Paintings, in any museum, portray the powerful and the holy, people puffed up with self-importance or crazed by saintliness or by the torment of martyrdom, but that child doesn’t represent anything, she isn’t the young Virgin or a princess or the daughter of a duke, she’s just herself, a solitary little girl with a serious, sweet expression, as if lost in a daydream or some moment of childish unhappiness. She’s lost, too, in that place, in the pretentious and somewhat shabby halls of the Hispanic Society, like an enchanted child in a storybook palace where time hasn’t moved for a hundred years. She has a frank and at the same time timid gaze, and those dark eyes look straight into mine as I write this, although now I am very far from her and that cloudy day in New York, on the eve of our departure. Only a few months have gone by, and my memories are still clear and strong, but if I think hard about those hours in the Hispanic Society, about the face of the little girl in the Velazquez painting, about the voice and fiery eyes of the woman who never told us her name, everything has the shimmer, the fragility, of something you are not sure really happened. I have kept proof, material evidence, the stub from the bus that carried us there, the postcards we bought in that gift shop, where you can still find black-and-white postcards from a century ago, and guides and catalogs of publications that would be at home on the counters of those bargain bookshops where they sell the most dog-eared and maltreated publications. But this modest shop reminded me a little of a humble state shop in Spain—in contrast to the shops in other New York museums, those spectacular supermarkets of luxury. They occupy enormous rooms lined with large, dark wood counters like shelves of an enormous early-twentieth-century fabric showroom, or like the gigantic wardrobes you see in the sacristies of cathedrals for holding liturgical garments. This museum shop occupies one dreary corner of the hall and a section of the counter where an elderly woman sits, looking for all the world as if she will bring out her knitting at any moment, as soon as these two strange visitors who are thumbing through a collection of faded postcards leave.
Every wall, from floor to ceiling, is covered with enormous paintings, or by a single painting as if in a baroque delirium. Here is a jumble of encyclopedia illustrations representing every regional folk costume, the traditional occupations and dances and geographies of Spain, all the gems of folkloric Romanticism diligently painted by Joaquín Sorolla, like a Sistine Chapel consecrated to the glory of Mr. Huntington’s Hispanic passion, celebrating in broad, colorful brush strokes every racial type, every dusty costume closet or ancestral headwear or anthropological peculiarity: Andalusian horsemen in their wide-brimmed hats, Basque villagers in their berets, Catalans in their typical caps and espadrilles, Castilians with furrowed, sunburned faces, Aragonese with red kerchiefs tied around their necks dancing jotas, along with orange groves and olive trees, and Cantabrian waters where the fishermen of the north ply their trade, Gallegan granaries and the windmills of La Mancha, Andalusian Gypsies in their tiered, ruffled skirts and Valencian women in stiffly starched skirts and necklaces and with hairdos rigid as those of the ancient stone sculptures of the Damas Ibéricas, lush gardens and high, windswept plains, the violet skies of El Greco and the mellow, clear light of the Mediterranean, paintings by the square yard, a profusion of faces like masks and clothing like disguises that have all the vertiginous animation of a Carnival ball and also the grinding meticulousness of a catalog or rule book, each district with its folkloric characteristics and particular dress, along with its eternal customs and regional landscape, each individual categorized by origins and place of birth like birds or insects in their zoological taxonomy.
I HAVE BEFORE ME NOW, in my study, beside the keyboard of my computer and the white, polished shell that Arturo found two summers ago on the beach at Zahara, one of the postcards we bought in the Hispanic Society gift shop, the portrait of that dark-haired, delicate, solitary girl painted against a gray background. She looks at me today as she did that day on the eve of our return trip, when we went to see her for the last time before leaving the museum, when we were not quite present in New York though it was still twenty-four hours before our flight to Madrid. Time was disintegrating in our hands with the flimsiness of burned paper, pages of ash, anxious minutes and hours, like the agitated and fleeting time of clandestine lovers who know that the countdown to their separation has begun almost as soon as they see each other. When you invent, you have the vain belief that you are controlling places, things, the people you write about. In my study, beneath the lamp that lights my hands and the keypad, the mouse, the shell whose grooves I love to stroke, the postcard of the Velazquez girl, I can entertain the illusion that nothing I invent or remember exists outside me, beyond this reduced space. But the places are there even though I am not and even though I will not go back, and the other lives I have lived, and the men I was before I became who I am with you, may endure in the memory of others, and at this very moment, six hours and six thousand kilometers away from this painting, the girl who watches me from the pale reproduction of a postcard is showing the hint of a smile on a real and tangible canvas painted by Velazquez around 1640, taken to New York around 1900 by an American multimillionaire, and hung in semidarkness in a large room of a museum that few people visit. Who knows whether right now, when it is 2:40 P.M. in New York and here near nightfall at the end of a December day, someone is looking at that girl’s face, someone who notices or recognizes in her dark eyes the melancholy of a long exile?
