There was another witness to everything, I remember now, a large old man with a broad smile and chubby red cheeks, one of those gallant fellows whom age seems to make more compact and sturdy. He always took a slow morning stroll through the neighborhood streets between Chueca and Vazquez de Mella Plazas, looking larger than he really was in his old-fashioned and opulent overcoat and with his singularly small head covered by a Tyrolean hat, complete with a green feather. I always noticed that hat and his enormous shoes, and his perfect complacency toward the world, the way he took levelheaded pleasure from everything around him, sometimes pausing to enjoy the first ray of sun that lit one corner of Chueca Plaza on winter mornings or to contemplate, with interest and approval, the maneuvers of a dump truck in the middle of interrupted traffic or the arrival of the police car or ambulance to pick up someone lying stiff in a doorway. He stopped a moment, observed, then continued his walk, as if the richness of things yet to come on his walk prevented him from staying as long as he would have liked. Satisfied and absorbed, he lifted a finger to his hat brim in greeting to Sandra at her newspaper stand, helped a blind man walk between badly parked cars on the sidewalk, admired the bags of oranges hanging from the stand of a fruit merchant, even devoted a vaguely compassionate glance to the ghosts on the corners, giving equal attention to stern policeman and furtive dealer. The admiring and magnanimous curiosity of the man in the Tyrolean hat was part of the small business activity of the barrio. How strange to meet him every day and suddenly not see him and yet be unaware of his absence. You go away and forget the habits and figures of that little enclave in the heart of Madrid, and years later remember, for no reason, a place, a face, a fragment of a story with no beginning or end, a novel we each carry but never tell anyone. What kind of life did the old woman have who spread her dinner tablecloth over the lid of a garbage can every midnight? Or the young man and woman who came to the barrio looking for heroin and pushing a baby buggy, their child sleeping despite the clatter and jolting, pacifier loose at one side of its half-open mouth, eyes placidly closed? Or, if the child was red and rigid from crying, they didn’t hear it, both focused on the corner where the tranquil shadow they were waiting for would appear at any moment. They must be somewhere around there this very minute, if they’re still alive, and the child, who wasn’t yet two, would be eight or nine by now, and maybe poisoned by the same disease the parents carried in their blood, the disease that has killed so many of the specters of the barrio. The living dead have disappeared from the corners of Augusto Figueroa. A few may survive in hospitals and jails or are dragging themselves like zombies along the footpaths that wind through the open land leading to the tin-and-cardboard shacks on the outskirts of Madrid, where police have been herding them since the order came down to clear the addicts off the city streets. A flower shop in the arcade has replaced the kiosk where Sandra sold her newspapers in slippers and a track suit, or in a flannel bathrobe and knit cap on winter days, and if some mornings she didn’t shave, her eyes were always carefully outlined in the manner of Sara Montiel, her idol.
Other figures drift back from oblivion, the forlorn drunk who brought back our puppy and the tall, slender woman who was with him for a few months and then disappeared.
She was like a model, with Asiatic cheekbones, a large, fleshy mouth, long legs, and a spring to her step as she walked. From the back, or from a distance, you saw a tall figure and long curly hair. Only when she came near did you see her pallor, the cloud over her large eyes, the bruises on her beautiful legs, now too thin, and the black gaps of lost teeth. She went from one end of the barrio to another like a great disoriented bird beating against walls, not knowing how to get out. She lurched along with the stride of a model, still straight-backed, taller than anyone in the barrio, her curls and mannerist neck above figures hunched in councils cooking up schemes or hunched in doorways where the flame of a cigarette lighter heated a square of aluminum foil on which a shot of heroin was turning liquid and smoky. Sometimes she stopped and stood motionless, her body silhouetted against a building, watery eyes gleaming through dirty hair, a drunken, demented smile on her ruined mouth, a cigarette held in her long fingers and smoke seeping from her lips in a photographic pose.
She began sleeping in the entryways of shops and closed bars, where the indigent set up their burrows of rags and cardboard. In winter she wore a tattered jacket of fake fur over the usual T-shirt and light miniskirt. On cold mornings her white face had a violet hue. Her hair was thinning, and her eyes had lost their color. She begged for cigarettes; she would take one in her hand, slowly put it between her lips, and wait for someone to give her a light as well.
Once she asked the barrio drunk for a smoke. He shrugged, grunted, walked on, but that night, when she was shivering in her fake-fur jacket in a doorway on Calle San Marcos, a shadow stopped before her, it was the drunk offering her a cigarette, holding it delicately in his thick, grubby fingers as if it were the stem of a flower. The woman brushed the hair from her face and put the cigarette between lips purple with cold, and the drunk, whom no one had ever seen smoke, lit it, his living-dead face visible in the brief flare.
