Roberto Melendez A.K.A. Esteban Martinez
Twenty years ago, when I was invited to appear as a guest on The Phil Donahue Show to talk about Passing Through Havana, my newly published novel, I demurred. My editor said it was an opportunity not to be missed, but I thought it was in bad taste to push my own book, to be, as they say, proactive. In those days, which don’t seem all that long ago, serious people considered talk shows beneath their dignity. Call me a snob, an elitist, but I knew that Phil and his “guests” were not there to plumb whatever depth my novel might have. On the contrary, to gratify the appetite of his audience, which was in the millions, Phil would surely insist on the most sensational aspects of the book. Still, believing that no one I knew would watch the show, I went ahead. How naive of me; closet Donahues exceeded my wildest dreams, or better yet, nightmares.
Passing Through Havana takes up where the little war memoir I had written for Professor Helmreich left off. It charts a second, more successful, escape from occupied Europe, this time via France to the port of Bilbao where, in July 1941, we boarded the ocean liner Magallanes headed for Havana, Cuba. My family and I would spend seven unexpected years there awaiting yet another visa, this time for the USA.
A few weeks after the Donahue broadcast, I received a letter, forwarded to me by the network, which unsettled me to no end. It was from a certain Maria Melendez Deschenes, the daughter of the very Salvadorian consul who had been instrumental in our escape from Europe during the occupation. She had recognized my name, but, fortunately, she seemed not to have read my book.
“My father, Roberto D. Melendez, was Consul General of El Salvador in Antwerp l936-l941,” Maria Melendez writes. “He was instrumental in aiding Ms. Rosshandler and her family to escape the Nazis and to travel safely through occupied France to Spain by stamping their visas as visitors to El Salvador… I would like very much to hear from Felicia since she is the only one of many my father aided to ever turn up. We have been on the look-out ever since we returned home in June of l942 for a familiar name or face. Maria Melendez Deschenes. P.S. I remember so well that her mother taught us to braid bread!”
I never answered Maria’s letter. I figured that the safest way to keep her from my book would be to remain silent. What would she think if she saw what I had done to her father in my story? It bothered me to ignore her, I had been touched by the tone of her letter, but I thought it would bother me more if I had to explain how, forty years after the fact, I had turned the generous Consul Roberto Melendez into the opportunist lady-killer Esteban Martinez who handed out visas with one hand and seduced women like my mother with the other.
In the winter of l940, when we were summoned to register at the Antwerp Kommandantur, we knew it was just a matter of time before we would be called up for deportation. Only if you had a visa, a destination, a country that would take you in, did you have a prayer of obtaining the coveted exit papers called laissez passer that might get you out of the country. The quest for visas was feverish, the word hung on everybody’s lips like a mantra. Visa. Did you hear? Do you know? Consulates, besieged by long hungry lines, gave out evasive contradictory information. That is when Señor Roberto Melendez, the Consul General of El Salvador, stepped forward. And no matter how often I tell myself that all is fair in love and fiction, I still feel guilty about using Consul Melendez to further my narrative.
“‘Wiener blut,’ Don Esteban requested, kissing Suze’s hand. She looked into his eyes and, I was sure, held onto his hand for an extra instant. There was a girlish flush on her cheeks; I had never seen her look more beautiful.” Passing Through Havana, page 30.
I have considered writing to Maria Melendez and confessing everything. Her unexpected letter had brought back the entire Melendez family, the portly Señora, the little girls bundled and layered against the “Belgian winter.” Suddenly I could hear the caress of the ch sound as Consul Melendez taught me my first words of Spanish, muchacha, buenas noches, cucaracha. Even the pervasive odor of his cigars, which he lit for my father and himself, has traveled back to me through time. Roberto Melendez’s exuberant attention to me, to my family, was a revelation, something from another world. In my house, in those days, the role I knew as a child was to be either invisible or disobedient. Never had I encountered someone like consul Melendez, whose deep baritone affirmed my presence the moment he walked in the door: Cómo estás, linda?
