Ben Darling,
I waited, hid for fifteen minutes behind a refuse bin, behind a buttress of a pedestrian bridge, behind the burned-out hulk of a church, behind a sign reading “JUNTA ANDALUCíA: RESTAURACIÓN DE LA IGLESIA STO. DOMINGO—TERMINADA 1989.” Which one of us was most foolish?
Someday, Ben, when I rank my embarrassments in descending order, you will find my night on the stage of the Teatro La Rábida in Mariposa well above First Date and First Kiss. But for now—silence. There are Things That Happen that are too terrible to reveal even to one’s travel agent.
Once I was confident that no one had followed me from the flamenco hall, I stepped out onto the bridge. Call it nerves, call it atmosphere—I hadn’t taken a dozen steps when I was shanghaied by a memory of Paris that flushed the heat back into my face and gripped my feet like magnets. The bridge, short as it was, spanning a dry riverbed of dead winter grass and Spanish garbage, was nevertheless a wrought-iron wonder, a worthy southern cousin to whichever Parisian pont it was that played Waterloo in the disastrous Affaire Maimonides.
Nineteen eighty-five—only weeks after Lina Philosopoulos had returned to active duty as my executive producer. Paris—UNESCO’s international conference in honor of the 850th birthday of Maimonides. By the opening of the first session, the Senegalese director general, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, had so antagonized the Western World that both the U.S. and the U.K. had withdrawn from the organization and the staff of UNESCO had gone on strike to protest salary cuts imposed after the loss of funding. Only a handful of scholars showed, from Pakistan, India, Cuba, Spain, the Soviet Union, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran—hardly countries one would expect to provide Maimonidean enlightenment.
The evening before the conference, while the plenary session was planning its own salvation, I was dining with the ambassador of New Zealand—who kept a top-notch Vietnamese staff—when Newby, my A.D., rang to announce two slight obstructions. Our co-producers had withdrawn their financing, and our French crew refused to cross the UNESCO picket line. I handed the phone, ever so gently, to Ambassador Braithwaite, who happened to be not only ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Monaco, Italy, San Marino, and the Vatican, but Kiwi’s representative to UNESCO as well. By the time we had finished our Sweetbreads Da Nang, my documentary had a fix.
Newby rang the doorbell at half past ten. The cameraman stood just streetside of the iron gate of the embassy. The girl with the boom perched on the shoulders of the boy with the tape recorder. Three Middle Eastern-looking scholars in Italian suits watched with unsophisticated amazement from the far gutter as Ambassador Braithwaite and I sauntered down the steps of the embassy to greet them under the tender gaze of lens, mike, and Parisian moonlight. We chose Raymond Poincaré, an avenue of foreign boutiques and discreet boîtes for the diplomats and dignitaries of the 16ième, chatting at a leisurely pace about the strike, M’Bow, U.S. imperialism, making small talk.
I had instructed Newby not to begin filming in earnest until we’d reached the Trocadéro, but merely to go through the motions, allow my ivory-mosque media-naïfs a good twenty minutes of nervous rehearsal time before delivering them of their theses on Maimonides. But as we crossed the rue de Longchamps, I noticed the little red Record light on the Frenchman’s camera blinking furiously. I shifted into high gear with my first serious lead-in.
Abderrahmane, the Kuwaiti, began with a discourse on the Missing Period of Maimonides’ life, the twelve years of wandering, from the flight from Córdoba in 1148 to the reemergence of the family in Morocco in 1160, when Maimonides was twenty-five. He detailed the common explanations and the uncommon—visits to relatives in Granada, trips as far north as Provence, a secret life under assumed names in the port of Mariposa.
Hassan, the Palestinian, clocked in with the phrase of all adoptive cousins—Maimonides and his family must have converted from Judaism to Islam during the Missing Period. “It is inconceivable,” he argued, “that they could have survived in a Spain ruled by the insistent Almohades without having converted.”
“But it was not just a conversion of necessity,” Abderrahmane replied, in equally precise French. “Have you not noticed that in all the millions of words that Maimonides wrote, there is not a single slur on either the teachings or the person of the Prophet?”
“The reason is Aristotle.” Gebelawi, the Egyptian, was a good twelve inches shorter than I and spoke in a high-pitched, ungrammatical dog-yip. We were crossing the broad, sharply lit plaza of the Trocadéro, dodging skateboarders with boom-boxes, as Newby guided the crew backwards toward the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. A glass-roofed tourist boat was blaring statistics over its speakers. But as near as I could make out, Gebelawi argued that twelfth-century Muslims, Jews, and Christians all drank their philosophy from the same Greek coffee-pot. “They were all People of the Book,” Gebelawi piped excitedly. “But the Book wasn’t the Old Testament or the Koran, it was the Ethics, the Physics, and the Metaphysics of Aristotle.”
