Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) (6 page)

But yes, by admitting five years ago my situation as an eternal immigrant, of being a country of one person, of being the eternal immigrant from that country, I found a room for me in this house called Earth. It’s a small room with no windows, but it has a door and a key.

Someday I’ll have to learn to leave this room.

“The swallows didn’t come back.”

“And the promises from our mothers weren’t kept.” “The storks stopped bringing children.”

“But I was mostly waiting for the swallows, whether they would come back or not.”

“But the poem returned, the words returned.” “The words came back and never left again. More and more swallows came until they filled our lives, leaving no room for any other bird.”

“They flew and they fly in our pages. They bring words from the sky and carry words to the dead and to those going to die.”

“The last Tetuanis.”

“And we are them, that’s the only thing we are, the last Tetuanis.”

“No swallow will bring us back to Tetouan. Because Tetouan no longer exists. Jewish Tetouan has died.”

“The eagles will celebrate our memories there. The eagles always end up with the remains, they end up with the best part.”

“The same eagles that bring us to another land, the same eagles that attack the swallows who left and didn’t return.”

“Who is at home now? Who runs through the halls created by our footsteps?”

“Other children who will fly one day from those lands that don’t support humans. They will fly with a broken dream, a toy never taken out of its box, and will always look like a tourist.”

“I saw you one day in Madrid looking like that, in a corner, and it scared me because I was seeing myself, and you looked to the other side, as if the answer were in the other corner.”

“Give me your hand, give it to me, let’s walk together. Two one-armed people, one right hand and one left hand. Only together can we applaud our long journey.”

A
nd why the Mediterranean couldn’t be the same without my gaze.

Raquel tells me she likes the sea. And she asks me what I like. I like the sea, and I like the word for sea in Spanish, ‘mar’, because it is both feminine and masculine. It’s feminine when the waves go out and masculine when the same waves penetrate the shore. Sometimes they caress each other and sometimes they hit each other. And I ask her what she does in Madrid when she feels the need to see the sea, and she tells me she looks at the sky, because the sky in Madrid is a maritime sky. And I dream about strolling around Madrid with Raquel. I want to see the city through her eyes, and have her guide me through its narrow streets and to it’s main street,
Gran Vía
. I want to see where she stops and at what cafe she drinks her coffee and where she buys book and music and which painting she likes at which museum.

But what I like are words. There are words I like a lot, and others less so. Take the Spanish word
ensimismado
, for example, roughly meaning absorbed, lost in thought or daydreaming. I love the word
ensimismado
because it is untranslatable, and on top of that, I see its meaning in its letters, en-si-misma-do. It reminds me of the word
Bohu
in Hebrew, which describes the Chaos, the chaos of the Creation. But there is something of
ensimismado
to it, it means the chaos going inwards.
Bohu
in Hebrew means “he is inside”, which is different than
Tohu
, the chaos you see going outwards. It’s worse, nothing like
ensimismado
. I can already see the face of that poor translator, trying to translate this passage into English, French or Hebrew. I’m sorry, I just like the word
ensimismado
way too much.

There are other words in Haketia, like Ketbear, Hhokear, or Selkear, all verbs that take a Hebrew root and with the flick of a magic wand turn into Spanish verbs.

Every time I need the sea, I get on the bus and go to Tel Aviv. There I feel regenerated and imagine I can see a little bit of the opposite shoreline, the one belonging to Morocco, where I swam for the first time. Like a mother tongue, a mother sea, it will always be the sea against which all others must be compared.