Author’s Note
I HAVE INVENTED very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book. Some of them I was told and have carried in my memory for a long time. Others I found in books. I discovered Willi Münzenberg while reading Stephen Koch’s El fin de la inocencia (The End of Innocence), and I followed his trail in The Passing of an Illusion by François Furet, a book as admirable as its title, and in the second volume of the memoirs of Arthur Koestler, Invisible Writing, and in a surprising number of Internet pages. I saw the beautiful name of Milena Jesenska for the first time in the amazing Cartas a Milena (Letters to Milena) by Franz Kafka, in an Alianza paperback that has been with me for a long time. It was that single name in the title of a book, Milena, that led me to discover its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, whom I found a few references to in Koch and in Furet, as a kind of minor character in a footnote. The two volumes of her autobiography, the French version of which I tracked down in the Seuil catalogue—Déportée en Sibérie, Déportée ä Ravensbrück—was quickly sent to me from Paris by my editor Annie Morvan. It is curious that in this dark affair of the hells created by Nazism and Communism there are so many testimonies by women: they have been vital to me; among them are Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam and especially Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, whose name I read for the first time in an extraordinary book by Tsvetan Todorov that I discovered in English translation, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. I learned a great deal from Todorov by reading El hombre desterrado. I read extensively on the situation of the Jews in Spain in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, the tendentious and colossal study by Benzion Netanyahu, and from the much briefer and also more balanced classic by Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, not forgetting a book that to me seems extraordinary despite its extreme concision, Historia de una tragedia by Joseph Perez. My friend Emilio Lledó has read the extensive diaries of Professor Victor Klemperer in the original German: I know only the English two-volume version published under the title I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years. It is sad to think that books of such depth are virtually inaccessible to readers in Spanish.
It is questionable whether this book would have occurred to me or that I would have found the state of mind necessary to write it without two of the most decisive writers in my education during recent years. I am referring to Jean Améry and Primo Levi. I discovered Améry’s book about Auschwitz by accident, and without previous knowledge of its existence, in a bookstore in Paris in 1995. It was published und
er the title Par delà de la crime et le châtiment, and I have no indication that any Spanish publisher is interested in it. Thanks to Mario Muchnick, however, the Spanish reader has access to the great trilogy of Primo Levi: If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved. What one learns in these three volumes about human beings and the history of Europe in the twentieth century is terrible but instructive, and I don’t think it is possible for anyone to develop a full political awareness of the Holocaust or Holocaust literature without reading them.
There are other books, but the ones I have named are those that nourished me most fully as I wrote Sepharad. I have also tried to listen to many voices: among them I must name, with gratitude and emotion, those of Francisco Ayala and José Luis Pinillos; the resonant and jovial voice of Amaya Ibârruri, who one winter afternoon invited me to have coffee and told me some episodes in the extraordinary novel of her life; that of Adriana Seligmann, who told me about her grandfather’s nightmares in German; and that of Tina Palomino, who came to my home one afternoon when I thought I had finished this book and made me realize, listening to the story that she, unknowingly, was giving me, that there is always one more thing that deserves to be told.
1
SURROUNDED BY the confusion in Pennsylvania Station, Ignacio Abel stopped when he heard someone call his name. I see him first at a distance in the rush-hour crowd, a male figure identical to all the others, as in a photograph of the time, dwarfed by the immense scale of the architecture: light topcoats, raincoats, hats; women’s hats, the brims at a slant and small feathers on the sides; the red visored caps of porters and railroad employees; faces blurred in the distance; coats open, the coattails flying backward because of an energetic pace; human currents that intersect but never collide, each man and woman a figure similar to the rest and yet endowed with an identity as undeniable as the unique trajectory each follows to a specific destination—directional arrows, blackboards displaying the names of places and the hours of departure and arrival, metal stairs that resound and tremble beneath a gallop of footsteps, clocks hanging from iron arches or crowning the large vertical calendars that are visible from across the station. It was necessary to know it all precisely: the letters and numbers bright red like the caps of station porters that day in late October 1936. On the illuminated sphere of each of the clocks, hanging like captive globes high above the heads of the crowd, it is ten minutes to four. At that moment Ignacio Abel moves through the lobby of the station, through the great expanse of marble, high iron arches, and dirty glass vaults filtering a golden light where all the dust floats alongside the clamor of voices and footsteps.