So far so good, I remember thinking. I hadn’t really done my homework, but I was pleased that these three were able to engage without any prodding from me. Ambassador Braithwaite, a not unattractive widower, was impressed by the high tone of the discourse, the stylishness of our Aristotelian stroll through the 16ième. I had never been to New Zealand, and my mind was half-clicking through a project file.
Then I tuned in to trouble. Somehow I had allowed Hassan, the Palestinian, to make a political speech. “Mankind,” he was saying, “must be unified through universalism, not sectarianism, parochialism, ethnocentrism, or chauvinism. The United States has failed, the Soviet Union has failed, Africa, India, Cuba, the nonaligned states have all failed. It is universalism, long defended by the prophets since Noah, Abraham, and Moses, reaffirmed by Christ in the name of the new covenant, and realized in Islam, in the Andalusian model of Spain. Universalism is the answer. Universalism is the centrepiece, the guiding light of a new Palestinian State, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims can live in peace, freedom, and harmony.”
“Bullshit!” came the sound, in clear, Frankish tones. To this day I don’t know who said it, whether the cameraman, the soundman, or the girl with the boom. But in a moment, the girl was reading out loud from a copy of Maimonides’ “Epistle to Yemen,” picking out, phrase by phrase, all of the philosopher’s attacks on Mohammed—“The Madman and his notorious religion!”—on Jesus the Nazarene—“May his bones be ground to dust!”—and suddenly the camera was down, the red light still blinking, as it recorded sidewalk, feet, and ultimately the brownish scum of the Seine, as fists, feet, words flew. I don’t think specific racial insults were hurled—Arab, Jew, Christian—but somehow the crowd on that Parisian bridge heard enough to pick sides, and within seconds, the sirens of the gendarmerie were wailing towards the pitched battle of universalism that my documentary had become.
Newby and I ran Leftwards, for the uncertain cover of the Eiffel Tower, while poor Braithwaite, who I imagine had hoped that his sophisticated planning and Vietnamese cuisine would lure me into the ambassador’s suite, was stranded on the far side of the battle, fleeing for the Right Bank and the bright lights of the Trocadéro.
Late at night, over the dry Guadalaljama of Mariposa, camera and clothing were intact. I wheeled across the bridge towards the lights on the far side of the riverless river, stopping in the first pool of the first streetlamp to open my Guide and locate myself on the map of Mariposa. Six minutes later, I was sipping Lágrima Trasañejo in the Santa María and wondering whether a second meal of fried fish would help keep me awake.
Because her table was hidden by the row of wine casks behind the bartender, I didn’t see the girl at first. It was only as the perspiration cooled from my eyes that I recognized the violin case propped up against a cask, the fingers of her left hand tapping a rhythm on the scroll end, the third movement, possibly, of the Bach Double, although rhythms are more difficult to decode than fingers on strings.
Perhaps it was the backdrop of the wine casks, perhaps it was the way she sat—straight-backed against the chair, eyes lowered, motionless except for the fingers of the left hand—that made her look both smaller and younger than when I’d spotted her on the bulletproof balcony above the Duty Free Lounge. The dozen or so tables were peopled with a family tree of candles melted into the backs of their ancestors. In the upcast light, the girl’s face glowed with the luminescence of a china doll, a piece of delft pottery. The whole, the wood behind, the girl before, the candle in front, had a clear, precise restorative effect on my mind, as if I knew every pore of the face, every joint of the hand, every long, brown, girlish hair. Yet the mystery of this second meeting, with a girl who looked all of fourteen, bathed the scene in a halo of unease and confusion—an effect tempered somewhat by her attendants, who appeared to be, at a distance, a pair of nondescript local seamstresses and three out of four members of a rock band.
“The Lost Tribes.” The fourth member blindsided me with his approach from the bar. “Our band, The Lost Tribes.” I said nothing, pretending not to understand the language, generally the safest course when alone in a strange bar in a strange town at two-thirty of a December morning.
“Maybe you caught our gig tonight at the Plaza de Toros?” I looked at my girl, still thrumming her fingers on the top of her violin case. “We record for Warner Brothers,” he continued. “We’re big, BIG!” he stressed. “We’re the Julio Fucking Iglesias of Clapham Junction!” I must have smiled. He sat down. I stopped smiling.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” I began.
“You’re Holland,” he said. Statement, not question. I thought of Hook, how many years ago, standing at the kerb while I tried to flee to the safety of Hampstead Heath, stopping me with the same surprise declaration.
“Don’t worry.” He leaned forward. “Your secret’s safe with me.” I looked at him, not an unattractive rocker, spiked black hair on a rising forehead, wearing, I’d guess, about forty years fairly lightly.
“I’ve taped everything you’ve done,” he went on, “carry a full set on the bus when we do the States. ‘Cromwell,’ ‘Marlowe,’ ‘The Mighty Mississippi,’ ‘Heterosexual Poets,’ ‘The Samurai of Ethiopia,’ ‘Sosua: Dominican Kibbutz,’ ‘Flamenco: Gypsy Rip-off, Et Cetera, Et Cetera …’ ” He paused. “Do I have to go on?” I looked over to the bartender, trying not to seem too helpless but to give an impression—some impression.
