The Expelled (10 page)

“Well now I don't want to read his books anymore, I had a boyfriend who loved Harry Esh and I promised him I would read his novels, but I never did.”

They both looked toward the door. They didn't know what time it was, whether it was night or day, whether it was raining or it was sunny, or maybe it was even snowing. They moved closer one to another and they could hear again in their minds the music of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen's song at the same time, it was engraved in their memory and they both heard the word Hallelujah simultaneously. Dospasos remembered a scene in a novel by Harry Esh in which two lovers meet after twenty years and every time they are getting close to each other the phone rings. That was what had happened with his first girlfriend, slow dancing to Elton John, “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word”, at his complete moment of shyness when they were both warming up and he almost dared to bring his mouth to hers, the phone rang. After that, the song had ended, he was relieved of stress and they never kissed, they hardly saw each other again. Perhaps she got confused, he thought, right there in front of Nahid. Maybe they didn't love each other that much, maybe she wasn't his, or it wasn't the right time. A thousand times in his life he wondered what would have happened if the phone hadn't rung, or it had but an hour later. Perhaps they would have been in bed and he would have lost his virginity that day. That scene was what almost caused an identification with Harry Esh's books, they were identical to that moment that changed his life forever, life suddenly left him.

She was afraid to leave and she felt better now in the hands of a man who protected her, it was hard to think or understand how he had become a protector in a few minutes of her life, when the first thing she thought when she saw him come through the door was that she was looking at Satan. Now she wasn't even sure anymore if he was the one who had raped her. The way he acted, so protective and seductive, made her doubt, and more than doubt, it changed what had happened or hadn't happened on the bus, or the very existence of the bus.

Both, very tired, got closer and fell asleep together and almost embraced and at the same time with Cohen's Hallelujah in their minds. They said nothing. At four, Dospasos woke up with a tremendous pain in his big toe that made him think that someone was trying to cut it off, he woke up screaming, she asked him what was going on.

“It hurts,” he said, “it hurts, my foot hurts a lot.” It was all swollen and red, like a kind of edema. “It hurts,” he repeated, “it hurts a lot,” and he cried from the pain.

“Alright, let's go to a hospital.”

“I know what it is, my father had it once and it hurt for a week, it's called gout, that's what I have. It's genetic.” He knew it although it was his first attack.

They both went out to the street, it was 3 a.m. There was nobody walking on the sidewalks, and the first car that passed was a taxi. The taxi stopped and they both got in the back.

I finish, cough a little. I read it all in one blow, it's been more than two hours, almost three, I read fast but clearly.

“What do you think?”

“Honestly, I don't know, I don't understand a word of Spanish.”

“Come on...”

“It's true,” she says it in Spanish, with a French accent. “It's
tr-ue
.”

“What about me? You let me read like that for three hours.”

“I like how Spanish sounds.”

I feel humiliated, ashamed, swindled, I want to leave, but I don't. We have already begun a kind of relationship. Well the important thing is that she followed me with her eyes, and I couldn't even imagine that she didn't understand me, maybe she's just kidding. I recover. Alright then. Now I only speak in Spanish.

“From now on, if that's what you like, I'm only going to speak in Spanish.”

She looks at me and smiles. I say it again in Hebrew and then in French so she can understand, but then I say it in Spanish.

“I'm going to break your gut, all over, I want to fuck you now, here, right now. Actually, that's not true, what I really want is to leave. And I thought this relationship was going to be something literary so my readers could think that wonderful things happen to me, and in the end it's nothing more than a night fucking with a child like all man in their forties who are frustrated with their wives do. Damn what an interesting writer I'm going to be! I'm not going to sell a thing like that, and well, it's not that I want to sell, what I want is to write and to write you have to sell books, to later write books that don't sell or to really write, this is becoming more difficult by the day.”

“Do you want more tea?” She asks in French.

I don't answer and she pours me more tea and I keep talking.

