Lucena (16 page)

Right away I began to study Social Work at the university but after the first year I already began to see that that country with so very many Jews living together was not for me. They were gross and humiliating. Everything I did seemed humiliating. It was much more humiliating than for a man to give me money. For me such vulgarity and the crude way they talked was as if they were humiliating me. They didn’t do it on purpose. That’s the way they are. Period. But everything humiliated me. Maybe I had that feeling because the Jews started looking to me as degrading as you Mr. Pinto.
Monseur
Pinto, spoiled, perverse rich kid who thinks he can do anything that pops into his head. Surely your wife knows that you fuck your young Moor, but she doesn’t care because of the money, or perhaps because she is the kind of woman who can’t see beyond their own nose. Like my own mother who, when she came to Paris she didn’t try to find out how I could buy a Mercedes Coupe. She didn’t ask about anything. Maybe she was afraid to find out. But she was an expert in not seeing or asking. She has always been that way. She didn’t want to know that I had grown up. That I had become a woman, a monster. Nobody knew that I did what I did because of you. Then I used the money for psychological treatment while I was working as a translator for UNESCO. You always came up in the sessions and I always said that I wanted to kill you. She, the psychologist, tried to influence me to resign myself to the fact that this had happened in the past. But the only thing I wanted to do was to kill you. To assassinate you. And today I will do it. I will wear a djellaba. I’m tall enough for people to think I’m a man. It will only be a few seconds. I’ll do it, Mr. Pinto. Today a Moor will kill you that’s what everybody will think. Perhaps the only thing that’s lacking, is to look you in the eye and remind him of what happened. To talk to you for an instant but those are just dreams. Today, at dusk, the same time you forced me into your new car, as you go to synagogue for the evening prayers. Yes, I know you go there to complete the minyan. I will stick the knife into your gut at nightfall. I will run along the streets and then I will get into my car, take off the djellaba and no one will be able to identify me. Everybody will think you were assassinated by a crazy Moor dressed in a djellaba. Could there be a more logical death for a rich Jew than that?

A SEPHARDI IN TEXAS

I am not the first of course. There were already Sephardim who settled here in the eighteenth century. It is surprising what I am doing here. It is absolutely surprising how things happened. I participate in international poetry festival it is the first time I participate in a festival and right here, in Austin, Texas.

In Israel I had not been invited to a single festival. This is both surprising and not surprising. Here I am, here after having uploaded several dozen poems on the internet. Someone in some corner of the world saw them. And here I am, the most international poet in the world. I read my poems in Spanish, in English, and in Hebrew. And every time I present, I am asked to read, again, the poem that gallops, they say, the poem “Caballos.”

“Caballos,” the poem that gallops, I wrote in Spanish, the language of my mother. Spanish after so many years, so many ups and downs but precisely in Spanish the words sound good to me. I write a poem and I feel satisfaction, a satisfaction that I had not felt after thousands of poems in Hebrew. In Hebrew I always felt I had to write another, and another, and another, because I could not find the correct tone. But after one poem in Spanish, I can rest a few days. I feel a music. The place from which it has come, the sound of my infancy, of an infancy that returns with the words, with a sound, with the personal, exact coding. Words that come back through the tunnels of history, words that come back from Lucena.

A week in Austin, a mysterious place for me, the melodies that I used to hear were always linked to this city. Or, at least with Texas. Songwriters, for me great poets, names unknown in Israel, even in the United States: Tornes Van Zandt, David Rodríguez, Jimmy Lafave, who, in reality was from Oklahoma, yet forms an inseparable part of the sounds of this city. Because in Austin, music is a kind of religion. Everyone goes there to hear music. It is everywhere, at ridiculous prices because the singers have to come through here. I went a few nights to the “Cactus Cafe” and there I heard Butch Hancock, Lafave, Elisa Gilkinson, and Cliff Eberhardt.

