Authors: Mois Benarroch
Brown Scarf Blues (4 page)
11.
What was the writer thinking about at those key moments? In those moments when the scarf ceased to exist for him?
Well, let’s ask him.
The investigation begins.
12.
“What were you thinking about?”
“When?”
“During the scarf incident, well, before, when it started snowing.”
“I was sitting in the Café Gijón with the writer Guillermo García Gasset, and it began to snow, he said he was going, and I said I’d pick up the bill, because he almost always pays and he’s considerate enough to realize I have much less money than he does, so I thought I should treat him for a change. They brought me the bill, which at that café consists of a bunch of slips of paper for the things you ordered, every time you order something they add a slip, I thought I saw nineteen euros on one and eight or nine euros on the other, and we’d only drunk two coffees and an orange juice and I’d had a croissant, and then I said to myself it was too much, so at one point I said we should split it, and I felt ridiculous, then I realized the nineteen was ten euros, the zero looked like a nine, but it was still an excessive sum, I figured that next time we should meet at a more normal café, since a few days earlier I’d had a whole breakfast on the same block for three euros, with juice and toast and coffee and all, and then he left. I told him I’d stay a few more minutes and smoke another Cohiba Mini and then I’d go, maybe I would wait for the snowstorm to subside.”
“And did you say anything about the scarf?”
“No, nothing about the scarf, though afterwards we made plans twice but never got together, he cancelled, saying he had builders and electricians coming and going at his house, which was very unusual for Guillermo. But we did talk about the book.”
“What did you say?”
“Not much, but I told him I’d seen a copy at El Corte Inglés and that I didn’t know whether to buy it for my aunt, because she’d asked me for some copies and my publishers were in Guadalajara and I couldn’t buy them at the publishing house, I hesitated, wondering if El Corte Inglés would reorder it or if they would be content to have sold one copy, and he categorically said yes, I should buy it, so it would show up as a sale, and besides they had another book of mine on the shelves, maybe I sell well or maybe that book department accounts for all the books I sell and I didn’t even know it.”
“Do you think he could have taken your scarf?”
“Could be, since I don’t remember seeing it after that. I think on such a cold day I’d have noticed before leaving. I believe I left the house with it but I don’t remember seeing it after that, maybe Guillermo thought it was his and took it or maybe he’s a kleptomaniac and stole it when I went to the rest room, maybe he’s even a scarf kleptomaniac. He’s a bit odd.”
“And after that what did you think?”
“Let’s see, do you think this is important? It was just a scarf, it’s not the stuff of crime novels and investigations.”
“A criminal can hide behind a scarf, and behind every criminal lurks a crime.”
“That’s downright Twitter-worthy, that is, but these questions are boring me.”
“But please go on...”
“I was planning to walk up the Paseo de la Castellana, and that reminded me that a Hebrew translator once translated it as Castellana Street, which sounds even worse in Hebrew, and what I felt was that it was very cold out, so I crossed the street, which seems very wide when it’s snowing, and caught a bus that I was sure would go up the Castellana, but halfway up it took a left, so I got out, that whole time I was bundled up and can’t recall whether that included the scarf, but I think it did, I don’t remember, even though I liked my scarf, but I don’t remember, I do remember taking it off at the Gijón, after that I don’t know. So I hurried off the bus and kept walking, I thought I was almost there but I wasn’t nearly there, I saw the spot where I’d peed three days earlier and I thought that on a day like this your dick could freeze, ow! I think it was the 5 bus, and I kept walking quickly towards El Corte Inglés, I needed to pee and when I arrived I couldn’t find a bathroom, maybe I went up to the café on the sixth floor and had something to drink, or maybe that was a previous visit, and this time I held off. While I was there I bought a pair of black long underpants, and I put them on in the fitting room, for some reason I told the sales clerk that I came from a hot country where I never wear long underpants, I don’t know why I said that, but I remember thinking that as I said it, and I also thought that I didn’t say the word Israel for fear that he wouldn’t sell me the underpants, I thought of asking for a VAT refund, but I didn’t, it’s a tedious process, and I did it once and they never even returned the eleven euros they owed me, and for that pittance I felt rich for a few moments, the truth is that in those weeks I wasn’t short of cash, a rare occurrence in my life, rare in the life of a frustrated writer who finds scarves. Then I ate a tapa at the Bar Delfín, and another at the Cervecería Köln, on the Calle Orense, before going up to my aunt’s place. And I’m getting tired of this.”
