Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  * * *

  I think that after a certain age, which is more or less the age I was when I started seeing Yoshie, sex becomes only relatively important. Or rather, it becomes extremely important, but for reasons that are no longer sexual, if that makes sense. You tend to put more value on everything that happens in the name of desire, what you talk about afterwards, what you remember, or imagine beforehand. Those things would be impossible without sex, and yet they aren’t themselves sex.

  As a young woman, you get used to screwing in a way that prioritizes the other person, in order to not disappoint them, to satisfy their expectations. That’s why you sometimes go over the top in bed: it has nothing to do with deception, that’s just a stupid male chauvinist idea. It’s more a question of replacing your own lack of enjoyment with the other person’s approval. If everyone else thinks you do it okay, then you do it okay. As no one has ever taught you that you’re important, at least you can be important to someone.

  Later on, you learn, or unlearn, to really shag, and to give yourself pleasure. To make pleasure happen when you’re with someone else. Since you don’t really know how to achieve it, you’re constantly pursuing that goal. And then, as the years go by, you learn to do it for the other person once more. Only this time, the pleasure you give serves as a lever for your own. Sex is no longer about a goal, or the goal now is to become close to someone. Even if only for a little while.

  And time again continues to pass, and you desire differently. Maybe you don’t want to get so close now. What you want is to get away, to get far away from everything, and from yourself. Your life, your struggles, your obsessions, because you’re starting to know yourself too well. That’s usually when people take up fetishes, I think, when you don’t so much try the things you like as the things you thought you didn’t like.

  With Yoshie, well, I occasionally had the feeling that I was getting far away from myself. It wasn’t a high-wire act. He, how can I put it, didn’t hold me back. It was more like he helped me get away. He realized that he wasn’t the goal. As you grow older, pleasure becomes a bit of a fugitive. Life’s hard knocks start to accumulate and it is more like solace, a kind of reward for enduring.

  Yoshie had this ruse that worked really well. We’d be walking down the street and suddenly he’d ask me what I would do if I knew I was going to die that day. He did that several times when we were strolling past Recoleta Cemetery. Then we’d rush into a rooms-by-the-hour hotel on Calle Azcuénaga. (Maybe it’s still there, I don’t know. Sadly, I haven’t been there in a while.) I remember one night, in that hotel, right after I came. I saw my body reflected in the ceiling, and I said to him, I don’t know whether I had an orgasm or a premonition. I saw him turn in the mirror. Where did I read that? he wanted to know. Whenever I tried to say something profound to him, he gave me the same reply.

  He’d insist that when I was naked I smelled of sand. What type of sand? I’d tease him. Dry or wet? From the Atlantic or the Pacific? Neither wet nor dry, he’d answer.

  * * *

  At first, Emilio saw Yoshie as an intruder who was invading his space. He was jealous, not because of me so much as because of Ari. He hated the idea of another man playing with his kid. I understood how he felt, of course. But I also had the impression he was using our child to stir up other stuff.

  I thought the most sensible thing was to keep my ex as far away as possible from my new partner, but that didn’t work. Not seeing Yoshie only made him more apprehensive. In the end, I decided that the best solution was to do the exact opposite. I forced Emilio and Yoshie to meet. We had lunch together a few times. And, after two or three uncomfortable afternoons, Emilio started to treat him with a friendliness that I suspected was strategic. I wasn’t sure how to react. I was prepared for the war of jealousies, the duel between proud males, the battle of the phalluses. But not for the two of them to laugh, talk behind my back, and ply me with questions about each other.

  All of a sudden, I felt uneasy seeing Ari play with these two men I had slept with. Emilio and Yoshie eyed each other, I don’t know, with that look of gratitude men get in the supposed absence of rivalry. Of mutual admiration at having decided not to come to blows. Or am I being unfair? When a guy relaxes and stops competing for a second, he must feel such relief, such love for everything!

