Sepharad

berghof

A DARKENED WORKROOM, abstract as a cell, with white walls, wood floor, and a table of sturdy, rough wood, like the tables you used to see in kitchens, in our kitchen when I was a boy. Places become echoes, transparencies of other places, they rhyme with austere assonance. Walking into the room at this indeterminate hour of the winter afternoon, I am reminded of García Lorca’s room in Huerta de San Vicente, and of the one he had in Madrid, in a student dormitory, and from Madrid and García Lorca and the set of transparencies and assonances of places my thoughts go to Rome, to the room in the Spanish Academy where I slept a few nights in March or April of 1992, where I imagined long industrious days of solitude and reading, monkish days of work and tranquillity of mind, the retreat it seems one carries imprinted in one’s soul, is always dreaming of and looking for, the room with only a few necessities: bed, bare wood table, window, perhaps a bookcase for a few books, not too many, and also one of those portable CD players. I would spend the whole day walking around Rome in a state of intoxication, a trance accentuated by solitude, and at night I fell exhausted onto the narrow bed in my room at the academy, and in my agitated dreams, powerful and dark as the waters of the Tiber, I continued my wanderings through the city, seeing columns and ruins and temples magnified and blurred as if in a delirium. I would wake up exhausted, and in the cold, olive-green light of dawn my newly opened eyes would focus on the cupola of the small temple of Bramante.

Another place rises before me as shadow begins to turn to darkness lighted only by the phosphorescence of the computer and the lamp that illuminates my hands on the keypad. The hand resting beside the mouse isn’t mine any longer. The other hand, the left, distractedly rubs the worn white shell Arturo picked up two summers ago on the Zahara beach, the afternoon before we left, one of those luxuriously long afternoons at the beginning of July when the sun goes down after nine and the sea takes on the blue of cobalt, slowly retreating from the still-golden sand where the footprints of homebound bathers become delicate hollows of shadow.

From the darkness around by the computer screen and the low lamp, from the two hands, from the smooth feel of the mouse and the roughness of the shell and without any premeditation on my part, a figure emerges, a presence that is not entirely invention, or memory either: the doctor alone in the shadows, waiting for a patient, moving the mouse with his right hand, searching for a file in the computer, a medical history opened not many days ago, to which he added several test results just yesterday.

I OFTEN SEE THAT FIGURE, the hands especially, typing in the light of the screen: they are long, bony, sure, with a lot of hair on the back, not as gray as the hair and beard of the doctor, whom I don’t envision standing, although I know he is very tall and so slender that his bathrobe hangs loose from his shoulders. I see him seated, white bathrobe and gray hair and beard, in a room with the curtains drawn, although there is still some time before nightfall. The computer is on one side of the table, and on the other there is nothing but a white, rounded seashell, smaller and more concave than a scallop, stronger, too, as worn and eroded on the outside as the volute of a marble capital eaten by sea air and weather, and on the inside it is soft as mother-of-pearl, a pleasure to brush with fingertips that run over it as if of their own volition as the doctor speaks to the patient who has just arrived, trying to choose his words carefully — or earlier, when he is still alone, reviewing once again the test results lying open on the table. His mind wanders to a different time, luminous days invoked by the feel of the shell, which is a modest shell, not at all flashy, grayish white patterned with ridges opening from its base like the ribs of a fan, each following an exquisite curve, the beginning of a spiral interrupted by the outer edge, which is worn and nicked, presenting the fingertips with the irregularity of a piece of broken pottery.

One image evokes another, as if joined by the slim thread of coincidence: shells on the seashore in Zahara de los Atunes, curved bits of a broken amphora. He must let the thread roll off the spool, or pull lightly lest it break. He is on the verge of a discovery, a sensory memory like a bubble of air from millions of years ago captured inside a blob of amber. The wood floor of the large, dim room where the doctor works is as old as the building, and when someone walks across it, it creaks. He will hear the buzz of the intercom and tell the nurse that the patient can come in now, and footsteps will resonate as they would on the wood deck of a ship.

In the house of one of my grandmother’s sisters there was a room with a wood floor. I liked going there with my grandmother just to enter that room, to feel the floor give a little beneath my feet, and to hear the sound of it. It was like being in another place, another life. I have a similar sensation when I hear a cello. Again time leaps from one thing to another, an almost instantaneous impulse between neurons: Pablo Casals playing Bach’s suites for cello in Barcelona, in the fall of 1938 when the Battle of the Ebro has been lost and Manuel Azaña and Juan Negrín are listening from a box in the Liceo Theater. Behind the table, on a shelf holding a small number of books, most on medicine and history, the doctor has a CD player, which sometimes plays softly as he interviews or examines a patient lying on the cot in a dark corner of the room, in front of a screen. On the cot, the patient becomes more vulnerable, surrenders to the illness, to the doctor’s examination, to what he already sees on the other side of the invisible but definitive line that separates the healthy from the ill, deep in the prison of his fear, pain, and, perhaps worst of all, shame. The healthy flee from the ill, Franz Kafka once wrote Milena Jesenska, but the ill also flee from the healthy.

Before he tells the patient what the tests reveal — there is no way to say it without awakening terror, without feeling a knot in the throat, though it has been said so many times — the doctor will ask him to lie on the cot with his clothes on, all he has to do is lower his trousers a little and pull up his shirt, so the doctor can auscultate the abdomen, palpate the viscera with his long fingers, quickly, smoothly, precisely. The patient suffers the ignominy of lying on his back on a cot, flat and passive, his trousers pulled down to his scrotum, while the intrusive hand seeks what should not be there.