I would like to take Raquel’s hand and lead her down all the shores where I’ve gotten my feet wet. I would start with Turkey, around Antalya. It was winter and I remember one morning when I woke up really early and saw a very thin woman come out of the sea. Fifty degrees out and her in the sea, she was probably coming from the North Pole. Then we would continue on to Rhodes, where I drank very good espressos and bought umbrellas as gifts for all my family, because on Rhodes there are only umbrella shops. Then Crete, an immense island with waitresses in terrible moods. From there we could go to Rome, a humid city that gave me an asthma attack, and then to Nice, and the phone they gave me from a distant cousin who told me he didn’t know my father. Then Marseilles, the last stop before getting on the plane to Israel in 1972. From there we would reach Perpignan, where I stopped to get a visa to go to Madrid in 1982, the last time I was in Madrid. And then Barcelona, my lady always smiling. From there we would go to Mallorca, my last trip with the whole family, kids, my brother, my mother. And from there to Malaga, where I couldn’t control myself and ate calamari, which isn’t kosher. I can live fine without meat, without chicken, without any animal, but calamari is my biggest weakness. And now we’re in Algeciras, and then at the beaches between Ceuta and Tetouan, Restinga, Kabila, Ksar El Rimal, El Rincón and Río Martil. A short trip around the Mediterranean, mine, my Mediterranean, the one that can’t continue to exist without me, that doesn’t exist unless I write about it.

In that sea we found each other, sea of sun, sea of freedom, sea of childhood, sea of innocence, oh terrible and beautiful innocence, lost forever in customs between Morocco and Ceuta, lost without the ability to look back like Lot’s wife, like the sweet salt of sea water.

“I came in one door while you were leaving out the other.” “And I left through the second right when you were returning to get the keys that had been forgotten.”

“And then I came in to get my suitcase, but you had already left.”

“Our footsteps traveled through the same houses for years, but we never found each other.”

“Always walking down parallel streets.”

“Drinking at the same bars.”

“Tasting the same calamari from the same sea.” “The same innocent fish.”

“We were children in paradise, adolescents in tunnels, adults in strange walls, and today we are the memory of each other.”

“W
hat language do you make love in?”

It’s been two months now, and one hundred e-mails from each of us, and most of all I feel full of Raquel. Her presence comes with me wherever I go and wherever I am. I’m possessed, or as Van Morrison says, “It’s a beautiful obsession.”

So much so that I wonder how presence is created or how sometimes you can be in front of someone and you realize they’re not there, they’ve disappeared. Their body and their faraway gazes are there, their words, their smiles, but not the person. You don’t feel their presence. But what I didn’t know is that you could feel the strong, very strong presence of someone thousands of miles away.

I wonder what distance is, and what presence is. Because I spend the day talking to Raquel, I spend the day discussing Tetouan, literature, what love is, marriage, children, beauty, aesthetics, and Raquel by my side answers me, she responds to me, she gets mad when I tell her I don’t like Levinas and when I tell her that Camus seems like a fake to me. I feel as though everything he writes is perceived only by the mind and the intellect, and she says but how can you say that, have you read
Le Premier Homme
, and I like how French words naturally enter our discussion. Well no, I never finished a book by Camus. From the first words a little bird in my head tells me this isn’t the Maghreb or the Mediterranean. These are the philosophical conclusions about the Mediterranean, and literature is not philosophy. Literature has to try to include everything, and I especially can’t stand anyone who writes knowing the beginning and the end. For the writer, literature has to be a discovery.

Okay yes, Raquel, I don’t like that part about “having to be”. It doesn’t have to be, it’s what I like or don’t like. Yes, and now I look like a know-it-all, like someone who believes they can convince everyone of everything they think. A friend of mine said it’s difficult to argue with me when I’m not right, but when I am right, it’s impossible. The worst thing about all this is that I feel the opposite, that I act this way out of a lack of my own conviction. Like when, still a virgin at age twenty, I tried to flirt with a girl, and she went to a friend and said don’t let this Moshe think I’ll be one of his many women and that he’s going to seduce me in half an hour. Out of so much fear, I gave off the impression of being a Don Juan.

Yes, that’s it, keep writing in Hebrew, echoes Raquel’s voice in my ear. You have to keep going. You can’t keep those voices stifled. And I’m there telling her it’s not a decision I made, but a decision that was made for me. It’s not at all easy to change languages at age forty after writing in Hebrew.

And have you read Saramago?

No, and as my friend would say, I’m not reading it out of respect.

Honestly, right when I decided to read him, he got involved in Israeli politics and I lost interest because of his comparisons to Auschwitz, and I’m just waiting to get over that. I’m most interested in the book about Pessoa, that one about the death of Ricardo Reis.

