Sepharad

you are…

YOU ARE NOT AN isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable. Every morning you wake up thinking you are the same person you were the night before, recognizing an identical face in the mirror, but sometimes in your sleep you’ve been disoriented by cruel shards of sadness or ancient passions that cast a muddy, somber light on the dawn, and the face is different, changed by time, like a seashell ground by the sand and the pounding and salt of the sea. Even as you lie perfectly motionless, you are shifting, and the chemistry that constitutes your imagination and consciousness is altered infinitesimally every moment. Whole scenes and perspectives from the distant past fan out, open and close like the straight lines of olive groves or plowed furrows seen from the window of a racing train. For a few seconds, a taste or a smell or some music on the radio or the sound of a name turn you into the person you were thirty or forty years ago. You are a frightened child on his first day of school, or a round-faced young man with shy eyes and the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip, and when you look in the mirror you are a man over forty whose black hair is beginning to be shot with gray, whose face holds no traces of your boyhood, though a sort of unfading youth accompanies you as an adult, through work and marriage, your obligations and secret dreams and responsibility for your children. You are every one of the different people you have been, the ones you imagined you would be, the ones you never were, and the ones you hoped to become and now are thankful you didn’t.

And your room is different, the city or the countryside you see from the window, the house you live in, the street where you walk, all of it growing more distant, disappearing as quickly as it’s seen through the glass, there one moment, gone forever. Cities where it seemed you would live forever but left, never to return, cities where you spent a few days only to preserve them in memory like a clutter of old postcards in bitter colors. Or cities that are little more than their beautiful names, divested of substance by the passing of time: Tangiers, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Göttingen, Montevideo. You are who you were when you walked through them, sinking into the anonymity they offered you.

PERHAPS WHAT CHANGES LEAST, through so many places and times, is the room you take refuge in, the room that according to Pascal one should never leave if one is to avoid disaster. “Being alone in a room is perhaps a necessary condition of life,” Franz Kafka wrote Milena. There is a computer in it instead of a typewriter, but my room today is much like any of the many rooms I’ve lived in throughout my life, my lives, like the first one I had when I was sixteen, with a wood table and a balcony that overlooked the valley of the Guadalquivir and the blue horizon of the Mágina Sierra. I would lock myself in to be alone with my typewriter, my records, my notebooks, my books, feeling both isolated and protected. The balcony allowed me to look out upon the vastness of the world, the world I wanted to run to as soon as I could, because my refuge, like almost all refuges, was also a prison, and the only window I wanted to look through was the one on the night train that would carry me far away.

Laura García Lorca, who was born in New York and spoke a careful and proper Spanish that sometimes had a trace of English, showed me her Uncle Federico’s room in Granada, in Huerta de San Vicente, the last he had, the room he would leave one July day in 1936, looking for a refuge he wouldn’t find. All human miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone. I saw Lorca’s room, and I wanted to live sometime in a room like that. The white walls, the floor of large flat stones like the ones in my boyhood home, the wood table, the austere but comfortable bed of white-painted iron, the large balcony open to the Vega, to the sweep of groves dotted with white houses, to the bluish or mauve silhouette of the sierra with its snowy peaks tinted rose in the sunset. I remember van Gogh’s room in Arles, just as sheltering and austere, but with its beautiful geometry already twisted by anguish, the room that opened onto a landscape as meridional as the Vega of Granada and that contained only the bare necessities of life, yet it, too, failed to save the man who took refuge there from horror.

I wonder what the room in Amsterdam was like where Baruch Spinoza, a descendant of Jews expelled from Spain and later Portugal, he himself expelled from the Jewish community, edited his lucid philosophical treatises and polished the lenses from which he earned a livelihood. I imagine it with a window that lets in a clear gray light like that in the paintings of Vermeer, whose rooms warmly protect their self-absorbed inhabitants from inclement weather but always contain reminders of the expanse of the outside world: a map of the Indies or Asia, a letter from a distant spot, pearls found in the Indian Ocean. One Vermeer woman reads a letter, another gazes seriously and absently at the light falling through the window, and perhaps she is waiting for a letter. Closed in his room, perhaps the only place he is not stateless, Spinoza shapes the curve of a lens that will allow him to see things so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. With no aid other than his intelligence he wants to encompass the order and substance of the universe, the laws of nature and human morality, the rigorous mystery of a God that is not that of his elders, who have disavowed him and excommunicated him from the congregation, but neither is it the God of the Christians, who might well burn him at the stake if he lived in a country less tolerant than Holland. In a letter to Milena, Kafka forgets for a moment whom he’s addressing and writes to himself: You are, after all, completely Jewish, and you know what fear is.

