THE ATENEO ESPAÑOL, the Galerías Duna, the lights of the Spanish coast shimmering at night, so close it seemed they weren’t on the other side of the Mediterranean but on the far shore of a very wide river, the Danube, the Duna that Señor Salama saw in his childhood, the river into which in the summer of 1944 the Germans and their lackeys threw the Jews they’d murdered in the street, in broad daylight, hurriedly because the Red Army was approaching and it was possible that the rail lines would be cut and there would be no way to keep sending convoys of the doomed to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or to those lesser-known camps whose names no one remembers. Spain is a stone’s throw away, an hour and a half by ship, witness those lights visible from the terrace of the hotel, but in a conversation with Señor Salama, in the Galerías Duna or in the Ateneo Español, Spain seems thousands of kilometers away, across oceans, as if one were remembering it from the Hogar Español in Moscow one waning winter day or in the Café Madrid in Washington, DC. Spain is so remote that it is nearly nonexistent, an inaccessible, unknown, thankless country they called Sepharad, longing for it with a melancholy without basis or excuse, with a loyalty as constant as that passed from father to son by the ancestors of Señor Salama, the only one of all his line to fulfill the hereditary dream of return, only to be expelled once again, and this time definitively, because of a misfortune that he no longer considered just another injustice of chance as the years went by, but a consequence and punishment for his own pride, for the self-indulgence that had pushed him to be ashamed of his father and to reject him in his deepest heart.
If he hadn’t been driving that car so fearlessly, he thinks day after day, with the same obsessive mourning his father had devoted to the wife and daughters he didn’t save, if he hadn’t been going so fast, wanting to get to the Peninsula as quickly as he could, to go up to Madrid not on one of the slow night trains that scored the country from south to north like dark, powerful rivers but in the car his father gave him as a reward for completing the two degrees he’d studied for concurrently and completed with such brilliance. By now neither father nor son maintained the fiction that these university diplomas were going to help the business on Pasteur Boulevard prosper. Tangiers, Señor Salama told his father when he went home after his last courses, would not much longer be the lively and open international city it had been when they arrived in 1944. Now it belonged to the kingdom of Morocco, and little by little foreigners would have to leave—“we first,” said the father with a flash of the wit and sarcasm of old. “I only hope they throw us out with better manners than the Hungarians, or the Spanish in 1492.”
That’s what he said, the Spanish, as if he didn’t consider himself one of them anymore, even though he held that citizenship and during a period in his life had felt such pride in belonging to a Sephardic line. Señor Salama realized that his father was calculating the possibility of selling the business and emigrating to Israel. But the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to change countries again. “I should have paid attention to my father,” he says now, in another of his episodes of repentance, “because Spain doesn’t want to know about anything Spanish in Tangiers — or about those of us Spaniards who are still here. In Morocco there is less and less room for us, but they don’t want us in Spain either. With the pension I’ll get when I close this shop, from which I get next to nothing now, when I retire I won’t have enough to live on the Peninsula, so I’ll stay here to die in Tangiers, where we are less and less Spanish and more and more old foreigners. I could go to Israel, of course, but what would I do at my age, in a country I know nothing about, a place where I have no one?”
If he had paid attention to his father then, if he’d had a little patience, if he hadn’t been driving so fast along one of those Spanish highways of the 1950s, so full of himself, he says, his fleshy lips twisted in a sardonic smile, believing he could do anything, in control of his life.