by Ilan Stavans
Bernardo Tzalkin kept looking at his watch, fearful it was getting late. He saw all the guests sitting at their tables and straining their eyes in anticipation of the hosts’ arrival. And here they were still lingering. The injections prescribed by the doctor the day before had wrought the desired effect. The boy felt better, thereby vindicating Bernardo Tzalkin. After all, what would the entire party have been like without the bar mitzvah speech?
All of a sudden he noticed the door opening. Out stepped his daughter, bedecked, shining brilliantly. His wife followed, leading by the hand their son, swaddled in warm clothing. He opened up the car door quickly and took his son by the other arm. Together, they helped the boy into the car.
Bernardo Tzalkin was overtaken by cheer. Here he was, taking his son to recite the long-awaited bar mitzvah speech. The celebration was to go forward exactly as planned.
Upon entering the catering hall, he remarked how his son began hesitating, tottering, and seemed about to fall over. The boy’s usually ruddy face went pale and gaunt. His eyes were sunken in and surrounded by bluish spots. Bernardo Tzalkin gave a shiver, taking fright lest his son’s health worsen and keep him from delivering the bar mitzvah speech.
The band intoned a joyous melody. Merriment and laughter poured over the hall. The honorees were welcomed with great festivity; applause broke out on all sides. Hands stretched out to wish the family happiness. Bernardo Tzalkin was entranced by the music, the jolly faces that shone at him from all directions. The ceremonious music swept over him like a warm wave, embracing and caressing him, making him forget all his cares. The fears regarding his son dissolved. He remembered only that today was a celebration in honor of both his children, a double celebration he had made as sumptuous as possible, renting out the most luxurious hall, arranging for the finest foods—an occasion people were not likely to forget. They would all comment on his unrestrained generosity, his brilliant social standing. And soon his son would recite the bar mitzvah speech.
VENEZUELA
Papa’s Friends
ELISA LERNER (b. 1932)
Translated from the Spanish by Amy Prince
Evoking the world of Russian Jewish immigrants in Caracas, this story takes place during the late 1930s and 1940, when Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City. Told from the viewpoint of a teenage girl confronting the underside of bourgeois family life, it first appeared—ironically enough—in the slick Venezuelan magazine Exceso in 1991.
IN APRIL OF 1953, Lydia was locked up in the remote land of a psychiatric clinic, and the gentle white dawns of her uniform were never seen again in Samuel’s grocery store. Berta found prosperity after years of cheerful hard work managing the restaurant she had with her husband, Bernardo. Like a versatile sofa bed that never declines to show its hospitality, the restaurant also functioned as an inn. Freed from work, Berta began moving from one dismal house to another: you can all imagine her last home. She entertained herself buying ostentatious display cabinets for the different houses, in which she would place small, well-polished silver spoons. Now that she had money she could offer better service. But the spoons went unused, like cloistered nuns.
Señora Olinda, almost seventy years old, was obliged to close Odessa, the shoe store she had presided over for close to half a century. There were no longer customers looking for shoes with toes like pointed noses, or thin rose-stem heels. Left without the shoe store, she discovered in herself a belated religious vocation and found herself more and more at ease in the synagogue and at the jumble sales they held. Her lips (as in the younger days at the Odessa) were, as always, covered with a throbbing scrap of a vibrant velvet red that at times obscured her smile.
As for Amelia, I heard she was stricken by an incurable disease that drove through her body like a sword watching its knight die on the battlefield. Susana got fat, as big as an ever-growing metropolis. She now lives with only her fatness for company in an apartment building in Miami, where most of the tenants are rich sentimental old women—widows exiled from New York or from some town in Central or South America.