  Yoshie took to Ari like a house on fire, and that surprised me, because I had him pegged as a bachelor who hated kids. To my son, it seemed like a huge exploit for someone to come from so far away. Whenever we ate a meal together, Ari would ask him to say something in Japanese. Yoshie used the opportunity to teach us how to say, Enjoy your meal. Itadakimasu. And afterwards, Gochisousama. I loved that one, The food was delicious. And loads more that I’ve forgotten.

  I think he would have made a wonderful uncle. The way he got along with Ari was astonishing, as were the clear boundaries he set. For example, he would spend a Saturday with him. He would look after him, attend to his needs, give him affection. And when on Sunday he went back home, he would forget about my son until the next time. You could say he preferred being a guest star to being a father figure.

  Ari and I were still living in the Palermo neighborhood, in the tiny flat Emilio and I had bought. The move from London was so strange. The dictatorship was coming to an end, and we’d decided to come back here for the elections. So we cashed in the few pounds we had managed to save. We grabbed our scant possessions, and without giving it too much thought, the three of us boarded a plane. We met up with our friends (at least with those who were still here). We were really pleased to vote. Ever the loyal Peronist, Emilio voted for Luder. And when Alfonsín won, we split up. Instead of starting a new life, all the baggage we’d been dragging around came crashing down on us.

  It was a pleasantly luminous two-bedroom flat with wooden floors on the junction of Calle Mansilla and Aráoz. Back then, Palermo hadn’t yet become Soho or Hollywood or anything of the sort. It was an authentic neighborhood. If you know where to go, parts of it are still like that. The people who’ve lived there all their lives (meaning those who weren’t bought out) feel very strongly about this. That was when the fractures started to appear, sometimes on the same street. You can see the scars on nearly every building. The people who arrived before and after the money.

  In fact, there are so many clichés about Palermo that you can’t see the real thing anymore. What you see is the image that’s projected of the neighborhood. Most people seem to go there simply to reinforce these projections. There’s the posh Palermo (boutiques, chefs). The intellectual Palermo (bookshops, cafés). The nocturnal Palermo (bars, cabs). The traditional Palermo (family ironmongers, homemade pasta). The alternative Palermo (charity shops, organic tea). The conservative Palermo (patisseries and Macri). The tourist Palermo, obviously (chargrills and Malbec). And so on. All of these visions are as real as they are biased. I think that, despite everything, this lack of a true essence is one of the best qualities of the neighborhood.

  The point is, Yoshie got used to coming to Palermo more and more frequently and he became a constant for Ari. This made me both happy and anxious. Relationships being the way they are, I realized I was exposing my son to another potential loss.

  When he started to sleep over at my place on the weekends when it wasn’t Ari’s turn to stay with his father, I would ask him not to smoke in the apartment. And remember that back then, being anti-smoking was really something. If you didn’t smoke, you were considered a bore by the assholes who were choking you. But with that military discipline he occasionally demonstrated, Yoshie instantly obeyed, and started to smoke less at his own place too. He told me that way, he would feel fewer cravings when he was at my apartment.

  The poor guy had so many allergies and phobias. He dealt with them in his own way. I suspect that deep down they helped him prove that he could overcome them if he had to. For example, the cat problem. Before he entered the apartment, I had to shut it in the kitchen and give the place a thorough hoovering. There couldn�
�t be a single hair left on the sofa, the sheets needed changing, a whole rigmarole. But my son felt sad that he could never play with both of them together. That he had to choose between Yoshie and his cat, Walsh.

  Until one day, Yoshie went and swallowed the most powerful antihistamine he could find at the pharmacy, then got down on the floor with Ari and the cat. You can’t buy the kind of happiness I felt when I saw them rolling around together, screaming like crazy. It’s worth an entire relationship. Afterwards, he seemed to be breathing strangely, and I got scared. I imagined having to call an ambulance. How are you feeling, Yo? I asked. Surprised, he replied, nose streaming, eyes bloodshot.

  Walsh, who was a bit mistrustful, didn’t care very much for Yoshie. I think he sensed that he touched him only begrudgingly. Walsh allowed him to do so, maybe because he sensed that it was a triumph. Even so, he would arch his back and instead of closing his eyes, would gaze at Yoshie while he was stroking him.