In the background, behind the sounds of breathing, the patient’s and the doctor’s, so close to each other and yet separated by a line, a Bach suite for cello is playing, performed in 1938 by Casals, on a night when the sky over Barcelona may have been pierced by the reports of antiaircraft fire and the flames of exploding bombs may have illuminated the dark city already defeated by hunger and a harsh winter.

Although the sound is low, the patient recognizes both music and the recording. For a few awkward minutes they speak of Bach, of the sound of the cello, of the technical marvel of digital recordings that allow buried musical treasures to be rescued, performances that took place on only one night. They talk, and the sheet with the test results lies on the table in the space bracketed by the doctor’s quiet hands, which in turn rest beside a shell that fingers instinctively reach out to touch. Until Casals exhumed these scores, the Bach suites had never been performed. He found them by chance one day as he was looking through old papers in a stall on a narrow street near Barcelona’s port, just the way Cervantes says he found the Arabic manuscript of Quixote in a secondhand clothes shop in Toledo. Pure coincidence hands you a treasure, triggers a memory hidden for years. That long-ago afternoon on a train: a tall woman in high heels, the beginnings of uncertainty and vertigo, of intoxication, in the green eyes glittering in a dark frame of curls, an unprovoked smile on thin lips set above a firm chin that looked Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon.

BUT I DON’T WANT HIM to come yet, though he must already be on his way, uneasy but still not terrified, still living a normal life, which he will remember as a land to which he can never return when he leaves here. The doctor knows that the patient won’t want anyone to know what the tests reveal, won’t meet the doctor’s eyes, although a few minutes before, or during his previous visit, they were talking comfortably enough, perhaps about the Bach suites for cello. Now the patient is excluded, expelled, from the community of the normal, like a Jew in a Vienna café reading the newspaper in which the new German race laws have just been published. The café is the same, and the newspaper is the one he’s read every day for years, but suddenly everything has changed, and the waiter who used to speak his name so obsequiously and who knows what to bring without being asked, the same waiter he has every morning, might refuse to bring him a cup of coffee if he learned the truth, though there is nothing in the customer’s face — blondish brown hair, light-colored eyes — that says Jew.

I hold the shell in the palm of my hand. The still-childish hand of my son fits into it so easily, my son who takes my hand so naturally when we go for a walk, even though he’s thirteen. He would say to me when he was young, “Let’s measure hands.” We would hold them up, palms together, and his wouldn’t be even half as long as my bony, angular hand, the back covered with dark hair, not the hand of a doctor but an ogre’s paw making him giggle with happiness and terror. “Swallow up my hand with yours, the way the big bad wolf swallowed the little lambs. Tell me another story, don’t leave yet, don’t turn out the light.” He marveled that when I opened my hand, his was whole, not devoured, not even bitten, like the white lambs rescued by their mother from the belly of the wolf.

We would go outside the hotel and take a sidewalk lined with palm trees and hedges, and soon we would be at the Atlantic, dazed by the light, by the breadth and depth of the horizon, which didn’t end at the sea but farther out, at a line of blue mountains that were North Africa. At night we would watch the flickering lights of Tangiers through the ocean fog. I was in Tangiers once, many years ago, in another lifetime. As the doctor squeezes the curve of the shell, he is squeezing the hand of his son two summers before. His wife is pressed to his other side, to protect herself from the west wind off the sea, blowing from the direction of the dark mass of Africa and the lights of Tangiers, a wind smelling of seaweed. Every night, somewhere along that enormous beach, furtive emigrants disembark, or boxes of contraband tobacco and bricks of hashish are unloaded stealthily. Sometimes the powerful tides of the Atlantic carry cadavers of Moroccans or blacks swollen by the water and nibbled by fish, or bits of old rusted metal or rotted wood from the ships they went down on.

ONLY WHEN THEY REACHED the beach that first afternoon were they aware of the weariness they had brought with them, of how light they felt after shedding it, like leaving their luggage back in the room, along with the sweaty clothing they’d worn that morning as they left Madrid. So many months closed up in that dark room, waiting for visitors, for test results, seeing the faces of men and women marked by illness, chosen by the cruel hand of fate. The boy ran ahead, impatient to get to the shore, kicking across the sand the seemingly weightless blue-and-white ball the wind kept blowing away from him. The sun was still up, but there were few people on the beach, or else it was its length that made it seem bare, almost deserted, offered to them alone. He was a little reluctant to take off his shirt, he was so pale and skinny in that golden light, so resistant to tanning, unlike his wife and son, who had the same cinnamon skin, one of the primary genetic traits the mother transmitted to her son. I wonder what you inherited from me, child of my heart, leaping so intrepidly that afternoon into the first high wave crowned with summer’s foam, tumbled by it, jubilantly rising from the sea with the gleam of water and sun on skin not yet abused by time.

