Brown Scarf Blues (2 page)

The painters in my books are all based on him. For years, I told him he should go back to painting, that one could make a living at it. But he didn’t believe me. One August on Rakevet Street, where he rented a small apartment surrounded by trees, he painted five or six of his last pieces. That was 1993. After that all he created were covers for my books. Sometimes he talked about painting after he retired. That won’t happen now. It won’t.

It’s over.

Alan’s life is over. He always drew little imaginary animals for the children, generally called chirpaletas, or sometimes they were also chirpalezas or chirpetas. My kids grew up with a bunch of chirpaletas and he always smiled when he drew for children.

No, I didn’t try to dissuade him. I should have. At least I should have tried. But Alan felt awful and was always very tired, so when he came to visit a few months ago and said he had made up his mind and had no other choice, I said nothing.

“It’s just that if I don’t do it now I could be dead in four or five years.”

His words. Five years. Five years sounds like a lot of years, Alan. It sounds infinite. Five years.

Now I read, “Ten percent chance of complications, one to two percent chance of death.” Thank you modern medicine. Thank you.

No, I never meant to write this book. Maybe that’s why it’s urgent. It calls to me. The book calls to me.

Atalia, one of Alan’s close friends, told me just before the funeral that the only thing she thought when she heard the news was the word MERDE. Multilingual as I am, I think that is the right word, the perfect word. Merde means shit but it’s more than that, it’s, well, Merde. A cry against injustice, against the world, against death. It means to hell with something. Death, merde. Śmierć, merde! He once told me that Atalia was his soulmate and that if he were younger he’d have married her, he is (was?) about fifteen years older than her.

The book calls to me. “Mourn. Now. Mourn now. More now!” The book is calling to me.

“Maybe you could write about that,” a friend said. “Maybe something will come to you.” As if the act of writing earned the writer a consolation prize. It doesn’t. Writing is not a consolation, or a form of psychotherapy. People get that wrong. Writing is the creation of words. Sometimes to fill the void. Sometimes to fill the void that the dead leave. Alan dead. I’m getting used to the idea slowly. If it’s possible to get used to the idea of death. We live in life, and the people we know, we know them when they’re alive, so we don’t know death and cannot conceive death and death does not exist. Something is over, I won’t drink coffee with Alan ever again every Friday with a thin cigar and he won’t describe some new woman he met, starting with her boobs, always with her boobs, especially her boobs, sometimes with a word or two about her ass, and always getting the gender of “boobs” wrong in Hebrew, since in Hebrew boobs are masculine, like in French,
les seins
, but he was always saying, in the feminine, that she had
shadayim yafot
, and sometimes I would correct him and say
shadayim yafim
. The way I often correct my wife. Though sometimes I get it wrong myself. Boobs should be feminine in all languages. That won’t happen anymore. But if I remember those get-togethers now it’s like they’re happening at this moment while I’m writing or when I remember them. They’re happening in remembered reality, remembered, not imagined. And even if it were imagined what difference can there be between that memory and the memory of a live person. None.

This culture does not know how to die. We know nothing about what death is. We don’t know how to talk with the dead. We don’t know how to communicate with them as hundreds of cultures do.

But I spoke with Alan after his death. Well, not spoke, connected with him for a few days. It started before the funeral.

Now, two weeks and two days later I’m making a CD of music we used to listen to together, music he liked, or some songs he never had the chance to hear, songs I meant to play for him when he came over or on one of our road trips to Tel Aviv.

The first is Bob Dylan’s “I’m Not There,” one of Dylan’s old Basement Tapes with The Band. I rediscovered those songs recently and made a CD for his car. Though “I’m Not There” isn’t on the double LP from the seventies, it was recently in the film of that title and I put it on the CD that I made for him. “I’m not there, I’m gone.”

The latest to arrive, too late for Alan, was the most recent Bob Dylan album,
Together through Life
, which I planned to give him before the operation. He’d asked for it as a birthday gift but I gave him a different album, Luka Bloom’s
Amsterdam
, since the Dylan seemed expensive and I told him I’d find it for him another time. Another time came but the album arrived two days after our lunch together. So I thought I would give it to him after the operation, once he recovered. But when his wife said he wasn’t doing well and there had been a complication and they were going to operate a second time, I knew. I knew he wasn’t coming out of this, he wasn’t. And I even thought he would have preferred not to come out of it half alive, disabled, without his already failing kidneys, in a wheelchair, mostly I feared he’d end up in a coma for many years, that would be the worst for Alan. I think he feared that, too, I think that in a way he decided to give the hell up when he saw what awaited him.

