Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) (7 page)

It’s time for your e-mail and I check my account every two minutes, like someone waiting for a lottery check. I won the lottery, but so much money at once is something I can’t digest. At the same time, it scares me a lot. So much sensitivity and so much understanding, and I’m a prisoner of fear. Where does one go from here? Where do both of us go, where will we bring our words?

But I feel we are one, not on a physical level but on a spiritual level. I think about what the Kabbalah says, that what parents think about when they procreate is very important. The Kabbalists prepare and train to have good thoughts so their children go down a good path. I think your father was thinking about my mother and my mother about your father when they conceived us, and that we are actually the same, the same spiritual entity. And suddenly, like so many other things I think, this seems stupid to me. But suddenly I see the girl I was, not the boy, who was she? My grandmother always said I was the most beautiful baby in Tetouan, and she wasn’t a person who gave out compliments easily. In all the photos I’ve seen from my first months and years, I seem more like a baby girl, and when I was an adolescent people often made that mistake and took me for a girl, until I was sixteen. I remember a time at the airport when, going into the bathroom, someone told me that the ladies’ room was to the right. That must be the reason for the beard, the beard is for defining my sexuality. And when I write in female first person I can feel completely like a woman. It’s not easy, it’s scary. But I also think my mother wanted a son so much after my older sister, and I couldn’t take part in that decision. She put all of her effort into making me male, but deep down there is a woman. It could have been you, throughout this whole journey. I will be that person, the one you see when you write in masculine first person. You say you like it and it seems like you’re writing to me when you speak from a masculine I.

Tell me about your first kiss.

You ask me and at that moment your face is that of a mischievous girl who wants to know something forbidden, something hidden for years. I think about my first kiss, when was the first one, I think it was with Claire in Tel Aviv, a kiss lasting half an hour in the middle of the street, and I turned her around ten times. The people on the street almost applauded. I was already in the military and we didn’t see each other often, Claire was in the military too. Since many of my relationships were run by distance, I would fall in love a lot on trips and then I would write long and romantic letters. Maybe I was falling in love to write, or I was falling in love with a tourist, like now with you, so that the relationship would be word-based, because only in words do I find that fire that physical encounters put out.

You tell me about your first kiss and you tell me you’ve never told anyone, not even your husband. Your secret kiss, a kiss with a Count, it’s a fairy tale. He’ll ask you if it’s your first kiss or if you’ve kissed many others, and he won’t get an answer. The answer comes to me, because that’s what I’m here for, to tell those secrets you don’t tell your friends. And at that moment I see you, Raquel, in the sky, winking at me and guiding me through these naked streets, these kindred alleys that only you can light up.

You’ll tell me again and again that I should write more about that eight-year-old boy you like. It’s because you wrote about the girl you were when you were seven. And you’re right. But I don’t see that boy clearly. He always appears from a window and says hi to me. He tells me to keep walking, to be careful of something, and then he disappears, to reappear one month later. I can never imagine one day, live one entire day with him, there are memories, photos, clips of a movie to be edited, words, meaningless phrases, with no beginning or end.

Let’s go eat, it’s getting late. Well in Spain people eat lunch late, not like here. In the end I bring you to a restaurant in the center and I suggest you try the Kubbeh soup, an Iraqi soup, and you say you like it, and you want a Coke, and you’re reminded of the 7 Up from Tetouan, or what we also called Sharba, or Sharbalilah, drinks without content, just water and sugar. And you laugh and laugh and laugh...

Yes, this is Jerusalem like you’ve never seen it, it’s my Jerusalem. Deserted streets and restaurants with motherly smells. Bookshops and stores with used books, in all the languages of the world. Books in Spanish, French, English, German, Portuguese, and more. And then, another good coffee and I wait for your questions. They always surprise me, I really like your questions. I am a prisoner to your questions.

And I will also take you down my streets in Tel Aviv and show you my sea, my waves and my shores, and more music stores, the same way months later you will show me around Madrid. I’ll take you to my restaurants in Tel Aviv, the Yemeni ones and the few that have good fish. Whenever I eat fish in Israel I think how it’s never as good as the fish in Spain, though the fish in Morocco is still much better.

What time is it? I have to go.

