Sepharad (45 page)

I remember the large uneven stones in the Santa María cloister, some of which were gravestones bearing names of persons from long ago carved into a slab and nearly erased by the footsteps of centuries, and I remember a garden you reached through ogival arches, where there was a bay tree so tall that from a child's perspective the top could not be seen. In the garden shaded by that tree and filled with ferns and weeds, there was always, even in summer, a strong scent of growing things and moist earth, and the garden rang with the uproar of the birds that nested in the thick branches and the long whistles of swallows and swifts in the slow summer afternoons. You could see the dark green thrust of the bay tree from a great distance, like a geyser of vegetation rising higher than the bell towers of the church and the tile roofs in the barrio, and it swayed on windy afternoons. When my mother took me by the hand into the cloister, it made me dizzy to peek out into the garden and see the tree. I always noticed how cool the dirt and the stone were, and I was always deafened by the clamor of the birds, which flew up in a cloud when the bells were rung.

I was sure the tree reached the sky, like the magic beanstalk in the story that my aunts told me and that many years later I read to my oldest son, who from the age of three always begged for a story at bedtime, quickly restless when he knew the story was about to end, asking me to make it last a little longer or read him another or, better still, make up one he liked, and give the characters his favorite personality traits and magic powers, and the names he had to approve. Reading the story at my son's bedside, I imagined his little hero climbing the branches of that prodigious bay tree at Santa María, up, up toward the sky, and coming out on the other side of the clouds, just as I imagined it when I was a boy. If you looked up, looked hard, the tree swayed slightly even when there was no wind. When a strong wind blew, the sound of the leaves was like that of waves on the shore, which I had never heard except in movies, or when I held a seashell to my ear.

 

I WENT TO THE CHURCH
of Santa María every afternoon during the summer I was twelve to say a few Ave Marias to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of my city, whom I asked to intercede for me so I would pass gym in September, because in the June examinations I had failed in a truly humiliating manner. I wasn't good at sports, I couldn't climb a rope or vault over a pommel horse, I couldn't even do a somersault. I had a growing sense of being excluded that was bitterly accentuated by the loss of the comfortable certainties of childhood and the first confusion and fears of my transition to adolescence. Pimples were breaking
out on my too round face, fuzz was darkening my upper, still childish lip, hair was growing on the strangest parts of my body, and I was suffering sharp and secret remorse about masturbation, which according to the grim teachings of the priest was not merely a sin but also the beginnings of a series of atrocious illnesses. How strange to have been that solitary, fat, clumsy child who all summer long, at dusk, as the heat was fading, walked to the Alcázar barrio and went inside the cool cloisters of Santa María to pray to the Virgin, stepping on the gravestones of dead buried five or six centuries before, devout but ashamed because that summer I had learned to masturbate and was always surreptitiously looking down women's necklines and up their naked legs: the white breast, the large dark nipple, and the light blue veins of a barefoot Gypsy nursing her child at the door of one of the huts of the poor who lived at the edge of the barrio, beside the ruined wall.

Sometimes from a distance I would see four or five of the toughest boys in our class sitting on a stone bench in the large plaza in front of the church. They already smoked and went to taverns, and if I walked by them, pretending not to see them, they made fun of me, the way they had jeered at my physical cowardice in the gym and schoolyard. They made fun of me even more when they realized where I was going, the fat little sissy who got good grades but flunked gym and now came to pray every afternoon to the Virgin and more than once went to confession and then stayed for mass and took Communion, with the remorse and anguish of not having dared confess everything to the priest, who asked the formulaic questions and in the dark traced the sign of the cross as he murmured the penance and absolution—that there was a further sin he couldn't say the name of but only allude to using a vague euphemism: he had committed
an impure act.
The Catholic doctrine accustomed us to the solitary struggle with ourselves at an early age, to the contortions
of guilt; an impure act was a mortal sin, and if you didn't confess it then you couldn't be absolved, and if you came to take Communion in a state of mortal sin, you were committing another, equally grave as the first, which was added to it in the secret ignominy of your conscience.

