Sepharad

wherever the man goes

THE NEW HOUSE, recently occupied, sparely furnished, still echoing empty, the paint fresh on the walls, wood floors smelling of varnish, all trace erased of those who lived there until a few months before, presences of long years’ standing abolished overnight, like the rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung. Only one thing defines the austere utility of each room, now that it is stripped of decoration: in the bedroom a large iron bed, in the office a table and chair.

The new house, the new life, recently begun in a different city, far from the dreary provinces, in a Madrid neighborhood unknown until now, a small enclave in the heart of Madrid, where the streets are poorer, hidden, working-class, with a blur of strange people of uncertain sex, of skin tones and facial features denoting faraway places, languages heard in passing that carry the sound of Asia, of Muslim settlements and African markets and Andean villages.

Going outside every morning was a journey of discovery, and the customary errands often ended in aimless ambling, in the simple inertia of walking and looking, of hearing indecipherable tongues spoken in telephone booths on Augusto Figueroa, words of the circular and sinister vocabulary of heroin, the ringing, timeless voices of neighborhood women yelling back and forth, of elderly ladies who come to their doors in their bathrobes and look with resigned amazement at what they see or choose not to see, the way their barrio has changed, the affected voices of men transformed into women, although not completely, as sometimes a manly beard shows on cheeks puffed with silicone, or a male bald spot through a blond, tempestuously back-combed mane, or feet much too wide and sinewy in high-heeled patent-leather shoes.

On every street corner stand the living dead, so pale that the veins snaking up their forearms stand out beneath transparent skin. So habitual and quiet in their waiting are these specters that you quickly learn not to see them, to pass them as if they were already in the world beyond. They stare into space or keep their eyes fastened, vigilant and expectant, on the nearest corner, where sooner or later a dealer or a police car will show up. Then they move, slowly, with the lethargy of saurians, trying without conviction to act natural before the police who ask for IDs, as if their identity weren’t known, their dead faces and names not radioed from patrol car to patrol car. Led off in handcuffs, they go with the weariness of actors in a bad play.

A man or woman follows an individual with dark glasses and a scrawny beard. Shoulders back, hands in the back pockets of his jeans, the individual hurries so that the follower must struggle to keep up, though bent over and abject as an old beggar, holding out a dirty and insufficient amount of money, which the dealer slaps to the ground with one hand, not even turning to the person who is now on his knees, scrambling to pick up the bills and coins scattered beneath cars or in the filth of the sidewalk.

At first they are disturbing strangers, these figures who appear on a street corner or at the end of a sidewalk, huddled between cars, defecating or shooting up, curled up in the shelter of a stairway or entryway. But soon they became familiar presences, as common in the barrio as the transvestites and old ladies in bathrobes and knife-thin silhouettes of the dealers. The dealers walk with a swing of the shoulders, looking to the side, disappearing into an entryway or kneeling behind a hedge in Chueca Plaza, in the miserable garden at the mouth of the metro. They return with what they never show, speak words that cannot be heard, and there is a quick and secret contact of hands, a little packet in the palm of one hand and dirty bills in the other, and they move on, bend down to a car stopped with its motor running, throw the driver a glance, rest reluctant elbows in the open window.

So many voices, lives, and worlds juxtaposed in a narrow space, even the rarest and most sinister things soon become ordinary, each inhabitant an unwritten novel: the young man roaming in search of heroin who on the narrow sidewalk crowded by parked cars passes the neighbor woman who’s come down in slippers and robe to buy bread and has learned not to look at him. The women-men babbling away with little squeals and hands flipping; the blind men tapping the ground and walls with their white canes; the Chinese packed tightly into dark apartments and unventilated cellars; the small Native Americans who at three or four in the morning congregate by the telephone booths and hold long conferences in Aimara or Guarani or Quechua with who knows what relatives left behind on the Altiplano or in the jungle. The man in pajamas who sits every evening on a balcony, in a wicker chair beside a butane burner, watching without expression and suffering fits of coughing that bend him double and force him to rest his damp brow on the iron railing.

