Sepharad

tell me your name

I SAT QUIETLY, WAITING, killing time, observing things from my window for hours on end, in an office where it might be mid-morning before someone came in — an emissary from the outside world, usually a second- or third-rate artist, a poet from the provinces trying to set up a reading or get a subvention to publish a book of poems, people who knocked timidly at the door and who might sit for hours in the small reception room, waiting for a contract or a payment, a chance for an interview, to deliver a badly photocopied résumé that somehow, through my hands, might reach the manager I worked for, the man who made the decisions, judgments that were a long time coming, bogged down in the archaic lassitude of the administration, or held up by negligence or carelessness: the manager didn’t look at the documents I put on his desk, or I forgot to put them there. Sloth, isolation, estrangement, people always going out of focus, less real than the people in my mind or memories, in the fog between the invented and the remembered. In a letter Kafka wrote, I recognized the symptoms of my illness: ennui. I was like a dead man, having no desire to communicate, as if I did not belong to this world or any other; as if during all the years that led to this moment I had acted mechanically, done only what was required of me, while waiting for a voice that would call out to me.

I wrote letters, waited for letters, and when one came, I answered it hastily, then let a few days go by before I resumed my attitude of waiting, because it would be at least two weeks before the next letter arrived, that is, if it wasn’t delayed like the decisions awaited by the applicants in the reception room of my office. I waited in both expectation and fear, but also out of mere habit, and if I saw the striped edge of an air-mail envelope among the letters and documents my assistant brought every morning, I would feel a senseless surge of renewed hope.

I worked alone, not in the main administration building but on one of the floors rented for new offices, temporary quarters that always had something furtive about them and often lacked an official seal on the door. There might be just an improvised sign at the end of a narrow corridor or steep stairway, a location close to central headquarters but behind it, on a little street with old taverns, dark hangouts for drunks, and shops that not many years back sold condoms and dirty magazines under the counter. Those streets were so narrow the sun didn’t reach them, and there was always the hint of a sewer, and dank shadows gathered at the corners that faced the remnant of what once had been the red-light district, in other days a labyrinth called La Manigua. Now the last survivors occasionally emerged from those alleyways, old women, fat and heavily made up, or a few young pale ones hooked on heroin, with scuffed high heels and a cigarette stuck into the red stain of a mouth, specters loitering in lugubrious arcades.

I sat quietly at my desk waiting, and hours could go by before anyone came. Some mornings there might be only one or two visitors beside the person who brought the mail, perhaps a clerk asking me to consult a file in my archives, in which I had arranged the dossiers that came in the mail or were handed to me by the artists alphabetically, and the records of past performances chronologically. I saved every piece of paper in manila folders: posters, tickets, press clippings, should there be any, the count of the house, a number that often was misleading, depending on the reputation and attractions of the acts I booked; they were not for the important theaters in the city but for community centers in the barrios, little more than halls for school plays, or open-air stages in plazas or parks during the summer months, where it was also my responsibility to organize some festival or other that always featured the adjective popular on the posters advertising it, shows with lights and local rock groups, and merry-go-rounds and puppet shows.

My office occupied the narrowest angle of a triangular building that had a pastry shop on the ground floor and a small legal office on the first. Sweet, warm aromas wafted up from the pastry shop, and from the legal service came the sounds of voices and telephones and a lot of tramping back and forth that contrasted with the quiet prevailing in my office most of the time. There were two windows, one that looked out over the Plaza del Carmen and the other onto Calle Reyes Católicos, but the entry was on a narrow street with little traffic, so it was easy, when I came to work every morning, to feel that I was entering a secret observatory, as appropriate for spying as for getting away. I would come and go without being seen by anyone, and from the windows I could note who went by at that central crossroads of the city. The people I knew, who walked with no idea that they were being watched, looked different. Who is the person, really, when he is alone, temporarily free from others, from the identity others give him?

