Sepharad

I REMEMBER A JEWISH house in a barrio in my native city called the Alcázar, because it occupies the location, still partially walled, where a medieval castle stood, an alcázar, a fortified citadel that belonged first to the Muslims and then after the thirteenth century to the Christians — after 1234 to be exact, when King Ferdinand III of Castile, who in my textbooks was called the Saint, took possession of the recently conquered city. To help us children remember the date, they told us to think of the first four numbers — one, two, three, four — and as if it were one of the multiplication tables we would chant: Ferdinand III, the Saint, conquered our city from the Moors in one thousand, two hundred, thirty, and four.

A mosque first occupied the elevated corner of the Alcázar that was nearly inaccessible from the south and east sides; the Church of Santa María, which still exists although it has been closed many years for a never-ending restoration, was built on the same base. It has, or it had, a Gothic cloister, the only truly old and significant part of the building, which has been restored many times without much thought, especially in the nineteenth century, when around 1880 they added a busy and vulgar facade and a pair of undistinguished bell towers. But I could identify the tolling of their bells from the many heard in the city at dusk, because they were the bells of our parish, and I also knew when they rang for a death or a funeral mass, and on Sundays, at noon and dusk, I recognized the rich peals that announced high mass. Other bells nearby had a much more serious and solemn bronze tone — the bells, for instance, of El Salvador Church, and others had higher and more diaphanous notes, and then there were the bells at the nuns’ convent, which rang in a fortresslike tower that was as forbidding as the rest of the church, with its huge main door that was always closed and the high stone walls darkened with lichen and moss because they faced the cool shade of the north side. From time to time that enormous black studded door would swing open and two nuns would come out, always in pairs, and so pale I thought they must have come from the tomb, in their dark brown habits and with their faces tightly framed in white beneath their wimples, their skin whiter than the cloth, and they always frightened me terribly because I thought they would kidnap me, and I held tighter to the hand of my mother, who had put a black veil over her head to come to church.

I remember the large uneven stones in the Santa María cloister, some of which were gravestones bearing names of persons from long ago carved into a slab and nearly erased by the footsteps of centuries, and I remember a garden you reached through ogival arches, where there was a bay tree so tall that from a child’s perspective the top could not be seen. In the garden shaded by that tree and filled with ferns and weeds, there was always, even in summer, a strong scent of growing things and moist earth, and the garden rang with the uproar of the birds that nested in the thick branches and the long whistles of swallows and swifts in the slow summer afternoons. You could see the dark green thrust of the bay tree from a great distance, like a geyser of vegetation rising higher than the bell towers of the church and the tile roofs in the barrio, and it swayed on windy afternoons. When my mother took me by the hand into the cloister, it made me dizzy to peek out into the garden and see the tree. I always noticed how cool the dirt and the stone were, and I was always deafened by the clamor of the birds, which flew up in a cloud when the bells were rung.

I was sure the tree reached the sky, like the magic beanstalk in the story that my aunts told me and that many years later I read to my oldest son, who from the age of three always begged for a story at bedtime, quickly restless when he knew the story was about to end, asking me to make it last a little longer or read him another or, better still, make up one he liked, and give the characters his favorite personality traits and magic powers, and the names he had to approve. Reading the story at my son’s bedside, I imagined his little hero climbing the branches of that prodigious bay tree at Santa María, up, up toward the sky, and coming out on the other side of the clouds, just as I imagined it when I was a boy. If you looked up, looked hard, the tree swayed slightly even when there was no wind. When a strong wind blew, the sound of the leaves was like that of waves on the shore, which I had never heard except in movies, or when I held a seashell to my ear.

I WENT TO THE CHURCH of Santa María every afternoon during the summer I was twelve to say a few Ave Marias to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of my city, whom I asked to intercede for me so I would pass gym in September, because in the June examinations I had failed in a truly humiliating manner. I wasn’t good at sports, I couldn’t climb a rope or vault over a pommel horse, I couldn’t even do a somersault. I had a growing sense of being excluded that was bitterly accentuated by the loss of the comfortable certainties of childhood and the first confusion and fears of my transition to adolescence. Pimples were breaking out on my too round face, fuzz was darkening my upper, still childish lip, hair was growing on the strangest parts of my body, and I was suffering sharp and secret remorse about masturbation, which according to the grim teachings of the priest was not merely a sin but also the beginnings of a series of atrocious illnesses. How strange to have been that solitary, fat, clumsy child who all summer long, at dusk, as the heat was fading, walked to the Alcázar barrio and went inside the cool cloisters of Santa María to pray to the Virgin, stepping on the gravestones of dead buried five or six centuries before, devout but ashamed because that summer I had learned to masturbate and was always surreptitiously looking down women’s necklines and up their naked legs: the white breast, the large dark nipple, and the light blue veins of a barefoot Gypsy nursing her child at the door of one of the huts of the poor who lived at the edge of the barrio, beside the ruined wall.

Sometimes from a distance I would see four or five of the toughest boys in our class sitting on a stone bench in the large plaza in front of the church. They already smoked and went to taverns, and if I walked by them, pretending not to see them, they made fun of me, the way they had jeered at my physical cowardice in the gym and schoolyard. They made fun of me even more when they realized where I was going, the fat little sissy who got good grades but flunked gym and now came to pray every afternoon to the Virgin and more than once went to confession and then stayed for mass and took Communion, with the remorse and anguish of not having dared confess everything to the priest, who asked the formulaic questions and in the dark traced the sign of the cross as he murmured the penance and absolution — that there was a further sin he couldn’t say the name of but only allude to using a vague euphemism: he had committed an impure act. The Catholic doctrine accustomed us to the solitary struggle with ourselves at an early age, to the contortions of guilt; an impure act was a mortal sin, and if you didn’t confess it then you couldn’t be absolved, and if you came to take Communion in a state of mortal sin, you were committing another, equally grave as the first, which was added to it in the secret ignominy of your conscience.

My first marriage took place in the Church of Santa María, when I was twenty-six. Maybe because of the confusion and tension of the ceremony, and the dizzying number of guests, I didn’t take a good look at the great bay tree in the cloister, although now I am struck by the alarming thought that they may have cut it down, which wouldn’t have been unusual in a city so addicted to arboricide. The young man with the mustache and razor-cut hair, wearing a navy-blue suit and pearl-gray necktie, seems even more remote to me than the pious and ashamed boy of fourteen years before. Throughout that time, he had perfected the skills that he already glimpsed as his in early adolescence: the art of being what he was expected to be and at the same time rebelling in surly silence, the cleverness of hiding his true identity and nourishing it with books and dreams while presenting an attitude of meek acquiescence on the outside. Thus he lived in exile, at a distance as false as a perspective of open country painted on a wall, or as those cinematic backgrounds against which an actor is driving a convertible at top speed along a cliff without ruffling a hair of his head and the passing trees fail to throw a shadow on the windshield.

