Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Our friendship itself was routine and habit: meeting every morning at the same place, walking to a café, hands in our pockets and newspaper tucked under one arm, talking with no obligation to say anything new or too confidential. We were both crushed by the same docility and indolence, shyness or cowardice or lack of drive. Our friendship was surely based on that dismal reality, and it cost us nothing to share the irony with which we viewed the mediocrity of our lives and the deterioration of our ambitions. Each saw in the other the mirror of his insufficiency. We were united by the person neither of us dared to be. With identical correctness, we carried out our duties as employees, husbands, and fathers, rarely dropping the neutral sarcasm of our conversations for a true complaint. Many mornings during our walk to breakfast, Juan dropped a letter in the box at the post office located in the arcade of Calle Ganivet. Like everyone absorbed in his own melancholy, I was not too observant then. I had some vague idea that those letters were office business, until I noticed one that had a stamp for foreign mail. Juan gave no indication that he was trying to hide them from me, but there was something in his attitude that kept me from asking about them. Once, when we were having breakfast at the Suizo, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, leaving his newspaper behind on the bar. I picked it up, and two letters slipped out. One of them was from New York, addressed to him, but at his home address, not his office. The other letter he had written, and it bore the name of the woman who had written him from New York. In a couple of seconds I put the letters back inside the folded newspaper, and when Juan returned I said nothing but thought, with a certain desolation, that in my friend’s life, which I’d thought was an open book, there was a part he chose not to reveal.

  COMING OUT OF THE small lane where the Club Taurino used to be, we sometimes ran into our friend and office mate Gregorio Puga, who also worked as acting associate director of the city band, after having lost a much more prestigious job in the band of another city, and who even at that early hour was always a little drunk, smelling of stale alcohol and nicotine despite the coffee beans he sucked. Gregorio was the first friend I made when I started working, maybe because everyone had given up on him and he had to latch onto new employees when he wanted company at breakfast or for having a few beers or glasses of wine in the little hideaway taverns in the centro. It was said that were it not for his fondness for drink he would have been a major composer and conductor. He had a different version of his failure, which he would deliver with the whining monotony of a drunk: people had pushed him over the edge, they’d made him give up his promising career, begun under the best auspices in Vienna, and all in exchange for what, a pittance, the petty security of a steady job. He would sit with his elbows propped on the bar, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, held between the yellow tips of his second and third fingers, the languid, soft fingers of an old office worker, although I don’t think that he was more than forty-five at the time.

  “They bait you with the promise of security, and you get used to the money coming in every month, and then you don’t have the will to keep studying, even less when your wife burdens you right off with kids and is always going on about how you’re useless and why don’t you stop all this foolishness and dreaming and do something to get ahead in the office or go out and look for a job in the evening. At first you don’t, of course, your evenings are sacred, you have to keep writing, rehearsing with other musicians until you get out of them what not even they know they have inside, and you want to direct an orchestra, not a city band, that was my life’s dream, but you get depressed, and besides it’s true, you need money, so you agree to give private classes, or you get a place in a school, and before you get paid at the end of the month you’ve already spent or budgeted the money, it’s clothes for the kids, and books and uniforms for school, because of course we had to take them to a Catholic school. Midafternoon you leave the office, and because you dread going home you stop for a couple of glasses of wine, you get a bite of something and go to your evening job, and when that’s over, well, it’s the same: Gregorio, let’s go have a drink. At first you say no, then all right, just one rum and that’s all, the old lady will be pissed if she hasn’t seen the whites of my eyes by dinnertime, so you have two rums and one for the road or to help you face the uproar you know is waiting at home, and you forget to look at the clock and when you go outside to the Plaza del Carmen, it’s striking eleven and there’s hell to pay. I’ll buy some cigarettes and pull myself together, but you don’t have coins to put in the machine, and you’re too tired to ask for change for a bill, so you ask for a glass of wine, and maybe if you’re lucky you run into a friend who’s alone at the bar, and he treats you to the next one, or it’s the waiter who invites you, because all his life he’s been seeing you come in and out, he’s served you the coffee, or coffee and cognac, at dawn, the rums for an aperitif, and coffee and drinks after dinner—though in all honesty you haven’t eaten, just nibbled to fill your stomach.”

  I remember Gregorio with affection and pain, Maestro Puga, whom I haven’t seen for several years now, and I wonder if he’s still making the rounds of the bars in the centro where the office workers go, whether he’s still alive and clinging to the dream of a symphony premiere, elbows on the bar, wearing his suit that is getting more and more frayed and dirty, a cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers, a glass of wine held loosely in the other hand, and maybe a coffee bean sucked in a mouth now missing a few teeth. Some mornings Juan and I met him as we turned a corner and didn’t have time to avoid him, so we had to stand and listen to his whining and persistent invitations to come have a drink, just a quick cognac or anisette in the few minutes left of the half hour allotted for breakfast. When I was less cautious, I agreed to have a rum with him after work, and didn’t get away until eleven, ending up so drunk that the next morning I didn’t remember anything we talked about all those hours. I remember only one thing, and I’ve never forgotten it, because since then Gregorio has repeated it many times, grabbing my arm, pulling me toward him, enveloping me in a cloud of stale wine and black tobacco as he pierces me with those reddened eyes and says:

  “Don’t get stuck in this rut, don’t let what happened to me happen to you, get out while you can, don’t cave in, don’t let yourself be bought.”

