Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) Read Online Free

they were poorly written poems, poems that limped along, but that had something urgent about them, so urgent they almost seemed good. In a very short time I found a publisher that published a book of my poems in Spain. This, in comparison to the fifteen years it took me to find a publisher to publish my Hebrew writings. And very quickly, friendships were made with writers and poets all over Spain. Moshe remained even more isolated in Israel, but Mois came from the past to save me, to give me a name. Mois has always been the one who returns from a parallel world, crying over his premature death and telling me what steps I should take so the two of us can find each other one day.
    “We will fly.”
    “Yes, we will.”
    “Without planes.”
    “With words.”
    “We will create entire worlds without words.”
    “We will even create new words.”
    “And with them it will be easier to fly.”
    “Yes, easier than walking.”
    “And easier than living.”
    “And easier than dreaming.”
    “They will be words that will be said just once, only once
    ever.”
    “Only I will say them to you and only you will hear them.”
    “Or only I will say them to you.”
    “And all the others will become very jealous. They will realize that we have a secret that we ourselves don’t even remember.”
    “And that secret will be seen on our foreheads.”
    “And no one will be able to be the same anymore, nor will anyone be able to lie to us.”
    “Seeing our foreheads will keep them from lying.”
    “They will be very long words, with forty-two syllables.”
    “Or very short, words of half a consonant.”
    “And no one will remember them.”
    “But in oblivion their power will live.”
    “And in oblivion nothing dies.”
    “Memory is like the sun and not remembering is the night that awaits it.”
    “The sun has limited time, but the night is eternal.”

Third Chapter
    I n which I will discuss how the words choose the writer and not the writer the words, and other things that would prefer silence.
    Raquel says I shouldn’t stop writing in Hebrew. But it is the Hebrew language that is leaving me, little by little. Like with all my writing, this began with poetry; everything begins with poetry. In 1998, I suddenly felt the need to write in my mother tongue, the language of mine that had been nursed and fussed over. It was much stronger than I was. The words guided me in spite of myself, in spite of my spite.  I remember an interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun in which they asked him why he didn’t write in Arabic, and I think he said in these words “la question est resolue” (“the matter is resolved”), and I said to myself in that moment, well no, nothing is signed and nothing is sealed. I wrote a poem in English, the first language I wrote in, in which I said that the words will never stop in any language. The poem was left in my notebook for months before I understood its real significance. It was the announcement of the Spanish poems that would come to follow.
    And now the thoughtful reader will ask why I began to write in English. Well, because Mois wanted to write in Spanish, but at age fifteen he couldn’t, and Moshe wanted to write in Hebrew, but he couldn’t either, he didn’t have enough knowledge of Hebrew, and Mois had died. There was also the possibility of French, that was Moise, the Moise from class, when the professor would read the names and make sure they were present, but French was always a foreign language; at recess everyone spoke Spanish, and at that very recess I saw Raquel for the first time, or perhaps it was earlier. Her mother and my mother were close friends, perhaps they even went out to walk the streets of Tetouan together, with the two of us. They would drink coffee while Raquel and I would communicate through strange pathways and the two of them wouldn’t notice. Pathways no stranger than the internet today, which seems so natural to us, but is actually nothing more than the realization of