“Well, me too. We’ll continue tomorrow.”
13.
No.
This business of turning the story into a crime novella is not going well. But what matters in literature is opening doors, opening doors and walking through the door you didn’t mean to. And such mistakes can make even better literature than entering familiar rooms. A scarf is a scarf and what’s needed here is a word in Haketia, the scarf hayea, or more properly Hhayea, which means “to warm” but at the same time “to caress.” Words now gone from the world, now lost in the volcanoes of history, languages smothered by time, notions that get lost, that is the scarf for me. The verb “hayear” is not just something that warms your neck, not just bundling that bundles you, but a caress, a mother garment, a lover garment, a friend garment, a garment given to you in a restaurant thousands of miles from home that stays with you in the cold, in the snow, that follows your path through life for a few days, difficult days, days of internal and external cold, that is a brown scarf for my throat, for my neck, for my steps through the world.
14.
“One can always kill oneself.”
“The little that wasn’t killed already?”
15.
I came to say goodbye, I came to bury, I came to kill, I came to mourn that author who now will never exist. One of those writers I was going to be, a kind of rock star, the kind everyone asks their opinion, I came to say goodbye to that author who can no longer be. I came to say goodbye to his fame. At fifty, it’s too late to be an enfant terrible, or, of course, a wunderkind, that time is past, and you’re left with failure, a failure that immortality might someday rescue from oblivion, but only momentarily, oblivion is inevitable, even God and his Bible were forgotten for long periods, though of course He is better connected than the rest of us. And so I came to say goodbye to the man who was going to sell books, that writer always waiting for me on some corner that I dodged, like a thief who knows there’s a cop on that street. I don’t regret doing it, even if that’s who everyone wants you to be and who your friends wish you’d become, though I can’t see why. Japanese writers used to write seven books under a pen name before publishing under their own name, there’s nothing worse than being identified with your first or second book, before you’ve really become the writer you are, before knowing what you want and what you consider good or bad. Readers will find you eventually, and if not, it’s their loss. What matters is always to write what you want, long before anyone reads it. So, I learned from my publisher that I was an unsold writer, but despite that, he told me:
“Just because your book’s not selling doesn’t mean we don’t want to see more manuscripts from you and publish them, though we understand if you don’t want to stick with us and decide to go with another house.”
I told him to be careful what he says. But I laughed. “I’ve always had a good relationship with my publishers, but they all went bankrupt.”
My publishers, the two of them, who are true publishers and run the whole operation themselves, started laughing.
“Well, not all of them, one died at fifty-seven.”
“Maybe we don’t want to keep publishing you then.”
We laughed. The scarf there in my backpack. Trying to get out, trying to straighten itself like a cobra in a circus, to find out what is happening to the man who found it in Seville, and took it to the capital. The scarf that wanted to know what the publishers’ publishing house was like, what publishing houses in the capital were like, on that street, on the Calle Embajadores.
There are many good writers but few good publishers.
16.
The world disappointed her. For very good reasons, the world disappointed her. For the world disappoints everyone in the world. Men always deceived her, stealing her last cent, even four days before she died, taking what little compensation she’d gotten from Social Security for her terminal illness. Her children didn’t understand her, and those who did steered clear of her, those she treated left as soon as they felt better, and they feared her. Cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, parents, none of them could understand what she wanted. And no one could help her, at least not with money, because her money vanished into fantastical business schemes in which everyone who could cheat her cheated her. The banks came after her debts, great Biblical behemoths, like great torrents of salt, were coming for her money, bringing debtors and guarantors down on her, with the debtors waiting below, hoping something would drop to them. She needed great fortunes, which had disappeared from the family a generation earlier, otherwise she could have lived as a great squanderer, and she never forgave her mother for spending and living, though some of the expenditures were herself and her own divorces and businesses and infinite spending. She died young. If she hadn’t, she might have ended up in prison. Life itself can be the worst prison.
17.
