Promise me you’ll always be the happy one, said my mother. I can’t have two unhappy children. If I can’t remember when she first said that, I do remember thinking, She really means it—and feeling happy that she thought of me in this way and also pained for her. She said it more than once, though maybe not quite in those exact words. Still, having an inherently “happy-go-lucky” disposition, as Mamita liked to claim we both did, didn’t necessarily make you kind to your little sister or even intuitively empathetic. If Lexi sometimes had a hard time as a child and adolescent, I was indifferent or pretended to be. Was it that she didn’t have friends? But Lexi did have friends, more and better friends than I did. Maybe they weren’t all nice enough to her, I don’t know. She had an innocence that made her easy to confuse. When someone was mean, it hurt her, but it also confused her. When people were mean to me, it didn’t confuse me. It didn’t even hurt me that much. It was just the way things were.
Even into my thirties, even beyond that, I still felt a kind of internalized mandate to hide any unhappiness of my own from my mother—I would never have been tempted to share it with my father or sister anyway.
Eventually, over the years, I had a couple of girlfriends who got close enough to me to also observe my mother and how I was with her and to form opinions about it. I remember giving one of those girlfriends that whole spiel about my mother and me being so similar, happy by nature, smiling through misfortune, and I was so taken by surprise when she responded that it wasn’t true. Yes, my mother might have a cheerful disposition, but she was sad inside. Camila said she could tell that in many ways Mamita had had a sad life, that she was a wounded woman. I, on the other hand, really did let things go. The bad things that happen to you, she said, it’s weird, it’s like you just shed them and go on to the next thing. A year or two later, Camila repeated those very words when she broke up with me. Sure, I was sad now, devastated even, but she knew I’d get over it, shed it, move on to the next thing like I always did. She reached out to actually stroke my nose as if saying goodbye to a dog, faithful and stupid, who’d miss her but would also soon forget all about her, happy to go off with a new master.
I did everything I could, tried everything for years, to get you to open up your heart, and nothing worked! That’s what Camila exclaimed a few months ago as we sat in her kitchen in the Williamsburg loft that she shares with her partner, an Iranian German avant-garde theater director, having invited me for lunch. She shouted, Frank, are you laughing? You are such an asshole. You’re laughing! But she was laughing, too, partly in disbelief, because it was me who’d just asked, all these years later, why she thought our relationship had failed, and she’d made the effort to answer honestly, I had some nerve to laugh! I don’t know why I’d started to laugh, embarrassment probably.
Not long after that previous trip when Lexi had told Camila about how those boys had “almost murdered me,” I’d come to Boston alone because my father was in the hospital to be operated on for a blocked artery maybe, though I’m not sure. Bert had so many emergencies and operations that I regard as minor only because he so robustly survived them all. Lexi, my mother, and I had met at the hospital to sit with Bert in his room for a while, and then my sister drove us in her car to the Chestnut Hill mall to have dinner at Legal Sea Foods, where, it turned out, my sister wanted to talk about her therapy sessions. I knew Lexi had been in therapy since her childhood, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her discuss it so openly. Of course one of the major problems she and her therapist had worked on was the harm my father had done to her, endlessly insulting her, demeaning her, making her feel like she was a huge disappointment to everybody, worthless. I know I’m not worthless now, Frank, she said in a tone of cheerful exhortation. But that took years of therapy, which helped me to find the confidence to prove my worth to others, yes, but mostly to myself. But, sadly, she said, trying to prove that to Bert is a waste of time. I know that now too. I was struck by how she’d pronounced “But, sadly,” as if our father’s cruelty was something she could now regard with a certain perhaps feigned detachment. Yes, darling, I know, my mother said, putting her thin, delicate hand on my sister’s paler, more substantial, elegantly sculpted–looking one. Lexi really does have beautiful hands, as if shaped by all those years of violin and viola playing when she was a girl.