Then Primo Levi in his bourgeois apartment in Turin comes to mind, the house where he was born and died, throwing himself, or accidentally falling, into the stairwell. He lived there all his life except for the two years between 1943 and 1945. Before September of 1943, when he was arrested by the Fascist militia, Levi had left his safe room in Turin to join the Resistance, carrying with him a small pistol he scarcely knew how to use and in fact never fired. He had been a good student, earning a degree in chemistry with excellent grades, profiting from what he learned in the laboratories and lecture halls, as well as from literature, which for him always had the obligation to be as clear and precise as science. A young man, slim, studious, with glasses, educated in a renowned bourgeois family in a cultured city, hardworking, austere, accustomed from childhood to a serene life, in harmony with the world, without the least shadow of the difference that would separate him from others, since in Italy, and even more in Turin, a Jew, in the eyes of society and his own, was a citizen like any other, especially if he came from a secular family that didn’t speak Hebrew or follow religious practices. His ancestors had emigrated from Spain in 1492. He left the room in which he had been born, and as he walked out the door he was probably struck by the thought that he might not come back, and when he did come back two years later, thin as a ghost, having survived hell, he must have felt that in truth he was dead, a ghost returning to an untouched house, the same door, his room in which nothing had changed during his absence, in which there would have been no change had he died, had he not been spared the cadavers’ mudpit in the concentration camp.

“WHAT IS THE MINIMAL portion of country, what dose of roots or hearth, that a human being requires?” Jean Améry asked himself, remembering his flight from Austria in 1938, perhaps the night of March 15, on the express train that left Vienna at 11:15 for Prague, his troubled, clandestine journey across European borders toward the provisional refuge of Antwerp, where he knew the endless insecurity of exiled Jews, the native’s hostility toward foreigners, humiliation from the police and officials who examine papers and certify or deny permits and make you come back the next day and the next and who look at the refugee as someone suspected of a crime. The worst is to be stripped of the nationality you thought was yours inalienably. You need at least a house in which you can feel safe, Améry says, a room that you can’t be dragged from in the middle of the night, that you don’t have to run from as fast as you can when you hear police whistles and footsteps on the stairs.

YOU HAVE ALWAYS LIVED in the same house and the same room and walked the same streets to your office, where you work from eight to three Monday through Friday, yet you are also constantly running and can’t find asylum anywhere. You cross borders at night along smugglers’ routes, travel with false papers on a train, and stay awake while the other passengers snore at your side. You fear that the footsteps coming down the corridor toward you are those of a policeman. At the border, uniformed men who study your papers may motion you to one side, and then the other travelers, who have their passports in order and are not afraid, look at you with relief, because the misfortune that has befallen you has left them unscathed, and they begin to see in your face signs of guilt, of crime, a mark that cannot be seen and yet cannot be erased, an indelible stain that is not in your appearance but is in your blood, the blood of a Jew or of a sick man who knows he will be driven out if his condition is discovered. Confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, Kafka remembers the anti-Semitic remarks another patient made at the dining table, and writes a letter sharpened by insomnia and fever: The insecure situation of the Jews explains perfectly why they believe that they are permitted to possess only what they can cling to with their hands or teeth, and that only such possession gives them the right to live.

In the room of a hotel in Port-Bou, Walter Benjamin took his own life because there was no road left to take as he fled from the Germans. Two identities were offered to Jean Améry when he was stopped by the Gestapo, when he was interrogated and then tortured by the SS: enemy or victim. He could be a German, an army deserter, in which case he would be tried and shot as a traitor, or he could be a Jew, in which case he would be sent to a death camp. He was arrested in May 1943, in Brussels, where under the name of Hans Mayer he and his small group of German-speaking resisters printed leaflets and distributed them at night near the barracks of the Wehrmacht, risking their lives on the futile hope that the conscience of some German soldier would be moved by reading them. Primo Levi armed himself only a few months later with the small pistol he didn’t know how to use, no more a threat to the Third Reich than Améry’s leaflets. Neither man was a practicing Jew; Levi thought of himself as Italian, Améry as nothing but Austrian. But when arrested, both declared themselves Jews and joined the ranks of victims condemned not by their acts or their words, not for distributing pamphlets or plunging into the forest without warm clothes or boots and with no weapon but a ridiculous little pistol, but for the simple fact of having been born.