What could this have to do with seeing the waves? Here, in these pages, there are no times and there is nowhere to return to. You wait for an e-mail, but the hours don’t have legs to run by on. The streets are always ours, and everything revolves around our words, our steps, our looks. When I saw you it was the first time you had your face, and for me, it was the first time someone saw me.

Yes, but it’s time for your e-mail, and I’m already waiting, waiting to find out what you’re going to ask me. I’m waiting to find out what you’ve read in me that I didn’t know, what you know that I’ll never know about myself, and what I’ve understood about you that you never knew about yourself.

Once again I’ll talk to you about the discrimination against Moroccans in Israel, but very unconvinced of it being a topic that interests me, the way it interested me before, when I talked non-stop to everyone about it. But I’ll explain it to you anyway, because they see us as a challenge, a threat to Israeli society for not being Western, and you’ll tell me I shouldn’t write these things, that the antisemites already criticize us enough and that the atmosphere today in Spain and in Europe is totally anti-Israeli. Yes, I understand you, and sometimes for this very reason I don’t translate some of the things I’ve written. But I also realize that when I talk to European intellectuals about the problems between the Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews in Israel, at first their mouths drop open, but later they want to learn more. Suddenly all those Israeli Jews, who appear to be a large united and indivisible mass, become human. The Galicians understand what I’m talking about. Suddenly the Jews are more like normal people. But the thing is, here no one is Jewish enough: the secular man because he is not religious, the Ashkenazi because he is not a true Jew and is a descendant of the Khazars, the Sephardic Jews because they are not European enough, and so no one is truly Jewish. I remember what Ruth Knafo-Setton, a writer of Moroccan Jewish descent, told me after sending a story to a Jewish magazine in the United States. The editor said “Yes, you write very well, but why don’t you write about real Jews?”, because to him the Jews of Morocco are not real, they’re something exotic, and here what I am is something exotic. Everything will go fine if I tell the story of how we lived in the trees of Africa with the lions walking around below us, and the great Israeli culture saved us, but if I talk about an upper-class life full of books and music, they don’t believe me. It simply doesn’t fit into the natural outline of things, and therefore, they don’t see it. The victims of colonialism to the Ashkenazim, we are the same orientals they were not long ago. The others of the others.

You smile and I tell you about Sepharad, about that sudden impulse in one’s heart to walk around Toledo, Seville or Lucena, to see everyone we were and no longer are. And the almost personal guilt felt for those we could not save. Save from what? We don’t know, but certainly without being Jewish nothing makes sense. Those who fell, those who couldn’t tie themselves to our hands, the Kabbalah calls them Nitsosat, sparks. They are sparks that fall into the abyss, that abyss where darkness existed or was created before God created light. I see them walking, mostly around Seville, and I want to tell them to come back, that I’m here with my arms open to receive them, but what are they going to return to, to whom are they going to return, and from where did they leave? They are my cousins, and many of them hate me just for being a Jew. They hate themselves, they hate their past, their ancestors. They are killing history. They are cousins, and between cousins there can be a lot of hatred, too.

We, Raquel, were them not very long ago. We were converts, in Lisbon or in Seville, Jews in hiding, or Christians convinced that because of the Inquisition they returned to Judaism. It was better to die like your father and as a Jew than to be humiliated as a new Christian. History...how ridiculous... The Inquisition brought Jews closer to Judaism more than it pushed them away from it. Many of them were on their way to becoming good Christians, and it was precisely the Inquisition that showed them their identity as Jews. Just like the Nazis, who killed so many Jews that the last thing anyone wanted was to be Jewish. Many who had assimilated over three or four generations, and felt completely German or Hungarian, suddenly saw themselves faced with their Jewish label. It reminds me of the scene from the movie Sunshine where one of the Jews dies because he is not willing to repeat the Nazi’s sentence, “I am Jewish”, because he was already a good Hungarian Christian.

