Resistance (2 page)

The letter explained, in phrases that bore the brushstrokes of zealots and lawyers, that we were to be sought out, quizzed, and possibly punished or isolated from society, because we “were terrorizing the imaginations of our fellow citizens” with our books, paintings, and performances. Sojourning, some of us, with “unadvanced” cultures, attending to their myths and stories, along with making inquiries into primitive or revolutionary art, had poisoned our capacity to understand civilization’s triumphs. We were attempting to resurrect the past and have it stand equal with the present. We profoundly misunderstood, our accusers argued, the promise of the future. We were offering only darkness where for some centuries the fires of freedom had been blazing, the beacons of prosperity increasing in their intensity.

The letter implied that there was still hope for us, however. The interrogations, the extraditions, trials, and incarcerations—these need not follow a predictable course. Apology, if of the most profound sort, was a possibility. Reeducation was an option. Missionary work, yet another possibility. In a democracy, the acknowledgment of one’s errors, coupled with a suitable penance, could leave an individual with a very bright future. Some, inevitably, would have to face harsh punishment for fooling with the country’s destiny.

The human imagination, the letter speculated, was a problematic force, its use best left to experts. An imagination in the wrong hands, missing the guidance of democratic reasoning and fed the wrong ideas, an imagination with no measure of economic awareness, was a loose cannon.

The combustible nature of the communiqué, its rhetorical gibberish, its Draconian suspicions, its headlong theorizing, its fear of contradiction were all of a piece—fundamentalism’s rave and cant. That our government had succeeded in reaching each of us with such a letter, considering the deluge of volunteers among domestic antiterrorist groups who had responded to its call for administrative help, was no surprise. What surprised us was that we mattered to this degree, that we represented a serious threat.

The dispatch, then, made us think. It made us wonder if that leap of faith by which we had lived each day, and according to which every citizenry would outlive its tyrants, was not a more valid belief than we had supposed.

The contents of the letter galvanized each of us. In that small apartment on rue Lepic that morning, Mary and I made a decision, which we then communicated to our friends in Alice Springs and elsewhere. When we had read their responses, we packed.

We are not to be found now. We have unraveled ourselves from our residences, our situations. But like a bulb in a basement, suddenly somewhere we will turn on again in darkness. We will carry what we know—what it can mean to have your country under you like a hammock, what it is to take part in the world instead of using your people as fodder in a war to control the world’s meaning and expression—we’ll carry all of this into other countries. It will be hidden in our individual skills, in our dress, our speech and manner, in the memory of each one of us. The memory of one will kindle the memory of another, a burst of electricity across a chasm. We will disrupt through witness, remembrance, and the courtship of the imagination. We will escort children past the darkest warrens of the forest. We will construct kites that stay aloft in the rain. We will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant.

For all we know our interrogators are already airborne, or checking through customs, scouring phone books, hiring boats to take them quickly upriver. They will be packing satellite phones, PalmPilots, and GPSs, local dictionaries, Lonely Planet guides, open bank drafts, automatic pistols, Dexedrine, Visa cards, Kaopectate, Xanax, cocaine, letters of proprietary claim from NLog Communications, and cartons of Marlboros for purposes of barter. They will get where they are going but we will not be there. They will find instead these stories of where we have been and what we have seen.

In place of ourselves we offer the written documents that follow, partly out of simple respect for each agent’s arduous journey, but with an intuition also about his or her misgivings, and with compassion for the many troublesome addictions that afflict the emissary sent on an errand of violence.

To these loyal marshals’ distant master we concede this: we understand you mean us no good, that you are cunning, and that you have the support of many in our country who regard works of the imagination unreviewed by your committees as disruptions in the warm stream of what pleases them—product availability, job advancement, pretty scenery, buying a ticket that wins. We will not describe or attempt to defend the lives that may recently have brought each of us to your attention, being wary of what you will make of them in consultation with the national media. I have asked the other recipients of your letter instead to recall the moment in which they recognized the transformation that led to the work that so infuriated you—Lisa Meyer’s installation AdSpeak, when it opened in Toronto; Susan Begay’s mural of the terrorist Kit Carson’s depredations at Canyon de Chelly; Eric Rutterman’s translations of Tukano mythology and the play Emilio Chavez developed from them, which opened at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles; the private correspondence of Corazon Aquino edited by Jefferson deShay, which so embarrassed your predecessors.

Instead of a defense of the Republic, thrown in the corporate face of your governance, instead of another map to the kingdom of your frauds, an exposé of your pursuit of the voter as a mail-order customer, we give you a description of the events that changed us, that led to our decisions no longer to be silent, no longer to hunker down in the small rooms of our lives.

It is also our intention to break these stories out ahead of your avenging fist, to get them, through the agency of a sympathetic and defiant publisher, directly into the hands of men and women who stand at similar thresholds, before you stifle their initiative with your intimidations.

We regard ourselves as servants of memory. We will not be the servants of your progress. We seek a politics that goes beyond nation and race. We advocate for air and water without contamination, even if the contamination be called harmless or is to be placed there for our own good. We believe in the imagination and in the variety of its architectures, not in one plan for all, even if it is God’s plan. We believe in the divinity of life, in all its human variety. We believe that everything can be remembered in time, that anyone may be redeemed, that no hierarchy is worth figuring out, that no flower or animal or body of water or star is common, that poetry is the key to a lock worth springing, that what is called for is not subjugation but genuflection.