I hadn’t been around many people who spoke in this earnestly self-disclosing way. Even Camila, who could be direct in expressing her emotions, possessed, I suppose, an innate British restraint. Starting in my twenties, I’d spent practically ten straight years in Central America, as a freelance journalist, covering the wars, trying to write my first novel, occasionally spending time in New York, but the focus of my life was always down there. The other journalists I knew never spoke like that, the way my sister did at dinner, nor did any of the Central Americans I knew. It would have raked stridently across almost anyone’s nerves and sense of private equilibrium, would have sounded incredibly gauche, to hear someone going on about their therapy sessions or their personal emotional problems, “sharing” in this way. Obviously, violence, death, suffering were all around us. We were living through a terrible war, Central America in the 1980s, a war that many of us were dedicated to observing, to investigating in ways that practically required us to merge self and commitment to our jobs, emotionally, morally; it seemed the only way to rise to the horror of what we were witnessing. We couldn’t help but try, at least. It’s not like we didn’t manage to have fun too. But I don’t doubt that the experience was in some ways deforming. I can see now that it was. Of course some of us, maybe even most of us, also found partners to be close to, intimate with, even if discreetly. Not me, though. I didn’t find anyone in all those years. It seemed fine, in the context of that time and place, to be the way I was. What a camouflage it was for me, I guess, to be down there in those years, emotional inarticulateness passing for stoical virtue.
So here was Lexi talking about her therapy, about what a bastard Bert was and how she’d worked through that with the help of her therapist. But my sister had a surprise. Her voice was now raised and flattened as if to focus our attention, or mine really, to this new level of seriousness. Recently, she and her therapist had been going deeper into her life’s traumas, bringing those that hadn’t seemed so obvious to the surface. I remember considering at that moment whether or not to order another bourbon on the rocks and deciding that one was enough; I’ve never let myself get even a little bit drunk around my sister or even my mother, afraid of what I might say, guarding against something, not sure what exactly. Lexi began to speak about what she’d suffered when we were children, watching me be bullied by the Saccos and other boys. Here we go with the almost murdered story again, I thought, and I got ready to scowl and say, Lexi, I wasn’t almost murdered. Instead my sister said that even that had not emotionally hurt and damaged her the way, when we were a little older, watching my father beat me had. She explained that not only was it terrifying, just awful, Frank, to witness, but it also used to make her feel so helpless. It was her helplessness in the face of my father’s violence, her inability to rescue me, to make him stop hitting me that had traumatized her. That’s what her therapist had made her see.
Hah, yeah, I said, lightly scoffing, trying to turn it into a little joke. Back then there were all those protests against the violence of the Vietnam War, but I guess you couldn’t just march up and down Wooded Hollow Road protesting against Daddy, could you?
Lexi pressed on as if she hadn’t heard me. My mother was complicit in that helplessness, she was explaining, being helpless herself. I can’t blame Mom, she said. She didn’t know what to do either. We were both helpless. As she listened to Lexi go on in this way, my mother’s expression became childishly blank, as if her dementia had chosen just that moment to seize control of her brain, which it hadn’t, not at all. She was still teaching in those days.
I said coolly: So you pay money to talk about how Daddy hitting me used
to make you feel. That’s rich.
It was obvious I was going to be a dick about it. Inside I was seething. I was furious, as if she’d stolen something that was mine.
Lexi said, That’s right, Frank. That’s what I talk about with my therapist lately. Yes, it was traumatic for me. If you’d prefer, I won’t talk about it anymore. It’s private anyway. I thought maybe you’d be interested.
Así es, said my mother wanly. Tal cual, she added, a bit nonsensically. She was tired out from these long visits to my father in the hospital; soon she’d be putting up with Bert at home again. Just knowing that was coming was probably exhausting by itself.
Maybe I should go to a shrink, I said. I’ll ask her to help me work through my trauma over hearing you talk about how seeing Daddy beat the crap out of me traumatized you.
I hope you’re never a father, Lexi said. You’re just like him.
I’m just like him, right, I said.
Yes, just like him, so condescending and nasty.
Without a doubt, the anger shooting up through me probably was like the anger that so often overtook Bert and made him go berserk, but it really was as if another chemistry operated inside me: I reached a boiling point, it peaked, and almost instantly subsided, just like that. I’d realized as a young journalist that in dangerous situations, when others were most frightened or most tense, I’d flatten out in a way that had nothing to do with bravery; sometimes I’d just fall asleep. I smiled at my sister and said, calmly as can be: I get it, Lexi. It’s just that I’ve never been to a therapist. Maybe I will someday.
I’m sure it would help you a lot, she said, her voice now melodious, a little shrill.
Of course it traumatized her, the poor thing, said Camila, after I was back in our apartment in Brooklyn and had told her about it, playing up my own mocking indignation. And I understand completely, she said. If I’d ever seen my father beating up one of my brothers like that and couldn’t do anything, I’d—She fisted her hands to her temples and let out a muffled little shriek.