As I dropped facedown onto the sand, I felt, like a tangible plenitude, the curvature and solidity of the world. Jorge Guillén wrote: And walking, my foot knows / the roundness of the planet. I examined the tiny grains, the infinitesimal bits of rock and shell, glass, broken amphorae, worn and pulverized through geological spans by the monotonous force of the sea, which was working this very moment, resonating like a drum in my ear, in my body weak with fatigue, gnawed by months of work, anxiety, insomnia, emergencies, remorse, months of witnessing the pain and infirmity of others, the panic, the progress of their deaths. I took a handful of sand then opened my fingers to let it trickle away in a thin thread. First it was something solid inside my closed fist, closed like the valves of a mollusk to the small fingers of my son, who tried to pry it open but couldn’t; if he managed to pull up one finger, breathing hard, the finger would lock back into place. Then the hand would open, slowly, and the sand that had been so compact would dissolve, leaving nothing but a few tiny grains on my broad, open palm, mineral dots glinting in the sun. Eleven years old but still enjoying that game, still futilely challenging his father, struggling and panting as he tried to pry open a fist where sometimes he found a caramel or a coin. Defeated, he would throw himself on his father and hug him with all his might, with a rough, deep-seated tenderness, and rub his hand against the grain of his beard to feel the prickles. And I had only to touch two fingers to my son’s side, just below his ribs, to make him fall to the sand, laughing and kicking his feet in the air.

“What a pain, you two, as big as you both are now.” Stretched out beside us, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses, my wife brushed off the sand the boy’s kicking had sprayed over the magazine she was reading. Hours of idleness on the beach and in the hotel pool and siestas in the cool darkness of the room had removed all the fatigue from her face, and she wore the same smile of happiness that had dazzled me the first few times we saw each other. So desirable and young, as if twelve years hadn’t gone by, as if it weren’t her son who had sat down near her and slowly buried her red-toenailed feet, pouring from his half-opened fist a thread of sand that slipped across her arch and between her toes like a caress.

But I didn’t want to deny time, it had been kind as it went by, bringing us so many blessings, which were right there before me in those July days. My wife’s body pleased me more than ever, because for twelve years I had been learning it, with a desire that only familiarity can give, and also because it had sheltered and given birth to my son. I remember the rich threads of milk it spilled in drops from her breasts after the baby finished nursing. The same hand that felt the abdomen of the patient lying on the cot, searching for disease, twelve years earlier caressed that taut, round belly crisscrossed with powerful currents and quivering from the heartbeat of the child about to be born; I felt its planetary curve on the tips of my fingers. Who knows whether a physician can leave his profession behind the way he leaves his white coat in the darkened consulting room and walks toward the exit? My footsteps echo on the polished wood that glows with the luster of things well cared for over time, and I am blinded when I reach the street by the still-summertime brightness of the sun, forced to put on dark glasses and remember that my wife had bought them two years ago, two summers ago, in the same hotel shop where as soon as we arrived we made all the necessary purchases for our days at the beach: bathing suits and sandals, sun cream with maximum protection, a cap for the boy bearing the emblem of Zorro, a large inflatable rubber ball, so light that the breeze from the sea was always carrying it away, frogman goggles and fins, because the boy wanted to spear-fish as he had seen it done on a television documentary.

Now, in the half-light of the consulting room, there is something more. I didn’t see it until this moment, on the shelf with the CD player: the photograph of a child who is still a boy but growing out of boyhood, mussed hair and delicate features, goggles pushed up on his forehead and laughing so hard his eyes squint, with dabs of sand on his nose and in the black hair falling over his forehead.

TO THE WEST, THE BEACH stretched toward the white blur of houses in the town, mist blending the whitewashed walls and the sand into a single sunlit dazzle. Only with the first light of day, or at sunset, did colors show clearly and the forms of things come into focus. To the east, an abrupt hill covered with wild growth stood out sharply above the sea, framing the bay. In the setting sun the windows of expensive homes glittered half hidden in the dark green of hedges and palm trees, enclaves surrounded by high white walls interrupted by the strong purple of bougainvillea. We were told that multimillionaires, primarily German, spent their summers in those houses. At the foot of the cliff, on a large rock that became an island when the tide was in, was a concrete bunker that stood like a mineral cancer on the landscape, as resistant to the assault of the sea as the rock onto which it had been fused. For the boy it was an adventure to hold his father’s strong hand, climb up to the bunker, and through a corridor with a sand floor reach an interior room illuminated by the dusty, slanting ray of sunlight that fell through the narrow embrasure cut into the concrete, where guards could keep watch with their binoculars and rest the muzzles of their machine guns. On a cloudless morning, through the slit, you could see the coastline of Africa in great detail. The father took delight in explaining everything to his son, observing his concentration, pleased by his interest, the courteous and attentive way he listened. In 1943 the Allies defeated the Germans and Italians in North Africa and began preparing for the invasion of southern Europe. Look how close they would have been had they wanted to land on this beach instead of in Sicily; imagine the poor Spanish soldiers cooped up in this bunker, waiting for the American warships to appear.

They started back after the tide began to rise. Small, translucent fish fled between their feet as they splashed through the clean water. They walked along a smooth outcropping of rock that was slippery with seaweed or else covered by a dark, spongy moss that was soft beneath their feet. A wave retreated and left behind a pool in which tiny creatures worked busily, and father and son knelt to watch them more closely. The immediacy of human action shifts to the inconceivable slowness of natural history. Primary organisms dragging themselves from the sea to the land, teeming in pools, in the dense fertile ooze of salt marshes, armoring themselves in order to survive, developing valves and shells over millions of years, feet and pincers that leave a faint trail in the sand, a trail no more fleeting, though, than the marks our footsteps leave, our lives, the father thinks with no drama or melancholy, a fortyish man walking along a beach holding his son’s hand in a state of perfect and tranquil happiness, of gratitude, of mysterious harmony with the world, on one of those long early-July afternoons when the heat is not yet overwhelming and summer is still a perfect gift for a child.

