Sepharad

oh you, who knew so well

THEY DISAPPEAR ONE DAY, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone’s memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world. Someone comes along, suddenly enters your life, is part of it for a few hours, a day, the duration of a journey, becomes a presence so insistent that it’s difficult to recall a time he wasn’t there. Whatever exists, even for an hour or two, seems permanent. In Tangiers, in the dark office of a cloth merchant, in a Madrid restaurant, in the dining car of a train, one man tells another fragments from the novel of his life, and the hours of the telling and of the conversation seem to contain more time than will fit within ordinary hours: someone speaks, someone listens, and for each the other’s voice and face take on the familiarity of a person he has always known. Yet an hour or day later, he isn’t there, will never be there, not because he died, although he might have, and his presence for those to whom he was so close dissolves into nothing. For fourteen years, beginning July 30, 1908, Franz Kafka punctually went to his office in the Society for Prevention of Workplace Accidents in Prague, and then one day in the summer of 1922 he left at the customary hour and never returned, because of illness. His disappearance was as inconspicuous as the way he had sat for so many years at his neat desk, where in one of his locked drawers he kept the letters Milena Jesenska wrote him. For some time afterward an old overcoat that he kept there for rainy days hung in the closet, then it too disappeared, and with it the peculiar odor that had identified his presence in the office for fourteen years.

The most stable things vanish, the worst and the best, the most trivial along with those that were necessary and decisive: the years one spends in a dismal office or endures remorsefully indifferent and distant in a marriage, or the memory of a journey to a city where one had either lived or promised oneself to return to after a unique and memorable visit. Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember.

In Tangiers, Señor Salama told of going to Poland to visit the camp where the gas chambers swallowed up his mother and two sisters, and of having found nothing but a large clearing in a forest and a sign bearing the name of an abandoned railway station, and of how the horror of the fact that there were now no visible traces of the camp was somehow contained in that name, in the rusty iron sign swinging above a platform beyond which there was nothing but the sweep of the clearing and gigantic pines against a low gray sky from which a silent rain was falling, rain scarcely visible in the fog but dripping from the roof of a shed at the station. It was a camp so unimportant that almost no one knew its name, said Señor Salama, and he pronounced a difficult word that must have been Polish — but then the name Auschwitz hadn’t meant anything to Primo Levi either the first time he saw it written on the sign of a railway station. In a place like that, far from the principal camps, it was easier for deportees to be lost, for their names to disappear from those detailed records the Germans always kept. With that same fanatic administrative zeal they organized the transporting of hundreds of thousands of captives by rail in the midst of the Allied bombings and military disasters of the last months of the war.

Railroad tracks were just visible in the wet grass, rusted rails and rotted ties, and one of Señor Salama’s crutches snagged or got tangled in them, and he nearly fell, fat and clumsy and humiliated, onto the same soil where his mother and two sisters perished, over which they’d walked when they reached the camp and got down from the train that had carried them like animals to the slaughterhouse: three familiar faces and names in an abstract mass of unknown victims. The guide steadied him, the survivor who had driven him here in an old car, and pointed out the now barely visible outlines of walls, the rectangles of cement on which the barracks had stood, a low line of bricks that someone who didn’t know the place well wouldn’t have noticed, it was all that remained of the courtyard where the crematory ovens had been, because the Germans had blown up the buildings at the last moment, after the sky had been red every night for weeks on the eastern horizon and the earth trembled with reverberations from the ever closer Russian artillery. Tens of thousands of human beings killed there over four or five years, unloaded onto this platform from cattle cars and lined up on the cement platforms, with orders barked in German or Polish and cries of pain and desperation, echoes of screams and commands lost in the enormous thicket of conifers, military marches and waltzes played by a spectral orchestra of prisoners… and of all that, nothing was left but a clearing in a forest drenched by a wet mist, and the fog wiping out the view, the places the prisoners would have seen every day through the barbed wire, knowing they would never walk in the outside world again, excluded from the number of the living as if they were already dead.

That skinny, evasive, servile man who accompanied Señor Salama to the site of the camp, what could he have experienced to make him choose this strange duty of acting as guardian and guide of the hell he had survived yet still did not want to leave? Guardian of a large deserted area in the middle of the woods and of a platform that now had no connection with any railroad; an archaeologist of blackened brick and slowly rusting hinges and oven doors; a seeker of remains, testimonies, relics, the metal bowls and spoons the prisoners used to eat their soup; a guide through traces of ruins increasingly overgrown and erased by the simple passage of time or sometimes enhanced by the white winter snows. When he died or was too old or tired to accompany the rare traveler who came to visit that unimportant camp, when he was no longer there to point out the sooty brick wall or line of cement platforms or peculiar undulation beneath the unbroken snow, no one would notice those minor irregularities in the forest clearing, or realize that the metallic crunch beneath their boots came from a spoon that once was the most valuable treasure in a man’s life, and no one would guess the atrocious significance of a few piles of burned brick or, lying in the grass, a post to which a curl of barbed wire was still attached.

THEY DISAPPEAR, left behind by time, and distance falsifies memory as gradually as the rain. The years, abandon, and deteriorating materials all obliterate the ruins of a German death camp lost in the woods on the boundary between Poland and Lithuania, meticulously burned and destroyed by its guards on the eve of the arrival of the Red Army, which found only cinders, debris, and hastily filled-in ditches where countless layers of human bodies were piled, preserved by the cold, clustered and tangled, naked, skeletal, frozen limb to limb, tens of thousands of nameless bodies among whom were Señor Isaac Salama’s four grandparents and most of his aunts and uncles and cousins, along with his mother and two sisters, who weren’t saved as he and his father were, because the passports came too late for them in the summer of 1944, issued by the Spanish legation in Hungary, acknowledging the Spanish nationality of the Sephardic families living in Budapest.