THE BARRIO OF THE ALCÁZAR, bounded on the south and west by the road that circles the ruined wall and terraced gardens, has narrow cobbled streets and small plazas on which it is not unusual to see a large house with a great stone arch and a few mulberry or poplar trees. The oldest houses date from the fifteenth century. The exteriors are whitewashed, except for the door frames, which have the yellow tint of the sandstone from which they were hewn, the same stone that was used for the palaces and churches. The white of the lime and the gold and blond of the stone create a delicate harmony that has the luminous elegance of the Renaissance and the austere beauty of vernacular architecture. High, narrow windows with heavy iron grilles thick as shutters, and gardens enclosed in tall adobe walls, recall the impenetrable look of Muslim dwellings that was adopted for the cloistered convents. There are large mansions with windows narrow as embrasures, in which we children sometimes hid, and great iron rings in the facades, so heavy that we weren’t strong enough to lift them; to these rings, we were told, the former lords of the houses tied their horses. The mansions were inhabited by the nobles who ruled the city and who during their feudal uprisings against the power of the kings dug in behind the walls of the Alcázar. In the shelter of those walls was the Jewish quarter; the nobles needed the Jews’ money, their administrative abilities, the skills of their artisans, so they had an interest in protecting them against the periodic explosions of fury from devout and brutal mobs stirred up by fanatic priests, by legends about profanations of the host and the bloody rituals Jews celebrated to dishonor the Christian religion: that they stole consecrated hosts and spit them out and ground them beneath their feet, and pierced them with nails and crushed them with pincers to repeat on them the tortures inflicted upon the mortal flesh of Jesus Christ, and kidnapped Christian children and slit their throats in the cellars of the synagogues, and drank their blood or with it sullied the sacred white flour of the hosts.

Someone told me about a specific Jewish house, and I wandered around the barrio until I found it. It sits on a narrow street, as if huddled there, and I remember it as lived in, with sounds of people and television flooding out to the street through the open windows, which were filled with pots of geraniums. It has a low door, and on the two extremes of the large stone lintel are engraved two Stars of David, inscribed in a circle, and not so worn by time that you can’t make out the design clearly. It’s a small but solid house that must have belonged to a scribe or minor merchant, not a wealthy family, or possibly to the teacher of a rabbinical school, to some family that in the years prior to the expulsion would have lived divided between fear and an attempt at normality, hoping that the excesses of Christian fanaticism would die down, just as it had so many times, and that in this small city, and behind the protection of the walls of the Alcázar, the terrible slaughter of a few years earlier in Córdoba would not be repeated, or the pogrom at the end of the preceding century. The house on this little street has an air of watchfulness and self-effacement, like someone who lowers his head and walks close to the wall in order not to attract attention.

What do you do if you know that from one day to the next you can be driven from your home, that all it takes is a signature and a lacquer seal at the bottom of a decree for the work of your entire life to be demolished, for you to lose everything, house and goods, for you to find yourself out on the street exposed to shame, forced to part with everything you considered yours and to board a ship that will take you to a country where you will also be pointed at and rejected, or not even that far, to a disaster at sea, the frightening sea you have never seen? The two Stars of David testify to the existence of a large community, like the fossilized impression of an exquisite leaf that fell in the immensity of a forest erased by a cataclysm thousands of years ago. They couldn’t believe that they would actually be driven out, that within a few months they would have to abandon the land they had been born in and where their ancestors had lived. The house has a door with rusted studs and an iron knocker, and small Gothic moldings in the angles of the lintel. Maybe the people who have gone carried with them the key that fit this large keyhole, maybe they handed it down from father to son through generations of exile, just as the language and sonorous Spanish names were perpetuated, and the poems and children’s songs that the Jews of Salonica and Rhodes would carry with them on the long, hellish journey to Auschwitz. It was a house like this that the family of Baruch Spinoza or Primo Levi would leave behind forever.

I walked through the cobbled alleys of the Jewish quarter in Ubeda, imagining the silence that must have fallen during the days following the expulsion, like the silence that would linger in the streets of the Sephardic barrio of Salonica after the Germans evacuated it in 1941, where the voices of children jumping rope and singing the ballads I learned in my childhood would never be heard again, ballads about women who disguised themselves as men in order to do battle in the wars against the Moors, ballads about enchanted queens. The Franciscans and Dominicans preaching to the illiterate from the pulpits of their churches, the bells tolling in triumph as exiles left the Alcázar barrio in the spring and summer of 1492, another of the dates we memorized in school because it marked the moment of the greatest glory in the history of Spain, our teacher told us, when Granada was reconquered and America discovered, and when our newly unified country became an empire. Of Isabel and Fernando the spirit prevails, we sang as our martial footsteps marked time with the hymn, we will die kissing the sacred flag. A feat by the Catholic king and queen as important as the victory over the Moors in Granada, and a decision as wise as that of sponsoring Columbus, had been the expulsion of the Jews, who in the drawings in our school encyclopedia had hooked noses, goatees, and who stood accused of the same dark perfidy as other sworn enemies of Spain of whom we knew nothing but their terrifying names: Freemasons and communists. When we were fighting with other children in the street and one of them spit on us, we always yelled at him: Jew, you spit on the Lord. On the floats during Holy Week, the soldiers and the Pharisees were depicted with the same gross features as the Jews in the school encyclopedia. On the Last Supper float, Judas was as scary to us as Dracula in the movies, with his hooked nose and pointed beard and the green face of betrayal and greed that turned to sneak looks at the bag that held the thirty pieces of silver.

IN ROME’S HOTEL EXCELSIOR, many years and several lives later, I met the Sephardic writer Emile Roman, a Romanian who spoke fluent Italian and French, but also a rare and ceremonious Spanish he had learned in childhood and which must have been very similar to the Spanish spoken in 1492 by the people who lived in that house in the Alcázar barrio. “But we didn’t call ourselves Sephardim,” he told me. “We were Spanish.” In Bucharest in 1944, a passport expedited by the Spanish embassy saved his life. With the same passport that liberated him from the Nazis he escaped the Communist dictatorship years later and never returned to Romania, not even after the death of Ceauşescu. Now he was writing in French and living in Paris, and as he was retired, he spent his evenings at a club of elderly Sephardim called the Vida Larga, the long life. He was a tall, erect man who moved deliberately; he had olive skin and large ritual hands. In the bar of the hotel, an individual with a red bow tie and silver dinner jacket was playing international hits on an electric organ. Sitting across from me, beside the windows that looked out on the traffic of Via Veneto, Roman took sips of an espresso and spoke passionately of injustices committed five centuries before, never forgotten, never corrected, not even softened by the passing of time and succession of generations: the incontrovertible decree of expulsion, the goods and homes hastily sold to meet the time period of two months granted the expelled, two months to depart from a country in which your people lived for more than a thousand years, almost since the beginning of that other diaspora, said Roman. The deserted synagogues, the scattered libraries, the empty stores and closed workshops, one or two hundred thousand people forced to leave a country of barely eight million inhabitants.

And those who didn’t leave, who chose to convert out of fear or for convenience, assuming that once they were baptized they would be accepted? But that didn’t work either, because if they couldn’t be persecuted because of the religion they had abjured, now it was their blood that condemned them, and not just them but their children and grandchildren after them, so that those who stayed behind ended up as alien in their homeland as those who left, perhaps even more so, for they were scorned not only by those who should have been their brothers in their new religion but also by those who remained loyal to the abandoned faith. The most heinous Christian sinner could repent, and if he fulfilled his penance be freed of guilt; the heretic could recant; original sin could be redressed thanks to Christ’s sacrifice; but for the Jew there was no possible redemption, his culpability long predated his being and was independent of his acts, and if his behavior was exemplary, he became even more suspicious. But in this respect Spain was no exception, it was no more cruel or fanatic than other countries in Europe, contrary to common belief. If Spain stood out in any way, it wasn’t for expelling the Jews but for being so slow to do so, since Jews had already been expelled from England and France in the fourteenth century and not, to be sure, with any more consideration, and when many of the Jews who left Spain sought refuge in Portugal in 1492, they obtained it in exchange for one gold coin per person, only to be expelled again six months later, and those who converted in order to stay had no better life than the converts in Spain; they, too, were tagged with the vile name Marranos, pigs. Some marranos emigrated to Holland after several generations of subjection to Catholicism and, as soon as they were there, professed their Jewish faith: the family of Spinoza, for example, who was too rational and freethinking to conform to any dogma and was in turn officially expelled from the Jewish community.

