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

It is also very Tetuani, just like our hearty laughs. It’s a memory of someone who left us on the way, those who converted to Christianity and later to Islam, and those who assimilated recently. It’s a sad feeling of what can we do? What could we have done? Nothing, we couldn’t do anything, and today we still can’t do much. More than nothing, but it’s not much. How can we undo so much injustice throughout history?
    But you smile again and once again we are those two children playing at recess or in the sand at Río Martil. We are freedom and we run, we go into the sea and the sea is ours. And then the sandwiches that mom brought us, and then they tell us not to go back into the sea, that it interrupts digestion, but we want more sea, more waves and more water, more salt and more happiness. And where did all that happiness go? Or perhaps it stayed there, walking on the sand, like in the song by Serrat that goes ‘my childhood keeps playing on your beaches’. I could have written that a thousand times. Our footsteps are still there, kissed a thousand times, cried on a thousand times. It’s like traveling on a train when suddenly you change tracks, and you see the track you should have taken. And you are the new track that could bring me back to the same path, but I can no longer return to experience that trip. We lived another trip, a trip that was not our trajectory, but from here we can continue onward and imagine the lost miles. In your book you guide me to return to my track, although it is only a track, missing a lot of footsteps, but since I’ve been writing you your book, I feel as though these are finally my steps, these are my shoes, this is my street, and there is finally a corner without prostitutes where I can wait for you.
    Talk to me, ask me more things, remember unknown memories for me. I want to know everything you remember, I want your memories to become mine, and mine to be yours. Write me books, I want to read everything you wrote, to find myself in them, I want to be a character maladjusted to life in your books. I want to be that boy who watches me from the window and disappears without ever telling me when he will return. I want to be your brother and your lover, your voice and your silence. I want to be the most beautiful words you’ve written, I want to be the most beautiful words you will write. Give me life in your words, give me life in your thoughts, without them I am no one. Give me a face by looking at me, your look is the creator of my face.
    And once again Serrat, now that I’m crying, a man crying for a secret woman, who says to that woman undress me, undress me, now that I’m crying, crying over my life, my pants lost. And the vests I always forgot everywhere, just like my children do, and my mother would scold me because I lost so many things. It’s just that I’ve never liked things much. I collect looks, the lost looks of women lost on the street, in the metro, in the subway. I collect the looks of pretty women who have given me their love for a second and disappeared forever. I never liked things very much, I always give everything away. When someone comes over and they like a CD, I give it to them, they like a book, I give it to them. A friend of mine always told me to stop giving thing away so much, but I don’t need those things, I need warm looks in cold cities, in cities where everything human has disappeared.  A smile is more than a car, and I don’t even have a driver’s license anyway.
    What is the difference between a poet and a novelist? Poets don’t have driver’s licenses.
    And now you laugh again, you laugh again and you’re seven years old, you laugh again and you’re fifteen and the boys dream of you, the boys want to dance with you, but you want to write one poem and then another poem about the boys. You want to dance alone on the sand, on the beach, naked, at sunrise. You want to dance free of everything and everyone, and that’s why you write