LIKE MANUEL AZAÑA when he was a fat, nearsighted adolescent, I wanted to be Captain Nemo. Closeted from eight to three between those walls were Nemo in his submarine and Robinson Crusoe on his island, and also the Invisible Man and detective Philip Marlowe and Fernando Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares and any of Kafka’s office workers in that company in Prague for preventing workplace accidents. I imagined that I, like them, was a secret exile, a stranger in a place where I had always lived, a sedentary fugitive who hid behind an appearance of perfect normality, who, seated at an office desk or riding in a bus on the way to work, could conjure up amazing adventures that would never happen, voyages that would never be made. In his office at the water plant in Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy imagines the music Mark Antony heard the night before his damnation, the retinue of Dionysus abandoning him. In a cheap restaurant in Lisbon, or riding a streetcar, Pessoa pensively scans the lines of a poem about a sumptuous transatlantic voyage to the Orient. A bespectacled, self-absorbed man arrives at a hotel in Turin, peaceful, well dressed, although with a hint of oddness that prevents his being taken for the usual traveler; he registers for that one night, and no one knows that it is Cesare Pavese and that in his minimal luggage he is carrying a dose of poison that within a few hours he will use to take his life. I imagined the suicide in morbid detail. From a literary point of view, was shooting oneself or killing oneself slowly with alcohol a form of heroism? I watched the hopeless drunks in the dark taverns of the side streets with both admiration and disgust, for each hid a terrible truth whose price was self-destruction. I walked past men with scowling faces and unsettled behavior and imagined Baudelaire in the final delirium of his life, wandering lost in Brussels or Paris, and Soren Kierkegaard cast adrift in the streets of Copenhagen, composing biblical diatribes against his countrymen and friends, mentally writing love letters to Regina Olsen, whom he left behind, perhaps frightened to death when he found himself betrothed to her, though he never forgives her when she later marries another man. Closeted in my office, I read his letters, diaries, and notebooks, and learned in Pascal that men never live in the present, only in their memory of the past or in their desire or fear of the future, and that all our miseries outlast us because we are not able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Did Milena’s letters reach Kafka at his home, or did he prefer to receive them at the office? He sent hers to general delivery in Vienna so her husband wouldn’t see them. Reading many books did not tell me that she was something more than the shadow to whom he wrote letters or who occasionally appeared in the pages of his diary: she was a real woman who obstinately, courageously shaped her destiny in the face of hostile circumstances and a tyrannical father, who wrote books and articles in favor of human emancipation. She passionately loved several men, and continued to write when the Nazis were in Prague. Arrested and sent to a death camp, she died twenty-two years after the man whose letters I read in my office.

I surrounded myself with shadows that were more important to me than people, shades that whispered the names of cities I had never visited — Prague, Lisbon, Tangiers, Copenhagen, New York — and the place in America those letters came from bearing my name and the address of my office and written in a hand that became not the anticipation but the substance of my happiness. I kept Letters to Milena in a desk drawer, and sometimes I carried the book in a pocket to read on the bus. It nourished my love for the absent beloved, and for the failed or impossible loves I had learned of through films and books. Dispensing hand of happiness, Kafka writes of Milena’s hand.

I LIVED IN WRITTEN WORDS, books, letters, and drafts of things that never saw the light of day, and in an office that was more in harmony with me than my own house and was, in a strange and oblique way, my intimate dwelling; the outside world was a blur, as if I didn’t live in it, just as I performed my job so casually that it might have been someone else doing it. My life was what didn’t happen to me, my love a woman who was far away and might never return, my calling a passion I did not devote myself to in real life, although I had begun to publish an article or two in the local newspaper, using a pseudonym, then felt they were letters not addressed to anyone except a few readers as isolated as I was in our melancholy province, so remote from anything reported in the newspapers of Madrid.

I read in Pascal: Entire worlds know nothing of us. I read eagerly, with the same will for oblivion that makes Robert De Niro yearn for the opium pipe in the Sergio Leone film that was playing then, Once upon a Time in America. I emerged from books as muddled as from the movies, when you come out of the darkness of the theater into bright sun. Some evenings I took on work I didn’t need to, or invented an excuse to go to the office for a few hours, then sat at my desk staring at the door of the small waiting room, imagining I was a private detective, as childishly, though nearly thirty, as when at twelve I imagined I was the Count of Monte Cristo or Jim Hawkins, or when I would look down on the street, with no danger that anyone would see me from below or that any visitor would come to interrupt me. I had read in Flaubert: Every man guards in his heart a royal chamber: I have sealed mine. My head was filled with phrases from books, films, songs, and those words were my only consolation in the exile to which I was condemned. I read Pavese’s diary, poisoning myself with his nihilism and misogyny, which I took for lucidity, just as I sometimes took the effects of too much alcohol for clearheadedness and enthusiasm. Death will come, and she will have your eyes. To write and read was to weave a protective and airless cocoon, to drink a potion that would allow me to flee invisible, to take a tunnel that no one knew, to scratch the wall of my cell with the patience of Edmond Dantes. With a silken line of blue ink I spun a world filled with imaginary men and women who softened the harsh edges of reality. The light scrape of pen on paper, the tapping of the keys of the typewriter, which was manual and noisy like the machines of fabulous screenwriters, the ones Chandler and Hammett used, literary gods, drunk, original, solitary men who could not be bought. The alcohol fumes and tobacco smoke of the 1980s, in retrospect as embarrassing as most of my alienated life then, as distant as the memory of that office and the woman to whom I wrote the letters, not realizing that I loved her not despite the fact that she lived on the other side of the ocean and with another man but precisely because she did. Had she returned, leaving everything to go with me, I would have been paralyzed with terror, I would have fled as Kafka fled before the determined and earthy passion of Milena Jesenska, preferring the refuge of letters and distance.

