“Rafael!” my father said, horrified. He pulled me up effortlessly. “What’s the matter with you!” There was more annoyance than concern in his voice.
“Pobrecito,” Pablo said.
“You need to sleep,” my father said, softer now. He hugged me tight; tight enough that I didn’t have to make any effort to stand on my own. I breathed the slightly stale odor of his Old Spice cologne, combined with a fresher whiff of his real smell. Oddly, it cured me of my queasiness. I breathed in his heat and his animal nerves. He was a big, hot strong man. Of course he could prevent Bernie from taking me. I was safe, after all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sibling Rivalry
CARMELITA WAS WAITING FOR US AS WE EMERGED FROM THE ANXIETY OF clearing customs in Madrid. This time, when my phony passport was presented to the Spanish official, I was too scared to pray in my head for happiness. But the official’s comparison of the photograph against me was perfunctory. He chatted with my father about why we were in España: were we looking up relatives? In this confrontation my father seemed brilliant to me. He relaxed on his heels, smiled, and told the story of my grandfather’s emigration from Galicia to Tampa; he even began to recount the quaint anecdote of how Pepín romanced Jacinta by making up for her slow rolling of the cigars with his own superhuman speed. The customs man was charmed, but a supervisor (I think; or perhaps a stern colleague) looked cross and that spurred the agent to interrupt Francisco, stamp my passport without a glance and use a nub of white chalk to check off each of our bags, although there had been no investigation of their contents.
I was surprised by the lax security of this running dog of fascism. On the tedious flight Francisco had told me his version of the Spanish Civil War. It amazed me that we — and especially that I, a half-Jewish boy — were en route to a nation ruled by a man whose staunchest and most crucial ally had been Hitler.
“Did they exterminate Jews?” I asked.
He laughed. “Why am I laughing?” he caught himself. “There was the Spanish Inquisition, after all.” And he explained about Spain’s peculiar Jewish history, of the almost total annihilation of the literate, prosperous, and talented Spanish Jews, accomplished for the most part by murder and exile but also by massive conversion, the hiding of thousands behind new names and the adoption of Catholicism. My father told me — accurately, by the way — of the Spanish families who, to this day, turn their paintings of the saints to the wall at sundown on Fridays and then light candles, but don’t know why. “You don’t have to worry about anti-Semitism today,” he concluded as we began our airplane meal.
But with his coffee and my scoop of ice cream, he changed his mind. “Maybe, just to be careful, you shouldn’t mention to anyone that you’re half-Jewish.”
After that talk I had expected more vigilance from the guardians of the fascist Spain than we experienced at customs.
So had my father, evidently. “We made it,” he whispered with a smirk of triumph as we walked, officially sanctioned, under a sign that welcomed us to Madrid in Spanish, English and German. I thought — we’re safe, it’s over, everything’s okay — while barely noticing that there was a young Negro woman, tall and thin, except for large breasts and a pronounced potbelly, clapping and calling to us. Carmelita had broad lips painted vermilion and huge brown eyes whose whites brimmed with happiness at the sight of my father. She stopped her applause, came toward Francisco with measured speed and single-minded purpose, her skinny arms casting for him, gathering him with the blind confident greed of an octopus; a beautiful, exotic and apparently harmless octopus, but nevertheless a creature whose reach seemed boundless and whose grip looked unbreakable.
All eyes were on them. As I was to discover shortly, any black-skinned woman, much less one as exquisite as Carmelita, would have attracted stares in Spain during the sixties. I had a specifically American racist response to her: as a right-thinking red-diaper baby I saw her as Negro, noble and oppressed, and therefore probably a cleaning woman or a singer, since those were the only activities permitted by American culture and economics. I was amazed, therefore, when Carmelita spoke. She had a rich voice, deep and amused, which certainly would have made for a good chanteuse, but what stunned me was that she talked in Spanish, in the cackling, speedy Cuban of my Tampa relatives.
“Y tú eres Rafael?” she yammered at me with a broad smile of brilliant teeth. She had a remarkable mouth, huge and almost always parted, flashing her pink tongue and cheerful smile. Not liking her was impossible. “Es muy guapo, verdad?” she said to Francisco and then commented to me, “Como tu padre.” These compliments on my looks — any likening of my appearance to my father’s had to be praise — increased my confusion. Why wasn’t she speaking in English, in the sassy trill of my former classmates from P.S. 173, or the slow Southern drawl of the Great Neck serving women? Obviously she had learned Spanish from my father, but why was she using it on me?
“I don’t speak Spanish,” I said.
“But you understand a lot,” my father said. “And you’re at the perfect age to learn. At this age your brain is like a sponge. In two weeks you’ll be talking like a Castilian.”
“No lo hablas?” Carmelita stroked my face lovingly. “Qué lindo,” she said, another compliment that I took as a way of praising Francisco. Not that I minded. I liked her a lot. Of course I was an easy mark: she was a woman and a woman’s presence reassured me. A loving glance, a kind word, and any woman owned my soul.
My father, who had still made no reference to my mother or her death, didn’t explain Carmelita either except to say, “Carmelita is Cuban. She knows some English, but refuses to speak it.” The language of the enemy, I assumed, and felt ashamed that it was all I spoke. So there were Negro Cubans. [In case my ignorance surprises readers who may assume that my Tampa relatives were of mixed race and had dark complexions, I should explain that although a branch of my family is of mixed race, the relatives I had met — and whom I mistakenly thought of as wholly representative of the Cuban population — were of Mediterranean origin. One particular branch, the Pardos, are especially fair, with red hair and freckled skin. Of course to a true believer in Aryanism my white skin wouldn’t truly distinguish me or my people from an African-American. Years ago, at the suggestion of my training analyst, I did as complete a trace as I could of both lines of my ancestors — Latin and Jewish — and discovered relatives of all races within four generations. I have an African great-great-uncle and a great-great-grandmother who was Chinese. Nevertheless, to my white-skinned American eyes Carmelita was distinctly a Negro, just as to my own eyes I was distinctly a Jewish-Spanish boy. I should also point out, although it is a tiresome cliché no one believes in anymore, that ultimately we all have the same parents. Race is one of the mind’s most convincing and deadly illusions. As Freud might have written: racism is frequently the excuse for our savage behavior, but rarely its cause.]
We took a cab through the surprisingly New York-like Madrid streets. My father chattered to Carmelita in Spanish, telling the story — I could gather from the occasional word I understood — of our surreptitious departure from the United States. I watched my new world out the cab’s window. The gray modern buildings whose coldness disgusted my father (“fascist architecture,” he called it) reassured me. However, the sight of one of the Guardia Civil patrolmen was unsettling. I interrupted my father’s account to Carmelita to ask about him, expecting to be told he was an elite soldier, a unique man, perhaps an executioner. Before he answered, my father pointedly glanced at the cabbie to remind me of his presence. The driver did seem interested in us, for obvious reasons — not only the racial mixture but now the mixture of tongues. Francisco explained with studied indifference, “He’s one of the Guardia Civil. They’re a kind of police. In fact, they are the police.”