The Laugh

I had given a guest lecture on quantum physics at the University of São Paulo, when postgraduate students surrounded me and eagerly suggested I should have speculated more thoroughly on the nature of reality. I thought their earnest remarks pretentious, gave my excuses for an early night and retired to my bed.

A tapping aroused me from a deep sleep at half past two in the morning. My beloved friend, Roberto, stood on the other side of the door.

“You are tranquil?” he said.

“Just tired,” I replied.

He explained that a group of colleagues had gone for a meal—would I like to join them? I held up my watch, but he regarded me as if I was growing horns. Clearly there was a huge cultural difference between city life in London and São Paulo. I cannot bear to hurt Roberto so I asked him to wait, brushed my teeth and dressed. He ordered a cab. Roberto sat next to the driver, who joshed that, from his accent, Roberto must be a Carioca, and made jokes about the carefree residents of Rio, Roberto’s birthplace. It was a warm summer’s night and the streets still teemed with life. In the Japanese restaurant, a crowd drank and discussed politics. Lula had made his first bid for the presidency, and the anticipation of a transformed political landscape was manifest.

After a few rounds of sake, I was as voluble as everyone else. I returned to my hotel so inebriated, I found it impossible to sleep, took a shower and, when it was reasonable to do so, went down to breakfast. Roberto sat in a corner of the lounge, beside an ornate standing lamp, reading that day’s Folha de São Paulo. He inquired about my health. I told him I was glad I had accompanied him last night but was the worse for wear. Roberto folded his newspaper. I went over the conversations we had had over sushi and sashimi and asked if I had correctly interpreted them. He shook his head, his brow furrowed. I asked him how he had slept. He extolled the wonders of a long dreamless sleep, which was rare for him.

“Mas você estava comigo, Roberto.” But you were with me.

“Não,” he replied in a drawl. No.

“O restaurante. Taxi.”

He made a glottal sound—Tuk Tuk Tuk—which indicated that I was mistaken.

2.Later, free from social and academic commitments, I explored Bom Retiro, the old immigrant quarter of São Paulo. I imagined Ottoman-style houses, narrow passages beside ancient souks, an antique reproof to the inanities of the contemporary world.

Bom Retiro is not like that. I visited a park, one of the few in São Paulo, which offered respite from the incessant hum of traffic; in the distance were fleets of skyscrapers: a glinting armada of concrete and steel. The art gallery and chic shops catered to a flagrant middle class. Murals of human and animal figures, contorted into rebellious poses, covered walls fringed with bougainvillea.

A Turkish café with orange and green awnings, and two potted olive trees, offered shade. I ordered cold mezes and opened the novel I had been reading. The only other customer was a young bespectacled man two tables away. His hair, a blond thatch, appeared to have an urgent need to take off, as if trying to escape from his head. He wore black, dressed more for winter than for summer, his hand movements were jerky. I waited for him to drop his coffee cup, but he held it—and himself—together. Finally, I met his gaze; he nodded and came over to my table. Before I could say “Bom dia,” he told me he had attended my lecture, although I had no memory of him being there. He was an electronic engineer and had studied for two years at CalTech. Producing a magazine from his briefcase, he flattened its pages and pointed to a short story he had written. He asked me if I would be kind enough to read it; he was about to collect some photographs and would be back within the hour.

Something about his manner urged me to be attentive; his deep uneasiness evoked a pathos that warmed me to him. His story, under the author’s name of Gimmel Tzaddik, was published by an obscure university press.

It went back to a time when there was a large Jewish community in Bom Retiro, told of a Hasidic family walking to the small synagogue on a Friday evening to greet the oncoming Sabbath. Come my friend to meet the Sabbath, for it is a wellspring of blessing. On their journey they were met by a gang who taunted them—“Judeu, Judeu”—and threw garbage in their way.

At first the narrative depicted the family through the eyes of the gang leader. Everything about the Hasidim assaulted his sensibilities: their dress, their language, their exclusivity he perceived as a deliberate snub to him. Through the narrow echoing street, he watched the family make their way, as Hasidic families often do: the bearded father in front and alone, hands clasped behind his back, his absurd fur hat, white stockings and long gabardine coat; his wife in her preposterous blonde wig, a few paces behind, chatting with a friend, and the children following in order of seniority. Then he happened to catch the eye of one of the Hasidic daughters, about sixteen or seventeen years old, when his body turned ice cold, and his skin tingled. The quicksilver glance she threw him, her mouth with its intimation of censure and wickedness, touched something in the depths of his soul. The following week he was unable to think of anything or anyone but her.

