by Jay Cantor
“What in God’s name does that mean? Is it a Cuban thing?”
“No. It’s critical. Called a Bronx cheer. Never seen one. Only read it.”
“I don’t think you have it right. I’ve seen one. Once, when I was in Miami, when I was twenty-one, I was mouthing off to old men in a cafeteria, and the FBI took me in for questioning. I told them what I thought of the United States, and one of the agents gave me a Bronx cheer.” I did it for Walter. A fleck of spit landed on my mate gourd. Ponco laughed: dry husks scraping each other. “The agent had a fat face, and with his cheeks bulged out he looked obscene, as if he were shitting his thumb. But don’t you have anything more to say about my story, my life?”
Walter fidgeted in his chair. (I saw my body turning in bed the night before and thought, that’s what my account is good for, to make people fidget.) He scratched his face, pulled the smooth skin tight. He was nervous; he wanted to go read, to be somewhere else entirely. But I didn’t care. Walter was silent for a while, scratching under his arm, up and down his chest, a breach of his fastidiousness. Then: “Nuh wdgmmugh.”
Sometimes Ponco’s voice is so low and so harsh it is hard to make out the words. I leaned more closely towards him. “What?”
“No women?”
“My mother.”
“Yes. But no women. Didn’t you have women? Or think about them? I heard Che was a ladies’ man before the Revolution. A Don Juan.”
“It’s not a story about women.”
“I suppose not.” He drank some coffee. “Do you think often about your family?”
“What do you mean?”
He put his hands to his head, on each side, and pushed them together like a vise.
I understood. “You mean psychology. Psychoanalysis? Oedipus complex? Freud?”
He drew his lips up, clicked them shut, nodded.
A party game: charades. The loss of his voice had opened into new languages. “I thought you read only fiction.”
“A fellow told me about it. Good story. Demons.”
“I used to think a lot about it once, in that way. I was absorbed by Freud when I was in medical school, and after, until the beginning of the Revolution. Until I met Fidel. Hilda and I used to argue about psychoanalysis. She thought it was a bourgeois idea.” Walter had met Hilda a few times, when she came to Havana with the baby, after the Revolution. I was not always comfortable seeing her after the divorce, and I sometimes sent Walter with gifts for the child, my child. “We used to argue in Guatemala about Freud and Sartre. It was during my existentialist period. Sartre, she said, was bourgeois, too. All that talk of anxiety, she’d say disgustedly, as if the word were dirty. Anxiety was a luxury item, more expensive than Paris perfume. It was only for Europeans. Latin Americans didn’t have the spare change for it. For us the only choice was unremitting struggle, or having your face shoved in shit, not whether to commit suicide or not. With so many people trying to kill you, why give them the satisfaction? Of course, you know, she would never have said ‘shit.’ She doesn’t talk like that. She doesn’t speak ironically. She spoke of the struggle for social justice, the fight against exploitation, hunger, bad health, illiteracy, that’s the way she talked, very clearly, very directly, not bitterly, not ironically. When we met in Guatemala she was in exile. Not self-chosen exile, like mine. She had led the APRA group at the university in Lima, and after the coup she had had to flee. She had the right to talk the way she did. Is this interesting you?”
Ponco nodded happily, a real smile. “Very. I’ve never heard you talk like this.”
“It’s the writing. Once you begin explaining yourself there’s no end to the process. In any case, Hilda believed in Pavlov, not Freud. He explained people’s behavior in a way more acceptable to her. You know Pavlov? The dog trainer? Sartre and Freud paid too much attention to individuals, she said, not enough to the social struggle. And she found Freud disgusting. Nothing but sex drives and dirty thoughts! She said it wasn’t a complete picture of a human being. I remember that phrase of hers. Political fighters were not sick men acting from frustrated sex drives. They were normal human beings, acting as we all should, freely accepting their responsibility to society. Very contradictory to Pavlov’s poor doggies. She only liked Pavlov, really, because of her sympathy with the Soviets. I pointed that out to her. It was late at night, in her boardinghouse in Guatemala. Time for me to go she would say.”
