by Jay Cantor
The last policeman left the dock. The crews returned to work.
Chaco let me up.
That evening, as the others slept, I dragged myself to the wall, by the window, and leaning against it, read my father’s neatly typed letter.
Dear Ernesto:
I was very interested to read that you, too, are once more involved with Gandhi’s teaching, and that you found your imagination of him to be a comfort during that foolhardy ride in the Andes. Perhaps it is a sign that you are meant to follow his teachings of nonattachment, and nonviolence (though I do not think you have understood his teachings yet in their full depth).
I, too, have been thinking of Gandhi’s way, and even more have tried to immerse myself in the difficult tradition from which he comes. Since your departure I find that my activities here in Cordoba, the practice of medicine, the discussions of politics with your mother and her friends (as you know, I have no friends here) are of very little interest to me. Now it is as if these things occurred on the other side of a partition; soon they will, I am sure, drift away from me utterly. Perhaps I detach myself from life in order to ready myself for my death. I would not want you to think, though, that this turn of events bothers me. I am content with my lot. I want nothing.
To reduce one’s wants, Gandhi taught, is the secret of contentment. All my life I have sought for this feeling of nonattachment, but my commitment to you and your mother have time and again pulled me back into the concerns of life. Perhaps your departure was a godsend to me, for it helped me to sever my last attachments to life. I do not engage in useless plotting in anyone’s behalf, certainly not in my own. Each day I practice the exercises for breathing and posture from a book I tried to share with you in your childhood, The Hindu Science of Breath Control It is hard for an old man to sit with his legs crossed. But I lie down absolutely straight, with my arms at my side, my palms facing upward, in what is called “the corpse position.” I let my mind quiet itself. Your mother comes in at such times, to annoy me, often with worries about you. But I remain uninvolved. She seems to be standing at a great distance above me, and I can hardly make out her voice. It is as if I were already enjoying the peace of the grave. I see during those evening meditations that life is just a play of images, and not something for a man my age to take seriously.
You are quite right in your admiration of Gandhi’s teaching, and its way of nonviolence. Your mother, of course, mocks me for this, wondering how I can eat anything at all, even vegetables, or wash myself, and kill microbes. It is not so comical as she thinks. It is a contradiction. We must do violence in order to live, but it is a beautiful thing if we can keep that violence to a minimum. Nonviolence is a very high ideal, for true aristocrats of the Spirit, men of intelligence and morality. To follow Gandhi, to be nonviolent, is a continual task, not something settled once and for all. Final victories are the imaginings of violent men; apocalypse; fiery consummation. Gandhi’s way must be the will’s slow patient work. It is a difficult path, and requires the utmost courage from those who follow it. One cannot experience that courage without the serenity of nonattachment. One must be attached to nothing, not even to one’s family, not even to one’s own life, if one is to have the courage not to take another’s life when one’s own is threatened.
Nonattachment comes from performing the correct action at each stage of our life. It does not come from following our particular fears and desires, but from finding our place in a much larger scheme, from understanding the stage of life that you find yourself incarnated in. One does not choose that state according to one’s whims. One finds oneself there as part of a family, a profession. These circumstances, and not one’s own wishes, determine to the last detail our conduct.
If one does this there is purity and clarity, not the muck and chaos of “personality.” (Imagine, please, a provincial acting company making up its own lines, each actor doing what he wants, deciding to walk off perhaps during another’s farewell speech!) It is like focusing a lens. Before the lens (the self) is focused, nothing is clear; the lens calls attention to itself. But once the impersonal cosmic drama is allowed to operate, the glass comes into focus. It is anonymous and self-effacing; nonattached.
Have you done this? I don’t think so.