People in the barrio soon knew what had happened: he had bought the cigarettes and lighter at the same small shop where they stocked his cartons of white wine, and where the next day, contrary to his custom, he bought some custard and chocolate-filled doughnuts. The druggies lived on that kind of food; mixed in with their syringes and scorched sheets of foil were always candy wrappings and empty custard containers.
He began to carry things every night to the doorway where she took shelter, sometimes not waking her in her shivering delirium. He would cover her with his jacket, older than the one she wore, and one night he was seen dragging a filthy, torn comforter down Calle Pelayo, which he must have found in a trash barrel. He began to move with diligence, concentration, like Crusoe on his island preparing a hut or cave in which to spend the winter. During the day he was never far from her, although he didn’t approach her or make himself too visible, watching from a corner where he could duck behind a building. Indifferent to the people passing him, who gave him a wide berth because of his smell, he was focused on the tall, young, skinny woman who walked with a long stride past people and cars or huddled pale in arcades or doorways late at night after no one was left in the dark streets except the most persistent dead, those who at three or four in the morning were still waiting for something.
She probably spoke to him first, asking him imperiously to bring her cigarettes again, or yogurt or doughnuts from the shop where he went when no one else was there and wordlessly laid money on the counter. He always paid and was never seen to beg. The shop owner’s story was that the drunk was the firstborn of a wealthy family in the north, that a tyrannical father threw him out, disinherited him, yet took care to see that his son had what he needed to survive, enough food and clothing to keep him from dying of cold in the streets.
No one will ever know the true story, just as no one knew his name, unless he told the woman with whom little by little he began to share nightly encampments in the most sheltered nooks of the barrio. No one ever saw them walking together, but they must have kept each other warm during the icy nights of that winter. He wrapped her up and protected her, stayed awake to be sure she was covered, constructed her bed of cardboard and newspapers with an expert hand, and then cocooned her in rags and garments scavenged from the trash. You would see a flickering glow in the dark expanse of Vazquez de Mella Plaza: the drunk had started a fire where the tall, skinny woman warmed herself like a sphinx, smoking the cigarettes he brought her and lighted with a quick gesture every time she put one to her lips, and eating the yogurt or custard he bought for her at the same time he bought his cartons of wine.
Now he did turn to begging. He never said anything, just held out his hand, looked at you, made the gesture of putting a cigarette to his mouth. He begged for money and tobacco and seemed to become more aware of other people, no longer in the solitude of
his desert island. He didn’t share the woman’s tobacco or heroin, and there probably was nothing sexual between them, but he did pass her his liters of white wine, which she poured into her wide, fleshy mouth, her eyes gleaming.
You would see them in the shadows like two animals deep in their den, two untouchables who had regressed to the savagery or innocence of an irreparable damnation, so remote from those of us passing by in our overcoats and normalcy, on the way to our new house and warm, stable life. They truly did live in a different world, in one of caves and hollows in the rock where primitive man and castaways found shelter.
After weeks or months, the woman disappeared, and we would have forgotten her fleeting existence had the drunk not stayed in the barrio, subdued and sedentary, again withdrawn into a seamless self-absorption, apparently not seeking in the haunts of the living dead the figure of the tall woman who looked like a model from a distance. But we did not pay that much attention to him, so accustomed were we to his presence, just as we did not follow closely what happened every day in the barrio, our neglect including the man, the woman, and the boy who now went to school by himself, who came out every afternoon with his snack, tugging at the leash of the ungovernable dog that no longer was a puppy.
They too moved away, habitual one day and the next gone forever, and the man on the balcony saw that the apartment across from him was empty again, and witnessed the arrival of other tenants, months or years later, it didn’t matter, because for him life was a slow endurance with little modification. Months or years later, we met a former neighbor who was still living in the barrio. We talked about the days that suddenly had become distant, fading into the sweetness of the past, and the neighbor asked if we remembered the drunk who was always wandering the streets. He told us that the man turned up dead one morning in the Vazquez de Mella Plaza, purple with cold, his beard and eyelashes white with frost, rigid and wrapped in rags like those polar explorers who get lost and go mad in deserts of ice.