The boy let go of his father’s hand to dive into the waves, and the father veered away from the shore and walked through warmer sand toward his wife, of whom he also has a photograph in the darkened consulting room: wide smile, fine lips always red with lipstick, even that afternoon at the beach, sunglasses like the ones film stars wore in the forties. I liked to think she watched us from a distance, the boy and me, easy to pick out on the beach that was nearly empty at that hour but still warm and bright, a time when there are already puddles of shadow in the footprints and on the sides of the dunes: the two of us kneeling, heads together, observing something in a brilliant sheet of water left by a retreating wave, then walking hand in hand along the shore, the pale, thin man and the plump, dark boy with the embers of a setting sun glistening on his wet skin and rolls of a little boy’s tummy showing above the elastic of his bathing suit. The two so different, separated by more than thirty years, and yet astonishingly alike in some expressions, in the complicity of their gait and their lowered heads, although the boy resembles his mother more, not only in skin tone, but also in the way he laughs, in the strength of his chin, in his hands, in the unruly hair curling in the damp sea air.

There is a salty taste on her lips and a more carnal feel to her kisses when I caress her beneath the slightly damp cloth of her bikini during the siesta, behind the drawn curtains. Her breasts and lower torso are white against her dark tan. I put my hand on the fuzz between her thighs and am reminded of the damp moss along the shore that my toes sank into until they touched the smooth rock. We couple slowly, desire building with the gradual tide, then our two bodies are used and exhausted by love, mutually fondled, gleaming in the shadow.

As a young man he’d believed like a religious fanatic in the prestige of suffering and failure, in the vision of alcohol, and the romanticism of adultery. Now he could conceive of no deeper passion than what he felt for his wife and son, a love that enfolded the three of them like a magnetic field. Shared fluids, chromosomes mixed in one cell, the recently fertilized egg, the saliva exchanged and digested, saliva and vaginal secretions, saliva and semen sometimes glistening on her lips, dissolved into the nutritive current of her blood, mixed odors and sweat impregnating skin and air and the sheets they lay on, sated, asleep, while from beyond the drawn curtains came the splashing and cries of the children in the hotel swimming pool, and, farther still, if one listened carefully, the powerful roar of the sea, the wind lashing the tops of the palm trees.

WILD PALMS WAS THE TITLE of the novel his wife had been reading on the train and had carried to the beach in her large straw beach bag. He often asked her to tell him about the novels she was reading, and those summaries, along with a few movies, also chosen by her, satisfied his appetite for fiction. To him reality seemed so complex, inexhaustible, labyrinthine, that he didn’t see the need to waste time and intelligence on invention, unless it was filtered through his wife’s narrating or endowed with the ancient simplicity of fairy tales. In art he was moved only by forms in which something of the harmonic unity and functional efficiency of nature shone through. The ruins of Greek temples in the south of Italy or of the spas of Rome awakened in him an emotion identical to what he felt in the huge forests he had visited in New England and Canada. In a classic column, a great fallen capital, he found a correspondence with the sacred majesty of a tree, or with the precise symmetry of a seashell. He showed his son the spiral of a small shell and then, in a book on astronomy, the identical spiral of a galaxy. He led him to the bathroom and showed him the spiral the water made as it flowed down the drain of the sink. He caught a gleam of intelligence in his son’s dark eyes, which had the same color and oblique slant as his mother’s, and identical to hers in expressing, without pretense, wonder or disappointment, happiness or sadness.

He doesn’t remember having asked the patient whether he has children. Probably he does, because the man carries an old-married or fatherly look, there is a certain physical wear and tear, a burden of responsibility on his shoulders, of worry. It was the weariness, the vague overall exhaustion, that brought the patient here. The doctor didn’t tell the man that in the blood test he was ordering a specific analysis would be included. He didn’t want to alarm him, to offend him. “Who do you take me for?” the patient might have said. “What kind of life do you think I live?”

The man will be there in a few minutes, and the doctor will have to say those words, the name of the illness, spoken cautiously, with clinical objectivity, using the euphemism of the initials. Of course we will repeat the test, but I must also tell you that the chance of error is small.

Those words, spoken so many times, always neutral and yet horrible, the panic and the shame, and so much predictable anguish, and the never-mitigated bitterness of the doctor’s impotence. That is almost another form of contagion, a fatigue like the one his patients suffer, a vague, persistent, and inexplicable malaise, the awakening in certain specialized cells of the unnoticed guest, hidden for years, but also obedient to genetic codes that even now no one knows how to decipher, just as the ultimate nature of matter is not decipherable, the whirlwind of particles and infinitesimal forces of which all things are made, the light of my computer screen and the lamp above the keypad illuminating my hands, the shell I am feeling this moment, remembering a summer, two summers to be exact, alike and yet so different.

You will not swim twice in the same river, nor will you live the same summer twice, nor will there be a room that is identical to another, nor will you walk into the same room you left five minutes ago, the same darkened doctor’s office where you were only once, sitting across from a doctor who spoke slowly and asked shocking questions, and who nodded as he listened to your answers, attentive, fingering a white shell on his desk at the left side of his computer keypad, symmetrical with the mouse he touches almost secretively with long, white, hairy fingers as he looks for a file, the data the patient gave by telephone to the nurse when he called the first time asking for an appointment.