“Our neighbors, my friends from school, my father’s colleagues — they took all of them,” said Señor Salama. “We wouldn’t go out of the house for fear they would pick us up in the street before the papers the Spanish diplomat had promised us arrived. We heard on the radio that the Allies had taken Paris and that to the east the Russians had crossed the border with Hungary, but it seemed as if the only thing that mattered to the Germans was exterminating all of us. Imagine the enterprise required to transport all those people by train across half of Europe in the middle of a war they were about to lose. They chose to use the trains to send us to the camps over sending their troops to the front. They went into Hungary in March — March 14, I will never forget, although for many years I didn’t remember that date, I didn’t remember anything. They came in March and had deported half a million people by summer, but since they were afraid that the Russians would come too soon and not leave enough time for them to send all the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in an orderly fashion, they shot many of them in the head right in the street and threw their bodies into the Danube, the work of the Germans and their Hungarian friends. The men of the Cross Arrow, they were called; they wore black uniforms that copied the SS and were even more bloody than the Germans, if much less systematic.”

You live all the days of your life in the house you were born in, a haven where you always had the warm protection of your parents and your two older sisters, and you expect to have that forever, just as you expect to have the photographs and paintings on the walls, and the toys and books in your bedroom. Then one day, in a few hours’ time, all that disappears forever, without a trace, because you went out to do one of your usual chores, and when you came back, you were prevented from going in by an uncrossable chasm of time. “My father and I had gone to look for something to eat,” said Señor Salama. “And when we returned, the concierge’s husband, who had a good heart, came out and warned us to go away because the soldiers who had taken our family might come back. My father had a package in his hand, maybe one of those little packets of candy he brought home every Sunday, and it fell to the ground at his feet. That I remember. I picked up the package and took my father’s hand, which was ice cold. ‘Go away, far away,’ the concierge’s husband told us, and quickly walked off, looking from side to side, fearing that someone might have seen him talking to two Jews as if he were their friend. We walked for a long time without exchanging a word, I clinging to my father’s hand, which no longer warmed mine or had the strength to lead me. I led him, keeping an eye out for patrols of Germans or Hungarian Nazis. We went into a café near the Spanish legation, and my father made a telephone call. He fumbled through his pockets for a coin, but he kept getting tangled up in his handkerchief and his billfold and his pocket watch. I remember that too. I had to give him the coin to buy the token. The man came whom my father had visited before, and he told my father that everything was arranged, but my father didn’t say anything, didn’t answer, it was as if he didn’t hear, and the man asked him if he was ill. My father’s chin had sunk to his chest, and his eyes were empty, the expression he would wear till he died. I told the man that they had taken our whole family, I wanted to cry but the tears didn’t come, and a suffocating heaviness gripped my chest. Finally the tears burst out, and I think that the people at the nearby tables stared at me, but I didn’t care; I threw myself at the man, clutching the lapels of his overcoat and begging him to help my family, but maybe he didn’t understand because I spoke in Hungarian and with my father he’d been speaking French. We were driven in a large black car bearing the flag of the diplomatic legation to a house where there were a lot of other people. I remember small rooms and suitcases, men wearing overcoats and hats, women in kerchiefs, people speaking in low voices and sleeping in the corridors, on the floor, using bundles of clothing as pillows. My father was always wide-awake, smoking, trying to make a telephone call, from time to time badgering the employees of the Spanish legation to bring us something to eat. We searched for the names of my mother and sisters on the list of deportees, but they didn’t appear. Later we learned — that is, my father learned years later — that they hadn’t been taken to the same camps nearly everyone else was sent to, to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. The Spanish diplomat who saved the lives of so many of us was able to rescue some Jews even from those camps, endangering his own life, acting behind the backs of his superiors in the ministry, driving from one end of Budapest to the other at all hours of the day or night in the same black embassy car he’d taken us in, picking up people in hiding or those who’d just been arrested. If they didn’t have authentic Sephardic blood, he invented identities and papers for them, even relatives and businesses in Spain. Sanz-Briz, his name was. He located many people and managed to have some sent back from the camps, he snatched them from hell, but of my mother and sisters there was no trace, because they’d been taken to that camp no one had ever heard of, and of which nothing remains except the roof and the sign I saw five years ago. I would never have chosen to go. I can’t bear to set foot in that part of Europe, I can’t bear the idea of standing and looking at a person of a certain age in a café or on a street in Germany or Poland or Hungary; I wonder what they were doing during those years, what they saw, whom they’d sided with. But shortly before my father died he asked me to visit the camp, and I promised I would. And do you know what’s there? Nothing. A clearing in a forest. The roof of a railway station and a rusted sign.”

I wonder what happened to Señor Salama, who in the middle 1980s was the director of the Ateneo Español, the Spanish cultural center in Tangiers, working in a small office decorated with once brightly colored tourist posters now crumpled and faded by time and with old furniture in fake Spanish style; he also managed, grudgingly, the Galerías Duna on Louis Pasteur Boulevard, a fabric shop established by his father that took its name from a river in that other country that they, unlike most he knew, had managed to escape from, unlike the sisters and mother they didn’t even have a photograph of, nothing to use as a crutch for memory, as material proof that would have helped against the erosion of memory.

