Lucena (12 page)

Only my wife could tell it was not true, but it had been a year since he had died. It happened when I had finished transporting all the Jews, so I let him take advantage of everything. All I wanted to do was to disappear and I went to Tetuán as though I were one of the “Marranos.” Under a year later it became known that the new King of Morocco had decided to confiscate all of Yosef Ruti’s property and condemn him to death. People said that my double went crazy and at the gallows began to scream that he was a Muslim, that he had simply taken my place. It looks like that is how I escaped death.

Who knows, perhaps if he hadn’t let himself be seen, nothing would have happened to him. Maybe that was his punishment.

It was during that time frame that the saga of the Benzimra family that you belong to began. I married the first Sol who gave me seven sons and three daughters, from which come all the Benzimra. Then I simply disappeared on a commercial expedition, something very common in those times.

WHERE ARE THEY TAKING YOU, MY SON?

“I don’t know. There is a cloth over my eyes. It is a long trip.”

“I hear the water.”

“Where there is water, fire cannot burn you.”

“My memory is burning.”

“What do you see on the cloth?”

“I see the only two words in Hebrew that my mother taught me,
Shemá Israel
.”

“Pronounce them every day to remember them, and teach them to your children, they will take you again to your people.”

“I can’t come back papa. You know very good and well that this is a one-way trip, not a circle. There is no exit.”

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T
HE FATHER

I judge myself every day. Did I really do the right thing when I decided to go back to Málaga? So that my children would be Jews? What else could I do? In Israel, no matter who I asked, I was always up against a brick wall. Everything I tried ended up with me hitting insurmountable obstacles. Samuel worries me a lot but perhaps he is good. People say that when a boy goes to the army he learns a little about life and becomes a man. He spends the day staggering around with all kinds of friends, going to the beach, from the beach to home, who knows if he would be capable of completing his studies. How much can a man weigh his actions, I can’t regret it now. Now I am here, and here I will die. They will bury me in Málaga. This is closer to Tetuán than to Jerusalem. Who knows if perhaps someday they will expel us from here too? Maybe this will be changed into the neo-Nazi common market. They will get rid of us in different ways. We thought that if the influence of Christianity in Europe weakened, anti-Semitism would lessen. But precisely when Christianity evaporates, a new anti-Semitism appears, scientific, demonic, and pagan. Compared with this, Christian antisemitism was child’s play. And now we think that if Europe unifies, the danger to minorities will decrease, especially the Jews. Wrong. No, no, we can’t really be sure of anything. The communist Jews also believed that in a secular state they would be protected and then, communist antisemitism also began. Expulsion, death, and a nomadic life awaited us at every corner. We take with us, just as we take the coin purse in our pocket, and if I thought the answer could be Israel, that, also, was motivation for other migrations, return to Sefarad. Who could have imagined it there in Tetuán? My mother would tell me “Israel is not for us. It is a lovely state, a lovely country, but it is not for us. We can only live in Sefarad.”

It seems that, like always, she, half senile, was right. She was old, but she was right. The two years I spent there wasting time are a joke... At myself. . . No matter what I did was reason for humiliation. Everything humiliated me. Even going to the café, ordering a pizza, or a combination plate. Getting on a bus, travelling in a car, seeing how people were squashed together in those pieces of metal placing their lives in danger to demonstrate one is not stupid, everything humiliated me. I felt suffocated all day long. But perhaps, as Coti said, I was too egotistical and sacrificed the future of my sons for my own well-being. Perhaps here, in one or two generations, there will be no Jews. But after living two years in Israel, I ask myself: Why is it so important to be a Jew? What have they done with this country? For this they have remained Jews for two thousand years, just to create this economic chaos? Maybe yes. Maybe in reality this is the achievement. I don’t know. Maybe this is the goal. I don’t think these people are very smart, at least as a people, they do everything backward or against themselves. One thing is certain, out of all this ruckus some people important to humanity, and they are just half Jews, even less. Just when they assimilated, or their contact with Judaism is scarce, great Jews emerge like Freud, Jesus, Teresa de Jesus, or maybe Cervantes. It could be that the tension of the guilt feelings that makes one distance oneself a little more from the Jewish people is what produces Jewish genius. Certainly during the hundred years of Zionism not one of our writers has deserved world acclaim while in the countries of the diaspora dozens of them have flourished. Isn’t that surprising? Generally national revolutions make great writers but here precisely the opposite occurs. Maybe what gave us an Isaac Bashevis, a Woody Allen, a Bob Dylan, an Edmond Jabés and an Allen Ginsberg was precisely that: feeling guilty for not participating in the Zionist revolution, they set themselves to sewing sutures between Judaism and assimilation. Surely my son Samuel would have fainted if he had known that I once dreamed of being a poet, but now I won’t be. I will sell my textiles in the city of Málaga just as the Benzmira family has always done. Textile merchants for generations. I have closed the circle of Tetuán to Jerusalem and back to Málaga to be a textile merchant. Isn’t that a very strange thing? It’s as though one can never renounce one’s destiny? Will my son also be a textile merchant?

