Sepharad

cerbère

THE LETTER FROM THE German embassy must have arrived when we’d been living in the new house for less than a year. I noticed the postmark, that it was dated several months before, and that the address on the envelope was the old one, the one in the apartment building in the Las Ventas barrio where I was born just as the war broke out, and where I saw my father for the last time, the day before the Nacionales entered Madrid, although I was too young to have any memory of that. The letter had been going from place to place for a long time, and the mailman who handed it to me said it was hard work to find us because at that time everything in the barrio where we were living was new and many of the streets didn’t have names yet, and sometimes there weren’t even streets, just open lots that became mud pits whenever it rained. Now you go to the neighborhood and that seems impossible, everything’s so well arranged, so established, and the trees are tall, as if they were planted a long time ago, but then, when we arrived, they were as rare as street lamps, and the first blocks of buildings were far apart, separated by embankments and empty lots, and the country was only a step away. There were wheat fields, orchards, and flocks of sheep, and you could see Madrid in the distance, looking prettier than ever, with its tall white buildings, like the capital of some foreign country in a movie. People said, mockingly, “You’ve gone to live in the country,” but that didn’t matter to me, I actually preferred it. I liked going out on the balcony of my new apartment and seeing Madrid in the distance, liked roaring into the city on my husband’s new Vespa with my arms around his waist. For the first time we had rooms with ventilation and a bathroom, and hot and cold water, and as soon as I became pregnant my husband bought me a washing machine, and before long he got his driver’s license, which at that time seemed almost better than if he’d had a profession. One morning I heard a horn and went out on the balcony and there was a new car in front of the house, a light blue Dauphine, and my husband was driving. He made the down payment and they gave it to him, just as they gave us the apartment and washing machine with only a down payment. The very words down payment scared me, but they pleased me too, and they still sound good if I stop to think about it, because we had the feeling we were starting a new life, exactly as when we walked into the new apartment and smelled fresh plaster, and when I got into the car the first time, it smelled a little like that, new and clean, because where we’d come from everything smelled old, the houses, streetcars, clothes, corridors, closets, dresser drawers, the toilets on the landings, everything was old, dirty, used, sour. Life had been so hard for so many years, everything in short supply, and suddenly it seemed that all you had to do to get something was want it, because they handed it to you with just that down payment, the way they gave us the keys to the apartment even though it would take us more than twenty years to pay it off. The patio of our old building in Las Ventas, near the bullring, was always crowded and cramped, and there were always people around: the neighbor women who listened even though you weren’t talking loud and who seized any excuse to come in and snoop around your place, some with no good in mind, so that when I walked into my new apartment in Moratalaz for the first time, it seemed enormous, especially when I opened the living-room window that looked out on wide-open country, with Madrid way in the background: it was like a movie screen in Technicolor. Everything new: my kitchen, which I didn’t have to share with anyone, my washing machine that didn’t stink of plumbing or other people’s filth, my bathroom, with the white ceramic tile, and a toilet and bidet so white that the fluorescent light was dazzling when it reflected off them, a really good light, not those sickly bulbs we had when I was a girl. My mother complained because she’d lived all her life in Las Ventas and couldn’t get used to being away from her neighbors and the shops she knew, and in the new barrio she got lost the minute she stepped out the door, she said it was like being an invalid, always at the whim of whoever would take her and bring her back, because in those days neither the metro nor the bus went as far as our barrio, it wasn’t even on the maps of Madrid. I didn’t want to show my mother the letter. But since she was so suspicious, she shot out of her room to ask who knocked, and when I told her it was the mailman, she wanted to know who’d written us, but I said it was the wrong address and went into my bedroom to open the letter by myself. My heart was pounding, because by that time we’d got over being hungry, but we still had the fear that we’d fall on hard times again, that they’d take my mother away again, the way they did after the war, when it was days before she came back and my grandmother went around to all the police stations and women’s prisons asking about her. My father told her, if you don’t come with me something so bad will happen to you that you’d be better off hanging yourself or jumping off the balcony, but she wouldn’t budge, she didn’t want to leave Spain, although she knew perfectly well what lay in store for her, not because she’d done anything, because politics had never mattered to her and she didn’t even know how to read or write, but just because she was married to him. I was three years old when the war ended, the day my father showed up one morning in our building in Las Ventas to take us with him. I don’t remember anything about it, but I can imagine the scene perfectly. Knowing how hardheaded my mother was, she would have been sitting in a corner, very serious, head down, and no one could have budged her. I can imagine my father, talking and talking and telling her that we all had to go to Russia, trying to convince her, promising her things, arguing just the way he did at his political meetings, where it seems he always won, which was why he rose so high. He had a golden tongue, my grandmother told me, the only person