Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina Read Free Book Online

them from continuing. Some leaped from the train and fled across the fields, hoping to cross the border in the shelter of night.
    What would it be like to arrive by night at the coast of an unfamiliar country, to jump into the water from a boat in which you have crossed the ocean in darkness, hoping to leave the coast far behind even as your feet are sinking into the sand? A man alone, with no documents, no money, who has come from the horror of illness and slaughter in Africa, from the heart of darkness, who knows no word of the language of the country to which he’s come, who throws himself to the ground and crouches in a ditch when he sees the headlights of a car, maybe the police, coming toward him.
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    IT SEEMS WE ENJOY reading travel books more when we are traveling. At the beginning of the summer of 1976, after wrapping up my courses, I took a train from Granada and during the trip read Proust’s account of a journey to Vienna in
Remembrance of Things Past.
Two years later, on a September evening, I went to Venice for the first time, and remembered Proust and his painful propensity for disillusionment as I visited places I had wanted so long to see. Talking with Francisco Ayala about the pleasure of reading Proust, I discovered that he, too, connected it with the simultaneous pleasure of a journey. In nineteen forty-something, when my friend was living in exile in Buenos Aires, he taught at the provincial University of Rosario. He traveled once a week,
first by train to Santa Fe, then in a bus that ran along the banks of the Paraná. He always carried a volume of Proust, and it seemed to him that reading Proust now was even more delicious than the first time, because when he looked up, he saw vistas from the other side of the world, was instantly whisked from the streets of Paris in 1900 and from the cloudy beaches of Normandy to the immense uninhabited spaces of South America he was passing through by train and bus. Suddenly the book was his only tie with his previous life, with a Spain lost to him, a Spain he might never return to, and a Europe that still had not emerged from the cataclysm of war. He was reading Proust on a bus traveling along the sealike vastness of the Paraná, and the volume he held in his hands was the same he’d read so often on streetcars in Madrid.
    Once, at one of the stops, he looked up and saw a white-haired old man who had just got on, wearing a worn overcoat and carrying an equally worn briefcase. He was struck by his air of melancholy and poverty; the face reflected illness and exhaustion, the face of an old man whom the years had not spared life’s bitterest dregs. In an instant of shock, disbelief, and embarrassed compassion, he recognized in this old man riding a bus in a remote town in Argentina a man who had once been president of the Spanish Republic: Don Niceto Alcalá Zamora. Afraid that Alcalá might recognize him as well, he turned his face toward the window and buried himself in the book. When he looked up again, after the next stop, the man was no longer on the bus.
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    ON A JOURNEY YOU HEAR a story or by chance find a book that sends out ripples of concentric rings that affect succeeding discoveries. Once on a train to Seville, at a time when I was very much in love with a woman who fled from me when I most desired her and who pursued me when I tried to break away, I was reading
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
and bestowed on Giorgio Bassani’s beautiful and ungovernable Jewish heroine, Micol, the features of the woman I loved. The final failure of the novel’s protagonist sadly anticipated mine, which I saw with a clearsightedness I wouldn’t have been capable of on my own.
    I remember a cheap, dog-eared copy of Herodotus’s
Histories
that I found in a street stall in New York, and also Captain John Franklin’s journal of his trek to the North Pole that I had leafed through by chance in a secondhand bookshop and then read