  I avoided Gregorio, as everyone did, because he was a bore and a drunk, and even if you were fond of him you couldn’t take his bad breath or the tedium of his increasingly disjointed stories, his detailed account of the intrigues and tricks he was victim of in the office, or about the city band, where another man with fewer qualifications but more connections had been named director. But I also avoided him because I was ashamed to have him see the fulfillment of his prophecy about me: the years went by, and I went to work every morning punctually at eight o’clock, I had obligations now, was married with a child and making payments every month on a car and an apartment, and although my wife earned more than I did, the money didn’t always stretch to the end of the month, so I was considering looking for a second job. In this way I’d gradually given up all the plans that seemed so courageous when I started working: preparing myself for a better career, say, university professor, or researcher in art history, or even geography teacher in some institute. But I didn’t have the time or the will, and my free evenings got away from me without my noticing, and besides there were only a few openings every year for a history professor and thousands of university graduates, many of whom I’d gone to school with and who were desperate after years of being unemployed, and looked with envy at even a job as unappealing as mine. I would occasionally meet Gregorio in the corridor, each of us carrying a briefcase loaded with files, or I would see him at a corner of the alleys dotted with bars where office workers escaped at midmorning for a quick coffee, but my repugnance for his bad breath and shabby air was more powerful than any gratitude I felt for his friendship. I would look away, or slip through a side door to escape his red eyes, not wanting to hear again what I knew he would say: “What
are you doing? Why haven’t you got out of here? How many more years are you going to take it?”

  ONCE IN A WHILE I did go somewhere, but only for a few days; they would send me to Madrid to get papers signed in a ministry or to place an order for supplies I was charged with inspecting. The trips were brief, the per diem insufficient, and my low rank limited me to moderately priced hotels and meals in modest restaurants, yet the anticipated departure acted as a stimulant, pulling me toward the future like a giant magnet, giving me back the childish happiness of looking forward to an outing.

  Several days before the train pulled out of the station, I had already left in my mind. The night express with its blue sleeping cars that reminded me of the Orient Express would be sitting there when I arrived with my suitcase a little before 11 P.M., filled with the heady relief of being alone, of having temporarily freed myself from the oppressive sameness of office and home, from the schedules and scares and bad nights that go with having a very young son. The preparations for this short trip contained all the excitement of a real journey, of any one of the journeys I’d read about in books or seen at the movies or imagined for myself as I studied maps and glossy guidebooks. In the midst of such a low-key, shallow life, the trip was an almost physical pleasure, a sensation of freedom and lightness, as if leaving the station would free me from all the obligations and habits that weighed me down. With the slam of the door of the taxi that would take me to the station, my old identity would be entirely sloughed off.

  Since I was going somewhere, I wasn’t myself; I luxuriated in the intoxication of being no one. I dissolved into the moments I was living, into the pleasure of being borne away by the train and looking out the window of my compartment at the lights of highways and cities, cheerful windows where stay-at-homes lived, at that hour watching television or going to bed in miserably hot bedrooms beneath a suffocating conjugal blanket, the “watered-down coffee of married life” referred to by Cernuda, a poet I was reading a lot at the time, his disciple and apprentice in the bitterness of the distance between reality and desire.

  Those trips were so rare that the administrative monotony of the tasks I had to perform at my destinations didn’t affect my intense and childish sense of adventure. But I traveled seldom not only because so few opportunities presented themselves. Sometimes I sacrificed a trip in order not to upset my wife, who didn’t like my being away from home, and who was exhausted from her own job and from caring for our child and didn’t always want to understand that my stays in Madrid weren’t some capricious escapade but required by my administrative position and that carrying them out well could be to my advantage when eventually it came time for promotion.

  Whenever I agreed to go, I had difficulty telling my wife, I would keep putting it off, until in the end I was forced to break the news with insensitive haste, or, worse, she would get wind of it from someone who called from the office or the travel agency that handled the ticketing. I didn’t have to be unfaithful, my natural state was guilt, and the innocuous secret of the upcoming business trip would be as much of a strain on me as an actual affair. I helped weave the entangling web of reproaches and resentment with my cowardice. And up to the last minute I was never sure I was going, because our son might get a fever, or my wife might suddenly be under the weather with a lumbago attack or a difficult period, complaints it seemed I was entirely responsible for, and that would become much worse in my absence, my desertion.

  Finally I would leave and still couldn’t believe it, and as the taxi took me to the station I would get a rush of happiness mixed with panic, the fear that I might not get to the station on time because the road was blocked, or because I’d waited too long disentangling myself from my family and my life, from the stifling conjugal heat of my apartment, from the irritation and accusation radiating from my wife as she stood with her arms around my son, who would cry even harder when he saw I was leaving; the two of them would be there in the doorway as I waited for the elevator, and my wife’s face would be pale, her eyes sad.

