From my acute angle I saw more berets and bald spots than faces. But onstage, it appeared, the Flamenco Halevy were no longer in control. The floor was in the hands of a gang of men and women, a dazzling dark girl in a slit skirt at the fore. She was in constant motion, trying to rouse the political passions of the assembled aficionados. But the comments from the back and the barely suppressed guffaws from the front implied that the men in the audience were suggesting something deeper than oratory.
“¡Periodista!” I heard her cry, “¡Periodista!” and it was then that I recognized the mezzo as the woman from the airport, my Rosita Luxemburg, the strikers’ moll, the slit-skirted Fury who had chased me from the waiting lounge. A cadre of her male comrades unfurled a banner onstage—“¡Colón a Bajo!”—as she signaled for someone, something offstage. A figure moved, a shout went up from the audience. There, in the dusty spotlight of center stage, stood—who else?—My Lady Journalist.
Imagine, Benjamin, my frustration. There I was, with my superroyal’s-eye view of, perhaps, the explanation to the mystery of why I was passing a cold December night at the skin flicks in the godforsaken city of Mariposa and unable to understand a word of the dénouement. Nightmare, pure and simple—textbook definition.
Two things made themselves clear, however, in the universal language of emotion and pantomime. The first was Rosita’s insistence that MLJ take a picture of the strikers. The second was the impression that MLJ made upon the audience. I hadn’t realized before, hurried and hassled as I was by your steamer trunk, that the woman was six feet tall if an inch, and built like a pornographer’s dream. Where before I had focused on Palestinian scarf and jumpsuit, too-long neck and imperious innocence, now I saw, and not without a certain sympathy for her stage fright, the possessed, confident representative of northern European womanhood.
Rosita saw this too. And though MLJ was hardly in front of the footlights through the booking of her own manager, it was clear that Rosita viewed her as more than a handy photographer—as an ally, a leader, a mover, a friend.
My Lady Journalist squatted down on her magnificent haunches—and I remember thinking “magnificent” even from my perch behind the screen—and unstrapped the bungee cords from her infernal wheels. So that was it, I thought, a video camera. How long had Rosita known her, I wondered? Had she invited her to the meeting at La Rábida? If so, why did she bounce MLJ from the airport as thoroughly as she did me?
The theater fell silent as her thighs flexed and she stood, camera perched on shoulder, and began to film Rosita. But the next sound was not the opening of a party political speech but the bass string of a guitar. And the one after was not a call to arms but an arpeggio, followed by a beaten-out, a struck, a stricken rhythm, pounded into the stage by the heels of the dancing Rosita. The Halevy guitarist, the Halevy singer, I imagine, had moved forward from within the onstage crowd of stewards and waitresses, duty-free clerks and pilots, to accompany the flamenco pronouncements of slit-skirted Rosita.
For the first time, I was given a language to understand the strike. Or rather, I understood the surface sense of her message, the questioning of her arms, the despair in the turn of her wrists. She was searching for something, with her fingers, with her eyes, for what? Not a lost reservation, a pineapple Danish, a fog-bound runway. But backward, forward, in and around, up through the sleeves and out the buttonholes of the Halevy singers. Through the pockets, rifling the hair, searching under armpits, between shoulderblades, casting net after net over the blue-capped waves of the auditorium, asking the camera with her mouth, the workers with her hips, the audience with the unanticipatable staccatos of her heels—why travel? Why travel? What is the purpose of a motion-filled life? Why take off when there’s no point in landing?
I picked up Carranque’s, Zoltan’s, portfolio, wondering if Kima, dying miles and miles from her father, ever asked herself that question. Whether Joseph, whether Maimonides, would have traveled unless they had been pressed by others, from the outside. Would they have been better off if they had converted? If they had stayed put, if they had chosen to live out their lives in Córdoba, in Fez, in Alexandria, as Muslims? Would we all have been better—be better? Had I ever, in my years in the business, ever sold a ticket to a client who was traveling unpressed, unforced, who was traveling on pure, unguided whim?
As if in answer, My Lady Journalist handed the camera to Carranque and joined Rosita in the circle of light. I held the portfolio tight to my chest and swallowed with the crowd, roared my approval with theirs. “Ándale,” they shouted. “¡Ándale, Faraona!”