Duna is the Hungarian name for the Danube River. Señor Salama, with his rich vocabulary and strange accent punctuated with dim tonalities, musical embers of the Jewish Spanish he’d heard spoken in his childhood and the few lullabies he still remembered, with his laborious way of pulling himself along on two crutches and with his eyes that watered so easily, his sparse gray hair, his forehead always gleaming with sweat he constantly dabbed at with a white handkerchief embroidered with his initials, with his breath ragged from the effort of moving a large clumsy body whose legs no longer served it, bone-thin legs beneath the cloth of his trousers, two appendages swinging beneath the weight of a large belly and thick torso. But he insisted on doing everything for himself, without help from anyone; lurching skillfully along, breathing rapidly, he would open doors and turn on lights and explain the small treasures and souvenirs of the Ateneo Español, framed photographs of a famous visitor many years ago, or of performances of plays by Benavente and Casona, even Lorca, a diploma issued by the Ministry of Information and Tourism, a book dedicated to the center’s library by a writer whose fame had been fading with the years, until even his name was no longer familiar — though you had to hide that from Señor Salama, you had to tell him that you’d read the book and that his inscribed first edition must be very valuable by now. Awkward, expert, chaotic, tireless despite his difficulty breathing and his crutches, he would point out old posters announcing conferences and plays in the Ateneo’s small theater, and even in the large Teatro Cervantes, which now, he says, is a shameful ruin infested with rats, invaded by delinquents, a jewel of Spanish architecture the government pays no attention to at all. They don’t want to know anything of what little is left of Spain in Tangiers, they don’t answer the letters that Señor Salama writes to the ministries of Culture and Education and External Affairs. He sets the posters to one side, looks through the papers on his desk, and pulls out a folder stuffed with carbon copies bearing the stamp of the main post office, clear proof that they’ve been sent, though never answered. He points out dates, quickly thumbs through papers — from a petition to a document dated several years before — all written on a typewriter, in the old-fashioned way before the age of word processors and photocopiers, always with several carbon copies. The stage of the Ateneo Español was the setting for the first theater company of Tangiers, although, he explains, “it is composed of amateurs who don’t get a peseta for it, including me — who can’t act, as you may imagine, but I often direct.” Along the walls of a corridor, he points out poorly framed black-and-white photographs in which the actors hold exaggerated, theatrical poses, enthusiastic amateurs declaiming in front of modest sets of the inn in Don Juan Tenorio, the stairway of a tenement in Madrid, the walls of an Andalusian village. “We’ve done Benavente and Casona, and every year on the first of November we perform the Don Juan play, but don’t judge us too quickly, because we also presented The House of Bernarda Alba long before it made its debut in Spain, when the only person to have performed it was Margarita Xirgu in Montevideo.”

THE MELANCHOLY AND PENURY of Spanish colonies far from Spain. Fake-tile roofs, mock-whitewashed walls, imitations of Andalusian railings, regional bullfight posters, Valencian and Asturian schlock, greasy paellas and large Mexican sombreros, grimy decor inspired by the romantic prints and films of Andalusia that played in Berlin during the Spanish Civil War. The red tiles, the wrought-iron light fixtures, and fancy iron railings of that place in Copenhagen called Pepe’s Bar, the imitation caves of Sacromonte at a crossroad near Frankfurt, where they served sangria in December and hung copper sauté pans and Cordovan and Mexican sombreros on the walls. The red tiles and inevitable white stucco wall in the Casa de España in New York in the early nineties; the Café Madrid, which appeared unexpectedly on a neighborhood corner in the Adams Morgan district of Washington, DC, amid Salvadoran restaurants and shops selling cheap clothing and suitcases and bellowing merengue music in places that were emerging from absolute desolation overnight, ruined neighborhoods with whole rows of burned or razed houses and parking lots encircled with barbed wire. Beside the empty lot of a burned house would be a shop for Ethiopian brides, and beyond that a Catholic funeral parlor. Suddenly you would see an eye-catching sign: Café Madrid, right next to a Santo Domingo Bakery and a little Cuban restaurant called La Chinita Linda. It was an icy morning in Washington, and the winter sunlight shimmered on the marble of the monuments and public buildings. You would go up a narrow stairway and on the second floor come to the swinging door of Café Madrid and breathe in warm air carrying odors that were familiar but as rarely experienced as the hiss of the sizzling oil used to deep-fry the white dough of the churros, or as the sight of the round, oily face of the woman waiting on tables, who had the brassy air of a churro seller in a working-class neighborhood in Madrid but who by now spoke very little Spanish, because, she said, in an accent flavored with the cadences of Mexico, her parents had brought her to America when she was a kid. Old bullfight posters on the walls, a montera, a toreador’s hat, on two crossed banderillas in an arrangement that suggested a display of military trophies, the paper of the banderillas stained an ocher color that could pass for blood and the montera covered with dust, as if coated with years of heavy smoke from boiling oil. Color posters of Spanish landscapes, ads from Iberia Airlines or the old Ministry of Information and Tourism. In his office, Señor Salama had a poster of La Mancha, an arid hill crowned with windmills, all with the flat, overlit tones of color photographs and films of the sixties. There was a poster of the Del Tránsito Synagogue in Toledo, and beside that, equal in the favor and almost the devotion, of Señor Salama, another picturing the monument to Cervantes in Madrid’s Plaza de España: it had that same clean winter light of a cold, sunny morning, and Señor Salama remembered childhood walks through that plaza he was so fond of, although it seemed strange now, almost impossible, to believe that he had been a slim young man who didn’t need crutches but walked on two efficient and agile legs without a thought for the miracle of their ability to sustain him and take him from place to place as if his body were weightless, believing that everything he had and enjoyed would last forever: agility, health, being twenty, the happiness of living in Madrid with no ties to anyone, being nothing more or less than himself, as free from the force of the gravity of the past as from the earth’s, free, temporarily, from his former life and maybe from the future life others had planned for him, free from his father, his melancholy, his cloth business, his loyalty to the dead, to those who couldn’t be saved, those whose places they, father and son, had occupied or usurped, merely by chance not ending up in that obscure camp where so many of their family, their city, and their lineage had perished without a trace. Franz Kafka’s three sisters disappeared in the death camps. In Madrid, in the mid-1950s, Señor Salama took courses in economics and law and planned not to return to Tangiers when the period of freedom granted him came to an end, and for the first time in his life he was completely alone and felt that his identity began and ended in him, free now of shadows and heritage, free of the presence and obsessive enshrining of the dead. It wasn’t his fault he had survived, nor should he have to be in mourning any longer, mourning not just for his mother and sisters but for all his relatives, for his neighbors and his father’s colleagues and the children he’d played with in the public parks of Budapest — for all the Jews annihilated by Hitler. If you looked around, in a tavern in Madrid, in a classroom at the university, if you walked along the Gran Vía and went into a movie theater on a Sunday afternoon, you wouldn’t find a hint that any of it had happened, you could let yourself be borne off to a life more or less like that other people lived, his compatriots, classmates, and the friends who never asked about his past, who knew scarcely anything about the European war or the German camps.

