Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Only the distant past was stable, a foreign country that long predated my arrival on the scene, a place you told me many things about but could not be found on any map, but only in the forbidden land of time. The three Moorish syllables of its name did not describe a location, they were merely a sound, a call that was familiar to you but had no resonance in my memory. All it took was the telephone ringing at midnight, and now haste, death, and guilt have invaded our static kingdom, and you realize that every day, every hour, every minute holds a threat, and you glance at the speedometer out of the corner of your eye, at the clock on the dashboard, calculating the kilometers yet to go, the days or hours of life left to your aunt, whom you imagined as safe from old age as she was in that black-and-white photograph taken in her youth, where she wears a summer dress and stands arm in arm with your mother, the two of them so much alike, yet one is striking and attractive and the other isn’t; both laugh, innocent, for in their future no illness or death exists, and you and I are not even possibilities.

  The place-names along the highway invoke your childhood, space transmuting into time as the signs mark the kilometers. You gaze out the window, recognizing the landscapes you saw long ago, and your eyes take on a faraway look. It’s the beginning of summer vacation, and your excitement and impatience to get there are much more powerful than the weariness of so many hours in the car. Each roadside name and each number are a promise repeated every year, and yet it never loses its glow of happiness. You can’t remember the sequence of the summers, though you might organize them according to the episodes of your childhood, but the sequence has come to a sudden conclusion in a hospital room on a chokingly hot day in July, as you observe the waxen face of the woman who has just died and is already losing her resemblance to your mother. In your mind all those summers become one broad and serene river, and all the trips are variations on the theme of approaching paradise. Sitting in the front seat, in your mother’s lap, looking at the highway and gradually falling asleep as you gaze at the profile of your father, who was driving and smoking, or back toward your brother and sister, who were fighting in the backseat and surely resentful of you because you were the smallest and in the arms of your mother, who was still young and in good health, or didn’t yet know she wasn’t, or at least didn’t let your brother and sister and you find out. But maybe even then, as she held you in her arms and let her thoughts roam, she was feeling in her breast the labored thudding of her heart and thinking that she might die and never see you grow up, never know what would become of you, that this summer trip to the town where she was born just might be her last. When the car made the final turn, and as you beheld the paradise of the orchards on the plain and the stair-stepped houses on the hillside, maybe she was looking up toward the sere, reddish peak where the cemetery was and thinking, “That is where I want to be buried, with people I love and who know me, not in one of those cemeteries in Madrid filled with nameless dead.”

  FINALLY, DRIVING INTO TOWN, you will see the name in the headlights and only then realize that you’re slightly carsick, and bored. The old joy of arriving is scarcely a flicker. It’s winter now and totally dark, and although from a distance the lights have given you the sensation that everything might be the same, little by little you see that things are not as you remember: the road is paved where you remember cobbles with grass growing between the rounded stones, encroaching buildings transform the street corners and block the view, and the shop where your mother and your aunt sent you as a girl to do the shopping, where you bought rolls and treats and soft drinks and Popsicles in the summer, is closed and looking run down. My cousin was a lot more adventurous than I. Whenever she could get away with it, she would take some coins from her mother’s apron and drag me with her to buy ice cream and chocolates. As for me, I take everything in, look at what you point out, and study your face as we drive up a steep, narrow street toward the house where your aunt lies dying. I know I’m not seeing what you’re seeing, the ghosts that have welcomed you the moment you arrived and are escorting you or lying in wait as we go up a paved hill and along a dimly lit street on which many of the houses are boarded up.