he couldn’t convince was his wife, he’d never been able to get her to come to any protest, she was never interested in his meetings and politics and didn’t believe a word of anything he promised her, didn’t admire him for the higher and higher positions he held during the war, or for the stars he wore on his cap and cuffs. He would go away, leave in the morning and come back maybe that night or not till after a week or a month, he’d come back from jail or from the front, disguised so the police wouldn’t find him, or dressed in his military uniform, and she never asked where he’d been, listening without a word to his explanations, which she probably didn’t understand. But she always kept a clean house for him and the kettle on the fire, and sometimes she treated his wounds or fixed him bowls of broth or hot coffee at every hour of the day or night to ease his hunger, and when what little money he’d given her ran out she would go out on her own and try to make a living by scrubbing floors or selling water in the Plaza de Toros with a clay jug and tin cup, and if she had to she would go to the parish church to ask for clothing for us, although she hid that from my father, who would never allow any priest to help him. The last time I saw him must have been that night he came looking for us, already in hiding, because if the war hadn’t ended it was close to it, and he told my mother that he had a car with its motor running waiting at the door, that he was going to take us that very night, I don’t know whether to Valencia, where there would be a boat, or to an airport, and that we’d go straight to Russia and would never be hungry again and have every comfort. In the meantime the car with the driver was at the door, and Franco’s troops were at the edge of the city, and my mother sat there as if she were listening to it rain, I can see her so clearly, shaking her head, staring at the floor, saying no, no, he could do what he pleased, he always had, but he wasn’t going to take her and their children anywhere, least of all to Russia, so far away, because going was easy, but whoever saw anyone come back from so far? And he paced the room; I have no memory of him, but I can see him, tall, handsome in his uniform, the way he looks in one of the photographs they gave me at the embassy and that later my mother tore into tiny pieces and burned in a pile with all his papers, letters, drawings, and documents, things I’d like to have now as a reminder of him. “Then I wash my hands of anything that happens to you, and to the children,” he would have said, and she would have leaped up like a lioness, “As if you haven’t always washed your hands of us, you with your politics and adventures and revolutions, if we’d depended on you, your children would have gone begging in the street.” Or they’d be in Russia, well fed and cared for, not having to pay the price they had to pay here because of her contrariness, because one other time, when I was two, my father wanted my older brothers to go on one of those expeditions of Spanish children to Russia, but my mother refused then too. She told me that I was sleeping in the room beside theirs, that the shouting woke me up and I came out crying, that when I saw my father I didn’t recognize him at first and ran to bury my head in my mother’s skirts when he tried to hug me. But there was another woman in the room; as I tell you this, it’s as if I remembered it, I see her so clearly, a tall, dark woman, vigorous, beautiful, dressed in black as if in mourning, she had been a neighbor of ours and had a daughter who sometimes looked after me and played with me, a daughter even more beautiful than she was, and she also had a strapping son who was in Russia two or three years. The woman picked me up and sat me on her knees, my mother told me, and said to her, “Please, if not for yourself, at least do it for this child, who isn’t to blame for anything.” The woman rocked me so I would go to sleep, and sang a song in a low voice while my father kept pacing and arguing with my mother, and all the while you could hear cannons in the distance, but less and less frequently, because the war was in its last hours and everything was lost by then. “And do you know who that woman was?” my mother would ask me, lowering her voice the way she did when she was telling about the things that happened that night. “She was La Pasionaria, who followed the same politics as your father, and she told me that her children already spoke Russian and were getting along stupendously in the Soviet Union, just as we would if we went that night.” My mother didn’t answer, just sat with her head down, staring at the floor, and my father lost control: talking to you is like talking to a wall. “Whatever happens is on your head,” he yelled at her, and again he said that he was washing his hands of it: you’d be better off throwing yourself into a well, because they’re ready to take over the city and won’t show any mercy. And it was true, because they shaved my mother’s head and gave her terrible beatings, just for being the wife of an important Red, and my uncles, his brothers, were all put in prison, and they shot two of them. Every night you could hear shots from the Del Este Cemetery from our house, and as soon as they stopped my mother and grandmother would throw shawls over their heads and go with the other women to look through all the corpses and see if they found anyone from our family. That I do remember, because I was a little older: the two women with their black shawls over their heads, starting off down the street, and me not sleeping until they came back, when the sun was already up, but the part I didn’t see I also seem to remember, those two in the light of early dawn moving slowly among the dead bodies, rolling one over in order to see his face. My mother took us to her village, believing that we would eat better and they would pay less attention to her there, but the minute she arrived they arrested her and made her scrub the church floors every morning for two years, and she got so cold scrubbing those paving stones on her knees that she had trouble with her bones for the rest of her life.

