“Who is at home now? Who runs through the halls created by our footsteps?”
“Other children who will fly one day from those lands that don’t support humans. They will fly with a broken dream, a toy never taken out of its box, and will always look like a tourist.”
“I saw you one day in Madrid looking like that, in a corner, and it scared me because I was seeing myself, and you looked to the other side, as if the answer were in the other corner.”
“Give me your hand, give it to me, let’s walk together. Two one-armed people, one right hand and one left hand. Only together can we applaud our long journey.”
Tenth Chapter
And why the Mediterranean couldn’t be the same without my gaze.
Raquel tells me she likes the sea. And she asks me what I like. I like the sea, and I like the word for sea in Spanish, ‘mar’, because it is both feminine and masculine. It’s feminine when the waves go out and masculine when the same waves penetrate the shore. Sometimes they caress each other and sometimes they hit each other. And I ask her what she does in Madrid when she feels the need to see the sea, and she tells me she looks at the sky, because the sky in Madrid is a maritime sky. And I dream about strolling around Madrid with Raquel. I want to see the city through her eyes, and have her guide me through its narrow streets and to it’s main street, Gran Vía. I want to see where she stops and at what cafe she drinks her coffee and where she buys book and music and which painting she likes at which museum.
But what I like are words. There are words I like a lot, and others less so. Take the Spanish word ensimismado, for example, roughly meaning absorbed, lost in thought or daydreaming. I love the word ensimismado because it is untranslatable, and on top of that, I see its meaning in its letters, en-si-misma-do. It reminds me of the word Bohu in Hebrew, which describes the Chaos, the chaos of the Creation. But there is something of ensimismado to it, it means the chaos going inwards. Bohu in Hebrew means “he is inside”, which is different than Tohu, the chaos you see going outwards. It’s worse, nothing like ensimismado. I can already see the face of that poor translator, trying to translate this passage into English, French or Hebrew. I’m sorry, I just like the word ensimismado way too much.
There are other words in Haketia, like Ketbear, Hhokear, or Selkear, all verbs that take a Hebrew root and with the flick of a magic wand turn into Spanish verbs.
Every time I need the sea, I get on the bus and go to Tel Aviv. There I feel regenerated and imagine I can see a little bit of the opposite shoreline, the one belonging to Morocco, where I swam for the first time. Like a mother tongue, a mother sea, it will always be the sea against which all others must be compared.
I would like to take Raquel’s hand and lead her down all the shores where I’ve gotten my feet wet. I would start with Turkey, around Antalya. It was winter and I remember one morning when I woke up really early and saw a very thin woman come out of the sea. Fifty degrees out and her in the sea, she was probably coming from the North Pole. Then we would continue on to Rhodes, where I drank very good espressos and bought umbrellas as gifts for all my family, because on Rhodes there are only umbrella shops. Then Crete, an immense island with waitresses in terrible moods. From there we could go to Rome, a humid city that gave me an asthma attack, and then to Nice, and the phone they gave me from a distant cousin who told me he didn’t know my father. Then Marseilles, the last stop before getting on the plane to Israel in 1972. From there we would reach Perpignan, where I stopped to get a visa to go to Madrid in 1982, the last time I was in Madrid. And then Barcelona, my lady always smiling. From there we would go to Mallorca, my last trip with the whole family, kids, my brother, my mother. And from there to Malaga, where I couldn’t control myself and ate calamari, which isn’t kosher. I can live fine without meat, without chicken, without any animal, but calamari is my biggest weakness. And now we’re in Algeciras, and then at the beaches between Ceuta and Tetouan, Restinga, Kabila, Ksar El Rimal, El Rincón and Río Martil. A short trip around the Mediterranean, mine, my Mediterranean, the one that can’t continue to exist without me, that doesn’t exist unless I write about it.
