A Guide for the Perplexed

In 1935, my parents, both direct descendants of Moses Maimonides, received an engraved invitation from the Alcalde de Córdoba to an eight hundredth birthday party. I was a skinny nine in Mrs. Benning’s fourth-grade class at P.S. 145, and too young, in Spanish eyes, to skip school or stay up for a party. But to my mother, it beat lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Poor Mama. She always believed there would be an apology. In 1290, Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Cromwell apologized, and the Jews returned. In 1306, Philip the Fair expelled the Jews from France. It took the Revolution, but the French invited them back.

“Fourteen ninety-two was a mistake,” Mama explained, “a failure of imagination. Isabella had to pay for Columbus’s expedition. She couldn’t think of a better way than to expel the Jews and confiscate their property.” From a framed watercolor above my bed, Columbus’s three boats sailed out of Palos de la Frontera, leading a flotilla of other less-seaworthy craft filled to the rails with sad-eyed Jews. Although the centuries following the Expulsion were pockmarked with the occasional efforts of needy politicians to bring wealthy Jews back onto the peninsula, the bishops prevailed over the bankrupts, and the Jews were kept out.

“Columbus Schlamumbus,” Papa said, and I tended to agree with him. “If the Spanish really wanted to apologize, they’d have sent the boat fare.”

I did. In ’44, eighteen years old and geographically naïve, I was seduced over the border by a musician. Even then, I spent under twelve hours on the peninsula, and was back in Vichy by noon. Afterward, firm resolve, never again! They told me that after Franco died life returned—a rabbi was invited to lecture in Barcelona, a synagogue reopened in Córdoba. I should care, who never went to college, who never set foot in a synagogue? As Papa said—forget the apology, send cash.

Until the business of the Esau Letter. After Leo died—how wonderful to write that word, “passed” being the required term in the condo, as if you moved out of South Glades Drive and into the North Miami Beach Funeral Parlor in gown and mortarboard—I was worried that some of my wiring upstairs might start to crumble. But it wasn’t for another fourteen years, until 1989, when I left London and moved back to the Home of the Brave, that I began to forget, and worse, to remember that I had forgotten. Memory—the black lung of Miami Beach. Twenty-seven percent of my condo has Alzheimer’s. Don’t tell me it isn’t contagious.

It was barely six weeks ago, a quiet pre-Thanksgiving morning. I was up in 9H, drinking Sanka and talking about this and that with Gershon Mundel while his wife was out shoplifting at Burdine’s, when we got onto the subject of Miami zoning restrictions. I told him that since my parents were second cousins—in-breeding being one of the few foibles the Jews share with racehorses and Spanish nobility—they had a common ancestor, the first European settler of Miami. Gershon politely inquired when that might have been. I told him, and went on to describe the cross-fertilization with the Indians and the conversions. I was well into the story of how, by 1495, my great-great-ancestor Esau had filled enough swamp and taught enough Hebrew to hold the first minyan on the North American continent when I noticed Gershon’s eyes searching for the telephone.

I told him, no, no, don’t call the white jackets yet, I have written proof, and took the stairs two at a time down the fire exit to my apartment. When Gershon knocked an hour later—my bank books, my journals, my junior high school diploma, all my paper possessions laid out in a grid on the living-room rug—the Esau Letter was still unfound. He suggested that we eat a little something. I opened a can of mushroom soup but insisted that he sit down with a pad and pencil and help me work out when I had last seen the Letter.

When I moved from London to Miami? No, I’d only assumed it was in the brown satchel with Papa’s other papers.

When I married Leo? Definitely not. We married out of such desperate need—in 1950 I was still searching for something far more important—that by the time it occurred to me that we had never had a courtship of late-night schnapps and autobiographical recitation, the moment had passed, and Leo was dead.

The fall of 1977, when Sonny rented my front parlor? It seemed likely, he would have been interested. But I could not picture the two of us in the green room with the bay window and Leo’s pianola, me sitting next to Sonny on the fold-out sofa, Letter in hand.

