by Jay Cantor
My father, though he sat with my mother, hadn’t participated in these newspaper sessions for years. Not, that is, the way his wife still did, with vehemence and energy. He was present, now wearing a gray tweed jacket from England (it needed patching at the elbows), and he fashioned from his august bearded presence his method of participation, that of judge. His eyes were deeper in his sockets. His face was thinner, was stripping down to bone (a kind of declaration of his distaste for the world). He withdrew more and more into an abstract and—as my mother pointed out to him—“perfectly sententious moralism.” With a doctor’s conviction of rightness, he rendered judgments that were indisputable.
My mother nonetheless disputed. So he withdrew further, rarely spoke—perhaps out of strategy, for my mother would be intentionally provoking when he did speak. And she was hard to keep up with in an argument—she had so much passion for it. She had little else besides arguments, while he was worn from work, and waiting for work.
My mother, though, had grown more and more involved in these newspaper sessions, driven by Peronism into greater and more elaborate inventions of invective. Peron and his late wife, “those fascists,” were “truly unbelievable” to her. And this absurdity was, at least, a comic opportunity for her.
That night—for my benefit I suppose (for he was a little above such joking)—she did a decent imitation of that other energetic implacable woman, Eva Peron. She lacked only the desolation of Evita’s singsong voice, the near hysteria of a child whose main amusement had been to watch the trains pull through her town. (She stands on the tracks as long as she can until panic overcomes her and she leaps aside. The train passes by. It is her lover, of course, taking her almost to the point of destruction. It is her own power. The last car shakes her. It has passed by. She is desolate. The town looks shitty. It is shitty.) That my mother could not imagine, that aridity she could not mimic. My mother made her voice throaty, seductive, but, like Eva’s, mechanical in its rise and fall. “Oh, I grew up in terrible poverty myself, so I know the people very well. I wear these feathers, this joowelery for them. Of course it’s a terrible burden for me! Just think how much it weighs! But they’re happy to see me in beautiful clothes and joowels. I can’t deny them that pleasure. I can’t deny them anything you know, I’m so fond of them. I was trained as a tragedienne you know”—here my mother, released from her usual modesty by the drama, did, before her son, a very moderate, very restrained, bump and grind. “And this I feel is part of my costume, part of the role the people delight in my playing for them. It’s part of my sacrifice for them, so they have someone a little bit like them to tell stories about.”
My mother continued in her own voice, speaking to me. “And do you know what’s most nauseating? They love her! They swoon before her like teen-agers at a burlesque show. When their homes are washed away they say”—meek voice like a cartoon mouse—“ ‘Eva will take care of us.’ Now that she’s dead they tell each other her body wouldn’t burn when the army tried to destroy it. I heard two idiot women saying that just this week! They pray to her for Christ’s sake! Our stripper who art in heaven!” There was real disgust and anger in her voice, her look, the way she gestured, pointing her cigarette at me with a sharp stabbing motion. But there was delight too. I laughed, and carefully put my drink down on the table, and clapped, to show my appreciation. Polite guest. For really this show brought me to the edge of despair. She had done this little act for me, because once it had pleased me. But it did no longer. Once this mockery had been my bedtime story. But now I felt like a grown-up being fed a sticky treat his mother assures him was his childhood favorite. I was an adolescent being read a children’s book. I wanted to shout out, like that rebellious adolescent, I’m too old for this! I’m no longer a child, Mother! But I couldn’t—for why wasn’t she too old for it?
And this was just like what had delighted me in my childhood, this performance, my mother and not my mother, peekaboo from around the edges. But she was always like that, performing or not, even in her real life, her family. For the roles she’d been given to play in that life were too small for her. She overflowed them, was them and not them at once. A great actress in a very provincial company, trapped in a minor role, too much intelligence and talent had gone into her small part; her qualities called attention to themselves, as if it were not a character you were watching, but someone who made you exclaim at each moment: Now there’s a great actress! It gave a heightened quality to her least gesture—her hand moving through her hair, her conversation at parties—but it destroyed the verisimilitude of what she was doing. My mother, you see, seemed to be playing herself. And so she was always ironic—as if what was most important about her could not be expressed, could not manifest itself, but could only, ever, hint at its existence.
