis
­
tan! It is incredible.

This is an obses
­
sion, you should go to a psychologist. That seems like a goo
­
d idea to me, send all Israeli writers who have written more than three books about the
kibbutz
to a psychologist. There are a lot. But you are all still surprised that we talk about
Ashkenazim
and
Sephardim
. I for one speak about this five times a week, since the second Intifada be
­
gan only the
Ashkenazim
are on television, only the
Ashkenazim
write in the newspapers, now important things are happening and you have to let the people that matter talk.

But, but, what I want is a story, a real story, and the problem is that I don't see it here. I don't see the plot. What I have isn't enough. Maybe that's just reality, but you can't write a book about reality, that's not enough, Alberto. You had better hope that something happens that you can write about, maybe in five years, something will be disco
­
vered, put the project aside. But I have to write now, while it is hot, I can't wait five years. I feel like I have to do something now, I can't wait. We finally get on the plane. I'll keep going from there.

On the plane I ask myself why I need to write abo
­
ut my life, why talk about the story of the inheritance? I could write something more imaginative. Why this obse
­
ssion with describing everything that happens in my family?

"S
­
ir, please turn off your computer before takeoff," says the flight attendant and I continue with the pen, I'm trying to capture something I can't see, unde
­
rstand that it isn't a coincide
­
nce, it isn't a coincidence that I live in Jerusalem and not Madrid, and not Paris, the same way that it is not a coincid
­
ence that Silvia lives in Paris, maybe there is some mission I need to complete. Maybe I have to wr
­
ite something else, maybe a poem that will sav
­
e me from this insanity in my head. Why do I take notes without stopping, even in the bathr
­
ooms, in cafes in European capitals, capitals that were so recently full of Jews and now have so few left. What happens when I write a poem in Hebrew in Málaga or in Granada, or when I write a poem in Spanish while I'm walking through a Jewish neighborhood in Sevilla? Am I saving the world? The Talmud says that the world depends on writing, even on a single letter.

I wonder if all these thoughts could end up in a novel, or maybe they'd be better in an article, or if they are even impor
­
tant. Maybe they're not. Paper will take anything, but the reader can handle very little. They can read almost no books, even the most famous end up forgotten, and books that sell millions of copies go unread, or are read only in part. The page can take anything but apparently the reader is more intel
­
ligent, few people will leave in the middle of a movie or a play but it is easy to leave a book in the middle, thinking that one day you'll come back to it, but you never do.

So, if there is no plot, then there won't rea
­
lly ever be a storyline, or maybe there will be, maybe Yos
­
ef's story will become clearer while we get to know the family better, and maybe I'll even let this book si
­
t for a couple years so that I can write a more logical en
­
ding, a more complete ending.

I
live in airports. I'm looking for the meaning in my deat
­
h. From Orly to Newark, Barajas to Hong Kong, Tangier to Lod, I fly on all the planes, I keep them from crashing, I stop them to ask the passengers if they are tired, I free them, and I see them there, the new wander
­
ing Jews. They live in airports, they're religious, ultra-orthodox, secular, converts, assimilated, but you know that they are Jewish, with their laptop and there attention to the flight announcements, as if they were watching the
Hejal,
the tablets of the law.

Loo
­
king for their next destination, the next place to go. They go to sell oranges or French fries. They go to sell watermelons, flowers, blouses, t-shirts, ideas, but they know that that isn't why they travel, they travel because they have to be connected to disparate parts of the world, all the
nitsosot
, all kinds of parallel lines that sustain the world. They've done this for years, gone between cities and countries, and have paid in blood, have paid in the deaths of their children, they've paid with the loss of their family. They have paid by going back to cit
­
ies where there are no Jews, but they need to go back, and still do.

I see my brothers traveling to Morocco, a jour
­
ney of four people and twenty airports, they don't know that the story of our half-brother is half-inve
­
nted, that they had to go to Tétouan to rearrange something in their souls. That's what Rabbi Najman said, every journey is a
tikkun
, and you travel to places where you have to fix something, and we seem to have left things to repair all over the world. With all our journeys, we have had to return to Israel to be repaired. All journe
­
ys go towards Israel, that's where I'm going, from one airport to another.

Isaque, who heals the sick with memories of minerals, pieces of fruit, sparks from disappeared wo
­
rlds, minerals that exploded in At
­
lantis and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. With air, they return in the form of diluted drops, in rocks, in the bones of animals, in the human imagination that believes that there are things that can be cured.

Fortu tries to heal people in pain, he gives them d
­
rugs that destroy disease, years ago those doctors were persecuted by the authorities in Atlantis, by priests that only used natural products and homeopathy. Today it is the opposite. They must learn from each other in order to be complete.

My brother Alberto is the witch doctor of our tribe, he wants to cure with words, but the sick don't know that they're sick or what they a
­
re sick with. They are sick from not reading enough poems, not reading psalms, or singing songs, and those that read still don't internalize the poems that they read.

And women heal the world when they have children. They don't need anything other than that. But today they want to give the world more than children, their influence is becoming stronger, and this is good.

From here, from the distance of years of death, I see the world another way and I no longer get angry. I don't get mad about the fact that they sent me to die, or get mad at the ones that kil
­
led me, children with roc
­
ks, r
­
ock by rock, I'm lying down on rocks, because of a rock they threw at me. I'm not mad at the world or its suffering, or its
tikkun
, because
­
everything brings
tikkun
into the world. I travel from airpo
­
rt to airport, and when the planes take off I bless them, I send them on their way, to build bridges between m
­
en, and rivers below the bridges.

For many years I asked myself what had happened to my father, what he was looking for in Israel at the age of fifty-four? What could he find there? That his sons hadn't followed behind him, or that they went one by one? And in the end he found his peace in Ruth. Everyone made fun of her, her religiousness, living in Har Nof with her ultra-religious husband, but she was his peace. Her children, the grandchildren pla
­
ying around him and that drove him crazy, maybe he felt like he was getting back top something mysterious that he hadn't felt even in his childhood, another incarnation of Tétouan and its Jewi
­
shness. From the 18th century, when people were born and di
­
ed in the same house, when the
goyim
were there, but among those who know and remember the pain of Sefarad, those that know that you can only trust the pain of another Jew.

Sometimes he told me that wealth distances people. Money distanced him from his cousins and his father, and I was young and didn't understand what he was talking about. Look, it's great being rich, going to play tennis, when so few can afford such an expensive sport, travel abroad when no one to
­
ok vacations. See the world, he said, that's what is most important.

And now you can see the whole world in a second, all the beautiful and luxurious streets, the ones that are well-known, the ones that are dirty, Via Veneto in Rome, the streets of Bombay, the Ist
­
iklal in Egypt, Broadway, Oxford, and everywh
­
ere, What do I see? People running everywhere, moving things from one side to another, moving their bodies from one place to another, moving the world without stopping, because nothing is where it belongs, but you move the weight to a good place and then another person comes and you change the place, and then another, and then another, and you don't know about the two that came first, because you feel obligated to leave the o
­
ffice to drink a coffee and because you can't handle it any other way anymore, but you would be able to handle it if everyone stayed in the same place for one hour out of the year on the same day? Then I could return to the world.