A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

But the girl on the bulletproof balcony, sixteen, perhaps seventeen years old, was in perfect proportion. She began with an F, an octave and a fourth above middle C. A long note, even though I had missed the upbeat of preparation, the swing forward of the elbow, the contact of the downbow. As the F stepped carefully and deliberately down the carpeted stairs of E and D to a long C, the White Rabbit’s voice melted into the familiar tones of the continuo, the regular ebb and swell of the second movement of the Bach Double Violin Concerto in D Minor as played by, say, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under the direction of Neville Marriner. Turning away from the girl, away from her fingers, looking out the far window to the light of the moon on the Mediterranean, I could still hear the B-flat, A, pass to the drawn-out mordent around the lower F, back to B-flat, the roll of the harpsichord glancing off the crests of the waves, the thrum of the double bass tugging on the lights of the runway, the elegant modulation like a raising of the spirits, lifting the chin, the eyes, up to a higher vantage point, the scale down, the G, F, E, D, leading with such hope and necessity that, turning back to the girl on the balcony, I expected to see the first violin appear at its famous entrance, expected the holy note, the exquisite high C, expected Sandor.

  No Sandor, of course. I had driven him to the airport from La Rosa Náutica. I had seen him strut across the tarmac with his precious Guarneri, climb the stair to the Tristar, watched the plane taxi, take off to the south, and turn into the sunset towards Gibraltar and Carnegie Hall. No other violinist either. Why would some young beggarita choose to play the second violin part alone? Why not a solo sonata, a partita, a local folk tune, a malagueña? What brief and tragic partnership ended when the first violinist’s plane lifted its wheels off these Spanish shores, leaving the young girl alone with her descending scale, her G, F, E, D, leading with hope and necessity to an inevitable silence?

  “Last chance,” the old woman snapped.

  “But the flight will be leaving,” I said, half an eye still on the girl. “Aren’t the bags on the plane?”

  “Suit yourself.” She pushed through the door. Up on the balcony, the girl was gone. I voted against Rabbits and trickled back through Sheep Control.

  The pandemonium of Flight 802 barely touched the empty hangar of the departure lounge. I had my pick of telephones. I rang through first to Sandor’s villa. No luck, María probably asleep. I doubted, after our behaviour in the last ten days, disrupting her routine with cables and cameras and endless pots of Spanish roast, whether she would welcome me back in Sandor’s absence. The concierge at the Hotel Mayor apologized graciously over the phone. My suite had been given up, and he doubted whether any other hotel room “of a reasonable class” could be found, as a shoe convention had just occupied the Plaza de Toros.

  So I dialled the number of your Mariposa office. Your machine, your machine, encore your machine. I left a message, in the vain hope that you’d ring in and find me, wherever I’d kip down tonight. I wish we’d hooked up, Ben. At least for a drink.

  Other passengers, mostly families, were queuing for vouchers and boarding a coach to the Youth Hostel, 10 km west on the coast road. A few businessmen were jockeying for an international line out to Jolly Olde E. Four couples, the men in designer windbreakers, the women, Benetton cardigans draped over their shoulders, local Socialist millionaires on their way to the Harrods sales, had settled down for a few dozen hands of hearts, an aluminium shaker in the middle of the table and a pile of plastic airport martini glasses. Half a dozen Spanish students in Union Jack T-shirts were drinking wine from a bota and playing reggae music from a buzzbox at the foot of a giant plastic Orangina. No girl, no violin.

  I arranged the right combination of armless benches with decent cushioning in a deserted aisle near the seaward window where the radiation was least harsh. Shoes, handbag, wheels collapsed, precious Sandor on the bench, Issey Miyake jacket folded above, head weighing all down, I clutched my handbag to my chest, took one last look at the moon over the sea, voiced one last profanity at the customs officer who had separated me from my beloved Charlie Three, closed my eyes, and began to think myself to sleep.

  I saw myself watching Sandor in the Moorish courtyard, hundreds of years older than the rest of the house, arcades finished by delicately arched cypress transoms, low olive trivets topped with hammered copper trays, thick carpets and pillows everywhere embroidered with episodes of the Moorish occupation, from the retreat of Charlemagne at the battle of Roncesvalles to the tears of Boabdil mourning the surrender of Granada. In the center, a simple fountain weeping into a pink granite pool.