In a single breath I told Gershon of that suicide, forty-six, forty-seven years ago, in Port Bou on the Spanish border, high above the Mediterranean. How Zoltan had undoubtedly died with the Letter among the other forged papers I had given him. How the Letter, wrapped in a purple ribbon, stuffed in Papa’s portfolio, must have bounced on the stretcher alongside the lifeless body of my virtuoso lover, down a rocky goat path toward the hospital in Figueras. Gershon fed me a spoonful of cold soup.

Sonny called the next night, as he does once or twice a year, from Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, an airport phone somewhere. My old brain was still full of the Letter, and Sonny was very comforting, assuring me that a document as valuable as the Letter would certainly have been saved, even by Franco’s stone-stupid border police. Fascists and the Catholic Church, he said. They burn copies, but they file the originals away for a rainy day. The Letter must be around, he said. And probably in Spain. A note arrived a week later, with a list of a dozen names of priests, scholars, and collectors throughout the country, and a suggestion that I write to you, dear Benjamin, and book a trip immediately.

Your arrangements were faultless. Irún to Burgos: the train was punctual and comfortable—the conductor moved me to First Class, thank you very much. Burgos to Salamanca: shared a compartment with a woman my age and her grandchildren, aged seven (the boy) and five (the girl). Sweet, I suppose, though I’ve lost all patience with anything under sixteen—they turned up their noses at my orange; I still dream about fruit, fresh, canned, rotten, bruised, or artificial. Fell asleep to their voices, a song I remember hearing in ’44, on the rainy night we tried to sleep in an olive grove outside a tiny refugee camp.

“El sol se llama Lorenzo,
Boom da da, boom da da, boom,
El sol se llama Lorenzo,
Y la luna, Catalina,
Boom da da, boom da da, boom.”

“Cuando Lorenzo se acuesta,
Boom da da, boom da da, boom.
Cuando Lorenzo se acuesta
Catalina se levanta,
Boom da da, boom da da, boom.”

The old days, when Lorenzo never set on the Spanish Empire, are thankfully vorbei. They tell me Lorenzo has been rehabilitated, that in the latest climate of tourism he has passed from devil incarnate to patron saint of the dustbowls of Castile. You can’t drive into a travel agency in Florida without getting mugged by that neo-Miró of a Spanish travel poster—the kindergarten letters, the españa scrawled haphazardly across Lorenzo’s grinning face.

Why Lorenzo, why Catalina? Why not Abraham and Sarah? There’s a question for the readers of your Guide.

I don’t know which is worse—leaving Spain after two weeks without the Letter, or being kept from leaving five hundred years after being expelled. Still, no complaints—I don’t suppose you have any control over wildcat strikes by Spanish airport workers. I can’t blame Sonny for his list of recommendations. Maybe Don Lucho did have it in Burgos, or it was sitting all the time in Salamanca in the safe of Dr. de Salas, or the mattress of Doña Carreres, the great-great-grandsomething of Ferdinand the Catholic. Maybe none of them liked my looks, despite the color of my traveler’s checks. Maybe I need a better map. Maybe I need to bury my obsessions. Is there room in your steamer trunk?

I am, in fact, relieved to move from a quest of my own to a task for you. Although, Benjamin, when you wrote suggesting I carry a package to the Dominican Republic in return for my airfare, I didn’t expect a package the size of the Ritz. Even the attendant at Baggage Claim was shocked that any man would give a woman such as myself a ticket to a trunk such as this.

Still, I will follow your orders to the letter. I am a woman of great, severe independence. But I have always known that I am happiest, that I am at my best, my most successful, when my independence is strictly, knowledgeably, faithfully guided. It’s about time, with the rest of my traveling, that I see a bit of the Caribbean. It might as well be in the company of your steamer trunk.

