Nada us our nada as we nada our nadas. But there’s no Nada IPA on the menu, so I tentatively order the Spaceman IPA. The waitress, tall and trim in all black, reassures me that I’ve made a good choice. I order a grilled fontina and guanciale sandwich, too. She brings the beer, and I silently toast and drink to nada.
Up to fifth grade, Mamita always took us back to Guatemala City for the summers, and even though they were supposed to be our vacation months, we were always put in schools. For a few of those summers I was enrolled in the Colegio Ann Hunt. Ann Hunt was an expat from Alabama, and her husband, Scobie, owned travel agencies and tourist hotels. It was at the Colegio Ann Hunt that I encountered for the first time, in the school library, the phenomenon of strictly classifying writers by ethnicity and race. The shelves labeled “American” held books by writers from Alcott to Wolfe. The bottom shelves, inches above the floor, of two adjoining bookcases were labeled “Negro,” Baldwin to Wright, and “Jewish,” Bellow to Wouk, the lower parts of those book spines scuzzy with the dust of broom sweepings. Latino/Latina, or Hispanic, or however Ann Hunt might have labeled it, wasn’t on her map yet, and neither were Asian, Native American, etcetera. What would Ann Hunt’s library be like now, if she were still alive and her mania for disaggregating and classification had never slackened? Ever-expanding, infinitely bifurcating? Now I know that Ann Hunt was a pioneer of the American multicultural book business, however inadvertently. She should have gotten a medal.
“In a hypercapitalist society like this one, this commodification of ethnicity and race is both inevitable and good business, much better than just dispersing these writers like multi-colored sprinkles into our more established commercial batters, but you do have to be clear about what you’re selling. Somebody buying a novel in our coveted Guatemalan-American niche doesn’t want to be surprised to find a bunch of Jews and half-Jews in there.” I didn’t foresee, when I published my first short stories, how easy I could have made things for myself by publishing under my mother’s maiden name, Montejo, as other writers in situations like mine have done. Then I thought that as I’d already published under Goldberg, altering it would be shameful, as if admitting it bothered me to be thought of as only Jewish. I was jealous of Jewish writers and half Jews whose last names didn’t sound Jewish, all those Millers and Bakers, Mailer, Salinger, and Proust. Or writers who simply changed their name and paid no price in shame or ridicule, James Horowitz to James Salter, who said he hadn’t wanted to be typecast as “another Jewish writer from New York.” Could it really be possible that Frank Gehry would have had fewer important architectural commissions if he’d kept his name, Frank Goldberg?
It was only about a year ago, when I read an essay about Natalia Ginzburg and her youth as an Italian girl in Turin with a Jewish last name and Catholic mother, a girl from a stalwartly anti-Fascist family, longing to fit in with her Catholic schoolmates, almost all from Fascist families, that I understood my own longing to fit in was normal enough, as was the loneliness of not fitting anywhere. Natalia wrestled with that kind of sadness and exclusion, which she privately referred to as “pathos ebraico.” Whenever I read her I’m reminded that it’s okay to be always an outsider.
Once, when Gero Tripp and I were in Spain on a brief working vacation with Teresa Fijalkowski—she was editing both our books that summer and had invited us to the house she was renting near Bilbao—Gero joked that whatever country I went to, the people from that country always saw me as being of whatever brown ethnic group was most despised there. In Spain I was called moro everywhere I went. Even in Guatemala, a husky blondish drunk, in the Bar Quixote, insulted me as a morenito de mierda and took a wild swing at my head. On the Paris metro a group of working-class young thugs in tracksuits followed me off the train car imitating cartoon Arab music. Only back in November, in another bar on the outskirts of Carroll Gardens where I’m friendly with Deandra the bartender, on a night when I was the last customer, three small-time wise guy clichés right out of Goodfellas came in and almost right away started in on me: Hey, you Rican? You Nuyorican? Hey Rican, don’t make like you don’t fucking hear me. On and on like that. I was sitting down at the very end of the bar. Deandra came over and said in a lowered voice: Don’t say anything, don’t move, I’m going to phone the police. Like I was about to say anything. But they must have heard her say police, because they drank up and snaked right out the door.