“Listen,” he continued in a dangerously soothing baritone, “you are much safer talking to me than sitting by yourself, late at night, in a Spanish bar in full view of the front door.” I could see through the glass to the chippie across the street, where a trio of high school types were counting their pesetas.
“My Angelica’s at school with your ex’s Arielle. What more do you want, my National Health Card?” I looked back at him.
“I didn’t know Foss had a child.”
“So much for investigative journalism,” he said. “My name’s Roger.” He held out his hand. I couldn’t very well refuse. I apologized. He smiled, really quite a beguiling smile. I reckon that’s what separates the men from the rock stars.
“I’m sorry I’ve never heard of your band,” I said.
“The Lost Tribes?” He laughed. “It’s a new name we’re stretching for this tour. Used to be Roger and the Rogers, but Ivy over there, the guitar player, got tired of being called Roger.”
“Now, that I’ve heard of!” I said with some pleasure, never very au courant with rock and roll. The one he’d called Ivy had started plucking a rhythm on an acoustic guitar. Across from him, the darkest of the bunch, shorter and mustachioed, in leather boots and corduroys, began singing:
“Listen to the jingool, the rrrumbool and the rrraw …”
“I know that,” I said. “Is that yours?”
“Roy Acuff used to sing it,” Roger answered. “A Yank. All the good ones are. But we’re trying something new with it.”
“… Heah the mighty rroosh of the enjawn,
Heah the loneson hobo’s squaw …”
“Sounds like I’ve always heard it, with a Spanish accent, perhaps.”
“… on the Wabash Cannonbaw …”
“That’s Fredo,” Roger said. “Acoustic and electric bass, timbales, guerreros, congas, and all the Orff instruments. We rescued him from a Club Med off the coast of Tunisia just before the tour. Colombian Piano Bar cartel was holding him for ransom.”
“Thoz Easton Estates are dandee,
So the peepaw always esay …”
“We open the show with ‘Wabash Cannonball,’ ” Roger explained. “Move on to ‘She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain When She Comes,’ Vim’s favourite. He only started playing drums up in Cambridge, whilst writing his doctoral thesis on music therapy and early child development.”
“Not under Jock Bismuth?”
“Of course.” Roger grinned. “Vim couldn’t take his eyes off you the whole time you were up at Pembroke. There’s a bit of him in that film you did of Bismuth, ‘Rock ’n’ Rollabye, Baby.’ ” I looked over at Vim. A tall, skinny boy, like many another, shag haircut, pleasant Norman nose. “You know the shot? The shaved mouse on the marble pastry table dancing the Watusi? Vim’s the slack-jawed bloke running the amps.”
“I’m afraid I don’t recognize him at all,” I said.
“Oh, but he will you, I’m afraid,” Roger said. “He keeps your pinup above his bunk in the bus.”
“My pinup?” I must have said it too loud. The whole band turned and looked my way. Only the girl kept her eyes turned down to the table.
“Oh, my dear, you’ve been documentarized in more ways than you could possibly imagine,” Roger whispered, and raised me gently by the elbow for the inevitable introductions.
Ivy, the guitar player, was a small-eared King’s College grad, wearing a T-shirt and a padded plaid suit that I had once coveted at John Lewis. Poor Vim was so flummoxed by my arrival that he departed immediately to retrieve more drink, serenaded by Fredo’s Spanish obscenities and a chorus of giggles from the two local girls, whom no one attempted to name.
I was hoping for an introduction to the little violinist, or at least an explanation of what such a young girl was doing in this crowd at so late an hour. But Ivy insisted on an impromptu audition.
“Roger must have clued you in on the Grand Concept,” Ivy began, retuning his guitar.
“Ivy,” I tried to say gently but firmly. “I’m afraid I’m not in my best form to judge anything right now.”
“That’s a Spinoza Portacam, isn’t it?” he carried on without looking up. “Vim can tape me and Roger, and Fredo can beat out the drum part while humming the bass line.” Vim set the glasses on the table and looked down at me with big doey eyes. I could refuse? Any better than I could refuse Conchita at the Teatro La Rábida?
“Worse comes to worse”—Roger winked—“you can sell the tape to MTV.”
Ivy hit a loud open-string chord. Fredo upended an overflow bucket off the tap of a Seco Añejo for a conga drum. The bartender’s head shot around the wall of casks. Ivy vamped on, a fast, pounding choo-choo train in some minor, maybe G. Fredo shrieked with pleasure. It was going on towards three in the morning. There were no other customers. The bartender shrugged.
“The Grand Concept,” Roger announced, as Vim crouched and the red Record light flashed into action. “About thirteen thousand five hundred miles into our last tour, we realized that we Famous Rock Musicians, Roger and the Rogers, knew more about travelling, more about the ins and the outs of the ons and the offs, than we did about musicology, more about Upgrade than Retrograde.” The English sophistication, I thought, trying to freeze a certain look of interest into my jaw. Every English boy over the age of forty-five tries to impersonate Clive James on camera, and every boy younger aims at Jools Holland. I recognized this familiar banter. They all wanted into my knickers. But I was safe. They were British.
