I turn. Then I sigh. I fall asleep. A few minutes. When I open my eyes she is already dressed and smiling. You play around you lose your wife, you play too long you lose your life. That's what Danny O´Keefe is now singing in my head, “Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues”, and yes, my back hurts now when I write.
“Come on, get dressed, let's take a walk around the market.”
It was Thursday and the market was crowded, and with every step I stumbled upon a friend, first it was Alan Green, yes, himself, the very same person who made the illustration for my book, and he says “hello, what are you doing here, I thought you didn't like the marketplace” and then he greets Gabrielle as usual, “how are you Gabrielle?” He smiles and she says “good”.
“I prefer the market in Ramla.”
“Yes, me too.”
Alan goes his own way and later we see Shely Elkayam and the same thing happens, I hope Gabrielle says something, that she gets surprised, but she says nothing. We continue and we buy a bottle of wine, another, I don't remember opening the first one which cost me fifty-five shekels instead of twenty-two, and we keep encountering more acquaintances of mine, who greet me and Gabrielle as if nothing was different. And to top it all, I see my son, I decide to hide, but he asks me what we're doing in the market, and says he's in a hurry, he is late for work. He works for a company that does business with the US, and he works in the hours the Americans are awake, he begins at four or five o'clock and finishes at twelve a.m., modern world. So I am the one who asks
“Don't you feel something strange is happening?”
“Everything seems strange to me,” she says.
“And the fact that everyone knows you?”
“Yes, everything is magical, and I like it.”
“But can't you see? They think that you are another Gabrielle.”
“I am another Gabrielle. Ever since I met you I am another, others change you.”
Should I tell her or not? No. I don't tell her that they are mistaking her for my wife and that it has very little to do with magic.
We buy organic quinoa and fresh chicken, we return to her house and make dinner. Finally, I open the bottle that cost me fifty-eight shekels instead of twenty-six and the wine is a little sour, maybe it's better to wait a few minutes to see if it improves. She cooks rather well but she burns the chicken a little and the quinoa a lot. I say nothing about the smell of burnt food, I like burnt food. Well, a little.
At nine I take my leave and I return home. My wife is waiting to have dinner with me. I eat again. Having two lovers makes you fat. Days went by and they repeated themselves a little in this feeling of well-being. Happiness never bored anyone. We met, we made love, we walked, we met with friends of ours who didn't seem to find it strange that we were together. But I was anguished at the thought of the two Gabrielles crossing paths but at the same time, the idea of making love to both of them together amused me. What would happen? And to that I also added the idea that maybe they were one and that Gabrielle was playing a trick on me. That she was pranking me. But in happiness there are no questions, and when they begin they break it.
I thought that I had to somehow bring them both together, but I didn't dare initiate such an encounter. I started writing this story and getting here, between the two of them and the narrative, between fiction and reality, I started changing previous passages to adapt them to reality and I adapted reality to what I wrote. I never bumped into my wife while I was with the other, but I stopped trying to avoid it and we went for walks a lot on Emek Refaim Street, where Gabrielle, my wife, often happened to be, either to buy something, to get a movie from the video store, Haozen hashelishit, The third ear, or because she came back walking from work. What I knew for sure was that I had finally written a book that couldn't be summarized on any book cover, or the synopsis would not reveal anything specific about its contents. A story that's inside another and another and another and apparently they all have nothing to do with each other, or they don't, even if one tries to find a link. But I already knew that the cover or the back cover is always what sells best, more than the name or the illustration. It could go like that: A love story that bifurcates. The narrator falls in love with a young woman who looks exactly like the woman his wife used to be twenty five-years ago. While the reader wonders whether they are the same person or not, the narrator reads aloud to young Gabrielle a story about the kidnapping of a bus, is he or isn't he the abducted?
Alright, forget the cover, my walks took me one sunny morning to have breakfast at Ribale, a new café that stood where Aroma was a few months earlier and that wasn't able to quite fill up its tables. The coffee shop offered a double breakfast for 51 shekels, which included fried or scrambled eggs, a salad, an orange juice or a lemonade, cheese, coffee, bread, and brioches. A good deal. But the coffee shop was almost empty. Gabrielle was in red and black, which were always my favorite colors on women's bodies, I always stopped to look at a woman in black and red. The service sucked and they brought the coffee before the juice and the eggs after the salad but the sheep cheese was great and we only cared about the sun and our well-being.
