Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) (3 page)

That’s why all these things about time don’t work well for me; I think that when it comes down to it, I’m living in reverse.

Bernardo took me back to 1983, but things don’t end there. Raquel brings me to 1982, the year I traveled to Paris and Madrid looking for love, for a woman. And the question I ask myself is how I managed to not see Raquel in Madrid, since that’s the reason I went. It’s been exactly twenty years since then, twenty, and we’re going backwards. But, did I not see her then? I doubt it, I really doubt it. Surely we crossed paths several times, but how could I not notice her? Or yes, I did notice her, I remember that face well. Every time I see her picture it seems more familiar. If it wasn’t in 1982 then it was 1977, the years I traveled to escape from serving in the Israeli military. But in the end I returned to those three disastrous years of service. But I couldn’t see her because Moshe was looking for a woman, but the one who saw Raquel was Mois. And Mois those days, while Moshe wanted with his entire being to become a true Israeli and began to adopt the Sabra pronunciation, during those same days Mois would write poems in Spanish, sprinkling in Haketia words. When Moshe discovered this, it was a great disappointment. His whole idea of being able to become a Sabra someday, of the possibility of being accepted by his new society, fell into the void.  A large void, but, like all voids, it was suddenly filled with poems in Spanish. At the beginning they were poorly written poems, poems that limped along, but that had something urgent about them, so urgent they almost seemed good. In a very short time I found a publisher that published a book of my poems in Spain. This, in comparison to the fifteen years it took me to find a publisher to publish my Hebrew writings. And very quickly, friendships were made with writers and poets all over Spain. Moshe remained even more isolated in Israel, but Mois came from the past to save me, to give me a name. Mois has always been the one who returns from a parallel world, crying over his premature death and telling me what steps I should take so the two of us can find each other one day.

“We will fly.”

“Yes, we will.”

“Without planes.”

“With words.”

“We will create entire worlds without words.”

“We will even create new words.”

“And with them it will be easier to fly.”

“Yes, easier than walking.”

“And easier than living.”

“And easier than dreaming.”

“They will be words that will be said just once, only once

ever.”

“Only I will say them to you and only you will hear them.”

“Or only I will say them to you.”

“And all the others will become very jealous. They will realize that we have a secret that we ourselves don’t even remember.”

“And that secret will be seen on our foreheads.”

“And no one will be able to be the same anymore, nor will anyone be able to lie to us.”

“Seeing our foreheads will keep them from lying.”

“They will be very long words, with forty-two syllables.”

“Or very short, words of half a consonant.”

“And no one will remember them.”

“But in oblivion their power will live.”

“And in oblivion nothing dies.”

“Memory is like the sun and not remembering is the night that awaits it.”

“The sun has limited time, but the night is eternal.”

I
n which I will discuss how the words choose the writer and not the writer the words, and other things that would prefer silence.

Raquel says I shouldn’t stop writing in Hebrew. But it is the Hebrew language that is leaving me, little by little. Like with all my writing, this began with poetry; everything begins with poetry. In 1998, I suddenly felt the need to write in my mother tongue, the language of mine that had been nursed and fussed over. It was much stronger than I was. The words guided me in spite of myself, in spite of my spite.  I remember an interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun in which they asked him why he didn’t write in Arabic, and I think he said in these words “la question est resolue” (“the matter is resolved”), and I said to myself in that moment, well no, nothing is signed and nothing is sealed. I wrote a poem in English, the first language I wrote in, in which I said that the words will never stop in any language. The poem was left in my notebook for months before I understood its real significance. It was the announcement of the Spanish poems that would come to follow.

And now the thoughtful reader will ask why I began to write in English. Well, because Mois wanted to write in Spanish, but at age fifteen he couldn’t, and Moshe wanted to write in Hebrew, but he couldn’t either, he didn’t have enough knowledge of Hebrew, and Mois had died. There was also the possibility of French, that was Moise, the Moise from class, when the professor would read the names and make sure they were present, but French was always a foreign language; at recess everyone spoke Spanish, and at that very recess I saw Raquel for the first time, or perhaps it was earlier. Her mother and my mother were close friends, perhaps they even went out to walk the streets of Tetouan together, with the two of us. They would drink coffee while Raquel and I would communicate through strange pathways and the two of them wouldn’t notice. Pathways no stranger than the internet today, which seems so natural to us, but is actually nothing more than the realization of the dream of a fifteenth-century mystic. People talk to each other and send photos from thousands of miles away.

What were those two babies talking about? Maybe they promised to meet each other after turning forty, and promised to write fantastic books about the city where they were born and that their mothers longed so earnestly to leave in order to discover a new world. They promised to remember, even when all the others wanted to forget. They promised to bring with them the memory of everyone buried in the old cemetery, called the cemetery of Castilla. The Corcos and the Castiels, the Ibn Danans, the Hachuels, the Taurels, the Bentatas, and the Ben Walids; the male and female descendants of converts who returned to Judaism to be able to breathe air where everything was smoke. Today I tell you, Raquel, I tell you, my darling, I cry for them, I cry from their pain that I carry on my back. They are the ones that pain me the most. Then came the protectorate and the money, and with the money we forgot our Haketia, but above all we forgot that simple and innocent Judaism, that Judaism where God was one of us and one of ours. That Judaism where the rabbis did not need to impose themselves and they understood the conditions in which each person lived. They understood that we were human beings, fragile and sinners. I live in them and they live in me. Those rabbis were the true intellectuals of our lives, and they passed on to us that natural Judaism that no one will be able to change for hundreds of years. There, there is my pain and there is my happiness, that profound candle of happiness that no one will ever be able to put out. And thanks to them, everything always ends up as a smile in me. That smile is the truest thing about me. That smile that no one will be able to take from me.