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P
ATRICK

I was born in Oran. My father was born in Oran. My mother was born in Oran. But I am from Tetuán. I can’t even say I am an immigrant. Nobody in the family could think we are French or anything other than Tetuanies. Although we lived so far from Tetuán, not really. My grandfather, Samuel Benzimra son of Mesod Benzimra and Clarita Yovel left the Jewish ghetto in 1866. That was four years after the Spaniards returned to Spain. The reason was simple. There was no more room in the ghetto and Jews were not allowed to build new houses. The streets were increasingly stuffed with people, so, well, the rich, who could buy a house in Tangier, in Gibraltar, or in Oran left the city. And the poor, who could not buy a house, had to go to faraway places. Every so often, an epidemic would break out. They called it the tithe. Because of it a tenth of the Jewish population would die.

If any friend should read me now, if he knows Spanish or if some day my works are translated into French, surely they will think I am insane. What do I have to do with Spanish? What has happened to me that brought me to write my family history in Spanish, the history of a Ladino family? Why don’t I write it in French? But if Partik is very French, What is up with the Spanish? They will continue repeating that I was born in Oran, that I was raised and studied in French schools and that I have lived in Paris since age six. This book will be the explanation for my friends and loved ones.

Why, at the age of thirty eight, do I abandon a language which I know well and go back, or rather I put myself to learning from scratch the language which my grandfather and grandmother spoke? I don’t even have the ‘ñ’ on my typewriter and I mess up the accents and the ‘z’ and the ‘s.’ Someone will have to correct all this. After having spent so many years in Paris and two in Israel, after having studied in Jewish schools, now, in this tiny studio on Pereire Street, sixth floor, no elevator, each morning I go to buy a croissant. In Spanish they call it a media luna. I don’t know why I trouble my brain during the few hours I have of free time trying to write a book in Spanish as though there were not enough books in Spanish.

I want to hear again the songs my other used to sing to me to put me to sleep. I want to hear my grandmother telling me stories about Tetuán in a mixture of Spanish, French and Haquetia.

I want to again hear the words which calmed me, words in Haquetia not possible to translate to any other language.

It is what I do every day after work. I come here and write all the words in Haquetia and in Spanish that I hear. All those words what make me feel connected with Oran, Tetuán and Granada. I can’t say it makes much sense, but neither does the twentieth century. Nor human history. I don’t understand why my grandfather never returned to Tetuán or as many did, to Spain. Why? So that his great grandson might continue speaking Spanish in an Arab/Muslim state governed by French and with a majority of French speaking citizens. I don’t understand Spaniards. Why, as many think, did they not grant Spanish citizenship to the Jews of Tetuán in the nineteenth century? Those Jews still saw the queen of Spain as their queen. They still saw Isabella, the last Catholic, as the seat of authority. This, even though they had been herded out of Spanish territory like cattle. There are many things I don’t understand, especially the two years I spent in Israel. My parents sent me there but they stayed in France and now, retired, spend most of their time in Spain, not in Israel. Like many argelinos who’s Zionism consists in complaining about those who leave Israel and spend their retirement by the sea in Netanya or in Tel-Aviv. I have never understood what I am doing here in Israel and much less why everything seems strange. Because I have always been a Zionist but everything was oriented toward the wrong place. I understood that when I read a booklet by Marcel Cohen in Ladino, I understood deep within, what I wanted was to go to Spain, not to Israel. In the book Cohen tells that at the start of the century some Zionist delegates had gone to Thessaloniki and in their after report said it was impossible to convince them to emigrate to Israel because what they wanted was to return to Spain.

