Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected)

by Mois Benarroch

  What time is it? I have to go.

  What could this have to do with seeing the waves? Here, in these pages, there are no times and there is nowhere to return to. You wait for an e-mail, but the hours don’t have legs to run by on. The streets are always ours, and everything revolves around our words, our steps, our looks. When I saw you it was the first time you had your face, and for me, it was the first time someone saw me.

  Yes, but it’s time for your e-mail, and I’m already waiting, waiting to find out what you’re going to ask me. I’m waiting to find out what you’ve read in me that I didn’t know, what you know that I’ll never know about myself, and what I’ve understood about you that you never knew about yourself.

  Once again I’ll talk to you about the discrimination against Moroccans in Israel, but very unconvinced of it being a topic that interests me, the way it interested me before, when I talked non-stop to everyone about it. But I’ll explain it to you anyway, because they see us as a challenge, a threat to Israeli society for not being Western, and you’ll tell me I shouldn’t write these things, that the antisemites already criticize us enough and that the atmosphere today in Spain and in Europe is totally anti-Israeli. Yes, I understand you, and sometimes for this very reason I don’t translate some of the things I’ve written. But I also realize that when I talk to European intellectuals about the problems between the Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews in Israel, at first their mouths drop open, but later they want to learn more. Suddenly all those Israeli Jews, who appear to be a large united and indivisible mass, become human. The Galicians understand what I’m talking about. Suddenly the Jews are more like normal people. But the thing is, here no one is Jewish enough: the secular man because he is not religious, the Ashkenazi because he is not a true Jew and is a descendant of the Khazars, the Sephardic Jews because they are not European enough, and so no one is truly Jewish. I remember what Ruth Knafo-Setton, a writer of Moroccan Jewish descent, told me after sending a story to a Jewish magazine in the United States. The editor said “Yes, you write very well, but why don’t you write about real Jews?”, because to him the Jews of Morocco are not real, they’re something exotic, and here what I am is something exotic. Everything will go fine if I tell the story of how we lived in the trees of Africa with the lions walking around below us, and the great Israeli culture saved us, but if I talk about an upper-class life full of books and music, they don’t believe me. It simply doesn’t fit into the natural outline of things, and therefore, they don’t see it. The victims of colonialism to the Ashkenazim, we are the same orientals they were not long ago. The others of the others.

  You smile and I tell you about Sepharad, about that sudden impulse in one’s heart to walk around Toledo, Seville or Lucena, to see everyone we were and no longer are. And the almost personal guilt felt for those we could not save. Save from what? We don’t know, but certainly without being Jewish nothing makes sense. Those who fell, those who couldn’t tie themselves to our hands, the Kabbalah calls them Nitsosat, sparks. They are sparks that fall into the abyss, that abyss where darkness existed or was created before God created light. I see them walking, mostly around Seville, and I want to tell them to come back, that I’m here with my arms open to receive them, but what are they going to return to, to whom are they going to return, and from where did they leave? They are my cousins, and many of them hate me just for being a Jew. They hate themselves, they hate their past, their ancestors. They are killing history. They are cousins, and between cousins there can be a lot of hatred, too.

  We, Raquel, were them not very long ago. We were converts, in Lisbon or in Seville, Jews in hiding, or Christians convinced that because of the Inquisition they returned to Judaism. It was better to die like your father and as a Jew than to be humiliated as a new Christian. History...how ridiculous... The Inquisition brought Jews closer to Judaism more than it pushed them away from it. Many of them were on their way to becoming good Christians, and it was precisely the Inquisition that showed them their identity as Jews. Just like the Nazis, who killed so many Jews that the last thing anyone wanted was to be Jewish. Many who had assimilated over three or four generations, and felt completely German or Hungarian, suddenly saw themselves faced with their Jewish label. It reminds me of the scene from the movie Sunshine where one of the Jews dies because he is not willing to repeat the Nazi’s sentence, “I am Jewish”, because he was already a good Hungarian Christian.