Once, in Elaine’s, that famously clubby Upper East Side celebrity bar where Teresa used to ask me to meet her sometimes—this was in the days when she was first publishing me, when I used to come up from Central America for a while, or in the years right after—I was walking back to our table from the men’s room when I saw veering toward me that always-wasted Brit with hyphenated aristocratic surnames, a friend of Teresa’s and her friends from that downtown New York nightlife scene she liked, I don’t even know what to call him, a writer-socialite? He drunkenly grabbed me by the shirtfront and said, I hate you sweaty, swarthy immigrant people in your loud shirts. I didn’t punch him, though I was still of an age when it’s normal and right, I think, to punch an asshole who gets up in your face and speaks to you that way. I was too aghast and stunned to react, too intimidated by the setting of New York glamour and power. My shirt was kind of loud, I wished I hadn’t worn it. He fixed me with a squinting look of pucker-faced dismissal and stumbled on. When I got back to our table, I told Teresa and her friends what had just happened. Oh, he’s just like that, they said. Don’t pay any attention to him. That’s just his irreverent sense of humor, Jimmy loves to play the bad boy. Jimmy was what they called him. Sure, I get it, okay, yeah. Later Teresa said, I’m sorry that happened, Frank. It must be hurtful to be singled out like that. And I said, What hurts is that I didn’t smash his fucking face in. I never wanted to be someone closed off and controlled by racial defensiveness, that seemed especially inappropriate for someone like me anyway, racially mixed, nothing in particular, no matter what anyone else wanted to see in me. But that insult festered inside me for years, more than other similar slurs have. Teresa doesn’t come from a fancy background, though people always assume she does. She’s working-class Detroit, went to Harvard, Oxford. When at a publishing house Christmas party Teresa told me that the Brit from Elaine’s had been stabbed in the gut by a transsexual prostitute and was in the hospital, the words just came out: Good, I hope he dies. Teresa was horrified. Whatever else, he was her friend. I apologized, though couldn’t help adding that I hoped the transsexual had a good lawyer. I’m sure she has her side of the story, I said.
On another, earlier occasion I was in that same place, Elaine’s, waiting at the crowded bar because I was supposed to meet Teresa there, and an attractive woman stepped up to me, lifted her fingers up into the tangle of curls on my head, and said with alcohol-fueled merriment: Oh you black Irish mick you, you’re a boxer, aren’t you? So, not always whatever people most hated. Remembering her, whoever she was, I smile down into my nearly finished Spaceman IPA.
Have been subject to my share of anti-Semitism too. In Europe, my God, though usually as a sort of bystander, starting with that first-ever trip to the UK, white Brits mistaking me for Pakistani, letting it rip on the Yids. This one is my favorite, if you can call it that. At my hotel in Havana, while I lounged on a recliner trying to read by the swimming pool, a quartet of hairy male sex tourists from Spain were in the water splashing each other like children while loudly declaiming in their baritone Castilian voices, Muere, perro judio. Every “die, Jewish dog” sent angry waves of adrenaline through me. The lifeguard, afrocubano, about eighteen, lean, dark-honey skinned, went to the edge of the pool and told them: El racismo no está permitido en la piscina. If they kept it up, he calmly told them, they’d have to leave. That lifeguard and his words, so beautiful. No racism permitted in the pool.
