Authors: Mois Benarroch
Brown Scarf Blues (3 page)
I’d rather they hear more Steve Young songs, the Spanish government I mean. Not Neil Young’s, Steve’s.
And after the obligatory fish lunch that Jewish groups always have, and after the strong Seville coffee, and after the purifying trip to the bathroom, I returned to the dining room where we’d had lunch and everyone was gone, they’d forgotten me, a poet is always forgettable, I went to get my raincoat from the brown wooden coat rack, which rose above the floor like a svelte ballerina, proud of her airy body, and behind her, a scarf. A scarf like the one that killed Isadora Duncan in 1927 in an accident when it got tangled in the wheel of her convertible, she was fifty, like me, she was famous and at the height of her fortune and fame. That scarf was a promise of warmth, of touch, I needed to be touched even if it was by a scarf and not a hand. And that scarf, there by itself, as I put on my raincoat, that scarf seemed like a hand calling me to contact, a gentle hand, of a woman or a man with a fluoric constitution, a fragile scarf, a scarf surrounded by loneliness, it was seeking me as much as I was seeking it, and it found me as much as I found it. I looked around, the waiters had gone, there was no one, just me and the scarf. I took it without much thought and ran to join the group, which had reached the end of the street and was about to step decisively out of sight. I stepped after them with the scarf in hand, not yet around my neck, and asked the last person in the line if the scarf was hers, and whether she knew whose it was. “No, it’s not mine, no, I don’t want that scarf.” Perhaps even the owner said that while everyone was saying “No, it’s not mine, it’s not mine,” until the last person, who suggested I return it to the restaurant, as maybe someone was out on that cold day with only a scarf, maybe in a suit and scarf, maybe because their spouse said just before leaving the house, honey, put on your scarf or you’ll catch a bad cold, or maybe someone set out to lose it that day, because they wanted to forget a gift from a lover.
The scarf, like one of those loves at first sight, the French
coup de foudre
, was now mine, I put it around my neck quickly, hoping no one would awaken from a mini-siesta and remember it was theirs, we were like lifelong friends, the scarf that would be mine for thirteen days, two weeks in November, thirteen days, from Wednesday to Monday, from Seville to Madrid. Great loves are short and are always found in one city and vanish in another. That’s what true loves are like.
4.
The raincoat. I bought it in Salamanca twenty years ago on a trip I took in another era, from Lisbon to London. The price: eleven thousand pesetas, expensive for the time. I wore it very seldom. It never seemed quite right for Jerusalem rain, and on this trip I left it in Madrid, it ended its journey there, too.
The umbrella. I put it in the suitcase at the last second. In Madrid, I left it in my room and it ended up raining. Again at the last second I stuck it in my backpack, on the way to Seville. It was useful here because it rained all day, on the bus the young man from the Three Cultures Foundation apologized for the weather as if he controlled it personally and as if the rain were a result of his carelessness.
I was walking with the umbrella open and each time that I asked whether the scarf belonged to someone, it became more mine, in stages, so after I’d asked fifteen people, half of the scarf was mine, after twenty it was two thirds mine, and so on till we got on the bus to go take a late Andalusian siesta and prepare for the evening program.
I’ll have to check into why the Spanish word for umbrella sounds plural, why we call it
el paraguas
and not
los paraguas.
5.
On the second and final Saturday with the scarf, I went to visit my uncle and as I walked on the Paseo de la Castellana towards his place on the Paseo de la Habana, in that pedestrian-trodden stretch of La Castellana, I finally pissed on the Madrid soil, I couldn’t hold out any longer in that cold weather, and it wasn’t easy, between the four- and five-star hotels and the streets laid out carefully to minimize any hiding places, but just before I reached the Corte Inglés store at Nuevos Ministerios—where two of my books were!—I found a spot and pissed. If I meant to make Madrid mine during this trip, if I meant to take ownership of Madrid on this tenth journey to the city, my piss had marked my territory, my piss and the transient scarf. It wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t help it, so I found a small tree from which I could still see the endless boulevard, and I hope and think no one could see me and I did it fast, like a cat that wants to mark his territory and knows that at any moment someone could show up and scare him away but he has to do it.