He was gone for a while, and when he reappeared, in the same pajamas, sitting in the same wicker chair beside the butane burner, he had a white mask across his mouth, and a thin plastic tube emerged from one of his nostrils. He didn’t cough now but still sat looking down at the street, at the people passing, the neighbor women, unshaven transvestites, countless Chinese, An-deans with their babies bound in shawls on their backs, the new couple with a baby and a dog who just moved into the apartment across the street. Sometimes after midnight, when the barrio was deserted, a carefully dressed and made-up old woman ventured out. She always carried a chair that looked as if it had been found at the dump and a plastic bag tied in a knot. She would choose one of the garbage pails lined up along the sidewalk and set her chair before it; then, very serious and neat, she would undo the knot of her plastic bag and pull out a checked tablecloth, the remnants of a meal, crusts and crumbs, a plastic glass, a knife and fork, and finally a large, dirty napkin that she tucked beneath her chin. She sat down at her table as if sharing a distinguished meal with someone, sipping water as if savoring a fine wine, and dabbing at the corners of her mouth, smearing crimson and grease across her chin. When she was finished dining, she collected everything and put it back into the plastic bag — empty sardine tins, bakery wrappers, glasses, plates, and silverware — removed the napkin, folded the cloth she used to cover the garbage pail that served as her table, and left with her bag and chair, not be seen outside until the next midnight.

Gradually you become familiar to the stranger watching you, though no words are exchanged, only a glance from balcony to balcony, or a moment when you brush against each other on a narrow sidewalk of the barrio: the man, the woman, the boy, the dog, the workmen who completely emptied the house across the street, erasing all traces of those who lived in it for years, the trash bin by the door, then the new walls painted soft, luminous colors, to eliminate efficiently the marks of the previous neighbors, the way the pavilion of a hospital is painted white for reasons of hygiene.

You are neither your consciousness nor your memory but what the stranger sees of you. Who was the neighborhood drunk whose name no one knew, though we saw him constantly and were no longer afraid of him, who was suddenly there when you turned a corner one night, with his filthy lank hair all tousled and his heavy bearlike body wrapped in rags stinking of piss and vomit? At times his small, watery blue eyes would seem to focus, but he never spoke to anyone or asked for charity, wandering through our streets like the hide-clad Robinson Crusoe depicted in old lithographs, and just as alone. He fashioned his shelter from cardboard, newspapers, and plastic bags in the entry of a building or slept stretched out in the middle of the sidewalk like a Calcutta beggar, his territory marked by the stench he emitted. What are the episodes of one’s life seen through the eyes of an indifferent but attentive witness? Every afternoon the man in pajamas on the balcony watched the new boy go into his building carrying his schoolbag, then come back outside a few minutes later, eating a snack and leading the dog, pulling him or trying to hold him back, never able to control him, this outlandish puppy that must have been as new to his owners as the recently painted house, as the new barrio and the new life and the school the boy was attending for the first time.

Things repeated every day seem to have been happening forever. The boy with the schoolbag, the yips of the dog in the house where the balcony doors are always open, the boy tugging at the dog’s leash, undoubtedly taking him to Vázquez de Mella Plaza, which is the only open space in the barrio, a large, ugly concrete expanse, nothing but a large platform built above a parking lot, where the locals walk their dogs while neighborhood boys play soccer and the girls jump rope and play hopscotch and the junkies shoot up and none of the groups seems to see the other, although how can you not see the bloody syringes carelessly tossed aside, the squeezed-dry lemon slices, the scorched squares of silver wrap? The plaza is ringed by buildings occupied by questionable hostels and very elderly people who haven’t been able to leave. At night, high above the rooftops, the most visible landmark is the telephone tower, its enormity reminiscent of a Soviet skyscraper, topped with the yellow sphere and scarlet hands of a clock that on foggy winter nights emits a gold-and-red phosphorescence.

