My grandmother let go of my hand and shifted slightly and the maroon-and-black-checkered quilt also moved a little, and I thought with a fright that I was about to see the face of my dead grandfather.
My grandmother wanted to say something to me, but the words wouldn’t come to her, or maybe she didn’t know what words to say. I leaned a little closer to her, as though to help. Oh Eduardito, she whispered, and then, with a half-smile, added: That was what your grandfather used to call you, wasn’t it? And she repeated the diminutive of my name a couple of times, her jaw trembling, her voice gradually fading, her pale blue eyes sinking floorward again. I considered her face. A sweet lady, my grandmother, very compassionate and good-natured, but overly sentimental as well. She told me once that her father, my great-grandfather, a Jew from Damascus who lost all the family’s money at cards, would never allow his children to kiss him except on the hand. Nothing else. Just kiss him on the hand. Never, my grandmother said with an amazing sadness, I never got to embrace my father.
Far off, the growing murmur of visitors could be heard in the dining and living rooms.
The rabbi was talking to my grandmother about Noah and the Flood and a rainbow among the clouds and I began looking around my grandparents’ bedroom. There, next to the bed, still hung the only photo my grandfather had managed to keep of his family in Łódź, all of them dead in ghettos or concentration camps: his sisters Raquel (Ula) and Raizel (Rushka), his younger brother Salomón (Zalman), his parents Samuel (tailor) and Masha (washerwoman). Gray, bland faces, all too distant for me. I thought about the last time I’d said to my grandfather that I wanted to travel to Poland, to Łódź, and about his reaction that had bordered on violent. What do you want to go to Poland for? he said. You mustn’t go to Poland, he said, but later he jotted down for me on a small piece of yellow paper (as though it were a small inheritance for a grandson, or a key to a long-buried family secret) his address in Łódź, in precise detaiclass="underline" ground floor of the building on the corner of Źeromskiego and Persego Maja, number 16, near the Zielony Rynek market, near Poniatowskiego Park. And I thought about the number tattooed on my grandfather’s forearm, 69752, a faded green number that as children he told us was his phone number, and he’d smile, saying he had it tattooed there so he wouldn’t forget it. And I thought about Rena Kornreich, another Polish survivor of Auschwitz, who years later, as she herself told it, had her number surgically removed, 1716, but instead of throwing it away, she had kept that small piece of skin, that small piece of herself, in a bottle of formaldehyde. And I thought about Primo Levi, about the number tattooed on Primo Levi’s forearm, 174517, and how, whereas my grandfather avoided his number, hid it, made a joke out of it so as not to acknowledge it, and whereas Mrs. Kornreich tore hers off, Primo Levi left instructions for his to be engraved on his tomb. And so there, on a tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Turin, both his name and his number are engraved: his family name and that other, more sinister name. Both, I suppose, like it or not, intrinsic elements of his identity.
Now the rabbi was talking to my grandmother (who was taking no notice) about some pact of God’s (Hashem, he kept saying) after the Flood, and I went on studying my grandparents’ bedroom. I noticed three things that were out of place. On my grandfather’s bedside table, a candle was burning; the wall mirror above the dresser was covered with an enormous white sheet; the window, always kept shut because of the draft, was wide open. Shlomo had finished his little homily now and I asked him about these three things. Still standing, he seemed to get a real kick out of being able to explain them to me. Whispering, he said that when a Jew dies, a candle is lit because the flame dispels negative energies; that when a Jew dies, all the mirrors in the house are covered so as to eliminate vanities; that when a Jew dies, a window is opened in the room where his body lies, symbolically, so that, as it says in the Torah, in the Book of Daniel, his body might be aided in its ascent to heaven. Shlomo smiled beneficently and topped it off with a few words in Hebrew and I could have sworn I heard harps. He suddenly came a little closer to me, leaned in a little closer. I thought he was about to tell me something else, something very ceremonious and deeply Jewish. I gritted my teeth. Yesterday, he whispered, I came back from Tikal.
I watched the ice cubes melting languidly on my grandmother’s knee.
You’ve been to Tikal, Shlomo said. I liked Tikal very much, he said, and to assure himself that he had conveyed the full extent of his enthusiasm for the Mayan ruins in the Petén jungle, he repeated it twice: Very much, very much. I said nothing. His enthusiasm, in front of a dead body, seemed out of place. I wanted to get up and tell him so, make my excuses and quietly leave my grandparents’ room. But the rabbi placed his warm, furry paw on my shoulder and, very softly, almost breathing the words down at me, began telling me about his trip, about the Mayan temples, about the heat in the jungle, the animals in the jungle, the tourists, about his guide, Juan, a squat, dark-skinned fellow and a terrific guide, he said, a very nice fellow, he said, gripping my shoulder hard, as if to keep me from moving, as if he’d guessed that I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Do you know Juan the guide? he asked, and I just smiled as cynically as I could. He was with us the whole day, Juan, and at the end of the day, he asked us if we wanted to see the sunset from one of the temples, I don’t remember which, maybe the biggest and tallest one. Shlomo looked up at the ceiling of my grandparents’ bedroom, metaphorically. He could take us up there, he said. From up there, he said, we’d have a great view of the sun going down over the jungle canopy.
He was interrupted by the noise of sandals in the corridor. I knew right away that it was Julie, the Salvadorean lady who had been working for twenty years as my grandparents’ cook.
Julie came into the bedroom and walked straight over to me. I wanted to get up and hug her, but the weight of something — possibly the rabbi’s hand on my shoulder — prevented me. Julie smiled with her gold and silver teeth. We gave each other a sideways hug. Don León is resting at last, she said, and turned toward the maroon-and-black-checkered quilt, and I remembered the last time I had seen my grandfather alive, or at least still with a little life left in him, a few weeks earlier, when I had just gotten back from a long trip to the Balkans (chasing ghosts) and Portugal (tearing realities). I’d come to my grandfather’s house to say goodbye, and I knew it was for the last time. He was already very ill. Almost unconscious. Frail and thin, his skin yellowing and flaky. He was delirious. He thought he could see his mother. He thought he was surrounded by German soldiers. My uncles and aunts were having coffee in the dining room, my cousins watching a Spanish league match in the living room. I peered tentatively into the bedroom, and then stood in the doorway watching Julie, who was kneeling on the carpet beside the bed, stroking my grandfather’s forehead. I didn’t go in. There was no need. I said goodbye to my grandfather for the last time in silence, from the doorway, while I watched Julie on her knees in her white uniform, and listened to the way she whispered to my grandfather. Futile words, pious words, words of encouragement and tenderness.