Everything at my office proceeded at an administrative crawl, and several months would pass before the Department of Internal Affairs installed the appropriate plaque beside the entrance and above the door, that is, assuming there was not an unexpected move to yet another place, another rented suite in the same area or a vacant office in the main building, and I would have to get settled all over again, the desk and metal filing cabinet with the documents and typewriter and folders with drafts that never reached final form, the books that filled the hours of waiting and daydreaming, the letters kept under lock and key in a desk drawer and judiciously reread.

My life had only past and future. The present was a parenthesis, an empty space, like the spaces that separate written words, the automatic touch of thumb to the long bar of the typewriter, the line that separates two dates on a calendar, the pause between two beats of the heart. I lived from one letter, among the ordinary envelopes on my mail tray, to the next, recognizing it from afar, the moment the clerk came through the door with the large folder of correspondence under his arm, unaware of the treasure he was bringing me.

Real life evolved on a distant plane, the space of separation between the remembered and the desired, a space as empty and neutral as the small reception room where someone occasionally waited, hoping for a part or an interview with one of my superiors, the manager if possible.

He was the one who made the decisions and the one to whom I submitted my reports but who rarely appeared, since he was devoted to tasks of greater importance, such as public relations, over in the main building where he welcomed the eminent personalities visiting the city, the first-class artists whose performances were booked in the best theater, the largest auditorium: managers of Catalan avant-garde companies, celebrated soloists, orchestra conductors. First thing in the morning, I would read the arts section of the newspaper, looking for notice of the arrival of these personalities, their interviews and the photographs in which they often shook the hand of one of my superiors, especially the manager, who always wore a big smile and leaned toward the celebrity to make sure he wasn’t left outside the frame. I cut the photographs out and put them in a folder after I pasted the clipping onto a page with a typed notation of occasion and date.

The artists I booked rated no more than a small box in some easily overlooked corner of the paper, pieces that were anonymous or signed with initials, sometimes mine, because more than once the editor on duty just reproduced the note I’d sent in. Thespians, many of them called themselves. The word made me think of limited talent, shabbiness of costumes and sets, the weariness of the itinerant ham actors of other days, except now updated with hippie schlock, improvisation, audience participation. They painted their faces and dressed in rags like clowns and played the drum or walked on stilts in their parades and street theater. The women wore sweaty tights, didn’t shave under their arms, and moved sexlessly. They were paid almost nothing, and that little money took a long time to reach them. Every morning they would show up at my office, listen to my explanations, not understanding much, probably not believing much. All the forms they had to fill out, the obscure progress of paperwork from office to office, from Administration to Auditing and then to Disbursements, the delays, the carelessness and neglect, which could mean more weeks of waiting, and the lies at which I had become expert: “They told me at Administration that today they’re sending the check request to be signed, and tomorrow without fail I myself will take that form to Auditing.”

Like me, they lived in unfilled time, in the small waiting room of my office, as grim as that of a backstreet doctor or one of those private detectives in novels. They brought their portfolios, their sorry assortment of photocopies, their mediocre or invented résumés, and I cared nothing about them, indifferent to their lives and their art, though it was my job to give them hope, invent excuses for delays, confuse them with administrative procedures and administrative language. There was a Gypsy poet with sideburns and a thick head of white, curly hair who claimed he had translated the complete works of García Lorca and part of the New Testament into Caló, Gypsy Spanish, and as proof he brought the entire manuscript of his translation with him in a huge satchel, but he opened it only long enough to show me the first page, afraid he would be plagiarized or the translation would be stolen, and he refused to leave the bundle of pages to which he was dedicating his life in my office, lest they get lost among all the other papers or lest a ire break out in the oven of the pastry shop on the ground floor and his Lorca in Romany go up in flames. I asked him why he didn’t make a photocopy, saying it would be a good idea for him to have a spare just in case, but he didn’t trust the employees at the copy shop either, they might carelessly scorch the pages of his book or make another copy without his knowledge, and sell it or publish it under another name. No, he wouldn’t part with his manuscript, clutching it in his arms as he sat across from me at my desk or waited in the reception room for the manager to arrive, because he couldn’t rest until it was published, with his name in large letters on the cover and his photograph on the back so there would be no doubt about the author’s identity, his Gypsy face recognized by everyone in the city.