  We’re almost there. The house is at the top of the hill, and you used to arrive panting with excitement, running up the street ahead of your brother and sister, and with your two childish hands you’d push open the large door that was closed only at night, at bedtime. Now, too, the door is half open, and there are lights in all the windows, lights that suggest wakefulness and alarm in the winter darkness. You push open the door, fearing you’ve come too late, and for a moment you think you see reproach on the exhausted faces that turn to greet you, as if they’d all been devastated by the same illness. I hear names, give kisses, shake hands, exchange words in a low voice; I am the outsider whom they accept because I’ve come with you. Being part of your life, I, too, belong to this place, to the fatigue and sorrow of people who have spent many nights watching over a sick woman and anticipate the mourning for her. There is an eleven- or twelve-year-old child, and a youngish man who must be his father clasps my hand with a warm and vigorous show of welcome. “This is my cousin, the doctor.” Having come here with you binds me to you in a new way, not merely to the adult woman I met not so many years ago but to all your life, to all the faces and places of your childhood, and also to your dead, and to those for whom this house we’ve just come to is a kind of sanctuary. I see a large photograph of your mother and another of your maternal grandparents, remote and solemn as an Etruscan funeral relief, and atop the ancient television, which is probably the same you sat before as a child to watch the cartoons, is the smiling face of your deceased cousin in a color photo.

  I like being nothing more than your shadow here, the person who’s come with you: my husband, you say, introducing me, and I become aware of the value of that word, which is my safe-conduct in this house, among these people who knew you and gave you their affection long before I found you, and when I see how they treat you, the familiarity that is immediate among you despite all the time that’s passed since you last were here, my love for you expands to encompass that fullness, those bonds of tenderness and memory, bonds that also connect with and nourish me, linking me with a past that until now didn’t belong to me, to the photographs of dead relatives unknown to me that were waiting for you with the same loyalty as the worn furniture and whitewashed walls. “How old all this is,” you must be thinking sadly, again with a stab of guilt for having waited so long, for living in a house much more comfortable than this one in which your aunt spent the last years of her life, with the same old television that was here when you liked to flop on the sofa and watch the children’s programs and an electric heater under the table and a supplementary radiator that did little to dissipate the cold rising from the paving stones, as if seeping up through them, the same floor that has been here always, except more worn, where here and there a stone has worked loose and makes a hollow sound when someone steps on it. Everything is simply old, stripped of the beauty with which memory endows things from the past, the plastic-upholstered chairs that were the latest thing when you were a girl, the brown imitation-leather sofa, the plaster Immaculate Conception with the fine, pale face and cloak of celestial blue. What will happen to them after tomorrow, after the burial, when the house is closed, too uncomfortable to be lived in and too costly to renovate? “Probably it will have to be torn down,” someone beside me says, one of your relatives, in that tone people use when speaking of trivial matters in order to break the tedium of a death watch. “It’ll be closed up and fall down piece by piece, like so many other abandoned houses here in town.”

  There is an air of weary insomnia in the house, of waiting for the ponderous arrival of death, which is drawing near on the other side of a half-opened door, the one that separates the living room from the bedroom of the dying woman. “She’s sleeping now,” we are told by the man with the white hair and the pleasant but melancholy expression, your mother and your aunt’s brother, the father of t
he physician and also of your deceased cousin whose photograph sits staring into the monotony of the waiting, a young and very attractive young girl with green eyes and shining chestnut curls and something of you in her features—maybe the strong chin and broad smile, or the cinnamon tone of her skin. In this room that breathes the presence of death, I observe what you do and see and say and maybe feel as you sit here beside me on the sofa, holding my hand but at the same time far away, lost in the invocations of this place, of all these relics of your childhood I am seeing for the first time, talking in a low voice with people who have known you since you were born.

  We never see people who were young adults when we were children exactly as they are today; we superimpose on today’s gray hair and wrinkles the splendor they once radiated in our innocent eyes, the face of the old man, for example, who hugged me when he said hello as if he had known me forever; you still see, beneath the insults of age, the energetic features of your uncle, who looked so much like his sisters, your mother and your dying aunt, the younger brother who now will be the only survivor of the three, the man whose daughter’s death may have turned his hair gray and given him a burden of mourning that is renewed as he awaits death’s arrival again, guarding his sister’s bedroom door, wanting to hear her should she wake from her morphine-induced sleep long enough to know that you’ve come and that she will see you before she dies. “She’s been asking about you all day, whether you called, whether you’re really on the way.”

