Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina Read Free Book Online Page A

ravenously in a London hotel, a narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom of perverse geometry and a dressing room scarcely larger than an armoire but writhing with angles of expressionist decor. In 1989, having arrived in Buenos Aires during the southern hemisphere’s autumn, I spent hours lying on the bed in my room listening to the rain drumming against the windows, the same rain that prevented me from going outside to walk the streets I wanted so badly to explore. For hours, to offset the claustrophobia of my confinement, I read the first book I had discovered by Bruce Chatwin,
In Patagonia.
Now I know that precisely during the time I was reading Chatwin’s book, the author was dying of an illness whose name he did not want to divulge to anyone. A rare infection contracted in Central Asia through food or an insect bite, his friends said, to conceal his disgrace and avoid speaking the word that was already akin to the sore that centuries ago announced the horror of the plague.
    So I read Chatwin in Buenos Aires as he was dying in London. My journey through Argentina was thus part truth and part literature, because as I read I was traveling to the great desolate spaces of the south, though my itinerary had ended in the nation’s capital, in the room of a hotel I seldom left because of the rain. What a rest for the soul, to be far from everything, completely isolated, like a monk in his cell, a cell with every comfort: a firm bed, a telephone within reach, a remote control for the television. The rain absolved me from the exhausting obligation of
touring and provided the perfect excuse for spending hours doing nothing, lying or half sitting propped up on two pillows, with a book in my hands that told of a journey to the ends of the earth and in which other, much older journeys were recalled: that of Charles Darwin in the large sailing ship
Beagle,
that of the Patagonian Indian who traveled with Darwin to England, learned English and English ways, visited Queen Victoria, and after a few years returned to his southern clime and to the primitive life he had left, now forever an alien wherever he lived.
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    IN COPENHAGEN, a Danish woman of French and Sephardic heritage told me of a journey she had taken as a child with her mother through recently liberated France, toward the end of autumn 1944. I met her at a luncheon in the Writer’s Club, which was a palace with double doors, marble columns, and ceilings with gilded garlands and allegorical paintings. At a window I watched as one of the tall ships passed, looking as if it were gliding down a street: it sailed along one of the canals that lead deep into the city and suddenly give a street corner the surprise perspective of a port.
    That was early in September, about eight years ago. I had spent a couple of days wandering the city, and on the third an editor friend invited me to lunch. My memory is filled with cities that have greatly pleased me but that I visited only once. Of Copenhagen I remember especially images from my first walk. I left the hotel and started walking at random, and soon I came upon an oval plaza circled with palaces and columns; in the center was the bronze statue of a horse, the color bronze acquires because of humidity and lichen, a grayish green like the sky or like the marble of the palace I was told was once the Royal Palace.
    In all the cold and baroque space of that plaza cut through from time to time by a solitary car (as I heard the sound of the motor, I heard also the whisper of tires on the cobblestones) there
was no human presence other than mine and that of a soldier in the red coat and high furry shako of a hussar who was unenthusiastically standing guard with a gun over his shoulder, a gun with a bayonet as anachronistic as his uniform.
    Not knowing which way to go, I let the streets lead me, as I let myself be led by a trail in the country. Across from the bronze horseman began a long, straight street that dead-ended at a dome,