One afternoon the boy comes running home and doesn’t have the dog, and even from his balcony on the second floor the man in pajamas sees that the boy’s face is covered with tears as he pushes the button on the intercom panel. The door opens, but the boy doesn’t go in, the man and the woman come down, and the boy throws his arms around his mother, barely waist high and crying as if he were much younger; he points toward the corner and wipes his nose with the handkerchief his mother has given him.

The man’s entire life is watching and waiting. He monitors his breathing, fearing a blackout, where he would lie motionless on the balcony in his flannel slippers and pajamas, the mandatory uniform of the terminally ill, perhaps already excluded from the realm of the living like the pale shadows that slip along the street, always hunched over in pain, always worried and hurrying after a scornful dealer.

The man, woman, and boy disappear from view at the end of the street at the corner of Calle San Marcos, which is the limit of his field of vision. After a few minutes the man returns alone, calling a name that must be the dog’s, trying, inexpertly, to whistle. The puppy is so little it’s probably lost forever, run over by a car. But they don’t give up, they go back and forth all afternoon, passing beneath his balcony, and go inside only when it grows dark, while at the corner of Augusto Figueroa, the pink neon sign of the Santander Bar has been turned on, a pink as soft as the blue sky above the roof tiles, as the dusk reflected in the windowpanes of the highest apartments when it is already night down in the street.

It’s too cold to stay out on the balcony, but the man with the mask over his mouth keeps watch through the window, his back to a room of which all that can be seen from across the street is murky lamplight and occasionally the bluish wink of a television through sheer curtains that have the same fatigued look as the man’s pajamas or the neck of his T-shirt. What would it be like to go into that house? Half behind the curtains, the man breathes through his mask and watches the lit balconies of the house across the way, which still have no curtains, and the now nearly dark sidewalk filled with passersby both living and prematurely dead, each seeing what the other cannot. Someone stands in the middle of the street, but the watching man can’t see who it is, so when he hears the sharp, short barks of the puppy, he pulls the curtains back and presses his face to the glass to get a better view.

It’s the drunk, huge, his face turned up toward the balcony of the new neighbors, weaving slightly as he holds the black-and-white dog, who is barking hoarsely and struggling to escape from the suffocating rags and hands. The drunk does not approach the door or the intercom, he stands waiting for something to happen with the dull patience of an animal. The sickly man knows that one of those balcony doors will open and reveal a recently painted pale yellow interior, that the boy will come out, the first to hear and recognize the barking, and that the vestibule light will go on.

Father and son come down, and the young woman runs out to the balcony, so focused on the street that she doesn’t glance once at the building across the street. The boy, containing his impulse to run to the dog, holds tight to his father’s hand. The drunk does not walk one step toward them. Slow and bulky, he bends to the ground and sets down the puppy with great delicacy, without a word, and already the boy is hugging his dog and the man is saying something to the drunk and offering him something in an extended hand. The drunk’s eyes are very light, colorless like certain Slavic eyes, his round face is purple with bruises and sores, and though he is less than a meter away, he looks at them from a much greater distance. He is like a castaway who has forgotten the use of language and ended up mad. It occurs to the father that when his son is a little older he will help him read the novels about shipwrecks and desert islands that inspired him in the best years of his own childhood.

THERE ARE OTHER FIXTURES on the street corners of the neighborhood, their faces as familiar as that of the woman in the bakery or pharmacy, or the woman-man at the newspaper kiosk; the police from time to time force one of them to put his hands against the wall and frisk him, or they’ll ask a Moroccan dealer for identification and take him away in a patrol car, and he might be back in the barrio shortly afterward, or disappear and never be seen again in this squatter’s city on the outskirts of Madrid.

Some of those who arrive maintain a certain dignity, manners from a life they still haven’t completely abandoned; they are recent converts to the sweet stupor of the barrio. Young boys with new clothes and name-brand shoes, who from a distance seem undamaged but who at closer range show signs of deterioration, usually succumb after a few months, aged, part of a process in which each of them is both vampire and victim. Their arms and neck marked by needles, they tell the boy never to touch the syringes that crunch beneath pedestrians’ feet in the park, never to bend down and pick up anything off the ground.

