where I couldn’t control myself and ate calamari, which isn’t kosher. I can live fine without meat, without chicken, without any animal, but calamari is my biggest weakness. And now we’re in Algeciras, and then at the beaches between Ceuta and Tetouan, Restinga, Kabila, Ksar El Rimal, El Rincón and Río Martil. A short trip around the Mediterranean, mine, my Mediterranean, the one that can’t continue to exist without me, that doesn’t exist unless I write about it.
In that sea we found each other, sea of sun, sea of freedom, sea of childhood, sea of innocence, oh terrible and beautiful innocence, lost forever in customs between Morocco and Ceuta, lost without the ability to look back like Lot’s wife, like the sweet salt of sea water.
“I came in one door while you were leaving out the other.” “And I left through the second right when you were returning to get the keys that had been forgotten.”
“And then I came in to get my suitcase, but you had already left.”
“Our footsteps traveled through the same houses for years, but we never found each other.”
“Always walking down parallel streets.”
“Drinking at the same bars.”
“Tasting the same calamari from the same sea.” “The same innocent fish.”
“We were children in paradise, adolescents in tunnels, adults in strange walls, and today we are the memory of each other.”
He She
“W hat language do you make love in?”
It’s been two months now, and one hundred e-mails from each of us, and most of all I feel full of Raquel. Her presence comes with me wherever I go and wherever I am. I’m possessed, or as Van Morrison says, “It’s a beautiful obsession.”
So much so that I wonder how presence is created or how sometimes you can be in front of someone and you realize they’re not there, they’ve disappeared. Their body and their faraway gazes are there, their words, their smiles, but not the person. You don’t feel their presence. But what I didn’t know is that you could feel the strong, very strong presence of someone thousands of miles away.
I wonder what distance is, and what presence is. Because I spend the day talking to Raquel, I spend the day discussing Tetouan, literature, what love is, marriage, children, beauty, aesthetics, and Raquel by my side answers me, she responds to me, she gets mad when I tell her I don’t like Levinas and when I tell her that Camus seems like a fake to me. I feel as though everything he writes is perceived only by the mind and the intellect, and she says but how can you say that, have you read Le Premier Homme , and I like how French words naturally enter our discussion. Well no, I never finished a book by Camus. From the first words a little bird in my head tells me this isn’t the Maghreb or the Mediterranean. These are the philosophical conclusions about the Mediterranean, and literature is not philosophy. Literature has to try to include everything, and I especially can’t stand anyone who writes knowing the beginning and the end. For the writer, literature has to be a discovery.
Okay yes, Raquel, I don’t like that part about “having to be”. It doesn’t have to be, it’s what I like or don’t like. Yes, and now I look like a know-it-all, like someone who believes they can convince everyone of everything they think. A friend of mine said it’s difficult to argue with me when I’m not right, but when I am right, it’s impossible. The worst thing about all this is that I feel the opposite, that I act this way out of a lack of my own conviction. Like when, still a virgin at age twenty, I tried to flirt with a girl, and she went to a friend and said don’t let this Moshe think I’ll be one of his many women and that he’s going to seduce me in half an hour. Out of so much fear, I gave off the impression of being a Don Juan.
Yes, that’s it, keep writing in Hebrew, echoes Raquel’s voice in my ear. You have to keep going. You can’t keep those voices stifled. And
In that sea we found each other, sea of sun, sea of freedom, sea of childhood, sea of innocence, oh terrible and beautiful innocence, lost forever in customs between Morocco and Ceuta, lost without the ability to look back like Lot’s wife, like the sweet salt of sea water.
“I came in one door while you were leaving out the other.” “And I left through the second right when you were returning to get the keys that had been forgotten.”
“And then I came in to get my suitcase, but you had already left.”
“Our footsteps traveled through the same houses for years, but we never found each other.”
“Always walking down parallel streets.”
“Drinking at the same bars.”
“Tasting the same calamari from the same sea.” “The same innocent fish.”
“We were children in paradise, adolescents in tunnels, adults in strange walls, and today we are the memory of each other.”
He She
“W hat language do you make love in?”
It’s been two months now, and one hundred e-mails from each of us, and most of all I feel full of Raquel. Her presence comes with me wherever I go and wherever I am. I’m possessed, or as Van Morrison says, “It’s a beautiful obsession.”
So much so that I wonder how presence is created or how sometimes you can be in front of someone and you realize they’re not there, they’ve disappeared. Their body and their faraway gazes are there, their words, their smiles, but not the person. You don’t feel their presence. But what I didn’t know is that you could feel the strong, very strong presence of someone thousands of miles away.
I wonder what distance is, and what presence is. Because I spend the day talking to Raquel, I spend the day discussing Tetouan, literature, what love is, marriage, children, beauty, aesthetics, and Raquel by my side answers me, she responds to me, she gets mad when I tell her I don’t like Levinas and when I tell her that Camus seems like a fake to me. I feel as though everything he writes is perceived only by the mind and the intellect, and she says but how can you say that, have you read Le Premier Homme , and I like how French words naturally enter our discussion. Well no, I never finished a book by Camus. From the first words a little bird in my head tells me this isn’t the Maghreb or the Mediterranean. These are the philosophical conclusions about the Mediterranean, and literature is not philosophy. Literature has to try to include everything, and I especially can’t stand anyone who writes knowing the beginning and the end. For the writer, literature has to be a discovery.
Okay yes, Raquel, I don’t like that part about “having to be”. It doesn’t have to be, it’s what I like or don’t like. Yes, and now I look like a know-it-all, like someone who believes they can convince everyone of everything they think. A friend of mine said it’s difficult to argue with me when I’m not right, but when I am right, it’s impossible. The worst thing about all this is that I feel the opposite, that I act this way out of a lack of my own conviction. Like when, still a virgin at age twenty, I tried to flirt with a girl, and she went to a friend and said don’t let this Moshe think I’ll be one of his many women and that he’s going to seduce me in half an hour. Out of so much fear, I gave off the impression of being a Don Juan.
Yes, that’s it, keep writing in Hebrew, echoes Raquel’s voice in my ear. You have to keep going. You can’t keep those voices stifled. And
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