FROM THE BEACH we could see a row of white houses on the cliffs to the east, half hidden in the foliage of their gardens and surrounded by high whitewashed walls, their large windows and terraces facing south, toward the bluish line of the coast of Africa. We were told that high up in the naked rock, where no vegetation grew, was a cave with Neolithic paintings and the remains of Phoenician sarcophagi. I got up very early one morning, just as it was getting light, quietly put on my clothes and running shoes, trying not to wake my wife, and left the hotel, cutting through the deserted garden reflected in the mauve, motionless water of the swimming pool. In the restaurant, beneath unflattering electric light, the waiters on the first shift were setting up trays for the buffet, arranging china and silver on the tables, silent as sleepwalkers. I noticed with pleasure the spring in my step, the comfort of the running shoes in which I’d walked and run hundreds of kilometers. The cool air numbed me in my T-shirt, so I began jogging slowly, breathing easily, but instead of heading toward the beach, as I did every morning, I followed the highway curving up the hill. Because the hill was so steep, I quickly grew tired and slowed to a walk. Seen at close range, the houses we had viewed from the beach were even more imposing, protected by walls topped with broken glass, by security company warnings, and by dogs that barked from gardens as I passed and that sometimes hurled themselves against the gates, rattling bars as they stuck their muzzles through and growled. Except for the barking and the sound of my steps on the gravel, the only thing I could hear was the methodical click of sprinklers watering lawns that I couldn’t see but that emitted a strong aroma of sap and well-fertilized soil.

Now and then I glimpsed the silvery body of an enormous German-made car through the bars of an iron fence. I turned a corner, and before me lay the vertiginous expanse of beach and sea. The hotel looked like a scale model, or one of those cutouts my son liked to put together when he was younger: a picture-postcard blue pool, the line of windows. Behind one of them, my wife was still peacefully asleep in a night preserved by drawn curtains.

I found no path that would take me to the top, to the cave containing the Neolithic paintings. I abandoned the asphalt road, striking out through thick clumps of rockrose in which I thought there might be a path. I came to the road again, which narrowed between rocks and weeds before ending abruptly at a wall with a tall metal door painted a military green. Several dogs were barking behind it. I recognized the high terraces and arched windows we had seen from the beach: the house on the highest point of the hill. Beside the door, on a ceramic plaque, was a name in Gothic characters: berghof. I had read that name somewhere, in some book, but I didn’t remember which one.

I turned back. I was tired. When I reached the hotel, it was no later than 9:00 A.M., but it was already beginning to get hot, and the first German tourists, red from the sun and stuffed from breakfast, were beginning — with careful deliberation — to claim the best chairs, the reclining loungers arranged on the shady side of the pool. I opened the door of my room cautiously and listened in the darkness to my wife’s breathing, and smelled the shared scents of our lives. I sat on the bed beside her; she was wearing nothing but her panties and was sleeping on her side, curled up and hugging her pillow. To see you naked is to remember the earth. I brushed the hair from her face and saw that her eyes were open and that she was smiling at me. I remembered that word: Berghof.

I wish I could hold every detail of those July days in my mind as completely as I hold this white shell, because if any of it, essential or trivial, is lost, the equilibrium of things may tip out of balance. In my student encyclopedia I read the story of how for want of a horseshoe nail, an empire was lost. How many small coincidences were needed for Pablo Casals to find Bach’s suites for cello in a stall in Barcelona filled with old manuscripts? This shell is dragged by waves for a year or for two hundred, and is thrown so hard against a rock its outer edge is nicked, then it lies buried in the white sand of a beach that fades into the horizon toward the west so that one July afternoon Arturo can find it, and so that I in turn may have it here now within reach of my hand, as part of the familiar kingdom of the sense of touch: the plastic of the computer keyboard, the rough wood of the table, the porcelain of the coffee cup, and paper shining in the light from the lamp where I am writing words that are indecipherable to anyone except a pharmacist.

THE DOCTOR IMAGINES he is speaking with a friend, telling him the story, he who confides in no one but his wife, the story of those two summers, of the second summer, the one of repetition, the return two years later. If there is something I truly yearn for, it isn’t youth, it’s friendship, the mutual affection that joined me to others when I was fifteen or twenty, the ability to talk for hours, walking around my deserted city on summer nights, recounting every detail of who you are, what you want, what you suffer, to do nothing but talk and listen and be together, because often we didn’t have money to go to a bar or a movie or play billiards. Hands in our empty pockets and heads sunk between shoulders, we leaned toward one another to share thoughts and conspirings. I miss that bashful male tenderness, feeling accepted and understood but not daring to express gratitude for it — not the rough male camaraderie, that boasting or poke of the elbow or drooling wink at the sight of a desirable woman.

He imagines he’s talking now to a friend from thirty years ago, they’ve kept in touch and maintained the old loyalty, strengthened and improved by time and by the experiences and disappointments of their two lives. He invented friends when he was twelve or thirteen and found himself alone, no longer a child but not yet an adolescent, not a youth, as they used to say — too bad such a beautiful, precise word isn’t used anymore.

Now my son is at the point of entering his youth, beginning to be independent of me, though he isn’t aware of it. He would tell his friend this, if he had one, if he hadn’t lost the ones he had because of distance or negligence or a slightly bitter current of skepticism that the years have accentuated and from which only the core of his life is safe, his wife and son, and maybe also his work in this darkened consulting room. It is calming to tell things to a friend, though words are imprecise, and it is worth the effort to transmit an experience in every detail in order to make it intelligible, free of the melancholy and self-pity that slip into a memory that hasn’t been shared. When I go home and my wife notices I am self-absorbed and asks me if something is the matter, and I say nothing — the strain of work, the oppressive persistence of illness on those new faces that keep showing up every day, faces of the newly exiled — it is a silent betrayal.