“To be Jewish was unpardonable, to stop being Jewish was impossible,” Emile Roman said, burning with a slow and melancholy wrath. “My true name is Don Samuel Béjar y Mayor, and I am not Jewish because of the faith of my ancestors, for my parents never practiced, and when I was young I cared about religion as much as you cared about your grandparents’ belief in the miracles of the Catholic saints. No, it was anti-Semitism that made me a Jew. For a time my Jewishness was like a secret illness that doesn’t exclude a person from contact with others because it isn’t revealed in external signs, not like the lesions or pustules that condemned you as a leper in the Middle Ages. But one day in 1941 I had to sew a yellow Star of David on the upper chest of my overcoat, and from then on the illness could not be hidden, and if I forgot for an instant that I was a Jew and couldn’t be anything but, the looks of people I met in the street or on a streetcar platform (while we were still allowed to travel by streetcar) reminded me of it, made me feel my illness and my strangeness. Some acquaintances turned their heads so they wouldn’t have to say hello, or be seen talking with a Jew. Others walked far out of their way, as you would make a wide berth to avoid a filthy beggar or someone with a horrible deformity. As I was walking down the street, anyone at all might insult me, or push me off the curb, because I had no right to be on the sidewalk.

“Have you read Jean Améry? You must, he’s as important as Primo Levi, if much more despairing. Levi’s family emigrated to Italy in 1492. Both men were in Auschwitz, although they didn’t meet there. Levi didn’t share Améry’s despair, nor could he accept his suicide, though he, too, ended up killing himself — or at least that’s how it was reported by the police. Améry’s name wasn’t really Améry, or Jean. He had been born in Austria and was legally Hans Mayer. Until he was thirty, he thought that he was Austrian and that his language and culture were German. He even liked to wear the Austrian folk costume of lederhosen and kneesocks. Then one day in November of 1935, sitting in a café in Vienna, just as you and I are sitting here, he opened the newspaper and read the proclamation of the Nuremberg race laws, and discovered that he wasn’t who he had always thought he was, who his parents had taught him to believe he was: an Austrian. Suddenly he was what he had never considered himself to be: a Jew. He had walked into the café taking for granted that he had a country and a life, and when he left there he was stateless, and worse, a possible victim. His face was the same, but he had become another person. In 1938 he escaped to the west, to Belgium, while there was still time, but in those days the borders in Europe could change into barbed-wire traps overnight, and the person who had escaped to another country woke up one morning hearing a loudspeaker blasting the voices of the executioners he thought he’d left behind. In 1943 Mayer was arrested by the Gestapo in Brussels, tortured, and sent to Auschwitz. After the Liberation, he repudiated the German name and language and decided to called himself Jean Améry. He never again set foot in Austria or Germany. Read the book he wrote about the hell of the camp. After I finished it, I couldn’t read or write anything. He says that at the moment your torture begins, your covenant with other human beings is lost forever, that even if you are saved and live many years more, the torture never ends, and you will never be able to look anyone in the eye or trust anyone. When you meet a stranger, you wonder if he has been a torturer. If an old and well-mannered neighbor says hello when she meets you on the stairway, you think that she could have denounced the Jewish man next door to the Gestapo, or looked the other way when he was dragged downstairs, or shouted Heil Hitler until she was hoarse when German soldiers marched by.”

I WAS INVITED TO GERMANY once, some years ago, to give a talk in a very beautiful city, a storybook city with cobbled streets, Gothic rooflines, parks, and hundreds of people riding bicycles: Gottingen, the home of the Brothers Grimm. I remember the silken sound of the bicycle tires as they rolled over the wet cobbles at night, and the sound of the bicycle bells. It had been a sunny day, and I’d been up since early morning, taken from one place to another all day, always by very helpful and friendly people whose sole concern was to organize the immediate satisfaction of any desire I could dream up, with an efficiency that became oppressive. If I said I was interested in visiting a museum, they immediately began telephoning, and in a short time I had information pamphlets, hours, and possible means of transportation at my disposal. In the morning they took me to give a talk at the university, then agonized over various places to have lunch. Did I prefer Italian food? Chinese? Vegetarian? When I said that I liked Italian, they discussed which of several possibilities would be the best.

That afternoon, drowsy as I was from the food and the accumulated exhaustion of the trip, they took me to a bookstore to give a talk there. I read a chapter from my book, and then a translator read it in German. I became depressed thinking of all the pages I had to go, and I was disgusted and irritated by my own words. I looked up from the book to swallow, to take a breath, and saw serious, attentive faces, an audience listening with great discipline but without understanding a word. I was embarrassed by what I’d written, and felt guilty for the boredom those people must have been experiencing, so to shorten their agony I read as fast as I could and skipped entire paragraphs. I closed my eyes when my German translator began to read, and tried to sit up straight and be attentive, as if I understood some of it, and in the slightly less inanimate faces of the audience I looked for reactions to what I’d written some time ago in a language that had no similarity at all to what they were hearing. I would detect a smile, an expression of agreement with something I’d written, but had no idea what it was. At the end I felt so relieved that it was of no consequence that the applause was enthusiastic, though I smiled and bowed my head a little, with the usual insincerity of a person being praised. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and not have to sign another book or show interest in another explication, and to be free of the crushing politeness of the organizers, who were already plotting my next steps, looking at the clock and calculating how long it was before the museum I wanted so much to see would close, discussing whether it would be quicker and more comfortable for me if they took me in a taxi or by streetcar.

They were completely undone, and I felt inconsiderate and ungrateful telling them that I would rather go back to the hotel, I would just get a bite to eat there; there was no need to call a restaurant and have the menu read to me so I could make my decision. I wasn’t hungry and would be happy with a beer and a bag of potato chips from the minibar in my room. Finally they left, saying good-bye at the steps to the hotel with a friendliness I didn’t deserve, they being so amiable and I cursing them inside, longing for the moment when I could lie down on the bed, do nothing, not speak to anyone, take off my shoes and fluff up the pillow and stare at the ceiling, enjoying all the hours ahead when I could be alone, take a walk at my pleasure, wherever I pleased, with no one beside me to subject me to implacable courtesy.

I luxuriated for a while in the German comfort of the room, which was small, with beams in the ceiling and a floor of polished wood, like an illustration in a story. I pulled up one of those warm, light eiderdowns that you don’t find in any other part of the world, but I didn’t want to fall asleep because it was early, even though it was growing dark, if I slept now I might be wide-awake at two in the morning and spend the rest of the night in one of those miserable bouts of hotel-room insomnia. So I went down to the lobby, first looking to see that none of my hosts was about, and when I went outside, I also looked both ways, like a spy in the John Le Carré novels I read as a youth, ordinary-looking men in glasses and overcoat who walk through small German cities, turning from time to time to look in the side mirror of a parked car to be sure they’re not being followed by an agent of the Stasi. There was a cold mist in the air, the dampness and smell of a river and wet vegetation. As I walked I began to recover from my exhaustion and drowsiness, and the euphoria began that tends to animate me when I go outside in a strange city and have no obligations to meet and nobody knows me.