In Miami she has become addicted to vitamins. Yet she often still finds herself returning from Florida on the occasion of the weddings and bar mitzvahs of her numerous relatives. These efforts, at times tiresome, to arrive on time for the family festivities have made her whine in the pharmacy for a renewed supply of her much-appreciated vitamins. “I am always on an airplane. The day before yesterday it was Raquel’s wedding in New York. In June, it’s on to Caracas for Leah and Isaac’s golden anniversary. Next fall I’m invited to Tel Aviv to spend the New Year with Ana Landau. She’s a widow now. What a production! I don’t know anyone who functions more like a well-organized minister of foreign affairs than a member of a Jewish family. I’m about ready to ask for the ambassadorship. I’m just waiting for the Kafka twins’ bar mitzvah in Rio de Janeiro.”
Lydia, Amelia, Berta, Olinda, and Susana were my papa’s friends. It wasn’t a conscious flirtation on their part, nor on Papa’s. There never was a more tender, loving, and conciliatory husband than he. Mama was a small anxious despot, a protector. Thanks to her methodical, stubborn, and proud nostalgia—above all, to the crazy collection of things she took with her on the boat—we lived in a far-off town of fiction, one that moved erratically in dark seas, ships of gigantic dimensions like massive caskets transporting entire populations.
The city that my mother founded with such care inside our house never had a real and established spot on the map. This was such an injustice when there was so much beautiful real geography that I began to suspect she was a capricious woman, of a spirit subject to sudden change. The passing of time assured me of my conviction that she is a silly woman, a scatterbrain who changes borders as if they were one-night stands.
Papa, possessor of an educated cynicism, faced reality with distracted compassion. That was why he could not remain forever inside the rigorous region invented by Mama’s mournful longings. Some Saturday mornings (if the teacher gave me good marks on the report I brought home from high school), he took me with him on the short but unconventional walks down the narrow streets in the center of town. I suspect Papa’s own walk began much earlier. More than one Friday at 7:00 p.m., after greeting God and drinking a small glass of muscatel (his body wore the striped suit like a tablecloth ready to receive its wine glasses), nimble and content (with the jug of his heart half-full of wine), he would run to see his lovely Lydia and his needy Amelia before eight o’clock (the most melancholy time in the universe) when the stores closed.
Mama planned things like an actress in a repertory company of three-act comedies. The celebration of Hanukkah represented the first act. On the pretext of collaborating with the Israel Club, she would make a cake of honey, nuts, and raisins. The club now and then served as a house of charity, a somewhat bohemian, cordial hospice.
On Fridays, protected by the merciful music of prayer, men who looked as though they didn’t even have a place of their own to die would appear at the door.
In order to do the honors to the second act, Mama put on her skirt and jacket of silk imprime (that’s what the pretentious employees of El Gallo de Oro called the printed material) with the firm determination of appearing, hanging on Papa’s arm, at the Israel Club, to drop off the delicious cake, decorated with the skill of an English assassin. She also used the argument of wanting to stretch her housewife legs (those crippled spousal extremities, sacrificed like mermaids’ limbs in an ocean that prohibits voyages to worldly lands of enjoyment and pleasure) in order to arrive with dignity at the pretenses of the third act. Accompanying Papa on the short trip to his friends’ shops (while he made some insignificant purchase), Mama perhaps wanted to assure herself that the visits were not just a useful excuse for a gaze or a verbal caress, performed with the enigmatic touch of love that has no homeland in bed, toward Lydia or Amelia, who, behind their safe sales counters, in the sweetness of dusk, were remote women hidden in the towers of their chaste castles.
Mama
admired and at the same time despised Lydia. The variations of her indifference came in all sizes, big and small. Mama, the small domestic despot, envied Lydia her disquieting ability to sell black olives, nuts, almonds, and Maracay cheese, as she did her white uniform, which, free of marital stains, emancipated her, gave her independence.
Lydia was of short stature, a bit heavy. Her ass was the least animated part of her body, but she seemed to keep singing birds in her somewhat meddlesome belly. The hapless uniform nevertheless tried to silence the indiscreet sparrows of a troublesome digestion. Her face, the green eyes, were those of an artist of the time. A shorter and plumper Kay Francis (the bargains she found in expensive department stores gave authority to her warm greetings), she was happy to be able to seize to her waist the liberating banner of stable and certain work.