  ONE WINTER MORNING, on one of those trips to Madrid, I finished my errands at the Ministry of Culture early and found myself with nothing to do for the rest of the day. My train didn’t leave until eleven that night. Disappointment was quick to come in Madrid, a vulnerable feeling of being alone in such a big city, where I didn’t know anyone, where there was uncertainty and danger everywhere. When you crossed one of those broad avenues, the light always turned red before you could get to the other side, and when you went to a movie at night, you ended up in a labyrinth of dark streets where you could easily be attacked by someone with a knife, one of those pasty drug addicts who loitered on the corner of the Gran Vía and Calle Hortaleza. I was dazed with loneliness, not because I didn’t know anyone anymore, but because I was a nobody, a lowly provincial official who was pulling back into his shell like a snail only three days after fleeing in search of greener pastures and richer air, wandering in circles around the city, carrying his depression with him as if it were a fever that made him long for the shelter of his home and the familiar narrow streets in which he lived his life.

  Walking around in a dense fog with no idea of where I was, I ended up at the Retiro, crossing streets that seemed not to be in Madrid, not even Spain, streets with noble buildings and luxuriant trees, the blacktop wet with drizzle, the sidewalks yellow with the newly fallen, broad leaves of plane trees and horse chestnuts. The Prado Museum, the Botanical Garden, the Cuesta de Moyano. At the peak of a wooded hill was a building that resembles a Greek temple: the Observatory. Things opened before me as I approached them through the fog: motionless statues, threatening or serene, a statue of Pio Baroja or Cajal or Galdos, alone in the groves of the deserted park, lost and melancholy in an ostentatious oblivion of bronzes and marbles.

  I remember my amazement at the sight of a glass building on the other side of a pond, with columns and filigree of white-painted iron, a white liquefied in the translucent grayness of the morning mist, in the motionless, dark green of the water. I had read in the newspaper that there was an exhibition dedicated to the exile of Spanish Republicans in Mexico in the Crystal Palace of the Retiro. It all comes back, after so many years, an ordinary day of an uneventful trip to Madrid, a walk that by chance led to the Retiro, where amid fog and trees I came upon the Crystal Palace, like one of those enchanted houses that materialize before lost travelers in storybook forests.

  I remember glass display cases with newspaper clippings and ration cards, TV monitors showing old films of soldiers wrapped in rags fleeing along the highways toward France, clustered at the border crossings at Port-Bou and Cerbère after the fall of Catalonia. I remember a blackboard and a desk that had been in the first school for Spanish children in Mexico, and a navy-blue student smock with a white celluloid collar, which shook me with unexpected anguish, as did the pages of penmanship exercises written in pencil by children forty years before, and the boxes of paints identical to ones I’d had in school. The smock, too, was very similar to those we wore, and there were the same creased, colored oilcloth maps of Spain that I saw the first time I walked into a schoolroom, except that on these the flag was tricolor: red, yellow, and purple. There was a large photograph of people crowding onto a steamship in a French port. A woman of about fifty was standing next to me, staring at it, murmuring something in a Mexican accent, although there was no one with her. She was breathing hard; I looked at her and saw that she was crying.

  “I was on that boat, señor,” she said, hiccuping. She had large eyeglasses and dyed hair and was the only person besides me that morning in the glass building enveloped in fog, as if padded with silence. “I am one of the persons in this picture. I was eight and trembling, afraid my papa would let go of my hand.”

  NOW I AM IN A different past, a different morning, not the one in which I walked through the Retiro and fog to the weightless shape of the Crystal Palace, the beautiful and melancholy purple of Republican flags on the shelves of an exhibition, insignia of a country I
had lost before I was born. I leave the Ministry of Culture on Plaza del Rey and start walking aimlessly, disheartened before I begin by the hours ahead, in which I have nothing to do and no one to talk to, hours in which I will slowly become infected with the unreality of being alone in a large, unfamiliar city, of turning into a ghost that from time to time stares back at a stranger reflected in a shopwindow. I look at my watch and calculate that at this hour my friend Juan will be finishing breakfast, reading his newspaper in the Suizo, or maybe he will already have used the pedestrian crosswalk to the post office to mail one of those letters he doesn’t want me to know about. Instead of walking back toward the office beside him, both of us dragging our feet, I am wandering around Madrid, leaving to chance the route and choice of streets, and after half an hour I am totally lost, or maybe I’ve let myself be guided by an old memory independent of my consciousness, rising from the blind and persistent impulse of my feet. On a certain street there is a certain heavy door, says one of Borges’s poems. I walk along streets with narrow sidewalks and recessed doors, with fish markets and fruit stands and old-fashioned stationery shops and stores selling groceries and notions more antiquated than the ones in the city where I live, with a pullulating mass of cars and people and the strong, working-class voices of Madrid. Remembering, drifting, I head toward a place I shouldn’t go, a place I visited only once: Fernando VI, Argensola, Campoamor, Santa Teresa. At some moment, unknowingly, chance has become purpose, and the sequence the street names trace upon the city in which I am a stranger is a coded map, a wound that hasn’t hurt for a long time but can still be felt as a slight scar.