Here are the songs to mark the thirtieth day since his funeral, a day when Jews generally gather and talk about the deceased.

1)  Bob Dylan’s “I’m Not There.” A song from his Basement Tapes era. The title says it all and Dylan repeats, “I’m not there, I’m gone.” A recently rediscovered song that we listened to very often in the last few months. Coincidence?

2)  T Bone Burnett “River of Love,” Alan really enjoyed that singer, better known as a producer and composer of film scores, like the Coen brothers’
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
His songs are a kind of rock encyclopedia. His voice sounds a little like Elvis Costello’s. He was part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the seventies.

3)  Merle Haggard “If I Could Only Fly.” It’s a Blaze Foley song. Foley was a singer from Texas who got shot to death at age fifty in 1989, while trying to save an old man from an attacker.

4)  Neil Young “Helpless,” a song we’ve shared. Live version.

5)  Danny O’Keefe “Pieces of the Rain.” A singer-songwriter of the seventies. Another song about rain. The rain on the day of the last lunch.

6)  “Help Me” by Joni Mitchell, a singer Alan loved but I never really connected with.

7)  “Second Lovers Song” by Townes Van Zandt, a very pretty Van Zandt song like most of his songs, and Alan played the recording at his wedding. Van Zandt died at fifty-two, of complications from an operation...

8)  “Woodstock” by Matthews Southern Comfort. The most famous cover recording of this Joni Mitchell title. I don’t know if Alan knew it.

9)  Satie’s
Gymnopedie No. 1
.

10)  “Beside You,” Van Morrison, the last vinyl we listened to together,
Astral Weeks Live at Hollywood Bowl
. One of the last records I bought.

11)  “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou Reed.

12)  “Sweet Dreams,” Emmylou Harris.

13)  “Poet Wind,” David Munyon.

14)  “Rain Falling Down,” Jimmy LaFave.

15)  “No Frontiers,” Mary Black.

16)  “Day is Done,” Nick Drake.

17)  “Dream Café,” Greg Brown.

18)  “Be Well,” Luka Bloom.

Friday arrives. On Friday mornings in recent years we used to sit and drink coffee, in my house or outside. A standing appointment around nine thirty. Then sometimes we’d go for a stroll, or to the supermarket and the post office to see if anything had arrived late in the week. It’s Friday and I’m more aware of the void.

But what I wonder is whether there’s such a thing as a capitalist death, if we decide to die or to take deadly risks with a capitalist mindset.

Let’s see:

Alan.

Age: 55

State of health: mediocre.

Illnesses: obesity.

Condition: heart problems, metabolic diabetes.

Salary: around $3,000 a month.

Mortgage: $130,000. Recent. Monthly payment: $800

Life insurance: $180,000.

Alan thinks about what would happen if his health gets worse, he’d be fired and lose his job. At his age it would be impossible to find another job. Unemployment benefits in Israel are 70% of your salary for seven months. After that he would be left with no life insurance and little Social Security. So maybe his wife would have to support him, something he couldn’t stand for even six months.

So death gives him more than three hundred thousand dollars (the mortgage is also insured) and eliminates all personal expenses. That’s around a hundred months’ salary, assuming he had been able to work till retirement.

Not such a bad deal, death.

This sounds like an absurd calculation to make, but it’s not impossible for such thoughts to cross your mind at a certain age.

Death is economical.

I think Alan chose the operation because he feared deteriorating, becoming dependent. As he said, “If I don’t do something now, in five years I could have a heart attack.” Well he had it sooner, but what meaning can age have after death? None, I think. Age is a necessary parameter for the living. The dead become ageless.

Alan is dead and my mother-in-law is still alive, she’s eternal. Alan is dead and Alan’s aunt is still alive.

Rage came, rage rage against the dying of the light, fury, over a pointless death, a modern death. We’re all to blame. Alan was sick, he shouldn’t have been working, but he was so afraid of being fired that he kept putting himself through an hour and a half of traffic jams every morning and another hour and a half every evening. They wouldn’t even give him a week off before the operation, he worked till the very last day and got home at 9 p.m.

