All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [110]
We set out for the Spanish border. I was terrified of the police and customs officials who examined my stateless person’s travel permit. Would they take me for a Communist agent, a veteran of the International Brigades? True, I could tell them I was only eight to ten years old during their filthy civil war, but did fascists know how to count? I pictured myself in a Spanish jail. I should have taken a different route, I thought to myself. But it was July, and they seemed to be in a state of lethargy. They let me pass without a problem.
Spain enchanted me—the landscape, the singing, the dancing, and especially the women, the Spanish women with their sensual lips and their dark, passionate eyes. Since childhood I had dreamed of this country where our greatest poets and philosophers had lived and sung, where the Inquisitors tortured and humiliated my people in the name of a bizarre love of God. I recalled reading their manual. They thought of themselves as God’s protectors punishing the enemy.
Haunted by tales of the Marranos, I searched for their descendants. Any passerby I encountered on the ramblas of Barcelona could be one of them. Barcelona and its crowds, Barcelona and its ghosts. I was strolling down a deserted street when suddenly a young boy stood before me. Perhaps he had come from some neighboring hovel. He held out his hand, palm open, and said, very softly, “Señor, I’m hungry.”
Instinctively I reached into my pocket for a few pesetas to give him, but my hand refused to obey. The boy’s words—and, more than that, his voice—paralyzed me. I froze, unable to take my eyes off the hand that seemed to accuse me of all the sins committed since the first man turned his back on his brother, not far from paradise.
“Señor,” the boy repeated, “I’m hungry.” I wanted to ask him his name, but didn’t know how. Juanito, Alfonso, José? Once again I tried to give him what I had in my pocket, and once again my fingers refused to move.
The scene lasted but a few seconds. Time had stopped, all Creation concentrated in the motionless Spanish boy. Believing that I was refusing to help him, he dropped his hand and disappeared. Only then did I emerge from my trance, my heart pounding so loud it might have roused the slumbering city.
I began to call the boy, crying out for him to come back, telling him I wanted to give him what I had, that I wanted him to understand how much I hated societies in which children have to beg strangers for bread. But it was no use. Discouraged, he must have gone off to try his luck elsewhere.
I never saw him again. But no—he has a hundred faces and as many names, and he is always hungry.
Madrid: I wondered whether all those people in the streets found what they were looking for. They seemed to spend more time outside than at home or at work and to be suspicious of strangers. One definitely felt the dictatorship, but no one followed us, or at least that’s what we believed. Later we learned we were mistaken. In a police state everyone is suspect, tourists most of all.
We visited the Prado. The madness depicted by Goya, so human and yet so grotesque, would long haunt me, as would the dignity in the portraits of Velázquez. We visited Arias Montana, an institute of Jewish studies. I wanted to read and reread all the documents and archives on Spain’s Jewish past, but there wasn’t time.
On Friday night I went to synagogue. A small minyan gathered in a cellar. I closed my eyes and imagined that I was back in the age of Ferdinand and Isabella, the days of Torquemada. The worshippers prayed in soft voices. I mingled with the congregation and listened to their remarks