We went back that summer, the doctor recounts, or he would if there were a friend to listen. We had only ten days there, and did almost nothing but swim and sunbathe, read on the beach or by the hotel pool, go out occasionally in a rented car to have dinner or drive around the town. I got up early, ran a few effortless kilometers along the hard sand near the shore where the tide had just gone out and the sand stretched smooth and shining in the first light of day. I liked coming back to the hotel and waking my wife and son, having breakfast with them by a window in the restaurant that overlooked the palm trees in the garden. In everything we did there was perfection, a harmony among the three of us that corresponded to the external beauty of the world, to the full moon and the wind at sunset the first night we walked down to the beach and huddled together to protect ourselves against the cold, corresponded to the purity of the form of a shell, and to the taste and aroma of fish roasted over coals that we ate on the terrace of a restaurant beside the sea. My wife and I, my son and I, my wife and my son, my son watching as we hugged or kissed, my wife watching the boy and me as we walked with our heads close together along the beach, looking down, searching for shells and crabs, I watching the boy as he dribbled sand over his mother’s feet.

Two summers later, they return to the same hotel, during the same days of July, with afternoons that stretch with golden laziness toward the dinner hour. Everything is the same, and yet he catches himself spying on himself, looking for some flaw in the repetition of his earlier enjoyment, uneasy, disheartened without reason, irritated by inconveniences that he knows he should attach no importance to, the room that this year doesn’t look out over the sea but onto a patio with palm trees and the windows of other rooms, the east wind that keeps them away from the beach the first few days, provoking a bad mood in his son, who turns surly and locks himself in his room to watch television hour after hour. He’s thirteen now, and the shadow of a mustache darkens his upper lip. He has lost his child’s voice; it changed without our noticing, and we will never hear it again. Two years in our lives as adults are nothing, but in his life they are a leap from larva to butterfly. His big eyes, crinkled in laughter, the expression so like his mother’s, don’t look the way they used to. You look into them, and he isn’t there. His father must convince himself not to feel desolation and resentment. “The boy misses his friends in Madrid,” his wife tells him, smiling with a benevolence he envies. “Don’t you realize that he’s going to be fourteen? I wonder what you were like at that age.” He watches himself as carefully as he examines the face of a patient or palpates his abdomen or listens to his breathing through the stethoscope, looking for symptoms.

One night while he is waiting for his wife to get ready for dinner, as she is talking to him from the bathroom, combing her hair before the mirror, trying a new lipstick, he sees a blond woman lying on a bed in a room on the other side of the patio. It’s too far away to be able to make out her features, to tell whether she’s young or attractive or just a figure his imagination is crystallizing, the blond, barefoot foreigner on the steps of a train one early summer night long ago. She is gesticulating, talking to someone he can’t see. A man’s silhouette appears in the window. The man bends down to the woman, and something slow and hazy takes place. The doctor presses to the window, to see more clearly, excited, because the movements of the two bodies in the room across the patio are rhythmic; his mouth is dry, like that of a teenager choked with desire.

It lasts only an instant. He turns away from the window when his wife comes out of the bathroom; he fears being discovered by her, or blushing and causing her to ask the reason, which would make him blush even more. The two figures in the other window dissolve like fragments of a dream in the clarity of waking up. His wife wears a form-fitting black dress and black high-heeled sandals; she has put on eye shadow and painted her lips a new, softer shade of red that goes with the deep tan of her skin, and she smiles, offering herself to his male scrutiny, seeking his approval. Now the troubled, secret inspector finds no flaw in the quality of his emotion, he hears no false note, senses nothing feigned or forced; his delight in looking at his wife is the same as it was two summers ago, or twelve years ago, it hasn’t waned, hasn’t been contaminated by habit. He looks at her dark, bare legs and is as captive to desire as the first time, in another hotel room, and he drinks her in with all the lust women have always kindled in him. Even when he was twelve he would stand bewitched after school, watching the girls in the first miniskirts, and once one of his young and beautiful aunts bent over him to set down his dinner and before his eyes was the white, trembling flesh of her breasts in her low-cut dress, perfumed, shadowy — the delicate female flesh he now smells and strokes and gazes at as he puts his arms around his wife, trying to pull down the zipper of her dress, to run his hands up her thighs with urgent need.

She bursts out laughing and tries to draw away, flattered and annoyed, always amazed at the suddenness of male desire. “My lipstick is all over your face, we’re late for dinner, and our son’s waiting.” “Let him wait,” he says, breathing through his nose as he kisses her neck, and when, as if invoked by their words, their son knocks at the door and tries to turn the doorknob, he sighs, “It’s a good thing we locked the door.” That will give them time to compose themselves, to calm down, and when they come out, the boy gives them a look that may be slightly censorious, or maybe it’s only questioning, even a little mocking. “What took you two so long to open the door?”