In Madrid his memory of Tangiers sank out of sight like ballast he had shed at his departure, and by now he felt very little remorse for having abandoned his father or for the fact that he was living off a business he had no intention of devoting himself to. Of his earlier life, Budapest and panic, the yellow star on the lapel of his overcoat, the nights huddled beside the radio, the disappearance of his mother and sisters, the travels with his father through Europe carrying a Spanish passport, amazingly few images remained, only an occasional physical sensation, as unreal as early childhood memories. “I saw an interview on television,” he said, “with a man who went blind in his twenties; he was nearly fifty now, and he said that gradually he had been losing images, they were being erased from his memory, so that he couldn’t remember the color blue, for example, or what a certain face looked like, and his dreams were no longer visual. He retained only bits and pieces, and even those were going, he said, the white blur of an almond tree in bloom in his parents’ garden, the red of a balloon that he’d had as a child and that was like a globe of the world. But he realized that in a few more years he would lose everything, even the meaning of the word see. In Madrid, during my years at the university, I forgot about the city of my childhood, the faces of my mother and sisters, and the irony that I didn’t have so much as a snapshot to help remember them when there’d been so many in our house in Budapest, albums filled with photographs my father took with his little Leica, because like music, photography was one of his hobbies, one of the many things that disappeared from his life after we came to Tangiers and he didn’t have either time or energy for anything except work — work, mourning, religion, reading the sacred books he’d never opened in his youth, and visits to synagogues, which he’d never attended until we came here. At first I wasn’t interested in going with him. But I would take him by the hand and lead him as I had that morning in Budapest when we learned that they arrested my mother and sisters.”

After he died, Señor Salama’s father regained the place in his son’s life that he’d occupied many years before, and was the object of the same devotion he’d received when he led his son through the streets of Budapest or Tangiers, a placid boy, obedient, plump, seen smiling in a lost photograph, hazily remembered, in which he was wearing a goalkeeper’s cap and the wide-legged pants of the period between the wars, a proud boy looking up at his father, both wearing a yellow star on their lapel. One June day his father bought a newspaper and after first glancing right and left pointed to the front page, where there was news of the Allied landing in Normandy. Then he folded the paper and put it in his pocket and pressed his son’s hand tightly, transmitting in that way his joy, alerting him not to show any sign of celebrating the invasion in the middle of a street filled with enemies. “When I die, you will say the Kaddish for me for eleven months and one day, like a good firstborn son, and you will travel to the northeast corner of Poland to visit the camp where your mother and two sisters died.”

Now Señor Isaac Salama, who had no son to say the Kaddish for him after his death, regretted that he had been a prodigal son and that the tenderness he was feeling now could not make amends to his dead father, whom he missed as much as he would have missed a wife and children. They had always been so close. As long as he could remember, every afternoon his life lit up because he knew his father would soon be home. He had been sheltered by him, had admired him as he would the hero of a novel or movie, had seen him crumble in the middle of a street and felt the terrifying weight of responsibility and also the secret pride that his father’s hand, resting on his shoulder, was not protecting him but was finding support in him, his son, the heir to his name.

But when he was sixteen or seventeen, he didn’t want to live with his father any longer, all the things they’d shared since it had been just the two of them were beginning to stifle him — more than anything the endless mourning, the endless guilt. As the years went by, instead of consoling his father, the mourning had pushed him deeper into the shadows of silent injury in a world where the dead didn’t count, where no one, including many Jews, wanted to hear about or remember them. He tended his business with the same energy and conviction he had dedicated to it when they lived in Budapest. Within a few years, out of nothing, he had succeeded in establishing a shop that was one of the most modern in Tangiers, and whose glowing sign, “Galerías Duna,” illuminated the bourgeois, commercial section of Pasteur Boulevard by night. But Señor Salama realized that his father’s untiring, astute activity was only a facade, an imitation of the man his father had been before the catastrophe, in the same way the shop was an imitation of the one he’d owned and managed in Hungary. He became more and more religious, more obsessed with fulfilling rituals, prayers, and holy days, which in his youth he’d thought of as relics of an obscure and ancient world he was glad to be delivered from. Perhaps he gained a feeling of expiation with this growing religion; in any case, he prayed now, docilely, to the very God that in sleepless days and nights of despair he had denied for having allowed the extermination of so many innocents. His son, who at thirteen or fourteen accompanied him to the synagogue with the same solicitude as he prepared his evening meal or made sure he had ink and paper on his desk every morning, now found this religious fervor irritating, and any time he was with his father he felt a lack of air, the musty, sour odor of the clothing of Orthodox Jews and of the candles and darkness of the synagogue, as well as the dusty smell of cloth in the storeroom where he no longer wanted to work and from which he didn’t know how to excuse himself.

But when finally he dared express his wish to leave home, to his surprise and, even more, remorse, his father not only didn’t object, he encouraged him to go study in Spain, believing, or pretending to believe, that his son’s aspiration was to take over the business when he graduated and that the knowledge he acquired in Spain would be very useful to both of them in renovating and developing the company.