Where did the new arrivals come from? What was in those eyes that were both intense and vacant? A young woman looked like a secretary, dressed in a suit and dark stockings and heels and carrying a leather purse and a folder. She could have been an employee in any of the nearby offices, maybe the manager of a small lawyer’s office who had agreed to meet someone on this corner; from time to time she glanced at her watch. Well filled out, rosy-cheeked, and discreetly dressed, ignoring the others who were also waiting, the habitual ones who could barely stay on their feet, who leaned against a wall where they dozed or seemed in a faint, slowly slipping down the wall to the ground. But after a few days, you might notice that her heels were scuffed and worn, or there was a run in her stocking or a hole in her shoe, or her hair needed care and you could see the lighter roots in her part, or that the rosiness in her face wasn’t from good health but from makeup, and she no longer had a wristwatch to consult as if she were waiting for an appointment.

As time passed, she clutched the folder with black covers, the last vestige of her dignity, or a laughable attempt to disguise herself from the people she knew or the police who patrolled the barrio, or simply not to feel embarrassed when she saw women she had resembled not long ago, secretaries of small businesses, employees in pharmacies or hair salons.

As she grew paler she applied more color to eyes and lips and used a more strident rouge on her cheeks. Now she wobbled on her run-over high heels, and her blouse was unbuttoned to show off a pouter pigeon bosom, against which she pressed the ubiquitous file (now with the plastic torn along the edges, revealing the cardboard beneath) that spilled out sheets of paper like forms or memorandums collected haphazardly off the ground and shoved in hit or miss.

Sometimes a man came with her: tall, thirty-something, more distinguished-looking than she, maybe an inexperienced and benevolent boss, wearing a sport coat, wool trousers, and leather shoes, with a studied, three-day growth of beard and tousled hair, a man you would guess to be a journalist or architect. Both of them disappeared, and after a few weeks or months she alone returned, her hair more badly dyed, her eyelashes blacker, the look in her round, protruding eyes more anxious, her lips more clumsily reddened. She wore the same high-heeled shoes and perhaps the same stockings, and the same black folder was in her arms.

The next time I saw her, the last, wasn’t in the barrio, it was maybe a year later, as I was walking down Calle de la Montera. She was leaning against the corner of a building, and I was slow to recognize her, she was so much like the other miniskirted women with heavy thighs and scuffed heels who clomp up and down those sidewalks, smoking on street corners, watched over by pimps nearly as moribund as they, surrounded by the sex shops and gaming parlors at the mouths of narrow streets where the air is foul with bad plumbing.

PEOPLE LONG FORGOTTEN rise to the surface with a shudder of memory. Recently I walked by the entry of our building now inhabited by others, and from below I could glimpse, through the balcony railing, the ceiling and upper portion of a wall we had painted pale yellow. It was one of those long May afternoons with a hint of summer and pollen in the air, and on the balcony across the street sat the sickly old man in his slippers and pajamas, elbows on the railing, mask over his mouth, and plastic tube in his nose. He was looking down at the street, and he may have seen and remembered me, or maybe not, after all these years in which I have rarely walked down our old street.

