holding me in his arms and asking if I wanted to fuck, it caught me completely off guard, that was the sort of thing the redhead might do, or even the Sabra but not that timid boy who was never sure what to say to a woman, I told him he was crazy but the fact is he was drunk, very drunk, and ultimately it was not too hard to push him away and he fell on the floor, he stayed there for a long moment and I even thought he had hurt himself. Then he raised his right hand towards me and said “Good night.” I went and told the redhead and he gave me a real “guy” response: I should consider it an honor that the best poet of his generation had wanted to fuck me.
Just what I needed. After that, I stopped spending time with those lunatics.
37.
A coma, being in a coma, is a comma, a calmer, in your life. I was dead two whole minutes, I don’t remember it, they told me about it. After death came the coma. Seven months in a coma. I do remember that. Seven months, though I could hardly tell if they were months, days, hours, years, millennia. They could have been anything. In those seven coma/comma/calmer months, I saw many of my reincarnations. Perhaps all of them. And that’s what I’m going to tell you in this book. I will try to be linear but things in the coma world were very different, they were anything but linear. Anything but logical. In mere seconds I could go from the 1400s to 1700s, from male to female, from old to adult to teen to child. Or I would see it all at once in one moment.
When I awoke, the events started structuring themselves on their own. They might have been imagined or real. I can't know. Though if this book sells and if I earn money, maybe I can travel and see all those places that became mine though I was never there physically. At least not in my physical body from this reincarnation. I always believed in metempsychosis (μετεμψ or χωσις), so I’m going to lie and say I was always a firm materialist and after the coma I decided to change my mind. I even have read books about the subject in the past, such as Albec’s famous nineteenth-century volume. Or Kabbalistic books on the topic. But Kabbalah does not generally support the idea. So maybe it’s all pure imagination based on my illogical attempt to give the world meaning through these theories. But I was also never fanatical or obsessive about it. It’s a topic I was interested in and even passionate about at times, much like astrology, but in the end life took me in other directions.
One of those was the road to Sepharad, which might be why the first reincarnation in my coma was from the late 1400s. You could (and should) wonder if I saw that because I was already preconditioned to see myself in Sepharad, specifically in Granada in 1480. If you believe in such things. Or conversely, the fifteenth-century reincarnation might explain my obsession with the era, with Sepharad and the Moriscos and the Marranos. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. They are the two ends of the scarf that are pulling tight to smother me.
Appendix
Fragments of a fragmented childhood
1 .
Dear Mezouar,
You asked about my childhood and I’m surprised again, though such things shouldn’t surprise me anymore, that you’re asking about something that’s exactly what I’m writing about at the moment. I’ve been writing about the first five years of my life at 21 Maharaka Annoual Street. Your question should not surprise me since you’re translating my poetry book Esquina en Tetuán into Arabic. And yet the way literature crosses into reality is always surprising, as if the only thing separating fiction from reality were just a window you have to open occasionally to keep from asphyxiating.
The text is called “Pasaje Benarroch,” which you may recall on Mohamed V Street near the Muslim Quarter and the Jewish Quarter, not far from the royal palace in Tetouan. For the past ten years I believed it once belonged to my family, though recently I asked my
Just what I needed. After that, I stopped spending time with those lunatics.
37.
A coma, being in a coma, is a comma, a calmer, in your life. I was dead two whole minutes, I don’t remember it, they told me about it. After death came the coma. Seven months in a coma. I do remember that. Seven months, though I could hardly tell if they were months, days, hours, years, millennia. They could have been anything. In those seven coma/comma/calmer months, I saw many of my reincarnations. Perhaps all of them. And that’s what I’m going to tell you in this book. I will try to be linear but things in the coma world were very different, they were anything but linear. Anything but logical. In mere seconds I could go from the 1400s to 1700s, from male to female, from old to adult to teen to child. Or I would see it all at once in one moment.
When I awoke, the events started structuring themselves on their own. They might have been imagined or real. I can't know. Though if this book sells and if I earn money, maybe I can travel and see all those places that became mine though I was never there physically. At least not in my physical body from this reincarnation. I always believed in metempsychosis (μετεμψ or χωσις), so I’m going to lie and say I was always a firm materialist and after the coma I decided to change my mind. I even have read books about the subject in the past, such as Albec’s famous nineteenth-century volume. Or Kabbalistic books on the topic. But Kabbalah does not generally support the idea. So maybe it’s all pure imagination based on my illogical attempt to give the world meaning through these theories. But I was also never fanatical or obsessive about it. It’s a topic I was interested in and even passionate about at times, much like astrology, but in the end life took me in other directions.
One of those was the road to Sepharad, which might be why the first reincarnation in my coma was from the late 1400s. You could (and should) wonder if I saw that because I was already preconditioned to see myself in Sepharad, specifically in Granada in 1480. If you believe in such things. Or conversely, the fifteenth-century reincarnation might explain my obsession with the era, with Sepharad and the Moriscos and the Marranos. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. They are the two ends of the scarf that are pulling tight to smother me.
Appendix
Fragments of a fragmented childhood
1 .
Dear Mezouar,
You asked about my childhood and I’m surprised again, though such things shouldn’t surprise me anymore, that you’re asking about something that’s exactly what I’m writing about at the moment. I’ve been writing about the first five years of my life at 21 Maharaka Annoual Street. Your question should not surprise me since you’re translating my poetry book Esquina en Tetuán into Arabic. And yet the way literature crosses into reality is always surprising, as if the only thing separating fiction from reality were just a window you have to open occasionally to keep from asphyxiating.
The text is called “Pasaje Benarroch,” which you may recall on Mohamed V Street near the Muslim Quarter and the Jewish Quarter, not far from the royal palace in Tetouan. For the past ten years I believed it once belonged to my family, though recently I asked my
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