Brown Scarf Blues (10 page)

Everyone was drinking and wandering through the offices and hallways and even onto a half-balcony on the roof of the back entrance. With no railings. The Sabra started running towards the one-story drop saying he would kill himself, and someone went and calmed him down, explaining that the most he would do is break a hand and a leg, and that even if he landed on his head, a nine-foot leap wouldn’t kill him. That’s when I felt a hand reach in from the hallway, touch me from behind and grab my right breast, it startled me, and I turned around, I couldn’t believe it, it was him, Charly, well, he called himself Charles but we all called him Charly or, to piss him off, The Moroccan or El Marrocano, and there I was with my face practically touching his, with this child ten years younger than me holding me in his arms and asking if I wanted to fuck, it caught me completely off guard, that was the sort of thing the redhead might do, or even the Sabra but not that timid boy who was never sure what to say to a woman, I told him he was crazy but the fact is he was drunk, very drunk, and ultimately it was not too hard to push him away and he fell on the floor, he stayed there for a long moment and I even thought he had hurt himself. Then he raised his right hand towards me and said “Good night.” I went and told the redhead and he gave me a real “guy” response: I should consider it an honor that the best poet of his generation had wanted to fuck me.

Just what I needed. After that, I stopped spending time with those lunatics.

37.

A coma, being in a coma, is a comma, a calmer, in your life. I was dead two whole minutes, I don’t remember it, they told me about it. After death came the coma. Seven months in a coma. I do remember that. Seven months, though I could hardly tell if they were months, days, hours, years, millennia. They could have been anything. In those seven coma/comma/calmer months, I saw many of my reincarnations. Perhaps all of them. And that’s what I’m going to tell you in this book. I will try to be linear but things in the coma world were very different, they were anything but linear. Anything but logical. In mere seconds I could go from the 1400s to 1700s, from male to female, from old to adult to teen to child. Or I would see it all at once in one moment.

When I awoke, the events started structuring themselves on their own. They might have been imagined or real. I can't know. Though if this book sells and if I earn money, maybe I can travel and see all those places that became mine though I was never there physically. At least not in my physical body from this reincarnation. I always believed in metempsychosis (μετεμψ or χωσις), so I’m going to lie and say I was always a firm materialist and after the coma I decided to change my mind. I even have read books about the subject in the past, such as Albec’s famous nineteenth-century volume. Or Kabbalistic books on the topic. But Kabbalah does not generally support the idea. So maybe it’s all pure imagination based on my illogical attempt to give the world meaning through these theories. But I was also never fanatical or obsessive about it. It’s a topic I was interested in and even passionate about at times, much like astrology, but in the end life took me in other directions.

One of those was the road to Sepharad, which might be why the first reincarnation in my coma was from the late 1400s. You could (and should) wonder if I saw that because I was already preconditioned to see myself in Sepharad, specifically in Granada in 1480. If you believe in such things. Or conversely, the fifteenth-century reincarnation might explain my obsession with the era, with Sepharad and the Moriscos and the Marranos. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. They are the two ends of the scarf that are pulling tight to smother me.

Appendix

1
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Dear Mezouar,

You asked about my childhood and I’m surprised again, though such things shouldn’t surprise me anymore, that you’re asking about something that’s exactly what I’m writing about at the moment. I’ve been writing about the first five years of my life at 21 Maharaka Annoual Street. Your question should not surprise me since you’re translating my poetry book
Esquina en Tetuán
into Arabic. And yet the way literature crosses into reality is always surprising, as if the only thing separating fiction from reality were just a window you have to open occasionally to keep from asphyxiating.

The text is called “Pasaje Benarroch,” which you may recall on Mohamed V Street near the Muslim Quarter and the Jewish Quarter, not far from the royal palace in Tetouan. For the past ten years I believed it once belonged to my family, though recently I asked my mother and she said it has nothing to do with our family. I remembered going with my father to collect rent, but it turns out my father had a different building on Mohamed V Street, not in the Pasaje. And it felt like a very literary idea for the passage to be related to my family. Sometimes literature is more logical and perhaps even more real than reality.

Anyway, I was born and lived almost until age thirteen at 21 Maharaka Annoual Street, which before independence was called Consul Murphy Street, in a building with very pretty Andalusian architecture that my grandfather and his brother built in the 1930s. My grandfather, Moisés Benarroch, and his brother Abraham had a prosperous business called Benarroch Brothers that supplied the entire north with sugar, oil and flour. A lot of money passed through those hands, and with that money he constructed buildings in what is now downtown Tetouan. Many of the buildings were put up by Jews returning from the Americas with small fortunes. 

Here is a good photo of the building.

I think the bicycle shop is still there on the ground floor. I lived one floor up, and from the little balcony you could see the edge of the Riff mountain range. My cousins lived one floor up from us and other cousins of my father’s one floor down, the Nahons and the Bibases. On our floor there lived a Muslim whose name I can’t recall, though I’m trying, who worked as a butcher. He was married but had no children and lived with his wife. Well, almost always, because sporadically he would fight with her and rip up the papers, in other words he divorced her according to sharia law, only to appear before the Qadi the next day and marry her again. According to local legend, one day the Qadi told them he would never marry them again, and then the butcher calmed down a bit. I think a great love story occurred in that home, very intense and romantic.