I was always certain that the dramatic dinner in my novel, the one where the Consul and Suze’s flirtation grew so outrageous that poor nervous Max knocked over a glass of wine, was invented. Yet Maria Melendez’s reference to bread baking rekindled memories of sunless Belgian afternoons illuminated by the exotic Salvadorean family chattering at our table, savoring my mother’s Mittel Europa cooking. So God help me, sometimes I can’t tell the difference any more between what I wrote in the book and what really happened. So many things that I thought were invented have turned out to be more than half-true that I wonder, even, whether the romance between the fictional Don Esteban and the ravishing Suze didn’t happen in reality after all. I always perceived my mother as brazenly coquettish and remember being intensely aware during my adolescence that she was having a turbid love affair in Havana. We never spoke about it, she and I, but I believe that it imprinted me deeply. Perhaps that is why I drew the character of my father in such a sad sympathetic light.
Even as a small child, I was aware that my mother possessed a certain “magic” turned on by the presence of men, be it even a simple küss die hand formality. I loved to see her extend her long bejeweled fingers, gay and radiant, in response to a compliment or an intense male gaze; I wanted to be just like her, I loved her and hated her. Yet I sensed even then that her erotic energy came at a price we children, and I in particular, paid with a heartbreak I did not know how to express at the time. Deprived of kisses and tenderness rightfully mine, I do remember my love for Mutti as excruciating and thwarted. It is a loss that would only grow in intensity as I grew older and tragically cast its shadow to the very end. So it is perhaps not surprising after all that I implied in my narrative what I must have known in the loneliness of my childish soul, that Consul General Roberto Melendez a.k.a. Esteban Martinez and my mother were lovers.
I had no qualms about using this scenario in the book; it seemed absolutely necessary to move the plot along, which is what I believed mattered. In spite of the pain I had felt as a child, I relished painting my mother in bold glamorous strokes. I was certainly aware of my debt to her beguiling wiles for getting us out of Europe at such an impossible time. In truth, fiction and memory can blend so seamlessly that confusing the two seems beyond one’s control. How often have I stated with the arrogance of the artist, it’s all made up, it’s all true. But where do I draw the line? What do I say to Maria Melendez?
As I write about it now, it occurs to me that if I peeled away yet another layer, I might find out that the creation of the roguish Esteban Martinez had nothing to do with strengthening the plotline after all. Maybe I should say to Maria Melendez: your father had it coming for stealing my mother’s radiance. Or better yet: this is my way of punishing him for that childhood pain. There it is then, a most disturbing motive—bilious revenge. Of course I would never hurt Maria Melendez that way.
And if all this were not baroque enough, something else has come up that makes me realize that the Melendez/Martinez affair is even more faceted than I could have ever imagined. Last year I started receiving, unsolicited, a quarterly called Together devoted to “uniting all Holocaust survivors.” I often wonder how I got on such a mailing list since, if I must, I would consider myself a refugee rather than a “survivor.” Still, I noticed that over the last few years the term has attached itself, with little exception, to all those touched by Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws. It is not my purpose to quarrel with Together for trying to unite those of us affected by the Shoah, but it makes me uneasy to see the refugee survivor and the concentration camp survivor thrown into the same mix. It seems a sacrilege.
Ironically, the very point of Passing Through Havana was to mark the distinction between survivor and refugee. I wanted to show how Hitler’s demonic obsession had affected the thousands who had managed to flee the Nazis only to wash up, alienated and confused, on unfamiliar shores. What was it like for them in Shanghai, in Rio de Janeiro, in Melbourne, in Sto. Domingo, in Havana? I wanted to describe that experience of dislocation because I felt it had been overlooked, and rightly so, when the story of the Holocaust was first being told after the war. I wanted to show how far Hitler’s evil had radiated, how subtly it had damaged those who, like me, were “saved.” But the term “survivor,” to my mind, belongs only to the Primo Levis of this world who had lived the actual agony of the camps.
Still, there are articles in Together that do touch me, such as the ones that tell of the search, even now, half a century later, for relatives and friends torn apart by the Holocaust. I don’t know why, but I read them avidly, probably because most tell stories of dispersals similar to mine. Sometimes people send in class photos from Antwerp circa l937 looking for the whereabouts of best friends and playmates and those kids look just like me, wearing the same smocked dresses, the same oversized ribbons in their hair.
