Monastery Page 10

  The homeless man, two or three steps away from me, mumbled something. I approached slowly without closing the car door. I stared at the cat, willing it to move, to yawn, to stretch the way cats stretch, to do something, anything, to show me that it wasn’t dead. But the more I contemplated it, lying there, inert, squalid, the more convinced I became that, in fact, it was dead. I stubbed my cigarette out on the sidewalk. I crouched down to see it better. The cat’s eyes were open. It seemed not to blink. Suddenly the homeless man yelled at me, perhaps in Hebrew, most likely begging. Then he began to laugh. Loud. Then louder. His laugh was solid and abrupt, like a series of waves crashing into the rocks. He was jeering at something behind me, farther back. I turned. Not two minutes had passed, but the brown Citroën was surrounded by a group of soldiers, maybe four or five soldiers, all young, all holding guns. They were nervous. They were looking inside the car. I walked toward them and they became even more nervous and began shouting at me in Hebrew and pointing their guns at me and instinctively I put my hands up, and suddenly I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear anything. A few pedestrians began to stop, to shout at me, but I just saw mouths moving and shouting without hearing what they were shouting. I saw the homeless man still laughing without hearing his laugh. I saw one of the soldiers, a blond girl, asking me something without hearing her question. I saw Tamara approaching from a distance, running in slow motion, a plastic bag in her hands, and I felt as if someone were removing cotton balls from my ears, and slowly I began to recognize Tamara’s voice, calming the soldiers in Hebrew. Saying something like this, I imagined: that she was very sorry, that the brown Citroën belonged to her, that the idiot standing there with his hands in the air was her Guatemalan friend, that he didn’t know that in Israel you can’t just leave an empty car in the middle of the street. I could hear the pedestrians murmuring again. I could hear the homeless man laughing again. The soldiers weren’t lowering their guns. Tamara told me in English to get in the car. Right now. I got in and sat down and closed the door. She handed me the plastic bag and immediately started the engine. I apologized, distressed, but she didn’t say a word. Just shook her head as we started to drive away. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, from the back of my neck. The white cat was still splayed in the same position.

  IT HAS MANY NAMES, she told me as she drove, dropping pebbles of hash and strands of tobacco into a rolling paper on her leg. The Israelis call it security fence, or separation wall, or antiterrorist fence. She then licked the paper and rolled it long and tight. She was steering with her elbows. She hadn’t shifted out of fourth gear for some time. The Palestinians call it the wall of racial segregation, or the new wall of shame, or the apartheid wall. And she lit the joint, inhaled. The international media, according to their political slant, call it wall or fence or barrier, depends, she said, and exhaled a sweet bluish cloud. She passed me the joint. I don’t like hash. But I couldn’t say no. I took a couple of drags and handed it back to her, and we fell silent, simply staring at the immense wall or fence or barrier. I hadn’t pictured it so tall, so long, so thick, so imposing. It looked like it went on forever. I felt a profound desire to touch it. I was about to ask Tamara to stop, when suddenly I felt queasy. Maybe it was her driving. Maybe it was the combination of hash and the heat inside the Citroën and the adrenaline rush I’d gotten with the soldiers. Maybe it was something much darker and more fleeting. I rolled the window all the way down, stuck my head out and, breathing in the warm fresh air, thought of other walls. Chinese walls and German walls and American walls. Holy walls of temples and damp mossy walls of cells. The brick walls of a ghetto, the walls surrounding an entire people imprisoned in a ghetto, starving in a ghetto, dying slowly and silently. All of a sudden, I saw or imagined I saw on the wall (we were driving very fast and my eyes were almost closed and my pupils were dilated) the all-black figure of the girl in the Banksy painting: her black braid, black bangs, little black skirt, black shoes, black face looking up, her whole body facing up toward the sky as she floats up the wall with the help of a bunch of black balloons held in her tiny black hand. It occurred to me, my head halfway out the window and already experiencing a delicious lethargy from the hash, that a wall is the physical manifestation of man’s hatred of the other. A palpable, concrete manifestation that attempts to separate us from the other, isolate us from the other, eliminate the other from our sight and from our world. But it’s also a clearly useless manifestation: no matter how tall and thick the construction, no matter how long and imposing the structure, a wall is never insurmountable. A wall is never bigger than the spirit of those it confines. Because the other is still there. The other doesn’t disappear, never disappears. The other’s other is me. Me, and my spirit, and my imagination, and my black balloons.