I remember a few things clearly: a cobblestone street, houses with peaked roofs on both sides, slate roofs, wood beams crisscrossing the facades, small windows with carved wooden shutters, and through them scenes of well-lit, paneled rooms lined with books. I would hear the sharp sound of a bicycle bell behind me and be overtaken by a placidly pedaling man or woman, not necessarily young, sometimes a white-haired lady in an out-of-style hat, sometimes an executive wearing a navy-blue suit beneath his raincoat. I saw Gothic towers with gilded clocks and streetcars that floated across a street in a silence almost as ghostly as that of the bicycles. On a street corner my attention was caught by a bright pastry shop and busy sounds — though they, too, were muted, as if wrapped in the general quiet of the city — of jovial conversation and the clink of teaspoons and cups, along with the warm, pungent aroma of baking, and of cocoa and coffee, on the cold air. Because I was hungry and I’d grown cold during my long walk, I overcame the timidity that so often keeps me from going alone into a place filled with locals, that Spanish diffidence that becomes more pronounced when I’m in a foreign country. It must have been a shop from the turn of the twentieth century, preserved intact, with stucco and gilding reminiscent of the Autro-Hungarian baroque, mahogany-framed mirrors and ballroom chandeliers, and marble-top tables and slender columns of white-painted iron that gleamed with touches of gold on the capitals. There were racks holding thick German newspapers, the print heavy and black, as if from early in the century, the First World War. The waitresses wore low-cut white bodices and old-fashioned skirts, their blond hair a wheel of braids or curls secured over the ears and their round faces pink from rushing among tables crowded with people, one hand high above their heads skillfully supporting a tray laden with teapots, porcelain jugs of coffee or chocolate, and tarts — the same copious, exquisite tarts so temptingly displayed in the showcases in greater variety than I had ever seen, or have since.

I took a seat at a small corner table and waited for my tea and the cheese-and-blackberry tart I had succeeded in ordering, using sign language. I entertained myself looking at the faces around me, enjoying the warm room and the tranquillity of not having to pay attention to a language I didn’t understand. Most of the clientele were older, prosperous retired couples or groups of ladies in hats and coats, and the general tone was one of solid and civilized pleasure, heads nodding and hands with extended pinkies lifting teacups, prudent laughter, lively conversation. Pairs of light eyes sometimes registered my presence with a slight flicker of curiosity, or perhaps rejection. I was undoubtedly the only stranger in the place, and in the mirror in front of me I suddenly saw myself as if from the outside — as the waitress bringing my tea and tart must have seen me, or the man with very blue eyes and very white hair who had turned slightly and was examining me as he continued talking to the lady with gold earrings, jet-black-dyed hair, and white gloves sitting next to him, whose excessive makeup accentuated the countless creases that ringed her crimson lips. I saw my own black hair, dark eyes, white shirt — no necktie — and the five o’clock shadow that gave me the appearance of a Bulgarian or Turk. My suit jacket, wrinkled after several days of travel and neglect, looked like the jackets immigrants wear, the ones you see in 1960s photographs of Spaniards in Germany.

I was tired; professional trips wear me out, and new acquaintances make my head spin, and I sleep badly in hotels. I was beginning to see the faces and objects around me as through a fog, although no one was smoking in the pastry shop and the only vapor came from the cups and the breath of people walking in from the cold. How strange I hadn’t noticed earlier that everyone except the waitresses was old, the men and women as carefully preserved as the decor and the plaster molding of the tearoom, and equally decrepit: false teeth, canes, toupees, blond or white-powdered wigs, bi- and trifocal eyeglasses, orthopedic shoes and stockings, Miss Marple hats, and parchment-skinned, arthritic hands tremulously conveying forkfuls of tart and delicate porcelain teacups. Even the rosy, plump waitresses were somehow ancient despite their ballooning skirts, braids and curls, bodices and lace-filled décolletages. I looked at the man who had been examining me a moment before, and it occurred to me that he must be over seventy, maybe eighty. His face and hands were ruddy, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors, and he had the haughty air of a retired military man. In 1940 he wouldn’t have been more than thirty. I saw him in a uniform, those light eyes shaded by the visor of a silver cap. In the Germany of the 1930s and later, during the war, what would he have been doing, where would he have been? I must have been staring at him, because I caught an expression of irritation when his eyes met mine.

I considered the other people in the tearoom in the light of the chandeliers glittering in gilded moldings and multiplied in the mirrors, and I imagined every face, man’s or woman’s, as it might have been fifty or sixty years back. The transformation was at first disquieting, then threatening: those placid features became young and cruel, the mouths sipping chocolate or tea opened in cries of fanatic enthusiasm, the hands with age spots and knuckles deformed by arthritis so elegantly holding teacups shot up like bayonets in an unanimous salute. How many of those around me had yelled Heil Hitler? What was on their conscience, in their memories? How would they have looked at me had I been wearing a yellow star stitched on my overcoat? Had I been in this same pastry shop, would one of those men, in a black leather coat, have approached me and asked for my papers? The stranger with the southern European look draws sidelong glances; cupping his tea in his hands to warm them, he doesn’t know that some conscientious citizen has already called the Gestapo. So many people called in those days, without anyone forcing them, they called out of a sense of duty, and maybe one of these elderly people in the tea shop made such a call, a denunciation like the ones in the archives, proof that the crime was nearly universal, that a multitude of individuals supported the bloody edifice of tyranny. More eyes are focused on me, and my face in the mirror that expands space and multiplies people has also been modified: I am odder, darker. My discomfort grows. I wish I had a book or newspaper, something to distract me and occupy my hands. I feel through the pockets in my overcoat, but I haven’t brought anything except my passport and wallet. Tired of waiting, I gather my courage and stand up to leave, but immediately sit back down — I even think I blush — because the waitress has arrived with the tray and a paper-doll smile, saying something I don’t understand. I pay her before she leaves, drink a little tea, and nibble the overly sweet tart. Dizzy from the excessive warmth, I go outside and am grateful for the solitude and the cold, clean air. I start off through a park, believing it’s the one I walked through on my way from the hotel, but when I come out of it along a high railing and see the lights of a modern street I don’t remember having seen before, I realize, with all the sudden lucidity of waking from a dream, that I am lost.

ONE SOLITARY WALK blends into another, like a dream that leads into another, and the German night dissolves into a rainy afternoon ten years later on the other side of the ocean, but there is the same penetrating odor of wet vegetation and soaked earth, and the person doing the walking is not the same man he was then. At some moment in that interval of time, he has discovered what everyone knows and yet no one accepts: that he is mortal. Having been on the verge of dying, he also knows that the time he is living now is a gift half of chance and half of medicine. That this midafternoon stroll through the tree-lined, tranquil streets of New York might never have taken place. That if he were not this minute, slightly dizzy, crossing Fifth Avenue at Eleventh Street, going west, wearing his raincoat and carrying his umbrella, it would make absolutely no difference, no one would notice his absence, there would not be the slightest modification in the world, in the redbrick houses with high stone steps that he likes so much, in the lines of gingko trees with their fan-shaped leaves, still young and tender green, as shiny as the green of the wisteria climbing up the house fronts to the cornices, sometimes curling around the metal geometry of the fire escapes. He might never have come back to this city, it could easily have happened, and since it is only one or two days before he leaves it, he fears this may be the last time, and his awareness of the fragility of his life, the so easily cut thread of any person’s life, makes this walk he is taking now that much more valuable. Among the names of cities and women his life and mind have gifted him with, there is a new name, scrabbling up like a scorpion in his vital lexicon. Just as Franz Kafka never wrote the word tuberculosis in his letters, he never speaks the word leukemia, he doesn’t even think it or say it silently, lest with that mere pronunciation he feels the poison of its sting.