Out of my reverie, expelled from Hilda’s house, I looked at Walter and saw (or imagined) the sidelong glance, the tightened lips of a leer. “No,” I said emphatically. “Not a Don Juan. Not a conquest. Hilda was very serious, almost stern. There was nothing light about her. As I say, she was unironic, she didn’t want to play, usually, only to get at the truth and act on it. She was not at all like my mother. I suppose that’s a point against Freud. You know if she hadn’t been pregnant she would have asked Fidel to let her join the expedition. Instead she went to my parents’ house to wait for me. Each night she wore a flannel bathrobe I’d left behind. When she came after the victory of the revolution I told her immediately about Celia. I couldn’t wait. I felt like dung. I said, ‘It would be better if I’d died in battle.’ I know: very self-dramatizing. Very self-pitying. She stopped crying immediately. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the Revolution needs you.’ You see what I mean?”
“Yes. You were made for each other.” He was smiling at me; talking of my life, I had opened myself to this tender irony in others.
I paused, remembering her, going deeper into my trance. A boardinghouse in Guatemala. She was plump, with a round face, her mouth turned down, her eyes thin, Indian-looking. She wasn’t pretty in the ways I was familiar with, but her looks fascinated me. I couldn’t get them to come out right, and I felt there was something valuable there I didn’t understand, as if, if I could learn to find her beauty, I would have deepened myself, changed for the better, solved a problem. Sometimes I knew she wasn’t attractive, sometimes I thought everyone would think her beautiful, and sometimes I knew she was beautiful and knew also that no one else would see it. “I remember sitting in her living room, with our friends and her roommates. They were giddy things by comparison with Hilda. She always had fresh fruit for me, for my asthma, and hot water for my mate. In the days before the mercenaries invaded, I slept on a golf course, and I would come over in the morning to wash up. She took care of me. I think that was why she liked me, at first, because I needed her attention, because of my asthma. I wasn’t like other Argentines, she said, stuck up, with overdeveloped European ways. I wasn’t like other men. I think she meant I had a visible weakness, though I tried to hide it. After we were married she told me that at first she had thought I was haughty because of the way I stuck out my chest like a rooster. But when she found out from Soto that it was to ease the pain of my asthma, she found it touching, I was like a little boy bravely hiding his illness. That’s a deep part of her nature: she’s a very compassionate person. And very courageous. After the invasion of Guatemala she went to prison rather than tell the police where I hid. And in prison she went on a hunger strike because they denied her the rights of a political exile. It was an amazing performance.”
“You gave up Freud for her?”
“What?” Walter meant well, but he was calling me back for no reason, for a silly joke. “No. Because of Hilda’s arguments? No. Then we would have nothing to fight about. I only explained things to her in a Freudian way to tease her. It was a way of talking to her about sex—it was many, many months before we made love. She was right in a way. Freud may help us to see what parts of ourselves need changing. Then we must find the material conditions that must be changed to change ourselves. So Freud becomes Marxism. And then Gramsci’s right: the revolutionary must be his own psychoanalyst. It is a matter of freeing the will to act.”
Walter looked away. He didn’t care for theory unless he could read it allegorically, make characters out of the abstractions, battles of Spirit, Will, Heart, Head.
“You must stop m
e talking,” I said. “What do you think of my childhood?” He owed me something—not for my theory, but for my reminiscences.
And finally I goaded a response. “You were a violent child.”
“I was? I thought your childhood more violent than mine.”
“No. Mine had more hitting. All kinds of hitting. My mother and uncle raised me. Don’t doubt. He was a fag, he didn’t wear socks. You don’t know?”
“About socks? No.”
Ponco laughed. At me. “Yes. Much of Cuba is figures to you. The ones who wear sandals without socks are making a statement. He embarrassed me. Started my career as a liar. And he hit me. Often. When I was fourteen he knifed someone, and ran to the United States. I shot him at Playa Giron.”
“Figuratively you mean.” I thought his old ways were returning, brought back by my pressuring him to speak. (Or by my example.)