There was another witness to everything, I remember now, a large old man with a broad smile and chubby red cheeks, one of those gallant fellows whom age seems to make more compact and sturdy. He always took a slow morning stroll through the neighborhood streets between Chueca and Vazquez de Mella Plazas, looking larger than he really was in his old-fashioned and opulent overcoat and with his singularly small head covered by a Tyrolean hat, complete with a green feather. I always noticed that hat and his enormous shoes, and his perfect complacency toward the world, the way he took levelheaded pleasure from everything around him, sometimes pausing to enjoy the first ray of sun that lit one corner of Chueca Plaza on winter mornings or to contemplate, with interest and approval, the maneuvers of a dump truck in the middle of interrupted traffic or the arrival of the police car or ambulance to pick up someone lying stiff in a doorway. He stopped a moment, observed, then continued his walk, as if the richness of things yet to come on his walk prevented him from staying as long as he would have liked. Satisfied and absorbed, he lifted a finger to his hat brim in greeting to Sandra at her newspaper stand, helped a blind man walk between badly parked cars on the sidewalk, admired the bags of oranges hanging from the stand of a fruit merchant, even devoted a vaguely compassionate glance to the ghosts on the corners, giving equal attention to stern policeman and furtive dealer. The admiring and magnanimous curiosity of the man in the Tyrolean hat was part of the small business activity of the barrio. How strange to meet him every day and suddenly not see him and yet be unaware of his absence. You go away and forget the habits and figures of that little enclave in the heart of Madrid, and years later remember, for no reason, a place, a face, a fragment of a story with no beginning or end, a novel we each carry but never tell anyone. What kind of life did the old woman have who spread her dinner tablecloth over the lid of a garbage can every midnight? Or the young man and woman who came to the barrio looking for heroin and pushing a baby buggy, their child sleeping despite the clatter and jolting, pacifier loose at one side of its half-open mouth, eyes placidly closed? Or, if the child was red and rigid from crying, they didn’t hear it, both focused on the corner where the tranquil shadow they were waiting for would appear at any moment. They must be somewhere around there this very minute, if they’re still alive, and the child, who wasn’t yet two, would be eight or nine by now, and maybe poisoned by the same disease the parents carried in their blood, the disease that has killed so many of the specters of the barrio. The living dead have disappeared from the corners of Augusto Figueroa. A few may survive in hospitals and jails or are dragging themselves like zombies along the footpaths that wind through the open land leading to the tin-and-cardboard shacks on the outskirts of Madrid, where police have been herding them since the order came down to clear the addicts off the city streets. A flower shop in the arcade has replaced the kiosk where Sandra sold her newspapers in slippers and a track suit, or in a flannel bathrobe and knit cap on winter days, and if some mornings she didn’t shave, her eyes were always carefully outlined in the manner of Sara Montiel, her idol.

Other figures drift back from oblivion, the forlorn drunk who brought back our puppy and the tall, slender woman who was with him for a few months and then disappeared.

She was like a model, with Asiatic cheekbones, a large, fleshy mouth, long legs, and a spring to her step as she walked. From the back, or from a distance, you saw a tall figure and long curly hair. Only when she came near did you see her pallor, the cloud over her large eyes, the bruises on her beautiful legs, now too thin, and the black gaps of lost teeth. She went from one end of the barrio to another like a great disoriented bird beating against walls, not knowing how to get out. She lurched along with the stride of a model, still straight-backed, taller than anyone in the barrio, her curls and mannerist neck above figures hunched in councils cooking up schemes or hunched in doorways where the flame of a cigarette lighter heated a square of aluminum foil on which a shot of heroin was turning liquid and smoky. Sometimes she stopped and stood motionless, her body silhouetted against a building, watery eyes gleaming through dirty hair, a drunken, demented smile on her ruined mouth, a cigarette held in her long fingers and smoke seeping from her lips in a photographic pose.

She began sleeping in the entryways of shops and closed bars, where the indigent set up their burrows of rags and cardboard. In winter she wore a tattered jacket of fake fur over the usual T-shirt and light miniskirt. On cold mornings her white face had a violet hue. Her hair was thinning, and her eyes had lost their color. She begged for cigarettes; she would take one in her hand, slowly put it between her lips, and wait for someone to give her a light as well.

Once she asked the barrio drunk for a smoke. He shrugged, grunted, walked on, but that night, when she was shivering in her fake-fur jacket in a doorway on Calle San Marcos, a shadow stopped before her, it was the drunk offering her a cigarette, holding it delicately in his thick, grubby fingers as if it were the stem of a flower. The woman brushed the hair from her face and put the cigarette between lips purple with cold, and the drunk, whom no one had ever seen smoke, lit it, his living-dead face visible in the brief flare.

