LITMIR.BIZ

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can I help you sister. I am free for a change, free abroad for the first time in my life without anyone to make demands. It’s nice to be alone with no sisters at my elbow, jabbering about relatives or borrowing money or trying to drag me to yet another mall to find just the perfect bargain in leather pants or jade earrings. Do they have malls here? I haven’t seen any yet, but maybe they’re in the suburbs if they have suburbs here. I know nothing about this city, nothing about this country, nothing about these buildings, with their ornate facades. I wonder what they call this architecture. I wonder what history these buildings contain. We never studied architecture and we never studied our own history very much and certainly not the history of Europe. Only Alexander the Great, how we were the only ones to defeat him, and the only ones to defeat the British and we did that twice. Aren’t we wonderful, we defeat everyone including ourselves, but nobody talks about that. Our history. I hated that long list of dates of battles and of emirs and shahs and poets and holy men, Timur and Ghengis Khan and Dost Mohammed and Rumi, but nothing about who they really were or how treated their wives and daughters.

      The directions from the desk clerk are clear. I am to walk down this street named Calle de las Huertas, meaning what? I pass tiny restaurants and plenty of small stores, boutiques, with jewelry, scarves, jackets, shawls, and shoes, wonderful shoes but not shoes you could walk in, not with those heels, not on these cobblestones. It’s wonderful to walk where you want and have no men sidle up to grab your arm or push against your breast or call you a bad name for being alone. The men on the street don’t all look like actors as did those in the hotel, but I like their discretion, the way they look at me, see me, but not with a stare, more of a glance, a slight smile, of appreciation perhaps? I look good today. I know I look good when I am not working and harassed. They are wondering: is she one of us or a foreigner? The people are mixed here, you can see the combinations clearly in the body types, the skin tone, the hair color, the slightly beaked noses, the full lips that whisper of North Africa. A few are blondes but not real blondes. The kind of blondes you get in any dark country where hair coloring and peroxide drip to the roots.

      I reach the archway the clerk mentioned and go through the shade of a tunnel and out into the sunlight of a huge square. The Plaza Mayor. What an amazing space! Enormous buildings with arcades and balconies and on one of them, huge paintings of nude women climbing and twisting up the facade. It’s like a stage setting for a great pageant. I see women in long, full dresses, holding silk parasols in one arm while the other is entwined with that of a man in a frock coat and top hat who carries a walking stick. You expect carriages with drivers and lackeys in uniform, the hooves of horses clattering over the cobblestones, while on those balconies women with enormous piles of hair and diamond necklaces drink champagne from crystal flutes and smile down on their inferiors. Right now the plaza seems both empty and full of life, café tables with bright awnings spill out of arcades, waiters in black jackets and white aprons hurry along with trays of food and drinks, guitarists, bongo drummers, and violinists play furiously with their instrument cases open on the ground to catch coins, painters at easels sketch portraits of bulky tourists, groups of furtive men in tweed jackets and hats, in this weather? cluster in a corner of a far arcade, arguing heatedly, buying, selling something small, very small—but what? coins? stamps? drugs?

      I avoid the cafes for a stone bench not far from a bronze statue of a man on a rearing horse. Women alone in outdoor cafes are prostitutes, aren’t they; or taken for prostitutes. It’s the same thing. If I sit here I won’t have to deal with waiters or other foreigners like me, Americans or Brits who will no doubt ask where I am from. It’s a circular bench, a ledge really, around a tall iron street lamp. The sun is just sinking behind the buildings that line the square. I sit down next to two mothers with squalling babies in strollers. On my other side a very old one armed man who badly needs a shave and wears a summer jacket with the sleeve neatly pinned to the shoulder lights a match by flicking it with his thumb, then touches it to the cigarette in his lips, one of those foul smelling smokes that might as well be a cigar. Beyond the women is a figure I glimpse when sitting down. Benjamin. This is our famous meeting, but at the time all I know is that it’s someone who is very aware of me and wants me to be aware of him, only I want to be alone so I can enjoy the buildings and the space and the doings of Plaza Mayor without having to think or talk or be social.

      One thing in life is certain: you are never alone for long. A slender young man with long, messy blonde hair approaches and asks do I speak English. He has a slight accent that I don’t recognize. I say yes and he stands in front of me with his head tilted slightly to the right as if there is something wrong with his neck, and his arms hang by his side, and his fingers twitch, and he begins a story about what sad and difficult things have happened to him here in Spain in the last few days. He is Dutch, and this was his last big vacation before going to work, he has wanted to come to Spain all his life. He starts a job next week, back home, in computers, software, but three days ago his backpack was stolen in a youth hostel, and his wallet was in the backpack, but the people running the hostel wouldn’t believe him and threw him out, and when he went to the cops they shrugged and said you Dutch are rich, just get some money from home, but his parents are on vacation in Italy and he can’t reach them, and his friends are all away on vacation too. It’s just a matter of two or three days. He keeps making collect calls and soon his parents will be home and wire him the money, but right now he’s starving, and he has been sleeping in the corner of the square for three days, trying to keep clean washing at the public fountains but that’s illegal and cops threatened to arrest him if he tries washing there again.

      The two mothers stand up and push off with their strollers, the one armed man keeps smoking, uninterested in the babble of foreigners, and the man on the right begins to edge closer to me on the bench. I ignore the impulse to look his way, yet I can’t fail to hear his voice, a warm voice, say something about how the youngster wants to take advantage of me. I do remember the line: If his story is true, I’m the king of Spain. What nerve from a stranger on a bench, as if I don’t know my way around the world, as if I haven’t lived in fifteen different countries, some of them like Egypt and India where the beggars have their hands out everywhere you go. I pride myself on knowing when one of them is telling the truth.

      The young man hears these words too and responds not with anger, which is what you would expect if his story weren’t true. You’re right, he says, and if I were you, I’d be suspicious too. You’ve never seen me before. I must look like a bum or a drug addict. It would be natural to think I’m going to take money and buy drugs and stick a needle in my arm. But look at my arm, and he rolls up his right sleeve and then his left. You can see there’s no needle marks. My family we are good middle class people and I’m a graduate of the University of Amsterdam in mathematics. I didn’t know this kind of thing could happen in Europe today. Give me your address. I swear I’ll pay you back. I have my pride. I hate the idea of asking strangers for something, but lady, your face is so kind that it gave me the courage to come up to you. I thought here is someone who will believe me. Honest. I swear on the Bible this is true.

      Somewhere in the middle of this, his voice cracks with emotion and a tear trickles from his right eye. I fumble with my purse, pull out my wallet, which contains more dollars than pesetas. How much should I give him? Ten dollars? That doesn’t seem enough. Twenty? For all the honor of being at the festival, this trip is costing me out of pocket and I’m not exactly rolling in money.

      The voice on my right speaks again, saying that if I’m going to give a donation to the cause that I should keep the amount small. I have never liked taking orders, so I hand over a twenty dollar bill, and while the boy is blubbering thank you, I turn towards the voice. The face doesn’t go with it. Not at all. I don’t expect such a substantial nose or such penetrating blue eyes. I don’t expect a face that has to be Jewish because the voice is so not quite American but different, somehow, yet not British either and certainly not full of the nasal tones that seem characteristic of so many of the Jews that I have met in America, and once you are in Los Angeles it seems that just about everyone you meet is Jewish.

      You have made a mistake, the voice tells me, and I respond, politely as I can when I feel annoyed, that it’s none of his business, that the poor child looked so hungry and desperate, and when the voice agrees the young man is certainly both of those, the tone is slightly mocking and yet full of an invitation, and the question becomes whether I want to respond.

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