I leaned back in my chair, trying to get comfortable. Now there were dozens of frayed or unraveled pieces of wicker. My parents did not make repairs. My parents (and myself) had the necessity of economy but none of its habits. I think this got on my father’s nerves (though he never found time to do anything about it). But my mother didn’t seem to notice. (Any more than she saw her own mess. Half-filled notebooks, ashtrays, coffee cups, crumpled cigarette packs, magazines and books were scattered all over the table.) She was indifferent to her surroundings. She belabored my father for losing her money, but that was only for purposes of argument; she never seemed to want very much the things the money could have bought, never seemed unhappy about their worsening circumstances. A true intellectual, she didn’t care about such things. Or perhaps she was simply too aristocratic to show her feelings.
Or perhaps she showed them constantly. I thought of her love for the Spanish Anarchists. She wanted to be not only on the side of justice, but part of a small beleaguered and necessarily doomed group on the side of justice. The smallness, isolation, and consequent doomedness of the group were, I think, very important to her. Against the aristocracy that she rebelled against, that she truly wanted no part of, she posed this other aristocracy, an elite that her family and friends would want no part of, because it was an aristocracy of the oppressed, it was against them. But it would be an aristocracy nonetheless, the purest of the left, kindred, chosen, noble spirits. And as the miners had lost more and more battles, more and more men, more and more territory, she had, I remembered, become that much more ardent for their cause, her fund raising for them that much more active. As if the Spanish miners, so far away, were an image of her own defeat in the world, her own coming down, because they too were part of an elite that was too good for this world. Beyond the political position of the defeated, it was the defeat that was important.
Peronism, I saw from my corner, sipping my smoky liquid, Peronism was perfect for my parents in an awful way, the final justification of their style: her irony, his judgments. With their hatred of the oligarchy they’d come from and with the workers on the side of “that madman,” there was no one good enough for them to make common cause with. And once the Communists were cut off from the masses, from any possibility of success, once they had become a persecuted secret debating club, my parents became fellow travelers of the Communists, on the side of an imaginary, doomed, empty-handed proletariat, a proletariat of dreams.
The masses that did exist in our homeland were, alas, “irrational, driven insane by the smell of that woman’s sex.” Those masses had once, in fact, tried to tear my mother limb from limb. My mother, my parents, were, of course, rational, and it was clear to any rational person that there was nothing to do but to condemn this madness and wait for everyone to come to his senses. And they were right, I thought, their reasoning was faultless. (So it was reason itself I was running away from? Sanity that I wanted to be cured of? Doctor, make me mad!)
Why for God’s sake didn’t the masses follow decent leaders—for my mother was not for a mindless leaderless leveling, but for a natural aristocracy of leaders, one, I think, she was certain that, with her talent, ideas, education, she’d be a part of. (And she shou
ld be, I thought, listening to her analyze the Marshall Plan. She was brilliant.) If only the people had brought their sorrows to her instead of to that actress, she would have known how to teach them to lament. Then something might be done. But now—nothing.
Trapped forever with feelings they could neither act on, nor let go of, my parents had, for years, argued fiercely about politics with everyone—for there was nothing to do but argue. All their energy went into baiting their acquaintances, their friends, and then—the circle, like this glass table, closing in on itself—each other. They were constantly insulting each other. (My mother went so far once as to bring a small nickel-plated pistol to the table, to indicate just what might happen to my father if he pushed her sorely tried patience any further with his deliberate, his obstinate stupidity. The next night he too laid a pistol by his cup. They kept up this charade for a week.)