I told Cliff Eberhardt that he looked Israeli. In reality I told him he looked Kurdish, I told him if he should go to Israel, people would speak to him in Hebrew. To my surprise he told me that his maternal grandfather was Professor Simon, who had taken part in the peace treaty with Martin Buber. Zionism had arrived in Austin and I could not escape it.

I am here as though in a dream. I take careful note of my cosmopolitanism, I take note of it in my ancestors, who were Sephardim, but never forgot they form part of the greater world, the world of Christians and Muslims at the same time. So they could travel throughout the world without feeling like foreigners anywhere. Without counting Israel. In Israel they became a neglected minority and all their liberality sank into the sea. So that is how the strange situation is created. Here, I am the cosmopolitan and in Israel, the ethnic poet who does not concern himself with serious problems such as love between couples, death, or the Holocaust. And to think that one of the poets who has delved most deeply into the Holocaust is the Egyptian Sephardi Edmond Jabés who wrote in French. Without a doubt, if he had written in Hebrew, In Israel nobody would have paid him any attention. In the best case, he would have had to cover all the expenses of printing his books and he would have distributed them among his friends.  

Too late to worry about this, the issue is lost. Second and third generations for some time have accepted the stereotypes engulfing them. Sephardim are passive, whiners, only good for manual labor, and have no interest in getting ahead in life. I was the crazy guy that was there and I remember. I know how the Spaniards from Málaga and Madrid are. I lived there and I remember. But the memory is a damnation, a damnation that it is among the society where I live. I live, and I don’t. Because if I dream of anything it is about going back to live in the diaspora. I like exile. I like the Jews that don’t have anything to do with this economic and social calamity. I live in a schizophrenic society. But I, much to my sorrow, am not schizophrenic. After a hundred years of Zionism that should have healed the Jews, I am sorry to say that the ones out in the diaspora are the sanest, at least relatively. The real crazies are the ones who reside in Zion. Here in Texas I can realize that. Here people talk to me about poetry, about the meaning of the diaspora, about the words, not about Morocco, Morocco, and Morocco. In every interview I participate in, I am asked about Morocco as if I represented some organization of hundreds of thousands of persons, when I can barely talk about myself. They keep looking at me and asking themselves if I could get them votes
in which case they would publish a book for me at the ‘Am Oved’ publishing house
.

That is what I accuse the Ashkenazi’s of. This does not absolve the Sephardim from their situation. In all parts of the diaspora they have struggled to maintain their identity and in Israel, without thinking for a moment, they make concessions to a tiny group of Cossack Jews who didn’t have enough money to go to the United States. They renounce their entire history for a plate of lentils with more carrots than lentils. That is why the food is so red.

I get nervous again but no, I am not so angry, but there are days. Or, better said, there are moments in which I get angry but then I accept the verdict because I know that everything is a great lesson. To learn how to always be among the opposition, and understand it.

In Austin one night at midnight on leaving the Alejandro Escobedo presentation, I walked to the hostel where I stayed the night. It was a walk of less than an hour, but at that time of night the streets were empty. Suddenly I saw a young black man in front of me walking slowly and a squad car of the Austin Rangers approached him, stopped and the police officer inside began talking with the young man. I was a few minutes distant from them but I could see it all clearly. I continued walking. The police car awaited me. The police officer politely wished me a good evening and asked me if everything was ok. Apparently I said yes, and then, surprisingly, the officer told me to be careful around that young black man who was walking in front of me and it would be best if I kept my distance from him. I said yes, thanked him, and continued on. Not only was I not afraid of the black man who by then had distanced himself from me but I couldn’t stop asking myself if he would have said the same thing if that young man had been white. And why did he have to tell me anything, me, a foreigner in a strange land. Who was really closer to him than the black man, whose family has lived in this country for more than three hundred years, and probably more years than that of the policeman?

Could it be that the warning is what creates fear of the black person who then ends up being a delinquent? Could it be that this is what the statistics say? According to them, thirty percent of black men between twenty and thirty in the United States end up with a criminal record.