One cannot run away into the nonattached life. One must act selflessly, at the time dictated by one’s place in the drama. One must pursue one’s career in the appropriate way. (And what career, I wonder, could be more satisfying than the one I hoped you would share with me, that of saving lives?) One must see to the care of one’s family. (I require no care myself, for, as I said, I have very few and very small needs. But your mother’s case is different. She is attached to you deeply, misses your company very much, speaks of you often. But more than that—though she is too vain to admit it—she is getting old, Ernesto, and she requires your help.) One must raise one’s own children. If one completes these necessary stages, these early acts of the drama, then one can be a true disinterested follower of Gandhi’s way, the way of nonattachment and nonviolence. Have you done this? I don’t think so. You have run away from your family, your profession, from your role. I think that lacks courage.
Your loving Father
And then, in an old man’s writing—that shaky black script, that child’s printing I had never seen before this letter—there was a message written askew to the rest of the page: “I am very tired. Please come home.”
I fell asleep against the wall. My mind was dark, my limbs heavy. I dreamed of my father in a hospital bed, a long open ward. I was the doctor on call. When I went to examine him he grabbed me and hugged me, as if he wanted me to merge with him. I woke naked, in a small puddle of my own shit.
That evening Soto called a meeting. We had to get out of here. Each of us would contribute the clothing he didn’t need, and Garcia would go to Quito, where they’d have use for the winter stuff, and peddle it in the street. A pile was formed on the floor, Soto’s vicuna coat, some extra pairs of pants. I wanted to be rid of everything, my leather jacket, my sports coat, my shirts, my two pairs of pants, my underwear.
“The naked man in the empty room,” Chaco said.
Fernando took back my clothes for me, surrendering only my sports coat.
A few days later we met to divvy up the money.
“Guatemala!” Soto said seductively. Sweat dripped from his sideburns and his mustache. Soto had a bad smell to him. (He rarely washed but each morning he poured more of that cologne on his hair.) Rolls of fat hung over his lizardskin belt. His chest was hairy, and he had large breasts.
“Guatemala,” Soto repeated, as if it were a rich strange delicious fruit.
The other lawyers nodded at the delicacy.
“No!” Fernando shouted. It all happened at a great distance from me. Fernando’s voice was high-pitched, almost crying. “We’re going to Venezuela! Just give us our share.”
“Venezuela!” Soto laughed. “How can you even think of it? Nothing’s happening in Venezuela. Guatemala is the most exciting political event in our continent’s history! A land reform expropriating the property of the United Fruit Company, a government committed, really committed to the goal of social justice, even if it means defying the North Americans! Guevara,” he turned to me. I sat cross-legged, naked. Long light shit stains ran down the hairs of my legs. “You’re fond of the word ‘experiment.’ Well, this is the most exciting social experiment in our century. This isn’t like the opportunists of the MNR. Every sector of the population has been mobilized. Arbenz isn’t afraid of anyone, not even John Foster Dulles!”
Ar-benz! I laughed. New syllables to hurl at the wall. I was a rag that had been soaked and wrung out and soaked again. I stood superior to an empty world. Or I was worthless. I was empty, and I wanted to be. Empty, naked, indifferent. Nonattached.
Fernando shouted, “Politics is shit! Politics is death!” He spoke quietly to me, reminding me of the time I’d visited him in the jail. Veins stood out in his forehead. “You said it,
Ernesto. Politics is death. You were right! This talk is nonsense Ernesto. Good isn’t done by Arbenz. It’s done by many individuals acting independently, a little at a time.” His voice pleaded, reminding me of intimate conversations, treaties entered into; friendship. “You were right, Ernesto!”
“Did I say that?” I couldn’t remember. What did he want from me?