“Accordingly, we transformed Roger and the Rogers into The Lost Tribes, named after those famous sons of Jacob who sometime around 722 b.c. were exiled well over the rainbow, somewhere past the arm of long-distance telephone and American Express traveller’s cheques. We took as our repertoire ‘Charlie and the MTA,’ ‘The Midnight Special,’ ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,’ ‘Route 66,’ ‘Highway 61’—part of our Grand Concept: Travel. Travelling Music. Music About Travel. Music to Travel To. Music About Famous Travellers.
“And who …” This must have been a prearranged cue, for Vim swivelled to shoot Roger from a position just above my left shoulder. “Who was, who is, the greatest traveller of all time? Called Cartaphilus by Roger of Wendover, Ahasuerus by the seventeenth-century Germans, Juan Grazia al Dei by the Spaniards, Giovanni Buttadeo by the Italians. Damned for shoving the Man with the Cross from his door on the way to Calvary. Condemned for his pains to wander the earth until Judgement Day. Who is he? None other than that long-bearded Frequent Flier, the Wandering Jew!”
And with that, Ivy modulated into an angry string-breaking mixture of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens—angry, you must understand, in the British sense of the word.
THE BALLAD OF THE WANDERING JEW
(as performed by The Lost Tribes at
the Bar Santa María in Mariposa)
When I was just a young man,
And looking for my Soul,
I travelled to Jerusalem,
And stood by the Wailing Wall.
An Arab in kefiyah,
Called me by my name.
He didn’t look familiar,
So I began to walk away.
He said, “Don’t be unfriendly,
I won’t keep you for long,
I know your folks and family,
I mowed your uncle’s lawn.”
He described my cousins Sofie,
Mona, and the twins,
The curly hair on all their heads,
And the one on Mona’s chin.
I smiled and said, “I’m sorry.”
He said, “Don’t apologize.
Since I returned I cut my hair,
Bought contacts for my eyes.
You see, while I was doin’ spadework,
For the landscape company,
I was studyin’ down in New York town
To get my Ph.D.
“I was up all night with Conrad,
In commune with Mr. Kurtz,
While watching I Love Lucy,
And digging Ethel Mertz.
My chief supervisor
Was a homeboy from big J,
A brainy Joe for the PLO,
Speechwriter for Y.A.
“He talked of Susan Sontag,
He talked of Derrida,
Of Sir William Jones, and what kind of stones
Pave the streets of Ramallah.”
CHORUS
Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.
“I tried to integrate it,
Thought he’d be proud of me,
If I incorporated
His guerrill-philosophy,
How Hemingway and F. M. Ford
Taught Conrad how to shoot,
How it’s one big heart of darkness
From Gaza to Beirut.
“Five hundred pages double-spaced,
Five-oh-one with the epigram:
A rifle shot from the Rubáiyát,
Of my man, Omar Khayyám.
Seven short days later,
His secretary phoned,
‘Seven at The Marlin,’
And then the dial tone.
“When I arrived, he was sitting down
With a shot of Johnnie Black,
And a ticket-of-leave to Tel Aviv
With my name writ on the back.
I asked him if he’d got me,
A Fulbright Grant or two,
The tenure track in Haifa,
A gig at Hebrew U.?
“I saw he wasn’t smiling,
So I took another tack,
I asked him when I would defend
In the face of the English Fac.
‘Defend?’ He laughed, and raised an eye.
I thought he looked impressed,
And wondered if he’d sent my script
To the University Press.
“He offered me a cigarette
And advice to go with it:
‘You’d best defend your homeland, boy,
Cause your thesis is for shit.’ ”
CHORUS
Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.
“Ten weeks on the West Bank,
In training, living rough,
I finally got my sheepskin,
And a new Kalashnikov.
I’m a Graduate in Plastiques,
I’m a prof of Sturm und Drang,
I’m a Ph.D. in TNT,
I’m the Dean of Datsun Bombs.”
“Just wait a minute, Abdul,
I don’t want to hear no more,
I came here as a tourist,
I don’t countenance no war.
I don’t know why you trust me,
Don’t know why you take such pains.”
“Cause your Uncle T., he trusted me
With his lawn up in White Plains.”
CHORUS
Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.
I have to admit that they weren’t the awful collegiate string band I’d expected when I first sat down, and it was a tremendous relief to hear real English, even if real English required that “Sturm und Drang” rhyme with “Datsun Bombs.” Ivy and Fredo were, to give them credit, setting up a rather sophisticated polyrhythmic counterpoint behind Roger’s declamation, throwing expectation slightly off balance, a five-cylinder polka, a one-legged reggae, a dance impossible to dance to, impossible to ignore. I had heard them before, I was certain of it. But was it Wembley or the White House? Opening for Kate Bush or George?