  * * *

  Emilio is nuts about football, and every Sunday his ear would be glued to the radio. Even in London, he managed to organize a group of Boca fans. He tried to explain the tactics to me. He made a sincere effort to share his enthusiasm with me, the way we did with everything else. I showed him how to revise translations. And Emilio had even succeeded in getting us to read the penal code together. Football on the other hand never grabbed my attention, I grew instantly bored. When I met Yoshie, I could see that football didn’t interest him either. That was another reason we got along. Being in the minority together is another kind of homeland, I think.

  To him, kicking around a ball that hardly bounces for ninety minutes, trying to get it through a hole disproportionate to its size, had to seem like a stupid activity. As a boy he played Ping-Pong, and in New York I think he became a fan of American football, or basketball, or something. But Ari is like his dad, a loyal Boca fan. And so Yoshie ended up sitting down to watch their games with my son. That and anime. Not that he understood much of what went on in the matches, though he enjoyed applauding the goals with Ari. Whenever they scored, Walsh would flee the room.

  What interested him wasn’t when the teams scored a goal, as much as the absurd possibility that nobody scored any. He found it intriguing that such a long match could end tied at zero, in an empty score. He saw it as a Buddhist joke. I must say, I never imagined for a moment that football could lend itself to any kind of philosophical comparison. I think Yoshie saw nil–nil as an objective. Instead of rooting for a team like the rest of us (I support either my son’s team or the poorest country or the one with the cutest players), he celebrated draws. He explained to us that the Japanese tradition cannot accept defeat and that the only honorable solution for both teams is a draw. This infuriated Ari, So do you or don’t you want Boca to win?

  Close to where we lived, on the corner of Calle Perú and Avenida San Juan, were some miniature football pitches, known as Nikkei. Maybe they still exist. Some weekends we’d take Ari there to play with his friends. For years, my son rejected English. I fretted over the problem. If Emilio or I made even the silliest remark to him in English, he would reply in Spanish. He had blocked out everything to do with our exile in London, which is where he’d learned to speak. And yet with Yoshie things were different. We discovered this by chance one afternoon, while watching him play on one of those mini pitches.

  At some point during the match, Yo let slip a typically Yankee shout of encouragement. Then Ari, perhaps without thinking, yelled back in English. I nearly fainted from shock. I asked Yoshie if he could keep talking to him like that from time to time. To my astonishment, Ari went along with it. As if he were being invited to play a simple language game, without the burden of family obligation. Isn’t that what translation does? It allows you to discover part of your identity, thanks to some foreign pretext.

  At the end of the dictatorship, when we told him we were going home, Ari had wanted to take his English radio with him. A small yellow plastic transistor, which he would fall asleep listening to every night. We told him that we could buy him another in Buenos Aires, but he insisted on bringing it with him, and so we packed it in our hand luggage. Emilio and I were on edge throughout the journey. I remember we had an argument at the airport. We weren’t sure what had messed up our son’s life more, leaving or returning home.

  Ari was totally relaxed during the flight. It was his first long-haul, and he kept pointing out the window and asking questions about Argentina. He even fell asleep for a few hours, something neither his dad nor I was capable of doing. No sooner had we landed at Ezeiza than poor Ari turned on his radio and discovered he couldn’t find any of his favorite stations. Then he burst into tears and cried all day. He was about five years old. I’ll never forget that.

  * * *

  At first, Ari was inclined to blame me for the separation. Not that he ever said anything to me, but his attitude towards me was always accusatory. He’d be grumpy and tiresome from Monday to Friday, and then when his dad came to pick him up, he was all over him. I felt awful. It was like the only love he got was on the weekends.

  I imagine this had to do with the way his father and I divided space, not only time. Emilio had been forced to live somewhere else, and Ari somehow interpreted this as me having kicked him out. Mom stayed in her domain, slept in the same bed (and with another man), while poor Dad had been banished. The only one on my side was Walsh, who would wind himself between my legs whenever Emilio came by.