“I would hear the siren of the boat leaving for Algeciras and count the days until I made that trip myself. At night, from the terrace of my home, I could see the lights of the Spanish coast. My life consisted solely of the desire to get away, to escape all that weighed on me, crushing me like the layers of undershirts, shirts, sweaters, overcoats, and mufflers my mother used to pile on me when I was a boy getting ready for school. I wanted to put the confinement of Tangiers behind me, and the claustrophobia of my father’s shop, along with my father and his sadness and memories and remorse for not having saved his wife and daughters, for being saved in their place. The day I finally left dawned with heavy fog and warnings of high seas, and I feared the boat from the Peninsula wouldn’t arrive, or that it wouldn’t leave the port after I’d boarded with my suitcases and reservation for the Algeciras-to-Madrid train. My nerves made me irritable with my father, quick to be annoyed by his concern, his mania for checking everything over and over: the ticket for the ship, for the train, my Spanish passport, the address and telephone number of the pension in Madrid, the papers for enrolling in the university, the heavy clothing I’d need when winter came. I don’t think we’d been apart since we left Budapest, and he must have felt like my father and mother both. I would have done anything to keep him from going to the port with me, but didn’t even hint at it for fear he would be offended, and when he came with me and I saw him among the people who’d come to see the other passengers off, I was mortified, wild for the boat to get under way so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at my father, who was the caricature of an old Jew. In recent years, as he grew more religious, he’d also grown old and stooped, and in his gestures and way of dressing he was beginning to look like the poor Orthodox Jews of Budapest, the eastern Jews whom our Sephardic relatives looked down on and whom my father, when he was young, had regarded with pity and some contempt as backward, incapable of adapting to modern life, impaired by religion and bad hygiene. I felt guilty for being embarrassed and guilty because I was abandoning him, and I truly felt sorry for him, but none of that could put a dent in my joy at leaving, and I cut my ties to my father and to Tangiers and to my shame the minute the boat set sail, the instant I could see that we were gradually separating from the dock. We were only a few meters away, and my father kept waving good-bye from below, so different from all the others in the crowd that I hated being linked with him. I waved back and smiled, but I was already gone, far away, free of everything for the first time in my life — you can’t imagine the weight that was lifted from my shoulders — free of father and his shop and his mourning and all the Jews killed by Hitler, all the lists of names in the synagogue and in the Jewish publications my father subscribed to, and the ads in the Israeli newspapers where you asked for information about missing people. I was alone now. I began and ended in me alone. Someone nearby on the deck was listening on a transistor radio to one of the American songs that were popular then. It seemed to me that the song was filled with the same kind of promise the trip held for me. I have never had a more intensely physical sense of happiness than I felt when the boat began to move, when I saw Tangiers in the distance, from the sea, as I saw it the day my father and I arrived, escaping Europe.”

WHAT WAS IT REALLY LIKE, Tangiers? Distorted in memory by the passing years, for memory is never as precise as literature would have us believe. Who can truly remember a city or a face without the help of a photograph? But they are lost, all those albums of a former life, a life that seemed unchanging, suffocating, and yet evaporated almost without leaving a single image, like the ruins of a camp or like colors gradually forgotten by a man who has gone blind, like the city where Señor Isaac Salama lived until he was twelve, like the faces of his sisters and mother, like the city where a young man feels as if he is a prisoner and will never escape, and yet he does, and then one day he doesn’t come back to the office, never again sits at the desk where, in one of the drawers, among official and now useless papers, there is a packet of forgotten letters that someone will throw out during the next cleaning: the letters from Milena Jesenska that Kafka didn’t keep.

Ships’ horns and the muezzin’s call at dusk, heard from the terrace of a hotel. A Spanish pastry shop like those in the provincial cities of the sixties, a Spanish theater called the Cervantes, now in near ruins. Large cafés filled with men only, thick with smoke and humming with conversations in Arabic and French. Gilt teapots and narrow crystal glasses filled with steaming, very sweet, green tea. The labyrinth of a market redolent of the spices and foods of his childhood. A blind beggar wearing a ragged brown hooded cloak that seems made of the same cloth as Velázquez’s Water Seller of Seville; the beggar wields a cane and murmurs a little chant in Arabic, and beneath the hood all you can see of him is a chin covered with a scraggly white beard, and a shadow hiding his eyes like a mask of melancholy. Idle young men loiter on street corners near the hotels, and as soon as they spy a foreigner they besiege him, offering their friendship and help as guides, trying to sell him hashish or provide him with a young girl or boy, and if he says no it doesn’t discourage them, and if he’s embarrassed and ignores them, pretending not to see them, they still don’t give up but trail behind this person who doesn’t know how to elude them but at the same time, plagued with the bad conscience of the privileged European, doesn’t want to seem arrogant or offensive. Pasteur Boulevard, the only street name that sticks in his memory: bourgeois buildings that might be found in any city in Europe, although the Europe of a different time, before the war, a city with streetcars and baroque facades, maybe the Budapest in which Señor Salama was born and where he lived until he was ten but never returned to and of which he has only a few sentimental impressions, like postcards colored by hand. The most beautiful city in the world, I swear, the most solemn river — pure majesty, none can compare with it, not the Thames or the Tiber or the Seine — the Duna, and all these years later I still can’t get used to calling it the Danube. And the most civilized city, we believed, until those beasts awakened, not just the Germans, the Hungarians were worse than the Germans, they didn’t need orders to act with brutality, the Arrow Cross bands, Himmler’s and Eichmann’s pit bulls, the Hungarians who had been our neighbors and who spoke our language, which by now I have forgotten, or nearly, because my father insisted on never speaking it again, not even between the two of us, the only ones left of our entire family, two alone and lost here in Tangiers, with our Spanish passports and the new Spanish identity that had saved our lives and allowed us to escape from Europe, which my father never wanted to return to, the Europe he had loved above all else and of which he had been so proud, the home of Brahms and Schubert and Rilke and all that great cultural dreck that made his head spin, rejected later in order to turn himself into a zealous Orthodox Jew, isolated and reticent among Gentiles, he who never took us to the synagogue when we were children or celebrated any holiday, who spoke French, English, Italian, and German, but knew scarcely a word of Hebrew and only one or two lullabies in Ladino — although when we lived in Budapest he took pride in his Spanish roots. Sepharad was the name of our true homeland, although we’d been expelled from it more than four centuries ago. My father told me that for generations our family kept the key of the house that had been ours in Toledo, and he detailed every journey they’d made since they left Spain, as if he were telling me about a single life that had lasted nearly five hundred years. He always spoke in the first person plural: we emigrated to North Africa, and then some of us made our homes in Salonika, and others in Istanbul, to which we brought the first printing presses, and in the nineteenth century we arrived in Bulgaria, and at the beginning of the twentieth one of my grandparents, my father’s father, who was involved in the grain trade along the ports of the Danube, settled in Budapest and married the daughter of a family of his own rank, because in that time the Sephardim considered themselves to be above the eastern Jews, the impoverished Ashkenazim from the Jewish villages of Poland and Ukraine, the ones who had escaped the Russian pogroms. We were Spanish, my father would say, using his prideful plural. Did you know that a 1924 decree restored Spanish nationality to the Sephardim?