  Now the doctor, who has been with your aunt, appears in the doorway, and with a gesture signals you to come in. He bends down a little to tell you in a low voice that she’s awake and has just asked for you. I hang back a little, unsure, feeling cowardly about what I will witness if I go through that door, but you pull me with you, holding my hand hard, and your uncle’s large, friendly hand on my shoulder encourages me to follow you. With the same shiver—not of sorrow but in response to a strangeness you cannot absorb—with which twenty years ago you pulled back the plastic curtain around the bed where your mother had just died, you walk into the darkened bedroom, which has the thick fug of old age, illness, and medications, but also the cold of ancient winters, along with some acrid, unhealthy scent that must be the exudation of death, the last secretions and breaths from that body lying on the bed in a stiff fetal position, its volume so reduced that it is barely visible beneath the blankets. Your uncle bends over his sister, brushes back the hair from her face, and pats her cheeks with a tenderness that is much younger than him: perhaps he patted his daughter this way in her cradle. “Look and see who’s come from Madrid,” he whispers.

  The eyelids, bare of lashes, scarcely part, but there is a gleam of pupils in the dark and a rictus that is almost a smile on the swollen lips that dentures have been pushing out as the face shrinks. One hand lifts very slowly toward you, bones and blue veins and ashen skin; it finds your hand, reaches farther, touches your tear-wet face, recognizes it, feeling it as a blind person would. She murmurs your name, using a diminutive I’ve never heard, undoubtedly the name your mother and she gave you when you were little, and sitting on the edge of the bed you put your arms around her, sinking into the odor of sickness you kiss the unrecognizable face, the hard bones of death beneath transparent skin, you call to her quietly, as if wanting to wake her from all this. You will remember all the times you snuggled near her in this same bed as a child, looking for warmth on cruel winter nights, and how again, when you were sixteen, you sought that same solace on the night they buried your mother.

  For the moment I have disappeared, become invisible, blending into the shadow of the corner where I stand, neither guest nor spy, a mute presence from another world and another time. But she, the person I have seen only as she is dying, who seemed to have her eyes closed, has noticed me and motions me forward with a faint gesture of a cadaverous hand, the hand that for you was as warm and reassuring as your mother’s. You smile and look toward me as your aunt tells you something in a hoarse, whispery voice I can scarcely distinguish from the rasp of her breathing. “She says come over here, she wants to see if you are as good-looking as I’ve told her.”

  I walk toward her with respect, at first uncertain and clumsy, like someone moving in the sanctuary of a religion not his own. The slits of her eyelids open a little wider. As I bend down, I peer into a life and eyes that are fading, and my lips brush skin that will be like ice in a few hours or minutes. The face so near my own is that of a stranger already lost in the shadowy land of death, and the hoarse voice is a death rattle, an anguished effort to breathe, in which words, barely formed, fall from pale, dry lips. Your aunt’s hand holds mine for a long moment, and I feel as if I am receiving the affectionate pressure of your mother’s hand from across time and from the other side of death, as if she too were seeing me through your aunt’s last gaze, and as if seeing you with me so many years later will dissipate a part of her sadness and uncertainty about your future in this life in which she is not at your side.

