After the event, Regina had come over to the stage, but we barely managed to talk while I signed books and catalogs at a table, sitting next to Graciela. She told me she’d been living in Paris for many years, and that she hadn’t hesitated to come and say hello when she’d learned of the event and recognized my name. I asked if she could wait a few minutes so we could chat more calmly, and she said she was really sorry, she had another commitment and had to leave right away. Maybe we can get a drink later?, I asked amid all the noise. She seemed to consider it a moment, doing the mathematical calculation of who knows what factors and probabilities and numbers. I took advantage of that moment to say I had a dinner engagement with Graciela and Alexis and the team from Fondation Cartier and I didn’t know what time we’d be finishing but that we could still meet somewhere later. Sorry, Eduardo, I can’t, she said, and I could tell by her expression or by her posture that the math hadn’t worked out and that she was ready to say good-bye—a good-bye that, at my age, one supposes might be forever—and it then occurred to me to ask if she wanted to join me for breakfast the following day, early, at an intolerable café.
*
The white-haired old man walked over to our table like somebody who has no desire to get to where he’s going, and there he stood, in silence, his arms folded, frowning, looking at both of us at the same time—that is, looking at each of us with one of his crossed eyes. Or that’s how it seemed. As if he’d only developed and perfected his squint in order to keep a check on two diners simultaneously. Regina, who was already sitting and unrolling a long burgundy velvet scarf from around her neck, asked for an espresso with no trace of an accent, and the old man, grumbling about something or other just for the sake of having something to grumble about, walked wearily away, back to his place behind the bar. We both sat quietly a few moments, on opposite sides of the table, just looking at each other and appraising each other and possibly also considering the absurdity of the situation. She was wearing a bone white sweater, delicate and light, that may have been made of merino wool. On her right wrist she was wearing a bracelet of beads of some kind of green stone, possibly jade; on her left ring finger, a thin ring of polished silver set with that same green stone. The black of her hair was less black now, a black that was fainter, with glints of gray, and the skin on her face had the winter glow of pale skin that never wears makeup. Due to the light, the shadows, the years now dead, she was sometimes fifty, sometimes fourteen.
Were you surprised to see me?, she asked, smiling impishly, and I said yes, a bit.
The previous night, Regina had said she wouldn’t be able to make it, that she had to be at a work meeting first thing in the morning. But all the same I’d explained where the small café was, just in case.
A customer was hunched over at the bar, staring at us brazenly. He was wearing the navy blue overalls of a plumber or a construction worker and moving his lips without saying anything, more like a nervous spasm than speaking words. He looked angry, maybe because of that implacable stare and his permanent frown. Despite the early hour, his plump oil-stained hand was holding a glass of cognac. His fingers, I could see even from that distance, were tinged with amber, doubtless from many years smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Hanging in front of him—on the wall behind the bar—were ten or twelve old maps of Paris, from different periods, in a range of sizes and colors, some of them in very poor condition and others better preserved, but all of them with a red dart or pin affixed to the same point, the same junction of two streets opposite the Jardin de Luxembourg, probably the same corner where the café was today. You are here, in red, as if to reorient any customer who’s gone astray.
I didn’t think you were coming, I said to Regina, and she gave a sigh that sounded to me much more than a sigh and she looked outside and said her office was very nearby, just across the park, and that she’d cycled over. I asked what work she did, and she was about to answer when the old barman appeared and set another espresso down on the table with an overfilled glass of water. She thanked him in a barely audible whisper and brought the little white cup to her lips, and I shivered when I recognized her hand. A hand I’d completely forgotten, or thought I’d completely forgotten. I recognized the shape of it. The long, thin fingers. The almost invisible freckles on the back. Without realizing it, I’d retained a recollection of that hand, accessible though well buried in some chink of my memory, just waiting to be dug up and dusted off at the exact moment she raised that little white coffee cup. I considered mentioning it, telling her of my shock at recognizing a hand I’d only seen so many years before. But I decided it wasn’t appropriate, or that she wouldn’t believe me, so I just watched her face and her hands and wondered if the images we see in childhood might not be stored in some different vault of our memories, a secret vault, a vault protected forever from the passing of the years. And I wondered how many memories of my childhood I still had there in that secret vault, apparently forgotten, just waiting for their little white coffee cup.
I’m a lawyer, Regina said, taking another sip of espresso. She told me that she too, had had to leave Guatemala many years earlier, as a teenager. I asked why and Regina just made a very subtle gesture with her head that could have meant something or could have meant nothing and she told me that she’d first completed her undergrad in London and then studied international law in Geneva and then begun her professional career in Brussels, where she met the father of her daughters, a Parisian lawyer named Brodsky. And so now she was Regina Brodsky, she told me, and had spent half her life living and working there, in Paris.