THE ATENEO ESPAÑOL, the Galerías Duna, the lights of the Spanish coast shimmering at night, so close it seemed they weren’t on the other side of the Mediterranean but on the far shore of a very wide river, the Danube, the Duna that Señor Salama saw in his childhood, the river into which in the summer of 1944 the Germans and their lackeys threw the Jews they’d murdered in the street, in broad daylight, hurriedly because the Red Army was approaching and it was possible that the rail lines would be cut and there would be no way to keep sending convoys of the doomed to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or to those lesser-known camps whose names no one remembers. Spain is a stone’s throw away, an hour and a half by ship, witness those lights visible from the terrace of the hotel, but in a conversation with Señor Salama, in the Galerías Duna or in the Ateneo Español, Spain seems thousands of kilometers away, across oceans, as if one were remembering it from the Hogar Español in Moscow one waning winter day or in the Café Madrid in Washington, DC. Spain is so remote that it is nearly nonexistent, an inaccessible, unknown, thankless country they called Sepharad, longing for it with a melancholy without basis or excuse, with a loyalty as constant as that passed from father to son by the ancestors of Señor Salama, the only one of all his line to fulfill the hereditary dream of return, only to be expelled once again, and this time definitively, because of a misfortune that he no longer considered just another injustice of chance as the years went by, but a consequence and punishment for his own pride, for the self-indulgence that had pushed him to be ashamed of his father and to reject him in his deepest heart.

If he hadn’t been driving that car so fearlessly, he thinks day after day, with the same obsessive mourning his father had devoted to the wife and daughters he didn’t save, if he hadn’t been going so fast, wanting to get to the Peninsula as quickly as he could, to go up to Madrid not on one of the slow night trains that scored the country from south to north like dark, powerful rivers but in the car his father gave him as a reward for completing the two degrees he’d studied for concurrently and completed with such brilliance. By now neither father nor son maintained the fiction that these university diplomas were going to help the business on Pasteur Boulevard prosper. Tangiers, Señor Salama told his father when he went home after his last courses, would not much longer be the lively and open international city it had been when they arrived in 1944. Now it belonged to the kingdom of Morocco, and little by little foreigners would have to leave—“we first,” said the father with a flash of the wit and sarcasm of old. “I only hope they throw us out with better manners than the Hungarians, or the Spanish in 1492.”

That’s what he said, the Spanish, as if he didn’t consider himself one of them anymore, even though he held that citizenship and during a period in his life had felt such pride in belonging to a Sephardic line. Señor Salama realized that his father was calculating the possibility of selling the business and emigrating to Israel. But the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to change countries again. “I should have paid attention to my father,” he says now, in another of his episodes of repentance, “because Spain doesn’t want to know about anything Spanish in Tangiers — or about those of us Spaniards who are still here. In Morocco there is less and less room for us, but they don’t want us in Spain either. With the pension I’ll get when I close this shop, from which I get next to nothing now, when I retire I won’t have enough to live on the Peninsula, so I’ll stay here to die in Tangiers, where we are less and less Spanish and more and more old foreigners. I could go to Israel, of course, but what would I do at my age, in a country I know nothing about, a place where I have no one?”

If he had paid attention to his father then, if he’d had a little patience, if he hadn’t been driving so fast along one of those Spanish highways of the 1950s, so full of himself, he says, his fleshy lips twisted in a sardonic smile, believing he could do anything, in control of his life.

A little before dawn, as he came out of a tight curve, his car drifted to the left of the road, and he saw the yellow headlights of a truck coming toward him. “I should have died right there,” Señor Salama says, and realizes he is reprising the words he heard his father speak so many times, the same desire to go back and correct a few minutes, a few seconds — if we hadn’t left them at home alone, if we’d returned just a little earlier — an entire life shattered forever in one fraction of a moment, an eternity of remorse and shame, the horrible shame Señor Salama felt when he found himself paralyzed at the age of twenty-two, walking with crutches and dragging two useless legs, knowing he could never stand on his own again, that he lacked not just the physical strength but the moral courage to pursue the life he had wanted so much and thought he had right at his fingertips.

“I didn’t want anyone to see me, I wanted to hide in the dark, in a cellar, like those monsters in the movies. It was years before I went outside with any feeling of normality, or walked through the shop on my crutches.” He noticed that gradually he was becoming deformed, the way his legs grew weaker and his torso more massive, his shoulders unnaturally broad and his neck sunken between them. He would fall in the shop in front of some customer — in those days when there were still a lot of them — and when the clerks came running to pick him up, he despised them even more than he despised himself, and he would close his eyes as he had in the hospital and want to die of embarrassment.

“How can you understand — forgive me for saying so — when you have two good legs and both arms? When you don’t, it is like having a grave illness, or a yellow star sewn to your lapel. I didn’t want to be a Jew when the other children threw rocks at me in the park in Budapest where I went to play with my sisters, who were older and braver and defended me. At that time in my life, being a Jew gave me the same sense of shame and the same rage I felt after I was paralyzed, crippled — none of this ‘impaired’ or ‘disabled’ drivel, which is what those imbeciles say now, as if changing the word could erase the stigma and give me back the use of my legs. When I was nine or ten, in Budapest, what I wanted was not for us Jews to be saved from the Nazis. I say it now, to my shame: what I wanted was not to be a Jew.”