The tempo caught fire. The singer jumped with a painful, charcoal-coated “Ay …,” a sound that carried with it tragic memories, carnal longings, the agony of too much too many times. Rosita danced back to the edge of the spotlight, giving way to this towering beauty. “¡Faraona del río!” went up the shout, and two pilots picked up the clapping, moving in on MLJ. “Faraona del río!” That much I understood. Faraona. The pharaoh’s daughter. Del río. Of the river. Perhaps the one, the pharaoh’s daughter, who plucked Moses from the bulrushes by the river, and raised him as her own son. Out of what? Pity? Loss? Pure, unguided whim?
Faraona del río, the shiksa godmother, not a Botticelli but an incandescent high-wattage Vermeer beauty, face upraised, the hair, now loosened, shining, maternal, a helmet and a comforter. And I saw, as she looked to the heavens for inspiration, or rather, as she looked to the beam of light above the Royal Box that glowed from behind my head, how beautiful, how truly, purely beautiful she was. And my heart, really, Benjamin, is it possible, for the first time in years and years, softened at the torment, the utter foolishness. Because the poor girl, My Lady Journalist of the too-long neck and the Palestinian scarf, didn’t know how to dance.
MARIPOSA—A BRIEF HISTORY
Once upon a time, a river of twine, a river of offal and fish skins, of chicken heads and rotten fruit, flowed through the broad southern door of the Mercado. Its headwaters were the hooks and racks, the shining carcasses of beer-fed cattle and curly-haired sheep, the open mouths of thick-muscled hares and half-plucked geese, the oversaturated sawdust beneath chickens, partridges, quails, pheasants, the melting snows beneath the hakes, the flounders, the baskets of pulpitos, calamaritos, langostinos, and boquerones, the psychedelic pulps, the severed stalks of the dozens of edible flora that began their journeys in the hopeless predawn black, on the shoulders of half-back carts pulled by mules harnessed with twine, on the open chassis of farm-converted deux-chevaux with fan belts made from doubled, tripled, lengths of twine, from farms far up the Guadalaljama, held together by a history of bits and knots of borrowed, stolen, reclaimed twine.
The river gushed out the broad southern door onto the cobblestones, unobstructed, save for the occasional dam of a horse hoof or urchin foot, the nightly beaver lodges of the suppurating forearms and bloated torsos of careless drunks who had stumbled safely across the footbridge of Sto. Domingo from the bars of La Rábida, only to slip in the fecundity of the Mercado. Six days a week, the river wound around the open cobblestoned gutters, stampeded down the length of the Calle de la Nación, leapt blindly into the muddy waters of the Guadalaljama, for a final cathartic embrace with the wine-dark, blood-dark, shit-dark, Francophilic plutonium-luminescent Mediterranean.
On the seventh day, the river rested, and the poorest of the poor, the más gitanos of the gitanos, cleansed the riverbank of its organic silt, making rags, soap, and breakfast of the remains.
Progress, in the form of a hydroelectric dam fifty miles above Mariposa, has turned the Guadalaljama itself into a dry gutter. A bridge-jumper will encounter nothing damper than spit-moistened grass and tin cans, except during an infrequent lunar bender when the moon spews a garbage-strewn tide a mile or so upriver.
The Junta Andalucía, in the foreknowledge that 1992 would bring tourism in the form of curious, womb-obsessed Americans to the shores of Spain, indentured the itinerant gitano knife sharpeners, musicians, pickpockets, and othe
r vagrants serving time in the regional prisons, and pressed them into digging three-foot ditches in patterns decipherable only by students of the Rosetta Stone. These trenches were then cobbled over thoroughly enough to protect the sensibilities of the out-of-towner, but with a grating giving access, every twenty feet or so, to the familiar sewer, so the freedom-loving Mariposan gentry could continue to liberate itself of whatever liquid or semisolid matter happened to inconvenience it at the time.
So fundamental are the rights of the individual that, since the days when their harbor serviced the Phoenician ships of Tar-shish, Mariposanos have clung proudly to their reputation of being at odds with whatever authority presumed to establish itself. While the bulk of Andalusia fell to the Fascist insurgents within the first few days of the Civil War, Mariposa hung on for a few more months—not for love of the Republic, but merely to show a difference. So it was with Ferdinand the Catholic in 1487, with the Moor Tariq in 711, with the Romans and the Carthaginians before them. Walk the streets today, sixteen years after the death of Franco, and you will still see the occasional obstinate Guardia Civil, refusing to exchange his snub-front hat and machine gun for the more sophisticated cap and pistol of his comrades.