*
Two boys with backpacks came into the café, dressed identically. They sat down at the next table and, as if this was part of a morning tradition, the white-haired old man brought them two croissants and two huge mugs of hot chocolate.
That’s kind of what we were like when we met at the camp, I said to Regina, gesturing at the boys with my chin. No, Eduardo, we were a bit older than that, she said, her voice overly nostalgic. Then she looked back at me. Besides, she said, that wasn’t where we first met. What do you mean?, I asked, incredulous. We didn’t meet at the camp? Regina shook her head. You don’t remember?, she said reproachfully. The first time we saw each other was a year earlier, she said, in the summer, at your cousins’ beach house. Really? Yes, really, she said teasingly. You didn’t notice me, but I noticed you.
Suddenly the pieces of the jigsaw began to slot into place.
Is that why you asked to do guard duty together?
Regina smiled.
Except that you, Monsieur Halfon, didn’t even talk to me.
I took a sip of espresso—which detonated, as usual, a twinge of pain in my belly—and then, with the unbridled joy of a thirteen-year-old boy, I told her about the list of questions in my pocket, and Regina explained that her counselor accomplice who did the guard duty list was her older sister’s best friend. And I reminded her about the book she was always carrying and reading everywhere (Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, to practice her English), and Regina in turn reminded me that I’d roundly refused to dance with her in a folk-dancing activity (rikudim, in Hebrew). And I told her the names of two of the positions we’d been taught for going to the bathroom in the open air (the orangutan and the crab), and Regina named two more (the skier and the double skier). And I reminded her of the Mexican tennis player and his girlfriend kissing and fondling each other behind every available tree or tent, and Regina told me that, as was normal and even expected by the families, a number of marriages had resulted from that camp. And I told her about the booklet that somebody in my group had found or had stolen, with the illustration of a woman who was caught and gagged by three soldiers dressed in green, and Regina told me that, the way I was describing it, it was probably a literacy and training manual produced by the guerrillas in those years, maybe belonging to one of the indigenous kids who helped out and cleaned up the camp (and about whom, until she mentioned them, I’d entirely forgotten, though those five or six kids were there from the start, from Santa Apolonia, carrying the tents and the cots and all our food across the mountain; there was one called Caliche, a boy my age with black eyes and very dark skin who was missing an arm, the lack of which seemed to leave him unfazed). And I told Regina about the naked woman bleeding as she bathed one night in the stream, and she explained that the more religious of the female counselors used that stream at night when they were menstruating as a purification bath (mikve, in Hebrew). And I confessed my feeling of euphoria when our knees had brushed together for a whole hour, and she said she hadn’t even noticed.
The two boys who were probably brothers had finished their croissants and their hot chocolates, and after saying good-bye to the old man, who was probably their grandfather, ran out of the café.
Regina turned around to get the bag that was hanging from the back of her chair and reached inside, and I was surprised to see her pull out a pack of Gitanes, which she placed on the table. It was a blue box, not quite square, on the front of which there was a sketched silhouette, black and refined, of a woman dancing. You smoke?, I asked her. Sometimes, she said, with an expression that was stoical or defeated. Less, she said, since they no longer allow smoking in restaurants and cafés. But it still relaxes me just to hold one, she added, the yolk-colored cigarette—made, she later explained, from corn paper—shifting between her fingers. So you’re saying you’re not relaxed here with me?, I asked a little mischievously, but she smiled a smile that was almost imperceptible and made a mocking gesture and said alors, Monsieur Halfon, now tell me about you.
*
She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms as if she was cold and asked about my family, about my son, about my studies, about my books, about the apparent flight relationship—as per my response the previous night—that I still have with my country of origin and with Judaism. The answer’s partly a joke, I said, and partly tragic. An answer I’ve known ever since I was asked years ago by a Spanish journalist about the books I hadn’t read that had most influenced me as a writer. The look in Regina’s eyes was now smaller and more narrow, as if she were trying to find that unexpected question in the air somewhere, so I repeated it. What were the books I’d never read, the Spanish journalist asked, that had had the greatest influence on me as a writer? A ridiculous question and also a brilliant one, I said. And sitting there opposite that Spanish journalist, I immediately knew my answer. I took a bitter sip of espresso and savored it for longer than necessary, just for the drama. The Torah and the Popol Vuh, I said to Regina. Though I’ve never read them, there aren’t two other books that, as a man and as a writer, have impacted me more. And the thing is, I don’t need to read them, I said, as they’re always with me, both of them inscribed someplace very deep inside me. The book of the Jews and the book of the Guatemalans, if I may be allowed to simplify it like that, and if books is the right word for those two monumental works that represent and define the two great columns upon which my house is built. But it’s a house that since childhood, for some reason, I have needed to destroy or at least abandon. I can’t explain why, I said. That’s the way it’s always been. It’s how I’ve always felt, as if something was forcing me to escape and disappear. I’ve spent my entire life running away from home.