The waitress delivers my sandwich. Of course, Natalia Ginzburg came from a loving, noisy academic and literary family, everyone a talker except for little Nat
alia, the youngest, a watcher and listener. Under Italian Fascist anti-Jewish rule, her father lost his university job and had to go into exile, and her brothers were imprisoned, as were many from their circle of family friends and colleagues. Natalia’s Jewish husband, Leone, a hero of the anti-Fascist Resistance, was born in Odessa, in the Ukraine, the same part of the world where, incredibly, Bert Goldberg was born one year later. Leone was beaten and tortured to death in a Roman prison by Nazi SS officers. In the autobiographical Léxico familiar, Ginzburg hardly mentions Leone’s death, the event that most marked and transformed her life, and yet you so feel her love and heartbreak that it seems somehow spread like living spiritual matter into the very ink her words are printed in. Ginzburg grew up in a secular family without any relationship to Jewish culture, much less religion. It was after Leone’s death, she explained, that she began to identify persecution with Jewishness. I was rereading Natalia Ginzburg because I was curious about half-Jewish writers. I could only find a few; there must be many more. Muriel Spark was another. Both Ginzburg and Spark converted to Catholicism. Well, like my friend’s lover, Sister Julia, too, whose Catholic mother had never had her baptized. Spark, too, as a girl growing up in Edinburgh, felt oppressed by the loneliness of not belonging. She had a working-class Jewish father; her mother was born a Protestant, and with her brother they were a happy, close-knit little family, a secular one, like Ginzburg’s. Spark later described herself as a Gentile Jewess. In her fiction, Gentile Jewesses personify characters who are perpetual outsiders, who choose who and where they want to be, “diasporic personalities,” as I recall one critic put it; they’re opposed in her fiction by characters like Miss Jean Brodie who belong to one place and one identity, with fixed, even monomaniacal certainties. In her thirties, Spark went about her conversion to Catholicism in the most diligent way, holing up in her bedsit to read through thirteen volumes of Cardinal Newman’s writings in preparation for her transfiguration. Almost nightly she joined her literary friends in boardinghouse sitting rooms, gardens, and pubs to discuss like apostles gathered together every aspect of Catholicism. Years later Spark’s son from her first marriage claimed to have discovered a Jewish wedding certificate demonstrating that his mother’s mother had been Jewish, too, not just her father; after deciding as a result that he was 100 percent Jewish himself, he so vindictively and publicly harassed his own mother for allegedly denying her own Jewishness that Spark ended up cutting him out of her will. But if I were going to convert to Catholicism, holing up to read thirteen volumes of Cardinal Newman wouldn’t be my way. The only time I’ve experienced what I believe were strong genuinely religious feelings was at the Catholic “widows’ Mass” in a sacred Maya town in the Central Highlands during the war. Possibly it was a syncretic Catholic Maya Mass; the young priest was Maya and gave the Mass in K’iche’. But it would have been suicide to publicly announce such a Mass right under the noses of an army that was still waging its scorched-earth war against the peasant Maya of Quiché and that, for symbolic effect as much as out of convenience, liked to appropriate local churches and convents and turn them into interrogation and torture centers. That priest was in fact murdered soon after. But word of the Mass must have been whispered and passed along all the surrounding mountain and forest paths because that day people came streaming in from far-flung villages and hamlets, hundreds upon hundreds of widows of men murdered in war, with their children and other relatives in their mostly worn, tattered native clothing. They packed the church shoulder to shoulder, the banner-strung air thick with the smoke of burning incense and the smells of pine boughs, candle wax, dirt, sweat, bad breath, unwashed hair; with prayers, singing, voluble exclamations of strong emotions in those strenuous and eloquent K’iche’ pronunciations that seem so suited for expressing sorrow, as some would say Hebrew is, spontaneous wails, sobbing, quiet tears. In suffering you are joined to Christ in His suffering upon the Cross. Together join your suffering to Christ’s and you are strengthened together. I felt it in every part of me; if I had been the kind of person truly open to that, it would have been a lastingly transfiguring moment. The image of Christ, a persecuted Jew nailed to the Cross, was often invoked by Natalia Ginzburg to explain her conversion. Also, her second husband was a Catholic. Natalia said that it was as a Jew that she felt a militant solidarity with all persecuted peoples; to her that was what it meant to be a Jew, even while she was also a Christian. You could be both at the same time. Perhaps not always coherently at the same time, maybe visibly one while invisibly the other and vice versa. Natalia used to say, I am fully Catholic but also fully Jewish; my father was Jewish and so was my husband. None of this half-and-half pie slicing. Just as Jesus Christ was both fully a man and fully God, rather than the Son of God dressed up as a young Jew or anything like that. Fully one, fully the other, at the same time. E pluribus unum implies a mestizo unity, neither a melting together nor an Ann Hunt library of white and a pushed-off-to-the-side infinity of separately shelved selves.
Three-quarters Jewish and three-quarters Catholic, keep a quarter secret only for myself.
Hello? Who do you wish to speak to, please? A child’s voice, a girl’s, I think. I ask for Lexi. I’m sorry, you have the wrong number. No one named Lexi lives here, she says, her voice that of a confident little girl. Methodically struck piano scales in the background. So it’s true, there are children. The policeman’s children? And Lexi has a piano too. Well, she’s always been musical.