I was on the verge of a recognizable picture when I noticed that the girl was halfway out the door. It was Fredo’s move that pushed me out of the current, the way he cradled the wine bucket between elbow and thigh, and slid between the girl and the exit. The girl, for her part, was grasping the violin case to her body, her face still bent towards the floor, so her hair hung in a protective curtain around the fiddle. Fredo was talking to her as he drummed, something Spanish, but too low and fast for me to understand. The girl had stiffened, terrified, refusing to move back towards us, incapable of moving forwards.
I stood. Roger was thrown back in mid-chorus, as were the two local girls draping his shoulders. I moved to the door, taking Fredo by the elbow, and urged him to the public telephone at the far end of the bar.
“Fredo,” I asked him, “I need to call a friend, but I can’t make heads nor tails of these Spanish telephones. Please,” and I twisted the drum from his arm, “please, talk to the operator for me.”
“Señora Holland,” he protested, and it took all my strength to maintain seduction against that declaration of my forty-six years. But it worked. When I turned around, the girl was safely gone.
With Fredo’s help, I tried calling your Mariposa office again, Ben. This time, I followed all your instructions, pushing this button and that, waiting five seconds, speaking slowly, leaving a message to reach me at the Santa María, where I hoped “The Ballad of the Wandering Jew” would last me until daybreak and Hertz, if not the end of Conchita’s airline strike.
Three steps into the procedure, Fredo deserted me to follow the local girls out the front door. I hung up the phone and retrieved my unused pesetas from the slot above the dial. The waves of Ivy’s guitar swept around the casks to the bar. Without the girl with the violin, my only reason to return to the table was to retrieve Spinoza and Sandor.
“Señora!” the bartender whispered to me as I walked past. I stopped, looked down. He must have lacked five feet by more than three inches. But he made sure that I waited by the counter for his message while he turned to the spout and drew me a fresh Lágrima Trasañejo. “Señora,” he said, and I bent down to catch his raspy English, “that song they are singing, the boys. They are making a joke out of something we Spaniards take seriously, very seriously.” He walked out from around the narrow wooden trestle and pulled a chair over for me.
“Once upon a time,” he began. But at that moment Fredo punched open the double glass doors, and his grin looked, if anything, twice as diabolical.
“Hombre,” he said to the bartender, “are you bothering the lady? Can’t you see she is with our party?”
“Nada, nada.” The bartender returned behind the counter, outnumbered and outranked.
“Please, Fredo,” I said, “the gentleman wanted to tell me a story. You sang your song. I think equal time is only proper.”
“Then let’s get it on film.” Roger stood at the wall of casks, Vim over his shoulder, Spinoza over Vim’s.
“Turn that thing off,” I said, and Vim jumped to the command. But the bartender stuck out his chin, walked back around the bar, locked the front door, and poured a round of drinks for the assembly.
“I would be honoured, Señora, to tell my story to your camera. Then the television can decide who tells the truth.” He lifted the tray up on one palm and led us back to the far side of the bar. There, to my utter amazement, sitting back in her original position, was my girl with the violin. In the clearing of half-full glasses and the wiping of the table, no one else seemed to find her presence astonishing. I tried to sit in the seat next to hers, but the bartender took firm control of stage movement and corralled me into my original chair. Vim began to film.
“The story, Señora,” he began, “that the English boys were singing is based on a four-hundred-year-old fiction by an Italian who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, smoked hashish for three months, and found the need to create a fabulous tale to impress the father of his wife, who had financed the excursion. This is the story the Italian told the assembled guests”:
I was walking one day in the piazza of Jerusalem, the piazza that surrounds the Church of the Holy Sepulcher above the Western Wall, when I was confronted by a Turk who asked, in perfect Italian, “Do you know me?” I had my hand on my dagger, half ready for an adventure, half ready for a fight. But aside from his turban the man looked so harmless and transparent that I felt compelled to answer his question and admit that I had never seen him before in my life.
The Turk smiled and said, “But I know you! For I was a slave in your uncle’s house in Turin and I received many favours from you and from your parents.” He gave their names correctly and also those of many prominent people in Turin. “When I was released,” the stranger continued, “I went to Venice and soon gained the friendship of some Turkish merchants. They brought me in their ship to Constantinople. There I sought out my old master, whom I had served in the naval forces in 1571. He had recently been appointed governor of Jerusalem, and, upon the death of his police captain four months later, he did me the honour of selecting me for the post.”
“Congratulations,” I said to him, “that is quite a step up from scrubbing floors in my uncle’s house.”
“Service is service,” the Turk replied with a casual twitch of his moustache. “But kindness must be repaid, so I trust that you will do me the favour of dining with me tonight. We shall be alone.” He described his house and advised me to come at four in the evening, so as not to be seen. But if I was seen by any police, I was not to worry, for he was their chief.
I accepted the invitation and was received at his house with much display of friendship. After a splendid meal, he told me he would show me something which no other living man had seen, save his master, the governor of Jerusalem.