“No. Literally. Or someone did. He was in the group that landed from the Travis. My area. He died there. My mother hated him. Her brother. Now she calls a fag a ‘Travis.’ She calls her late brother Travis. See. He doesn’t have a name anymore. He’s dead for her. When she’s angry at me, she says I’m like Travis. I’m a Travis.” He stopped to drink some coffee, as if he could moisten that dryness. “See, in my family, if you were angry at someone, you hit. As hard as you could. Really angry, you killed. Bam! Pow! You people, you carried it around inside you. It becomes personal. Sharp.” He paused, waiting for the right words. “Icy,” he said in his hot, harsh voice.
“I suppose. At night, in high school, before sleep, I imagined shooting people from the windows of the house. Bad people. Fascist police. They had the house surrounded. I shot at them from the windows. Where could I stand where the bullets wouldn’t hit me? My first strategic problem. I found it soothing.”
Ponco laughed, a long time, the merest sound, warm breath coughed up from his chest, grating the roof of his mouth.
“This is strange talk,” I said. “I’ve written more about my life than I ever wanted to. Or so I thought. And now we’re talking, as you say, in a way we never have before.”
“You mean I tell the truth.”
I smiled. “Not just that. But talking about myself makes me talk more about myself. I can’t stop! It’s like a trance. You remember one thing, God knows from where, the edge of a blanket you had as a child, and it reminds you of something else you would have thought was gone forever if you ever thought about it, like the way the fruit bowl looked in the mornings in Hilda’s living room, or the quality of dust in the light in my parents’ house.”
“You should go back to work.” He got up from the table and went towards the porch and someone else’s story. He was afraid, perhaps, of more questions; he didn’t want to talk about me.
JUNE 24
And next? The goal is raising the production of zinc. The goal is increasing the participation in factory councils. The goal is taking that outpost. The goal is This business doesn’t seem to work like that. Where am I going here? I don’t know how to name it to myself. The goal is how I became the person that I am? That is: a certain will: the struggle must begin now. The beginning of revolutionary violence will unite the masses, throwing them in one direction, in one way. The Third World will rise to save Vietnam, to end colonialism forever.
But how can that catechism be the story of my adolescence?
Before I asked: is it possible, can it be done? Is that like asking now: is it true? And then I think, but what about its opposite? Isn’t that part of the truth?
And next? Each sentence I write just stops. Dead. Like that. To know what comes next, after this sentence, I must imagine from the end backward. What is the end? (My plane lost over the sea? Some town in Bolivia? Or somewhere like Bolivia?) Make the life fit the death. To write one’s life story is to be already dead.
Is that true?
JUNE 25
This morning, Ponco, up before me, had left a note on the table next to my mate gourd. (He had read my thoughts!) He provided direction.
Is it true
you killed a man in Bolivia?
After tea and bread I took this note back to my room, placed it before me on my board.
My day’s work:
No.
I vomited on a man in Bolivia.
In Guatemala I killed a mercenary.
I left the page by Ponco’s plate at dinner. He looked at it quizzically, folded it up into a very small square, and put it in his shirt pocket.
JUNE 26
This morning’s note:
You always seem so certain.
Were you always so certain about everything?
Were you certain about Fidel?
I labored hard on that one.
No.
Yes.
Yes, I have always been certain. Imperialism is the enemy of mankind. But my tactics have changed. Once I was a follower of Gandhi, or so I thought. I believed in chastity, abstinence, humbling my body for my soul’s sake. I believed in nonviolence and the life of the Indian villages. I was against industrialization. Gandhi, I thought, had shown the way to defeat the imperialists.
And then there was an in-between time. The space between the sentences. Have you ever seen a strip of motion-picture stock? In between the frames there is a thin white line. On the screen the motion looks continuous, a man turning round or walking out a door. But there is really that line. A discontinuous dialectic that looks smooth.
When I didn’t know what should be done the world seemed hateful, nonsensical, rotten. It was like having a stomach ache.