A WARM BREEZE WAFTS through the open window of Señor Salama’s small office, the breeze of a May afternoon, though the visit came in December and he can hear the clear call of a muezzin, amplified by one of those rudimentary loudspeakers dangling precariously from a few wires, as well as the hoarse blast of a ship’s horn entering or leaving the port. With an expression of annoyance, he has called the shop to ask if there’s anything he should know, and in French told someone who took a long time to answer the telephone that he can’t come before closing time because the concert begins at eight in the recital hall of the Ateneo. Spanish Culture Week was inaugurated yesterday with a lecture on literature, and there was a respectable audience, but today Señor Salama is worried because the pianist scheduled to perform is not very well known and may not be very good either. If he were, why would he come to Tangiers to give a concert for so little money? It’s frightening, and depressing, to picture the hall with only a few seats occupied, the Andalusian white stucco wall arching above the stage, and the pianist in a travel-rumpled dinner jacket making an overly emphatic bow before an unenthusiastic public, the locks of a romantic mane covering half his face when he stands back up. There weren’t funds to print enough posters or send invitations in time. Besides, it’s Wednesday, and there may be an international match on TV. In the large, dark cafés of Tangiers, which assault the nostrils with the stale odor of male sweat and black tobacco reminiscent of Spanish bars thirty years before, you sometimes see a mass of dark faces raised toward a television screen, unshaved cheeks and unblinking eyes: a soccer match on Spanish television or one of those competitions of miniskirted airline stewardesses leaning against late-model cars. “That’s the cultural contribution Spain is leaving here,” rages Señor Salama, “television and soccer, while the language is being lost and our Ateneo goes without any help, eaten up by debts while on the Peninsula thousands of millions are wasted on that Babylon of the Seville Expo. Look at the French, in contrast, compare our Ateneo with the Alliance Française, their opulent palace, the film series they organize, the exhibitions they bring from the Continent, the money they spend on advertising — which they paste over all our posters, the few we can afford. You’ve noticed that French flag on high, haven’t you? I go there because they’re always inviting me, and I die with envy. The French invite me, yes, but the Spanish forget, I don’t matter, I’m no one. But the Ateneo itself… The people at the embassy and the consulate shove us aside every chance they get, as if we didn’t exist.” Señor Salama breathes heavily, his elbows propped on the desktop, his broad torso spread over the papers, his hands searching among the disorder: concert programs, letters, unpaid bills, invitations. It’s getting late, and he can’t find what he’s looking for; he checks his watch and verifies that it’s only a few minutes before the concert begins: the piano recital performed by the acclaimed virtuoso D. Gregor Andrescu, works by F. Schubert and F. Liszt, open to the public, please be punctual. Panic that almost no one has shown up, torture at the thought of being seated in the first row and seeing at such close range the disappointment and obligatory smile of the pianist, who according to Señor Salama was a figure of the first magnitude in Romania before escaping to the West and finding political asylum in Spain.

Señor Salama has found what he was looking for, an invitation written in French and printed on stiff, shining stock bearing the gold seal of the republic and, at the bottom, on a dotted line, his name written in exquisite calligraphy with China ink: M. Isaac Salama, directeur de L’Athénée Espagnol, the invitation unmistakable proof that foreigners have more consideration for him than his compatriots. “This exhibition was unforgettable,” he says, taking back the card, which he looks at again as if to check that his handwritten name and title are still there. “We will never be able to do anything like that: Baudelaire manuscripts, first editions of Flowers of Evil and Spleen, proofs with corrections and deletions made by Baudelaire himself. How strange it is, I thought, that these very personal things have survived so long, that they’re here and I can see them.” And his eyes nearly mist over when he remembers the emotion of seeing, copied cleanly by the hand of the poet, the sonnet to the unknown beauty, “A une passante,” which of all Baudelaire’s poems is the one Señor Salama likes best, the one he knows by heart and recites in the admirable French he learned from his mother in childhood, pausing with delight and a certain melodrama on the last line:

O toi que j’eusse aimé! O toi qui le savais!

He sits as if swamped in tragic silence, in an inscrutable pose of penitence. Eyes fixed and moist, he seems about to say something; he opens his mouth, taking a breath to speak, but just as he begins there is a knock at the office door. A thin older woman enters, eyeglasses hanging from a chain around her neck: the librarian and secretary of the Ateneo. “When you gentlemen want to come down, Maestro Andrescu says he’s ready.”

ONE DAY THEY DISAPPEAR, dead or not, they are lost and fade from memory as if they never existed, or have become something different, a figure or phantom of imagination greatly changed from the real person they were, from the real life they may still be living. But sometimes they rise up again, leap from the past, you hear a voice you haven’t heard for years or someone casually speaks the name of someone dead or a character in a novel. Far from Tangiers, many years later in another life, at such a great remove in time that memories have lost all precision and nearly all substance, on a train where a group of writers and professors are traveling through green hills and mist, someone mentions Señor Salama’s name, followed by an expression of mockery and a deep laugh.

“Don’t tell me you knew him, too, old Salama? It’s been years since I thought of him. What a mess the guy got me into. If someone had just warned me, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Tangiers, especially for the shit they paid, the place was falling apart, you know. Very accommodating that Jew was, almost to the point of fawning, didn’t you think? And an awful bore; he just kept at you. He’d pick you up at the hotel first thing in the morning and take you everywhere, practically to the bathroom too, and all the while the same thing, that song and dance about how no one in Spain paid any attention, and those long-winded stories about how he arrived in Tangiers, wasn’t it in the forties? It seems he came from a moneyed family, from Czechoslovakia or somewhere like that, and they had to pay an enormous sum to the Nazis to get out. I can’t remember the details, it was a thousand years ago. That was in the days when you had to travel, give performances wherever people asked you. Tedious as he was, he was very pleasant on the phone, lots of flowery talk, right? What an honor it would be, although unfortunately the emolument couldn’t be very generous, but on and on about how important it was to support Spanish culture in Africa…. What a drag, that Jew, all day long, back and forth with the crutches — from an automobile accident, I think. I am not disabled or impaired, he would say, I am crippled. And speaking of crippled, did he tell you about his train trip to Casablanca, when he met this dame? That’s strange, he told everybody after he’d had a couple of drinks, and he always began the same way: some Baudelaire poem, didn’t he recite that to you?”

Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life, episodes you think you’ve kept in a sealed chamber of your memory and yet are told by people you may not even know, people who have heard them and repeat them, modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for a certain comic or slanderous effect. Somewhere, right this minute, someone is telling something very personal about me, something he witnessed years ago but that I probably don’t even remember, and since I don’t remember I assume it doesn’t exist for anyone, erased from the world as completely as from my mind. Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives, rooms you lived in that others now occupy, photographs or keepsakes or books that belonged to you and now someone you don’t know is touching and looking at, letters still in existence when the person who wrote them and the person who received them and kept them for a long, long time are dead. Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you’re a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another person’s life.