I arrived with that Judaism to Israel, where everything was different. There, all the Jews thought of another God and other rabbis, very different than mine, such that I couldn’t understand for more than twenty years that something here was not what I expected. It is more difficult for me to explain this to someone like Raquel who lives in Madrid and has never lived in Israel.

It also makes me embarrassed to talk about the unbelievable discrimination, and on top of all that there will always be an anti-Semite who will use everything I say to kill me or my child, just as they always did with the prophets and with Jesus, or with Otto Weininger, because the worst thing about it is that, in spite of suffering from terrible discrimination, I am innocent enough to not accuse anyone of anything, and even to understand where things come from. 

Because of that, when Raquel tells me I should give classes at a university or be an editor, I don’t know how to respond. Here, people born in Morocco or their descendants are people who cannot, by definition, be intellectuals. They are people who should do manual labor. During the fifties and up until the end of the eighties, all the Jews from Arab countries were sent to vocational schools to become carpenters or electricians. In those days, no one could imagine that a Moroccan could be a writer or a university professor. In the end, today the success of the system is complete. Sephardic Jews themselves will tell you that their children have no business being history professors. The universities have become closed circles where only the Jews from European countries, the Ashkenazim, teach or lead. Yes, there are some exceptions, and if they ever say there is discrimination they will probably be let go in less than a year, for administrative reasons, of course.

All of this comes from Zionism being born in Europe, the same Europe of the nineteenth-century people who believed the people of the East were incapable of developing on their own. 

The Jews who until two hundred years ago were Europe’s ‘orientals’ finally became Asia, the Middle East, and Europeans, and here they created a hell that only makes the situation worse for anyone not born in Europe.

Europe and its ghosts came with us. And its disdain. And its tutelage. And its eternal obsession with never letting the others leave childhood, always needing a snack and, once in a while, a slap in the face.

“Where is the garden?”

“It’s in my heart.”

“And what is there in your garden?”

“Three trees and a flower.”

“What color is the flower?”

“The color of your breasts.”

“And what trees are there?”

“There’s a cypress. And I don’t know the others.”

“And who walks in your garden?”

“You do, barefoot.”

“And what do I see in your garden?”

“You see a bird in a tree, but it already disappeared.”

“And do you see me in the garden?”

“I see you and I don’t see you. I watch you and then you’re gone. You go between the trees and continue to walk.”

“And what fruit do your trees bear?”

“I don’t know, but all the fruit is red and has the same flavor as your kisses.”

“And why are you leaving now?”

“It’s because I ran out of words. Without words, I disappear.”

I
n which I talk about the little difference that really exists between literature, virtual reality and what we call real life.

Raquel says she is afraid we will meet. So am I. For now it’s just e-mails, and we are actually finally both experiencing a relationship that is completely extraterritorial and extramundane; a literary relationship. The Raquel from the e-mails is the Raquel of words, and Moshe is literature. We stroll among the words and drink coffee in imaginary cafes. But for quite some time now I’ve been doubting everything they call material. I walk down the streets and feel as though I live inside a movie. I don’t know when everything changed and the world became literature. Sometimes I want to wake up from this dream, but what happens if the past was actually the dream and I am now in reality? Everything I see is intangible, none of it is exactly what I imagine I see. The whole world exists only in my imagination, in my books. No, there is nothing that could prove the opposite to me. Hundreds of philosophy books couldn’t convince me of it being the most logical possibility. Each of us is Elohim and each entity creates their world and manages it as they can, and maybe as they like.

This is why Raquel and I live among books. We live among books the way words live among pages. We are two books that communicate the way a chapter of Finnegan’s Wake and a chapter of Le Livre Des Questions might communicate. Like them, they would talk to each other with words, they would send each other e-mails and they would create a world. Maybe they would send photos to each other in order to not get lost between reality and what seems to not be reality.

Today they published an article about one of my books in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, another one against it, like the majority of them. But, you see, I just read it and even laughed a little, I was Mois. If every three months they write an article against me, one day I will become very famous. But the reason this article didn’t cause me to become completely depressed for three or four days is simply that I am writing this book. Because when I write, I no longer live in that world outside of the book. When I write I live in the book, and when I live in the book, I understand little about that other person named Moshe who walks along the streets between books. I understand neither what he wants nor how he lives. I don’t understand his bank account or what he does for a living. For a few months he becomes a complete stranger. Sometimes I see him on TV talking about my books, about the ones I’m writing, and I wonder what this guy is talking about and why he would think that because he wrote me he knows me better than others. Only Raquel knows me, and not the Raquel who is married and goes to the supermarket every day and prefers red skirts over brown ones. No, not that one, the Raquel from the novels about Tetouan, from the novels she has written and the ones she will write, the Raquel from the poems and the e-mails, the Raquel that exists and is created letter by letter. Her verbal essence and MINE are the ones that find each other. 

I was thinking about that while I was reading the article and checking to see if Raquel had sent me an email yesterday or this morning, but no, I am still waiting for my daily ration. I think she waits too, but I respond quickly, I want to know what she will write back. From there these words are created, from the virtual reality that creates a book, that later will travel through the streets and will be read by people in cafes with computers that can communicate with others in other countries. It’s amazing, being able to talk to the world through words that write themselves, words that go from one continent to another and never forget Tetouan.

Raquel says that in novels the characters should change, but this is not a novel, this is a book. In books, the characters are words and they don’t aspire, like in novels, to give the illusion of being humans. In books, the humans want to be part of the book. Herein lie all the differences between Jewish mysticism and all the other mysticisms. In the Kabbalah man is made of letters and the letters form words.