I can still see that dark, rustic face and white hair, and suddenly an unexpected detail surfaces, the large iron rings the Romany translator wore on his fingers, adding to the force with which his two hands fell on my desk or on the bulging satchel he was always protecting from the world, from adversity, theft, indifference, and the administrative lethargy he encountered every day in the waiting room or wandering outside the main building with the hope of catching the manager or some superior with greater influence than mine and in that way, by assault in the middle of the street, achieve what patience never accorded: the interview in which he would be granted money to publish his masterwork or at least a part of it, maybe the Romancero gitano, which he recited to me first in Spanish and then in Romany, closing his eyes tight, holding up his right hand with the index finger extended like a flamenco singer in a trance.

I watched him from my window, as I watched so many people, men and women, known and unknown, figures that passed across the unreal diorama of my life in those days. I watched him at the pedestrian crossing, walking with a resolute stride, his satchel held in his arms as if to prevent a blast of wind or a thief from seizing it, and somehow that man was not the same one who a few minutes later entered my office and asked if I thought the manager would be in that morning.

I pretended to pay attention to him, and then I pretended to be very busy sorting papers on my desk or checking figures in a financial report. I wanted to be alone, to go back to the book or letter the visitor had interrupted, and my impatience turned to irritation, although I tried not to show it. No, the manager won’t be in this morning, he called and had me cancel all his appointments, he has a very important meeting, and the man closed his satchel again, stood up, pressing it between the huge stonemason’s or smith’s hands adorned with rings in crude Asiatic splendor, and a minute later he had left the office and I could see him crossing the street, deep in thought and walking a little more slowly, though no less decisively, not yielding to dejection, perhaps reciting in his restless imagination lines from Lorca and evangelical sermons in Spanish and Romany. But now, as I am writing this, I wonder how I would have appeared if someone observed me from a window without my knowledge as I walked through those same streets, as intoxicated with words and chimera as the Gypsy poet: a strange man who sees nothing around him, his city inhabited with the dark ghosts of desire and books. They didn’t see Philip Marlowe, the Invisible Man, Franz Kafka, or Bernardo Soares, only a serious and ordinary thirty-year-old employee who left the office every day at the same time and read a book at the bus stop, and who once a week, always at the same hour, slipped a letter into the “Foreign-Urgent” slot of the mail drop on one side of the Post Office Building.

SOMEONE IS WAITING NOW in the reception room, courteously asking permission to come into my office. I hide in the drawer the letter or book I was reading. Of all the names and faces from that time, one figure stands out, nameless now, and another I remember perfectly. Two images, like illustrations from two different stories, but both set in the same place and atmosphere, a gloomy waiting room where applicants wait hours or days. A man and then a woman, their accents not the same. I listen in a silence broken only by the keyboard. The woman has a child in her arms, no, seated on her knees, because he isn’t a baby but a child of two or three. “What luck,” she is saying, speaking with a Montevideo or Buenos Aires accent. “I’m so happy that he can’t remember.”

The man speaks a meticulous, slightly formal Spanish, which he learned in his own country, I can’t remember now whether it was Romania or Bulgaria, when he was a teenager and he thought of Spain not as a real country but a fabulous kingdom of literature and music, especially music, the pieces that he studied at the conservatory in his distant past as a child prodigy, when he astounded his professors by playing from memory difficult piano passages from Albéniz, de Falla, and Debussy, invocations of gardens in the moonlight and Muslim palaces with splendors of stonework and murmuring fountains. He read translations of Washington Irving and listened to and quickly learned Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole and Night in Grenada by Debussy, who had never seen the city when he wrote that music, the pianist told me, and who in fact never traveled to Spain, though it was not far away and he had written music indebted to it. The pianist told me that the first time he walked through the Alhambra, after escaping from his country, Debussy’s music played in his mind, and he seemed to recognize the things around him not from photographs or drawings but from the faint notes of a piano.