scheherazade
I WAS SO NERVOUS as we walked through those gilded salons that my knees were knocking, and I wished I still held the hand of my mother, who was just in front of me, very serious, quiet, like everyone in the group. She was dressed in black for my father and brother, and all the others wore dark suits, very stiff, very formal, some with uniforms and medals, all just as nervous and upset as I although they hid it. The only thing you could hear were footsteps on the marble floor, as if we were walking down the nave of a cathedral, and I beside my mother, as almost always in my life, moved and afraid, with a lump in my throat, looking at her profile because she never turned toward me, so straight, taller and stronger than I was, and proud of being the widow and mother of heroes. My mother would have given me a severe and mocking look if I tried to take her hand as I did when I was little and she took me to a protest march and I held her hand so hard that my fingers hurt because I feared the crowd would get wild and my mother and my father would be separated from me, feared that the guardias would charge, or that the people running away—and the horses we heard whinnying and pawing the ground, ready for their riders to spur them to attack—would crush me. Some soldiers, maybe they were ushers, guided us through the corridors, kept going ahead of us to open the doors, some of which were very tall and gilded, and others as plain as office doors, and every time we went by one my heart squeezed and I thought, now we’re going to see him, and when I’m so close that I can shake his hand I hope I don’t faint or burst into tears like a silly girl. My mother says I have the reactions of a child, although I wasn’t one, far from it, I would be twenty-five in January, and this was December 21, 1949, Stalin’s birthday, and we were going to have the chance to offer him congratulations in the name of our Party and all Spanish workers, with more solemnity than usual because it was his seventieth birthday and there would be a huge party for all Communists and workers around the world. The salon where they took us was large and filled with people, although no voices were raised, only a little for the speeches, and not much even then. I believe we were all equally moved, overwhelmed, I don’t know whether that’s the word, since often I’m going to say something and then after I’ve begun to speak realize I’m saying it in Russian and can’t find the words in Spanish. Chandeliers were switched on, but they didn’t give much light, or maybe there was smoke, or the sky was dark outside even though it was daytime, I remember, and everything was a little foggy. I couldn’t get close to Stalin and didn’t shake his hand, either because my mother motioned to me not to get on line or because someone pushed me back and I ended up in a different group. After all, I was nobody, I’d been allowed to come with our delegation because I begged my mother to take me along; when I had children and grandchildren I wanted to be able to tell them that once in my life I saw Stalin with my own eyes, and really close.
I was so nervous that I didn’t notice much of what was going on, or didn’t understand it, with that dim light and the low voices. But I could see Stalin well; he was seated at the middle of a long table, chatting with someone, very informal, smoking and laughing, and I almost had to pinch myself to believe that I was actually seeing him, the flesh-and-blood man, unmistakable, like a member of my family—he reminded me of the time I was a little girl and saw my father standing among a group of men—but also very different, I don’t know how to explain it; he looked as he did in the pictures we’d seen everywhere forever, and yet he wasn’t much like them, he was older and smaller, and I saw his short legs beneath the table and his crossed boots, and when he laughed, his face filled with wrinkles and his small teeth were chipped, or black from tobacco, and his uniform was a little big on him, but precisely for those reasons I was more moved than I’d expected, and in a different way, because I thought I would be seeing a giant at the peak of his strength but it turned out that Stalin was a tired old man, the way my father was at the end of his life. Fragile even though he’d had the enormous strength it took to rebel against the czar, oversee the birth of socialism, and win the war against the Nazis; you could see that all those years of effort and sacrifice had worn him down, like the years in the mines and in prison wore my father down, and I thought he looked as if he hadn’t slept well, and every so often he’d seem to be somewhere else while someone was talking to him or as he listened to a speech, until I felt sorry for him, for the sickish color of his skin and all those years with no rest, clear back to when he was a boy in the times of the czars and they deported him to Siberia. Later my mother said to me, “You should have seen your face when you were looking at him, your mouth was hanging open, and you’d have thought you were seeing a movie star.” But then something happened as I stared at Stalin, not taking my eyes off him as if no one else were there. I wanted to remember all the details of his face and felt sorry for him, he looked so exhausted, and the uniform jacket on him was so big, then I felt a stab, like an electric shock. Someone was looking at me, coldly, with rage, for my bad manners in staring so openly at Stalin, a small, bald man seated near him, wearing those old-fashioned glasses they call pince-nez, and a bow tie and high celluloid collar that were just as old-fashioned. I turned to ice and still get shivers down my spine when I think it was Beria, but I wasn’t afraid of him because he was the chief of the KGB, it was those eyes, which cut through the space separating us. He was studying me as you would an insect, as if saying, “Who do you think you are to be staring at Stalin like that? How did you get in here?” But there was something beyond that, and I was so stupid in those days that I didn’t realize what it was, although instinctively I felt repelled, the way I did by those men who stared at me when I lived in the girls’ residence and didn’t understand why they breathed so hard and never took their eyes off me and brushed against me in the trolley.