Rage against the need to maintain a standard of living, against taking out mortgages to buy a more centrally located home, against the need to live in cities for better access to supermarkets and shopping and more shopping. Rage against relatives who urge you to live up to your potential, especially your financial potential. Rage against earning more and more.

Rage against a society that won’t let its artists create and improve the world. Alan was an artist, an artist forced to give up painting.

Yesterday I visited his widow. Her home was full of his paintings that had been stored at his aunt’s place, many paintings full of happy colors that I had never seen. It hurt to see them now. Alan’s paintings are hurting me.

Rage against the banks that won’t let us live our lives. Rage against the banks that went after Alan when his natural-products shop went bankrupt, that went after the little he owed them, when we’re the ones who always shoulder the debts that the big millionaires can’t afford to pay.

Rage against the world, the world. The world killed my friend. The world is also me, I am the world. The world that couldn’t convince him not to have the operation, that’s me. Because I knew, I knew he shouldn’t have the operation. I am the world that couldn’t convince Alan to live closer to work, or get him to take a vacation. Yes, Alan, they owe you a month and a half of vacation. You can take it now, in the other world.

You left behind five packages of Partagás Club, a hundred cigars, and two packages of Upmann minis, another forty. At a rate of four or five a day you could smoke them on your vacation. In your final weeks, you stopped smoking. I asked if you had any cigars left, you said you were saving them for after your operation. Yesterday your widow gave me the Partagás, now I’m smoking them for you. You, who are now smoke.

Rage against your wife and the doctors who tried to save you in the operating room that killed you. Rage against the weight-loss drugs that made you put on weight, one of them, the most expensive, Bayeta. Bayeta which sounds like the name of a handgun. In Hebrew, bullet and pill are one word. A deadly pill. A bayeta. A year of bayeta and me telling you that you weren’t well, you would come over for coffee and fall asleep mid-sentence, I would yell and ask if you could hear me and you’d say “Yes” and repeat the last sentence, you weren’t asleep, your eyes had drifted shut.

Rage, rage against literature, which says everything while saying nothing, and the more that it says everything the less it says in truth. Rage against words that can no longer do anything about your pointless death. Rage against the pretty words that make us think and even cry.

3.

But, the scarf from Seville was a goodbye scarf, that’s why the lover left it in the restaurant, after a cell-phone call in which he or she promised to think it over again and just needed more time. And I, with my scarf, was also heading towards a goodbye, a goodbye to a dream. How do you say goodbye to a dream? It’s like saying goodbye to a ghost, like saying goodbye to a brown scarf found in Seville and lost in Madrid, okay, enough with that image, but it’s what I was looking for there. An encounter and a goodbye.

The tour guide took us out one rainy, cloudy morning through the streets of Seville’s Jewish Quarter, and led us to the Alcazar palace. She told our group of thirty Jews about the Inquisition, the Reconquest, Ferdinand and Isabella, and about more and more Catholic monarchs, who wanted to build a castle in the Moorish style, an unpleasant copy of the Alhambra where no one wanted to live now, until we reached the gardens in back, where she no longer explained anything. It never crossed her mind that for these Jews a tour of the Inquisition and the Catholic monarchs would be unpleasant. We’d have preferred hearing about how Jewish pirates used to attack the Spanish monarchs’ ships and steal all their gold along the Pacific coasts and near Morocco and Africa. And how the monarchs reacted to these former Spaniards who became enemies of the Crown. In the afternoon, at the Three Cultures Foundation, which had been the Moroccan Pavilion at Expo 92, I got a good look at the Moors’ architectural revenge for the imitations.

Then we had lunch at a restaurant in the Jewish Quarter, of which little survives although these days Jewish Quarters are popping up everywhere, and Spaniards think these restorations are what we are probably most interested in, though that is an internal matter that has little to do with the Jews. What interests me about Sephardim is their lives, not cemeteries and Jewish Quarters devoid of Jews, that’s the most macabre thing you can show a Sephardic Jew, but in the multicultural world we live in we not only have to swallow these Jew-free Jewish Quarters but applaud when they tell us about the enormous effort to recuperate them, and we have to look interested when they tell us how they expelled us, what the Catholic Monarchs did in our absence, and which Jew was accused of attending the synagogue of an alleged secret rabbi. Multiculturalism is the Western World’s and Europe’s new way to impose their view of reality, “Do you realize how much the Spanish government has spent renovating these Jewish Quarters?” Yes, but so what, it’s another inverted cross, another scarf that smothers more than it warms.