Regina leaned forward quite abruptly, maybe so that what she was about to say might reach me faster.
Though in a sense, Eduardo, also looking for your home, right?, she asked. Also needing to go back to that space you fled or escaped from?
She was still very close, her elbows on the table, her fingers interlinked as if in the middle of a prayer. I kept on looking at those hands that were so slender and so familiar. There, in her fingertips, I could see an entire biography of tender caresses and compassionate caresses and erotic caresses and caresses from a mother pampering and comforting a child. And while I was still thinking about that space I’d fled or escaped from, I said: No dogs or Jews allowed
*
My father parked his fire red Datsun 280 beneath a huge palm that stood alone in the middle of a parking lot. My brother, desperate in the cramped backseat, was kicking me to make me hurry, so I opened the car door and got out.
It was Sunday morning, still very early. My father was already standing behind the Datsun, taking his things out of the open trunk. Ready, he said to my brother and me as he closed it, and the three of us started walking silently toward the entrance, my brother on one side of my father and me on the other. The only sounds at that time of the morning were the shrieking of a flock of parakeets up in the palm tree and the metallic scraping of my father’s cleats on the dry pebbles. Without realizing it, I started to walk faster, if not run, but my father shouted ahead at me and so I had to stop and wait. I was excited. It was my first time there. It was the first time my father had brought us with him. The three of us went on walking together and it took what seemed like an eternity to get across the parking lot, but in the final stretch toward the front door, now on a narrow asphalt path, my father was the one who sped up (or at least that’s how I remember it, as if he was escaping from something or rather escaping toward something). I had remained two or three steps behind them, alone, still on the asphalt path, looking down. Come on, then, my father ordered me too firmly, holding the door open and waiting for me to go in. Come on, then, echoed my brother, standing beside him. I ignored them. I had only recently learned to read capital letters and I was still stopping at any sign or lettering to practice. My father again shouted something at me, but I was trying to decipher the big black letters against the white background of a sign driven into the grass, just off the asphalt path, until I finally managed to read the full sentence: No Dogs or Jews Allowed.
I turned to my father, asking for help, but he just said it was nothing and grabbed my hand awkwardly and yanked me forward and the three of us entered where we were not allowed to enter
*
Regina’s eyes were half closed, as if she hadn’t finished seeing or focusing on the five black words I’d just left hanging between us.
That’s what was written on the sign at the entrance of the golf club in the capital, I said, and she, in what might have been disbelief or surprise, narrowed her eyes even further. I was only a kid, I went on, but I remember it very clearly. I saw it one Sunday morning with my father and my brother.
Although that’s what I told Regina, the truth is that today I find it hard to believe I actually saw it. I struggle to believe that that sign could still have been displayed publicly in the middle of the seventies. Maybe I never did see it one Sunday morning with my father and my brother and I’ve just retained the image of the sign created in my imagination from out of my father’s voice. Maybe it was my father who told me about it and described it and left it in that deep, secret vault of my memory. Not long ago I mentioned it to my father and he replied, almost angry, that he didn’t remember anything. That is, he didn’t remember having gone with us to the club one Sunday morning and he didn’t remember telling me about that sign, nor did he remember any sign at all stuck into the golf club’s lawn. Do I remember it better than my father, then? Or did my child’s mind invent an entire scene—with a fire red car and the crunching of metal spikes on stony clay and the hysterical shrieks of a flock of parakeets—from the mere notion of a sign? Had the sign only ever existed in my mind? Is imagination so fanciful and audacious that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true? Anyway, doesn’t matter. That sign existed. I saw it or I imagined it, which for a kid is the same thing.
It was a small sign, I went on telling Regina, made of ceramic or cement, with black uppercase letters against a white background, placed in the neat, flawlessly green lawn at the entrance of the golf club, which forbade the entry of both dogs and Jews. I read that sign—or learned of the existence of that sign—and in my child’s mind I immediately understood one thing: to the members of the golf club, to my Guatemalan compatriots, there was no difference between a dog and me.
Regina was shaking her head, maybe without even realizing, possibly also imagining the sign stuck firmly into the lawn amid a procession of blond antisemitic golfers.
I never knew, she said after a few seconds’ pause.
Maybe because your father wasn’t a golfer.
No, he wasn’t.
I must have been five or six, I said, when I learned of the existence of the sign (be it because I saw it with my father and my brother one Sunday morning, I thought but didn’t say, be it because my father described it to me on a day that not even he remembered). And since then, Regina, I’ve never been able to forget it. Not so much for the sign itself, but for the feeling of rupture that that sign left me with. From then on, from those words and from that moment, my two worlds, the Jewish world and the Guatemalan one, parted forever.
