Free Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) by Mois Benarroch Page A

students and teachers. Were they ashamed of their mother tongue? At one time there were French thinkers who believed the world would be better off if everyone spoke French. In 1950, they did a study on the rate of illiteracy among Jews, and it came to fifty percent. When I read that I said it couldn’t possibly be true, all the men had to know how to read Hebrew to pray, at least a few lines. Then I read that only fifty percent knew French. There are ridiculous things in this world: at that time, only those who knew how to read in French were literate. The illiterate ones were actually the French people who created the study.
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    T hursday
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    Maybe on a Thursday like today
    I’ll find you among some trees
    the last trees of a great city, and you’ll ask me innocently in Spanish, where is Calderón street?
    and when I hear your sweet Spanish
    I’ll see the sea from my childhood
    a couple of waves and a lot of clouds
    and your words will caress me
    My eyes will stay fixed on you
    as if you had disappeared
    inside my mind forever
    and after a long while I’ll tell you
    that’s the street I never stopped looking for and your smile will be the sea
    But maybe
    we will never find each other
    all of our lives lost
    in the forest of coincidences maybe
    we are one street away from each other but we will never know
    we exist.
    A little air in the middle of so many words, half of a page left white, a poem I wrote you before knowing you, meeting you, or even imagining your existence.
    Because today it’s cold out, the clouds are covering the sky and it’s raining, and I have to tell you that bad times are coming. It’s the law of the fat cows and the skinny cows, times without water and without food, times when the earth tires of giving us fruit and the cows die. We can’t do anything about this, and many will perish. It’s not a prophecy, it’s the logic of seeing. And it rains, but the suns always comes out in the end in these lands. It doesn’t hide for long, one day, two, sometimes three, but not like in Paris or London. My brother calls me saying he needs the sun, that he hasn’t seen the sun in six weeks. In Tetouan, the sun wouldn’t disappear for long either. I remember a cloudy day in 1996 when I went there on vacation to look for my footprints, and I asked the taxi driver if it was going to rain. He said “No way! There’s an easterly wind.” Okay, who could have known that in Tetouan it only rains with a westerly wind. It’s not like here, where there is hardly ever a westerly wind, the wind always comes from the sea, sometimes the desert, but not from the mountains. And this is your book, I’m writing it to you to in some way realize that dream of getting married and living with a woman from Tetouan, that genetic dream of all our great emigrants who returned from Brazil or Oran to Tetouan to find a woman who was “one of us” and then returned with her to their adoptive countries, telling their children they were from Tetouan, that they were the true Sephardic Jews, and they would teach them words in Haketia. Once I met one of them at a party full of French people. His great-grandfather had gone to Oran in eighteen sixty-something and they introduced me to him saying I was from Tetouan. He asked me over and over again if I was really born in Tetouan, “Ça veut dire, que tu es vraiment né a Tetouan?”, which made me wonder if I had done something wrong. Then he told me that it was the first time he had met someone who was truly from Tetouan, but that his parents and grandparents always told him about that mythical city, that in Oran they were called the Spaniards, and they didn’t marry local Jewish women. I hadn’t dreamed it; finally someone had told me I was really from Tetouan.  You see, I truly am from Tetouan.
    You don’t laugh like you usually do, and all of a sudden you have a sad air about you, that air that goes through our hearts once in a while.