In that sea we found each other, sea of sun, sea of freedom, sea of childhood, sea of innocence, oh terrible and beautiful innocence, lost forever in customs between Morocco and Ceuta, lost without the ability to look back like Lot’s wife, like the sweet salt of sea water.
“I came in one door while you were leaving out the other.” “And I left through the second right when you were returning to get the keys that had been forgotten.”
“And then I came in to get my suitcase, but you had already left.”
“Our footsteps traveled through the same houses for years, but we never found each other.”
“Always walking down parallel streets.”
“Drinking at the same bars.”
“Tasting the same calamari from the same sea.” “The same innocent fish.”
“We were children in paradise, adolescents in tunnels, adults in strange walls, and today we are the memory of each other.”
He She
“What language do you make love in?”
It’s been two months now, and one hundred e-mails from each of us, and most of all I feel full of Raquel. Her presence comes with me wherever I go and wherever I am. I’m possessed, or as Van Morrison says, “It’s a beautiful obsession.”
So much so that I wonder how presence is created or how sometimes you can be in front of someone and you realize they’re not there, they’ve disappeared. Their body and their faraway gazes are there, their words, their smiles, but not the person. You don’t feel their presence. But what I didn’t know is that you could feel the strong, very strong presence of someone thousands of miles away.
I wonder what distance is, and what presence is. Because I spend the day talking to Raquel, I spend the day discussing Tetouan, literature, what love is, marriage, children, beauty, aesthetics, and Raquel by my side answers me, she responds to me, she gets mad when I tell her I don’t like Levinas and when I tell her that Camus seems like a fake to me. I feel as though everything he writes is perceived only by the mind and the intellect, and she says but how can you say that, have you read Le Premier Homme, and I like how French words naturally enter our discussion. Well no, I never finished a book by Camus. From the first words a little bird in my head tells me this isn’t the Maghreb or the Mediterranean. These are the philosophical conclusions about the Mediterranean, and literature is not philosophy. Literature has to try to include everything, and I especially can’t stand anyone who writes knowing the beginning and the end. For the writer, literature has to be a discovery.
Okay yes, Raquel, I don’t like that part about “having to be”. It doesn’t have to be, it’s what I like or don’t like. Yes, and now I look like a know-it-all, like someone who believes they can convince everyone of everything they think. A friend of mine said it’s difficult to argue with me when I’m not right, but when I am right, it’s impossible. The worst thing about all this is that I feel the opposite, that I act this way out of a lack of my own conviction. Like when, still a virgin at age twenty, I tried to flirt with a girl, and she went to a friend and said don’t let this Moshe think I’ll be one of his many women and that he’s going to seduce me in half an hour. Out of so much fear, I gave off the impression of being a Don Juan.
Yes, that’s it, keep writing in Hebrew, echoes Raquel’s voice in my ear. You have to keep going. You can’t keep those voices stifled. And I’m there telling her it’s not a decision I made, but a decision that was made for me. It’s not at all easy to change languages at age forty after writing in Hebrew.
And have you read Saramago?
No, and as my friend would say, I’m not reading it out of respect.
Honestly, right when I decided to read him, he got involved in Israeli politics and I lost interest because of his comparisons to Auschwitz, and I’m just waiting to get over that. I’m most interested in the book about Pessoa, that o
ne about the death of Ricardo Reis.
And then I put my hand on her shoulder and hug her, and say we can go eat at an excellent Asian restaurant at the Shuk, the Mahane Yehuda Market. Then I myself wonder if it’s not dangerous to go to the Shuk with so many bombs, where so many bombs have gone off, and at the same time I tell myself that life has to go on and that death is only something natural. On the day we die we have no age, we are neither old nor young, neither children nor adults. Age only makes sense to those who are still alive, and they will determine whether I was really so young, with all my life ahead of me. And it wouldn’t be so bad for the novels and poems either, maybe then they would become famous. But I can’t tell Raquel all this, these are things I just think about but seem best not to share.