But I was certain about Fidel. I had awaited him.
At dinner Walter smiled, pointing at me. “Gandhi?”
“In Bolivia,” I said, returning his smile, remembering that young man’s sermons.
“Chastity?”
“Yes.” I nodded. There was something chaste in Walter’s harshness. “The body is evil, unruly. Form yourself by cutting into the flesh.”
Walter laughed, gasp gasp gasp, but said no more.
JUNE 27
You don’t get the point.
Not an interview.
I meant a story. Tell a story about those things, about you.
Argentina-Bolivia, 1953
My Book
THE DISCOVERY OF LATIN AMERICA
Notes on Gandhi’s Importance for the Latin American Revolution:
To the colonial intellectual—before Gandhi—revolution had meant aping Imperialist talk, Imperial culture, Imperial attitudes, even the Imperialists’ contempt for oneself, his contempt for “natives.” One wanted to be modern. Gandhi said No to this, Gandhi lived No. Western civilization, Western industry, Western Imperialism, Western science—that is the real savagery!
Gandhi showed us the way for Latin America, as for India. Gandhi drove the intellectuals into the villages. A spindly-legged little man in a white homespun loincloth, he sat by a wooden hand loom, spinning out cotton, spinning the world “backward,” away from the West, away from History. Let our ways replace imperialist machinery, imperialist wage slavery. Hand weaving: a symbol of the people’s unity, a source of quiet meditation, sustenance, independence. Through that meditation we can learn stillness, learn to renounce our lust for violence, renounce the degrading lusts of our bodies.
—That was a piece of my notes on Gandhi and the Latin American Revolution (as I then imagined it!), a piece of the book I began on leaving Argentina, on the train to Bolivia. (Alvarados and I were on our way back to the leprosarium in San Pablo, Venezuela.) The “book” remained urgent homiletic notes—notes revised, notes added to with feverish exultation, notes rewritten, but always only notes, the preparation for a project not quite ever begun, a sermon never quite preached (except to Fernando, my congregation of one). The book was to be, I imagined, a tour de force; a political tract, a travel journal that was also the discovery of a self—in the existential sense. Whatever that meant. (I thought it meant “an active emptiness,” or “a continual venturing.” And I thoug
ht that meant …) I didn’t know what the book would be exactly. (I didn’t know exactly what a self was “in the existential sense.”) I thought that once it began it would all work itself out. (I thought the same about the self.) So I rewrote my notes, expecting from the writing a clue as to what to write next; and when it didn’t come, I made more notes. My script shook as the train from Buenos Aires swayed from side to side on its worn tracks; the notebook bounced against my knees and splotched “lust.” I crossed out the spotted paragraphs (I would recopy them soon in almost identical words) and looked about for the paper bag filled with oranges. It was next to Alvarados, on the outside of our wooden bench. Alvarados, tired, had given up reading an article on allergies and, like a bird folding its wings across its eyes for the night, had put the back of his left arm against his right ear. He shifted slightly in his sleep as my shirt sleeve brushed the bottom of his nose.
My mother had given me the notebook I wrote in, late my last night at home, when I had told her of my plans for a book. My father, in anger and disappointment (so cunningly mixed together that I could not reply to his fury with the force of my own), had gone off to bed. “I tire so easily lately,” he said to my mother, who must surely have known. It was for me to overhear, for I could no longer be spoken to. He would not even look at me. I was a dead man for him; or I was his executioner; anyway someone had died. Watching him my body grew rigid.
He stooped over as he walked, his hands pressed into the pockets of his jacket, and he pushed out the white swinging door from the kitchen with his shoulder, as if he were too fatigued to lift his hands up before him. A shameless charade, I thought bitterly. I wanted to rise and hug him to me. I could not. My body was stiff, held in an arc of love and rebellion; if I were to reach out to him he would bend my gesture against me, misinterpret it, make me cry. I made myself hard. I was a knife, I thought grandly, as if it were all so basic to me, this problem, so deep in my soul, that it was beyond choice; not a family quarrel but a damnation.