You are the person who after the morning of September 19, 1941, must go outside wearing a Star of David on your chest, visibly displayed, printed in black on a yellow rectangle, like the Jews in medieval cities, but now with all kinds of regulations regarding size and placement, explained in detail in the decree, which also lists the punishments awaiting the person who does not wear the star when he goes out or tries to obscure it by covering it, for example, with a briefcase or shopping bag or even with an arm holding an umbrella. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the star was blue, the armband white.

YOU ARE ANYONE AND NO ONE, the person you invent or remember and the person others invent or remember, those who knew you in the past, in another city and another life, and retain a frozen image of what you were then, like a forgotten photograph that surprises and repels when you see it years later. You are the person who imagined futures that now seem puerile, the person so much in love with women you can’t remember now, and the person you sometimes were whom no one knew. You are what others, right now, somewhere, are saying about you, and what someone who never met you is telling of what he has been told. You change your room, your city, your life, but shadows and doubles of you continue to inhabit the places you left behind. As a boy you ran along the street imagining you were galloping your pony, and you were both the rider spurring on your mount with film-cowboy yells and the galloping horse, and also the boy who saw that horse and rider in a movie, and the one who the next day excitedly told about the movie to friends who didn’t see it, and you are the boy who with shining eyes listens to another tell stories, the boy who asks for just one more story so his mother won’t leave and turn out the light, the mother who finishes telling the story to her son and sees in his eyes all the nervous enthusiasm of imagination, the desire to hear more, to prevent the loving voice from falling silent or the room from turning dark, when it will be invaded by dark fears.

You change your life, room, face, city, love, but something persists that has been inside you for as long as you can remember, before you learned to reason, it is the marrow of what you are, of what has never been extinguished, like a live coal hidden beneath the ashes of last night’s fire. You are uprootedness and foreignness, not being completely in any one place, not sharing the certainty of belonging that seems so natural and easy in others, taking it for granted like the firm ground beneath their feet. You are the guest who may not have been invited, the tenant who may be ejected, the little fat kid among the bullies in the schoolyard, the one flat-footed soldier in the garrison, the effeminate man among the macho, the model student who is dying inside of loneliness and embarrassment, the husband who looks at women out of the corner of his eye as he strolls arm in arm with his wife on a Sunday afternoon in his provincial city, the temporary employee who never is given a contract, the black Moroccan who leaps from a smuggler’s boat onto a beach in Cádiz and moves inland by night, soaked to the bone, freezing, dodging the spotlights of the Guardia Civil. You are the Spanish Republican who crosses the French border in February 1939 and is treated like a dog or someone with the plague and sent to a camp on a rugged seacoast, imprisoned in a sinister geometry of barracks and barbed wire, the natural geometry and geography of Europe during those years — from the infamous beaches of Argelès-sur-Mer, where Spanish Republicans are herded like cattle, to the farthest reaches of Siberia, from which Margarete Buber-Neumann returned only to be sent not to freedom but to the German camp of Ravensbrück.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHO you would be if you found yourself expelled from your home and country; arrested by a patrol of the Gestapo as you distribute leaflets one dawn in a street in Brussels and are hanged from a hook, held by handcuffs behind your back so that as the chain goes up and your feet lift from the ground, you hear the sound of your shoulder joints as they are dislocated; locked in a cattle car in which you spend five whole days traveling with forty-five other people, and night and day you hear the crying of a nursing baby whose mother cannot feed it, and you lick the ice that forms in the cracks between the planks of the car because in those five days and nights there is no food or water for you, and when finally the door is opened on an icy night, you see the light reflecting the name of a station you never heard of before: Auschwitz. “No one knows whether he will be cowardly or brave when his time comes,” my friend José Luis Pinillos told me. In a remote life, when he was a youth of twenty-two, he fought in a German uniform on the Leningrad front; when you see the enemy coming toward you, you don’t know if you will jump toward him or freeze, white as death, literally shitting your pants. “I am not the person I was then, and I am very far from the ideas that took me there, but there is one thing I know and am pleased to have found out: I wasn’t a coward when the bullets began whistling. But I am also alive, and others died, brave men and cowards both, and many nights when I can’t sleep I remember them, they come back to ask me not to forget them, to tell the world that they lived.”