THERE’S NO LIMIT TO the surprising stories you can hear if you listen to the novels in people’s lives. The woman came about six in the evening, the old hour for making calls, and brought with her the air of a caller from a different time. There was an affectionate formality visible in the care she put into dressing, and also in the pastries she brought, just like the ones from her youth. She’s in her sixties, appears to belong to a comfortable though not opulent middle class, but there is a working-class vitality in the gleam of her eyes and the openness of her manner. She no longer lives in her old neighborhood, the one where she went when she married and where her children grew up. She’s farther away, in a development on the outskirts, and you can see that she would have preferred not to move, that in recent years the change of address has involved a number of bitter adjustments: her husband’s retirement means a decrease in his earnings, which once allowed them to enjoy good cars, good schools for the children, and trips to other countries. But she is strong, a large, solid woman with an open gaze and energetic hands, and has a positive outlook on the world, on whatever life still has to offer, unlike her husband, she says, who hasn’t learned how to adapt and is driving her out of her mind because he would like to pull her into his depression, keep her beside him every minute in their small apartment. Suspicious of the world, he has no taste now for traveling or even going out, only nostalgia for what they’ve lost, both the money and the years. Things wear down, times change, you have less business, suddenly you’re retired and must live on a pension, and your savings have shrunk like your energy, the money’s gone and time’s run out.

So he’s at home, she says, sitting on the sofa with the thermos of coffee I left for his lunch, and when I told him where I was going, he perked up a little, and I think he was just about ready to come with me, but laziness got the upper hand, and cold as it is these days, a person has to be careful about going out, he tells me, particularly at eighty, and he’s always complaining about how far out we live and how long we have to wait for the bus, not like it used to be, when you could be in the heart of town in fifteen minutes. I just cut him off, “All right then, you stay here,” and he asks me again where I’m going, as if he’s afraid I’ll be gone a long time. By now he’ll be worried, checking his watch, wandering around the house in his bathrobe and slippers. “You dress like a sick person,” I tell him, but he doesn’t care, he’s lost his dignity, like so much else he once had.

She looks at her little gold watch, a trinket from the old days, like the bracelets and ring with the precious stone on a hand that’s no longer young but still has strength. I must be going, she says, or call him, because he’ll be nervous, what a trial the man is. But I can’t complain, in forty years of marriage he’s never given me any cause, he’s been so good that I almost want to murder him, and when I get impatient with him I immediately feel guilty.

She doesn’t want to go, you can see she’s enjoying the visit. She clearly doesn’t have the habit of drinking tea yet makes a show of savoring each sip and takes pains to hold the cup just so and praises everything around her, her eyes clear and radiant with appreciation, accustomed as they are to judging the price and quality of objects: the porcelain of the tea service, the fabric of the curtains, the red roses in the middle of the table. If she’s comparing this house with hers, she does it without resentment, more with admiration. Just as there are people blind to what’s around them, like black holes absorbing all light without benefiting from it, there are others who reflect any brightness near them, beaming it back as if it were their own. Aye, child, how your mother would love this house if she could see it, if only she hadn’t died when she was so young. This woman who has known better times is renewed in the presence of youth, in the spaciousness of a house much larger than hers, in the porcelain and roses she can’t afford now, and if she sees a painting she doesn’t like or tastes a Japanese tea that’s strange and bitter, the spur of curiosity in her is more powerful than the reflex of dismissal. She went to school only a few years, but she speaks like a sensible and cultivated woman, and if in the 1960s she lived in domestic servitude to her husband and children, she has the elegance and aplomb of one who can manage on her own. She reads books, loves the movies, has attended night school. I remember your mother, how angry she was that we were so enslaved to our husbands, the effort she made to see that you and your sister studied. She was very clever, realized that times would change, and that’s why she suffered even more when she knew she wouldn’t live to see you or your sister as adults, independent, not bound as we were.

She takes a sip of tea, nibbles a pastry, chats about a film or conveys a mild piece of gossip, looks at her watch and says it’s time for her to go, you must have so many things to do and here I am taking your whole afternoon, besides my husband must be very nervous by now, afraid I won’t get home in time to make dinner, he has to have dinner at nine o’clock sharp, not a minute before and not a minute after, he says it’s because of his stomach, that any deviation makes his ulcer worse. He’s always had this mania for punctuality. My mother told me when she met him, “Daughter, you surely didn’t choose him on purpose; your father was exactly the same, his life was governed by the clock.”