AT FIRST HE WAS an applicant like any other, although somewhat better dressed and with better manners, which were as correct as his use of the Spanish language. In the half light of the reception room, he leafed through a magazine on the low table as if he were in a doctor’s waiting room. He, too, had brought a dossier, his briefcase with clippings and photocopies, but his were better organized than usual, the pages protected in plastic sleeves, some with color photographs and programs of recitals in the cities of Central Europe, often with text in Cyrillic characters. On the cover of the album was a professional artist’s photograph, somewhat dated, a younger and more vigorous version of the man before me; the pose was that of an impetuous, romantic concert artist, long hair, closely fitted tuxedo, elbow propped on the lid of a grand piano, hand on cheek with the index finger touching his temple, a dreamer of consummate virtuosity. Or maybe I’m remembering the jacket of a recording of Spanish music published at the height of his career, which he insisted on giving me though earlier he told me that there were few copies left, because all his records and books, everything he owned — except his credentials as a musician — had been abandoned, left behind at the border that then divided Europe. “I didn’t desert, didn’t flee,” he said. “Me fui, as you say in Spanish: I went away, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life toeing a line, afraid my neighbor or colleague was a spy or that there were hidden microphones in the dressing room.” It wasn’t political, he assured me, sitting there in my office while I was willing him to leave so I could be alone again and he was lingering in the hope that the manager would come that morning. “I couldn’t bear to live in my country any longer, because everything was always the same, the face of the head of government on all the posters and in all the newspapers and on television, and his voice on the radio, while things that for you in the West are normal, buying a bottle of shampoo or looking up a number in the telephone book, were difficult, often impossible. In my country there are no telephone books, and it is a major undertaking to get a permit for foreign travel. If you try to bring in a typewriter, they confiscate it at customs and put you on the list of suspicious persons. But what am I saying, my country? Now my country is Spain.”

He set his dossier to one side, first making sure the album was tightly closed so no photograph, program, or clipping could fall out, and felt for something inside his skimpy jacket — velvet, I remember now, with very wide lapels, a jacket more for an obsolete crooner than a piano player — and for a moment his expression turned to alarm as he patted all his pockets, looking at me with a smile of embarrassment and apology, as if I were a policeman who’d asked for identification. But then the anxious fingers touched what they were looking for, the flexible covers of a passport so tenderly handled that it looked new, just like the identification card the pianist now showed me, his color photograph sealed beneath the smooth plastic along with his strange Romanian or Slavic name, which I’ve forgotten.

His long, pale fingers stroked those documents with reverence, with amazement that they existed, with the anxiety that they could be lost. So many years living in a country he wanted to get out of to visit another that he knew only through books and music, through the sonorous names in the scores he learned so well at the conservatory, all that tension on the eve of the final decision, when he climbed out the washroom window of his dressing room on the tour through Spain to avoid being seen by the agents watching him and his companions, all the waiting, giving statements in police stations and presenting papers, living in Red Cross shelters or filthy boardinghouses, with the fear of being expelled or, worse, repatriated, what a horrible word, he told me, with no money, no identity, in a no-man’s-land between the life he’d left and the one he had yet to begin, divested of the security and privileges he had enjoyed as a renowned pianist in his country, uncertain about the chances of beginning a new career here, of being unknown.

The bewildered look of one who has nurtured a dream for years and actually accomplished it contrasted, on his face and in his eyes, with the melancholy of one who has gradually capitulated to reality. He had been a child prodigy in the conservatory at Bucharest or Sofia, and his collection of clippings and programs attested to a distinguished career in the concert halls of Eastern Europe. But now he was spending entire mornings in the reception room of my office, awaiting a decision on a contract that would guarantee him, at most, two or three performances in cultural centers on the outskirts of the city, in theaters with bad acoustics and mediocre, badly tuned pianos.

He wasn’t allowing himself to be discouraged, and if he came into my office and I told him that the manager wouldn’t be in that day or that we hadn’t even begun processing the forms for his contract, he would smile weakly, thank me, and bow as he left with a mixture of old-fashioned Central European courtesy and Communist stiffness: a timid deference toward any official that he would probably never lose. He was a young man, small: in my now-faded memory he looks something like Roman Polanski, a fleeting liveliness in the eyes and gestures that at a certain distance erases the signs of age.