Sorry, I mean Alexandra Goldberg. Doesn’t she live there?
Yandra! she says happily.
Yandra, I repeat.
Yes, sir. Alejandra, but everyone calls her Yandra. But I don’t think she can come to the phone right now.
She can’t? This is Alejandra’s brother, Francisco. Frank.
You’re her brother? Oh. Yes, sir. Just one moment, please.
I hear her voice aimed away from the phone shouting: Yandraaaa! Yandraaaa! Your brother is on the phone! A moment later she’s saying bossily to someone: Doogy, ve arriba y dile a Yandra que su hermano está en el teléfono. Another childish voice, whiny edge, answers: Pero Yandra tiene cel, por qué no le marca ahí?
She speaks into the phone: Why don’t you try her cell phone, sir? Do you need the number?
I tried that, I respond. There was no answer. But I can try again. Are you sure Lexi’s home? Yandra, I mean.
Yes, I saw her go up the stairs. Yandra has a show tonight with her band.
Her band?
Yes, sir. They have a show in Acushnet.
In Acushnet?
Yes, sir, it’s a town near here.
Please don’t call me sir, okay? You can call me Frank. What’s your name?
Monica Tupil.
That’s a pretty name.
Vos cerote sube a ver que está haciendo Yandra, I hear Monica scolding again. Pero YA! Creo que se está bañando. Into the phone: At school kids call me Tulip.
That’s a nice nickname. There sure are worse ones.
I guess it’s okay. I think Yandra is in the shower. I’ll ask her to call you back when she gets out if you want. Does she have your number?
I’ll wait. Do you mind? That way I won’t miss her.
QUEEEÉ? Púchica, inútil, ni siquiera le dijiste de su hermano? Doooog! No le puedo creer.
Monica to me: Yandra is in the shower, but Doog forgot to tell her that you’re waiting on the telephone. Doog has to shout that outside the door so she hears. Do you want me to tell Doog to go back upstairs and shout this time?
Sure, if he doesn’t mind, I say. Through the phone I listen to Monica furiously unleashing this new iteration.
Okay, sir, I told him.
That’s your brother you were talking to. Doug is it?
Oh God no, please, he’s not my brother. What, do I sound retarded too? Yes, his name is Doug, but I call him Doog. But his real name is Smelly Retarded Horseshoe Crab.
Retarded Horseshoe Crab? I laugh and she does too, a mischievous childish cackle. Who is this sharp funny bilingual girl? Tupil, a Maya surname.
In the background, a stern adult female voice, this accent pronounced, interrupts: Monica, don’t say retarded. We don’t use that word. And Monica responds: I’m sorry, Maki. I won’t say that anymore.
That’s Maki, says Monica into the phone. She just got back from work. I don’t know if you can hear it over the phone, sir, but Doog is upstairs shouting outside the bathroom door that you’re here. Yandra will come down soon.
Okay. Well, tell Doog thank you. How old are you, Monica?
I’ve been ten for almost one week. You know what my birthday is? February twenty-eighth. My mother says I was born right before midnight, so if I came out a few minutes later, three out of every four years, I wouldn’t have a birthday.
Wow, I’m glad you got in there just under the wire. Happy birthday, then, Monica.
Thank you, sir.
And Maki, she’s your mother?
No. Maki’s isn’t anybody’s mother. My mom is at her job. She works in a factory.
Really? What kind of factory?
They make vests for the soldiers in Iraq that bullets can’t go through, you know what I mean?
Bulletproof vests, sure. For US soldiers in Iraq?
Yes, that’s right. When you see the soldiers on TV wearing their bulletproof vests, my mom made them. Not just my mom, a lot of other people work there. Everyone else here works in the fish houses.
Oh sure, I say, the fish-processing houses. What about your dad? Does he work in the fish houses too?
My dad? I don’t even know who he is. I mean, I’ve never met him. Presumably he’s somewhere in this country, but he’s not here in New Bedford.
Presumably?
Yes, sir, presumably. He wouldn’t go back to Guatemala unless he gets deported. That’s what my mom says.
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