  My greatest fear was that Ari would never forgive me. That I would be judged by my grown-up son, having not done enough to be pardoned. I don’t even think about it now. A mother’s fears are largely preemptive, they arise before the event itself. I’m not sure whether my guilt vanished naturally, or if I fought against it by trying to be the best mother I could be.

  As Ari grew older, he started to be more critical of his father, and the role he fulfilled, or didn’t always fulfill. Although my son denies it, he also felt jealous of his siblings. Emilio treated all his children the same, which in theory is a good thing. Only sometimes he forgot that Ari was the one who saw his father leave, and so maybe needed a little more attention, I don’t know.

  After giving it a lot of thought, Ari decided to make use of the new legislation. He changed his surname and adopted mine. Now, instead of Molinari, he is officially called Kerlin. I felt proud, why deny it. Emilio was hurt. From the start we had agreed to bring him up as a goy. No communion, no bar mitzvah, nothing. He could choose when he got older what he wanted to be. And the fact is he had no interest in these things. But lately, I don’t know, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about Judaism, or a grudge against his father. If you’ll forgive the tautology.

  I always tell people about my father, who, because he wasn’t born here, never learned to pronounce my name properly. He had a slight problem with the r in Mariela. And even today, my name sounds ugly to me. Whenever someone says it, underneath I can hear my father mispronounce it. Although he spoke perfect Spanish, there were words he had difficulty with all his life. Sometimes I think that’s what made me decide to study another language. To get away from the one that hampered my father.

  In all fairness, a possessive mother is no walk in the park either. My sisters and I know what it means to endure the love of a yiddishe mame. When we told my in-laws we weren’t going to circumcise or baptize Ari, they were understanding. They came from a more diverse background that included Italian Catholics, agnostics, and atheists. Or maybe they were relieved not to have such a Jewish grandson, who knows. It annoyed Emilio that I thought that. He accused my family of being addicted to conspiracies. Welcome to my people, mio caro! My sister backed us a hundred percent. Dad protested less than I’d expected. According to him, he’d feared this from the start, as he did with all bad things. Mom, on the other hand, true to herself, screamed to high heaven. She’s probably still screaming up there now, poor thing.

  Instead of enjoying their freedom after their children leave home, some mothers are left fe
eling empty. They can’t stop grieving. They’re lonely, unloved, abandoned, that whole Oedipal tango. As soon as I notice such feelings toward Ari, I try to suppress them. Yoshie maintained that a lot of parents operate with an emotional economy, with its ledger of sacrifices and unpaid debts. And they act like emotional creditors, because they expect their kids to return their investment. I found the idea unpleasant but interesting. He grew up with a gap, and had to build a defense around it.

  As far as I know, he never wanted kids, or he was afraid of wanting them. I think he felt shriveled up by his nuclear experience, as if reproduction were the prelude to genocide. He thought of himself as the last of his race: his identity was strongly associated with extinction. In my view, he still couldn’t cut that tie.

  As a mother I knew he was missing out on the most beautiful, the biggest thing in life, even though part of me understood that kind of dilemma. I remember when I had my son, I not only felt that I was perpetuating myself, prolonging my life through him. I also had the sensation, how can I put this, that he was emphasizing my own mortality. I didn’t doubt that he would outlive me, and that I wouldn’t get to experience all his different ages. To begin with, this shocked and even depressed me. We chose Ariel as his name because it was included in mine, Mariela. And Ari for short was the ending of his father’s surname, Molinari. My son says we took advantage of his name.

  In the end, I don’t know, your baby is born and fortunately he is healthy, and so beautiful. Well, not really. Aren’t newborns quite ugly? They grow to be beautiful. And this complete human being is supposedly yours, you created them yourself, and that’s almost incomprehensible. Emilio became committed as never before, he fought to earn his place. So much life all of a sudden, when all he had done was impregnate me. It made him feel slightly insecure. Or, as Yoshie would say, indebted.