Then Gabrielle saw us, or she saw me, and she came to say hello.
“Hello, do you want to sit?” I said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “This is Gabrielle.” I added, not really knowing who I was pointing to.
There I was with my wife and my mistress. My wife wearing a black blouse and a red skirt. My mistress a red blouse and a black skirt. Both had black stockings on. The same short black leather boots. “Do you want something?” I asked my wife. “They have good coffee, but the service is terrible.”
The waitress didn't seem surprised, what was happening seemed normal to everyone except me. My wife ordered a very short espresso, just like Gabrielle. They looked at each other. No one said a word. A long time passed, and they didn't speak.
Then they started talking, things like what do you do, when did you arrive in Israel, they spoke in French. Which seemed normal to me.
I felt bad, although I already knew where this was going, they were going to talk just the two of them, to tell each other everything then go and leave me alone, without either one of them. I excused myself in a very polite manner as if I were speaking with two mayors, and I went to the bathroom. Neither one realized I had left. I wanted to throw up the fried eggs and the juice gave me an unbearable acidity, but I couldn't do it. Nothing came out of my mouth. I took a leak, and after that I sat down and took a dump. I remembered how my Argentinian friend Armando would say: “I screwed up.” It was a half diarrhea, but I couldn't vomit although I really wanted to. They say you can shove a finger down your throat to provoke it, but I didn't. What a shitty situation, but at least I have a novel, not a very long one, but still a novel.
I don't know how long I stayed in the john, which was very clean and bright with its soft yellow walls. I was there for like ten or twenty minutes, or half an hour. I don't know.
When I returned, a little dizzy, nauseous, I saw only one Gabrielle. I couldn't remember how each one was dressed. But it was in red and black, I saw her facing away from me. It was her, the only one, there were never two of them. I had imagined it all.
I sat across from her. There she was, she had changed for the thousandth time, now she seemed to be ten years younger than my wife or ten years older than my mistress.
“She left,” said the new Gabrielle, “she said that she was going back to France today.”
“Just like that? Out of the blue?”
“You know these things don't just suddenly happen,” she said it with all the wisdom of her forties and all the mischief of her youth.
She smiled. It was all a big prank she had played on me. They weren't two, there was only one of them. I asked for the check. The waitress told me that the girl who was here had already paid.
We walked out in the sun.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “I forgot the umbrella.”
I walked up directly to
the waitress.
“When did she leave?”
“Who?”
“The one who paid.”
“Well, just when you went to the restroom.”
And then she walked to the door.
“Look, she's right there, waiting for the bus.”
And just then the bus arrived, and I never saw her again, or yes I did, for some reason my wife was waiting for me at the station when the bus left.
I had become, just like my ancestors, an expelled.
THE END
If you liked it...
You can continue reading the other 6 novels that constitute this work, some of them have been translated into English and the others are on their way.
Amor y Exilios (Love and Exile) is a cyclical literary work written by Mois Benarroch, a poet and novelist who was awarded the Amichai Prize and the Prime Minister Prize and he's the author of more than twenty books published with the best publishers in Spain and Israel, like Destino and Hakibutz Hameujad. Amor y Exilios was published in 2010 by the publisher Escalera in Madrid, it is a compendium of seven novels. The novels complete each other and at the same time they destroy each other to create new possibilities.
It includes the 7 novels:
The Cathedral, Renée, El Ladrón de Memorias[10], Raquel Dice, Muriel, The Expelled, El Empapado[11].
Raquel Says (something entirely unexpected).
There is someone in our shadow telling us that somewhere in this world there is another person living a parallel life, someone who feels the same, who is probably even doing the same thing at that exact moment. But what happens when two parallel lines meet? The impossible and what should never happen, occur. If soulmates do exist and if we feel the urge to find ours, that doesn't mean that this encounter would make our life easier or would give us solutions for our problems.