A Kay, happy to watch life through lenses spread with foggy yellow Kupperschmidt butter. But Papa would have had to make the sacrifice of buying the necessary (as well as the unnecessary) theater seats in order for Lydia to have really been the haughty Kay Francis, to whom silver-screen husbands presented divine jewels, hidden in the lustrous silver domes of breakfast platters, in humble homage to the night before, when at the elegant party, fox skins drifted from one shoulder to the other like snowflakes swirled by the wind around the gargoyles of a palace roof.
Impassioned stars winked in Papa’s eyes when he saw this domestic version of Kay Francis. Lydia, like the other Saturday morning women, didn’t pay much attention to me, a pale skinny girl with braids tightly knotted like the shoelaces of shabby winter shoes, a red dress of Scotch plaid wool, and frail bones like toothpaste that called for immense bottles of calcium brimming over like a full water tank. Life was passing by. To find love, one had to rush around like the race walkers in the stadium. Papa and the women counted on those few hours a week to ignite the fires of opportunity, to try to light the logs of burning tenderness from fragile, fast-burning twigs.
I felt sorry for Lydia, something of a respectful pity. Mama cautiously mentioned (with tremendous scorn) that she was “separated.” What the hell did that mean? I saw chubby Lydia flapping around in her uniform amid the comings and goings to Samuel’s store, like an ocean teeming with life and topped with the whitest waves. Could it be that separation was an adult disease, different from my discouraging lack of calcium? Or is that the way she labeled it because in her house she had a Chinese folding screen that she hid behind to leisurely put in place some linen contraption supposed to reduce the vast habitation of her stomach?
This desolate operation, to tighten or to meticulously loosen the waists of a weary corset, was like that of a ship captain at the moment in which he hoists or lowers the sails that have been entrusted to him.
Papa, loaded down by his Mediterranean riches, black olives glittering like the buttons on a widow’s bodice, grapes like fairies’ teeth, and the skinny girl at his side like some unattractive trophy of his matrimony, twenty or twenty-five minutes later would enter Amelia’s store for gentlemen.
She received him with little claps of happiness and with the melodramatic gymnastics of open arms. Papa’s smile was a cordial cliff of luminous teeth. I don’t remember if Amelia was married then or if she did it later. It doesn’t matter. In any case, her heart sheltered an extraordinary comprehension of and access to the masculine world. The sale of men’s shirts and ties gave her these powers.
Sometimes it surprised me that the anxiousness of the greetings, the intimate hubbub of the encounters between Amelia and Papa, depended on a commonplace casual Saturday visit to the haberdashery. It seemed unfair that the affectionate saleswoman wasn’t included at our family dinners and that the evident happiness that Papa’s arrival brought her had such a limited time frame. My girl’s eyes perceived that their mutual delight was reduced to a cautious passion that could have been set in the cold snow of far-off mountains.
Amelia eagerly dressed herself up for the hours she spent in the shop. But the pale mauve or blue blouses, the gray wool skirts, seemed to age rapidly on her body. She looked lovely, however, when she wore her Romanian white silk camisole, covered with pleats and done up in a profusion of multicolored sashes. How beautiful it would have been, her entrance into the house for an innocent domestic meal, dressed in the Romanian camisole and with the fire of her eyes burning in golden affection. Then perhaps Amelia’s love wouldn’t have been limited to the embrace that stung by its similarity to farewells from a train en route to distant lands. In the ecstasy of being in such close proximity to Papa (different from the stolen and wounding hour that, on his quick visits to the store, he offered her every Saturday), perhaps Amelia would have let him pull up the multicolored sashes of her adornment, as if they were the backdrop or house curtain of a small and illicit theater.
Berta had set up her restaurant in a long thin building a block up from Amelia’s store. The tables were at the back, in a raised area that meant climbing three or four bare steps, unprotected by the decorations of the rest of the scene. But for me, to arrive at this upper section of the house was like being installed on the gently sloping hill of a theater house.
There was always something frustrating about these visits to Berta. Papa and I would arrive just as the preparations for the noonday meal were taking place. At the table they would have already placed large platters overflowing with salads of potato, beet, onion, and tomato. The chunks of lettuce were veritable gardens.