  Tamara gently roused me with an elbow. She offered me the joint and I took it with no hesitation, almost with relief. Regardless of its name, she said, accelerating sharply into a curve, it is what it is.

  THEN EVERYTHING WAS SAND. The undulating landscape. The olive trees. The date palms. The Bedouins and camels on the side of the road. The sky and the clouds and maybe even the wind. As though we were making our way through a watercolor in which everything had been painted with the same sandy brush, on the same sandy canvas, in the same sandy color, but in endless tones and hues. Including us.

  TAKE OFF YOUR CLOTHES.

  Tamara stood in front of me. She raised her arms, peeled off her white linen blouse, and cast it to one side. She kicked once, kicked again, and her leather sandals landed on top of the blouse. She pulled down her khaki shorts, slowly, and tossed those too on top of the blouse. Take off your clothes, she commanded again, her whole body smiling in a red bikini, the freckles on her face sparkling in the sun. I began to sweat. I stuck my hands into my pants pocket. The modern bikini was invented by a French engineer, I stammered, my voice tight and idiotic, or at least to me it sounded tight and idiotic in that vast desert. By Louis Réard. In 1946. Tamara frowned. My hand unexpectedly touched a slip of paper. Réard took the name from Bikini Atoll, I blathered, the slip of paper clenched in my right fist, my right fist clenched in my pants pocket. An atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I said, where that same year the Americans carried out nuclear testing. Did you know that? I clenched the paper tighter, contemplating the shape of her legs and hips, the smooth curve of her belly, the hint of her nipples—round or pointy? pink or vermilion or translucent violet?—through the fabric of her red bikini top. Be quiet now, Eduardo, and take off your clothes. Her smile was emphatic, categorical. I assumed a slight stutter (as a friend suggested I do, during moments of crisis) and started to babble some excuse about my bathing suit, and what a shame that I didn’t have it with me. Look in the suitcase, she said, turning her freckled back to me, in the backseat, she added, her feet already in the water, and you’ll find two towels and a bathing suit for you. I didn’t want to ask whose bathing suit it was. I didn’t want to know. Best not to know. I stood still for a few seconds, the paper held tightly in my hand, watching her step like a goddess into the indigo blue sea.

  WE WERE FLOATING ALL ALONE. There was nobody else there. The water was hot and oily and smelled strongly of sulfur. I was suddenly jolted by an unbearable stinging on the tip of my penis. I thought of the hash. Tamara, watching my face, as though awaiting my reaction, laughed. It burns down there, right? she asked splashing around and laughing some more. It’s the salt, she said. Something the guidebooks don’t tell you. It’ll pass. We were floating close to each other without actually touching. She told me that although she loved the Dead Sea, she detested the hordes of tourists. Years ago, with some girlfriends, she’d stumbled upon this tiny private beach. She tried to come regularly, because the salt was very good for your skin, the salt was very good for many things. Smiling, rubbing invisible crystals between her fingers, she said that Egyptian priests abstained from salt because they believed it increased sexual desire. Swimming a bit closer, she said that the Romans referred to a man who w
as in love as salax, which meant in a salted state, and which, she added with a mischievous glint, was the origin of the word salacious. In traditional Japanese theater, before each performance, they used to scatter salt onstage to protect the actors from evil spirits. In Haiti, the only way to break a spell and bring a zombie back to life was with salt. Until 1408, the French salted their babies instead of baptizing them, and the Dutch placed hunks of salt in their children’s cribs, and the Arabs protected their children by putting salt in their hands on the eve of the seventh day after their birth. Old Jews, as in the Book of Ezekiel, sprinkled babies with salt to protect them from the evil eye. According to the Shulchan Arukh, the book of Jewish laws, Jews must touch salt only with their middle and ring fingers, because if a Jew uses his thumb, his children will die, and if a Jew uses his pinkie, he will become poor, and if a Jew uses his index finger, he will become a murderer. For Jews, salt was a pact, and a covenant, and a superstition, and a punishment, and a downfall, and a cornerstone, and a blessing, and a misfortune, and also a secret. She fell silent. I asked her what secret. I asked her how she knew so much about salt, but Tamara just smiled and told me that where we were was the lowest point on earth. Over there, she said, pointing to some tall yellowish rocks, is where some experts believe that Lot’s wife, when she looked back to see the destruction of Sodom, turned into a pillar of salt. And over there, she said, signaling a huge plateau with her eyes, was the biblical fortification of Masada, where an entire population of Jews, rather than surrender to the Romans, committed mass suicide. Tamara took her hand out of the water and sucked a finger. And over there, she said, pointing her just-sucked finger at the mountains beyond the sea, is Jordan. I liked her long pale index finger better than the gray mountains of Jordan. Not far from us, somewhere in that same dead and salty sea, someone’s prayer was already fading.