Our super Roberto is a Dominican and guarantees that I will adore Sosua. He used to play professional baseball, for Cleveland or Pittsburgh or one of those other godforsaken Ukrainian capitals. I caught him one day swatting aluminum Metrecal cans with a mop handle into the dumpster outside the Activities Room. He gave me a demonstration of the batting postures of the great Dominican ballplayers—Manny and Jesús, a pitcher named Walking Underwear.

“Ancient Dominican game,” Roberto confided. “Baseball before Columbus, way, way, before.” Everyone around the condo has his own personal time bomb. I promised to keep his secret.

He told me New Year’s Eve in Sosua ought to be festive. The town is so small that there are only two parties, one for the people who are willing to march through the cane fields to dance at the Town Hall, and one for those who aren’t. As a foreigner, I will be invited to both, claims Roberto, and I will undoubtedly meet your contact. I can just see myself wandering down a muddy goat path from the Town Hall to the other party, with your trunk on the back of a burro.

My burro at the airport tonight was one particularly flighty model—one of those New Women who started taking over England in the early eighties when gender was denationalized. This one had Unmarried Journalist tattooed all over her exposed parts—camera on a trolley, Palestinian scarf (100 percent raw silk) wrapped a little too Amelia Earhartily around a too-long neck, soft corduroy jumpsuit (another memento from Qaddafi’s bunker), and a self-enclosed look of naïve confusion when I passed her my best MittelEuropa baggage tip before Colón went on strike. Luckily, at six feet she had enough Anglo-jump and Saxon-bicep to lug one end of your trunk out of the airport and into a taxi.

I left her lying flat on her shoulder bag outside Colón. A squadron of fighter planes—ours? theirs?—overflew us (that’s the condo term) as soon as the airport workers ran us out of the departure lounge. I’m from the generation to whom the sound of planes overhead is the sound of rescue. My poor lady journalist must have had a Southeast Asia assignment somewhere in her past, filming Hanoi Jane for David Frost—who knows what horrifying matinee shot into her retina at that moment. I felt bad leaving her on the pavement, but it was late, and the last taxi, and rain was threatening, and by the time the driver could hear me over the roar of the fighters, it was too late to stop. Besides, I hate journalists.

I asked the taxi driver to head for the Casa Curro, where I was sure the manager would give me back my old room. The driver told me there was a choo choo convention in town, and that the Curro was undoubtedly full. He dropped me at the Huéspedes La Rábida instead and suggested I talk with the night maid, Maraquita, and mention his name.

Maraquita was no maid. The Huéspedes La Rábida, as you well know, is a bordello, pure and simple, and the taxi driver, long gone, is another Iberian imbecile. No matter, I told Maraquita, if you have a room to spare I will take it and reimburse you for the lost business.

“Impossible, Señora.” She smiled. “There is a chew convention in town. Even if you could afford the cost, you would get no sleep, and worse, I would feel guilty.” Indeed, the line of well-dressed men with shiny shoes, stretching past her desk, through the inner courtyard and up a flight of wooden stairs in the dim distance, was neither patient nor quiet. The moment called for dramatic gesture. I sank down on the trunk and pulled out your Guide. The effect was instantaneous.

“Señora,” she said, moving me away from the comments of the customers into the office behind the desk, “you are welcome to stay here. You will not sleep, but I have television and coffee, and the boy has just run out for churros.”

An office! The couch was a lightly upholstered remnant from the sixties with the Ilums Bolighus tag still on the arm. Two Louis XIV-repro side tables held a pair of Chinese lamps. Maraquita drew me coffee from a stainless steel samovar and tuned the TV—every bit as big as Mr. Samson’s in 12E, who made his fortune in cable—to a remarkably clear rerun of Roots dubbed into screechy Castilian. Everything in beige and chrome, not a flake of whorehouse red.

“A furniture convention last spring.” Maraquita beamed at my approval. “I took payment in trade.”

Two of the customers lugged your trunk into the office. I tried to tip them, but they raised their hats and handed me their cards: S. Jaime Carranque, BigFoot, Lima; Ryszard Koksacki, Shoe Coup, Krakow. I offered coffee, but they begged off with more-pressing business. A couple of real gents. I almost forgot I was in Spain.