  And Sandor, like an Arabian knight in his ever-present caftan, all sixty-four bantam inches, dark, compact, wispy grey hair blowing away from his head in the windless sanctuary, eyes closed, lashes resting on unwrinkled cheeks, violin parallel to the ground, bowtip balanced, well-rosined horsehair flat on the G string, wrist firm, little finger raised in balance, index tensed, all in anticipation of the first upbow.

  As I drifted, Sandor grew, the years falling into the pool at the base of the fountain. The woman watching Sandor became the beggar girl on the balcony, more child than woman, perched on the Siege of Granada, legs gracefully tucked beneath her, long hair curving behind a shoulder, under one armpit and around into her lap, back so grenadier straight, eyes so wide open you’d think she’d never seen a man play the violin. And I tried, in my dream, to lift her chin in one hand, to peer under her eyelids, ask her a question, to be sure, to be sure.

  A voice crackled, “Ladies and gentlemen …” I blinked and stared at the ceiling. No Moorish stars, only pre-stressed concrete. “Ladies and gentlemen. We regret to inform you that the United Andalusian Workers of the Air have announced a strike at the Aeropuerto Cristóbal Colón. We are sorry to have …” and then another sound of banging metal and heavy chanting. I sat up. Thirty feet away, a phalanx of cleaning ladies and pilots, visa stampers and dishwashers, Duty Free clerks and tile scrubbers, were marching on my position. Conchita in her black sheath led the way like Victory, wing in wing with—God forbid, could he be her novio?—the anti-helpful military man, banging on dustbins, overturning benches, armed with broom handles and hoover hoses, chanting vaguely heard slogans. I grabbed my bag, my jacket, jumped into my pumps, telescoped my wheels, and blinked desperately to locate the outside door. A strong hand grabbed my arm.

  “Help me and follow …” It was my White Rabbit, the lady of the grey hair and the chamois skin, with an oversized steamer trunk of Marx Brothers vintage. One hand on my wheels, the other on a strap of her trunk, I stumbled over the abandoned buzzbox and kicked the overturned martini shaker across the lounge, the roar getting louder, the workers tripping us with their mops, throwing cartons of Duty Free Gitanes at our backs, picadors goading us past Bureaux de Change and Bikini Stands, around giant Fundadors, me trying to keep Issey Miyake between my teeth, and thirty-one minutes of Sandor upright. My shoulder, tortured by the weight of the Rabbit’s trunk, shouted to be heard above the roar. We ran. We ran from sheer sound, from the union Concorde taking off at our heels, past the desks of Air Flamenco, Air Oporto, Air Divine, searching for any exit from the noise. Finally swinging the trunk through a double door, up into the fetid, jet-fuelled, real night air, only for the dying roar of the workers to crossfade into the unbearable attack of a dozen unseen aircraft, camouflaged underbellies, otherworld silhouettes, shrieking down at us from the hills, until the blast, the explosion into the pit of my stomach and then out the same way, punching me down behind the trunk with a forecast of hail and shrapnel and airport refuse, but only the fallout of motion-becoming-sound as the sonic boom of the fighters—cryptic hieroglyphs close enough, but too fast, to read—erupted overhead and flowed over the airport, down the beach, into the Mediterranean. And me, peering up, somewhat abashed, on scraped knees, as my White Rabbit hurled the trunk single-handedly into the boot of the last taxi, as Conchita rammed a broom between the handles of the outer doors, shrugging her shoulders as if sympathy would pick me off
the ground, as the Aeropuerto Cristóbal Colón on the Costa del Sol—with easy access to all major European destinations—went suddenly, totally, black.

  HANNI—CHOOS AND CHURROS

  Dear Benjamin,

  In 1935, my parents, both direct descendants of Moses Maimonides, received an engraved invitation from the Alcalde de Córdoba to an eight hundredth birthday party. I was a skinny nine in Mrs. Benning’s fourth-grade class at P.S. 145, and too young, in Spanish eyes, to skip school or stay up for a party. But to my mother, it beat lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “Look, Papa,” she said, “an apology.”

  Poor Mama. She always believed there would be an apology. In 1290, Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Cromwell apologized, and the Jews returned. In 1306, Philip the Fair expelled the Jews from France. It took the Revolution, but the French invited them back.