THERE ARE RAPIDLY blinking lights in the darkness beyond the broad white band of waves breaking on the sand; with the new moon, the speeding launches of the tobacco and hashish smugglers breast the foam, along with emigrants coming from the other side, from the darkest line of shadow, the coast of Africa. Aesthetic contemplation is a privilege, but sometimes a lie: the beautiful, dark coast we are seeing this night from the restaurant terrace, the scene onto which we project tales and dreams, adventures from books, is not the coast seen by those men crowded into boats rocked by the sea, on the verge of capsizing and dying in waters murkier than any well, dark-skinned fugitives with glittering eyes, pressed against one another to protect themselves from cold and fear, trying to conquer the feeling of being impossibly distant from those lights on the shore they have no guarantee of reaching.

Some are returned by the waves, swollen and livid and half eaten by fish. Others you see from the highway, dashing across open land, hiding behind a tree, or flattening themselves against the bare ground, terrified, tenacious, looking for the road north taken by those who preceded them, beleaguered heroes of a journey no one will speak of. When we drive back from the restaurant toward the hotel, we come upon two Guardia Civil jeeps beaming their spotlights on the dunes near the highway; with his face against the back window, the boy, as excited as if he were at a movie, watches as we pass silently whirling blue warning lights and the silhouettes of two armed guardias. What would it be like to hide in this moonless night, wet and panting, lying in a ditch or one of those cane fields, a nobody with no belongings, no papers or money or address or name, not knowing the highways or speaking the language, the doctor thinks later, in bed, lying close to the woman sleeping with her arms around him, both of them exhausted and drained by the greed of love.

He wakes with the first light, clearheaded and rested, but doesn’t get up, he barely moves in order not to leave her arms. He watches the gradual dawn like a silent and patient witness, drowses with eyes half closed, then feels the spirit and energy to get up and put on his running clothes: a favorable sign that their happiness will be repeated, that things will be exactly the same, his wife’s and his son’s love, the fullness of every sensation, as strong as his pleasure in thrusting deep within her. That memory is so vivid that he gets out of bed with an erection.

At that hour of morning, the colors on the seashore have the faded tones of an old postcard, the blues, grays, greens, and roses of a hand-colored photograph. He begins running along the highway curving up the cliff, at a fast pace, with long, energetic strides, pumping his arms rhythmically, noting in his Achilles tendons the effort of the climb, his lungs expanding in the sea air, his whole body weightless, moving with a physical joy he never experienced in his youth. With every curve the precipice is more dizzying and the view more sweeping: Tangiers in the distance to the west, a white line in the fog-free blue, the Rif Mountains, where flat-roofed villages cling to ravines just as they do in Alpujara de Granada.

Large silver German-make cars, dogs barking behind the walls of houses isolated amid rock gardens and palm trees. In the hotel they’d told us that the Germans arrived when there was nothing at all along the coast, except the bunkers erected against a possible invasion that happened much farther away: first in Sicily, in the south of Italy, then in Normandy. The Germans began coming at the end of the war, their war; they chose to build their houses and plant their gardens on those heights battered by the winds, where no one ever climbs and where there is nothing but that cave with the black drawings of animals and archers and buried amphorae in which the skeletons of Phoenician travelers were later discovered.

This time he is determined to reach the peak, to find the grotto. He’s been told that after he passes a certain curve where a large pine twists out above a ravine, he should leave the highway and follow a path that winds upward through thickets of rockrose and a kind of acacia with sharp thorns and clusters of yellow flowers whose seed, he’s heard, has been carried by wind or birds from across the water, because it’s a variety that grows in the desert. If he had a friend, he would tell him that almost as soon as he took what he thought was the path, he realized that he was mistaken, because it quickly became overgrown by brush. He made his way through harsh branches that raked his skin, through the sticky leaves of the rockrose, trying not to become disoriented, although soon he could see only a few steps ahead. He could hear the sea crashing against the cliff but didn’t know the direction it was coming from. He stumbled over fallen branches and feared he might loose his footing, get too near the edge of the cliff. But he kept going and fought the feeling he was lost; soon he would come to a clearing, find one of those rocks that rose above the vegetation, and climb up on it to get a sighting of the road.

He was so absorbed in the task of pushing through the thorny brush that he was slow to hear the ferocious barking of dogs. A few meters in front of him, invisible till that moment, was a high whitewashed wall topped with jagged glass. He followed it, without coming to a door or window, until he turned a corner and immediately froze. In terror and vertigo he pressed his body to the wall: only one step away was the edge of the cliff and, far below, the splendor and roar of the foam crashing upon the rock that was the base for the bunker.

He stood motionless against the wall struck now by the sun, his eyes closed, not daring to open them and look into emptiness. Then he stepped back, moved away from the precipice, and again heard the dogs. Clinging to the rough wall, he advanced in the narrow space between it and the brush.

He reached an open area in front of the main gate of the house just as a heavyset blond woman came running toward him, sobbing and saying something in a language he didn’t understand. Even before he saw the writing on the ceramic plaque, he remembered that he’d been in this place before. Berghof.

He thought at first that the woman was scolding him for having invaded her property. But she didn’t have the look of the owner of the house, more that of a servant, the hands she was waving so frantically as she shouted to him were the large, reddened hands of a domestic, a scrubbing maid or cook from a different epoch. She screamed and pulled him toward the half-opened iron gate, where the barking was louder. With dreamlike naturalness, he accepted that the woman knew he was a doctor and was asking him to help someone who was ill.

But she can’t have known I was a doctor, she can’t have been waiting for me to come. From the moment he enters the house, dragged in the woman’s tight grip, he imagines he is telling his wife this adventure, telling her later this morning when he is back at the hotel, sitting beside her on the bed, bringing her a story as he would breakfast: I wish you could have seen what happened to me, what I saw.