He was giving private lessons, and he sought and accepted concerts anywhere, earning almost nothing, a fee sometimes so low that when he was going over the figures, he told himself, using one of those Spanish sayings he liked so much, “Minimum pay, food for the day.” He also told himself, “Better than stone soup,” and, “A bird in the hand is worth scores on the wing” in the painstaking Spanish so passionately learned in a capital with broken-down streetcars, long winters, and early nightfalls, practiced privately and with the dream of escape and rebellion, much as he learned to play the most difficult passages of Albéniz’s Iberia or Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole. Now, although the fruits of his dream were so meager, because in Spain his career as a piano virtuoso meant nothing and he had to perform in lamentable venues, wearing worn clothing and living under the constant strain of poverty, he refused to give in to depression and continued to show his gratitude and enthusiasm for his new country. It was a pathetic happiness, as of a man in love who knows he is scorned by his beloved but still gives her his boundless devotion.

ONE DAY THE PIANIST TOLD ME — I don’t know whether it was in my office or one of the bars on the side streets where we lower-echelon employees ate breakfast, possibly he had invited me to have a cup of coffee or a tot of rum to celebrate modestly, that he finally got a contract for a concert.

He told me how he was coming back to Spain from Paris on a night train scheduled to reach the border at Irún by dawn. He had gone to play in a festival benefiting exiled artists of his country, and this was the first time he had traveled with his new Spanish passport. He couldn’t sleep all night because of the discomfort of his second-class seat and the added aggravation of rude passengers, and at nearly every station the French conductors forced him to get up because his ticket, the cheapest available, gave him no right to claim a specific seat. And he was nervous: it was the first time he would enter Spain with the new identity papers, which he had been given only a short time before. In the darkened compartment, among the snoring passengers, he kept touching the pockets of his jacket and overcoat, checking again and again for his ticket, passport, ID, and each time it seemed that he’d lost them or that he had one document but not the others, and he kept putting them in a more secure place, inside a lining or in the zippered pocket of his travel case, and when he dozed off and his eyes jerked open, he would forget where he’d put them, this time sure that he’d lost them or that one of those thieves who roam the night trains had taken them. After hours of anguish at border posts in Communist countries, the laborious review of papers and the flash of alarm each time some bureaucratic flaw in a document held him up, he decided not to go back to sleep. He tried to see what time it was by the pale violet light in the car ceiling, and at the stops he noted the names of the stations, calculating how much farther it was to Irun, eager to get there but also increasingly afraid as the train neared the border. Meanwhile the Spanish and French passengers slept tranquilly in his compartment, sure of the order of things and perfectly allied with their world, unlike him, an intruder who took nothing for granted and always feared the unexpected.

Finally, exhausted, he fell into a deep slumber, only to be awoken by a great screeching of brakes. At first, still trapped in the web of a bad dream, he thought the train had arrived at his native country and that gray-uniformed guards would arrest him because he was not carrying the proper identification, his old passport, which he also showed me, a relic of a dark past.

He got off the train, tightly clutching his travel case in one hand and in the other his Spanish passport. He had been told earlier to have all the documents relating to his naturalization easily available in his pocket, in case he needed to produce them. He took his place in the line, on the Spanish side of the border, in front of the guard post manned by two guardias looking bored or sleepy. “My legs were trembling, and when I tried to say good morning, my mouth was so dry I could barely speak.” Then, as he walked toward their booth, his palms sweaty and his knees weaker by the minute, something happened that he still remembers with amazement and gratitude. One of the guards came toward him, and he thought the man was returning his gaze with suspicion and distrust. But he summoned his courage, as he had the time he jumped out the window of the washroom, and, as naturally as he was able, held out his passport, carefully opened to his photograph, prepared to explain the discrepancy between his nationality and his name and to produce all the necessary papers. But the guard, without even glancing at the passport, without looking at his face, waved his hand and told him with a Spanish obscenity to move on, and that rude gesture and word seemed to the pianist the most beautiful welcome he had ever received. For my benefit he imitated the guard’s wave with his slender, white, musician’s hand, still stunned by a gift that none of the other weary passengers appreciated, repeating like a spell the guard’s expression, “for shit’s sake,” joder with a strong aspirated “j,” which he pronounced precisely and with pride.

THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE in the waiting room, or on the other side of the desk in my office, came and went, and I paid little attention to them, half listening to their petitions or demands for things that weren’t in my power to grant and that meant nothing to me, although I had learned to pretend to listen carefully, professionally, sometimes taking notes while I gave information about the necessary forms or explanations about delays of payments or the suggestion that a timely word to the manager might help, busy as he was with larger responsibilities. I was waiting, sheltered in my parenthesis of space and time as in a lair, but what I was waiting for beyond the next letter was unclear to me, and I made no effort to dispel the mist of my indecision. I sat quietly and waited, as one who has heard the alarm clock and knows he must get up but allows himself a few minutes more before he opens his eyes and jumps out of bed. Would the woman writing me come back or not? When she lived on this side of the ocean and in the same city, her interest in me did not last very long. I never felt more distant from her than those few times I held her in my arms. If I sought her out, she fled from me, but if I grew discouraged and gave up the chase, she came to me, always full of promises, erasing the resentment and uncertainty from my soul and making me want her again.