“But please,” he said firmly but without a trace of begging, “reveal this secret to no one. Should I be discovered, the penalty is impalement.”
The Turk took a ring of keys from an iron box, prepared a piece of wood for a torch, and lit a lantern, which he then carefully covered. He led me out of the room, shut the door, and gave me his hand to walk with him a good distance in the darkness of a narrow passage. In a short time we came to a large drawbridge, which led to another room. He shut the door from the inside and uncovered the lantern. Then he trudged an equally good distance to an iron door. It opened to reveal a corridor all worked in mosaic. Near the end we passed ten iron doors and entered a large hall ornamented with very fine marble and mosaic work in the vault.
At the left end of the hall there was a man, well armed in the antique style, with a halberd on his shoulder and a sword at his side. The man was continually marching from one side of the hall to the other without rest. The Turk said to me: “See if you can stop him.” I tried two or three times with all my strength, but it was impossible for me to hold him. He lighted the torch and gave it to me so I could see the man more clearly. I observed that he was of middle stature, thin and emaciated, with hollow eyes, black beard, and black hair. I asked the Turk who this man was and he answered, “I will tell you only if you swear by your Christ not to reveal it for three years.” This, I knew, was the extreme limit of office for a chief of police. Curious to know, I gave my solemn pledge.
“This man,” he said to me, “is the servant who struck your Christ before the high priest Annas. For punishment of his terrible crime, he was condemned by your Christ to remain here. We too believe in the old traditions. In this place he stays, never eating nor drinking, never sleeping nor taking rest, but always walking as you see him, and always—look, my friend—always the arm that struck, twitches!”
We left and returned to the room where we had dined. At my departure he tactfully reminded me of my oath. He trusted me to remember him to his friends in Turin and offered me money if I had need. I told him I lacked nothing and thanked him warmly for his kindness and, following his instructions, found my way to the inn. I returned to my native country, spent the past three years in Candia, Corfu, and Zara, and now I can tell what I saw without scruple, having observed the oath.
“Amazing,” Vim said, lowering the camera from his shoulder.
“Not bad,” Ivy allowed, picking a half-hearted tune on the guitar.
“Far fawking out, man! That’s the story!” shouted Fredo and let out a Turkish battle cry of his own composition.
“I am not finished,” said the bartender. Ivy stopped plucking. Fredo sat down. The bartender waited until Vim began to record. “What is the point of this story?” he asked, but like all storytellers I’ve ever interviewed, he sped on without reply. “The answer, of course, is that there is no point. The young Italian macho merely wants to impress his friends back home by displaying the ultimate trophy of the tourist, the unique. He tells a story that is unbelievable, yet bears the appearance of authenticity because his uncle himself is present and can attest to the character and bearing of the Turk, can assert that it is very probable that this man was made chief of police. Given one likelihood, it is only a short leap for the gullible listener to believe the most preposterous stories of endless dungeons and marching Jews armed with swords, halberds, and superhuman strength.
“Here in Spain, this Christ, who is just a minor character in the Italian’s story, is a very real, very central creature. There are those who believe He is God and those who are not afraid to fire rifles at His image and shit on His name. But everyone, every Spaniard, treats Him very, very seriously.” The bartender took a sip of his drink, let it roll around the inside of his mouth and trickle down the back of his throat.
“The true story”—he looked straight at me—“has a very real point, and that point is not about the Wandering Jew, but about God.” I tried to say something encouraging, but I was too dry to speak, and the moment too quiet to reach for my glass.
“This Wandering Jew,” said the bartender, “was a shoemaker who lived in Jerusalem in the Street of Bitterness. When the Saviour passed by bearing His cross, He was in so desperate a state, so exhausted, when He came to the door of the house, that He wished to rest and said to the owner: ‘Juan, I am suffering much.’ And Juan answered: ‘Go, go! I am suffering even more, I who labour here like a galley slave bound to his oar.’
“Then the Saviour, seeing Himself so cruelly rejected, said to the shoemaker, ‘Very well! Go yourself, walk. Until the end of Time!’
“Immediately this man felt his feet moving. He began to walk. He walked from dawn to dusk, from dusk to dawn. He walked through towns and out, through deserts and over mountains. The man recognized this endless walking as a punishment from Heaven for his hard-heartedness and his cruel words ‘Go! Go!’ which he had hurled in the face of the unfortunate one who had asked to rest. As he walked, he repented with all his soul for what he had done, and he fell to weeping his offense and to despairing.
“Thus he walked until, at the end of a year, on Good Friday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he saw appearing on the distant horizon, mingled with the clouds of Heaven, three crosses. At the foot of the highest of these—the one in the middle—there was a Lady, as beautiful as she was sad, as sad as she was sweet. This Lady turned her face towards him and said to him, her face pale and tearstained, ‘¡Juan, espera en Dios!’ Juan, believe in God!
