What is your real name?
Carolyn Toledano. But to say “real” is to not understand anything I’ve just told you.
And what kind of relationship do you have with your parents?
None. Let’s just say they’re dead. Or let’s say, more like it, that I feel like I talk to my mother sometimes: in the middle of the night, her voice tells me what path to follow. And let’s say that my father is a man who sits in a small mining town and tries to forget the end of the world. Changing your name is a little like changing family.
Part II
The Ruin Collector (2007)
The road would be long. All roads are long that lead toward one’s heart’s desire.
—Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line
1
Every afternoon the order repeats like an empty ritual: five o’clock arrives and the old man stops bustling around the garage, pours himself a blond beer, sits down at the table in the yard, and, one by one, sets up the chess pieces. With a cat’s ever-attentive calm, he takes off his boots, rolls up his sleeves, puts a hand to his beard, and then, sitting and facing the afternoon that now begins to sprawl out, he gives the deep-throated shout that tells me he’s ready. I toss my novel onto the cot and cross the living room, where I hear the sound of the canaries’ frenetic fluttering in their cages, then I open the door and, as I go outside, see that the ritual is now complete. I see him in his chair looking toward the old school that’s now become a vacant lot, his face cured by the sun and the years, his eyes fixed on the chessboard as if he were plotting his moves, his prominent bald spot surrounded by his elegant white curls. Three dogs ramble around him, trying to escape the afternoon heat. He gestures with his right hand while the left gives a little pat to the other chair. The signal for me to sit. Like that, without many words, the day ends and the game begins.
* * *
Every afternoon since I arrived has been the same. Sometimes we play several games and other times only one, eternal and multiple, which makes me think the old man is inventing games within the larger match, private rules within a universe in miniature that he himself built. We play to the afternoon heat, from one beer to the next, with the dogs wandering around us and the constant murmur of the canaries as background music. He always faces westward, I always look to the east, toward the house old Marlowe abandoned, where dozens of chickens now scrabble aimlessly. “He trained them to compete,” the old man told me at the end of the second day. “He’d take the chickens a mile away and then let them go, and he and his friends bet on which bird would make it home first.” Then he spat on the floor, as if putting an end to the conversation.
And like that, watching the restless chickens that in the end returned to a house that could give them nothing more, we play for hours in a companionable silence, until I feel the boredom start to get to him. I see him sit up straighter in the chair and he seems much taller and younger, with his eyes wide open and his face more expressive. That’s when I recognize him just as I’ve seen him in the photos in Giovanna’s file: the mischievous gaze, the half-smile, the well-defined eyebrows, now white. I recognize the man who, forty or fifty years younger, appears in the photos accompanied by tropical dancers, but I still try to hide the discovery. If he finds out I know, I tell myself, he’ll refuse to help me. Without stopping the game, between sips of beer, the old photographer starts to tell me a story that grows windingly: a long, thin story of detours and journeys that ends by depositing him here in this town that stretches out behind him, a town whose tired spirit as it empties is the same spirit with which he decided to adopt it as his own. He tells me the story in fragments, as if we were looking at photographs, until suddenly, weary, he cries out the inevitable checkmate. Inside, the silence of the house signals that the canaries have accepted the end of the day.
* * *
Still, I know his day doesn’t end there. I know that past nine o’clock the old man will return to the garage to contemplate the progress of those enigmatic models he spent the day creating. I know because I’ve seen it, that when he finishes dinner he opens the door of the house again, crosses the little patio, goes into the garage, and sits down to gaze, with the eyes of an age-old elephant, at those models that bear the outlines of half-drawn maps. Maps to different scales, full of eraser marks; maps that seem to dissolve the way a memory or a scent fades away. They apparently show the same city. They differ, though, in scale, and in the singular ways they’ve been distorted. Amid the mess of old magazines, newspapers, and beer cans that clutter the garage, there is a wicker rocking chair. He sits there, and with his elephant eyes he contemplates those ephemeral monuments, his movements as slow as when he moved the chess pieces hours earlier. I secretly watch him in that strange ritual until the question becomes obsessive: Why didn’t he leave when everyone decided to go? Why did he stay in this town that wasn’t even his? One of the dogs comes over to me and licks my hand, like an offering of friendship in the middle of the desert.