  “Fourteen ninety-two was a mistake,” Mama explained, “a failure of imagination. Isabella had to pay for Columbus’s expedition. She couldn’t think of a better way than to expel the Jews and confiscate their property.” From a framed watercolor above my bed, Columbus’s three boats sailed out of Palos de la Frontera, leading a flotilla of other less-seaworthy craft filled to the rails with sad-eyed Jews. Although the centuries following the Expulsion were pockmarked with the occasional efforts of needy politicians to bring wealthy Jews back onto the peninsula, the bishops prevailed over the bankrupts, and the Jews were kept out.

  “Columbus Schlamumbus,” Papa said, and I tended to agree with him. “If the Spanish really wanted to apologize, they’d have sent the boat fare.”

  Mama never returned.

  I did. In ’44, eighteen years old and geographically naïve, I was seduced over the border by a musician. Even then, I spent under twelve hours on the peninsula, and was back in Vichy by noon. Afterward, firm resolve, never again! They told me that after Franco died life returned—a rabbi was invited to lecture in Barcelona, a synagogue reopened in Córdoba. I should care, who never went to college, who never set foot in a synagogue? As Papa said—forget the apology, send cash.

  Until the business of the Esau Letter. After Leo died—how wonderful to write that word, “passed” being the required term in the condo, as if you moved out of South Glades Drive and into the North Miami Beach Funeral Parlor in gown and mortarboard—I was worried that some of my wiring upstairs might start to crumble. But it wasn’t for another fourteen years, until 1989, when I left London and moved back to the Home of the Brave, that I began to forget, and worse, to remember that I had forgotten. Memory—the black lung of Miami Beach. Twenty-seven percent of my condo has Alzheimer’s. Don’t tell me it isn’t contagious.

  It was barely six weeks ago, a quiet pre-Thanksgiving morning. I was up in 9H, drinking Sanka and talking about this and that with Gershon Mundel while his wife was out shoplifting at Burdine’s, when we got onto the subject of Miami zoning restrictions. I told him that since my parents were second cousins—in-breeding being one of the few foibles the Jews share with racehorses and Spanish nobility—they had a common ancestor, the first European settler of Miami. Gershon politely inquired when that might have been. I told him, and went on to describe the cross-fertilization with the Indians and the conversions. I was well into the story of how, by 1495, my great-great-ancestor Esau had filled enough swamp and taught enough Hebrew to hold the first minyan on the North American continent when I noticed Gershon’s eyes searching for the telephone.

  I told him, no, no, don’t call the white jackets yet, I have written proof, and took the stairs two at a time down the fire exit to my apartment. When Gershon knocked an hour later—my bank books, my journals, my junior high school diploma, all my paper possessions laid out in a grid on the living-room rug—the Esau Letter was still unfound. He suggested that we eat a little something. I opened a can of mushroom soup but insisted that he sit down with a pad and pencil and help me work out when I had last seen the Letter.

  When I moved from London to Miami? No, I’d only assumed it was in the brown satchel with Papa’s other papers.

  When I married Leo? Definitely not. We married out of such desperate need—in 1950 I was still searching for something far more important—that by the time it occurred to me that we had never had a courtship of late-night schnapps and autobiographical recitation, the moment had passed, and Leo was dead.

  The fall of 1977, when Sonny rented my front parlor? It seemed likely, he would have been interested. But I could not picture the two of us in the green room with the bay window and Leo’s pianola, me sitting next to Sonny on the fold-out sofa, Letter in hand.

  “Zoltan!”

  In a single breath I told Gershon of that suicide, forty-six, forty-seven years ago, in Port Bou on the Spanish border, high above the Mediterranean. How Zoltan had undoubtedly died with the Letter among the other forged papers I had given him. How the Letter, wrapped in a purple ribbon, stuffed in Papa’s portfolio, must have bounced on the stretcher alongside the lifeless body of my virtuoso lover, down a rocky goat path toward the hospital in Figueras. Gershon fed me a spoonful of cold soup.

  Sonny called the next night, as he does once or twice a year, from Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, an airport phone somewhere. My old brain was still full of the Letter, and Sonny was very comforting, assuring me that a document as valuable as the Letter would certainly have been saved, even by Franco’s stone-stupid border police. Fascists and the Catholic Church, he said. They burn copies, but they file the originals away for a rainy day. The Letter must be around, he said. And probably in Spain. A note arrived a week later, with a list of a dozen names of priests, scholars, and collectors throughout the country, and a suggestion that I write to you, dear Benjamin, and book a trip immediately.