The truth is, she was no more tangible to me than the women in the black-and-white movies who seduced me into a kind of hallucinatory love: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Tierney, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth. In Gilda, which I saw many times, Rita Hayworth runs away from Glenn Ford and Buenos Aires, and in a cabaret in Montevideo, dressed in white, she sings and dances a song called “Amado mío.”

Amado mío

Love me forever

And let forever

Begin tonight.

In the film, Montevideo is just a name, not even a set or one of those false panoramas they use when the actors are pretending to drive a car. But the woman who showed up one morning in the waiting room of my office with a child in her arms and a large bag filled with puppets had fled from Montevideo to Buenos Aires in 1974, and four years later from Buenos Aires to Madrid, pregnant, though she didn’t know that yet, carrying the child of a man who had been taken away one night by the military or the police and was not heard from again. As we were talking, the child sat on the floor of my office playing with his mother’s wooden dolls. She watched him out of the corner of her eye with an uneasiness that never lessened. A little over thirty, she had very dark hair and eyes; the hair was a silky mane, the eyes large and heavily outlined with kohl. Her nose and mouth suggested Italian blood. Her strong, slightly masculine hands were perfect for manipulating the puppets, a few of which she unexpectedly took and began to maneuver in front of me, after first starting a cassette player she also pulled from her peddler’s pack. On the gray metal of the desk and atop the confusion of my papers, Little Red Riding Hood, skipping to the rhythm of the music on the tape, entered the forest where the Wolf lay in wait behind a pile of documents, and in her strong River Plate accent the woman narrated the story and reproduced all the voices, the high voice of the little girl, the big deep voice of the Wolf, the quavering, grumbling voice of the Grandmother. The little boy, as if mesmerized, got up and came over to the desk, which was about at his eye level. Bewitched but terrified, as if the Wolf were also waiting for him, he was completely unaware of his mother’s hands or the strings dangling from her fingers.

The demonstration lasted only two or three minutes, and when the music reached its final flourish and the tape stopped, the puppets made a great bow together and collapsed, lifeless, upon my papers, but the boy kept looking at them with dazzled eyes, waiting for them to come back to life. “You saw,” said the woman, “that I can set up my little show anywhere.” She stowed the puppets and cassette player in her bag, but the boy immediately took them out again, one by one, and examined them slowly, as if to solve the mystery of their extinguished vitality, so absorbed in them and himself that he didn’t see me or his mother or the rather shabby office, though it probably was not as dreary as the boardinghouse where the two of them had lived since they came to the city. She had the constant worry, she told me, of not knowing how long they would be able to pay for it, and therefore she wanted me to organize a series of bookings for her in elementary schools and kindergartens.

She, too, had brought her dossier, and she spread out her photocopies and clippings, the credentials from another country that were of so little use here, diplomas from drama schools in Montevideo and Buenos Aires that wouldn’t have helped her get a job scrubbing floors in Spain. I reeled off the usual explanation about applications and forms and waiting time. She stared at me with disbelief and possibly sarcasm in those dark, kohl-rimmed eyes, as if to let me know that she didn’t believe what I was telling her but that it didn’t matter. She asked for an appointment with the provincial commissioner, put her dossier on my desk, and on the first page wrote the telephone number of her boardinghouse, which I knew to be a gloomy place, since I had lived there in my poorer days as a student. She knew as well as I did that there was absolutely no point in her leaving her telephone number, that she would have to come back many times, fruitlessly, but we both also knew that there was no other way, she had to persevere and hope to maintain her dignity. Every day she called to see whether I knew anything, whether there had been any decision; every day she pushed open the door of my office and took a seat again in the dark waiting room, always carrying the child or holding his hand because she couldn’t leave him alone in the boardinghouse and had no one she could trust to look after him.

Now he must be about twenty: he will look at the photograph his mother showed me one morning and see the face of a man with a boyish air, with the horn-rimmed glasses, long sideburns, and thick curly hair typical of the 1970s, the ghost of someone his age and yet his father, legally neither alive nor dead, not buried anywhere, not listed in any administrative register of the deceased, simply lost, disappeared, and those who have survived and hold his memory dear cannot rest, not knowing when he died or where he was buried — that is, if he wasn’t thrown into the River Plate from a helicopter with his eyes blindfolded and his hands bound, or already dead, his belly split open so the sharks would make quick work of the corpse.