“About that book.” Maraquita closed the door on Messrs. Carranque and Koksacki.

“Of course, I know it. Everybody knows it,” and her accent on “know” seemed a comment on how few appropriate words there are in English to convey what the Spaniards think of your Guide.

“Of course I am, page 35.” And sure enough, there she, or rather her establishment, lay.

In the Old Spain of long engagements and formidable duennas, serenades to unseen señoritas and sex supervised by sextons, establishments like the Huéspedes La Rábida carried out a noble and necessary function. Much as the picador initiates the bull in the art of the game, sapping the beast of his vital spirits before his encounter with the inevitable matador, so have the ladies of La Rábida prepared scores of Mariposan men for the Spartan hardships of the Spanish connubial bed.

One legend has it that La Rábida reclines on the site of a tenth-century Moorish bordello, the first established in Spain after the landing of Tariq at Gibraltar in 711. Another popular story dates from 1498. That was the year in which Cardinal Ximenes, Queen Isabella’s confessor and later Grand Inquisitor, ordered all Spanish clergy to refrain from the common practice of concubinage. Despite appeals to Rome and Isabella, the better part of the ecclesiastics obeyed. Four hundred monks from Andalusia, however, fled to North Africa with their “wives” and turned Muslim. And a small group of disgruntled friars from the monastery of La Rábida—which had sheltered Christopher Columbus only six years earlier, before his first Voyage of Discovery—left the Church and carted their concubines across the marshes of the Coto Doñana to the site of the current establishment in the center of Mariposa Antigua.

Among the patrons reputedly registered in the guest book, carefully locked away daily by the proprietress, are Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Miguel de Unamuno, Francisco Goya, Pope Alexander IV, and Ferdinand V, the Catholic, King of Aragón and Castile.

In the New Spain, the house has become infested with Germans and Japanese on well-financed Sexspielen and Labu-Tripu. To the extent that Mariposa can boast a red-light district, Huéspedes La Rábida is at its scarlet heart. This may explain its popularity with conventioneers, although the house discourages British clientele, especially coach tours. The girls are generally well maintained, with most hailing from the region, suffering neither from the severity nor the wit of the Big City.

You will also pay less at La Rábida than you will in Madrid or even Granada. The difference in price is reflected in the decor. The rooms are functionally appointed, lacking both the picturesque antiquity of the novels of García Márquez and the big-hearted Catholicism of Graham Greene. This may come as a disappointment to the non-Spaniard, who equates the function of a bordello with fantasy and adventure, who requires the Chinoiserie of one room, the rawhide of another, the chalkboard and ruler, the lace, the ribbons, the fresh-baked smell of buttermilk biscuits.

This is a Spanish whorehouse! Enough with form, enough with ceremony, enough with ritual and dignity! Those are for courtship, marriage, and widowhood! The function here is Aristotelian: pure, complete, cathartic.

Tel: (39) 492 291. 33 Plaza La Rábida. Reservations not accepted. From 1,500 pesetas upward, safety equipment provided. AE, MC, Visa, Diners Club, Traveler’s Checks.

“Not a bad recommendation,” I said, with the slight conviction that had more to do with my ignorance of these places than my judgment of your critique.

“How do you find Ben, my dear Hanni?” I hadn’t remembered introducing myself to Maraquita, but it was late and perhaps I had. I said a few nice things, of course, Benjamin, more curious to hear the sound of her voice.

“I’ve never had the privilege.” If a three-hundred-pound middle-aged madam could look coy, Maraquita would have been stuffed there and then, with eyes full of the question, “Have you, dear Hanni, met the boy?”

“Even though he’s left you stranded in the middle of the night in a Mediterranean whorehouse?” Maraquita rested back against a teak veneer doorjamb. I closed the Guide. “Why not call him? His office is right here in Mariposa. Ask him how he plans to get you out of Spain.”