You don’t know what you could have been, what you might yet be, but you do know what in one way or another you have always been, visibly or secretly, in reality and in daydreams, although perhaps not in the eyes of others. And what if you truly were what others perceive and not what you imagine yourself to be, just as you aren’t the person you see in the mirror? Hans Mayer, Austrian nationalist, blond, blue-eyed, son of a Catholic mother, himself an agnostic, a lover of literature and philosophy, and who dressed on festival days in the lederhosen, suspenders, and kneesocks of folkloric garb, realized that he was a Jew not because his father was Jewish, not because of any physical trait or custom or religious belief, but because others so decreed, and the indelible proof of it was the prison number tattooed on his forearm. In his room in Prague, in his parents’ home, in the office of his company that insured labor-related accidents, in the rooms of the sanatoriums, in the hotel room in the border city of Gmünd where he awaited Milena’s arrival, Kafka invented the perfect guilty party before Hitler and Stalin: Josef K., the man who is sentenced not because he’s done anything or stands out for any reason, but because he has been found guilty, and he can’t defend himself because he doesn’t know what he is accused of, and when his execution comes, instead of rebelling he tamely submits and even feels ashamed.

YOU CAN WAKE UP one morning at the unpleasant hour of the working man and discover with less surprise than mortification that you’ve been transformed into an enormous insect. You can go to your usual café believing that nothing has changed, and learn from the newspaper that you are not the person you thought you were and no longer safe from shame and persecution. You can go to your doctor’s office believing you will live forever, and leave a half hour later knowing that a gulf separates you from others, even though no one sees it yet in your face, that you carry inside you the shadow that waits invisible for all. You are the physician waiting in the dusk of your office for the patient to whom you must tell the truth, and you dread the moment of his arrival and the necessary, neutral words. But most of all you are the patient still unaware, who walks calmly down a familiar street, taking his time because he’s early for the appointment, leafing through the newspaper that he just bought and that will be left forgotten on a table in the waiting room, a newspaper with a date like any other in the calendar but a date that marks the borderline, the end of one life and the beginning of another, two lives, two yous that could not be more different.

You climb the stairway with the newspaper under your arm. You almost forgot the appointment, even thought of canceling it, the examination and the simple blood test, it all seemed so silly. You push the door of the doctor’s office and give your name to the nurse. You make yourself comfortable on a sofa in the waiting room and look at your watch, not knowing that it is marking the last minutes of vigor and health. You look at your watch, cross your legs, open a newspaper in the doctor’s office or in a café in Vienna in November 1935, when a news article will drive you out of your routine and out of your country and make you a stranger forever. A guest in a hotel, you woke up one night with a fit of coughing and spat blood. The newspaper tells of the laws of racial purity newly promulgated in Nuremberg, and you read that you are a Jew and destined to extermination. The smiling nurse appears in the doorway of the waiting room and tells you that the doctor is ready to see you. Gregor Samsa awoke one morning and found himself transformed. Sometimes in the streets of the city I thought was mine, I passed impoverished Jews, émigrés from the East, in their long, greasy overcoats and black hats, with sweaty curls at their temples, and felt repelled, glad that in no way did I resemble those obstinately archaic figures who moved through the spacious streets of Vienna as they had the villages they had left in Poland, Yugoslavia, or Ukraine. No one would stop me from walking into a park or a café, or print crude caricatures of me in the yellow press. But now I am as marked as they. The healthy, blond man reading his newspaper in a café in Vienna one Sunday morning, dressed in lederhosen and kneesocks and Tyrolean suspenders, in the eyes of the waiter who has served him so often will soon be as repulsive as the poor Orthodox Jew whom men in brown shirts and red armbands humiliate for sport, and he will travel with him in a cattle car and end up exactly the same way, a walking cadaver slipping in the mud of the death camps, wearing the same striped uniform and cap, sharing the same darkness and panic in the gas chamber. The doctor runs his fingers over a white seashell, strokes the mouse of the computer, seeking in your file the symptoms that confirm the diagnosis, the sentence, the word neither of you utters. When you go back outside, your eyes are at first dazzled by the sun. The passing men and women are strangers. You walk through the city that no longer is yours, and it is with less surprise than shame that you discover, what a bitter awakening, that you are a giant insect. You move through a sinister nightmare, though the places are everyday places and the light is that of a sunny morning in Madrid. You walk along a familiar sidewalk in Berlin, over glass from shopwindows shattered during the night, and smell the gasoline that fired the stores of your Jewish neighbors. Later you will remember the headlines, the photograph of Hitler, the chancellor, on a stage in Nuremberg, gesticulating before a panoply of flags and eagles, the large letters that announced your fate, that identified you as the carrier of a plague. You are Jean Améry viewing a landscape of meadows and trees through the window of the car in which you are being taken to the barracks of the Gestapo. You are Eugenia Ginzburg listening for the last time to the sound her door makes as it closes, the house she will never return to. You are Margarete Buber-Neumann, who sees the illuminated sphere of a clock in the early dawn of Moscow, a few minutes before the van in which she is being driven enters the darkness of the prison. You are Franz Kafka discovering with amazement that the warm liquid you are vomiting is blood.