I wore the scarf as I walked up the Calle Embajadores for what would be my first meeting with my publishers, Daniel and Talía, who’d gotten married a week earlier but disliked being congratulated, and there I discovered that the publishing house got its name because it’s four floors up from the street. Daniel asked if I wanted to go up or if he should bring down the books he was going to give me, I said I’d go up, of course, little knowing that it was an exhausting trudge up four flights of old, difficult stairs. Both editors were as I’d imagined them from our email exchanges, I don’t think we’d ever spoken till that moment, I think it had all been through characters and words sent through the web. A web of words. Perhaps poetry is disappearing, but the world is more and more filled with words and writings of all kinds.
The past is dead, and the future hasn’t been born.
In the subway station for the line that would take me to my uncle’s place, the green line, a man talking on his cell phone was saying, “Listen, don’t make the same mistakes as last week, cut off the animal’s head first to make sure it’s dead, or shoot it if you like, no, it’s not enough to put it under anesthesia it has to be dead, then you open its guts from top to bottom, right, at the thorax, and cut them all out, you take out the kidneys and heart and put them on ice in the cooler for me, starting with the heart, close it quickly, and move fast, then you can run the rest through the crusher, till hamburger comes out...” We reached the station and got out. On her phone, a woman was telling a man, “Well, your wife should go talk to the school principal since that’s a mother’s job and I want to see you this afternoon, we haven’t seen each other in a week and you see her every day.”
The world had died and we never even noticed.
6.
I reached the Casa del Libro bookstore on the Gran Vía, where I saw many books that interested me but I didn’t buy any, I was afraid of the weight, of putting my luggage over the weight limit, from books that friends would give me, my own books if I didn’t manage to sell them or give them away, and after walking out into the street feeling so modern, so twenty-first century, I had a premonition that we were living in pure change, pure change, that in ten years the world will be a very different world. That’s logical enough, so far so good. But then my mind started wandering, and I tried to imagine the most radical change that could happen in the world, the most unexpected, the most implausible. And ultimately I pictured a world where bookstores sell millions of poetry books. Nothing could be more alien to the world we live in. Every bookstore window filled with poetry books, and if someone asked for a novel, they’d be told there are a few shelves of novels in the basement but nobody reads novels anymore, nobody buys them. Publishers would issue books of unpublished verse by once-famous novelists, the complete poetry of Faulkner and even Philip Roth, we have not the remotest idea that Roth writes poems.
I told my friend Adolfo about this at breakfast, and he said it could never happen. I told him about it at the Café Gijón.
“Of course it can’t, I know that. But it
would
be a change.”
On an empty seat on the subway, I saw an abandoned newspaper. I like to find things in public, especially when I need them, for instance often I’ll need a pen and I’ll find one simply by looking down, or even money, sometimes, scarves, music magazines, just when I wanted to know more about classical music I found six issues of
Fanfare
, each more than four hundred pages long, on a little backstreet along with another periodical, and now here was another newspaper. It was called
¿Y qué?
, which means
So What?
And on the last page, in the lower right corner, was that day’s flash fiction, which, naturally, began with the person waking up. Here’s what it said:
7.
REINCARNATION
When he woke up he realized he was dead and that his soul had migrated into the body of a cow. "AH! La vache!" he thought and said it just the way his anatomy professor used to say it in the natural medicine classes he took in Paris. Now all he was waiting for was to reach the slaughterer, and he regretted his years as a vegetarian in his previous life.
8.
On the third day of the conference, at night, tired, I wrote a story in Haketia. The story’s title means naked, specifically naked from the waist down, a word people would say about children or to children when they would take me for a walk without diapers or without underpants. I wrote the title, “Chumbel,” at the top of the page, and then:
Cuando yo tenía quinze años me invito mi tío, que en buen olam esté, a pazar las vacancias en Madrid...