And I want to kiss her, kiss and kiss her, to fill up all those years when we brushed against each other without even seeing each other, but I tell myself no, it’s impossible, she’s married and I am too, and even if I weren’t married, I would never touch a married woman. But I know quite well that all of this is up to her. I’m not strong enough to say no to a kiss, a long kiss, full of all that love that no one gave you, that love you deserve, we all deserve.
I’d like to have another cup of coffee.
Says Raquel.
And I wonder over and over again how I can feel all of this when I’m alone on the street, and I’m going to see my wife in half an hour to celebrate our wedding anniversary, nineteen years, going into our twentieth year. Mois, people just don’t do things like this. Mois, you’re from Tetouan, remember, people don’t do this.
I wait for the time her e-mails come, a little after twelve, which is eleven there in Madrid. I’m on the way to the restaurant in Tel Aviv, and it’s raining. I walk along the sea and feel Raquel with me under the rain and under the same umbrella. And when I see my wife get out of the car, she gives me a look. I wonder what she knows. And Raquel tells me that when I sent her a kiss in an e-mail her husband became furious.
But, Raquel, if all of this is literature, my imagination, if all of this is just imagination, tell me so. Tell me. It can’t be that I’m in bed at night and feel you by my side, knowing that at that very moment you are thinking of me. You know where I am and if I’m sad, and I know when you think about your mother, but none of this is true, Raquel, it’s a story, a book, a novel, a poem, or the play you wrote in 1982, the same year I went to Madrid and searched for you like crazy. You were always on a parallel street and I didn’t find you. It’s a story in which a woman hears the voice of a man and decides to wait for him and continue on alone, waiting for that man from the past. It was the voice of a man from the future.
But in 1982 I was wearing a layer of fear and no one could touch my world, like the Paul Simon song, I am a rock. I was an island, and islands can’t be found in the material world. That’s why we found each other through a book.
Keep writing, I hear your sweet voice say, and it’s what I always tell myself. Nothing matters except for continuing to write. It’s a voice that comes from the depths of the universe, and it says that to me. These are the words that save the world every day. They’re the words of the poets that no one reads anymore, the ones that create a layer of life that pollution cannot destroy. They are your words, Raquel, that have the power to create life again, that have the power to conserve life.
And I love you, I love you, woman, and I love you, that’s just how it is.
Cernuda and Serrat singing.
That’s something else I won’t tell you. I won’t be able to say it, I’ll write it but I won’t be able to say it to you.
Oh how I write to you, my darling, but when we talk on the phone I can’t say those three words. My darling, my queen, is all of Tetouan in three words. There, where we were all kings, where my mother and my grandmother, my father and my uncles called me king. We were kings and queens and everything around us appears today to have been a long miracle. A world we will never be able to describe, a world where Sepharad lived its last moments, where only the good of the past existed.
It’s eleven and I’m waiting for your daily e-mail. I will smile again upon seeing your words. I’ll think about the turrón you sent me, and the marks you left on its sweetness. How did you know that the jijona kind was the one I liked best? Or rather, what I’m asking is how could you not know it, if you read me through the poems, you read my life and my footsteps on the shores of the Mediterranean. You read the tracks that have already been erased, that only you know are there, like yours in Restinga, or in Río Martil, where you left footprints I went to find. The ones I was looking for were yours, not mine. I already knew about mine. The small footprints of a girl who doesn’t know, or perhaps knows all too well that paradise ends quickly, that paradise is only born in the moment you leave it, and there at the end of the Mediterranean, where the ocean comes to eat up our sea, there I saw you walking happily, smiling, and always giving out love and joy to those with you. There you ran free, girl who will be a woman, girl who will always remain a girl. You would run in the sea and your entire life fit into your smile.
It’s time for your e-mail and I check my account every two minutes, like someone waiting for a lottery check. I won the lottery, but so much money at once is something I can’t digest. At the same time, it scares me a lot. So much sensitivity and so much understanding, and I’m a prisoner of fear. Where does one go from here? Where do both of us go, where will we bring our words?