2
Yoav Toledano is twenty-three years old the first time he thinks about Latin America as a real possibility that exists beyond all the dismal maps. A growing allergy to war, product of his participation in Sinai in 1957, has ultimately instilled in him the secret vocation of a globe-trotter. He thinks, at first, of visiting some Asian country, green palm trees and clear coasts, but the poetic resonance of Tierra del Fuego manages to dissuade him. The terribly romantic idea of the solitude at the end of the world makes him feel he is fleeing a history that encloses him on all sides. A photograph he finds in an old fashion magazine of Bariloche, with its snowy mountains and beautiful lake, confirms his intuition. He imagines himself at the end of the world, in the company of penguins and polar bears, surrounded by the taciturn solidarity of the color white. He tells himself that on arriving in America he will need three things: a camera, a map, and the voracity that has guided his family throughout a seemingly endless pilgrimage of four centuries. Though he’s never seen the snow, he imagines himself photographing enormous ice floes aboard little boats struggling to go ever deeper south. He conceives of his mission in epic terms: he will travel west like the sun and south like the stars. To his family, however, he explains the trip as a youthful sowing of oats. He’ll return after a few months, as soon as he’s learned to recite, in perfect Spanish, the poems of his father’s favorite: the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.
Once his parents are convinced, he turns to the selection of a camera. In a little book on the history of photography he finds the necessary inspiration: he reads about Niépce’s camera obscura and Daguerre’s device, about Talbot’s experiments, the emergence of Kodak’s first cameras, and the invention of the instant photograph. This last event fascinates him: he cannot imagine photography without that instantaneous lightness. It’s only natural, then, that when it’s time to buy, he decides on a Polaroid Pathfinder he comes across in a small electronics store in Tel Aviv. The choice of the map is simpler, but no less suggestive. In a history book, he finds a map showing the routes of Alexander von Humboldt’s American travels. He tears it out and draws over its wrinkled surface the trip he has imagined. It has four points. The first, a star drawn in red marker, is logical: the Haifa port. The second point, marked with a postage stamp, is on the southern tip of Spain, as if any transatlantic trip called for a repetition of Columbus’s voyage. The third, modern and dreamy, is New York. From there he draws a zigzagging line that again crosses the Atlantic, this time with an enormous arc that finally alights on the southern tip of South America. Marking this last point, Toledano decides to draw a little penguin, below which can be read, in Hebrew letters, the name that so fascinates him: “Tierra del Fuego.” And like that, inevitably romantic and with an imperious youthful will, he prepares himself during the winter while he waits for a trip he can only imagine under the rubric of other classic voyages: the one that deposited Charles Darwin on the southern tip of the same continent he’s headed toward; the famous circumnavigation of the globe when Magellan dis
covered the beauty of spheres; the sad flight that ended when Amelia Earhart disappeared, her aerial dream along with her. He traces routes, imagines sojourns, sketches projects. But mostly, he takes photos.
In the absence of a gun, the portable camera quickly becomes his greatest ally and defense, not to say his obsession. He travels the country north to south taking photos, from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev Desert, from the Roman ruins in Caesarea to the dimly lit alleys of Jaffa. After a few weeks he is an expert. His friends ask for portraits, his relatives, postcards. A family acquaintance who is an art collector even offers a commission in exchange for photographs of the five new pieces he’s just brought back from New York. Toledano doesn’t hesitate. He feverishly shoots those paintings by a young artist whose name he doesn’t know and whose style confuses him: he can’t know that behind the violent brushstrokes of a certain Willem de Kooning is a painter with whom he will soon rub elbows in the Big Apple. He can’t know and doesn’t want to. More than the art, more than painting, he is interested in the essential nature of color. And well does he know that there are two colors absent in his collection: the white of the southern snow and the green of the Amazonian jungle. So, on the sunny spring afternoon when he learns that his travel papers are ready, Toledano can only imagine himself surrounded by that Latin American world he pictures as a terribly natural monster. Anxious, he realizes that he has reached his twenty-third year without ever leaving the little clod of dirt that saw his birth. He calms himself by repeating a schmaltzy phrase that at his young age still sounds daring and poetic: “Soon I’ll photograph the end of the world.” He ignores, without the slightest qualm, the fact that the beginning of any trip is a detour.