I saw my father the last time when I was three. Sometimes I think I remember him, but what I probably remember is a photograph in which he’s holding me in his arms. When I mention my father, something happens, a shift in her gaze, inward, and the smile disappears. A casual comment is enough to make the woman very different, fading from the room where nothing else has changed. The new silence is like a blank page on which words are being printed, the novel of an ordinary life, leaping from one epoch to another, from an apartment building near the Del Este Cemetery in the bloody Madrid of the early postwar years to a recently constructed neighborhood of the 1960s, spanning the Civil War and the vicissitudes of a man who disappears one night, never to return, climbing into an automobile that’s been left running, waiting for him. It’s learned that he was in Russia but later slipped into France and fought in the Resistance against the Germans, and was arrested and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp from which he sent brief letters and drawings to his children, because he had a great talent for drawing. He escaped from the camp, again joined the Resistance, and again was captured and again escaped. His trail seemed lost forever until one day, more than twenty years after the end of the war in Europe, his daughter, who didn’t remember him, receives a notification from the German embassy. She is afraid to open the letter, with its official letterhead, because ever since she was a little girl official letters have announced only misfortunes. She is also afraid to show it to her husband, who never wants to know anything about politics and is doing very well working hard to pay off the bills for the apartment and the car and the washing machine, take her and their small children to the beach during summer vacations, and enroll the children in the best private school. He doesn’t want to know about the old days, he never asked about the father who disappeared so many years ago, but it’s also true that he fell in love with her even though she lived in a poor neighborhood and was the daughter and niece of Reds.

IF YOUR MOTHER HAD been here, of course, I would have told her about the letter, but we hadn’t moved to the barrio yet, and although I was already friendly with a few neighbor women I wouldn’t have wanted them to learn about my family’s past, not because I’m ashamed of it, don’t think that, but as a precaution, because we were still afraid in those days. Your mother, so distinguished, so young, I always remember her that way, not how she was at the end, although even when she was ill she never lost her elegance, but long before that, the first time I saw her, when your family came to the barrio and you were so small they still carried you in their arms or in the buggy. I remember the minute you arrived. I heard the sound of a car and I went out on the balcony and saw the big black automobile your father had then, the 1500, and when I saw all of you get out I was happy because there were so many of you, and there weren’t many people in the building or the barrio at that time. You children filed out of the car, bundles came out of the trunk, then your mother got out in a light-colored dress and stood on the sidewalk, maybe a little tired from the trip, and I didn’t get the impression she much liked what she saw, the open land with ditches and cranes and Madrid so far away, the broad streets and the trees like lamp poles. She took you in her arms and looked up, and I waved, so very pleased that she was pretty and young and moving into the apartment right above mine. She wasn’t sick yet, or at least she didn’t know it, paying no attention to the first symptoms, but I remember she was pale, more fragile than the other neighbors our age although she worked in her house and was kept busy with all of you, just like anyone else, and she wore that same smile of enjoying life that you have today. Often in the stairwell I would hear her singing as she worked in the kitchen or laughing out loud at something your father was saying in a low voice. I did tell her about my life and what happened to my mother at the end of the war, and even that La Pasionaria had held me in her lap and sung me a lullaby, and how afraid I’d been when the letter came from the German embassy, several months late, after being sent all over Madrid. I was afraid my husband would be angry if I showed it to him, but your mother laughed when I told her about it several years later: “My dear, why would he be angry, as good-natured as he is?” I didn’t dare hope that the letter would tell me my father was alive. As soon as my husband came home from work that evening, I closed the bedroom door and showed him the letter, and he calmed me down right away; it couldn’t be anything bad coming from a foreign government, because the only government we had to fear was our own. “It’s best, though, not to say anything to your mother until we know for sure what it’s all about.”