During my free time in Israel I learned to observe and understand discrimination in another country and how that works. The difference in racial discrimination is that in a racist state you are told: “Don’t get close to that black man.” And in a discriminatory state there are always reasons that a black man warrants different and discriminatory treatment. So that when you, a Sephardic, come to the ministry to submit an application for a scholarship, they tell you you have arrived an hour late, that they can’t submit any more applications or your course of study isn’t relevant, or that you haven‘t completed the application in ink or anything else.

The reasons are correct, all of them. And the ones they give to many of the Ashkenazi’s are, as well.

So the blacks are foreigners in their own land. And that is how I learned first-hand about discrimination. Austin, March of 1999, and the music was marvelous.

––––––––

W
ILL DEATHS, AND THE DEAD, CEASE?

-It is the end of the world, called the plague.

-They say one dies in just a few days.

-They say the only solution is to eat garlic.

-Only God can help us. It is best not to leave home,

-There are dead in all the streets,

-People go to the cemetery to prepare their own tombs

-Besides the fact we are dying, we are assured it is our own fault.

-Those who think that should die.

-Amen,

-Amen.

-They say our sins bring death. They call it the Jewish death, and the Black Death.

-Damn destiny is endless. It is not sufficient that we die as they do. They want to kill us too.

-They spread all kinds of rumors, especially when it’s about Jews.

-We need to leave the country.

-Where?

-your cousin Yehudá, the poet, say we should return to the land of Israel

-There they killed us too, and if we go back they will kill us

-We came to this world to be killed. We have to celebrate our death

-You are crazy.

-You don’t understand. Our God gives us a law. He tells us it is the law of life. We must do everything possible to live and to choose life and since we were given the tablets with the commandments. What is the world doing? Killing us as though it hadn’t anything better to do.

-We have to keep struggling for life.

-But we must also celebrate death. Death is our destiny and we must love it. Do you hear those shouts? Sol has died and Moishé the butcher. They say Sultana has also died. I’m not leaving the house. Frejahas died. They die by the minute, by the moment. I will sing as David did when his son Absolón died. I will sing Alleluia! Alleluia! The day of our death is better than the day of our birth.

-You’re crazy. I’m going to cry.

PAPA

I ask myself, what did he go to look for there? Two lost and strange years. A staunch, upright man gathering up his family: wife, sons, daughters and going on the road. He isn’t young any longer. He has no religious beliefs. He knows that all his hopes are simply a bed of deceptions. And here, an act of insanity. A hundred years ago, the Moroccans take their families in search of exasperation. It’s like genetic code. What is it that moves teachers, businessmen, doctors, tailors, and farmers, simple folk and rich? What is it? What hidden hand? Don’t say my grandfather was a dreamer, a great cynic, a man of principles, because it is not true. He was a prosperous businessman in Tetuán. A cool headed businessman who understood that in Morocco there was neither more business nor place for a small group of Jews. It is only filling with people from the mountains who were seeking to earn their bread. They would be transformed into beggars and day laborers. He knew how to make objective analyses but this was no longer the sixties when it was not known what was happening. He had already traveled and knew what awaited him. The family had already told him what it meant to be a Moroccan in Israel. He knew what his children would be called in school. He knew it all, in spite of it all. Like a bullet, he had to shoot to Jerusalem. What was he fleeing? Perhaps it was about a last opportunity. He always talked about Spain, and Málaga. He has a brother there who will help him, sometimes from Canada, from Quebec, from London. He talked about the whole world but I was almost sure that we would move to Málaga. We had been there a few times. I liked that summery, maritime city. But one day, during the ten days of penance before
Yom kipur
, he told us that we were leaving, just after my
Bar-Mitzva
. We were leaving. I didn’t even ask where. I had no doubt it was to Málaga, but being in Ceuta he announced the news. It was assumed that I would be happy. He looked at me for several instants expecting to see some sign of joy from the child who goes to Jerusalem, to Temple, to the Land of Judah, He expected a look from me confirming his feelings which justified his action. But that look didn’t arrive.