It had struck us both at the same time: behind these great forces another hidden cause, slippery, mischievous, malign, was at work.

To his own amazement he began to reflect on his need for violence. That moment, when their eyes met, unfolded from within him the possibilities of forgiveness and love. Struck by a quality that went beyond her exquisite slenderness, the unaffected delicacy of her movement, he vowed to defend the family from any insult, even if it meant losing the respect of his erstwhile gang friends. In the following weeks, he waited for the family at the foot of the hill leading to the synagogue, and wordlessly led them on a path to avoid their tormentors.

His reward was a momentary pursing of the lips, as if mouthing her appreciation, from the young sphinx he had come to worship. During the week he searched for tutors to teach him Yiddish, but his uncouth, breathless manner made them suspicious of his intentions. He considered disguising himself as a Hasid but he knew his mission was hopeless. Basking in those moments on the Friday evenings when she was near, he could only gaze at the source of his mad desire.

At night, to mitigate his pain, he walked with the crowds in the Avenida Paulista, downed rough brandy and caipirinhas in cheap bars, ventured into the red lights of Baixo Augusta. All to no avail.

He wrote poetry, but the prosaic words mocked his sentiments. He felt alone in the universe; the paving stones he trod seemed to resent the burden of his weight, and only she could have placated his loneliness. But she was forbidden to him. His terrible yearning drove him to a decision.

After the third week of escorting the family, he came towards her as she entered the portal of the synagogue and, in a Yiddish cobbled together from dubious sources, whispered out of earshot of her sibling escort “I will love you until the day I die.” He paused when she stopped, her back to him, but he knew she had heard. He added, “And beyond even death. Unendlich.” Her response was a faint nod, one he might only have imagined, but it was sufficient to give him succour that night.

The next morning, restless again, he cried like a baby. Toward evening, he took the inter-city bus to the city of Salvador, in the state of Bahia. His part in the story ended there.

She had heard his words, felt them before he uttered them. When he failed to appear the next Friday, she knew he had decided it was a doomed love. From then on, every Friday afternoon when her family prepared for the Sabbath, baking challahs, polishing shoes, preparing the candlesticks, kashering the chickens, mopping the floor, she made her way to a piece of wasteland, a twenty-minute walk from her house, where there was a single jabuticaba tree. She rested her back against the tree’s flaking trunk, turned and plucked from the bark two fruits. She held one in the palm of each pale hand, gazing intently at their shiny purplish-black skins as if they were eyes staring back trying to tell her their secrets.

Savouring each one in turn
The treacherous juices could not slake her thirst
As she waited and waited
Her beautiful eyes
Delicate and gentle from weeping.

3.Stirred by its hopelessness, I had read the story a second time when I heard a cough next to me; my literary friend had returned carrying three parcels. “Your story will remain with me,” I told him. But he was impatient to talk about other things. With a peremptory nod, he set the packages between us, folded the periodical, dropped it in his case, and resumed his seat. We ordered more coffee, the waiter serving us with a weary smile, and after we had each taken our first sip, he asked if he could tell me about a photograph that he had framed and was in one of the packages. He was already stripping off the brown paper and bubble-wrap cladding.

“In a way,” he said, “this photograph is another story.” He hesitated, peering at me. “Perhaps it is the same story.”

The black-and-white photograph, in its simple wooden frame, was about the size of his face as he set it upright before me. A posed group of people set in a rural village, a patch of grass before a large bare tree, a range of mountains receding into the background, from the deep blackness of those nearest to the group to a vague grey in the distance, nearly washed out by the light. On the left side stood two religious Jews, a man and woman, and a boy about three or four years old, held back by the woman, his mother. She wore an unwieldy sheitel and a modest dress with long sleeves.

The man, tall and balding, wore a yarmulke; the fringes of his tzitzit showed beneath his shirt. Their smiles as broad as the mountains, both these individuals revelled in the playful struggle they were having with their son.