As I’m sitting here, memories come back, and it seems unreal that so many things happened to me, that I was in such faraway places, at the Black Sea and in Siberia and the Arctic Circle, but I’m far from things here too, Madrid is a long way from Moscow. I don’t know Ma
drid as well, I’m afraid to go outside with all those cars and people, afraid of getting lost and not finding my way back, especially since the time I was mugged just outside the front door, thrown to the ground, my purse snatched, and I lay there on the sidewalk screaming, “Thief, thief,” but no one came to help, though now that I think about it, I probably shouted in Russian because of the problem I have with the two languages, speaking in one and thinking in the other. I always dream in Russian, and about things that happened there, or happened many years ago when I was little, before they sent us to the Soviet Union for a few months, they said, and then until the war was over, but the war ended and they didn’t send us home, and soon another war broke out and then it was impossible, it seemed the world was coming to an end. They evacuated us and sent us a long way away, I don’t know how many days we traveled by train, days and weeks, always in the snow, and I thought, I’m getting farther and farther away from Spain, from my mother and father, although I almost didn’t remember them, I even began to feel a little hostile toward them, I’m ashamed to say, because they shouldn’t have let me get on that boat, leaving me alone again, as they did when they went to their union or Party meetings. My brother and I were left alone all night, he crying because he was afraid or hungry and I rocking him in my arms, although I wasn’t much older, such a scared little boy he was and weakly because of our bad diet, but how strong and brave he became later, when at twelve he went out with me to sell the Mundo obrero, the Worker’s World, that was when we still lived in Madrid. He told me, “Don’t be afraid of those fancy young guys, because if they come after us I’ll protect you,” and later, when he was just twenty and a pilot in the Red Army, he came to see me and lifted me off my feet and whirled me around as he hugged me, so handsome in his air-force uniform and the red star on his cap. Then he came to say good-bye because his squadron had been ordered to the Leningrad front, and he never stopped laughing and singing Spanish songs with me, and he inspired all the girls in the school to be nurses for the troops. That night I went with him to the station, and when the train was pulling out he hopped down and hugged and kissed me again, then jumped back on the train and grabbed the handrail as if he were swinging onto a horse, and he waved goodbye with his cap in his hand, and I never saw him again. That’s the strangest thing about life, something I can’t get used to, that you have someone you’re close to and who’s always been there, and a minute later he disappears and it’s as if he never existed. But I know my brother died a hero, that he kept attacking the Germans when his plane had one engine on fire, crashing it into the enemy artillery, a hero of the Soviet Union, and his photo was published in Pravda looking as handsome as a movie star. I sit here thinking about him, the memory comes without my doing anything, as if I opened the door and my brother calmly walked in, with that smile and poise of his, I see him before me in his pilot’s jacket and imagine we’re talking and remembering things. I tell him everything that’s happened to me since his death more than fifty years ago, how the world has changed, how everything we fought for has been lost, everything that he and so many like him gave their lives for, but he never loses his good humor, he scratches his head beneath the cap, pats my knee, and says, “Here, now, woman, don’t go on so.” Sometimes I’m awake and see him standing before me as clearly as in my dreams, but strangest of all is not that he’s come back or that he’s still a boy of twenty, but that he speaks to me in Russian, so fast and perfect and without an accent, because Russian was really hard for him, worse than for me at the beginning, when people spoke to me and I didn’t understand, and not understanding was worse than being cold or hungry. Now it’s the other way around, sometimes I don’t understand Spanish, and I can’t get used to how people speak, so loud and curt, as if they were always in a hurry or angry, like the man the day I was mugged, who helped me get up and stand because I was in pain, thinking, “What if my hip is broken? What if they have to put my leg in a cast and then I can’t go out? Who will come help me?” The man said, “Damn it to hell, señora, I’ll go with you to the station to file a complaint, because we need to crack down on those bastards, it had to be one of those goddamned moros who hang around here.” I thanked him but kept my dignity and said, “No, señor, it wasn’t a moro who attacked me, he was white as snow, and besides, you shouldn’t call them moros, they’re not Moors, they’re Moroccans, and as for the complaint, that will have to wait, because the important thing to me right now is to get to the protest: this is May Day.” The man looked at me as if I were crazy, “Well that’s up to you, señora, whatever you say,” and I thanked him and went on to the protest, limping, but I went, and when it was over, some comrades took me to the police station in their car and I filed the complaint, but I’m not one to miss a May Day, even though it’s not the same anymore, each time fewer people come and it’s all so watered down, there’s just a few red flags and raised fists, and not even those marching in the front, right behind the banner, know the Internationale.
Sepharad Page 24