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

They are your words, Raquel, that have the power to create life again, that have the power to conserve life.
    And I love you, I love you, woman, and I love you, that’s just how it is.
    Cernuda and Serrat singing.
    That’s something else I won’t tell you. I won’t be able to say it, I’ll write it but I won’t be able to say it to you.
    Oh how I write to you, my darling, but when we talk on the phone I can’t say those three words. My darling, my queen, is all of Tetouan in three words. There, where we were all kings, where my mother and my grandmother, my father and my uncles called me king. We were kings and queens and everything around us appears today to have been a long miracle. A world we will never be able to describe, a world where Sepharad lived its last moments, where only the good of the past existed.
    It’s eleven and I’m waiting for your daily e-mail. I will smile again upon seeing your words. I’ll think about the turrón you sent me, and the marks you left on its sweetness. How did you know that the jijona kind was the one I liked best? Or rather, what I’m asking is how could you not know it, if you read me through the poems, you read my life and my footsteps on the shores of the Mediterranean. You read the tracks that have already been erased, that only you know are there, like yours in Restinga, or in Río Martil, where you left footprints I went to find. The ones I was looking for were yours, not mine. I already knew about mine. The small footprints of a girl who doesn’t know, or perhaps knows all too well that paradise ends quickly, that paradise is only born in the moment you leave it, and there at the end of the Mediterranean, where the ocean comes to eat up our sea, there I saw you walking happily, smiling, and always giving out love and joy to those with you. There you ran free, girl who will be a woman, girl who will always remain a girl. You would run in the sea and your entire life fit into your smile.
    It’s time for your e-mail and I check my account every two minutes, like someone waiting for a lottery check. I won the lottery, but so much money at once is something I can’t digest. At the same time, it scares me a lot. So much sensitivity and so much understanding, and I’m a prisoner of fear. Where does one go from here? Where do both of us go, where will we bring our words?
    But I feel we are one, not on a physical level but on a spiritual level. I think about what the Kabbalah says, that what parents think about when they procreate is very important. The Kabbalists prepare and train to have good thoughts so their children go down a good path. I think your father was thinking about my mother and my mother about your father when they conceived us, and that we are actually the same, the same spiritual entity. And suddenly, like so many other things I think, this seems stupid to me. But suddenly I see the girl I was, not the boy, who was she? My grandmother always said I was the most beautiful baby in Tetouan, and she wasn’t a person who gave out compliments easily. In all the photos I’ve seen from my first months and years, I seem more like a baby girl, and when I was an adolescent people often made that mistake and took me for a girl, until I was sixteen. I remember a time at the airport when, going into the bathroom, someone told me that the ladies’ room was to the right. That must be the reason for the beard, the beard is for defining my sexuality. And when I write in female first person I can feel completely like a woman. It’s not easy, it’s scary. But I also think my mother wanted a son so much after my older sister, and I couldn’t take part in that decision. She put all of her effort into making me male, but deep down there is a woman. It could have been you, throughout this whole journey. I will be that person, the one you see when you write in masculine first person. You say you like it and it seems like you’re writing to me when you speak from a masculine