Had those three been on their own, the image would have been unremarkable except that the couple looked so blissful, particularly in their religious clothing, which to me always imparts severity to any expression. Standing by them, equally animated, were women and men, the women wearing small bowler hats typical of rural Bolivia. What had brought these people together, the local community with a Jewish couple so reminiscent of pre-war Eastern European ghettos?

Gimmel Tzaddik then told me the photograph was taken in the early 1950s. The religious man and woman were his grandfather and grandmother, and the little boy, his father. This was where they were living, in the rarefied air of the Altiplanos. In 1937 his grandfather, then a young man, was apprenticed as a tailor in the Polish city of Lodz, but conscious of the migration of many of his friends, and the threats from Nazi Germany, he decided to try his—and his young bride’s —luck in New York. It was straightforward since it was just the two of them. The rest of the family, elderly parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, were to follow once they were settled. Friends from Lodz had made their home in the Bronx.

They boarded a boat bound for Hull where they caught a train to Liverpool before taking a transatlantic steamer. As happened so often at that time, and with their limited understanding of English, they only found out once at sea, and the Liver building receding into the distance, that their destination was not Ellis Island but Recife in Brazil. Still, they were young with a firm faith in the Almighty, and, after all, they had their Singer sewing machine.

As Gimmel Tzaddik recounted his family history, I looked again at the photograph, finding it difficult to reconcile this beaming couple with the penury and loneliness that they must have feared when they discovered the boat was not headed for New York. At the dockside in Recife they were met by a representative of La Sociedad de Proteccion a los Inmigrantes Israelitas. He arranged their transport to Bolivia, the only country in Latin America in the late 1930s that accepted immigrants from Eastern Europe. They found themselves in the back of an open truck, hurtling towards the border where, they were told, they would be issued with papers. Better, they supposed, than nothing. But where could a couple settle who spoke only Yiddish? Or make a living, with skills of tailoring adapted to the Orthodox Jewish community? Or learn Spanish from scratch? And in a country they had never heard of.

During the wearying bureaucracy at the Bolivian border, a young man approached the couple—Yankl and Chava—and gave them slices of bread and margarine, the first substantial food they had eaten since their arrival on dry land. Through laborious hand signals and drawings, he explained that he was a government surveyor located in the central Altiplanos. Turning to the sewing machine, he said he knew a settlement that would be only too grateful for a man with Yankl’s tailoring skills.

After a long journey over stony tracks, weak from exhaustion, unsuitable clothes and the unfriendly climate, they arrived at a small settlement where only Aymara was spoken. They were received with a meal of steamed yucca and quirquina and given a room in a wooden hut, bordered by two small quinoa trees, at the edge of the settlement.

Around the hut there was only dry grey shrub; yet each morning, Chava and Yankl found outside their door a tub of water to wash, and a wooden bowl filled with yams. The villagers crowded around the Singer and brought their brightly coloured polleras and ponchos to repair, in exchange for food and accommodation. Chava and Yankl assimilated into the community, joining in the bickering, politics and celebrations that made up their lives. They met once a week with the villagers to teach them Yiddish. Chava and Yankl picked up Aymara so well —they were young after all—that they began to use that language to converse, but continued to reminisce, argue and hurl abuse at each other in Yiddish.

Chava gave birth to a little boy who became the only person on the planet, in the history of humanity, fluent only in Yiddish and Aymara. The child, whose name was Simcha in Yiddish—meaning joy—and Ekeko in the local dialect, signifying “abundance,” was rooted in the village until, at the age of eleven, he was sent to boarding school in La Paz, where he learned Spanish. In time, Simcha became a psychotherapist in São Paulo, where Gimmel Tzaddik was born. Chava and Yankl, now elderly, refused to leave their village; they were content to see out their days there.

Noticing me, as if in surprise, he knows something I don’t. He is about to share his secret with me.

When Gimmel Tzaddik finished his account, I became aware of happenings I had not noticed before. The subjects in the photograph met my gaze full on; time and distance vanished, and the villagers’ exuberance was directed towards me. So intensely was the photograph communicating to me that I felt myself become part of the village: The call of a howler monkey as it slipped into Simcha’s hammock, the condor gliding through the thin air that made sounds so clear I was obliged to cover my ears with the shock.