  In the Greek funeral stelae we saw together at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the dead serenely clasp the hands of the living. The hand holding mine is slightly sweaty, and the pressure ceases at the same time the eyelids close. I panic, I’ve never seen anyone die, but when I move back a little, the eyes open weakly, a movement as faint as the voice was, as the smile on lips the same yellowish hue as the face. Her hand drops from mine; the scratch of her voice becomes a moan, and the doctor, who has a hypodermic syringe in his hand, gently moves me aside. “I must give her morphine before the pain gets worse.” But she shakes her head, her thin gray hair stuck to her temples in swirls from having been pressed so long against the pillows. She says no and murmurs something; the doctor leans down to hear. “Cousin, she’s calling you, she says bend over.” She’s using the name no one has called you since you were a baby, and when you are near, she opens her eyes wide, as if to assure herself that it’s really you. She strokes your wet face, and with her other hand she tries to hold both yours, patting and pulling, as if to tell you something or to kiss you. The hand never lets yours go, but after a slight shudder it is no longer squeezing yours, and the open eyes do not see you. She’s left you without your realizing, just as your mother did, slipped away so stealthily that you are stunned death can happen so quietly, like the faintest ripple on the surface of a lake.

  WHO CAN SLEEP THIS NIGHT, in which so much is under way, the prelude to a burial overseen by women trained in the rituals of mourning, in dressing the dead woman before she stiffens, in ordering the coffin and the catafalque on which it will rest, and the candles and large crucifix that for a few hours will lend the somber air of a sanctuary to the house, a place where the cult of the past and death is honored. I hear your soft breathing in the darkness and know you’re not asleep, even though you haven’t spoken for a long time and are lying as still as possible in order not to disturb me. The bed with its cold sheets and the room that smells of mildew and gloom feel strange to me, but must feel stranger to you, who haven’t slept here since the end of your teenage years, the first bed and the first room you slept in alone after you outgrew the crib in your parents’ bedroom, the room where you knew terror and sleeplessness on stormy nights, when rumbling thunder shook the windowpanes and a lightning flash blinded you with its white blaze, where you were afraid to fall asleep and dream of the horror movie your cousin and you saw at the theater that opened in the summer, the two of you huddled beneath the sheets and talking all night long, trading secrets of shameful intimacies, your first period and first boyfriends, slow dancing at the town fiestas with boys who were also summer residents, or in the sinful reddish darkness of the first discotheques you visited, you always tagging along behind your cousin, who introduced you to the giddiness of beer and cigarettes and didn’t seem to recognize any of the limits that held you back—not modesty, not danger. Who could have said then that your destinies would be so different, that she, so like you, born at almost the same time, would slowly disappear into the dark
maze of misfortune? She never made her way out, and it would have been so easy for you to wander into it, not consciously but just drifting, as she did. One year your cousin didn’t come back to spend the summer with her parents and the brother who became a doctor, so serious and docile from the time he was a little boy, always the exact opposite of his sister.

  Green eyes—her father stares at the photograph in silence, as if asking a question whose answer he must await forever. Curly hair, suntanned skin—hair made blond by the summer sun and swimming pool—the still plump cheeks of a teenager, the smile like a declaration of complacency or defiance, and the chin so like yours. She was very thin the last time I saw her, but still pretty, tall, with curls falling into her face and that gleam in her green eyes and the same crazy laugh I remember from the times we set out on some risky adventure. But by then she’d become so pale, and she spoke with a slur I’d never noticed before, and although she was married and had a child, she kept telling me the same kinds of crazy things she had told me when we started going out with boys in the summer. For instance, that she met a man on a train, and within a few minutes they’d locked themselves in the bathroom for a quick fuck. We were in a cafeteria, and she was smoking too much and glancing around, nervous, making a great effort to contain herself. I could see that she enjoyed being with me, but also that she wanted to leave, to get something she needed, something that made her bite her fingernails and chainsmoke, and we both also saw that despite our mutual affection and memories we weren’t alike anymore, we didn’t have things to talk about and just sat there sometimes in silence, then she would turn and look outside or put out a just-lit cigarette in the ashtray, crushing it violently. We agreed that the following summer we’d go back home together, but I couldn’t because I had too much work, and she didn’t go anyway, and I never saw her again. Not until after her parents had lost track of her completely. By the time my doctor cousin learned what hospital she was in, it was too late. An ambulance had picked her up in the street. He told me she was so wasted he could recognize only her green eyes.