“Yes. Yes. You people with your talk, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Look.” He pointed to his ear. But what he wanted to show us was an absence. “I can’t hear with this ear. You don’t care.” He turned to me angrily. His hand formed a fist, and he pressed it hard against his own sharp cheekbone. “But I love sounds. I love music. Ernesto, you remember when I tried to teach you to dance? You wanted to show Chinchina how much you cared for her. I taught you the tango. And you got up at that night club when they were playing a rumba.” He smiled at me, though he was crying now. He wanted to take me deeper into our past together, the bond between us, our vows. But I couldn’t go there. “You made a stupid fool out of yourself. Because you don’t care about music. You can’t hear it anyway. Because you’re so damn abstract. But I can hear. I love music. You never cared for it. I love to dance. You never could. You can’t dance! You can’t swim! You’re so damn afraid of losing control!” He cried openly now, rubbing his sleeve across his eyes like a child. I had never realized, never wanted to realize, Fernando’s anger, his resentment. I had admired him for his lack of bitterness, because, I suppose, I wanted him that way. He had admired me for seeing farther, admired me for saying things I did not now even remember saying, lines he had probably given me. “Look,” he said, his strength gone, ashamed of crying, “forget it. I mean, I just don’t want to lose another ear.”
Soto laughed, the flesh of his breasts shaking. “You think you’re the only one who’s suffered in jails, sir?” He turned away from us and, with one hand, reached up to his left eye socket. “Look!” He held something up between his fingers. It was growing dark outside. I didn’t look at the glass eye he held, but at the socket. My attention was fixed by that hole, a darkness within a darkness, a hole that entered into the darkness but didn’t look out, a stony place. It fascinated me. I thought I saw a different shade of black, almost silvery. And a streak of red. (There had always, I thought, been something dead about Soto’s stare.) “We mustn’t be afraid,” said the man afraid of rats. “We must see Guatemala,” said the man who couldn’t see. He turned from us and put the glass eye back in its socket.
I agreed. Fernando left the next morning for Venezuela. He was distant but calm when we parted. He embraced me. “Watch out you don’t become a partygoer, like your friend Soto,” he said. “A voyeur of revolutions!”
We were on a ship of the Great White Fleet, when I asked Soto about the injury to his eye. I admired him for not having mentioned it before, along with the straight-backed chair, respected his casual, insouciant story of his escape.
Chaco laughed so hard that spit came out in a little shower from his lips.
“You’re kidding of course?” Soto asked.
“What?”
The two lawyers looked at me blankly, as if from glass eyes, smiling.
“I didn’t lose an eye. I was just making a joke. You know, you’re a doctor. I didn’t think you could just pop a glass eye out like that? It was a childhood joke. You know, the way children will take out a false eye. I mean pretend to take out a false eye and put it in their mouth for washing.” He showed me, with exaggerated motions. I remembered it from the playground, someone swishing his eye around in his mouth, drying it on his shirttail.
“But I saw it!”
“Saw what?” he said. He put his arm around my shoulder. “The eye I don’t have?”
“You bastard.” I hated him, not for tricking me (it must have been a deception I wanted), but for mocking Fernando.
“I guess it was silly,” Soto said amiably. “But Fernando hasn’t really lost the hearing in his ear, has he?”
“Yes. Of course he has. He wouldn’t lie.” (But then, I thought: he wouldn’t be bitter either? We made others as we wished them. It was, as my mother said, a tricky world.)
“Well then, I guess that was really a little rough on my part. When you write Fernando again please tell him I’m sorry.”
But I had seen it. The hole in his face, the empty socket, the greater darkness, the silvery shadow streaked with red. I had seen it.
Isle of Pines, July 1965
JULY 10
“Oh, good,” Ponco said. “Guatemala!” His voice was the shimmer off desert rocks. He smiled broadly at me. There was something wonderfully full and welcome in Ponco’s smile, and yet (so broad! too full!) something mocking and menacing as well. What could give the cat such pleasure, really, except the wounded mouse’s last doomed erratic scamper? (The mouse! That’s me!)
“You mean,” I said, “that something’s about to happen, don’t you? Finally. You long for an action. Decisive. Something to thicken the plot.” I meant that I—the younger I, still Ernesto—did. I wanted something to happen, a choice made by me, and yet inevitable, a fate; something irrevocable, my work, a name, a path I couldn’t turn my back on. Ponco, I thought, must be remembering the note I left at the table several weeks (months, decades, pages) ago when I was setting out: an action: I killed a man in Guatemala. (As if it were a joke! Remembering that note, I felt ashamed.)