Between two of the Aymara women in the group there was a gap. In that space, in the background by a cylindrical stone structure which could have been a well, was a woman crouching. Two years before, I had encountered Goya’s painting of The Family of the Infante Don Luis at the Villa Magnani. Entering the room, the Goya on its own on the far wall, I had a sensation of being shuttled through time. My partner, alarmed by my rapid breathing, had handed me a bottle of water and had urged me to sit down.

In that portrait of exiled aristocracy and their retinue, three of the fourteen figures notice something beyond the circumstances of the group. Two women on the far-left gaze at a point behind the artist who has included himself in the picture. They might be responding to an incident beyond the range of the canvas, like a young gallante appearing through the far doorway, or the cook carrying an appetizing sweetmeat. But the second figure from the right, a man wearing a white bandanna, greets me, the viewer. Noticing me, as if in surprise, he knows something I don’t; he is about to share his secret with me. A direct invitation for me alone.

And the photograph of the settlement struck me with that same personal immediacy. The crouching woman’s hat, at a jaunty angle, was like those worn by performers in 1920s music halls. Although the photograph was in black and white, her hat was turning scarlet, festooned with brightly colored roses. The way she squatted, apart from the group—indeed they were oblivious to her presence—in a long dress that looked tailored for city life rather than a rural village, put her in another time and place. Emanating from her was a mysterious laugh.

Three days before, the day after I had arrived in São Paulo, nervous and exhausted in the vast halls of Guarulhos International Airport, Roberto took me to visit the astrophysics laboratory at the university, where scientists I knew by reputation had simulated a collision between Twin Supermassive Black Holes in the vicinity of our galaxy. Watching on the monitor the intense light emitted by the Black Hole combo, its gargantuan shifting shapes like contending colossi; the colors of sea residue—bladderwrack, emerald sea moss, glistening starfish; the innumerable worlds it swallowed like a cosmic alligator, I felt the death of God, such was the vanquishing of any meaning of History, Love, Nature, as countless universes evanesced in time so short it was unquantifiable.

A profound depression struck me, a tingling like cutlery in my stomach; that simulation would remain as a warning until the end of my life, and beyond, unendlich. Roberto and I, even as skeptical physicists aware of the playfulness of the cosmos, were united by the change this had wrought in us. It had struck us both at the same time: behind these great forces another hidden cause, slippery, mischievous, malign, was at work. We talked of this experience in jocular terms, accepting the meaninglessness of our existence because there was no other way to make sense of it.

“Life,” Roberto had sighed.

That woman’s laugh quashed my apprehension of the Great Cataclysm; in the photograph, the contents of the Black Hole materialized from her mouth in reverse. Together with countless points of light, they radiated outwards, reconstituting the world as I knew it. Although she was in a photograph, a deep bond sprang up between us. I turned my gaze back to the group but I could not distinguish her. She had disappeared like an alternative shape in a Gestalt image.

From somewhere inside me a raucous heaving takes over, which leaves my interlocutor offended. He wraps up the photograph and whispers a hasty “ciao.” Still roaring with unstoppable hysteria—the solemn waiter eyeing me with disdain —I see Gimmel Tzaddik, his back to me, walk away with a lateral swaying motion, parcels under his right arm. The margins of his black coat shimmer as if he strides through a mirage. I can tell he moves away because the street and buildings and people around him come towards me, as if he is on an invisible treadmill in a film set that projects a moving street. But his length and breadth don’t recede with distance, he is the same size as when he stood by me in the café.

A gold and green bird, the size of a large egret, settles on the olive bush beside my table, it squawks loudly in a curiously human tone. I turn towards the waiter to see how he reacts to the bird but he continues to watch me disapprovingly. When I turn back the bird is gone, no trace of its presence, even the olive bush is still, and Gimmel Tzaddik has disappeared too as if he had never existed.

Ralph Levinson lives in London, England. He is a recently retired university academic with a science background, and has close academic connections with, and has worked in, Brazil and the Palestinian West Bank. He has published short stories, some of which have won or been short-listed for prestigious national prizes. He is at present completing a novel with a strong Jewish theme.