Well, why not grab a baseball bat and hit him over the head? I said. My sister should have done that, if she wanted to help.
My oldest brother’s cricket bat, you mean. I don’t think it’s so easy. Any hint of violence paralyzes me too.
Of course, I thought to myself. I’d finally answered Bert’s violence with violence of my own, but I knew what Camila would say if I reminded her of that, that it was easier for a boy. Doubtlessly true, though I don’t know that I’d call it easy.
Well, your own father could be pretty mean, you’ve told me, I said.
If you mean bashing you over the head with patronizing pomposity, yeah—that British two-syllable yea-ah. But he never would have laid a finger on any of us. I like your sister, said Camila. She’s an emotional human, and she’s brave enough to try to talk about what troubles her. She must have loved you a lot when you were children. Who knows, maybe she still does. Though I have to say, I don’t see why she would.
Haha, I said.
Still my longest relationship, Camila Seabury. She and Gisela both for about five years, though with Camila, we were straight through to the end, whereas Gisela and I were off and on, probably more off than on, for all of it. And Camila was right, I did get over our breakup quickly. She kept the apartment, and I moved to Mexico City. I hadn’t even been there two months when I met Gisela, and that’s when something must have changed, because I’m probably still not over that. Would Camila really regard that as a change for the better?
Lexi and I are both unmarried. Neither of us has given our mother what she says she most wants, a grandchild. Just a coincidence, maybe? You can’t just go around blaming your family, your town, for that kind of thing, not at our age. But somehow take away my upbringing, take away Gary Sacco, Ian Brown, Arlene Fertig, and even what happened with Marianne Lucas, take away Monkey Boy and Gols, and who would I be? Would it be as if I’d never walked the earth? But I have walked the earth, and it’s been a long walk, and all of that is far in the past. Except I am seeing Marianne Lucas tonight. If nothing else, our dinner will be the only high school reunion I ever go to.
So I did manage to resist until we left New Haven. I reach down into my backpack and lift out the sandwich, pull it from its bag, set it down on the lowered seat tray, unwrap the wax paper but only around its top half, and hoist it to my lips for that first bite of crunchy sesame-seeded bread, capicola, soppressata, fresh mozzarella, olive oil–soaked hot red peppers, and sit back, savoring those flavors and textures. Finally I open the little Muriel Spark novel, holding it up in one hand. And read this sentence:
“Their eyes gave out an eager-spirited light that resembled near genius, but was youth merely …”
It makes me think of Lulú, the sweet, eager light in her eyes that chimes in my heart like a silvery bell. Gisela’s bottomlessly murky eyes were pretty much the opposite. Yet I’ve never in my life been so fixated—enthralled—by any gaze as by hers.
Besides journalists, all sorts of young foreign women, probably at least a slight majority of them gringas, were pouring into Central America during those war years: aid workers of every stripe, doctors and nurses without borders, solidarity activists, analysts and scholars of war and politics, spies, arms dealers, and even mercenaries. There were also those who would have been there even without the war: Peace Corps volunteers, embassy staff, grad students in every subject from anthropology to rain forest zoology, business types, eternal hippie backpackers; all manner of seekers seeking and scammers scamming, like those mixed up in the illegal adoption trade, fake orphanages filled with stolen and extorted babies.
Anyone might surprise. I knew a thirtyish British journalist, Cambridge grad, super suave fellow who was having a romance with a missionary nun from Indiana he’d met up in the Ixil. Sister Julia had graduated from University of Chicago Divinity School, she read Pascal and Simone Weil in French, and whenever she came down from the mountains to meet him at the lake or in Antigua or in the city, she traveled by bus with books of poetry in her knapsack. Rimbaud, Celan, Denise Levertov, I remember were poets he named. The British journalist and I weren’t close friends. The reason he came over to sit with me in Bar Quixote when I was drinking alone one night was because he was excited to tell me about his love affair with the nun from Indiana, and the reason he was so excited was because her last name was Goldberg, too, though she was “half-Jewish” by birth. I’m only half-Jewish, too, I told him. Do you think you might be related? he exclaimed. How many half-Jewish Goldbergs could there be? That made us both guffaw. Though she had a Catholic mother, she’d had to convert, because she’d never been baptized. He told me about another writer Sister Julia was into, Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian, half-Jewish and a Catholic convert too. That was the first time I ever heard of Natalia Ginzburg, but I didn’t read her until a few years later when I found some of her books in Spanish translation in a Mexico City bookstore. The British journalist told me he was in love with the missionary nun, but she refused to abandon the religious life because the people she was serving so needed her, the Ixil Maya being one of populations hardest hit by the war, the army’s now-notorious scorched-earth campaign of massacres, and its other well-documented crimes and horrors. As long as Sister Julia was living in a way that brought her closer to the meaning of Jesus Christ as she understood it, she didn’t care what other sins she was committing, was how my friend explained it. He said, She likes to call herself a Jesuit Anarchist. It’s been something like fifteen years since I last spoke to the British journalist, but I see him on TV quite a bit. He’s become an expert on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I have no idea whatever became of Sister Julia Goldberg, but I doubt she was killed. As far as I know, whenever they murdered an American nun in Guatemala or El Salvador, and they murdered more than a few, we heard about it.
