Brown Scarf Blues Read Online Free

survives although these days Jewish Quarters are popping up everywhere, and Spaniards think these restorations are what we are probably most interested in, though that is an internal matter that has little to do with the Jews. What interests me about Sephardim is their lives, not cemeteries and Jewish Quarters devoid of Jews, that’s the most macabre thing you can show a Sephardic Jew, but in the multicultural world we live in we not only have to swallow these Jew-free Jewish Quarters but applaud when they tell us about the enormous effort to recuperate them, and we have to look interested when they tell us how they expelled us, what the Catholic Monarchs did in our absence, and which Jew was accused of attending the synagogue of an alleged secret rabbi. Multiculturalism is the Western World’s and Europe’s new way to impose their view of reality, “Do you realize how much the Spanish government has spent renovating these Jewish Quarters?” Yes, but so what, it’s another inverted cross, another scarf that smothers more than it warms.
    I’d rather they hear more Steve Young songs, the Spanish government I mean. Not Neil Young’s, Steve’s.
    And after the obligatory fish lunch that Jewish groups always have, and after the strong Seville coffee, and after the purifying trip to the bathroom, I returned to the dining room where we’d had lunch and everyone was gone, they’d forgotten me, a poet is always forgettable, I went to get my raincoat from the brown wooden coat rack, which rose above the floor like a svelte ballerina, proud of her airy body, and behind her, a scarf. A scarf like the one that killed Isadora Duncan in 1927 in an accident when it got tangled in the wheel of her convertible, she was fifty, like me, she was famous and at the height of her fortune and fame. That scarf was a promise of warmth, of touch, I needed to be touched even if it was by a scarf and not a hand. And that scarf, there by itself, as I put on my raincoat, that scarf seemed like a hand calling me to contact, a gentle hand, of a woman or a man with a fluoric constitution, a fragile scarf, a scarf surrounded by loneliness, it was seeking me as much as I was seeking it, and it found me as much as I found it. I looked around, the waiters had gone, there was no one, just me and the scarf. I took it without much thought and ran to join the group, which had reached the end of the street and was about to step decisively out of sight. I stepped after them with the scarf in hand, not yet around my neck, and asked the last person in the line if the scarf was hers, and whether she knew whose it was. “No, it’s not mine, no, I don’t want that scarf.” Perhaps even the owner said that while everyone was saying “No, it’s not mine, it’s not mine,” until the last person, who suggested I return it to the restaurant, as maybe someone was out on that cold day with only a scarf, maybe in a suit and scarf, maybe because their spouse said just before leaving the house, honey, put on your scarf or you’ll catch a bad cold, or maybe someone set out to lose it that day, because they wanted to forget a gift from a lover.
    The scarf, like one of those loves at first sight, the French coup de foudre , was now mine, I put it around my neck quickly, hoping no one would awaken from a mini-siesta and remember it was theirs, we were like lifelong friends, the scarf that would be mine for thirteen days, two weeks in November, thirteen days, from Wednesday to Monday, from Seville to Madrid. Great loves are short and are always found in one city and vanish in another. That’s what true loves are like.
    4.
    The raincoat. I bought it in Salamanca twenty years ago on a trip I took in another era, from Lisbon to London. The price: eleven thousand pesetas, expensive for the time. I wore it very seldom. It never seemed quite right for Jerusalem rain, and on this trip I left it in Madrid, it ended its journey there, too.
    The umbrella. I put it in the suitcase