And today I want to return to Spanish. The language is my territory. I can carry the Spanish language anywhere.

My Spanish can subsist without the Inquisition; it is Spanish without Christians, without Marranos and without persecutions. In my heart of hearts I can place a Spain that never existed and that maintained its language through the roads of the diaspora. That is why I have read all the writers I like best in Spanish: Borges, Huidobro, Vallejo not in translations into French, or English, a neutral language which I used to write my first poems inspired by Bob Dylan. Also I have written something in Hebrew, a language I have always known, including, perhaps, the first language I saw written in the plain synagogue in Tetuán. But only in Spanish do I feel the heartbeat of the language, its past and its future.

SAMUEL

Who would have believed it? But really, who wouldn’t have believed it? We went on living our daily lives forgetting completely who we would have to deal with. We believed the Sasportes were strong enough to protect us. Here we are, in the same eternal boat, in the eternal Mediterranean, in 1669, and again it’s about the Spaniards that now want to kick us out of Oran. So, now where? To Tetuán? They say we can’t go there either. The Spaniards and the pirates lie in wait in all the corners of the coast around Gibraltar. Spanish ships, as though we were the enemy, not them. Probably, unknowingly, we are the pirates. We are the theological pirates for the Christians. Wherever they go, they run into us. We who believe in our religion, in our God and who do not kneel in vain, nor pointlessly.

They say we should go to Niza, to Italy, always in the Mediterranean, Málaga, Oran, Tetuán, Niza, Yafo, and Acre. And why never to our own land? It would be better to die there than to keep traveling around everywhere. My father used to tell me that times would change, that we would arrive there, to OUR land. He was referring to Spain. He said that if we could get along with them in Oran, we could go back to living together. He was lucky enough to die with that hope three months before that sudden expulsion. Thankfully he didn’t see us in the pirate ship, on our way again to exile, toward a new city where we could construct our lives and from which our children and grandchildren would be expelled.

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T
HE GRANDFATHER

I don’t understand why you have had to tell me this now minutes before being moved out. Or, perhaps I do understand but that doesn’t justify it. You wanted to avenge yourself for mama and I would again be the victim. Couldn’t I have lived forever without this chilling knowledge? How can I now look at my mother? Is it her fault? No, it’s not her fault at all, but her father’s. How could she be responsible for the actions of her father? Why must I be tormented with this now? Is it impossible to erase this knowledge? Throw it in the recycle bin and send it to hell? No. It’s impossible. From no one I know I am a descendent of ...I can’t even think the word, I’m not capable of thinking those words. Maybe I should have understood that something was not right when, at age four, I showed a lot of interest in what the Germans had done and then mama gave me strange answers. But I couldn’t think that my grandfather...I had been told that it was unknown who my grandfather was. Now, yes, it was known. Sometimes mama would be happy for me to read so much about the Nazis. Sometimes she told me I shouldn’t do it. “It’s a morbid subject. Better to forget it.” Sometimes she said the opposite, “must not be forgotten, we can’t forget it. We must always keep it in mind.” And at others: “Are you reading those Nazi Holocaust books again?”

Evidentially, I didn’t pay much attention to that. But today,
a posteriori
, I can relate it all. “How could I talk to mama today? What is different? I had decided not to bring up the subject with her but that is the first thing I did when I saw her.

“Papa told me about grandfather.”

She remained silent for quite a while.

“Perhaps it’s better that way. Now you know, and I have a weight off my chest. Now I don’t have to be afraid of the day when you find out, the way I did when one day, walking down the Street with my father through the streets of Sao Paulo, somebody shouted ‘Nazi!’ You’re a Nazi! You killed my brother. I remember you, Dr. Steiner!”