“And that is why we Spaniards call him Juan Espera en Dios, the man who has been walking ever since without ever stopping, who will walk until the consummation of Time, that the curse of God, which he drew upon himself, may be fulfilled!”
“I don’t understand,” I said when the bartender paused to empty his glass. “If the Jew repented, why must he continue to walk?”
“Because”—the bartender smiled calmly—“after our Civil War, we Spaniards discovered that none of us were right and that all of us were right. We discovered that Christ exists and that Christ is God. But we also discovered that we are doomed to worship the biggest two-timing, lying son-of-a-shit that ever lived, may his bones be ground to dust!”
“Madonna!” Fredo said. Ivy and Vim remained silent. A light bulb flickered at the far end of the room. I was never a churchgoer, even in my brief childhood. But early images—the blasted yew outside our deserted vicarage, the half smile on the face of my half-sleeping mother, the shadows of lace on the ceiling of my aunt’s bedroom—were enough religion to make me shiver at the ferocity behind the bartender’s blasphemy.
When I turned, I noticed that my girl with the violin had raised her eyes, perhaps out of appreciation for, or general interest in, the bartender’s story, but with a look of curiosity directed at Roger, waiting for, perhaps urging him on to, rebuttal. He, too, was looking at her, half smiling, sharing a joke, more likely just refuelling for the next lap.
“Gimme,” he said, taking the guitar from Ivy. In one stroke, he picked up the stumbling rhythm of the Ballad, but with a fiercer, less indulgent feel for the instrument, snapping string against wood, slapping palm against soundboard, more to shock an argument from the guitar.
“While you were phoning your travel agent,” he said—and I did wonder at the time how he knew whom I was phoning—“you missed the organic difference between the song ‘The Wandering Jew’ as written by Yours Truly of The Lost Tribes and the primitive Renaissance tale of Pablo over here.” The bartender jerked up his chin sharply, whether offended by the attack on his story or the presumption of his name, I couldn’t tell.
“In my version,” Roger continued, punctuating his words with attacks on the guitar, “the tourist does indeed go to Jerusalem and meet the Turk, in this case a young Palestinian Freedom Fighter named Abdul. But,” and his left hand slid up the neck in a dramatic glissando, “in my song, in the verses you missed, we discover that the Wandering Jew is not some old bearded codger buried beneath the walls of the city, marching a gutter into the earth, but he’s the young Palestinian himself!
“You see,” Roger continued, as Fredo supported him with a fresh tattoo on the bottom of his pail, “the bartender hasn’t taken his weak Iberian argument far enough. Cartaphilus, Ahasuerus, Malchus, Isaac Laquedem, Juan Espera en Dios, whatever you want to call him, the Wandering Jew was no dummy. Sure, he converted to Christianity. Maybe not at first, maybe he liked travelling, wanted to see the world, once, maybe twice. No planes, no trains, only ships, carts, horses, elephants, and camels, and all those most likely prohibited by the curse. Say he’s in Casablanca and has a yearning for Cádiz, he’s got to tramp across North Africa, up the Middle East, march around the Black Sea and then back west, around—never across—rivers, and over the Pyrenees:
I asked him for his favourite spot,
He smiled and answered: “Spain.
I was there before the Inquisitor,
And I’ll be back once again.”
“He’s in Jerusalem and hankers for a glimpse of the pyramids of the Mayans? He’s doomed to the polar route. Doesn’t matter how cold, he can’t freeze to death. Worse luck, since after a couple, three hundred years he wants to die, dreams of dying, tries it countless numbers of times.
“It’s after one of these heroic attempts, somersaulting down Everest, sunbathing in the Sahara, donating free periodontic service to the lions of Lake Manyara, that he sees the Lady and the Crosses, or thinks to himself maybe there’s something to all this Christ business. So he talks to the pope, tells him he’s sorry he told the Lord to fuck off, promises to build a shelter, a whole block of flats for homeless riffraff, gets himself sprinkled, immersed, whatever, gets himself a brand-new Christian-sounding name like Paul or Thomas, starts eating pork and shellfish, and waits to die.
“No dice. Maybe it’s the water, he thinks, not holy enough. Maybe it’s the pope, one of those Dark Age types who stole from the poor and buggered anything that couldn’t run. But after another few hundred years of walking and meditating, he thinks, maybe it’s the religion what’s worn down—the curse is still potent, but the antidote’s way past the expiration date.
“Along about this time, our friend happens to bump into a caravan of hapless souls in the middle of the Arabian desert. They’re all hot about this new prophet Mohammed, and though it sounds like the same old Adam, Noah, Moses, Jesus promise, the Wandering Jew wanders off to meet him. He finds Mohammed on the road to Medina and, over a cup of chicory, spells out his dilemma.