He walks west, letting his footsteps lead where they will, looking for the hidden, cobblestone streets close to the Hudson River, on the edge of the vast desolation of the port and the abandoned wharves where transatlantic steamers used to berth. Now the huge pilings are rotting in the gray water, and thick weeds grow in the cracks of the piers as if among the crumbling columns of a ruined temple. Some of the piers have signs forbidding entrance. Others have been converted into children’s parks or playgrounds. Countless people fleeing Europe walked across these broad wooden planks, and from here they looked toward the city with fear and hope. Along the river runs a path for runners and bladers, for people who come to quietly walk their dogs. On the other side he can see the New Jersey coast, low lines of trees interrupted by ugly industrial hangars, an apartment tower, a gigantic brick building that from a distance looks like the merloned door of a walled Babylonian or Assyrian city and that has its exact equivalent on this side of the river. Those constructions seemed the more mysterious to me because they had no windows and I couldn’t imagine what purpose they served. They were like the towers of Nineveh or Samarkand, erected not in the middle of the desert but on the banks of the Hudson; later I learned that they contain ventilators for the Lincoln Tunnel, which runs beneath the river and is so long that when you drive through it in a taxi you have the sensation that you will never reach the end and soon will run out of air.

In the distance, to the south, rises the cliff of the newest skyscrapers in the lower part of Manhattan, the ones that have grown up around the Twin Towers, which have a certain beauty only when surrounded by fog or when the sun at dusk gives them the splendor of copper prisms. On this afternoon of cloud and mist the waters of the Hudson are as gray as the sky, and the tops of the skyscrapers are lost in the large, dark, swiftly moving clouds in which the red lights of lightning conductors glow like coals beneath a light layer of ash. Almost lost in the fog are the Statue of Liberty and the slim brick towers of Ellis Island.

I have returned to this city and am already saying good-bye to it. I want to treasure every foot of it, every minute of this last evening, the red brick of those hidden streets, the fragrance of the purple blooms of the wisteria, the scent of the small jungle-like gardens you sometimes glimpse between two buildings, behind a wooden fence, where dank shade and thick vegetation remind me of the garden in the Church of Santa María on afternoons of heavy rain, when the water spilled from the gargoyles between the arches of the cloister and echoed within the vaulted ceilings. Between Fifth Avenue and Sixth, almost at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, I have found the Sephardic cemetery my friend Bill Sherzer once showed me. I never noticed it before, although I am often in this neighborhood, the lower end of the avenues, which become more open and bohemian at the juncture of Chelsea and Greenwich Village, with its street stands of books and secondhand records and shops of outlandish clothing, its sidewalk café tables and showcases of fabulous Italian specialty groceries. We had often gone to one of them, Balducci’s, to shop, but never noticed that shaded, narrow garden with the iron fence that at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the cemetery of the Hispano-Portuguese Jewish community, information confirmed by a plaque. Bill pointed it out to us. Fugitives from Russia, from hunger and the pogroms, his grandparents came to Ellis Island at the turn of the century.

Among the trees, ferns, ivy, and weeds are a few headstones so worn that you can barely read the inscriptions: Hebrew or Latin characters, an occasional Spanish name, a Star of David. The fence is closed, so we can’t get inside the tiny cemetery, but if you could touch the stones you might make out something more than slabs whose corners have rounded with time, eroded to the point that almost all trace of human labor has been erased, like the broken columns and fragments of capitals returning to a primitive mineral state in the forums of Rome. Who is there to rescue names that were carved two hundred years ago, names of people who lived as fully as I do, who had memories and desires, who perhaps could trace their lineage back through successive exiles to a city like mine, to a house with two Stars of David on the lintel and to a barrio of narrow streets that lay deserted between the spring and summer of 1492? On this foggy, misty afternoon in New York, standing at the fence of a tiny cemetery locked between the high walls of buildings, I reencounter my ghostly compatriots, and sadly say farewell, because I am leaving tomorrow and may not return. There may be no future afternoon when I stand in this place, before these stones with eroded names, lost like so many others to the immemorial catalogue of Spanish diasporas, to the geography of Spanish graves in so many exiles throughout the world. Gravestones, tombs without a name, infinite lists of dead. On the outskirts of New York there is a cemetery of rolling green hills and enormous trees called the Gates of Heaven, with lakes where in autumn large flocks of Canadian geese gather. Among the thousands of headstones, in the midst of a geometry of graves with Irish names, there is one that is Spanish, so modest, so like the others, that it is difficult to find.

FEDERICO GARCÍA RODRÍGUEZ

1859–1945

How could that man have imagined that his grave would be not in a cemetery in Granada but on the other side of the world, near the Hudson River, or that his son would die before him and not have a grave, no simple stone to mark the exact spot in the ravine where he was executed? Modest burial places and common graves line the highways of the great Spanish diaspora. I would like to visit the French cemetery where Don Manuel Azaña was buried in 1940 in the midst of the great upheaval in Europe, and read the name of Antonio Machado on a tomb in the cemetery of Colliure. Legions of other dead who have no tomb or inscription endure in the alphabetized archive of names. On one Internet page I found, in white letters on a black background, a list of Sephardim the Germans deported from the Island of Rhodes to Auschwitz. You would have to read them one by one, aloud, as if reciting a strict and impossible prayer, to understand that not one of these names can be reduced to a number in an atrocious statistic. Each had a life unlike any other, just as each face, each voice was unique, and the horror of each death was unrepeatable even though it happened amid so many millions of similar deaths. How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, can one attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives?

I REMEMBER THE MORNING of that next-to-last day in New York, when you and I were already a little dazed by the imminence of the trip. We were in that strange nontime of the eve of departure, when a person is not completely in the place though he hasn’t left it yet, when the things that seemed to accept him for a while now remind him that he is only a stranger passing through. We were shaken by the realization that no trace would remain of our presence in the apartment we occupied for such a brief time but in which, nonetheless, day after day, we had accumulated the signs of domestic life: clothes in the closet, which when I open it smelled of your cologne, just like our closet in Madrid, our books on the night table, your creams and my brush and shaving cream on the bathroom shelf — the part of us we brought on this trip, the part we must take with us again like nomads, erasing all the marks of ourselves before we go, even the scent of our bodies on the sheets, which we drop off at the laundry on the morning of our departure.

The least gesture casts the shadow of farewell. I was hoarding the count of the days we have left, and this morning I am thinking back on them, completely awake in the bed that belongs to others but has been ours for a few weeks. Still lazy and relaxed, my arms around you as you lie there as though still asleep and drawing pleasure from the deep pool of dream, I am also thinking that we still have this day, and I want very much to keep it whole and enjoy it slowly, like those moments we grant ourselves in bed after the alarm clock has gone off. Later I turn on the radio as I fix breakfast, but despite the announcer this is not a day like any other, and my routine of getting the coffee can from its precise place in the cupboard and the carton of milk from the refrigerator is false, like the ease with which I open the drawer with the spoons or turn the knob for the gas or put the filter in the coffeepot. False because tomorrow afternoon we will be two ghosts in this place, unknown and invisible to the new renter, whom we will not see and for whom we will leave an envelope with the concierge that contains the key to the apartment. The new renter is already an invading shadow, usurping the space of our intimacy, not just the bed where we’ve slept and made love and the table where every morning before you get up I have set out the coffee cups for breakfast, he also is present in the humid early-morning light that sifts through the glass doors to the terrace, and in the view we saw when, elbows propped on a fourteenth-story cornice as if on the railing of a great transatlantic steamer, we looked out over the city, especially at night. Those May nights of wind and lightning, storms with the fury of a monsoon, lightning bolts cutting across the large black clouds that blocked out the skyscrapers or that turned them into ghosts rising radiant through the downpour in the distance and disappearing suddenly in fog tinted the colors of the spotlights illuminating the highest floors of the Empire State Building, violet at times, red and blue, intense yellow. How reluctant we are to return to our country, for we have received almost daily accounts of obscurantism and bloodshed. We long to remain in exile.