  Those are the people who govern us, those, by chance, are the same Jews who direct the Israeli courts and universities. They are ashamed of beings Jews, of coming to the Middle East and not being good Europeans. I don’t judge them, honestly I don’t, but I wonder, how can we understand them? I can understand the Ashkenazim in the diaspora, or in Israel if they are religious. I can talk to them through a common Judaism. But when they are secular, when they have nothing of Judaism left, they are the people furthest from me in the entire world. I don’t understand anything about what governs their life, or why they want to be European so badly, as if Europeanism were some kind of religion, a religion that only exists in Israel, a religion professed only by the Jews expelled from Europe. They don’t understand that not even Europe is European, they way they dream of it.

  I wonder why I’m telling you about all this. It makes me sound cultured, intelligent, but are these really the things that interest me? Or is it another way for me to escape, to distance myself from what is most important? From my life. These thoughts aren’t the ones that distance us from the wonders of daily life, from my daughter’s smile, from experiencing the light of Jerusalem, a light beyond comparison, a light that explains all the wars.

  Suddenly you ask me about Bernardo Eisenstein, my wife’s ex-lover. You ask me why I went with her, why the character appears in the first part and isn’t mentioned again. Yes, it was a character that I wanted to develop, but in the end you, Raquel, you seemed more important to me, and I began to forget it, the way you forget an acquaintance you don’t see for months. Perhaps the pain was so strong I couldn’t tell the story.

  You’re right, I shouldn’t have gone, so how did it happen? One day around noon she told me she was going to Tel Aviv and that same day I was planning to go to Tel Aviv because I had to buy something, so I said alright, I’ll go with you. And then she told me she was going to meet Bernardo and I said okay, then I won’t go, because that’s your business. I’ll go another day. She told me there was no reason for that and that I should go with her, you see, she convinced me. We have to talk about that. I think she wanted me to come so she wouldn’t get out of control, which is what happened. Unconsciously she brought me as her guardian. I told her so and she said no. That’s what happened. And then, what a coincidence, her car broke down and she couldn’t call me, but then it got fixed, something about the battery, and then she returned all excited from the meeting and said she hadn’t noticed how quickly the time had passed and why didn’t I call her. I didn’t call her, I waited for her to call me. The following day we talked about it all and I asked her to not see him again, but she saw him three more times. The fourth time she lied to me (that hurt me more than anything). But don’t go thinking that I don’t think she slept with him or any of that, that’s not the problem. I think I would have realized if anything like that had happened. And besides, one day Ricardo went to the neighbor’s house for lunch, who invited us over for coffee. When I went to drink the coffee he said hello, we introduced ourselves (the first time I’ve ever seen him), and with plenty of hesitation I sat next to him, having no idea what he was going to say. But it didn’t matter, he got up and went to the living room (we were all outside), disappeared for half an hour and then left. The next week he came to our house on Shabbat, showing up suddenly while we were eating. My mother was there and she was talking about being in the old city and things like that, and then she asked him: “Are you Jewish?” He was rather bothered and uncomfortable (thanks so much, mom), and said that that wasn’t important, and tweedledee tweedledum. But he left,
oh my mother’s intuition... He left in less than ten minutes, which seems perfectly fine to me, considering he came without calling or anything. I didn’t see him again and a couple of months ago he left. He lives in each city for two months. He called my wife from Vienna but only left a message. He has four children, each from a different mother, and he is German. He and my wife were planning on getting married and she got pregnant by him. She miscarried a year before we got married. Are you getting an idea of the issue? Do you think I’m too jealous for reacting the way I did?

  We’re walking down Jaffa Road and it looks as if there had been an earthquake yesterday. They’re constructing the paths for a future tram and I’m telling you, it would be perfect for walking around all day with a camera taking photos non-stop. It’s apocalyptic, half streets, bus stops in the middle of the street, thousands of people looking for each other and closed stores or stores that look like shuks. The noise is horrible and you can’t hear anything. There are all kinds of tractors and strange machines making holes and filling them up. And this is your book, so you ask me for more descriptions. The Jerusalem winter sun, the entrance to the social security building next to the old city and hundreds of Arabs waiting for their turn. The one that was in the old city was closed a year ago, after a Palestinian killed the guard, and all those Moors remind me of the crowds in Tetouan, the streets full of people with nothing to do. And this is your book, but as soon as you entered this book you were no longer you. Things change, you’re a character, and characters have their own life. They end up far away from those who inspired them, they go so far that all they have left is a glance at reality.