The only truly successful conquest of Mariposa has been by the tourist trade, and by the tourist trade I do not mean the Hilton, Club Med, American Express, or Thos. Cook zaibatsus. In Mariposa, individuals slip a tip to other individuals, small operators match clients to desires that only Mariposa can fulfill. In Mariposa, renegade sons, unmarried daughters, owners of decrepit, fictitious buildings, sell out to wildcat real-estate developers, unencumbered by zoning laws or European standards of taste and tradition—a twenty-story condo here, a ranch house there, an elementary school next door to a Palm Beach-based haberdashery displaying dyed summer furs, all surrounding a gaudy nineteenth-century customs house that stands resolutely, defiantly useless. In this climate of unregulated, uncontrollable movement, the tourist expects nothing and is surprised by everything. She moves about the city and believes not that this world was created for her eyes alone—as she might, wandering into an exquisite begonia-choked patio in the Barrio Santa Cruz of Sevilla—but that she herself is doing the work of architects and time, creating a city in a way she thought possible only in her sleep. As in the days of the Phoenician sailors from Tyre, Mariposa is the headquarters of the unplanned, unlooked-for vacation, the birthplace of Anarcho-Hedonism.
Although the Mercado closes shortly after noon every day except Sunday, a few bars and restaurants remain open until late at night, primarily to serve the unexpected diner the unanticipated adventure. Recommended are the Pinta and the Santa María. The latter serves nothing but wine and beer, the former nothing but fried fish. One orders the fish by weight, choosing a fleshy piece of merluza, a whole baby flounder from the salt marshes of Cádiz, a dozen pieces of squid, or a couple of hundred thumbnail chanquetes, which are then coated in batter, deep-fried in soybean and olive oils, and delivered in a paper cone at a temperature designed to be edible by the time a drink has been bought across the street.
At the Santa Maria, all wine is drawn from double hogsheads propped up on sawhorses around the perimeter of the shadowy hall. Although beer and a variety of sherries can be ordered, the rule of the establishment is to drink the wines of Málaga, throttled from the rich, overripened muscat grape, then mixed in permutations to please the driest to even the sweetest of tastes. From Seco Añejo, the color of straw, to Lágrima Añejo, Seco Trasañejo, Lágrima Trasañejo, and the vintage Pedro Ximenes 1908, as impenetrable as Guinness with a smoothness to coat a full set of teeth, all can be ordered and folded into the sherries to spawn yet another generation. At sixty pesetas for a three-ounce glass, three or four samplings are the least politely possible, and several more are often required.
Ben
HOLLAND—THE WANDERING JEW
Ben Darling,
I waited, hid for fifteen minutes behind a refuse bin, behind a buttress of a pedestrian bridge, behind the burned-out hulk of a church, behind a sign reading “JUNTA ANDALUCíA: RESTAURACIÓN DE LA IGLESIA STO. DOMINGO—TERMINADA 1989.” Which one of us was most foolish?
Someday, Ben, when I rank my embarrassments in descending order, you will find my night on the stage of the Teatro La Rábida in Mariposa well above First Date and First Kiss. But for now—silence. There are Things That Happen that are too terrible to reveal even to one’s travel agent.
Once I was confident that no one had followed me from the flamenco hall, I stepped out onto the bridge. Call it nerves, call it atmosphere—I hadn’t taken a dozen steps when I was shanghaied by a memory of Paris that flushed the heat back into my face and gripped my feet like magnets. The bridge, short as it was, spanning a dry riverbed of dead winter grass and Spanish garbage, was nevertheless a wrought-iron wonder, a worthy southern cousin to whichever Parisian pont it was that played Waterloo in the disastrous Affaire Maimonides.
Nineteen eighty-five—only weeks after Lina Philosopoulos had returned to active duty as my executive producer. Paris—UNESCO’s international conference in honor of the 850th birthday of Maimonides. By the opening of the first session, the Senegalese director general, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, had so antagonized the Western World that both the U.S. and the U.K. had withdrawn from the organization and the staff of UNESCO had gone on strike to protest salary cuts imposed after the loss of funding. Only a handful of scholars showed, from Pakistan, India, Cuba, Spain, the Soviet Union, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran—hardly countries one would expect to provide Maimonidean enlightenment.