They took their ideas so seriously because they couldn’t find a way to take them seriously at all—they were always and ever only ideas. For the less you do the more strictly you have to define the difference of opinion between you and the class enemy (the oligarchy, the imperialists), you have to draw the line ever more sharply, because under Peron the main difference between you and that enemy (they, too, were against Peron) were your opinions.
So my mother grew funnier, more bitter, more talkative. In her heart she would, I think, rather have done something against Peron, like her fund raising, her rallygoing, during the Spanish War—for she became more witty at her own expense as well, making self-deprecating jokes, jokes about her own absurdity, jokes tinged with self-hatred. (Could she have stood, after all these years, so much accumulated self-dislike, to be on the winning side?) But there was no way to win, nothing to do, nothing but this endless bickering with everyone, until she was tired of her own voice.
If only my mother could have found some way to act—but for that, though she couldn’t see it, she would have had to turn herself inside out, become someone else, unrecognizable to herself. (I knew this because, as I lay in my damp bed in Buenos Aires, I had felt this truth for myself.) If only there had been some outlet for her energy! But there never had been, not her whole married life. My father had his work, my father had (or so it had seemed to all of us) me, and she had only her books, memories, a few admiring friends. So she made Peronism the stuff of an intellectual triumph; she could lampoon them, caricature them endlessly, destroy them with her wit. She threw herself into abusiveness as completely as she could (but how little of her this used!).
And as she abused the world it disappeared for her. History was only an excuse for her verbal structures; and at the end only a little bit of it remained in them, like a newspaper picture or some other found object that’s glued into the corner of a collage. The political world, which existed for them not as a sphere of action but as a subject constantly judged, constantly parodied or condemned, fell away. And soon it was barely discernible what they were contemptuous of—for this crazy world, called up only in ridicule, had left of itself only the merest distorted fragments. And so my mother’s abuse that had been at first her way of reaching out to the world, making it her own, mastering it, had by this time twisted the world out of anyone else’s recognition, and sealed her isolation.
Alone now in this small blue kitchen (the wallpaper had milkmaids and oddly, sheep, on it; it had come with the place), alone, the rail splitter asleep, the miner asleep, the gaucho asleep (the gardeners, I suppose, out drinking), they were the only ones awake in the house, in the country, vigilant, sipping from clay mugs, reading the newspaper, talking. They seemed loony to me, as I waited now for them to run down, to finish this talking to no one—not even to each other—about nothing. I had long ago stopped listening. (Though I was still marked by these sessions, and knew myself marked.)
When they were nearly exhausted I told them of my determination to leave Argentina. My father’s hand, holding the silver strainer for the glistening mate leaves, shook. The veins of his hand were thicker, more prominent than I remembered. He knew that I meant my departure, at least in part, as a blow at him, a way of separating us utterly. But his hand shaking like that, it was not, after all, a very gratifying sight. He was a lonely man. The peasants distrusted him, wouldn’t accept his care; there was a bewildering distance between himself and his wife that was, he knew, as much his character as her refusal.
And I, who was the last person he could simply love, was deserting him.
“Your generation is weak,” my father said, “not like mine. Very weak really, don’t you think. Your mother spoiled you with her stupid ideas about raising children. We were more men than you are. We were able to carry on our fathers’ work. We didn’t go running off at a challenge the way you do. But you’re all perpetual children now, you have no internal strength. I tell you this quite frankly, Ernesto, that’s what you all lack. When it becomes difficult you give up, go running off. Not like us, not like us at all. Not like my people”—meaning, I suppose, the Guevaras, gold miners, ranchers. He was repeating his words like an old man, in a cranky voice, mechanically shaking his head at me. And the skin of his throat quivered; it had formed into loose folds and wrinkles; an old man’s skin. Who was this old man? I barely recognized my father in him. “Weak,” he went on, “weak. I should have expected it from you, of course. It’s been too easy for you. Your mother always spoiled you. It’s been so easy that the slightest difficulty, like this Peron business, makes you squeal. A little discomfort and you cave in, just as you did when you were a child. In a way you’re effeminate, Ernesto. I’m being frank with you, that’s my opinion. She would have spoiled you worse if she could have. You’re weak, you have no courage. It’s been too easy for you.”