There is still one day to pretend to ourselves, to each other, that our presence in this house, in this city, is real, as real as the doorman who gives us a cordial good morning in his Cuban accent or the Bengali at the shop on the corner where every day I buy a newspaper and telephone cards. I have spent so much of my life wanting to leave the place where I am, but now, when time is moving so swiftly, what I want most is to stay put, to cling like a limpet to the cities I like, to enjoy the calm of habit and familiarity, as when I think of the years you and I have been together. Never, except when I was a child, have I been tempted to collect anything, but now I like to slip ordinary mementos between the pages of a notebook or book: matchbooks with the name of a restaurant, theater tickets, bus tickets, any minimal document that records a date and time, our presence at some site, the itinerary of a brief trip. I’m not attached to things, not even to books and records, but I am to those places where I have known the mysterious exaltation of the best of myself, the fullness of my desires and affinities. What I treasure like an avaricious and obsessive collector are the moments I spend listening to music or looking at paintings in the galleries of a museum, the pleasure of walking with you one afternoon along the banks of the Hudson as the sun tints the glass of the skyscrapers with gold and copper. That captured light continues to glow in a photograph. I treasure the restless sense of adventure and uncertainty that invaded us that next-to-last morning in New York as we watched the last opulent houses of the Upper East Side slip past the bus window and gradually be replaced by the first vacant lots and ruined blocks of Harlem.

Going north, there were fewer and fewer passengers on the bus, and almost imperceptibly the white Anglo-Saxon faces disappeared, and instead of pale old ladies with an air of fragility the passengers now were young mothers, black or Hispanic, holding babies in their arms or leading small children by the hand, fat ladies with the bleach-blond hair, long fingernails, and impudent mouth of the Caribbean, black grandmothers sitting in their seats with the majesty of Ethiopian matrons but moving with great difficulty when they got up at their stop, weaving from side to side in their untied sneakers, their bodies misshapen and twisted as if by a painful bone disease. And as the passengers on the bus ceased to be white, the city changed outside the window, it became wider, emptier, deteriorated. There was less traffic, fewer shopwindows along the almost deserted sidewalks, there were unpopulated spaces, perspectives of properties with wire fences and buildings burned or in ruins, lots with razed houses where maybe one wall still stood, its empty windows boarded up, sinister as blinded eyes. Occasionally we drove through a stretch of street where for some reason there remained a vestige of neighborhood life, a sidewalk, a row of houses spared from destruction, with a moderately prosperous store on the corner and solitary men sitting on the steps, with young mothers leading small children by the hand and pots of geraniums in windows. The last tourists had got off the bus many stops ago, the ones going to the uptown museums, the Metropolitan or Guggenheim, and we no longer saw the trees of Central Park on our left, topped in the distance by the towers of apartments on Central Park West with pinnacles like an expressionist film set: crests and gargoyles, ziggurats, temples of remote Asian religions, lighthouses, cupolas.

The nearly empty bus made much better time, and the conductor turned to look at us, or he studied our strangeness in his rearview mirror. We passed a square that featured a garden in the French style, with a bronze statue of Duke Ellington in the center. The pedestal was like the edge of a stage, and Duke Ellington, dressed in a tux, stood against a grand piano, also cast in bronze. It had been more than an hour since we got on the bus at the Union Square stop. But we’d come so far and moved so slowly that it seemed we’d been gone much longer, and there was no sign that we were near our destination: 155th Street.

Our stop was on the corner of a wide avenue lined with not very tall, widely spaced buildings, and its air of solitude and of being at the end of something was accentuated by the gray day and the low walls of the empty lots. There was no one around to ask directions of. Run-down houses, churches, closed shops, an American flag flapping above a brick building that looked both shabby and official. We were discouraged, afraid we were lost, maybe even in a dangerous area: two foreign tourists you could spot a mile away, who don’t know where they are and who realize with apprehension that among the few cars in the streets there’s no bright yellow of a taxi.

The two of us walk along the wall of a large cemetery, which at first we took for a park. To the west you can imagine the vast stretches of the Hudson, then on a corner, where the cemetery ends, we see on the other side of the avenue, like a mirage, the building we’re looking for, imposing and neoclassic, equally as strange as we are in this place, the home of the Hispanic Society of America, where we’ve been told there are paintings by Velazquez and Goya and a huge library no one visits, because who will come here, so far from everything and in a neighborhood that from midtown Manhattan can easily be seen as devastated and unsafe.

Behind a fence are a patio and statues between two buildings with marble cornices and columns and Spanish names inscribed across the facades. There is an imposing equestrian statue of the Cid, and on one wall a large bas-relief of Don Quixote on Rosinante, horseman and steed equally defeated and skeletal. Beside the entrance a woman with her white hair pulled back and with a rumpled look smokes a cigarette with that half-stubborn, half-furtive attitude of American smokers who have to go outside to fill their lungs with smoke, protecting themselves against the cold wind behind some column or in the shelter of a building, taking quick puffs from the cigarette and then hiding it, fearful of the censure of people going by. The woman looks at us a moment, and later we will both remember those eyes shining like coals in her aged face, the eyes of a much younger woman. She is an employee or secretary nearing retirement, who lives alone and doesn’t care how she dresses, who cuts her hair without fuss and wears dark sweaters, men’s trousers, and shoes between orthopedic and running gear, and hangs her glasses on a chain about her neck.

In the vestibule we look in vain for a ticket office. A burly old doorman sitting with indifference in a convent chair indicates that we can go on through, and from his face, attitude, and accent in spoken English we know he is Cuban. He wears a gray uniform jacket resembling that of a Spanish guard, but one from many years ago and threadbare after long service, after many terms of sleepy administrative laissez-faire. The minute we step into the lobby we notice, with misgiving, that there is practically no one there, and the whole place is dilapidated. A sign affixed to the glass of the entry door gives the museum hours; it is printed in an old typeface and badly yellowed, obeying the same principle of time as the doorman’s jacket or the framed photographs in a glass case that document the founding, in the 1920s, of the Hispanic Society: the large black automobiles of the Spanish and American officials who attended the inauguration, views of a building that doesn’t exist now, arrogant and white in the classicism of its architecture, its recently polished marble gleaming with the splendor of the new and up-to-date, and with the promise of a triumphant future. In the sky, above heads covered with top hats and stylish straw chapeaux, is an airplane that at the time would have been as dazzlingly modern as the cars of the ladies and gentlemen attending the inauguration. But the photographs have warped, and on the inside corners of the frames you can see the work of silverfish.

We enter a dark gallery reminiscent of the patio of a Spanish palace, with plateresque carved-wood choir stalls and arches of a deep red stone that is even darker in the faint daylight filtering through the skylights. The space defies identification: it could be the patio of a palace opening on several galleries, or the enormous desanctified sacristy of a cathedral… or a museum shop not organized according to any clear principle. At the beginning of the century, the millionaire Archer Milton Huntingon, possessed of a passion for all of Spanish Romanticism and a man of an insatiable and omnivorous erudition, wandered through Spain buying everything, anything, whether the choir of a cathedral or a glazed earthenware water pitcher, paintings by Velazquez and Goya, bishop’s cassocks, Paleolithic axes, bronze arrows, the bloody Christs of Holy Week, heavy silver monstrances, Valencian ceramic tiles, illuminated parchments of the Apocalypse, a first edition of La celestina, the Diálogos de amor by Judá Abravanel, called León Hebreo, a Spanish-Jewish refugee in Italy, the 1519 Amadís de Gaula, the Bible translated into Spanish by Yom Tov Arias, the son of Levi Arias, and published in Ferrara in 1513 because it could not be published in Spain, the first Lazarillo, the Palmerín de Inglaterra in the same edition Don Quixote must have read, a first edition of La Galatea, the successive augmentations of the fearsome Index librorom prohibitorum, the Quixote of 1605, and a multitude of Spanish books and manuscripts that no one valued and that were sold at ridiculous prices to the man who traveled the impossible roads of Spain by automobile and lived in perpetual enchantment and enthusiasm. Consumed by a prodigious acquisitive greed, Mr. Huntington traveled here and there with his wild American energy through the dead, rural villages of Castile, following the route of the Cid, buying things and having them shipped to America, paintings, tapestries, ironwork, entire altarpieces, the detritus of high Spanish glory, relics of ecclesiastical opulence, but also objects of the everyday life of the people, pottery plates on which the poor ate their wheat porridge and the water jugs that allowed them the luxury of cool water in the dry interior. He directed archaeological digs in Italy and in one purchase bought the ten thousand volumes in the collection of the dead-broke Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros. And to house the outlandish booty of his journeys through Spain, he constructed this palace at one end of Manhattan, which was never to be blessed with the prosperity or speculative fever he anticipated.