People in the barrio soon knew what had happened: he had bought the cigarettes and lighter at the same small shop where they stocked his cartons of white wine, and where the next day, contrary to his custom, he bought some custard and chocolate-filled doughnuts. The druggies lived on that kind of food; mixed in with their syringes and scorched sheets of foil were always candy wrappings and empty custard containers.

He began to carry things every night to the doorway where she took shelter, sometimes not waking her in her shivering delirium. He would cover her with his jacket, older than the one she wore, and one night he was seen dragging a filthy, torn comforter down Calle Pelayo, which he must have found in a trash barrel. He began to move with diligence, concentration, like Crusoe on his island preparing a hut or cave in which to spend the winter. During the day he was never far from her, although he didn’t approach her or make himself too visible, watching from a corner where he could duck behind a building. Indifferent to the people passing him, who gave him a wide berth because of his smell, he was focused on the tall, young, skinny woman who walked with a long stride past people and cars or huddled pale in arcades or doorways late at night after no one was left in the dark streets except the most persistent dead, those who at three or four in the morning were still waiting for something.

She probably spoke to him first, asking him imperiously to bring her cigarettes again, or yogurt or doughnuts from the shop where he went when no one else was there and wordlessly laid money on the counter. He always paid and was never seen to beg. The shop owner’s story was that the drunk was the firstborn of a wealthy family in the north, that a tyrannical father threw him out, disinherited him, yet took care to see that his son had what he needed to survive, enough food and clothing to keep him from dying of cold in the streets.

No one will ever know the true story, just as no one knew his name, unless he told the woman with whom little by little he began to share nightly encampments in the most sheltered nooks of the barrio. No one ever saw them walking together, but they must have kept each other warm during the icy nights of that winter. He wrapped her up and protected her, stayed awake to be sure she was covered, constructed her bed of cardboard and newspapers with an expert hand, and then cocooned her in rags and garments scavenged from the trash. You would see a flickering glow in the dark expanse of Vazquez de Mella Plaza: the drunk had started a fire where the tall, skinny woman warmed herself like a sphinx, smoking the cigarettes he brought her and lighted with a quick gesture every time she put one to her lips, and eating the yogurt or custard he bought for her at the same time he bought his cartons of wine.

Now he did turn to begging. He never said anything, just held out his hand, looked at you, made the gesture of putting a cigarette to his mouth. He begged for money and tobacco and seemed to become more aware of other people, no longer in the solitude of his desert island. He didn’t share the woman’s tobacco or heroin, and there probably was nothing sexual between them, but he did pass her his liters of white wine, which she poured into her wide, fleshy mouth, her eyes gleaming.

You would see them in the shadows like two animals deep in their den, two untouchables who had regressed to the savagery or innocence of an irreparable damnation, so remote from those of us passing by in our overcoats and normalcy, on the way to our new house and warm, stable life. They truly did live in a different world, in one of caves and hollows in the rock where primitive man and castaways found shelter.

After weeks or months, the woman disappeared, and we would have forgotten her fleeting existence had the drunk not stayed in the barrio, subdued and sedentary, again withdrawn into a seamless self-absorption, apparently not seeking in the haunts of the living dead the figure of the tall woman who looked like a model from a distance. But we did not pay that much attention to him, so accustomed were we to his presence, just as we did not follow closely what happened every day in the barrio, our neglect including the man, the woman, and the boy who now went to school by himself, who came out every afternoon with his snack, tugging at the leash of the ungovernable dog that no longer was a puppy.

They too moved away, habitual one day and the next gone forever, and the man on the balcony saw that the apartment across from him was empty again, and witnessed the arrival of other tenants, months or years later, it didn’t matter, because for him life was a slow endurance with little modification. Months or years later, we met a former neighbor who was still living in the barrio. We talked about the days that suddenly had become distant, fading into the sweetness of the past, and the neighbor asked if we remembered the drunk who was always wandering the streets. He told us that the man turned up dead one morning in the Vazquez de Mella Plaza, purple with cold, his beard and eyelashes white with frost, rigid and wrapped in rags like those polar explorers who get lost and go mad in deserts of ice.