The Cathedral
The Cathedral plays out in a real-life futuristic city constructed around a mall which provides everything, including stores, clinics, restaurants and bookstores. The suburbs are called "Passageways" and go from the city to the end of civilization, out where the city ends, and war begins. Sandoval and Sandra are hunted for trying to exit La Catedral Mall without making a purchase, a capital offense in a world where buying is a religion. "Buy for your future. Buying is our future." Chants a muezzin-type crier over the sound system of the mall named La Catedral which may have been a synagogue in the past. Sandoval gets to the city limits and there sees people who try unsuccessfully to enter, where he finds he can no longer be the person he was and seeks refuge in his father's writings which spoke of another past, another world.
A meld of science fiction and social commentary. A novel for the new millennium.
El Empapado
The trip towards the past that is the future. The narrator returns to a love that ended twenty years ago to find his lover already married, he thinks that she is interested in rekindling their relationship, but she meets with him for very different reasons, she still can't get over the abortion, the fruit of their great love that only resulted in an unborn fetus. Back then it seemed inevitable but with time she realizes that not only did the fetus prevent the life of another being, but that it also prevented the birth of a mother, because as she starts learning, each child makes a different mother. The conversation between the two is as impossible as the attempt to recreate the past after one has disconnected himself from it.
Muriel
In the wake of a terrorist attack, the narrator manages to escape and takes a car which does not belong to him. He speeds down the road toward the Dead Sea. He crashes into a truck and is mistaken for the owner of the Fiat Punto who perished in the attack. After many months in a coma, he awakens to find he is in a completely different life, perhaps a life he had dreamed, or perhaps he is dreaming now. Suddenly he is freed from an untenable relationship and begins playing the part of someone else. Seemingly everyone knows he is not himself but no one can back off. He begins to spy on his former life and finds everything there goes along better without him. The novel Muriel is a challenge to that which we think of as our inner self, the identity crisis, and the lies of the modern world.
Renée
Is it possible to meet again after decades? But then who does he meet again? Three Madrilenian teenage friends get together on a boring and hot summer and decide to go to Paris, there they go after prostitutes, all three of them with little or no sexual experience whatsoever. After that experience, all three of them come out changed people and they leave their friendship aside, each one of them holds a secret unknown to the others that he does not wish to share with them. The open friendship is reduced to a series of silent moments that ends up exterminating it. Twenty years later the narrator meets the Parisian prostitute or at least that is what he believes and he starts discovering what he did not dare admit to himself, as well as what his friends hid from one another.
El Ladrón De Memorias
It has happened to all of us, we're talking with our brother of a childhood memory and suddenly he says, but you didn't do that, I did. And that seems normal. But, what do we remember when we remember? Scientific studies show that in less than twenty-four hours we have already changed the memory of what has happened to us. Perhaps our memories are not always completely ours, only partially ours, partly they are what others who were in the same place have told us, and partly perhaps they are memories of others that with time are infiltrated in our brain. The narrator of "El Ladrón de Memorias" does not steal memories, but he feels like a thief, because he is drawn to pulling at some moments other people's most intimate memories, only to realize that he can no longer differentiate his memories from the others. “El Ladrón de Memorias” is an autobiography of the entire world.
"Rarely have I had the opportunity to read a book on Kindle with the characteristics of "El ladrón de Memorias". Mois Benarroch has the strange particularity of talking about anything and has a way of making you unable to stop reading. I have compiled many fragments of his book because they seemed interesting, intuitive and I think I almost believe that in fact the author is a memory thief:
"...But there is one that doesn't go away. And it is that every text is autobiographical. Each character is the author. Nothing original in that. I know. But I'm not saying that every text is based on the life of the writer. Just the opposite. It is based on the not-life of the writer. The wife who appears in the text of a male writer is not the writer's wife, and vice versa, the homosexual will be the one who was not, the rich one is the rich one that the writer longs to be, if he is poor. The writer defines himself by what he cannot be. What he cannot be is not infinite. One cannot not-be just anybody. He can only be characters or people he is able to imagine..."
I have read, as I said, other types of books, thrillers, suspense, mystery and action novels, but it is the first time that I find myself in front of a text that I can categorize as philosophical. I recommend it. And I hope that the author does not steal your memories. Well, in fact, this had already happened to me before with a book by Pablo Fergó. But this space totally belongs to Mois Benarroch." Blanca Miosi, author of "El legado[12]"
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