  NO ONE LOOKS DOWN. That’s what struck me on another trip, walking the gray streets of Warsaw on that first afternoon, dressed in a pink coat, still bleary, still wearing the same dirty wrinkled clothes—under that awful, garish pink coat—that I’d traveled from Guatemala in. No one greeted me. No one smiled at me. But no one looked down either. Men and women, young and old, they all turned to stare at me without any sort of judgment in their eyes, without emotion, without curiosity, maybe without even thinking me out of place in pink. As though for Poles looking down were a sign of cowardice. As though for Poles the last one to look down, the last one to blink, was declared winner of the game. But a critical game. An unrelenting game. A game between two blind pedestrians putting their lives on the line without realizing it.

  It wasn’t yet four o’clock in the afternoon, but night had fallen. I walked quickly, trying to warm up. I was underdressed or poorly dressed in that pink coat, and remembering that there’s nothing lonelier than watching all the other passengers happily exit the airport and being the only one left standing there, at a still-revolving baggage carousel with not a single suitcase on it, recently landed in a country so foreign and frigid and feeling a nakedness that had nothing to do with clothes, those clothes that I—histrionic pink pedestrian in an abysmally gray city—was now missing and pining for and were lost in some corner of the world.

  An airport official had helped me fill out a form. Then he stared at me gravely and told me in very poor English that they’d have the bag sent to my hotel. I began babbling that I’d be at that hotel for only one night, that the following day I’d be traveling by train—and here, mid-sentence, I cut myself off for a second while I measured my words, while I decided in that endless second whether or not to tell the official I’d be traveling by train to Auschwitz; or perhaps while I decided whether or not I’d go by train to Auschwitz, to Block 11 of Auschwitz, where my grandfather had been prisoner, in 1942. Although in part that was why I’d come to Poland—to go to Auschwitz, to see the cell in the basement of Block 11 where my grandfather had been prisoner—the truth is, I didn’t know if in the end I’d board that train bound for the extermination camp and the gas chambers and the crematorium and Block 11 and the cells in the basement where my grandfather had been trained by a boxer, in 1942. I don’t know why I wasn’t convinced I’d go. Fear of Auschwitz? Fear of the word Auschwitz? Fear of traveling by train to Auschwitz? Fear of forming part of that mass of tourists that goes to Auschwitz, that deplorable, sensationalist mass of tourists that one could even say worships the pornography of all things savage? In any case, and without saying something I shouldn’t, fear of something.

