In April 2018 I published the Teheran antiquarian. Stories of a diplomatic life, whose first story gave the book title. In it is the origin of the novel that now sees light, accidental spy (the sphere):
"The Manucheri Street of Tehran brings together the antiquaries of the city, just as it happens with the Rua of São Bento in Lisbon or the Via Dei Coronari in Rome. During a time of my life I had to travel a lot to the Islamic Republic of Iran for reasons of work and took advantage of free time to go through Manucheri and visit his shops, which, usually, were empty, because at that time after the Revolution From Jomeini foreigners were very few and tourists did not exist.
He could not explain myself as those antiquarians could survive. In one of those stores buy one day a wonderful Persian door of two leaves painted with human figures dressed in luxurious clothes and with scenes from horse hunters that came from an Isfahan Palace, as the seller explained.
They were not cheap doors and I had to do three visits to the store to bargain and get an acceptable price. During this long negotiation, watered with abundant cups of you, I trained a certain friendship with the antique, an old Jew named Raphael, which I kept seeing in later trips.
In one of those trips, and knowing that I was going back to Spain the next day, Raphaël asked me to accompany him at the bottom of the store and made me move on to the back room of his establishment. Solo there both of them, he asked me in a very low voice if he could do a personal favor. I nodded with caution and without committing myself, because the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a place where one can trust anyone. Then he pulled out from the bottom of a drawer a small package wrapped in newspaper, discovering before my eyes a necklace that I thought was old and that was golden, coral and aquamaries. According to him, he told me while he looked at me with aqueous eyes, it was a jewel that had belonged to his wife, a few years ago before.
Raphaël wanted me to take her and that from Spain he would get to his daughter, who was going to get married in California. Given the terrible relationships between the Ayatola jomeini regime and the Americans, nor others let him travel to the United States to attend his daughter's wedding and he could not make shipping by mail from Tehran.
I doubted, but Cedi when his hand burst and worn by the years he squeezed my arm and begs with the wet eyes: "Take it, Lord, so her mother and I will be somehow with her on that important day of her life. I ask you from the bottom of my heart. "
So that I did not even know, I could not, I did not even want to deny myself, and I said yes, what would do it with the condition that I did before me the package I wanted me to take and in which, next to the necklace, he introduced a note Hurriedly ticky in Farsi. Then, on another role that I kept in my wallet, he wrote the name of her daughter and signs her in Los Angeles.
I said goodbye with many thanks at the door of his store. Upon arriving in Madrid, I sent the package by certified mail to Los Angeles and some time later I received a letter of thanks with a photo of an attractive, brunette and petite, dressed in a long and bright suit, silk, satin or something Similar, and a nice smile on a neck adorned by the necklace that I had made it. I was excited to think about what was behind that photo and the happiness of that bride who wore on her heart of her the heat of the dead mother and the hug of the Far Father but happy to know that she was.
I never saw my friend Raphael again. The antique shop on him had closed on a later journey from me to Tehran and I only found vague answers in neighboring merchants. The Persian doors that had bought me brought them to Spain years later the ambassador José María Sierra and today remind me, every time I see them, the old Jewish antiquarian of Tehran with the pleading and hopeful look at him at the same time. "
So far what I wrote in my book. The rest that I remembered that night is that as soon as I left the store I went back to my hotel. What I did not ignore was that the story did not end there and that I did not do it when I returned to Manucheri Street a year later and I found the Raphaël store closed, resulting in us all the attempts I made asking for their whereabouts to the merchants neighbors. Nobody had seen him and nobody knew anything.
Until, following the publication of my book, I received the call from an old friend from the Mossad, whom they had sent it to him from Madrid. My friend had just read it in Jerusalem and, after the usual congratulations, he told me to have information about what happened to that young Los Angeles, not not warning that they were sad news. I confess that he picked me up curiosity. Already in Tel Aviv I called him and we were to dine at a picturesque Lebanese restaurant of Jaffa. It was a fresh and unpackable winter day, with raging waves and gray clouds, low and frayed, and there my friend Efraim told me what he knew from Myriam, which was like her name was the young man.
-The you are a melancholy but beautiful story. But it does not end where you believe, because that's where it begins. I have ahead on the phone that is a sad story, are you sure you want to meet her?
* Accidental spy (the sphere of books), by Jorge Dezcallar, goes on sale on September 15
Date Of Update: 21 September 2021, 10:12