If the details are lost, the easy thing is to invent them, falsify them, profane what was a painful part of another human being’s experience by claiming it as your own. On a train in Asturias, on the way to a writers’ conference, to while away the time of the journey, or for the simple vanity of telling with appropriate irony something that doesn’t matter to you at all, or to anyone listening, the writer who has spoken Señor Salama’s name aloud, although he can’t remember whether it was Isaac or Jacob or Jeremiah or Isaiah, begins a story that will last only a few minutes, but he doesn’t know that he is compounding an affront, aggravating an insult.

Isaac Salama boards a train bound for Casablanca, where he’s going for reasons of business. He’s in his forties and for several years, since his father’s retirement, has been managing the Galerías Duna, which is going downhill, like those large department stores in Spanish provincial capitals that were fashionable at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, but after that seemed to be frozen in time like archaeological relics. When he travels by train, Señor Salama likes to be at the station early, that way he can take his seat before the other travelers and avoid having them watch him — so clumsy, so exhausted-looking — struggling along on his two crutches. He tucks them beneath his seat or stows them unobtrusively in the overhead net for the luggage, if possible behind his suitcase, although not without first calculating what moves he must make to recover them without difficulty, and leaving the things he will need during the trip well within reach. He also tries to wear a lightweight raincoat and throw that across his legs. This is during the time when trains still had small compartments with facing seats. If someone takes a seat next to his, Señor Salama will sit the entire trip without getting up, hoping the other person will get off before he does, and only in an extreme case will he rise and collect his crutches to go to the lavatory, braving the risk that people will see him in the corridor, step aside and watch him with pity or derision, or offer to help him, hold a door for him or hold out a hand.

It is almost time for the train to leave, and, to Señor Salama’s pleasure, no one has come into his compartment. Which is frequently the case when he travels in first class. Just as the train has begun to move, a woman bursts in, perhaps agitated because she had to run to catch it at the last minute. She takes the seat facing Señor Salama, who pulls up his inert legs beneath the raincoat. He has never married, in fact he has scarcely dared look at a woman since he was injured, as embarrassed by his stigmatizing plight as he was as a boy obliged to wear a yellow star on the lapel of his jacket.

The woman is young, very pretty, cultivated, clearly Spanish. Despite his reticence, in only a short while after beginning the trip they are chatting as if they had known each other forever, because the woman has the gift of expressing herself clearly and easily, but also of listening with flattering attention to what is said to her, and then, without prying, asking further details. Without realizing it, they lean toward each other, and it may be that their hands brush as they gesture, or their knees — hers naked, bare of stockings, his pulled back and hidden beneath his raincoat. As they speak, their heads, profiled against the window, never turn to observe the rapidly passing countryside. Señor Salama is strongly attracted to her but also shivering with tenderness, the physical promise of happiness that he believes he sees reflected and returned in the woman’s eyes.

Both wish that the journey would last forever: the pleasure of being on the train, of having met, of having so many hours of conversation before them, and of discovering mutual affinities never shared with anyone until then. Señor Salama, whom the accident has left arrested in the tormented timidity of adolescence, finds an ease of conversing he never knew he had, a hint of seductiveness and audacity that after all these years restores the fun-loving impulses of his first days in Madrid.

She tells him she is traveling to Casablanca, where she lives with her family. He is about to tell her that he’s going there too and they can get off together and make plans to see each other during the next few days. Then he remembers what he has put out of his mind for the last few hours, his obsession and his embarrassment, and he says nothing, or he lies, he says what a pity, he must go on to Rabat. If he gets off at Casablanca, he will have to use his crutches, which she hasn’t seen, just as she hasn’t seen his legs, although she’s brushed against them, because they are covered by the raincoat.

They keep talking, but now there are occasional periods of silence and both realize it, and although she tries hard to fill them there is already a pool of shadow, of curiosity or suspicion, behind her words. Maybe she thinks she’s done something wrong, said something she shouldn’t have. In the meantime Señor Salama looks out the window every time the train comes to a station and calculates how many stops are left before Casablanca, before the inevitable farewell. He berates himself with secret rage, sets himself periods of time in which to express his feelings, postpones them, and all the while she is talking and smiling, her eloquent hands brushing his, her knees so close that they bump his when the train brakes, and then he surreptitiously adjusts the raincoat over his thighs so it won’t slip to the floor. He will tell her that he too is going to Casablanca, he will pull himself up in the seat as soon as the train has stopped and take down his crutches, he won’t let her try to help carry his luggage, because after so many years he’s acquired an agility and strength in his arms and torso that he never imagined having, and when he doesn’t have enough hands, he holds something with his teeth, or catches his balance by leaning against a wall.

But deep down he knows and has never doubted for an instant that he won’t do that. As the train gets closer to Casablanca, the woman writes her address and telephone number for him and asks for his, which Señor Salama scrawls illegibly on a scrap of paper. The train has stopped, and the woman, standing before him, pauses for a minute, confused, surprised that he doesn’t get to his feet to say good-bye, that he doesn’t help her get down her suitcase. She probably hasn’t seen the crutches hidden behind his bag, although it is also tempting to imagine that she did see them, with a woman’s keen perceptiveness, and also noticed something strange about the legs placed so close together and covered by the raincoat. She decides not to bend down and kiss Señor Salama goodbye, instead she holds out her hand and smiles, and the shrug of her shoulders expresses fatalism, or capitulation, and she asks him to call her if he decides to stop in Casablanca on the return trip, and says that she will call him the next time she goes to Tangiers. At the last instant, he is tempted to stand up, or not to release her hand but allow her to help him up with her strong grip. The impulse is so strong that it almost seems he has enough strength in his legs to stand up without help from anyone. But he sits quietly, and, after a moment’s hesitation, the woman releases his hand, picks up her suitcase, turns toward him for the last time, and goes out into the corridor. Once she’s on the platform, he can’t see her anymore. He leans back in the seat when the train starts off toward a city where he has nothing to do, where he will have to look for a hotel to spend the night, a hotel near the station because he will have to take the first train back to Casablanca. Oh you, whom I would have loved, he recited that evening in his office in the Ateneo Español, moved as deeply as if he were chanting the Kaddish in his father’s memory, the sound of a ship’s horn and the music of a muezzin’s call came through the open window. Oh you, who knew so well.