When Papa said good-bye to Berta, I knew we were going to miss the show, the real entertainment: the predictable actions of the actors, the customers’ unexpected moments. “It’s time to go.” Papa watched life through the jealous mirrors of haste. Mama’s tyranny awaited us in the dining room at 12:30 precisely, with the venetian blind up, the sun shining on a fountain of chopped egg, potato, and onion salad. That’s why I was never able to see any of Berta’s customers. Not once did I eat at her place of business. A restaurant was a prohibited adventure, a swelling of high waves. In order to get near such proud waters, it was necessary to make a crossing that would take an entire childhood.
The lower part of the house held the bedrooms where taciturn guests took their lodging. Berta had a slender, good-natured husband with the body of a dancer, who used it only to call the actors to their places: light taps on the doors to offer aspirins, front-door keys, correspondence from remote areas, vague messages. He spent the rest of the time in a corner, the chair balanced awkwardly against the wall behind the stairs that led to the tables, watchfully idle (carrying on the shoulders of his thin body the insomnia that flourishes in boardinghouses and also in theaters).
Sometimes he would let the newspaper drop from his hands onto the stairs as he murmured in a faltering voice: “Ay, Leybele! Leybele! Good God, the only one of us who got this far, and they wouldn’t rest until they tracked him down in the last corner of the world to kill him.”
Papa would hold me tight, tenderly taking my hand, trying to soothe with his smile the misfortune of the world. But a sad haze clouded the proud granite of his teeth.
I remember that Bernardo, Berta’s husband, would take a napkin from one of the tables, and it wasn’t sweat he wiped off his face. They were small and fragile tears. His Adam’s apple would swell up disjointedly, as if he had already served himself salad without waiting for the customers. As if the spine of an evil accursed fish had lodged itself in his throat.
In this restaurant, suspended as in a dream of some high tower, the tables were covered by a type of cheap oilcloth generally reserved for the kitchen. I was enchanted by the innocent little animals and the rough-drawn dahlias printed on the cloth.
The petty maternal despot had never seen such crude material on a table. Now I understand: for her, to omit the white starched tablecloths would have been like renouncing the snow of her native city.
On the occasions that they laid out white tablecloths in Berta’s restaurant, criminal fingerprints and blood (Del Monte ketchup spilled by negligent diners) ended up stainin
g them. Anyway, the owner of the establishment would never have had the patience to thumb through fashion magazines for ideas about interior decorating.
And it was Berta who triumphed. She jumped over the tables like a thoroughbred horse going over a fence. She didn’t bother herself with haughty refinement. A malady such as that would have shrouded Mama early in her pure white tablecloths of nostalgia.
Berta tended toward stockiness, and the gestures of a sharp and fierce worldliness peeked out from her face. Her eyes were spirited and vivacious. It was impossible for those pupils to fall victim to myopia or any other visual ailment. The abundance in her ebony gaze would have smashed to smithereens the glass of any lens. Those imperial violets! Her hair was all boisterous curls, like that of “Imperio Argentina” or some other torch singer, a joyful celebration of black ringlets.
A peaceful garbanzo bean of a mole, cooked over a slow fire on her skin and placed between the nose and the upper lip, gave belligerent notice of a large and brutal mouth, one that let loose virile laughs and cheerful curses in the way of greetings.
Sometimes the musical laughs, the insolent sarcasm, seemed to abandon her body, which was so occupied with changes in the menu and conversations with unattractive guests whose smiles revealed teeth like rusted grilles. And, indeed, the fighting and the celebrating in her grandiloquent voice migrated to a freer part of the body: straight to her arms. Berta’s mischievousness traversed her upper arms until it arrived at her hands, folded in a gesture of prayer (of embrace) toward Papa. But on a moment’s notice she would have to go back to the kitchen for more platters of food, for soon the diners would arrive and the oil and vinegar would be scattered around the tables like incense at a church. And Papa had the officious tyranny of home waiting for him.