And then I put my hand on her shoulder and hug her, and say we can go eat at an excellent Asian restaurant at the Shuk, the Mahane Yehuda Market. Then I myself wonder if it’s not dangerous to go to the Shuk with so many bombs, where so many bombs have gone off, and at the same time I tell myself that life has to go on and that death is only something natural. On the day we die we have no age, we are neither old nor young, neither children nor adults. Age only makes sense to those who are still alive, and they will determine whether I was really so young, with all my life ahead of me. And it wouldn’t be so bad for the novels and poems either, maybe then they would become famous. But I can’t tell Raquel all this, these are things I just think about but seem best not to share.

And I want to kiss her, kiss and kiss her, to fill up all those years when we brushed against each other without even seeing each other, but I tell myself no, it’s impossible, she’s married and I am too, and even if I weren’t married, I would never touch a married woman. But I know quite well that all of this is up to her. I’m not strong enough to say no to a kiss, a long kiss, full of all that love that no one gave you, that love you deserve, we all deserve.

I’d like to have another cup of coffee.

Says Raquel.

And I wonder over and over again how I can feel all of this when I’m alone on the street, and I’m going to see my wife in half an hour to celebrate our wedding anniversary, nineteen years, going into our twentieth year. Mois, people just don’t do things like this. Mois, you’re from Tetouan, remember, people don’t do this.

I wait for the time her e-mails come, a little after twelve, which is eleven there in Madrid. I’m on the way to the restaurant in Tel Aviv, and it’s raining. I walk along the sea and feel Raquel with me under the rain and under the same umbrella. And when I see my wife get out of the car, she gives me a look. I wonder what she knows. And Raquel tells me that when I sent her a kiss in an e-mail her husband became furious.

But, Raquel, if all of this is literature, my imagination, if all of this is just imagination, tell me so. Tell me. It can’t be that I’m in bed at night and feel you by my side, knowing that at that very moment you are thinking of me. You know where I am and if I’m sad, and I know when you think about your mother, but none of this is true, Raquel, it’s a story, a book, a novel, a poem, or the play you wrote in 1982, the same year I went to Madrid and searched for you like crazy. You were always on a parallel street and I didn’t find you. It’s a story in which a woman hears the voice of a man and decides to wait for him and continue on alone, waiting for that man from the past. It was the voice of a man from the future.

But in 1982 I was wearing a layer of fear and no one could touch my world, like the Paul Simon song, I am a rock. I was an island, and islands can’t be found in the material world. That’s why we found each other through a book.

Keep writing, I hear your sweet voice say, and it’s what I always tell myself. Nothing matters except for continuing to write. It’s a voice that comes from the depths of the universe, and it says that to me. These are the words that save the world every day. They’re the words of the poets that no one reads anymore, the ones that create a layer of life that pollution cannot destroy. They are your words, Raquel, that have the power to create life again, that have the power to conserve life.

And I love you, I love you, woman, and I love you, that’s just how it is.

Cernuda and Serrat singing.

That’s something else I won’t tell you. I won’t be able to say it, I’ll write it but I won’t be able to say it to you.

Oh how I write to you, my darling, but when we talk on the phone I can’t say those three words. My darling, my queen, is all of Tetouan in three words. There, where we were all kings, where my mother and my grandmother, my father and my uncles called me king. We were kings and queens and everything around us appears today to have been a long miracle. A world we will never be able to describe, a world where Sepharad lived its last moments, where only the good of the past existed.

It’s eleven and I’m waiting for your daily e-mail. I will smile again upon seeing your words. I’ll think about the turrón you sent me, and the marks you left on its sweetness. How did you know that the jijona kind was the one I liked best? Or rather, what I’m asking is how could you not know it, if you read me through the poems, you read my life and my footsteps on the shores of the Mediterranean. You read the tracks that have already been erased, that only you know are there, like yours in Restinga, or in Río Martil, where you left footprints I went to find. The ones I was looking for were yours, not mine. I already knew about mine. The small footprints of a girl who doesn’t know, or perhaps knows all too well that paradise ends quickly, that paradise is only born in the moment you leave it, and there at the end of the Mediterranean, where the ocean comes to eat up our sea, there I saw you walking happily, smiling, and always giving out love and joy to those with you. There you ran free, girl who will be a woman, girl who will always remain a girl. You would run in the sea and your entire life fit into your smile.