Why did he want to destroy my myth, the myth of my heroic struggle against asthma, the myth of the weak child who became a hero, the myth he’d been chief author of? I suppose it was his way of fighting back. And it stung, for he could still stir me if he wanted, his casual blows had power. And his accusations were too close to my own fears.
But I’d defeated him, this old man, that was clear, this old man with his crankiness about the younger generation. Not quite the feeling of triumph I’d expected when I arrived that evening. Did he read the strength of my will in my eyes and decide not to make a fight about my leaving—knowing that my will was as strong as his, was his, only younger?
I promised again that I’d return in a year. I whispered good-bye to the old man, but didn’t try to kiss him. We did not touch each other much anymore, not the way we once had. I rose, and kissed my mother’s cheek. She stood and hugged me—but lightly, hardly touching me, hugging me in the crook of her elbow, keeping the lit cigarette in her scarred hand away from her hair. When had this pretty woman, too, become old? Her own force, turned back on itself, had raked lines into her face. Her lovely eyes were darkly ringed again, permanently so. Her skin bagged beneath them now. “You will come back to us, Ernesto,” she said in a soft voice.
Opening her pocketbook on the table, she gave me fifteen dollars in pesos. If I got as far as the United States, I was to buy her a lace dress and bring it back to her on my return. But I felt that she was playing this out for my father, and knew better herself; I felt, in fact, that she, who knew something of traps, for I myself had been hers—was giving me her blessing. “You will come back with my dress.”
“Of course I will, Celia,” I said.
And of course I never did.
Isle of Pines, June 1965
JUNE 23
Yesterday evening, after our beans and rice, I gave Ponco my account, a hundred handwritten pages. He took it back to his room immediately, and spent the rest of the night reading. I could see his light, a thin strip underneath the door.
That light kept me awake, fidgeting in my bed, twisting the sheets about my body to cover myself. I couldn’t get comfortable; either the sheet stuck to my skin, or, kicking it away, I was too chilly, too exposed. It was not exactly, I think, a writer’s vanity that m
ade me turn in my bed, not “What does he think of my work, my talent?” not even “What does he think of me, how does he, knowing these secrets, judge me?” But I felt as if I weren’t in my own hands anymore; I wondered, what does he make of me? Behind that door, in that light, he was reading me; I was entering his imagination; he was creating a version of me.
I was up before Ponco, sitting at the table, drinking mate when he came in, waiting for him. I wanted his version; I wanted to gaze at that funny reflection of myself. “What did you think of it?” I asked. “I’ve written history before but never in this way. Before I was writing from the outside, an observer, describing battles I was at. You know, you’ve read them. I acted in those battles, but I never spoke of how they formed me. But this is different, a history that cuts across and into me, that forms me. I feel as if I haven’t given you an account, but my childhood itself.” I was pompous from embarrassment. I was ashamed to say with real directness what I wanted: let’s tell a story about me.
Ponco smiled, the peculiar way he has when nervous, quickly lifting his lips over his teeth, then letting them drop as if a switch had been thrown. “I enjoyed it very much.”
I was disappointed. I wanted him to present myself to myself. “Say something more.” My curiosity was a deep desire; it made me rude, imperious.
It only made Ponco more agitated. He bit the edge of a finger. “It’s a good story,” he said. “It made me wonder what happens next.”
“It’s all right. You can be critical.” That wasn’t what I meant either. I didn’t want his artistic judgment on my plotting. I wanted to know his construction of me.
“Something critical,” Ponco said, and paused. He then made a gesture that I had never before seen on this earth: he put one hand in his ear, palm out, and one on his head, like the comb of a rooster. He stuck his tongue out at me, and waggled his hands.