THE WOMAN BEGAN CRYING, and the child, playing on the floor and lost in an imaginary game, suddenly turned to her with a serious look, as if understanding what his mother told me in a low voice. She asked me for a tissue, and when she looked up I saw that a black line of kohl was trickling down her cheek. “I’m all right now,” she said, apologizing, pushing back the smooth black hair from her face. I lit her cigarette, and her large dark eyes smiled at me, gleaming with tears — not the usual courtesy or fawning in response to my administrative position, the smile was meant just for me, the person who had listened attentively and asked for details, who had offered her the temporary hospitality of his office, an uninterrupted block of time for her confidences. I thought with a touch of male cynicism that she was a desirable woman, that I might be able to go to bed with her.

She told me her name the first day, when I asked her for information to fill out one of the pointless index cards that gave me the appearance of being organized and that I later typed neatly, arranged alphabetically, and filed in a drawer of the metal cabinet on which there were small tags of different colors corresponding to the cards: “Theater,” “Classical,” “Rock,” “Flamenco Music,” or “Miscellaneous Artists,” a category that included the translator of García Lorca into Romany.

Maybe I have remembered the name because it didn’t go with her Italian looks: Adriana Seligmann. Sometimes when you hear a name, the name of a woman or a city, a story resonates in its syllables like a key to an encoded message, as if an entire life could be contained in one word. Every person carries his novel with him, her story, maybe not the entire story but an episode in which that life is crystallized forever, summarized in a name, even if the name is unknown or may not be said aloud: Rosebud, Milena, Narva, Gmünd.

The desirable woman on the other side of my desk sat down again and told me the story of her name. I have often seen a sudden change in someone who decides to tell something that matters very much, who takes a step and suspends the present to sink into a tale, who even as she speaks, driven by the need to be heard, seems to speak alone. I am never more myself than when I am silent and listening, when I set aside my tedious identity and tedious memory to concentrate totally on the act of listening, on the experiences of another.

MY PATERNAL GRANDFATHER’S name was Seligmann, Saúl Seligmann. As a little girl I knew vaguely that he had come from Germany, but I never heard him talk about his life before Montevideo. I remember holding my father’s hand to go visit my grandfather in his tailor shop. He would leave what he had been doing and sit me on his knees and tell me stories in a voice that had a foreign accent. Then he retired and went to live outside Montevideo, on the other side of the river, as we say. He had bought a country place in El Tigre where he could be alone, which was what he liked, my father used to say, I think with a touch of resentment. After that I seldom saw him. When I was twelve, my parents separated, and for a while they sent me to live with my grandfather in the house in El Tigre. It was a wood house on a small island, with a high railing painted white and a dock, surrounded with trees. After the last months I’d spent with my parents, that retreat in my grandfather’s house was paradise. I read the books in his library and listened to his opera and tango records. If I asked him anything about Germany, he’d tell me that he left when he was very young, that he had forgotten everything about it, including the language. But I discovered it wasn’t true. One of the first nights I slept in his house, I was woken by cries. I was afraid that thieves had broken in. But I was brave enough to get up and go across the corridor to my grandfather’s bedroom. It was he who was crying out. He was talking with someone, arguing, begging, but I didn’t understand a word because he was talking in German. He screamed as I had never heard anyone scream, calling someone, saying a name so loud that he ended up waking himself. I was going to hide but realized that he didn’t see me in the light of the corridor, although his eyes were wide-open. He was panting and sweating. The next day I asked him if he’d had a bad dream, but he told me he didn’t remember any. Every night the same cries were repeated, the screams in German in the silent house, the repeated name, Greta or Gerda. When my grandfather died, we found a small suitcase under his bed filled with letters in German and photographs of a young woman. Grete was the signature on all the letters, which stopped in 1940. I didn’t like my surname when I was a girl, but now I carry it like a gift my grandfather left me, like the letters I would have liked to read but couldn’t. I brought them with me when I came to Buenos Aires, along with the photos of Grete. I told myself that I would give them to someone who knew German and ask him to translate them for me, but I kept putting it off. Life gets busy, and you think there will always be time for everything, then one day it turns out it’s all over, you don’t have any of the things you thought you had, not your husband, not your house, not your papers, nothing but fear that claws inside you and never stops. I do not know what happened to her letters, what the people who raided my house did with them. I took only one thing with me when I escaped, though not knowingly: I’d just become pregnant.