* * *
The day of his departure, his father gives him two books. More than books, they are amulets, objects that will be with him throughout the trip as reminders of a promise of return. At least, that’s how the father imagines it; as his family looks on, he opens the first book and reads, in a very Ladino Spanish, some verses that no one but him understands:
Y llegué y vi en las nubes la prestigiosa testa
de aquel cono de siglos, de aquel volcán de gesta,
que era ante mí de revelación.
Señor de las alturas, emperador del agua,
a sus pies el divino lago de Managua,
con islas todas luz y canción.
In the father’s voice the syllables are rough, the r’s scratchy, the pauses uncomfortable. No one knows why he adopted as his preferred poet that Nicaraguan writer of somewhat grandiloquent phrasing, but that day, gathered around the departing son, they all take it as a kind of bad joke. All except Yoav, for whom this secret language represents a world. Still, curiosity wins out, and he puts aside the book of Darío’s poems and opens the second volume. A biography of Nadar, a photographer he’s read something of in his little history of photography, but about whom he knows only the basics: he was born and he took portraits. Soon he’ll know more: he will know, for example, that the same man who photographed the distinguished Baudelaire also depicted the Parisian catacombs. Years later he will wonder what would have happened if, instead of a book by Rubén Darío, his father had given him one by Baudelaire. But that will come later. On the day of his departure the book on Nadar is nothing more than a book. With eager curiosity, Yoav reads a few pages and stashes it in his backpack, between the book of poems and the history of photography that has kept him company during recent months. He kisses his father, kisses his mother, kisses his little brother, and leaves.
* * *
First stop: Spain. His parents have asked him to visit the place of origin that is tattooed on his name—Toledo. So when he disembarks in Madrid, the first thing Yoav does is determine the cardinal points. He will travel south in what he considers a practice exercise for the final trip that, according to his plan, will leave him at the southern tip of the American continent. His parents have asked him to try to take photos of the famous Toledo Synagogue, where the family history began. Yoav, however, is more interested in the beautiful name the Christians use: Santa María la Blanca. More than history, he is chasing the twists and turns of his name. Two days later, after a pilgrimage that involved a train and two buses, Toledo welcomes him with the uncertain melancholy of a parent receiving a prodigal son. As afternoon falls, Yoav recognizes the old synagogue and repeats to himself that this is where the whole story begins. It’s six in the afternoon on a Friday. This Sabbath will find him far from home, alone in a postcard landscape.
* * *
His grandfather has told him the story over the course of many evenings, in fragments scattered over countless Sabbaths. The story, as he’s heard it told, begins precisely there, in Toledo, when Yusef Abenxuxen, son of the most skilled finance minister of Alfonso VIII of Castile, decides he will be the one to convince the king that his people’s prayers also deserve a home. He will convince the crown that Toledo needs a synagogue. The twelfth century is approaching and a new wave of anti-Semitism has awakened anxiety in Toledo’s Jews. Using his influence and going against his father’s wishes, Abenxuxen secures a meeting with the king’s adviser. On a rainy afternoon, sitting across from a man who doesn’t seem to be listening, he tries to explain the need for this temple that he imagines, per the concepts of sacred scriptures, as a space for silence, prayer, and law. After an hour, tired of struggling with this enthusiastic young man’s rhetoric, the consul sends him away with the assurance that he will bring his complaints to the king, though he doubts the reaction will be positive. So, two days later, when the reply reaches Abenxuxen mid-supper, his surprise is considerable: the king has accepted. The problem is that Jewish architects aren’t exactly in abundance. The building, emphasizes the messenger, will have to be designed by Moorish architects. Yusef does not despair. Young and pragmatic, he knows that the important thing is to get the building up. But then comes the problem of convincing the old rabbis. Before long, he sees another way out. He remembers a friend of his who could always be found drawing architectural designs that never materialized. It occurs to him that if he can convince this architecture aficionado to join the team of Moorish architects, the rabbis will agree. That original architect, Yoav’s grandfather told him, was the first of their family line.