“ ‘I will tell you three things,’ Mohammed says straightaway. ‘First, there is no God but Allah,’ and he smiles as the Jew raises his eyebrows. ‘Second, I, Mohammed, am his prophet, which is why you must both believe everything I tell you and fundamentally doubt it. Third, and most important, you as a man have responsibility over your own actions. You are capable of distinguishing good from evil, free to choose and to act. Perhaps you need me to explain, to point, to guide you from time to time. There may be things beyond your control—the creation of worlds, the power over death, wind, rain, and the stars. But this wandering—you have the power to stop it, you have always had the power to stop it at any time.’ ”
“Like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz,” added Ivy, “telling Dorothy she could have clicked her heels together whenever she wanted and left Technicolor forever.”
“ ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,’ ” Vim whispered from behind the viewfinder.
“Well, the Jew sits and thinks about this for a while after Mohammed buggers off and founds Islam and gives good and wicked men alike the power to interpret his Koran any way they choose. And after one hundred years or so, he realizes that Mohammed was only half right. He does have power over his wandering. Hasn’t he been sitting and resting, after all, while his seven-hundred-year-old blisters peel off and turn to sand? But no matter how many times he clicks his tender, pink heels together, he cannot die. The morning of his eightieth birthday dawns, as it has ten times before, only to find him a young man of twenty once again. To Hell with this laying about, he thinks, and he trudges south to Yemen, where he catches a boat—because he can—and spends his next thousand years on the sea.
“In my song,” Roger said, “The Wandering Jew has become a Palestinian Freedom Fighter, just another manifestation of his wishy-washy Weltanschauung—one century he likes to wander, another century he wants a homeland, somewhere he can put his feet up, pop a cold one, and everyone on the block looks just like him. Most of all, he wants the power over creation and destruction, the one thing God or Jehovah or Allah won’t give him. So what does he do? He becomes a tourist, a critic, comparing this tower and that burger joint with this campanile and that sushi bar, home in no tradition, sans native land, sans native tongue, sans good homecooking.
“After all,” Roger said with a great Pete Townshend sweep of his arm, scattering the glasses from the table with a dominant seventh chord, “when you’re immortal, it’s just one mid-life crisis after another.”
The last time I saw Abdul,
His head was bended low,
He was shuffling away down the Great White Way,
With a sackful of Foucault.
The next time you pick up stone,
Or heft a piece of sod,
May your aim be keen, cause the guy you bean
Might turn out to be God.
He may make you immortal,
As he looks into your eyes.
But like Abdul, you’ll find that you’ll
Be doomed to criticize.
CHORUS
Oh, I’ve been wandering so long.
And that’s when I heard it, far off at first, a single bowed violin note, consonant with Roger’s key, then two, three, an inverted major triad, like a train whistle far off in the night. I looked at the girl, still smiling shyly at Roger, but her fiddle was well cased, and no one else was in the restaurant. It couldn’t have been a sympathetic ghost tone from Roger’s guitar, since, as the chord grew louder and nearer, Roger stopped strumming and we all, looking upwards, downwards, to the walls and windows, listened to its approach in amazement. Or not so much its approach because it was in the room with us all the time, but listened as some invisible hand turned up the volume to three, four, seven, an exquisite, perfect, disembodied violin pumped past the bursting point into our bodies.
The bartender was the brightest physicist. He was first under the table, followed by Fredo and the others, as the front windows exploded inward, smashing into the barrier of wine casks, raining glass over our heads to the back wall, as the triad turned into the roar of the jet fighters, the phantoms that had terrified me at the airport, coming, this time, in from the sea, this time only sparking my curiosity, introduced as they were by that heavenly chord that could only have come from Sandor.
I grabbed my wheels and my camera and ran out into the street, where the moon was blinking like a strobe light behind the shutter of hundreds of planes. A taxi screeched to a halt, a door flew open. It was only after I’d thrown Spinoza and wheels into the empty back seat with one hand, that I felt the young girl with the violin holding my other. I pushed her in, closed the door, shouting Sandor’s address to the driver, knowing that this is what I wanted all along, then looked up and saw, in the front seat next to the driver, the wild-haired White Rabbit.
The taxi shot through the narrow streets of the market, curved under the eternal scaffolding of the Catedral, climbed up the Calle Victoria around the Roman ruins, higher into the darkness, past the Gibalfaro, cut into the unpaved turning, and suddenly broke into the open blue-black of the sea, sky, and moon that signalled the height of the town and the massive gate to Sandor’s villa. I climbed out and ran to the gate, pulled at it, pushed at it, all locked and dark, as the sound began again and I had to run for the road, my camera out, to somehow film, record, just bear witness to the phenomenon of the music of the plane, as the last, solitary fighter flew so close that its belly lights lit up the taxi as it sped away down the mountain, and showed, as clearly as if it were daylight, the young girl with the violin, prying loose a bit of brick from a stanchion, and, with the iron key beneath, calmly, as if she did this every week, unlocking the gate to Sandor’s villa.
I didn’t need to be told. I picked up one end of the White Rabbit’s trunk, flung it inside the gate, the metal clanged shut, and except for the distant continuo of the planes—which could as easily have been the sea or the concentrated breathing of three women—all was quiet.