The evening before the conference, while the plenary session was planning its own salvation, I was dining with the ambassador of New Zealand—who kept a top-notch Vietnamese staff—when Newby, my A.D., rang to announce two slight obstructions. Our co-producers had withdrawn their financing, and our French crew refused to cross the UNESCO picket line. I handed the phone, ever so gently, to Ambassador Braithwaite, who happened to be not only ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Monaco, Italy, San Marino, and the Vatican, but Kiwi’s representative to UNESCO as well. By the time we had finished our Sweetbreads Da Nang, my documentary had a fix.
Newby rang the doorbell at half past ten. The cameraman stood just streetside of the iron gate of the embassy. The girl with the boom perched on the shoulders of the boy with the tape recorder. Three Middle Eastern-looking scholars in Italian suits watched with unsophisticated amazement from the far gutter as Ambassador Braithwaite and I sauntered down the steps of the embassy to greet them under the tender gaze of lens, mike, and Parisian moonlight. We chose Raymond Poincaré, an avenue of foreign boutiques and discreet boîtes for the diplomats and dignitaries of the 16ième, chatting at a leisurely pace about the strike, M’Bow, U.S. imperialism, making small talk.
I had instructed Newby not to begin filming in earnest until we’d reached the Trocadéro, but merely to go through the motions, allow my ivory-mosque media-naïfs a good twenty minutes of nervous rehearsal time before delivering them of their theses on Maimonides. But as we crossed the rue de Longchamps, I noticed the little red Record light on the Frenchman’s camera blinking furiously. I shifted into high gear with my first serious lead-in.
Abderrahmane, the Kuwaiti, began with a discourse on the Missing Period of Maimonides’ life, the twelve years of wandering, from the flight from Córdoba in 1148 to the reemergence of the family in Morocco in 1160, when Maimonides was twenty-five. He detailed the common explanations and the uncommon—visits to relatives in Granada, trips as far north as Provence, a secret life under assumed names in the port of Mariposa.
Hassan, the Palestinian, clocked in with the phrase of all adoptive cousins—Maimonides and his family must have converted from Judaism to Islam during the Missing Period. “It is inconceivable,” he argued, “that they could have survived in a Spain ruled by the insistent Almohades without having converted.”
“But it was not just a conversion of necessity,�
�� Abderrahmane replied, in equally precise French. “Have you not noticed that in all the millions of words that Maimonides wrote, there is not a single slur on either the teachings or the person of the Prophet?”
“The reason is Aristotle.” Gebelawi, the Egyptian, was a good twelve inches shorter than I and spoke in a high-pitched, ungrammatical dog-yip. We were crossing the broad, sharply lit plaza of the Trocadéro, dodging skateboarders with boom-boxes, as Newby guided the crew backwards toward the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. A glass-roofed tourist boat was blaring statistics over its speakers. But as near as I could make out, Gebelawi argued that twelfth-century Muslims, Jews, and Christians all drank their philosophy from the same Greek coffee-pot. “They were all People of the Book,” Gebelawi piped excitedly. “But the Book wasn’t the Old Testament or the Koran, it was the Ethics, the Physics, and the Metaphysics of Aristotle.”
So far so good, I remember thinking. I hadn’t really done my homework, but I was pleased that these three were able to engage without any prodding from me. Ambassador Braithwaite, a not unattractive widower, was impressed by the high tone of the discourse, the stylishness of our Aristotelian stroll through the 16ième. I had never been to New Zealand, and my mind was half-clicking through a project file.
Then I tuned in to trouble. Somehow I had allowed Hassan, the Palestinian, to make a political speech. “Mankind,” he was saying, “must be unified through universalism, not sectarianism, parochialism, ethnocentrism, or chauvinism. The United States has failed, the Soviet Union has failed, Africa, India, Cuba, the nonaligned states have all failed. It is universalism, long defended by the prophets since Noah, Abraham, and Moses, reaffirmed by Christ in the name of the new covenant, and realized in Islam, in the Andalusian model of Spain. Universalism is the answer. Universalism is the centrepiece, the guiding light of a new Palestinian State, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims can live in peace, freedom, and harmony.”
A Guide for the Perplexed Page 7