Another tale in Haketia:
Contan de un anciano que se halqueó de hadrear en todos las lenguas que conocía...
They say there was once an old man who grew tired of talking all the languages he knew—French and Italian, English and Spanish—and started speaking only in Haketia, though from time to time he would throw in an Arabic word, such as hak or aj’i. All his children had become modern and spoke only Hebrew (that’s what modernity was like in his city of Netanya), and they wanted to be Israeli, so they asked their parents not to confuse them by speaking other languages. People were already saying Israel should be a democratic secular western country, and therefore they stopped speaking French and Spanish. No one understood this old man, so they took him to a Ladino language specialist, who said he understood many of the words but that the sentences were tricky, since he couldn’t understand verbs like wajshear and halquear, which sounded Spanish to him. Then they brought in an Argentinian professor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and she was scared because she said that some of his speech sounded like Spanish but the rest sounded like Arabic words, and someone should alert the security forces because they might be coded messages about terrorist attacks. Next they took him to an Arabic teacher born in Baghdad, who said he couldn’t understand any of it, but he thought it sounded like a language spoken in Morocco that combines Old Spanish with Arabic, and he thought it was called something like Jankatia. So they asked around about that language and finally found a teacher in Beersheba who was the last person who spoke it in the Land of Israel. And he came and listened to this old man.
And the old man told him he could no longer speak anything but Haketia because he had very little zman left on this Earth and would soon go to the Olam Habah, for he had seen his mother Freja and his father Moshe, and all his aunts and uncles, and that he sat down to eat with them every day and they said not to be frightened and they would help him on his journey, and that they could hardly wait for his arrival. But he asked all his children to please go to his funeral and say Kaddish together after he died, and do the same during the Avel period, the seven days of Shiva, and he asked them to do that throughout the year, and told them that in Tetouan there was a treasure that his grandfather Mimon had brought from Pará, consisting of fifty gold coins, and that this treasure was in the middle of the family’s small farm in La Torreta. They would need to make an X from one side to the other, and a hundred feet from the middle was the treasure, and he asked them to use the money to look after the cemetery and the graves of their parents and their family. And the next day the old man departed to the Buen Olam. May he rest there in peace.
18.
Saying goodbye to the writer, to a writer I was going to be, a prize-winning author who gave his opinions daily in the newspapers, who would get divorced and receive love letters from much younger women, the writer who would get drunk regularly, the writer who, deep down, I never wanted to be. Saying goodbye to what you never wanted. To what maybe you thought you wanted, to what other people wanted for you, to a dream that was never yours. Even saying goodbye to saying goodbye. That’s why I came here, to Madrid, to see that writer walking towards me and then cross to the opposite sidewalk, I never was him and never wanted to be him, and yet he kept crossing my path on the streets of big cities, and he kept saying, “Look, look how good I’ve got it, you should be like me, too, like me.” Cordial as ever, such a good friend, saying “Yes, that’s what’s good.” But no more, though I still haven’t been able to tell him to his face, at least I’ve crossed to the other sidewalk, across a broad avenue, the far sidewalk, where he didn’t spot me on a foggy day. If that’s what’s good and if that’s success, he can have it. Let him keep it. I’m looking for something else. A different sidewalk. A different scarf.
19.
On the last day with the scarf, I walked along the Calle Orense on the way to my aunt’s, but I was early and did not want to hang out there for three quarters of an hour before lunch, so I went to have a tapa at the Bar Delfín. I had ordered a glass of red wine (I’m not a beer drinker) and a mini-omelet when I heard someone say my name behind me, my old name that was never my real name, and years ago I switched back to the older original name. A woman’s voice was saying my name and then a male voice joined her. The place was basically a corridor with a counter on each side and a couple of tables in back, where Ester Cohen and Arturo Belano were seated. I knew her, and I had only read him, I’ve no idea how he knew me, but since they say he reads everything, maybe he even read one of my books, what I didn’t understand was why he didn’t call me by name, well, maybe he didn’t know me and was just following Ester’s lead. They waved me over to join them so I picked up the wine I’d already been served, my black backpack, and I didn’t have more hands to carry the mini-omelet but the bartender said he would bring it over. I sat across from the two of them, and I felt like an idiot. I didn't know what to say.