Then one day, something in the magazine leapt right off the page. I couldn’t believe it. Imagine a call, a world wide search for “high minded Gentiles who had rescued Jews.” Good God, I thought, Consul Melendez! It is now twenty years since the publication of my book, but this Israeli Commission for the Designation of the Righteous seemed to speak directly to what had happened in Antwerp more than half a century ago. It seemed that fate was giving me another chance to redefine Roberto Melendez vs. Esteban Martinez.
One more time I composed in my mind the sequence of events of l941: Consul Melendez stamping the visitor’s visa in our passport, the embraces, the toasts to our safe journey, the tearful goodbyes. I could, I would testify before the Commission for the Righteous that Consul Melendez had risked his diplomatic career by issuing visas he was not authorized to give. He always asked the recipients, and there were many besides us, not to go to El Salvador if at all possible. (Which is one reason why, in the end, we chose to get off the boat in Cuba.)
I felt elated. The path seemed absolutely clear. It was my turn to be generous, my turn to put extraneous circumstances aside, to forgive peccadilloes and recognize the Consul’s grand gesture. Consul Melendez had been under no obligation, his family was safe and protected, but he had chosen to act and not look away. That’s what mattered. I would be a witness, I told myself, I would propose that Consul Roberto Melendez be designated to stand among the Righteous.
I could see the ceremony already, just the way it was described in Together. At Yad Vashem, Israel’s Hall of Remembrance, a cantor will recite the Kel Maleh Rachamim (God who is merciful) and the mourner’s Kaddish. The main prayer will be in the rescuer’s native language and a wreath will be placed on the vault containing the ashes of the Holocaust survivor. Consul Melendez will then be asked to re-kindle the eternal flame. Finally, the Righteous One will be presented with a medal and a certificate inscribed with these words from the Talmud: “He who saves one life is considered as having saved the whole universe.” In spite of the overbearing tone of the proceedings, I was moved by the description of the ceremony and thought that it might not be too late to bring about a restitution. As I grow old, I ask myself whether particulars should not, in the end, take precedence over the imperatives of literature. But I live in literature, and I am trapped in literature.
But what am I saying? Señor Melendez, who was consul from l936 to l941, is long dead. And his daughter Maria Melendez who lives in Connecticut is perhaps dead as well. But if she isn’t, she could go in his place. And I would go too. I have never even been to Israel.
But it is not to be. Not at all. As I read on, I am taken aback by the Commission’s criteria. It is truly chilling. From the beginning the ponderous terminology—Righteous among Nations—made me uncomfortable. But now it seems all wrong, as if the essence had been lost. It no longer seems to be just about a good person doing a brave good deed.
First of all, there is the Commission’s Criterion spelling out a fatuous separation between risk and altruism. The former counts, the latter doesn’t. For example, those who had diplomatic immunity where there was little or no risk are not eligible for consideration! That’s it, then, for Consul Melendez. But that is not all. Far from it. The act must have been made on the rescuer’s own initiative during the most dangerous periods of the Holocaust (whenever that is supposed to be). The rescuer must have risked everything, including his own life, freedom, and safety. There must have been no question of remuneration or reward as a precondition for help. And finally, proof from the survivor, or incontrovertible archival evidence that the deeds had indeed caused a rescue.
What is this, a grand jury? Why are they so busy keeping people out? It seems to me that the more names in the Hall of Remembrance the better. What one person does with ease, the other does with trepidation. What matters is that he did it. And they all took risks. That is so obvious. And what is wrong with altruism? Surely it deserves medals too.
So we won’t be going to Israel, Maria Melendez and I. I can imagine what it would have meant to her to see her father inscribed among the Righteous. And it would have restored a piece of my soul as well. But it was not meant to be. I still have Maria’s address and I have considered writing to tell her that I have not forgotten, will never forget. When I do it, if I do it, I would like to add that perhaps Consul Melendez’s act of altruism will shine more brightly in the vault of anonymity. The ultimate act of generosity, I will say, is the one that is never revealed.
When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. Matthew 6:3
Felicia Rosshandler
New York, January 2005
Otium