  The airport official was still staring at me steadily in that never-ending second of silence, perhaps bewildered or just waiting for me to finish my sentence. And so I opened my mouth a little, as though to encourage the words. But the words, capricious, insolent, wanted no encouragement. I looked down. I slipped my hand quickly into my pants pocket and felt the cold yellow slip of paper and thought of my grandfather’s hands, pale and impeccable, drawing hats and playing with domino tiles. My grandfather had been captured by Gestapo soldiers in front of his house in Łódź, in November of 1939, as he and his friends and his girlfriend played a game of dominoes. He was sixteen years old. He then spent the rest of the war—the next six years—as a prisoner in various concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme, and Buna Werke, and Auschwitz, where a Polish boxer saved his life, training him to fight not with his fists but with words. My grandfather left Poland in 1945 and refused ever to return, refused ever to pronounce another word in Polish. He lived out the rest of his life in Guatemala, deeply offended by his countrymen, and his native land, and his native tongue. The Poles, he used to say to me, betrayed us. And so every time I mentioned that I wanted to travel to Poland, that I wanted to visit Łódź, my grandfather laughed bitterly or stood and stormed off in a fury or spat a couple of insults at me or perhaps at the entire Polish population. But a few weeks before he died, by then weak, emaciated, and delirious (he thought there were Gestapo soldiers in his room, at his deathbed, waiting for him), my grandfather wrote out his complete address for me on a little sheet of yellow paper: ground floor of a building on the corner of Zeromskiego Street and Persego Maja Street, number 16, close to the Zielony Rynek market, close to Poniatowskiego Park. Like a little yellow testament. Like a little clue to the family treasure. Like a little inheritance left to a grandson. I took that yellow paper from his trembling hand and folded it in two and I knew immediately that my grandfather had given me much more than a wrinkled sheet of yellow paper. It was a mandate. An order. A dictate. An itinerary. A travel guide. A few coordinates on the mysterious and uneven map of our family. It was, in short, a prayer. His last prayer. There, on that folded yellow sheet of paper, with the last scrawl of his own hand, which I was now—standing in the Warsaw airport—clinging to like a talisman, were the coordinates of my grandfather’s personal history, a history that in a way was also mine. In the end, our history is our only patrimony.

  The Polish official was still staring at me steadily. I tried to smile at him, in order to regain some degree of calm or levity, in order not to feel so abandoned in the middle of Warsaw. But all that came out was a forced and awkward expression. The official, solemn, waited in silence, as though he knew I hadn’t finished that faraway sentence about Auschwitz, as though he were giving me time to finish it and tell him what I had to tell him. And so I gathered my strength and clenched the yellow paper in my fist and stood tall and hastened to finish it.

  The next day, I said, I was taking a train, heading south.

  I sensed something bitter in my mouth. The taste, it occurred to me on the way out, of cowardice.

  BOUREKAS. WHAT? I ASKED. Bourekas, Tamara repeated, enunciating the three syllables slowly as she passed me the plastic bag. There are spinach ones and cheese ones, she said. My favorite breakfast, she added.

  Behind us, the Citroën’s door was open and the music on the radio was scarcely audible, like a continuous white purr or a gentle breeze. Tamara had also bought two coffees with milk and sugar, in cardboar
d cups—cold by now, of course, too weak and too sweet. But sitting there before a biblical sea, still barefoot and half-naked and half-dry and sharing a cigarette on a beach of salt and sand, I didn’t care.

  When we finished the bourekas and the coffee, Tamara began telling me about her job at Lufthansa. She told me that at first she’d thought of it as temporary, just until she found something better. She’d been there almost five years. It’s not bad, she said. Pays well. I get to travel a lot. She smiled wryly, as if that were the handbook response. What about that man the other day, I asked, the one at the airport? Tamara reached for my cigarette and took a drag. Happens all the time, troublemakers, she said, and that was all she said. I asked her if anything like that had ever happened midair, during a flight. Nothing serious, she said, handing the cigarette back. But it occurred to me that maybe she wouldn’t tell me. And then I kept thinking about planes. I smoked. The cigarette tasted like Tamara. Tamara tasted like salt. I watched her slowly turn and stretch out facedown, long and slender, her face now very close to my leg, her lips almost kissing my thigh. Sometimes, I said nervously, I dream I’m on a plane hijacked by Arab terrorists. I took another puff, watching her use a skilled hand to untie the bikini’s red knot on her back. It’s a recurrent dream, I said, exhaling. One of the Arab terrorists comes and stands in front of me, I said, and in a panic, I begin reciting the few words of Arabic I remember hearing from my Lebanese grandfather. Her freckled face turning toward me, Tamara looked up with her big blue eyes. Lajem bashin, and kibe naye, and lebne, and mujadara, which are all names of Arabic foods, but they’re the only Arabic words I know. Tamara smiled faintly. Then the Arab terrorist sticks a gun in my face and screams at me to go to hell, screams that I look like a Jew, that I am a Jew, and shoves his gun even closer. I can feel the gun right here, on my forehead, I said to Tamara, and the Arab is about to shoot, about to fire a bullet into my head and kill me, and so I tell him no, he’s mistaken, I’m not a Jew.