Chumbel
When I was fifteen, my uncle, may he be in the Buen Olam, invited me to spend my vacation in Madrid with my cousins. Back then there were still no direct flights between Israel and Spain and I went via Paris. It was my first time flying Iberia and since then, whenever I travel on Iberia I miss my dentist. When I reached the capital city of the Gauls, whom we had studied at school, the stewardess said I wasn’t booked on the next flight to Madrid, but she could put me on the one after that. So I waited alone, sprawled on the floor of the airport corridors. The Madrid airport is called Barajas, which usually means “decks of cards.” I could never figure out what decks they meant, unless it was the baccarat decks we played with on Purim or the decks at the Jewish casino in Tetouan. After we landed at Barajas, I went to collect my luggage. But no battered suitcase arrived, everyone else went off happily with their clothes and I didn’t see mine. I was a shy lad but eventually had to approach the company to ask for my socks. A nice lady came and went thousands of times till she told me my suitcase had wound up in Manchester. My grandfather. He was a tzadik who would travel by ship with all his food and provisions and with ten Jewish men so he would have a minyan for shacharit, mincha and arvit, and he never lost a thing, but the first time I fly on my own, my suitcase ends up in a city that even my father never visited. The lady told me, “We’ll send it to your home as soon as possible.” I understood perfectly, since at school we studied French and not Spanish, and I told her it would be better to send the suitcase to my uncle’s. I gave her the address and left.
A day passed and another and I went from office to office and phoned every two hours, but there was no sign of the suitcase, none at all. On the third day my uncle found out and phoned the airline. He explained everything in detail, and eventually, he said, “Yes! But sir, I’m running around chumbel.” And my cousin and I rolled on the floor with laughter while he gestured for us to shut up. And he repeated the word chumbel five or six times, until both of us left his office and closed the door. I don’t know what they thought the word meant, but two hours later the suitcase appeared at my uncle’s home. It was the first suitcase to fly alone from England to Madrid on the Concord so that I would not be running around chumbel.
9.
“I confess that I am a mosque in disguise.”
“And I am an imprisoned metronome.”
10.
Literature aside, if we analyze this case, we have here a frustrated writer who travels to Madrid and thence to Seville, where he finds, he says, a scarf, though perhaps he did not so much find it as rob it, a nearly perfect robbery as not even the robber is aware he robbed it, he has the scarf for thirteen days, and it disappears on the very day when he buys long underpants for twenty-eight euros at El Corte Inglés on the Paseo de la Castellana, along with the only copy of his book that they had in the book department. With his two new acquisitions he heads to the home of his aunt, where he is slightly afraid his family will learn that a few days earlier, he published a story he wrote about an imaginary aunt called Aunt Blanca, who has nothing to do with the aunt he is going to visit, but it is well known that readers tend to identify with characters and then tend to attack writers and condemn them to familial desertion in these cases. In his aunt’s home there works a young South American woman, perhaps from Ecuador, a country where the author is somewhat known because his work appeared in three anthologies edited by a good, longtime friend of his. The young woman is the first suspect in the case, because she is foreign, because she is the one who, when the writer arrived, collected his beret and very possibly the scarf, and because she had been using the writer’s aunt’s moisturizers. And besides, as everyone knows, outsiders are always the first suspects and the ones who always have something to hide. When the frustrated writer leaves his aunt’s, on his way to his cousin’s, after he rides down in the elevator the cold weather reminds him he forgot his beret, so he takes the elevator back up three floors while his cousin goes to get the car before it is ticketed. It is snowing in Madrid. The increasingly frustrated writer goes up and asks the young woman where his beret is, and she is rather nervous, maybe because the aunt’s daughter is wise to what has been happening with the moisturizers, and she says she can only find his beret and umbrella, and if she finds a scarf, she will notify the aunt. It is odd, the aunt and the daughter are chatting about something and when the writer enters, they give fake smiles and change the subject. Everything suggests they were talking about the scarf, but at the same time everything suggests they were talking about the weather or about something even weirder. The frustrated writer thinks his cousin is talking about her husband and is saying he’s having an affair. The writer writes things like that or worse, which is why he sells very badly and why his book is in only one Madrid bookstore. Sometimes he considers himself a cursed writer, and sometimes not. Sometimes he even considers himself a blessed writer whom the gods shield from an accursed fame that destroys those who write. And sometimes he is cold and buys long underpants for twenty-eight euros. The competing brand was thirty-three euros. That, yes that, is the sort of superfluous sentence that earned him a reputation as a sloppy writer.