  But this is your book and you dream about it, and this one, like all books, is not mine, it is not my book. You inspired it through your words, through your book. For years I’ve wanted to write a novel in Spanish, but only poems piled up, more and more poems. My Spanish language only allowed for poems, but you opened that door for me and this is your book. But not a novel, or maybe so, Tabucchi calls everything a novel, although that’s for marketing purposes. Any book called a novel sells better than those called something else. “Ansina es”, “that’s how it is”, we would say in Tetouan. We’ll call it a novel but to me it’s a book, words, thoughts, but not a story. It’s about characters who cross paths once in a while and create a world that never convinces me. They don’t convince me that it’s truth, or even imaginary. Novels disappoint me so much that I almost never finish them and I open a book of poetry to the middle to breathe in some sincere air. That’s what’s missing for me in novels, sincerity. It seems as though the writer makes a lot of decisions with book sales in mind, either consciously or unconsciously, something that is almost ridiculous to do in poetry.

  That’s what I’m searching for in this prose, sincerity, a road not taken, a path full of trees whose fruit no one has eaten.

  And this is your book, but I don’t know you, while at the same time I have always known you.

  You ask me if I remember the Arabic teacher. Vaguely, but who I do remember is the Arabic teacher who I think came after you left, Monsieur Sitbon, who really liked to caress the girls. I would always argue with him. He was very tall and handsome, but like the Hebrew teacher, he was always an outsider, coming from the French part of Morocco. The other Arabic teacher, whose husband was in jail; yes, I remember her, she was an Arab. I think she gave me private Arabic classes for a few months because I didn’t have very good grades. At school we studied Arabic, Hebrew and English, and the classes were given in French. But they didn’t teach us Spanish even though all of us spoke it, students and teachers. Were they ashamed of their mother tongue? At one time there were French thinkers who believed the world would be better off if everyone spoke French. In 1950, they did a study on the rate of illiteracy among Jews, and it came to fifty percent. When I read that I said it couldn’t possibly be true, all the men had to know how to read Hebrew to pray, at least a few lines. Then I read that only fifty percent knew French. There are ridiculous things in this world: at that time, only those who knew how to read in French were literate. The illiterate ones were actually the French people who created the study.

  Thursday

  ºººººººººº

  Maybe on a Thursday like today

  I’ll find you among some trees

  the last trees of a great city, and you’ll ask me innocently in Spanish, where is Calderón street?

  and when I hear your sweet Spanish

  I’ll see the sea from my childhood

  a couple of waves and a lot of clouds

  and your words will caress me

  My eyes will stay fixed on you

  as if you had disappeared

  inside my mind forever

  and after a long while I’ll tell you

  that’s the street I never stopped looking for and your smile will be the sea

  But maybe

  we will never find each other

  all of our lives lost

  in the forest of coincidences maybe

  we are one street away from each other but we will never know

  we exist.

  A little air in the middle of so many words, half of a page left white, a poem I wrote you before knowing you, meeting you, or even imagining your existence.

