And that’s it.
Literature is no more than a good trick a magician or a sorcerer might perform, making reality appear whole, creating the illusion that reality is a single unified thing. Or perhaps literature needs to construct one reality by destroying another — something that in a very intuitive sense my grandfather already knew — that is, by destroying and then reconstituting itself from its own debris. Or perhaps literature, as my old friend from Brooklyn used to argue, is no more than the precipitate, zigzagging, rambling discourse of a stutterer.
It was something like this that I was reasoning out and brooding over during that cold, sleepless dawn, just about to understand or at least to find something important, when all of a sudden, now smoking a cigarette in bed, I remembered Ingmar Bergman.
The movie is called Skamme in Swedish, Shame in English, Vergonha in Portuguese. And it’s about the experience of a musician couple who take refuge on an island during the Swedish civil war, but being Bergman, it’s also much more than that. It goes something like this. Having lost everything — their house, their belongings, their marriage, their dignity, even their shame — the couple board a boat full of refugees trying to flee the island and the war. The boat’s engine fails and they are stranded in the middle of the sea. They share the last pieces of bread, the last lumps of sugar, the last drops of water. One man kills himself. The boat gets trapped — in a marvelously horrific image — surrounded by a mass of floating corpses. And in the final scene, the beautiful Liv Ullmann, in a laconic, lost voice that anticipates her death, tells us of a dream she’s had. She says: I had a dream. I was walking down a lovely street. On one side, the houses were white, with large arches and columns. On the other side, there was a shady park. Between the trees ran a brook of dark green water. At last I reached a high wall covered in roses. And a plane passed by and set fire to the roses. But nothing happened, because it was a beautiful image. I looked at the water and saw the reflection of how the roses burned. I was carrying a little girl in my arms. Our daughter. She hugged me close. I could even feel her mouth against my cheek. The whole time I knew there was something I mustn’t forget. Something that somebody had told me. But I forgot it.
That is exactly what literature is like. As we write, we know that there is something very important to be said about reality, that we have this something within reach, just there, so close, on the tip of our tongue, and that we mustn’t forget it. But always, without fail, we do.
Sunsets
My grandfather’s body was a vague shape on the bed. I could see it from the doorway, face-up, rigid, quite small, totally covered by his maroon-and-black-checkered quilt. It was Saturday. He’d died early that Saturday morning while he and my grandmother were sleeping. It was forbidden, until dusk, until the end of the day, to move or to touch this small, vague shape that a few hours earlier had been my grandfather.
I entered the bedroom slowly, trying to detect the smell of death. But it didn’t smell of anything, or it didn’t smell of anything other than the medicines and ointments and the sedentary air that always accompanies the elderly. My grandmother was seated on the far side of the bed — that is, on her side of the bed — with her back to my grandfather’s body. I thought she seemed much more stooped now. Her eyes downcast, she held a bag of ice on her left knee. Facing my grandmother was a fat, bald man with a disheveled red beard, dressed in black except for a cream-colored shirt. He was seated in a chair that clearly didn’t belong in my grandparents’ bedroom and that someone had probably brought in that morning. The man adjusted his skullcap and greeted me with a nod but said nothing, his face set in a permanent grimace. I walked over to him. He got up straightaway and offered me a doughy hand. My condolences, he whispered in poor Spanish and I don’t know why, maybe it was my nerves, maybe it was the huge effort he made to sound solemn, but I let out a small laugh. Solemnity, among strangers, is always farcical. He became even more serious and was about to say something to me or ask something of me, when my grandmother finally looked up. Leibele, she stammered, reaching out for my hand. That’s what she called my grandfather, Leibele, which is León in Yiddish. I crouched down, gave her a kiss and then a hug, and my grandmother held my hand between hers, gripping it tightly, clinging to it as though it were a buoy at sea, it occurred to me then, as I began to feel slightly dizzy and noticed that the bag of ice was about to slip and fall on the carpet. I asked what had happened to her knee. My grandmother tried to say something to me but couldn’t and just managed to purse her lips.
You should put this on, the man said to me somewhat brusquely, handing me a white skullcap. Out of respect, he said as I stood looking at the white skullcap in my hand. Kipa, in Hebrew. Yarmulke, in Yiddish. Respect for whom? I thought of asking. But I just put it on. Sit, sit, he said. He moved to one side and pointed to the chair and I thanked him. The chair was warm.
My grandmother whispered something, as though to herself, as though merely to make her presence felt, and carried on lightly shaking her head. She remained anchored to my hand. The bag of ice still sat precariously on her knee. She had the dull, abstracted gaze of someone who had been given a few sedatives.
Shlomo, said the man. I looked up. I tried to focus but all I could see was that his reddish beard, around his mouth, was full of biscuit crumbs. I’m Shlomo, the rabbi, the man said. We haven’t met, he said, you and I, and maybe he noticed that I was looking at his dirty, matted beard, because he immediately rubbed it and crumbs fell like snowflakes onto the carpet. But I know who you are. The grandson, he said. The artist, he said, and I felt a bit insulted and didn’t know if he was confusing me with my brother, but I was too lazy to ask or correct him, so I just said yeah, that’s me.
He spoke slowly, the rabbi, haltingly, with a heavy foreign accent. Possibly a Yiddish or an Israeli accent. It occurred to me that maybe he was the new rabbi, since in a Jewish community as small as Guatemala’s (a hundred families, they usually say), the rabbis are always imported. I remember that when I was a child, there was a rabbi from Miami Beach, more serious than Orthodox, who always had a runny nose, was always clutching a damp handkerchief, and who always said the prayers in English. And a rabbi from Panama who ran off with stolen money. And one from Mexico who only showed up every now and then, for holidays, and another one, also from Mexico, who used to sweat so much when he was praying that he’d have to change his skullcap halfway through the service. But the vast majority of the rabbis, as I remember it, were from Argentina. One, who was always extolling the virtues of the Boca Juniors soccer team and preaching against mixed marriages, got a local Catholic girl pregnant and later married her (own goal, as my grandfather rather philosophically put it). Another Argentinian, a nice young guy named Carlos, who arrived just in the years when I began to distance myself from Judaism and from my family (you can’t do one without the other), used to talk to me about music and nothing else. I’d begun listening to jazz. He also listened to jazz, or he knew about jazz, or maybe he just knew three or four names and used them as a way of bridging the gap. In any case, I was really mixed up at the time. I was very sensitive about everything and very frustrated by everything. I’d recently left home, which also meant leaving behind my father’s religion and everything about his glass-house world. And I really appreciated the fact that Carlos, instead of pestering me, would just talk about Armstrong and Coltrane and Parker and Monk. All except for the last time I saw him (he later moved to Israel with his family). It was in the street, in front of a kids’ ice-cream parlor. We greeted each other. We chatted a little. I told him what was going on with me, possibly a bit anxiously or unhappily, and so Carlos, out of the blue, asked me if I remembered the story of Abraham. The first Jew, he added, smiling. No, I told him. Well, more or less. Still smiling, he quoted a line from the book of Genesis: Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee. Lech l’cha, he said in Hebrew, with a wink, and that was all.