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To live in paradise is to live without consequences. Now I know I’m going to die, and ask permission to return to Spain. First, Mr. Nomura berated me: “You didn’t act like a member of the team, Cristóbal-san. Well, what did you think, that you were going to be able to keep your paradise away from the laws of progress forever? You’ve got to realize that by preserving a paradise you were only magnifying a universal desire to invade it and enjoy it. Try to understand once and for alclass="underline" there is no paradise without a Jacuzzi, champagne, a Porsche, and a discotheque. No paradise without french fries, hamburgers, sodas, and Neapolitan pizza. Something for everyone. You can’t go around believing in the symbolism of your name, ’Christ-bearer, dove of the Holy Spirit.’ Come back, fly away little dove, and carry your message: Sayonara, Christ; Paradise, Banzai! Wa! Wa! Wa! Conformity! The nail that sticks out will soon be hammered down.”
On the Iberia flight, I’m treated like what I am, a venerable relic: Cristóbal Colón returning to Spain after a five-hundred-year absence. I’d lost all notion of time and space. Now, up in the sky, I recover them. Oh, how I enjoy seeing from up here the trace of my first voyage — in reverse: the oak-covered hills, the strawberry trees, the incredibly fertile soil all under cultivation, the canoes plying the gulf into which seven rivers empty, one of them in a smooth, milk-colored cascade. I look at the sea and the sirens, the leviathans and the amazons shooting their arrows at the sun. And flying over my burned-out orchard, I begin to sense the beaches with shit tides, bloody rags, flies and rats, the acrid sky, and the poisoned water. Will they put the blame for all this on the Jews and the Arabs before expelling them or exterminating them again?
I observe the flight of ducks and ravens, and I feel that our own ship is pushed along by soft trade winds on a variable sea — here it’s as smooth as glass; there, when we’re anchored in the sargasso, it’s sometimes as stormy as it was in the worst moments of the first voyage. I fly near the stars and yet I see only one constellation as night falls. It’s made up of Ute Pinkernail’s magnificent breasts, the teats I was never to touch …
They serve me Freixenet champagne and they give me the magazine Hola to read. I don’t get the drift of the articles. They don’t mean anything to me. I’m on my way back to Spain. I’m going home. In each hand I carry the proof of my origin. In one hand, I clutch the orange seeds. I want this fruit to survive the implacable exploitation of the island. In the other, I carry the frozen key to my ancestral house in Toledo. I’ll go back there to die: a stone house with a sagging roof, a door made of creaking boards that hasn’t been opened since the time of my ancestors, the Jews expelled by pogroms and plagues, fear and death, lies and hatred …
I silently recite the prayer nailed to my chest like a scapulary. I recite it in the language the Jews of Spain kept alive during all eternity, so we would not renounce our home and house:
You, beloved Spain, we call Mother, and during all our lives we will not abandon your sweet language. Even though you exiled us like a stepmother from your breast, we will not cease to love you as a most holy land, the land where our fathers left their families buried and the ashes of thousands of their loved ones. For you we save our filial love, glorious nation; therefore we send you our glorious greeting.
I repeat the prayer, I squeeze the key, I caress the seeds, and I give myself up to a vast sleep over the sea where time circulates like the currents, uniting and relating everything, yesterday’s conquistadors and today’s, reconquests and counterconquests, besieged paradises, pinnacles and decadences, arrivals and departures, appearances and disappearances, utopias of memory and desire … The constant element in this going back and forth is the painful movement of peoples, immigration, escape, hope, yesterday and today.
What shall I find when I return to Spain?
I shall open the door of my home again.
I shall plant the orange seed again.
London, November 11, 1992