“Action? No.” He smiled—impossible!—more broadly still, delighted with his world, his toy. (Who would have thought the mouse had it in him?) He turned his body towards me. We sat on the porch, looking at the tall grass pushed down by the wind. A storm was coming. Shelves of dark clouds sat on the sea. “Not action. Hilda!” A gasped “H” hitting a consonant; it sounded like a chant beginning. “Romance!”
Hilda. It might, I thought, have been the name of a storm. “I see your movie,” I said. “You’ll be disappointed. It wasn’t like that.”
He said nothing. With his right arm he made circular motions, thickening the plot, I supposed. The witch. He smiled.
And I smiled, too, thinking of those dear young people sitting in the dark parlor of her boardinghouse in Guatemala City, the weeks before the invasion. (In the kitchen, unknown to us, the Catholic cook, scandalized, listened avidly to our murmurous voices.) We met in her parlor always; we didn’t have parlors; we didn’t have rooms to attach the parlors to (Chaco and I, the last week before the mercenaries came—bombing the city, falling from the air—slept out on a golf course); we didn’t have jobs. Hilda, an exile from Peru, a leader in the university arm of APRA, had a degree in economics and acceptable political credentials. (I had a useful skill, but no credentials; the Guatemalan CP was deeply sectarian.) The Revolution had given her work in one of its planning institutes. So we lived from her generosity. She provided fruit for me always, and gave me some of her gold jewelry to pawn for food money. It was, for her, an act not of charity, but of necessary solidarity with the exile community.
I perched on the edge of my overstuffed chair with its floral print of huge jungle blooms, as if that jungle threatened to engulf me if I relaxed my vigilance. Hilda sat sunk in her chair, her arms on the sides. She needn’t be vigilant. She knew what she thought. (For it was my inner warring voices I was on watch against, those conflicts that threatened to overwhelm my faith in Gandhi and leave me speechless.)
Hilda was Ricardo’s sister, the woman, as I had heard him tell his fiancée, “who knew many things.” She had a slight sisterly contempt for Helena, that fiancée. “She’s like a little dog,” she said of Helena, “looking from face to face to see who will pet her. She has to have everyone’s reassurance, everyone’s agreement. Poor little animal!”
“And your brother, what kind of animal is he?”
She laughed, a slightly unpleasant, mechanical sound. Hilda had wit, a cutting wit, used purposefully. But not the light propulsion of laughter. “My brother is a bear,” she said. “Hadn’t you guessed?” Sometimes, she told me, she
felt as if we were all animals, a continent of animals, not human yet. She saw it in our faces. Foxes, dogs—many many dogs. Wolves, bears, llamas, cats, sheep, ferrets, hawks. But no humanity. Not yet.
I was rapt at this bitter conceit of Hilda’s. She had shown me, for the first time, that more inward part of her, where her thoughts and feelings joined and issued in images: almost-human souls trapped in animal visages. It was an intimate place, the place just before sleep, and her speaking of it marked a stage in our courtship.
Did she mean, I asked, that the imperialists were human, and we were underdeveloped? (And I? I felt Chaco patting my neck. I was a pony.)
“The imperialists!” she said. “Don’t be stupid!” Didn’t I see? They weren’t even animals. They were ghouls. They had no faces. Latin Americans would have faces when they acted, when they freed themselves of the ghouls.
She smiled, closed her thin eyes, shook her head to clear it of this poetic nonsense, closed that place to me.
Hilda was the origin of Ricardo’s—that bear’s—certainties; she had graven her beliefs upon her brother, her faith in the spontaneous revolutionary will of the masses. She had given him that solidity I so much admired.
But she was unlike him, too. She was quick, not playfully so, like my mother, but almost angrily. She wouldn’t allow confusion or unmoored irony, which corroded one’s ability to work. (And in her presence even Chaco grew more serious, willing to acknowledge that there was a question about his proper work that he, too, wanted answered.)