I don’t think you’ll remember the business my grandfather ran with his brother but maybe you’ve seen the Almacenes Sananes store that belonged to my maternal grandfather, who also lived on Maharaka Annoual Street, at number 5, I think, in a house that now contains a twenty-room boarding house for workers from other cities. The last time I went to Tetouan, in 1996, it was being renovated and I told the owner that the house had known great blessings and growth. My maternal grandparents had eight children. And it was a home filled with richness and much generosity. Every Friday my maternal grandfather became a sort of Jewish welfare bureau and all the needy started arriving in the morning to talk with him and complain and leave with a bit of paper money to get them through the next week or brighten their Shabbat. Around three o’clock it was the grandchildren’s turn, and we would all sit on the stairs and wait to be called one at a time, and we each were given some coins. Those who bore his name always got a bit more and there was a whole social hierarchy to the distribution, children of sons got more than children of daughters, boys more than girls, those who bore his name more than anyone, and so on... I think that’s where I first rebelled internally against the injustice of discrimination.

The whole family lived between Mouquauma Street and Mohamed V, as did nearly all the Jews who lived in the new city rather than the Jewish Quarter, in what we called the expansion district. It was a very familial life, filled with cousins and aunts and uncles. Then there was the school, the Ittihad Maroc, which we all called the Alliance, it was a Jewish school though there were also a few Muslim and Christian students. It closed in 1974. It was the first school ever founded by the French organization the Alliance Israélite, back in 1862. It was their first in what became a Jewish educational network spanning the whole Muslim world.

We usually walked to school but sometimes rode the trolley home, though we usually stopped at La Glacial, which at lunchtime was packed with students who lined up to eat their good ice cream, thus spoiling their appetite for lunch. We spent summer vacations at Mediterranean beaches, originally in Martil, then at La Restinga and in later years at Kabila.

Often we traveled to Tangier or Ceuta, to walk around or shop or go to the dentist. I remember the baked goods from Port, and the Kent store where you could always find something, and the sandwiches from Brahim.

I remember those years in fragments, Fátima returns from Belgium with the box of chocolates, I must have been eight, unsure how to react or what to say to Fátima, who used to take me to school and was a second mother.

I’m going to write them down now, those fragments.

Thank you for inviting me to talk about this.

Fragments of a fragmented childhood

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W
alking home from school, we stop at La Glacial for ice cream, there’s a line. I like tutti-frutti more than all the other flavors, and crème brûlée.

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O
n the way home from synagogue, Friday night, Shabbat, we stop at La Campana where we are greeted by a tray of sweets, which will be our dessert after dinner, and part of breakfast.

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A
round midday on a Saturday, we are coming back from synagogue and stop at the Café Nacional to play pinball, or rather to watch other people play. I remember that the Hebrew teacher, Monsieur Cohen, would play for hours on end without losing a game, winning more and more. But now I wonder if the rabbi’s son was playing on Saturday or if that’s a displaced memory, imagined, maybe it was someone else. Thirty or forty children and adults gathered around the pinball machine.

First day of class, I cry a lot into my mother’s skirt, they can’t get me to go into the classroom, eventually I go back home. The second day I go in. Esther’s gaze.

Recess. Switching languages. We all go from French to Spanish. Shouting. Soccer game. Asthma.

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J
ust after school. On the corner they throw rocks at us. They’re Muslim children, we run and escape the torrent of small rocks.

Leaving school at lunchtime. My parents pick us up in the green Renault 4 and take all four of their children to the beach in Martil, my mother has made sandwiches which we eat when we come out of the water. We get back just in time for afternoon classes.

On the way home from school. From a doorway, a Muslim man offers me candy. Properly brought up, I politely say no. And continue on my way. He chases me. I escape, running as fast as I can.

We seldom took the trolley because we could walk home, but that time the driver scolded us for making noise, and another time for requesting a stop without anyone getting off.

Halfway between Tetouan and Ceuta, in the town we called Rincón, now called M’diq, on an alley parallel to the main road, an Italian who made ice cream, the first and perhaps best pistachio ice cream I ever ate.

Flooding on Yom Kippur, we all arrive home from Tefilah drenched. The best adafina of the year, only for children.

Yom Kippur, my Uncle Fortu describing a bucket full of Coca Cola to everyone who was fasting for the first time. The Jardín de las Delicias.

A street vendor selling drinks, we called the drinks Charba—something of no value: Charbalilah.

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O
n holy days, on Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, our home smelled of cleaning, holiness you could smell and feel: the true temple.

Grown-ups called chewing gum maxcanvalde, which means chewing in vain.

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M
y father tells me to go ask one of my uncles for a bit of Teremaká, another word that meant nothing. How many words for absence?

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E
arly mornings in winter, I head out into the deserted streets in search of churros, when I get back we eat them with the smell of café con leche from the Italian coffee machine.

Our 4 a.m. café con leche, without churros, left on the table half consumed before we went out.

In the Jewish Quarter, the last Jew with a Xoqua, a long tunic with a cloth belt at the waist, Yoseff, next to his store. Very short and thin, married to Sol, a huge woman, no children. Sometimes she would come to our home to look after us, so affectionately, Sol, and occasionally she would look after us at her home in the Jewish Quarter, a home of poor people. Sol, Sol, where are you Sol? Today I weep for Sol.

Driss’s grocery store on my street, the first Danone fruit yogurts, hashish bread, Driss always so friendly. Before he had the grocery I think he worked with my grandfather and always remembered him. Driss’s candies.

Tangier Clinic, possible appendicitis. The nurse asks me why I wear my socks to bed “like the Moors do.” The doctor was French, the previous night the Spanish doctor pressured my father to have me operated on immediately, but my father preferred to wait and saved me from an operation. They discharge me that day, I return home. Simple indigestion.