“Certainly there will be a flight tomorrow,” I said, and stood, feeling I had worn out my welcome with either argument or gullibility.

I sat down. I stood. I sat down. I opened your book and looked for your phone number in Mariposa.

“Forty-six, sixty-five, thirteen,” Maraquita said. “Dial nine to get an outside line.” And she left me alone.

I’m always reluctant to phone travel agents when I’m in a jam, when it’s less a question of planning and more a question of screaming for help. But I phoned you. For all the good it did. That synthesized message of yours with all its preplanned options—press “1” if you need transportation information, “2” if you need hotel reservations, “3” for daytime entertainment, “4” for nighttime. I tried “1,” and then “1” again for airplane, “D” for departure, “8” for Aeropuerto Cristóbal Colón, “12” for the month of departure, “30” for the original date, “H-A-L-E” for the first four letters of my last name, “H” for the first initial of my first, “M-I-A” for the city I called from to buy my ticket, but by mistake I pressed “M-1-A” and the recorded voice, more obsequious and scratchy than that of the worst day nurse on the Beach, apologized that the code I had dialed was incorrect, and hung up. My own fault. Never should have screamed.

I flipped the channels on the TV—only one other station broadcasting after midnight, a talk show, with what seemed to be either two transvestites and a magician or three local politicians. I understand Spanish through French, and Andalusian through hand signals and grimaces.

My comedian of a cabby had driven me around the statue at the center several suggestive times—what a beacon for the red-light district, a fifty-foot column topped by Columbus. But we had somehow bypassed the Teatro La Rábida. How thoughtful of you, Benjamin, to include a flier with a translation of this month’s schedule in my copy of the Guide.

Morocco Bound

I Am Curious—Basque

Inside Isabella

Autoerotic-da-Fé

Inside Lola Falange

closed

The Golden Rain in Spain

Tilting at Windmills

Rocky of Gibraltar

10.

Extrema Dura

11.

The Lewd of Kima

12.

Venus in Monteras

13.

closed

14.

Lez Is Moor

15.

Cris and Izzy

16.

Carmen Whore

17.

Teenage Dominicans

18.

Naughty Anarcho-Syndicalists

19.

Isabella, Mistress of the Damned

20.

closed

21.

Dong Quixote

22.

Barbara of Seville

23.

El “Greco”

24.

Spanish Harem

25.

Maria Makes Marbella

26.

The Dirty Nights of Torquemada

27.

closed

28.

Behind the Inquisition

29.

Rambam, Thank You, Ma’am

30.

Cante Jondo, Flamenco Halevy

31.

Adiós, Colón!

Is this what pornography has come to, Benjamin? Not that I am an authority. (I have, in fact, gone once, or should I say only once, on a date with a Gestapo officer in ’42, Heisse Hebräische Huren—how could I forget?) But the titles in the old days used to be literal, bare of irony and illusion—Corn Flakes was Corn Flakes.

I’d seen ¡Adiós, Colón! at the Hampstead Everyman back in the sixties (although that isn’t pornography, is it?), and I wish I’d been here on the 18th to see Naughty Anarcho-Syndicalists. Nevertheless, I was intrigued that this being the night of the 30th, although several minutes already into the new day, the Teatro La Rábida had planned a rare program of echt Kunst. And Flamenco Halevy no less, not that I knew the company, but what a name!

So I breathed in heavily through my nostrils, the way Gershon Mundel’s yoga instructor—he’s fighting Parkinson’s—has instructed him, and, with my measured exhalation, decided not to worry that my flight had been delayed, not to spend all night on the phone to your office, on the phone to the airport in the hope that the strikers had gone back to work, not, in short, to kvetch. I walked out. Maraquita shrugged—the trunk would be perfectly safe. I passed the boy on the stairs and relieved him of a churro. Halevy Ho!

