Lucena by Mois Benarroch Read Free Book Online Page A

state and everybody can do as they please.”
    “I’ll agree with that.” He had his mouth full and he turned red. “But not in my family. If you two, my sons, are gay, what do I know? If you like to be done back there, please, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to hear it. Or to have a heart attack.”
    Samuel realized that things were turning ugly and that his father wouldn’t go very long without suffering an attack of apoplexy as had occurred a few years back during the celebration of Sucot , when he got so upset he couldn’t breathe and had to be taken, to hospital. He remembered very well that they had argued about an uncle he did not know, a Jacob Benzimra, who, sixty years before, had married a Christian prostitute.
    “Papa, I don’t know why you get so heated up. Neither I nor my brother are homosexuals. You don’t have to worry. We are boy scouts and we go out with Jewish girls. Calm down. Everything is ok.”
    “I should calm down? With everything we see on television?”
    “Why don’t you stop watching it?”
    “So finally this Benchimol ended up changing sex. I know how they fill their brains with butterflies, those scabs. They poison their brains with this foolishness and they think they are being modern.”
    “But since we don’t have any contact with those Benchimol why do you care?” said the mother trying to calm things down.
    “Papa, tell me something: Did you have a grandfather Abraham Benzimra that went to Brazil in the last century?”
    “Back then everybody went to Brazil. Yes, there was one with that name. He left, but he would come back every couple of years until one day he didn’t come back and we don’t even know where he was buried. The wind took him. Or maybe he found a prostitute in Brazil. The specialty of our family.”
    “Does that make you nervous?”
    “May he rest in peace,” said papa. “No, God save me, we needn’t talk about our ancestors He was forty years old when he disappeared. He started out visiting Brazil, like many from Tetuán, seeking a bread crust, shortly after his Bar-mitzvah . He must have married very young, I can’t remember. Ask your grandmother. Remember the photo your grandmother has in the kitchen? Where there is an old man and a child at his side? The child is him: Abraham Benzimra, who disappeared in Brazil. They called him the one who left us in Brazil he who went to Brazil, and the one who is sitting beside him is his grandfather, who was also named Abraham Benzimra. ”
    “So did his children say Kaddish for him?”
    “Kaddish? I don’t know. Why do you want to know? Maybe they did, maybe not. His poor wife, Freja Benzimra, surely she remained alone to the end of her days. I didn’t know them. I was born after Moroccan Independence. All this is only stories. Maybe your grandmother can tell you something. Go see her.”
    The little brother, David, who up to then had remained silent, started imitating the grandmother, wrinkling up his face and in a parody of what she always said to them when they went to see her: “ All day long alone. Nobody comes to see me, neither my sons nor my daughters. What do you want child? Did you bring me a gift?”
    Samuel nodded to his brother indicating agreement with what he had said. But what happened when he went to grandma’s house was different. When he didn’t have anything to do, he used to go to grandma’s house and take her copies of Playboy.
    “Look, grandma: models.”
    “Models? Well I never saw anything like that!
    “Look at this blonde. Look at those breasts.”
    “What’s wrong with you child?” She would say halfway laughing half shouting. “This is new style renewed. Throw that all out.”
    “Why grandma? These are respectable models!”
    Sometimes he would go to see her to tell her he had joined the mafia, that he had asked them for a loan and that he owed them a lot of money: two million pesetas, and if he did not pay them back they would be on him. Then the grandmother