Led by the woman, he crosses a patio of white walls and marble paving and arches where sheer curtains flutter, offering a view of the sea and the coast of Africa, those same arches we’ve so often seen from the beach, wondering who had the privilege of living there. There is a marble fountain in the middle, but the sound of the water and our footsteps is masked by the barking that becomes even fiercer as I step inside the house. The woman is sobbing and rubbing her hands on her voluminous bosom, looking much older now: the blue eyes, light hair, pug nose, and round, rosy face made her look young, but now I realize she must be over sixty. With tear-filled eyes she gestures for me to hurry. The place is a pastiche of Andalusian and German decor, with huge iron grilles at all the windows and dark, paneled doors. But I see all this very quickly, blurred by confusion. We enter a large room where the woman points to the floor, waving her arms, crying openmouthed, tears streaming down her round, withered cheeks, but my eyes, accustomed to sunlight, are slow to adapt to the shadow, and see nothing.

The moan is the first thing I hear, although not clearly because of the woman’s screams and the barking dogs, who must be penned up nearby, since I also hear them clawing. A moan and the whistling breath of a sick person’s lungs, then I see the figure on the floor, an old man in a silk bathrobe, his yellowish pallor in sharp contrast with the bright red of his gaping mouth and the tongue waggling in search of air, thrust out like a grotesque marine creature struggling to escape a crevice in which it has become wedged. He is clutching his neck with both hands, and when I bend down to him, he grabs the front of my T-shirt, his eyes as wide as his mouth, the color so light that it’s difficult to say whether they’re gray or blue. He pulls me to him with fanatical strength, as if grabbing on to me to keep from drowning, as if he needs to tell me something. His face is so close to mine that I can see his long yellow teeth, the red tear ducts and tiny veins in his eyeballs, and his breath is like a sewer. Bitte, he says, but it’s a death rattle more than a word, and the woman who is sobbing beside me repeats the word, shakes me with her big red hands, urging me to do something, but the man has pulled me closer to him, and I can’t free myself to listen to his chest or attempt in some way to revive him. Beside him on the dark, polished wood floor is a puddle I had thought was urine, but it’s tea. I also see a broken cup and a spoon.

“This man is choking,” I tell the woman, absurdly spacing the words, as if she would then understand me better, and I point to a telephone: You must call an ambulance. What I want most, however, is to leave, get away from there, go back to my hotel room before my wife wakes up. I manage to get to my feet, and when the old man lets go, his breathing is somewhat improved, although his eyes are turned back in his head.

On the telephone table is a small red tray with a swastika in the center, inside a white circle. I haven’t looked around the room since I came in, only now, while I’m waiting for the emergency call to go through. On one wall is a large oil painting of Adolf Hitler, bracketed by two red curtains that turn out to be two flags with swastikas. In the illuminated interior of a glass case is a black leather jacket with the insignia of the SS on the lapels and with a large, dark-stained split on one side. In an ostentatiously framed photograph, Hitler is bestowing a decoration upon a young SS officer. In another glass case is an Iron Cross, and beside it a parchment manuscript written in Gothic characters and with a swastika pressed into the sealing wax.

I see all this in one second, but the number of objects around me is overpowering, they make the room seem crowded although the space is enormous: busts, photos, firearms, burnished, sharp-pointed shells, flags, insignia, paperweights, calendars, lamps, there’s nothing here that isn’t connected with the Nazis, that doesn’t commemorate and celebrate the Third Reich. What I first perceived as confusion is actually in a perfect order that suggests museum cataloging. Meanwhile, the man lies gasping on the floor, calling out to me in a voice so hoarse it seems scarcely to escape the cavern of his chest. Bitte, he says when I hang up the telephone and again bend down to him; he stares at me, terrified. “Be calm,” I tell him, although I’m not sure whether he’s learned any Spanish in all the years he’s lived as a refugee on this coast. An ambulance is on the way. Saliva drools from one side of his mouth. He feels my chest, my face, as if he were blind; he asks me something, orders me to do something, in German. Now he is breathing a little more regularly, but his eyes are still turned back and half closed. When I check his wrist for a pulse — skin and bone and a sheaf of twisting blue veins — he digs his fingernails into the back of my hand.

WHEN THE DOCTOR RETURNS to the hotel, he will show his wife the physical marks the fingernails made as proof of what happened, the things he will tell her with such relief, still feeling a trace of revulsion. He wants to leave but can’t, even though he doesn’t know if it’s his duty as a physician that holds him there or some form of malevolence he can’t shake, no more than he can free himself from the perhaps dying man’s fingernails digging into his hand. Time crawls. His wife will be awake by now and wondering why he isn’t back. She’ll fear suddenly that something happened to him, and be irritated about his mania for running and walking at dawn. We two are most alike in our fear that everything will fall apart, that our life will go down the drain. He needs to pull away from the old man’s hand and call the hotel to calm his wife, but he doesn’t know the number, and the task of finding it seems too great an obstacle.

The old man’s pupils are again visible in the slit of his eyelids and fixed on him. The doctor looks away and makes a sign as if to get up, but two skeletal hands stop him, tugging at his T-shirt. He hears the old man’s breathing, smells it, becomes conscious of the monotonous roar of the sea at the foot of the cliff. Between the murmuring and prayers of the woman planted like a monolith and the barking that hasn’t let up for an instant, he thinks he can hear, still far in the distance, the wail of an ambulance.