Everything is on the walls, in glass cases, in corners, always with a yellowing label giving the date and place of origin: Roman mosaics and oil lamps, Neolithic earthen bowls, medieval swords, Gothic virgins, like a flea market where all the testimony and heritage of the past has ended, washed up here in the convulsions of the great flood of time, refuse from the homes of the rich and the poor, the gold of the churches, the credenzas of the salons, the tongs that stirred the fires, and the tapestries and paintings that hung on the walls of churches now abandoned and sacked and palaces that may no longer exist, gravestones from the tombs of the powerful now worn nearly smooth, and marble fonts that held the holy water in the cool darkness of the chapels. And names, the sonorous names of Spanish communities on the labels in the cases, and among them, suddenly, beside a large green glazed bowl that I recognize immediately, the name of my hometown, where when I was a boy there was a community of potters whose kilns hadn’t been modified since the times of the Moors, all grouped on a sunny street called Calle Valencia that ended in open country. I point out the bowl to you behind the glass in one of the freestanding cases in the Hispanic Society of America. From this remote time and place it has taken me straight back to my childhood: in the center of the bowl is a rooster in a circle, and as I look at it I can almost feel the glassy surface of the glaze and the raised lines of the design on my fingertips, a timeless rooster that looks like one of Picasso’s and is also replicated on the plates and bowls in my home, as well as on the belly of the water pitchers. I remember the large bowls the women used for mixing ground meat and spices to make fresh sausage, the pottery plates on which they chopped the tomato and green pepper for the salads — austere and savory food of the common people and a standard subject of still lifes. Those objects had always been on the tables and in the cupboards of our houses, and it always seemed as if they had the status of a liturgical constancy, and yet they disappeared in only a few years’ time, replaced by the invasion of plastic and commercial pottery. They have vanished like the houses in whose dark shadow the generous curves of that pottery shone, vanished like the people who once inhabited those houses.

“That bowl holds memories for me too,” says the woman we saw smoking outside. She apologizes for interrupting, for having listened. “I recognized your accent, I lived in that town a long time ago.” Her voice is almost as young as her eyes, unrelated to the age inscribed on her features and to the American carelessness of her clothes. “I work in the library, and if you’re interested I’ll show it to you. There are so many treasures, and so few people know about them. Professors come from time to time, very learned people doing research, but weeks can go by, even months, when no one comes to ask me about a book. Who’s going to come all the way up here? Who would think that we have paintings by Velazquez, El Greco, and Goya, and that being almost in the Bronx, we would have the first Lazarillo and the first Quixote and the 1499 La celestina? Tourists go up to Ninetieth Street to visit the Guggenheim, and they think that everything that lies north of that is darkest Africa. I live near here, in a neighborhood of Cubans and Dominicans where you never hear a word of English. Downstairs from my apartment is a little Cuban restaurant called La Flor de Broadway. They make the best ropavieja stew and most delicious daiquiris in New York, and they let you smoke in peace at the tables, which have checked oilcloth covers, like the ones they had in Spain when I was young. What luxury, smoking a cigarette as I drink my coffee after dinner. You know how rare that is here, that they let you smoke at your table in a restaurant? I love my cigarettes. They’re good company, and help when I’m talking with a friend or to pass the time when I’m alone. When I was young, I wanted to run away from Spain and come to America because here women could smoke and wear trousers and drive cars, all the things we saw in the movies before the war.”

The woman spoke a fluid, clear Spanish, the kind you hear in some parts of Aragon, but there were sounds of the Caribbean and North America in her accent, and the timbre of her voice became totally Anglo-Saxon when she said a word in English. She invited us to have a cup of tea in her office, and we accepted, partly because we felt that physical exhaustion you get in museums, partly because there was something hypnotic in her way of talking and looking at us, even more in that empty, silent place on the gray morning of the last day of our trip. She still hadn’t given us her name, yet she seduced us, speaking in that Spanish from so many years ago and examining us with eyes much younger than her face and figure. Her office was small, cluttered, and smelled of old paper, the office furniture was from the 1920s, like something you would see in a painting by Edward Hopper. She took three cups from a filing cabinet, along with three tea bags, set them on the papers on her desk, and with a totally North American gesture of apology went to get hot water. We looked at each other wordlessly, smiled at being in such a strange situation, and the woman returned.

Her glasses hang from a black ribbon. She looks like a university department secretary who is about to retire, but her eyes question me unabashedly, they are not the eyes of a woman pouring hot water into teacups. She regards at me as if she were thirty and evaluated men only by their looks or sexual availability; and she regards you as if to determine whether we’re lovers or married and whether there is desire or distance between us. And while those magnetic eyes study our faces and our clothes, her old woman’s hands are involved in the ritual of academic hospitality, serving tea and offering envelopes of sugar and saccharin and those little plastic stirrers that so disagreeably substitute for spoons in the United States. Her clear voice, ancient Spanish with influences of Cuban and English, recounts details about the megalomaniac millionaire who built the Hispanic Society on the corner of Broadway and 155th Street, believing that this part of Harlem would soon be in vogue among the rich, and about how strange it was to spend a life so far from Spain and yet be surrounded by so many things Spanish. She gestures toward the window from which you can see a common, ordinary sidewalk that is nonetheless Broadway, a row of redbrick houses crisscrossed by fire escapes and with water tanks on the roofs, and, in the distance, the gray of a horizon and the large blackened towers of public housing complexes in the Bronx.

“I left Spain more than forty years ago and have never been back, and I don’t intend to go now, but I remember some places in your city, some of the names, Santa María Plaza, where the wind blew so hard on winter nights, and Calle Real, wasn’t that what it was called? Although now I remember it was called José Antonio then. And that street where the potter’s studios were, I’d forgotten the name but when I heard you talking to your wife about Calle Valencia, I realized you meant that street. There’s a song we used to sing:

On Calle Valencia

The potters, each day,

Make cooking pots

From water and clay.

“When I was still young I took some Spanish-literature classes at Columbia University with Don Francisco García Lorca, and he liked me to sing him that. He would repeat the words for the class so we could see there wasn’t one that wasn’t ordinary, and yet the result, he told us, was both poetic and as informative as something out of a guidebook, just like the old romances, those ageless ballads.”

