Sepharad Read Free Page A

morning, while I was crossing Chueca Plaza with my heart in my fist and my eyes straight ahead in order not to see what was around me—the drug dealers, the people with terrible diseases, the spectacle of sleepwalking men and women with faces of the dead and the shamble of zombies—I ran into my paisano Mateo Chirino, the man who was called Mateo Zapatón when I was young, not only because of his trade as a cobbler but also because of his size; he was much larger than most men in those days and, as I remember, wore huge black heavy-soled shoes, legendary shoes he must have spent a lifetime repairing. I noticed that he seemed to be wearing the same enormous shoes, although now they’d been stretched out of shape by his bunions. I was wearing the dark suit I wore for job interviews and carrying my black briefcase and files. I had been accepted, on trial, as a commissioned salesman of supplies for driving schools. Planted in the middle of Chueca Plaza, in an oversized overcoat and a dark green Tyrolean hat outfitted with the obligatory feather, Mateo Zapatón stood staring benevolently at something, the very picture of a robust, lazy fellow with time on his hands, and he rose from those black shoes as from the pedestal of a statue or the stump of an olive tree, so deeply rooted he seemed in the neighborhood of Madrid where he was living and where he gave the impression of being as comfortable as he had been in our distant, shared hometown.
    His face, too, was just as I remembered it, as if impervious to the wear of time. To a child, all adults are more or less old, so when you grow older and see those persons again after years have gone by, it seems as if they haven’t changed at all. It was a cold winter morning, one of those disagreeable workday mornings in Madrid when the facades of buildings are the same dirty gray as
the cloudy but rainless sky. I was rushing as always, harried from running late to meet a client, the owner of a driving school on Calle Pelayo. I’d made the mistake of coming in my car, and the little bit of time I’d left for having a cup of coffee was lost looking for a parking place in impossible streets filled with traffic, pedestrians, unshaven transvestites, thugs, drug addicts, distributors, and trucks loading and unloading, blocking the sidewalk and provoking a blare of horns that were the last straw for my already shattered nerves.
    It was late, I hadn’t eaten, I’d left my car so badly parked that it would probably be towed, but seeing Mateo Zapatón, and the pleasure of the recollections that seeing him awoke in me, was stronger than my haste. As tall as ever, erect, with the same placid expression, big nose, and slightly bulging eyes, cheeks ruddy with cold and good health, though sagging with age, his step as firm as when he used to march in his penitent’s robe ahead of the Last Supper float, guiding the huge cart sponsored by the association’s board of directors.
    That float was one of the most spectacular of all Holy Week, and it had the most figures: the twelve apostles seated around a linen-covered table, with Christ standing at one end, one hand on his heart and the other raised in a gesture of benediction. The gold fringe encircling his head vibrated with every majestic turn of the wheels over the cobbled or paved streets of that time, with the same slight shiver that flickered the flames in tulip-shaped globes and rippled the white tablecloth on which the bread and the wine were arranged for the liturgical sacrifice. All the apostles were looking toward Jesus, and each had a small white light focused on him that dramatically illuminated his face. Everyone except Judas, whose head was turned away in a gesture of remorse and greed, focused on the pouch that held the coins of his betrayal, half-hidden behind his chair. The light that struck Judas in the face was green, the bilious green of liver dysfunction, and
everyone in town knew that