Those are the people who govern us, those, by chance, are the same Jews who direct the Israeli courts and universities. They are ashamed of beings Jews, of coming to the Middle East and not being good Europeans. I don’t judge them, honestly I don’t, but I wonder, how can we understand them? I can understand the Ashkenazim in the diaspora, or in Israel if they are religious. I can talk to them through a common Judaism. But when they are secular, when they have nothing of Judaism left, they are the people furthest from me in the entire world. I don’t understand anything about what governs their life, or why they want to be European so badly, as if Europeanism were some kind of religion, a religion that only exists in Israel, a religion professed only by the Jews expelled from Europe. They don’t understand that not even Europe is European, they way they dream of it.

I wonder why I’m telling you about all this. It makes me sound cultured, intelligent, but are these really the things that interest me? Or is it another way for me to escape, to distance myself from what is most important? From my life. These thoughts aren’t the ones that distance us from the wonders of daily life, from my daughter’s smile, from experiencing the light of Jerusalem, a light beyond comparison, a light that explains all the wars.

Suddenly you ask me about Bernardo Eisenstein, my wife’s ex-lover. You ask me why I went with her, why the character appears in the first part and isn’t mentioned again. Yes, it was a character that I wanted to develop, but in the end you, Raquel, you seemed more important to me, and I began to forget it, the way you forget an acquaintance you don’t see for months. Perhaps the pain was so strong I couldn’t tell the story.

You’re right, I shouldn’t have gone, so how did it happen? One day around noon she told me she was going to Tel Aviv and that same day I was planning to go to Tel Aviv because I had to buy something, so I said alright, I’ll go with you. And then she told me she was going to meet Bernardo and I said okay, then I won’t go, because that’s your business. I’ll go another day. She told me there was no reason for that and that I should go with her, you see, she convinced me. We have to talk about that. I think she wanted me to come so she wouldn’t get out of control, which is what happened. Unconsciously she brought me as her guardian. I told her so and she said no. That’s what happened.  And then, what a coincidence, her car broke down and she couldn’t call me, but then it got fixed, something about the battery, and then she returned all excited from the meeting and said she hadn’t noticed how quickly the time had passed and why didn’t I call her. I didn’t call her, I waited for her to call me. The following day we talked about it all and I asked her to not see him again, but she saw him three more times. The fourth time she lied to me (that hurt me more than anything). But don’t go thinking that I don’t think she slept with him or any of that, that’s not the problem. I think I would have realized if anything like that had happened. And besides, one day Ricardo went to the neighbor’s house for lunch, who invited us over for coffee. When I went to drink the coffee he said hello, we introduced ourselves (the first time I’ve ever seen him), and with plenty of hesitation I sat next to him, having no idea what he was going to say.  But it didn’t matter, he got up and went to the living room (we were all outside), disappeared for half an hour and then left. The next week he came to our house on Shabbat, showing up suddenly while we were eating. My mother was there and she was talking about being in the old city and things like that, and then she asked him: “Are you Jewish?” He was rather bothered and uncomfortable (thanks so much, mom), and said that that wasn’t important, and tweedledee tweedledum. But he left, oh my mother’s intuition... He left in less than ten minutes, which seems perfectly fine to me, considering he came without calling or anything. I didn’t see him again and a couple of months ago he left. He lives in each city for two months. He called my wife from Vienna but only left a message. He has four children, each from a different mother, and he is German. He and my wife were planning on getting married and she got pregnant by him. She miscarried a year before we got married. Are you getting an idea of the issue? Do you think I’m too jealous for reacting the way I did?

We’re walking down Jaffa Road and it looks as if there had been an earthquake yesterday. They’re constructing the paths for a future tram and I’m telling you, it would be perfect for walking around all day with a camera taking photos non-stop. It’s apocalyptic, half streets, bus stops in the middle of the street, thousands of people looking for each other and closed stores or stores that look like shuks. The noise is horrible and you can’t hear anything. There are all kinds of tractors and strange machines making holes and filling them up.  And this is your book, so you ask me for more descriptions. The Jerusalem winter sun, the entrance to the social security building next to the old city and hundreds of Arabs waiting for their turn. The one that was in the old city was closed a year ago, after a Palestinian killed the guard, and all those Moors remind me of the crowds in Tetouan, the streets full of people with nothing to do. And this is your book, but as soon as you entered this book you were no longer you. Things change, you’re a character, and characters have their own life. They end up far away from those who inspired them, they go so far that all they have left is a glance at reality.