  Your arrangements were faultless. Irún to Burgos: the train was punctual and comfortable—the conductor moved me to First Class, thank you very much. Burgos to Salamanca: shared a compartment with a woman my age and her grandchildren, aged seven (the boy) and five (the girl). Sweet, I suppose, though I’ve lost all patience with anything under sixteen—they turned up their noses at my orange; I still dream about fruit, fresh, canned, rotten, bruised, or artificial. Fell asleep to their voices, a song I remember hearing in ’44, on the rainy night we tried to sleep in an olive grove outside a tiny refugee camp.

  The girl sang:

  “El sol se llama Lorenzo,

  Boom da da, boom da da, boom,

  El sol se llama Lorenzo,

  Y la luna, Catalina,

  Boom da da, boom da da, boom.”

  Then the boy:

  “Cuando Lorenzo se acuesta,

  Boom da da, boom da da, boom.

  Cuando Lorenzo se acuesta

  Catalina se levanta,

  Boom da da, boom da da, boom.”

  The old days, when Lorenzo never set on the Spanish Empire, are thankfully vorbei. They tell me Lorenzo has been rehabilitated, that in the latest climate of tourism he has passed from devil incarnate to patron saint of the dustbowls of Castile. You can’t drive into a travel agency in Florida without getting mugged by that neo-Miró of a Spanish travel poster—the kindergarten letters, the españa scrawled haphazardly across Lorenzo’s grinning face.

  Why Lorenzo, why Catalina? Why not Abraham and Sarah? There’s a question for the readers of your Guide.

  I don’t know which is worse—leaving Spain after two weeks without the Letter, or being kept from leaving five hundred years after being expelled. Still, no complaints—I don’t suppose you have any control over wildcat strikes by Spanish airport workers. I can’t blame Sonny for his list of recommendations. Maybe Don Lucho did have it in Burgos, or it was sitting all the time in Salamanca in the safe of Dr. de Salas, or the mattress of Doña Carreres, the great-great-grandsomething of Ferdinand the Catholic. Maybe none of them liked my looks, despite the color of my traveler’s checks. Maybe I need a better map. Maybe I need to bury my obsessions. Is there room in your steamer trunk?

  I am, in fact, relieved to
move from a quest of my own to a task for you. Although, Benjamin, when you wrote suggesting I carry a package to the Dominican Republic in return for my airfare, I didn’t expect a package the size of the Ritz. Even the attendant at Baggage Claim was shocked that any man would give a woman such as myself a ticket to a trunk such as this.

  Still, I will follow your orders to the letter. I am a woman of great, severe independence. But I have always known that I am happiest, that I am at my best, my most successful, when my independence is strictly, knowledgeably, faithfully guided. It’s about time, with the rest of my traveling, that I see a bit of the Caribbean. It might as well be in the company of your steamer trunk.

  Our super Roberto is a Dominican and guarantees that I will adore Sosua. He used to play professional baseball, for Cleveland or Pittsburgh or one of those other godforsaken Ukrainian capitals. I caught him one day swatting aluminum Metrecal cans with a mop handle into the dumpster outside the Activities Room. He gave me a demonstration of the batting postures of the great Dominican ballplayers—Manny and Jesús, a pitcher named Walking Underwear.

  “Ancient Dominican game,” Roberto confided. “Baseball before Columbus, way, way, before.” Everyone around the condo has his own personal time bomb. I promised to keep his secret.

  He told me New Year’s Eve in Sosua ought to be festive. The town is so small that there are only two parties, one for the people who are willing to march through the cane fields to dance at the Town Hall, and one for those who aren’t. As a foreigner, I will be invited to both, claims Roberto, and I will undoubtedly meet your contact. I can just see myself wandering down a muddy goat path from the Town Hall to the other party, with your trunk on the back of a burro.

  My burro at the airport tonight was one particularly flighty model—one of those New Women who started taking over England in the early eighties when gender was denationalized. This one had Unmarried Journalist tattooed all over her exposed parts—camera on a trolley, Palestinian scarf (100 percent raw silk) wrapped a little too Amelia Earhartily around a too-long neck, soft corduroy jumpsuit (another memento from Qaddafi’s bunker), and a self-enclosed look of naïve confusion when I passed her my best MittelEuropa baggage tip before Colón went on strike. Luckily, at six feet she had enough Anglo-jump and Saxon-bicep to lug one end of your trunk out of the airport and into a taxi.