Under the sconce above the outer door I took my bearings. Lorenzo was long set. I was glad to have my cardigan and a warm piece of dough to munch—although churro can’t hold a candle to kipferln. A trio of American sailors chatted on the low seawall across the street. Below the column, Columbus presumably secure on top, a violinist played through the sound of the distant waves. Across the plaza, six golden lanterns lit up an arcade below the gilded sign of the Teatro La Rábida. My watch read 12:45. I was slightly late. Not at all, I reminded myself. I am off my itinerary.

I had almost passed the violinist when I was ambushed by sound and memory. The song she was playing—for it was a she, a very young she with thick dark hair, a seductive pout to the lips, and just the tiniest fold of baby fat where the chin met the violin—flashed a sudden, vivid image of Zoltan, Zoltan the violinist, Zoltan on the train. I had heard a great deal of violin music since—Leo was a particular fan of Henryk Szeryng—but not this, and not played as if I were still in my private boxcar recital hall, rocking gently through the green-veiled innocence of the Auvergne, with Zoltan standing above me, rolling quietly through his entire repertoire. Forty-seven years ago, this piece of music had rescued my mind from politics, distracted me, for a few golden moments, from the danger of our journey. It was a slow movement, a handful of notes, each one simple, together weighty with a fully lived youth. I remember thinking that this piece was written for me, about me, eighteen years old, my own long hair long since bobbed, my own short life already well beyond experience.

But to find the composer, the title to fit the sound?—my Alzheimer’s again. I was sure I hadn’t heard the piece since my marriage to Leo. So it couldn’t have been Mendelssohn or Bruch—Leo had a thing for Jewish composers. Bach was the strongest candidate. Leo hated Bach with an irrational but immovable passion. Play Leo the most obscure cantata, the organ snatch that hadn’t seen daylight since Bach wrote it for a bygone Sunday, and Leo would snort that guttural name from the least attractive barrio of his throat.

So Bach, in all likelihood, but which Bach? Bach of the partitas, Bach of the concerti? Zoltan didn’t mind playing without accompaniment, the clicking of the train wheels over the splices of the rails was orchestra enough. The incessant, obsessional Bach, that was for sure, although the girl played with a depth and a concern for each note that painted Zoltan’s own profile down to the fine droop of the eyelashes and the concentration of the lips. Or maybe not obsession, but confession—Zoltan playing out his own failure, measure by measure, through the repertoire, coaxing his sins out the narrow f-hole that was his talent.

He had failed. I could see that the moment Frau Wetzler led him into our flat on Iranische Strasse. My duty was to escort this failure to the Pyrenees, where he might find the safety to try again. But each click of the train wheels made it more and more difficult to hang failure around the neck of this wonder. Here was Success itself, every note proof of Man’s triumph over God. By the time we jumped from the boxcar at Port Bou, I believed to the depth of my eardrums that as long as Zoltan continued to play the violin, we would win the war.

I was right, of course—that stretcher disappearing down the goat path to Figueras. I had lost Zoltan. We had lost the war. All that remained was the clicking of wheels to the east.

The music stopped. The girl stood shyly, the violin tucked under an arm, the bow dangling from long fingers toward the ground, her eyes lowered. I groped for my purse, struggling to cross the tracks to 1991, wondering if this was the proper response, or whether I was interrupting some fantasy of the house of La Rábida. Then I heard the click.

I turned, expecting a stiletto, or, worse still, the re-enactment of a nightmare of half a century ago in godforsaken southern Spain. It was My Lady Journalist. My Lady Journalist with her clicking trolley and her Palestinian scarf, crossing the cobblestones to the arcade of the Teatro La Rábida. I watched her disappear through the double doors and took my second deep breath of the night. I turned back to the girl with my hundred pesetas. She had vanished.

I looked up at Columbus, vaguely searching for what? A violin, a Zoltan? The Explorer stood, peering out to sea, to the west, holding a robe, a toga, a map. The moon, a cold winter Catalina, floated naked above him. Out where he looked, even the sailors had gone, all was darkness. I held my Guide closer, and turned to the lights of the arcade.