But I feel we are one, not on a physical level but on a spiritual level. I think about what the Kabbalah says, that what parents think about when they procreate is very important. The Kabbalists prepare and train to have good thoughts so their children go down a good path. I think your father was thinking about my mother and my mother about your father when they conceived us, and that we are actually the same, the same spiritual entity. And suddenly, like so many other things I think, this seems stupid to me. But suddenly I see the girl I was, not the boy, who was she? My grandmother always said I was the most beautiful baby in Tetouan, and she wasn’t a person who gave out compliments easily. In all the photos I’ve seen from my first months and years, I seem more like a baby girl, and when I was an adolescent people often made that mistake and took me for a girl, until I was sixteen. I remember a time at the airport when, going into the bathroom, someone told me that the ladies’ room was to the right. That must be the reason for the beard, the beard is for defining my sexuality. And when I write in female first person I can feel completely like a woman. It’s not easy, it’s scary. But I also think my mother wanted a son so much after my older sister, and I couldn’t take part in that decision. She put all of her effort into making me male, but deep down there is a woman. It could have been you, throughout this whole journey. I will be that person, the one you see when you write in masculine first person. You say you like it and it seems like you’re writing to me when you speak from a masculine I.
Tell me about your first kiss.
You ask me and at that moment your face is that of a mischievous girl who wants to know something forbidden, something hidden for years. I think about my first kiss, when was the first one, I think it was with Claire in Tel Aviv, a kiss lasting half an hour in the middle of the street, and I turned her around ten times. The people on the street almost applauded. I was already in the military and we didn’t see each other often, Claire was in the military too. Since many of my relationships were run by distance, I would fall in love a lot on trips and then I would write long and romantic letters. Maybe I was falling in love to write, or I was falling in love with a tourist, like now with you, so that the relationship would be word-based, because only in words do I find that fire that physical encounters put out.
You tell me about your first kiss and you tell me you’ve never told anyone, not even your husband. Your secret kiss, a kiss with a Count, it’s a fairy tale. He’ll ask you if it’s your first kiss or if you’ve kissed many others, and he won’t get an answer. The answer comes to me, because that’
s what I’m here for, to tell those secrets you don’t tell your friends. And at that moment I see you, Raquel, in the sky, winking at me and guiding me through these naked streets, these kindred alleys that only you can light up.
You’ll tell me again and again that I should write more about that eight-year-old boy you like. It’s because you wrote about the girl you were when you were seven. And you’re right. But I don’t see that boy clearly. He always appears from a window and says hi to me. He tells me to keep walking, to be careful of something, and then he disappears, to reappear one month later. I can never imagine one day, live one entire day with him, there are memories, photos, clips of a movie to be edited, words, meaningless phrases, with no beginning or end.
Let’s go eat, it’s getting late. Well in Spain people eat lunch late, not like here. In the end I bring you to a restaurant in the center and I suggest you try the Kubbeh soup, an Iraqi soup, and you say you like it, and you want a Coke, and you’re reminded of the 7 Up from Tetouan, or what we also called Sharba, or Sharbalilah, drinks without content, just water and sugar. And you laugh and laugh and laugh...
Yes, this is Jerusalem like you’ve never seen it, it’s my Jerusalem. Deserted streets and restaurants with motherly smells. Bookshops and stores with used books, in all the languages of the world. Books in Spanish, French, English, German, Portuguese, and more. And then, another good coffee and I wait for your questions. They always surprise me, I really like your questions. I am a prisoner to your questions.
And I will also take you down my streets in Tel Aviv and show you my sea, my waves and my shores, and more music stores, the same way months later you will show me around Madrid. I’ll take you to my restaurants in Tel Aviv, the Yemeni ones and the few that have good fish. Whenever I eat fish in Israel I think how it’s never as good as the fish in Spain, though the fish in Morocco is still much better.
Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) Page 5