“You see, Gabrielle, the worst thing is that the more you are a writer and the better you are known, the less money you have, or it will be a curse as my sister says, a curse that someone put on us there in Morocco three generations ago and there is no way of getting out of it according to her, but what I say is that from now on if that's what you like, I'll only talk to you in Spanish.”

She comes closer to me, touches my lips with her finger and says
shhh...

“Of course, I understood your story and I liked it very much, although it was very Kafkaesque.”

“Kafkaesque? But how can you say that if I have never read Kafka!”

“Liar, of course you have read Kafka.”

“Well, yes, but only a little, in my opinion he's a writer who's been read by way too many people.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think, well, I believe that each reader removes a part of the masterpiece and takes it forever, therefore if a book is read by many people there is nothing left in the book. Look at what happened to the Quixote. It is no longer a book, it is a shipwreck.”

“I don't understand.”

“It doesn't matter, but to me it doesn't seem Kafkaesque. And I want to make love.”

“Not today, today is a literary day, without sex.”

“Abstinence.”

Twenty-four hours and she's already like my wife. Was my performance so bad that she didn't want more?

“And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow we will see, but not today.”

“Then I'm leaving, I'll come back tomorrow.”

“You only want me for sex.”

“It’s just that you are already acting like my wife.”

I’ve let it slip, in these situations it is completely forbidden to talk about one's wife.

“And how is your wife?”

Now I choose not to screw up or tell her that they look alike, or that they have the same name, or that she is French. Nothing.

“She's like all women.”

“And how is that?”

“I don't know, a normal woman. I've been married for many years, believe me that in ten years everything, absolutely everything becomes normal, even the greatest love, and it's been a while since we celebrated our tenth anniversary. I don't even want to remember. I'm leaving. I don't feel good. I'm leaving. I'll call you tomorrow.”

“I'll be waiting here at four.”

“Like today.”

“Yes, like today, and I bought a corkscrew. Tomorrow we can drink the bottle of wine.”

“Yes, the one that cost me fifty-six shekels instead of twenty-four.”

I totally messed up there and left. It was 9 p.m. so I went home. My wife wasn't there. It was better, that way we didn't have to talk. I went to sleep before she returned and became all chatty.

I lie in bed, but I can't sleep.

Maybe all this is a simple illusion, so what? Isn't it why they pay us, sometimes, to write illusions, to imagine? Then what do I care if all of this is true if it is real or not? The problem is that I have already said that everything was real, but that could also be another fiction. Or am I afraid of reality, I'm afraid it will eat me and devour me, or I'm afraid to start suffering from schizophrenia, like in the movie about the mathematician who won the Nobel Prize, Nash, who creates an entire parallel life and believes in its existence, until he discovers that all that world does not exist, nor the offices, nor the people in them. Sometimes I think that everyone is living in absolute schizophrenia and that one day we will wake up to find that planes don't exist and that it's pure imagination of the masses, for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, that it's all fiction. And I should stop this habit of counting the number of words every fifteen minutes, and the back-ups in Gmail keep surprising me, I shouldn't have called this file Gabrielle, and in the end it's not even going to be the name of the book, maybe it'll be The Expelled, and maybe it'll be something else, The Bus, or a different name. Phone. I see Gabriele on the screen of my cellphone, I must be careful not to get it wrong, I should call her junior, sometimes I leave my phone around and it's my wife, with the double l’s, who answers it.

“How's your wife's cooking?”

“What?”

“Yeah,” junior says, “you've told me nothing about her.”

“And what interests you is to know if she's a good cook or not?”

“Well, it's something.”

“I like her cooking, but she burns a lot of stuff, I guess I love burnt food. That's why I like it. Well, not too burned, but just a little, like rice that sticks to tomato sauce or fried eggs, a little burned, she is always doing a thousand things and she forgets and she burns things, although sometimes the food is completely burned...”

“I don't need that many details, it's enough. See you later.”