His name was Yosef Ben Shotan, but after two weeks go by, the Moorish architects with whom he now shares the joy of a profession baptized him with a more neutral name: Toledano. The shyness of genius lent him a chameleonic aspect. He could go an entire afternoon without uttering a word, but when he did say something, it seemed as though he’d been there speaking from the start. He had the ability to fit in anywhere, to harmonize in any group. “He was the first Marrano,” his grandfather said, while little Yoav looked at him and nodded, not knowing what that word meant. He was only eleven years old, and history was already starting to intrigue him, even when it seemed incomprehensibly distant. “He was a few centuries early,” the old man went on, “but his expression already held the bravery of the Marranos.” Hours later, hidden among old volumes of Shakespeare in his father’s enormous library, captive to the bewilderment those family anecdotes made him feel, Yoav would find in an old encyclopedia a brief article on the secret systems of the Jewish conversos and the clandestine practice of religious traditions. He would find, scattered throughout the article, words that would confuse him even more—shining, winding words, like crypto-Judaism. Farther down, as one final aid, he would find a pictorial rendering that showed a group of Jews gathered in the dark, praying among candles, clearly in an age long past. Yoav forgot the rest and retained only that image. Every time his father repeated that Yosef Toledano was the first Marrano, he imagined a shadowy scene with ancient people chanting over candles. The secret of that word, for him, had much to do with twilight. So, eight years later, when he reaches the old synagogue of Santa María la Blanca past six in the evening, Yoav thinks to himself that his arrival could only be thus: late, Marrano.
* * *
The photo
graph of Toledo that he sent his family shows Yoav between two of the synagogue’s famous white arches, smiling in the sunset. He looks tall, handsome, his hair short and neat, just as he was when his parents said goodbye to him. There is a hint, however, of a certain nomadic inclination. Turning the photograph over we find a short note, written in Hebrew: “Here at the first temple, during a Marrano sunset. Hugs.” Farther down, in a nod to the books his father had given him, there’s a quote from Nadar: “There is much photography in the sunset.” He has barely left his house behind, and already he seems to have found a second home. He’s imagined the trip as an odyssey to the end of the world, but this first stop already strikes him as conclusive and comfortable.
* * *
He spends two weeks in Spain. He wants to finish his tour of the family history hidden behind that first name, Yosef Toledano. He has only the information his grandfather gave him: dates, a few names, general outlines of the story of the Marranos in old Spain. Still, he doesn’t give up. Nor does he care that he doesn’t speak the language. He has picked up several key words, which, combined with a few gestures and a dictionary, are enough to survive on. In the mornings he explores the streets of the old Jewish quarter, those aged sectors that stretch through the city with the force of a secret. He walks the streets of the walled city, crosses St. Martin’s Bridge to the Puerta del Cambrón, from the old Assuica district to Santo Tomé. He sits down to drink a beer in Montichel, enjoys a sunny afternoon on the outskirts of the Bab Alfarach neighborhood. In an alleyway in Hamanzeite, a couple of Gypsies try to steal his camera, but he fights them off. He knows the camera is his true language. Everywhere he goes he takes a lot of Polaroids; after lunch, he arranges them in a travel album, and at the end of the day, he sits down to write a diary that snakes among the photos as it grows. A luminous intuition tells him that the novels of the future will be something like this: illustrated almanacs, enormous catalogs, curiosity cabinets on which the authors, mere copyists, write commentaries.
Natural History Page 9