Of course there were millions of centroamericanas there, too, more or less my own age, born on the isthm
us and still living there. Surely among them was the romantic companion I so longed to find. I even told myself that it would be a logical way to resolve my sometimes-confusing identity issues, to have a serious relationship with and eventually marry a centroamericana, as tritely prescriptive as that sounds now. But over the next decade, I only had a few one-nighters and brief involvements, which I was never able to keep going much longer than a week, with a mix of local and foreign women I can count on one hand. No real intimate connection or electricity, not smart or funny or political enough, that’s the sort of thing I’d tell myself, whether she’d cut out first or I had. Instead, I’d carry around some absurdly far-fetched, unrequited crush or obsession, I could keep one of those going for years.
There were two bedrooms in the apartment, originally built for Abuelita’s sister Nano, over my abuelos’ house, and for a while Penny Moore lived in one of them. She was the most important human rights investigator in Guatemala, though she did that anonymously. Her cover was working as a stringer for one of the American newsweeklies, where not even her editor knew her secret. I accompanied her on a lot of her information-gathering trips up into the Quiché, Huehue, and Rabinal, and one time we crossed over from Mexico with an Ixil guide named Maria Saché, who led us to the camp of a nomadic Maya refugee group, one of the comunidades de población en resistencia, who’d fled into the mountains and forests to evade the army, living on wild plants and roots when they were on the run, sometimes able to settle long enough to harvest a season of corn, and improvise a little school. Even deep inside the rain forest, sometimes the only drinking water the refugees could find had to be squeezed or sucked from machete-hacked tree vines and roots that fathers held to the lips of their children, they’d even offer the chance to draw a few sips to a pair of thirsty journalists before taking any for themselves. I did my own reporting, too, in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America, every year publishing three or so magazine pieces, and those occasional freelance checks were what I lived on. I saw a lot, but not as much as Penny and a full-time correspondent like my other closest friend, Geronimo Tripp, always rushing off to the latest hot combat zone. But in Guatemala City I stayed in my room a lot, too, trying to get my novel going, writing by hand on legal pads or pounding with two fingers my little Olivetti portable. Or I’d spend entire rainy season afternoons hidden away in the upstairs mezzanine of Pastelería Jensen, a café in the center, writing in my notebook or reading novels in those British paperback editions that I bought in the little foreign language bookshop one block over, owned by a young French-Guatemalan Jewish man. He had books in English, French, German, even Japanese, but he never stocked any title known to be politically left. I remember a young French backpacker type coming in and asking for Che Guevara’s Motorcyle Diaries, and the bookstore owner looking like he was about to have a heart attack. He meticulously wrapped every purchased book with brown paper and tape, but if you tried to strike up even the smallest small talk with him while you patiently watched and waited across his counter, all you’d get back were terse nods, which must be why my memory of his very large head atop his small, slender body and his marzipan-pale, mole-splotched, sensitive face and thin, stricken lips remains so vivid. Sitting up on that café mezzanine with my little individual pot of coffee, I’d unwrap the brown paper around whatever black- (The Sentimental Journey), light-green- (Andre Gide’s Journals), or orange-spined (The Comedians) Penguin I’d just bought, hold it to my nose, and riffle the pages to inhale that nutty mustiness possessed by any book steeped in a Guatemalan rainy season. Tío Memo used to come into Pastelería Jensen from the store every afternoon at five on the dot for his coffee and oatmeal cookies, always accompanied by at least one of my younger girl cousins. Usually I’d leave my table to go downstairs and sit with them for a bit.
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