The next morning they got in the car, which still smelled brand-new, a delicious odor of plastic and metal and gasoline, and drove into Madrid like two tourists, she clutching in her lap the purse that contained the letter the whole time. Maybe they would tell her that her father was alive, that he lost his memory because of a head injury and that’s why he never came looking for his family, because she’d seen stories like that in the movies, but she also feared they would certify her father’s death, one more among the millions of nameless corpses thrown into the ditches and common graves of Europe during the time his last letter came from the German camp, a few lines and on the back the pencil drawing of a mountain village with bulbous bell towers and steep roofs. I usually walked holding my husband’s arm, but on that occasion he took mine, gave my name at the embassy office, and showed them the letter and my identity card. I was so frightened among those well-mannered people with blond hair and blue eyes who spoke with a strange accent and were so friendly, not like the Spanish officials who barked rather than spoke and were always in a foul humor. Finally we were taken to a gentleman in a room with a large table in the center, a man who spoke as if to calm me, like a doctor, so I worked up the courage to ask if my father was alive or dead, and he answered, “That’s what we’d like to know, because we’ve been looking for him for years to return his belongings to him.” Then he picked up a large cardboard box from the floor and set it in the middle of the table, a box tied with red tape and sealed with wax but battered, as if it had been shuffled around a lot. My husband and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do, and the man said, “It’s yours, you can take it; the things your father left behind the second time he escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany are in this box.” I looked at it without daring to touch it, and at my husband, who shrugged, nervous too, though later he didn’t want to admit it. They had me sign some papers. I picked up the box, at first expecting it to be heavy, then surprised it was so light. We went outside and walked down Castellana, I carrying the box as if it held something fragile, and my husband told me to give it to him. It was one of those cold, sunny days in Madrid. I couldn’t wait till we got home to open it, and besides, I didn’t want my mother to see it before I knew what was in it. It weighed little, and I could hear things loose inside. We sat down on a bench, and my husband opened it. My knees were shaking, and I was crying as he took things out, everything my father had owned in the camp. There were letters my mother sent him, letters she dictated to a neighbor, the ones my brother wrote him on lined paper from a school notebook, and also the letters I wrote when I was little, just learning to write, and the drawings my brother and I made for him, and snapshots of us, some with our names on the back, written in my clumsy writing. How poor we looked, with our starved and frightened little faces, and how had I forgotten all that in just a few years? There was a photograph of my father in uniform, holding a little girl in his arms, so small that I wasn’t sure it was me, and another of him, very thin, with a shaved head and huge ears and a number underneath, and also papers in French and German, all of them yellowed and so worn that they tore when we tried to unfold them, and lots of drawings on a piece of cardboard or the back of something printed in German, drawings of towns with church towers, trains, and mountains in the background, and portraits of people, men in striped uniforms, with shaved heads, and on a sheet of graph paper a large, pretty drawing of Red Square in Moscow, in color, that looked like a photograph. We closed the box, put it in the trunk of the car, and all the way home I cried as I hadn’t cried in years, like a fool, making everything blurry, and my husband took one hand from the wheel to pat my hand, and he said, “Look, woman, calm down, what are you going to tell your mother when she sees you’ve been crying, she’ll think it’s something I did.”

To make sure her mother wouldn’t see the box, she hid it in the back of her armoire. She lay awake nights trying to imagine what became of her father after his second escape from the German camp — in November 1944, they told her. Maybe his face was disfigured in an explosion and his body decomposed so no one could identify it, or maybe he drowned in a river as he attempted to cross it, or was crushed beneath the wheels of a train or the tread of a tank. Night after night she imagined different deaths for her father, with ghostly landscapes of the war, machine-gun fire, barking dogs. One morning she came home after shopping and was surprised not to find her mother. She felt a flash of alarm even before she ran to the bedroom and saw the doors of her armoire flung open. She ran through the apartment, then went out on the balcony. In the open field across from the building, where excavation was in progress for the foundation of a new structure, she saw her mother bent over, dressed in mourning. She remembered the times she watched her go out every dawn to the Del Este Cemetery. Now her mother was standing beside a fire, throwing things into it. When she heard her daughter call, she turned around but only for a moment, and kept on watching the fire. It was a cloudy, humid morning; the daughter cut across the field toward that solitary figure, her heels sinking into the mud. And as she came closer, she saw her mother was old. Her mother had started a fire with the cardboard of the box and was throwing papers, photographs, and drawings into it with an absorbed deliberation.

“Don’t look at me like that, as if I were robbing you of what’s left of your father.” Her voice was clear and dry, toneless, maybe the same voice of a quarter of a century before when she quietly stood her ground as the mustached, uniformed man and the tall, black-clad woman tried to persuade her, predicting disaster. “Your father is alive, and he doesn’t want to know anything about you or any of us. At the end of the war, the French government gave him a decoration and a large payment, but he never bothered to send us one centime. The last time he wrote me was to tell me that he had begun a new life and was therefore ending all contact with us. I didn’t want you to see that letter. You were still a little girl and always fantasizing about him. He lives in France and has another family, he even changed his name. He’s a French businessman now, that’s why the Germans couldn’t find him. If you want to see the man who was your father, take a train and get off at a French border town called Cerbère.”