My first marriage took place in the Church of Santa María, when I was twenty-six. Maybe because of the confusion and tension of the ceremony, and the dizzying number of guests, I didn't take a good look at the great bay tree in the cloister, although now I am struck by the alarming thought that they may have cut it down, which wouldn't have been unusual in a city so addicted to arboricide. The young man with the mustache and razor-cut hair, wearing a navy-blue suit and pearl-gray necktie, seems even more remote to me than the pious and ashamed boy of fourteen years before. Throughout that time, he had perfected the skills that he already glimpsed as his in early adolescence: the art of being what he was expected to be and at the same time rebelling in surly silence, the cleverness of hiding his true identity and nourishing it with books and dreams while presenting an attitude of meek acquiescence on the outside. Thus he lived in exile, at a distance as false as a perspective of open country painted on a wall, or as those cinematic backgrounds against which an actor is driving a convertible at top speed along a cliff without ruffling a hair of his head and the passing trees fail to throw a shadow on the windshield.

 

THE BARRIO OF THE ALCÁZAR,
bounded on the south and west by the road that circles the ruined wall and terraced gardens, has narrow cobbled streets and small plazas on which it is not unusual to see a large house with a great stone arch and a few mulberry or poplar trees. The oldest houses date from the fifteenth century. The exteriors are whitewashed, except for the door frames, which have the yellow tint of the sandstone from which they were hewn, the same stone that was used for the palaces and churches.
The white of the lime and the gold and blond of the stone create a delicate harmony that has the luminous elegance of the Renaissance and the austere beauty of vernacular architecture. High, narrow windows with heavy iron grilles thick as shutters, and gardens enclosed in tall adobe walls, recall the impenetrable look of Muslim dwellings that was adopted for the cloistered convents. There are large mansions with windows narrow as embrasures, in which we children sometimes hid, and great iron rings in the facades, so heavy that we weren't strong enough to lift them; to these rings, we were told, the former lords of the houses tied their horses. The mansions were inhabited by the nobles who ruled the city and who during their feudal uprisings against the power of the kings dug in behind the walls of the Alcázar. In the shelter of those walls was the Jewish quarter; the nobles needed the Jews' money, their administrative abilities, the skills of their artisans, so they had an interest in protecting them against the periodic explosions of fury from devout and brutal mobs stirred up by fanatic priests, by legends about profanations of the host and the bloody rituals Jews celebrated to dishonor the Christian religion: that they stole consecrated hosts and spit them out and ground them beneath their feet, and pierced them with nails and crushed them with pincers to repeat on them the tortures inflicted upon the mortal flesh of Jesus Christ, and kidnapped Christian children and slit their throats in the cellars of the synagogues, and drank their blood or with it sullied the sacred white flour of the hosts.

Someone told me about a specific Jewish house, and I wandered around the barrio until I found it. It sits on a narrow street, as if huddled there, and I remember it as lived in, with sounds of people and television flooding out to the street through the open windows, which were filled with pots of geraniums. It has a low door, and on the two extremes of the large stone lintel are engraved two Stars of David, inscribed in a circle, and not so worn
by time that you can't make out the design clearly. It's a small but solid house that must have belonged to a scribe or minor merchant, not a wealthy family, or possibly to the teacher of a rabbinical school, to some family that in the years prior to the expulsion would have lived divided between fear and an attempt at normality, hoping that the excesses of Christian fanaticism would die down, just as it had so many times, and that in this small city, and behind the protection of the walls of the Alcázar, the terrible slaughter of a few years earlier in Córdoba would not be repeated, or the pogrom at the end of the preceding century. The house on this little street has an air of watchfulness and self-effacement, like someone who lowers his head and walks close to the wall in order not to attract attention.

