“But my hair is so sparse,” Bianca said, trying to convince them that a professional haircut, which would last for three days at the most with her fine hair, was a waste of money, but they insisted, waiting at the entrance to the hairdressing salon in Bat Yam until she emerged with her hair stiff with spray. The whole family, including her uncles, invested an entire month’s salary in making a good impression on the tall man from Barcelona and waited, squeaky-clean and dressed to the nines, beside the table that had been laid to the very best of their ability. At seven thirty, instead of the doorbell, the telephone rang, and he said that he was terribly embarrassed, but his sister was furious that he wasn’t staying at her place for the seder, especially since she had been slaving the whole day so that they could all sit together around her table in Jerusalem.
“Didn’t you tell them you’d be spending the seder with me?” She tried hard to understand.
“I didn’t expect my sister to be so incensed about it,” he admitted truthfully.
She told him that it didn’t matter and glanced at her mother’s elaborate coiffeur. Her sister’s husband smiled and said that in Spain people apparently obey their parents, and that he’d grow out of it, but she was terribly upset because she had worked so hard for this holy day to be perfect, to make a good impression on him.
“You could tell your sister that my parents have made a special journey from Haifa in order to meet you,” she said, still trying to persuade him, peeved at the dozens of phone calls he had made, insisting on meeting her parents. Over the phone, she could hear him talking to his sister in French, and her angry response in the same language.
“She says that my parents made a special journey from Barcelona for us all to be together,” he told her in English, and she was obliged to explain to her parents in Romanian why the “intended” had canceled his participation in their seder.
“I can come over for coffee later on,” he said, but she refused; she thought to herself that there was no point in everyone sitting around nervously until eleven o’clock at night in the hope that he might turn up. “We can meet tomorrow,” she said, repressing the disappointment he had caused her family.
He arrived at her sister’s home the next day with a huge bunch of flowers, and they set off for a tour of the country in the tiny car that belonged to her sister and brother-in-law. Needless to say, they had a puncture on the way, and no one protested at all when he offered to change the tire. They felt they deserved some kind of reparation for the disappointment of the night before and had no pity for him when his hands stayed black and sooty throughout the rest of the trip. They were cramped together in the backseat, but when he wanted to put his arm around her, she told him that his hands were dirty and she was wearing a white shirt.
For ten days he courted her with a European fervor that she found very flattering: he opened the door of her sister’s car for her; he opened the door to their building; and he was on her right side when they walked in the street, so that if God forbid, a building should blow up nearby, he would take the main brunt of the explosion. When they visited a well-known fish restaurant, he cut the fish down the middle, pulled out the spine, and taught her how to cut into the sides of the fish to get rid of the small bones. Then he fed her fish from his own plate, so she should at least taste it.
On another occasion, he ordered shrimp for her—something she had never tasted before—and showed her how to pull off the heads and peel off the hard crusty outside, and when they were brought lemon-scented water in a small bowl and she asked how they were supposed to drink out of something so small, he explained that the lemon water was for dipping their fingers in after handling the shrimp. He poured wine for her—when she had ordered cola—pulled out the cork and poured it into her glass and her heart skipped a beat. He was a man of the world, thoroughly versed in all the niceties; at night, after devouring her body without bothering to first remove her bones, he sang her lullabies as she fell asleep happily in his strong arms. She felt protected and loved, and she loved him for it.
After a week of shrimp, sex, and lullabies, he returned to Barcelona with his parents, but not before making her promise that next time she would come to visit him. Almost every evening for the next three months he called to say how much he missed her, but she was too tired to miss him. Working at two jobs in order to save money for the airfare and a pair of contact lenses left her completely exhausted.
She lived with her sister and brother-in-law in Tel Aviv during the entire period; they too were working hard to save enough money for postgraduate studies in New York, and when they all returned home at night, tired and starving, the only thing they found in the fridge was some 9-percent-fat white cheese. Only when their mother came to visit and filled the fridge did they realize that they were putting away every penny they earned toward their trips abroad—she to her “intended,” and they to further their education.
She paid the equivalent of a month’s salary for a pair of contact lenses and loved the fact that people could see her eyes at long last. Over the phone she informed the man that he wouldn’t recognize her without the glasses that had been stuck to her nose since she was fourteen. She was so strung up on the night before her flight that she closed the cover down on one of the lenses as she was replacing them in their small plastic container, and tore it right in half. All through the flight to Barcelona, her first ever flight, she cried her heart out over the ruined contact lenses. She had so wanted to impress the man who would be waiting for her with all his family. A whole month of hard work had gone down the drain, and now she would have to arrive in Barcelona looking ugly and bespectacled; and she was especially upset because she had promised him that he wouldn’t recognize her.
He recognized her easily, with her ugly glasses and red-rimmed eyes.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s go and buy you some new glasses. But first you must promise that when we do, you’ll smile for me.”
She chose frames that didn’t appear too expensive, but he picked out some black ones with tiny diamonds in the corners and asked her to try them on.
They suited her perfectly.
“We’ll take these,” he said to the saleswoman, and she noticed that they cost three times as much the ones she had chosen.
She smiled at him, feeling pretty again.
“The laughter’s come back to your eyes, just as I remembered,” he said and hugged her.
“Where are we going?” she asked as they climbed into his small SEAT car.
“To the apartment you’ll be staying in—just so that you can drop off your things—and then I’ll take you to my home, where my parents are waiting.”
“Aren’t we going to be living together?” she asked, horrified; after all, he’d invited her to spend three months in Barcelona so they could get to know each other.
“That was what I had intended, but when I told my parents that I wanted to live with you, they objected strongly and said that it’s not done here for a young man to leave home before his wedding.
“My father was furious with me,” he told her naively, “for thinking that it wouldn’t matter if you were to spend the nights in a room of your own. Anyway, we’ll be spending all our days together.”
A man of good intentions, she thought, doing her best to console herself.
“The room I’ve found for you is in the home of my secretary, who has been looking for someone to share her apartment,” he said. “She’s very nice; her name’s Mercedes, and her boyfriend’s called Jorge, and their neighborhood is also nice and not far from where I work.”
“So how come Mercedes and Jorge are living together?” she couldn’t help asking.
“Well, they’re not Jews. It’s more complicated for us.” She didn’t really understand why a twenty-eight-year-old man, who had been engaged to be married for five years and who supported himself financially, couldn’t simply inform his parents that he wanted to move in with his Israeli bride-to-be, who had left her homeland for the