We just spoke and minutes later my wife opens the bedroom door and checks if I'm sleeping, I close my eyes and pretend to be half snoring. She goes away. Apparently to watch a movie. I hope the junior doesn't call me on my cell again. I turn it off. I think I should change the whole story because I can't convince a reader by telling him that everything is plausible and that it all happened to me, he's going to think I'm a moron, I just can't do that, I must convince him by using a technique and not by saying and repeating a thousand times that it's something that really happened to me and that the reader should believe me, the critics are going to rip me to pieces, tear me apart, criticize me, they're all anti-Semitic. This is how you resolve everything, I write what I want, good, bad, and if the critics don't like it it's because they are anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is no longer what it used to be. And if it's in Israel I say they're anti-Moroccan, and they are, at least many of the critics are. Well, those who hate me before reading me. I must stop thinking about it, about critics and readers. Didn't I say that a writer mustn't think about the readers? But I also already said this time I have to sell, if I don't sell I'll be homeless, not much, just a few, about ten thousand copies a year, I can live with that and keep writing. It's not too much to ask for or is it. And then comes a brat and with his first book, which is quite bad but that talks about incest or a crime, with that it becomes a bestseller and he can keep writing more bad books his entire life, and I'm here working my ass off for thirty years to end up selling nothing. I say it because I feel that my book will sell this time and it's the last time I can say these things and be convinced. It's going to be published on a good day, on the Jewish holiday Tu BiShvat, on the 22 of January, Tu BiShvat is on a full moon and trees are planted in celebration. Perhaps I should plant a tree. I finally fall asleep.

I wake up very early, before six. I prepare an orange juice for my wife and another one for me. She wakes up and asks me to help her fill up a form for social security. I say no. She gets nervous. She reproaches my lack of interest about money. I say it's time she learned Hebrew, after more than twenty years in Israel, twenty-five, or twenty-seven, I don't remember what number I said. She gets very upset, she finally yells, finally something other than that nervous apathy that makes me crazy comes out of her. I drink the apple tea that I brought a few months ago from Turkey, almost a year ago and that I forgot in the cupboard. In Turkey, you spend the entire day drinking glasses of apple tea and then you buy a package to bring back to Israel and you never drink that tea. I love Turkey.

She leaves, and when she does Gabriele junior calls me, she asks me again about my wife's cooking.

“It feels like a déjà vu, didn't you ask me that yesterday?”

“I don't remember. Why are you still with her?”

“I don't know. Sometimes I think that the only thing we have left is the past.”

“And isn’t it enough?” She hangs up.

Isn’t it enough? Good question, It's what I've been asking myself for years before the past began, isn’t it enough? I could ask myself that same question a thousand times, isn’t it enough? Isn’t it enough? Isn’t it enough? Isn’t it enough? It's not a repetition exercise, I just can't stop asking myself that same question, it's like a song in which Van Morrison doesn't stop repeating the same line. Luckily he doesn't sing in Spanish.

I realize there is a problem with tenses throughout the story. But the problem is its own solution. When one tells what has happened he is already in another present, and in that present the events happen again, and for the first time.

For that reason, and therefore, I get up and I go downtown to sell five books. It's been ages since I've sold a book, I always tell my wife and kids to do it because I can't get rid of books. I even take one of mine to see how much I get for it, I hop on the bus, line 18, which goes slowly. I arrive at the bookstore in Yaffo street, a nice cashier is talking to a buyer who buys about five books including a Bible, I wonder why someone would buy a Bible if right across from here they actually give them away, in all colors and sizes, with or without the New Testament and in all languages. In the end, he pays by credit card. When my turn comes and I ask if they buy books, the cashier tells me that the owner is not there and that she doesn't have the authority to do so. I go to the house of cigar and buy two boxes of Partagas Cuban cigars, I support Fidel Castro. At the station I see a new kiosk selling falafel and cappuccinos, I buy a falafel and before taking the first bite the bus arrives, number 21, the one that takes me home, but before I pass by the post office, there are three more books waiting for me there, more because I no longer have room for books, one by Fernando Vallejo, short stories by Reinaldo Arenas and another by Esther Bendahan.