What do you do if you know that from one day to the next you can be driven from your home, that all it takes is a signature and a lacquer seal at the bottom of a decree for the work of your entire life to be demolished, for you to lose everything, house and goods, for you to find yourself out on the street exposed to shame, forced to part with everything you considered yours and to board a ship that will take you to a country where you will also be pointed at and rejected, or not even that far, to a disaster at sea, the frightening sea you have never seen? The two Stars of David testify to the existence of a large community, like the fossilized impression of an exquisite leaf that fell in the immensity of a forest erased by a cataclysm thousands of years ago. They couldn't believe that they would actually be driven out, that within a few months they would have to abandon the land they had been born in and where their ancestors had lived. The house has a door with rusted studs and an iron knocker, and small Gothic moldings in the angles of the lintel. Maybe the people who have gone carried with them the key that fit this large keyhole, maybe they handed it down from father to son through generations of exile, just as the language and sonorous Spanish names were perpetuated, and
the poems and children's songs that the Jews of Salonica and Rhodes would carry with them on the long, hellish journey to Auschwitz. It was a house like this that the family of Baruch Spinoza or Primo Levi would leave behind forever.

I walked through the cobbled alleys of the Jewish quarter in Ubeda, imagining the silence that must have fallen during the days following the expulsion, like the silence that would linger in the streets of the Sephardic barrio of Salonica after the Germans evacuated it in 1941, where the voices of children jumping rope and singing the ballads I learned in my childhood would never be heard again, ballads about women who disguised themselves as men in order to do battle in the wars against the Moors, ballads about enchanted queens. The Franciscans and Dominicans preaching to the illiterate from the pulpits of their churches, the bells tolling in triumph as exiles left the Alcázar barrio in the spring and summer of 1492, another of the dates we memorized in school because it marked the moment of the greatest glory in the history of Spain, our teacher told us, when Granada was reconquered and America discovered, and when our newly unified country became an empire.
Of Isabel and Fernando the spirit prevails,
we sang as our martial footsteps marked time with the hymn,
we will die kissing the sacred flag.
A feat by the Catholic king and queen as important as the victory over the Moors in Granada, and a decision as wise as that of sponsoring Columbus, had been the expulsion of the Jews, who in the drawings in our school encyclopedia had hooked noses, goatees, and who stood accused of the same dark perfidy as other sworn enemies of Spain of whom we knew nothing but their terrifying names: Freemasons and communists. When we were fighting with other children in the street and one of them spit on us, we always yelled at him: Jew, you spit on the Lord. On the floats during Holy Week, the soldiers and the Pharisees were depicted with the same gross features as the Jews in the school encyclopedia. On the Last Supper float, Judas was as scary to us as Dracula in the movies, with his hooked nose and pointed beard and the green face of betrayal and greed that turned to sneak looks at the bag that held the thirty pieces of silver.

 

IN ROME'S HOTEL EXCELSIOR,
many years and several lives later, I met the Sephardic writer Emile Roman, a Romanian who spoke fluent Italian and French, but also a rare and ceremonious Spanish he had learned in childhood and which must have been very similar to the Spanish spoken in 1492 by the people who lived in that house in the Alcázar barrio. “But we didn't call ourselves Sephardim,” he told me. “We were Spanish.” In Bucharest in 1944, a passport expedited by the Spanish embassy saved his life. With the same passport that liberated him from the Nazis he escaped the Communist dictatorship years later and never returned to Romania, not even after the death of Ceauşescu. Now he was writing in French and living in Paris, and as he was retired, he spent his evenings at a club of elderly Sephardim called the Vida Larga, the long life. He was a tall, erect man who moved deliberately; he had olive skin and large ritual hands. In the bar of the hotel, an individual with a red bow tie and silver dinner jacket was playing international hits on an electric organ. Sitting across from me, beside the windows that looked out on the traffic of Via Veneto, Roman took sips of an espresso and spoke passionately of injustices committed five centuries before, never forgotten, never corrected, not even softened by the passing of time and succession of generations: the incontrovertible decree of expulsion, the goods and homes hastily sold to meet the time period of two months granted the expelled, two months to depart from a country in which your people lived for more than a thousand years, almost since the beginning of that other diaspora, said Roman.
The deserted synagogues, the scattered libraries, the empty stores and closed workshops, one or two hundred thousand people forced to leave a country of barely eight million inhabitants.