She is talking a lot, mesmerizing us, but we haven’t really learned anything about her, not even her name, although we realize that only later, and not without surprise, after we’ve left. We wonder what the apartment is like where she lives, undoubtedly alone, maybe with a cat for company, hearing voices and Cuban music from La Flor de Broadway below, where she regularly goes to eat, where she orders beans and pork and rice and maybe gets a little tipsy from a daiquiri, alone at a table with a checked cloth, smoking as she finishes her coffee and watches the street, appraising with unwavering eyes the men and women passing by. What does she do during all those hours and days when no one comes to consult a book in her library, the buried treasures that she catalogues and checks with a look of severe efficiency on her withered face, her eyes half closed behind the glasses on the black ribbon? Unique books that now can be found only here, first editions, entire collections of scholarly journals, seventeenth-century folios, autograph letters — all of Spanish literature and all possible knowledge and research concerning Spain gathered in this one great library that almost no one visits. But she doesn’t need to open the poetry volumes of the Clásicos Castellanos collection to recite, because while she was studying with Professor García Lorca, she told us, she had acquired, at his urging, the habit of memorizing the poems she liked best, so she knew by heart a large part of the Romancero, and the sonnets of Garcilaso and Góngora and Quevedo, and especially of Saint John of the Cross, and almost all of Fray Luís de León and the Romantics Bécquer and Espronceda, who had been passions of hers during the fantasy and literary adolescence she shared with her brother, who was a little older than her and with whom she had read aloud Don Juan and Fuente Ovejuna and Life Is a Dream. Thanks to her professor, she devoted all the years she worked in the library of the Hispanic Society to memorizing Spanish literature, to reciting it silently or in a low voice, moving her lips as if praying, as she walked to work every morning along the Caribbean sidewalks of Broadway or traveled to lower Manhattan on slow buses or crowded subway cars, as she tossed nights in the insomnia of her solitary bed or walked through the rooms of the museum, almost without noticing the paintings and objects that were etched in her mind, as their layout was, and the names and dates typed on their labels.

But there was one painting she always stopped before and sat down to study with a melancholy that never lessened, that actually became stronger as the years passed and nothing seemed to change, sealed in time as if in a magic kingdom. The labels, posters, and catalogues yellowed, the toilets in the rest rooms became ancient relics, the thick curly hair of the Cuban and Puerto Rican custodians turned white, there were holes in the pockets of their Spanish-guard jackets and the cuffs of their sleeves were rubbed threadbare, and she herself was becoming more a stranger every time she saw herself in a mirror, except for the eyes, which sparkled as brightly as they had when she was thirty and found herself in America, alone and mistress of herself for the first time, possessed of a fever for life stronger even than Mr. Huntington’s uncontrolled and lunatic fever for collecting. “I like to sit before that Velazquez painting, the portrait of the dark-haired girl that no one knows anything about, what her name was or why he painted her,” she told us. “I’m sure you’ve seen it, but don’t leave without going by again, because you may not be back this way again and will never have another chance. Over the years you don’t notice things as much, you get used to them and don’t look anymore, not out of indifference, but as a matter of mental health. The guards at any museum would go crazy if they looked at the same paintings day after day, at every tiny detail. I walk in here and after so many years I don’t see anything, but that little girl by Velazquez is like a magnet, she’s always looking at me, and though I know her face by heart I always find something new in it.”

Paintings, in any museum, portray the powerful and the holy, people puffed up with self-importance or crazed by saintliness or by the torment of martyrdom, but that child doesn’t represent anything, she isn’t the young Virgin or a princess or the daughter of a duke, she’s just herself, a solitary little girl with a serious, sweet expression, as if lost in a daydream or some moment of childish unhappiness. She’s lost, too, in that place, in the pretentious and somewhat shabby halls of the Hispanic Society, like an enchanted child in a storybook palace where time hasn’t moved for a hundred years. She has a frank and at the same time timid gaze, and those dark eyes look straight into mine as I write this, although now I am very far from her and that cloudy day in New York, on the eve of our departure. Only a few months have gone by, and my memories are still clear and strong, but if I think hard about those hours in the Hispanic Society, about the face of the little girl in the Velazquez painting, about the voice and fiery eyes of the woman who never told us her name, everything has the shimmer, the fragility, of something you are not sure really happened. I have kept proof, material evidence, the stub from the bus that carried us there, the postcards we bought in that gift shop, where you can still find black-and-white postcards from a century ago, and guides and catalogs of publications that would be at home on the counters of those bargain bookshops where they sell the most dog-eared and maltreated publications. But this modest shop reminded me a little of a humble state shop in Spain — in contrast to the shops in other New York museums, those spectacular supermarkets of luxury. They occupy enormous rooms lined with large, dark wood counters like shelves of an enormous early-twentieth-century fabric showroom, or like the gigantic wardrobes you see in the sacristies of cathedrals for holding liturgical garments. This museum shop occupies one dreary corner of the hall and a section of the counter where an elderly woman sits, looking for all the world as if she will bring out her knitting at any moment, as soon as these two strange visitors who are thumbing through a collection of faded postcards leave.

Every wall, from floor to ceiling, is covered with enormous paintings, or by a single painting as if in a baroque delirium. Here is a jumble of encyclopedia illustrations representing every regional folk costume, the traditional occupations and dances and geographies of Spain, all the gems of folkloric Romanticism diligently painted by Joaquín Sorolla, like a Sistine Chapel consecrated to the glory of Mr. Huntington’s Hispanic passion, celebrating in broad, colorful brush strokes every racial type, every dusty costume closet or ancestral headwear or anthropological peculiarity: Andalusian horsemen in their wide-brimmed hats, Basque villagers in their berets, Catalans in their typical caps and espadrilles, Castilians with furrowed, sunburned faces, Aragonese with red kerchiefs tied around their necks dancing jotas, along with orange groves and olive trees, and Cantabrian waters where the fishermen of the north ply their trade, Gallegan granaries and the windmills of La Mancha, Andalusian Gypsies in their tiered, ruffled skirts and Valencian women in stiffly starched skirts and necklaces and with hairdos rigid as those of the ancient stone sculptures of the Damas Ibéricas, lush gardens and high, windswept plains, the violet skies of El Greco and the mellow, clear light of the Mediterranean, paintings by the square yard, a profusion of faces like masks and clothing like disguises that have all the vertiginous animation of a Carnival ball and also the grinding meticulousness of a catalog or rule book, each district with its folkloric characteristics and particular dress, along with its eternal customs and regional landscape, each individual categorized by origins and place of birth like birds or insects in their zoological taxonomy.

I HAVE BEFORE ME NOW, in my study, beside the keyboard of my computer and the white, polished shell that Arturo found two summers ago on the beach at Zahara, one of the postcards we bought in the Hispanic Society gift shop, the portrait of that dark-haired, delicate, solitary girl painted against a gray background. She looks at me today as she did that day on the eve of our return trip, when we went to see her for the last time before leaving the museum, when we were not quite present in New York though it was still twenty-four hours before our flight to Madrid. Time was disintegrating in our hands with the flimsiness of burned paper, pages of ash, anxious minutes and hours, like the agitated and fleeting time of clandestine lovers who know that the countdown to their separation has begun almost as soon as they see each other. When you invent, you have the vain belief that you are controlling places, things, the people you write about. In my study, beneath the lamp that lights my hands and the keypad, the mouse, the shell whose grooves I love to stroke, the postcard of the Velazquez girl, I can entertain the illusion that nothing I invent or remember exists outside me, beyond this reduced space. But the places are there even though I am not and even though I will not go back, and the other lives I have lived, and the men I was before I became who I am with you, may endure in the memory of others, and at this very moment, six hours and six thousand kilometers away from this painting, the girl who watches me from the pale reproduction of a postcard is showing the hint of a smile on a real and tangible canvas painted by Velazquez around 1640, taken to New York around 1900 by an American multimillionaire, and hung in semidarkness in a large room of a museum that few people visit. Who knows whether right now, when it is 2:40 P.M. in New York and here near nightfall at the end of a December day, someone is looking at that girl’s face, someone who notices or recognizes in her dark eyes the melancholy of a long exile?