Status Updates From Sepharad

REMEMBER A JEWISH house in a barrio in my native city called the Alcázar, because it occupies the location, still partially walled, where a medieval castle stood, an alcázar, a fortified citadel that belonged first to the Muslims and then after the thirteenth century to the Christians—after 1234 to be exact, when King Ferdinand III of Castile, who in my textbooks was called the Saint.........

In a letter Kafka wrote, I recognized the symptoms of my illness: ennui. I was like a dead man, having no desire to communicate, as if I did not belong to this world or any other; as if during all the years that led to this moment I had acted mechanically, done only what was required of me, while waiting for a voice that would call out to me.

WOULD WAIT IN MY ROOM with the lights off until the bells in the tower of El Salvador Church struck midnight. Cautious, though I hadn’t gone outside yet, cloaked so no one could recognize me on the street, although at that hour and on those raw winter nights there weren’t many people venturing out to face the wind or rain that beat down on the large open plaza.

THE NEW HOUSE, recently occupied, sparely furnished, still echoing empty, the paint fresh on the walls, wood floors smelling of varnish, all trace erased of those who lived there until a few months before, presences of long years’ standing abolished overnight, like the rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung.

Berghof

A DARKENED WORKROOM, abstract as a cell, with white walls, wood floor, and a table of sturdy, rough wood, like the tables you used to see in kitchens, in our kitchen when I as a boy. Places become echoes, transparencies of other places, they rhyme with austere assonance. Walking into the room at this indeterminate hour of the winter afternoon, I am reminded of García Lorca’s room in Huerta de San Vicente...

DAYS BEFORE LEAVING, my life had already been turned by the magnet of the journey, pulled toward the hour of departure, which approached with agonizing slowness. I was still here yet distant, though no one noticed my absence, not from the places where I lived and worked, not from the things that were extensions of myself and indicated my existence, my immobilized life,

THEY DISAPPEAR ONE DAY, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone’s memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world. Someone comes along, suddenly enters your life, is part of it for a few hours, a day, the duration of a journey, becomes a presence so insistent that it’s difficult to recall a time he wasn’t there.