In Madrid his memory of Tangiers sank out of sight like ballast he had shed at his departure, and by now he felt very little remorse for having abandoned his father or for the fact that he was living off a business he had no intention of devoting himself to. Of his earlier life, Budapest and panic, the yellow star on the lapel of his overcoat, the nights huddled beside the radio, the disappearance of his mother and sisters, the travels with his father through Europe carrying a Spanish passport, amazingly few images remained, only an occasional physical sensation, as unreal as early childhood memories. “I saw an interview on television,” he said, “with a man who went blind in his twenties; he was nearly fifty now, and he said that gradually he had been losing images, they were being erased from his memory, so that he couldn’t remember the color blue, for example, or what a certain face looked like, and his dreams were no longer visual. He retained only bits and pieces, and even those were going, he said, the white blur of an almond tree in bloom in his parents’ garden, the red of a balloon that he’d had as a child and that was like a globe of the world. But he realized that in a few more years he would lose everything, even the meaning of the word see. In Madrid, during my years at the university, I forgot about the city of my childhood, the faces of my mother and sisters, and the irony that I didn’t have so much as a snapshot to help remember them when there’d been so many in our house in Budapest, albums filled with photographs my father took with his little Leica, because like music, photography was one of his hobbies, one of the many things that disappeared from his life after we came to Tangiers and he didn’t have either time or energy for anything except work — work, mourning, religion, reading the sacred books he’d never opened in his youth, and visits to synagogues, which he’d never attended until we came here. At first I wasn’t interested in going with him. But I would take him by the hand and lead him as I had that morning in Budapest when we learned that they arrested my mother and sisters.”
After he died, Señor Salama’s father regained the place in his son’s life that he’d occupied many years before, and was the object of the same devotion he’d received when he led his son through the streets of Budapest or Tangiers, a placid boy, obedient, plump, seen smiling in a lost photograph, hazily remembered, in which he was wearing a goalkeeper’s cap and the wide-legged pants of the period between the wars, a proud boy looking up at his father, both wearing a yellow star on their lapel. One June day his father bought a newspaper and after first glancing right and left pointed to the front page, where there was news of the Allied landing in Normandy. Then he folded the paper and put it in his pocket and pressed his son’s hand tightly, transmitting in that way his joy, alerting him not to show any sign of celebrating the invasion in the middle of a street filled with enemies. “When I die, you will say the Kaddish for me for eleven months and one day, like a good firstborn son, and you will travel to the northeast corner of Poland to visit the camp where your mother and two sisters died.”