  Because today it’s cold out, the clouds are covering the sky and it’s raining, and I have to tell you that bad times are coming. It’s the law of the fat cows and the skinny cows, times without water and without food, times when the earth tires of giving us fruit and the cows die. We can’t do anything about this, and many will perish. It’s not a prophecy, it’s the logic of seeing. And it rains, but the suns always comes out in the end in these lands. It doesn’t hide for long, one day, two, sometimes three, but not like in Paris or London. My brother calls me saying he needs the sun, that he hasn’t seen the sun in six weeks. In Tetouan, the sun wouldn’t disappear for long either. I remember a cloudy day in 1996 when I went there on vacation to look for my footprints, and I asked the taxi driver if it was going to rain. He said “No way! There’s an easterly wind.” Okay, who could have known that in Tetouan it only rains with a westerly wind. It’s not like here, where there is hardly ever a westerly wind, the wind always comes from the sea, sometimes the desert, but not from the mountains. And this is your book, I’m writing it to you to in some way realize that dream of getting married and living with a woman from Tetouan, that genetic dream of all our great emigrants who returned from Brazil or Oran to Tetouan to find a woman who was “one of us” and then returned with her to their adoptive countries, telling their children they were from Tetouan, that they were the true Sephardic Jews, and they would teach them words in Haketia. Once I met one of them at a party full of French people. His great-grandfather had gone to Oran in eighteen sixty-something and they introduced me to him saying I was from Tetouan. He asked me over and over again if I was really born in Tetouan, “Ça veut dire, que tu es vraiment né a Tetouan?”, which made me wonder if I had done something wrong. Then he told me that it was the first time he had met someone who was truly from Tetouan, but that his parents and grandparents always told him about that mythical city, that in Oran they were called the Spaniards, and they didn’t marry local Jewish women. I hadn’t dreamed it; finally someone had told me I was really from Tetouan. You see, I truly am from Tetouan.

  You don’t laugh like you usually do, and all of a sudden you have a sad air about you, that air that goes through our hearts once in a while. It is also very Tetuani, just like our hearty laughs. It’s a memory of someone who left us on the way, those who converted to Christianity and later to Islam, and those who assimilated recently. It’s a sad feeling of what can we do? What could we have done? Nothing, we couldn’t do anything, and today we still can’t do much. More than nothing, but it’s not much. How can we undo so much injustice throughout history?

  But you smile again and once again we are those two children playing at recess or in the sand at Río Martil. We are freedom and we
run, we go into the sea and the sea is ours. And then the sandwiches that mom brought us, and then they tell us not to go back into the sea, that it interrupts digestion, but we want more sea, more waves and more water, more salt and more happiness. And where did all that happiness go? Or perhaps it stayed there, walking on the sand, like in the song by Serrat that goes ‘my childhood keeps playing on your beaches’. I could have written that a thousand times. Our footsteps are still there, kissed a thousand times, cried on a thousand times. It’s like traveling on a train when suddenly you change tracks, and you see the track you should have taken. And you are the new track that could bring me back to the same path, but I can no longer return to experience that trip. We lived another trip, a trip that was not our trajectory, but from here we can continue onward and imagine the lost miles. In your book you guide me to return to my track, although it is only a track, missing a lot of footsteps, but since I’ve been writing you your book, I feel as though these are finally my steps, these are my shoes, this is my street, and there is finally a corner without prostitutes where I can wait for you.

  Talk to me, ask me more things, remember unknown memories for me. I want to know everything you remember, I want your memories to become mine, and mine to be yours. Write me books, I want to read everything you wrote, to find myself in them, I want to be a character maladjusted to life in your books. I want to be that boy who watches me from the window and disappears without ever telling me when he will return. I want to be your brother and your lover, your voice and your silence. I want to be the most beautiful words you’ve written, I want to be the most beautiful words you will write. Give me life in your words, give me life in your thoughts, without them I am no one. Give me a face by looking at me, your look is the creator of my face.

  And once again Serrat, now that I’m crying, a man crying for a secret woman, who says to that woman undress me, undress me, now that I’m crying, crying over my life, my pants lost. And the vests I always forgot everywhere, just like my children do, and my mother would scold me because I lost so many things. It’s just that I’ve never liked things much. I collect looks, the lost looks of women lost on the street, in the metro, in the subway. I collect the looks of pretty women who have given me their love for a second and disappeared forever. I never liked things very much, I always give everything away. When someone comes over and they like a CD, I give it to them, they like a book, I give it to them. A friend of mine always told me to stop giving thing away so much, but I don’t need those things, I need warm looks in cold cities, in cities where everything human has disappeared. A smile is more than a car, and I don’t even have a driver’s license anyway.