I saw him with increasing clarity, emerging out of nowhere, almost a figment of my imagination, holding his suitcase, tired after dashing up the staircase at the entrance, through the oblique shadows of the marble columns, and into that enormous space where he might not find his way in time. I distinguished him from the others, with whom he almost merges, a dark suit, an identical raincoat, a hat, clothes perhaps too formal for this city and this time of year, European clothes, like the suitcase he carries, solid and expensive, its leather worn after so much traveling, covered by hotel and steamship-company stickers, the remains of chalk marks and customs stamps, a suitcase that weighs a great deal for his hand, aching from gripping the handle so hard. With the precision of a police report and a dream, I discover the actual details. I see them rise in front of me and crystallize at the very moment Ignacio Abel stops in the powerful currents of the crowd and turns, as if he had heard his name: someone must have seen him and shouted his name in order to be heard over the clamor, amplified by the marble walls and iron vaults, the resounding confusion of footsteps, voices, trains, the vibration of the floor, the metallic echoes of the loudspeaker announcements, the shouts of newsboys yelling the afternoon news. I feel through his mind just as I feel through his pockets or the inside of his suitcase. Ignacio Abel looks at the front pages of newspapers expecting and fearing to see a headline in which the word “Spain” appears, the word “war,” the word “Madrid.” And he looks at the face of every woman of a specific age and height, foolishly hoping that chance will allow him to see his lost lover, Judith Biely. In the lobbies and on the platforms of train stations, in the sheds of port installations, on the sidewalks of Paris and New York, for the past few weeks he has crossed entire forests of unknown faces that continue to multiply in his imagination when sleep begins to weigh down his eyes. Faces and voices, names, phrases in English that he hears at random and that remain hanging in air like streamers. I told you we were late but you never listen to me and now we’re gonna miss that goddam train. The voice also seemed to be speaking to him, so hesitant in his practical decisions, so awkward with people, holding his suitcase, in his worn European suit, vaguely funereal, like the suit of his friend Professor Rossman when he first appeared in Madrid. In his overstuffed wallet Ignacio Abel carries a picture of Judith Biely and another of his children, Lita and Miguel, smiling on a Sunday morning a few months earlier—the two broken halves of his life, once incompatible, both lost now. He knows if you look at photographs too many times they no longer invoke a presence. The faces let go of their singularity, just as an article of intimate clothing treasured by a lover soon loses the intensely desirable scent of the one who wore it. In the police-file photos in Madrid the faces of the dead, the murdered, have been so severely disfigured that not even their closest relatives can identify them. What will his children see now if they look through the family albums, so carefully catalogued by their mother, for the face they have not seen for the past three months and don’t know if they will see again, the one no longer identical to the face they remember? The father who fled, they will be told, the deserter, the one who chose to go to the other side, to take a train one Sunday afternoon and pretend nothing had happened, that he would return calmly to their summer house the following Saturday (though if he had stayed, it’s very likely he’d be dead now). I see him, tall, foreign, thin by comparison with his passport photo, taken only at the beginning of June and yet at another time, before the bloody, deluded summer in Madrid and the beginning of the journey that perhaps will end in a few hours; his movements are hesitant, frightened among all those people who know their exact destinations and advance toward him with an unyielding energy, a powerful determination of husky shoulders, raised chins, flexible knees. He has heard an improbable voice speak his name, but as soon as he turns he knows no one called him, and yet he looks with that same automatic hope, seeing only the irritated faces of people now delayed, enormous men with light eyes and inflamed faces, chewing on cigars. Don’t you have eyes in your head, you moron? In the hostility of strangers, eyes never play a part. In Madrid right now, looking away from a stare is one of the new strategies for survival. You better not seem afraid or you’ll automatically become suspect. The voice actually heard or only imagined in a kind of acoustical mirage has produced in him the response of a man about to fall asleep who thinks he has tripped on a step and either wakes startled or sinks back into sleep. But he knows he has heard his name with absolute clarity, not shouted by someone who wants to attract his attention in the noisy crowd but softly, almost a murmur, Ignacio, Ignacio Abel, a familiar voice he can’t identify but is on the verge of recognizing. He doesn’t even know whether it’s the voice of a man or a woman, the voice of someone dead or alive. On the other side of his locked door in Madrid, he heard a voice repeating his name in a hoarse, pleading tone. There he stood in silence, holding his breath, not moving in the dark, not opening the door.
In recent months you can no longer be sure about certain things, can’t know whether a friend, seen a few days or only hours ago, is still alive. Once death and life had clearer, more precise boundaries. You send letters and postcards and don’t know whether they’ll reach their destination, and if they do, whether the one who should have received them is alive or still at that address. You dial the telephone and there’s no answer, or the voice at the other end belongs to a s
tranger. You pick up the receiver to speak with someone or get information and the line is dead. You turn on the faucet and water may not come out. The customary, automatic actions are canceled by uncertainty. Ordinary streets in Madrid abruptly end in a barricade or a trench or a heap of rubble left by an exploded bomb. On the sidewalk, turning a corner, you can see in the first light of day a rigid body pushed against a building that served as a blank wall for a firing squad the night before, the half-closed eyes, the yellowed face, the upper lip contracted into a smile that reveals teeth, the top of the head blown off by a shot fired from a few inches away. The phone rings in the middle of the night and you’re afraid to pick up the receiver. You hear the elevator motor or the doorbell in your sleep and can’t tell whether it’s a real threat or only a nightmare. So far from Madrid yet Ignacio Abel still thinks of those fearful nights and months of insomnia, fearful nights in the present tense. Distance doesn’t cancel the verbal tense of fear. In the hotel room where he has spent four nights, the deafening noise of enemy planes woke him; he opened his eyes and it was the rattle of an elevated train. The voices continue to reach him: who has called his name just now, as I saw him standing motionless in his open raincoat, holding his suitcase, wearing the anxious expression of someone who looks at clocks and signs afraid he’ll miss a train; what absent voice imposed itself above the uproar of real life, calling him, Ignacio, Ignacio Abel, urging him to run faster or to stop and turn around and go back?
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