We trace the line of our testament back beyond Agamemnon, past Ur, past the roots of the spoken to handprints blown on a wall. We cannot be done away with, any more than the history of the Sung dynasty can be done away with, traveling as it does as a beam of coherent light far beyond our ken. We cannot, finally, be imprisoned or killed, because we remember and speak.

We are not twelve or twenty but numerous as the motes of dust lining the early morning shafts of city light. We are unquenchable and stark in the same moment that we are ordinary. We incorporate damage and compassion, exaltation and weariness-to-the-bone.

These pages are our response to your intrusion, your order to be silent, your insistence that we have something to talk over.

Owen Daniels, independent curator,
author,
Commerce and Art in America,
on leaving Paris

Río de la Plata

I watched my best efforts turn to coal. I would gaze west over the city at the end of the day and not be able to recall even the names of the colors in the sky. I had lost, long before this, the ability even to write a sentence that might break through. For twenty-two years I’d kept a journal, writing out each day what I believed, what I hated, what I desired. Sometimes I would make small drawings in the margins, not illustrations really, but other ways to say what I meant. When I could no longer find the words, these lines would still reflect my beliefs and emotions. When I could no longer even draw the line, I put the journals away.

My mother was a restaurateur. For many years she had a nice place on Avenida Alberdi in Flores, in the center of Buenos Aires. Many women who knew her revered, even envied her—suave, accomplished, vivacious. The restaurant was full every evening, and the food and service, extensions of her dedication and grace, were celebrated year after year in the local and international guides.

When I came home from school in New Haven, Connecticut, I would host for her and give the regular maître d’ a few weeks off. At an early age, then, I began to appreciate the difference between sincerity and sycophancy, as people negotiated their reservations. I was able to separate those who wished only to be seen from those who admired the daring or intuition behind certain entrées on Mother’s menus. I could easily spot the braggarts, distinguish them from those who could host a conversation about something other than their own ideas while they ate. With the regulars, I came to know their flaws as well as their tastes, and to appreciate their allegiance.

All this knowledge—about how people comport themselves around pleasure and indulgence, about social maneuvering and material expense— did me no good, however, when it came to my father. I didn’t take in as deeply as I should have the evidence for deception. I was so caught up with social spectacle, I didn’t perceive the transparency of life.

My father kept Sonia Bendales a secret from Mother and me for three or four years. Then, in one of those accidents fate likes to arrange, Sonia drove the Mercedes 500SL he’d given her into another woman’s car on a busy corner of Calle Rivadavia. The other driver, one Beatriz Orchada, shaken up but not really hurt, happened to be a mid-level manager in the accounting firm my father used for his many ventures. As part of her regular duties it fell to Beatriz to review the comptroller’s report filed on the accident. Her indignation got away from her. In a few insouciant sentences it was declared that Beatriz had caused the accident. But it was Sonia who had run a red light. If Beatriz Orchada hadn’t been making a right turn, Sonia might well have killed her.

The report ended with a request, that the purchase of an identical car for Ms. Bendales be arranged right away.

Beatriz went straight to my father and confronted him—a big miscalculation for all of us. She should have known to handle the matter discreetly through her own boss. Sitting there in his office, Beatriz quickly understood that it was just going to be swept under the rug, along with all the rest of the expense Beatriz knew about to accommodate Sonia’s flamboyant personality. Beatriz phoned my mother anonymously and filled her ear. When Father came home that evening, he found Mother had packed his suitcases. Until he came to his senses, she said, he should live somewhere else.

Father was quick to make his decision. He divorced us, married Sonia, arranged an apartment for us nearer the restaurant, and moved Sonia into the only home I’d known since I was ten. Among other things, Mother and I lost the spectacular and consoling view across the Río de la Plata we’d had from the top floor of that building.

I was twenty-four. I had finished my degree and also gotten a license to practice architecture in Argentina. I might have stayed in the States, but during the time I hosted those evenings for Mother, I’d felt such promise for the future of Buenos Aires. I was also fairly well connected locally through my parents, and during my years in America I had honed a certain aggressiveness. By the time I was twenty-eight I was running my own firm, and before I was thirty I landed my first American commission, a monument to striking steelworkers killed at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Between what I earned and what Mother made at the restaurant (Father still retained his part of the ownership), we lived comfortably.

I am a reasonably attractive woman. Men, however, hardly inquired, except for the one thing. Better with oneself, I would joke with Mother, than with such men. She told me it was my penchant for contempt, a streak of belligerence in me, that kept men at bay. I said she knew too little about independent women. She said I knew too much. I said I was educated about people’s underhandedness and men resented my determination to do something about it. She shrugged. Then, often as not, the discussion would veer into a denunciation of my father, my mother’s hands trembling occasionally at the memories.

After the divorce I viewed my life as a horse race. Whatever satisfaction I drew from my work— another commission, a prize, the growth of my billings, the expansion of my staff—I would match against what Sonia accomplished. She lived out in the open now, a kind of public farce which my father endured for reasons I will not get into. She had no work of her own, unless you would call the practice of insult work—her dramatic and indignant dismissals of whatever didn’t please her, that laughable hauteur she affected, all of it lampooned anonymously in the gossip and society columns. Her politics, like her wardrobe and her taste in art, came directly from supermarket magazines.

Sonia was an actress, not a person. A client of mine has a phrase to denounce the nouveau riche of America:
un populacho empeñado en no educarse
con un poder económico pasmoso,
“a willfully uneducated people with stupefying economic power.” That was Sonia.

Well, it was a lot of time, years in fact, given over to reviling Sonia and competing with her, and despising my father and waiting for him to be impressed. I would tell myself that my fabulous life (as I saw it) was an intimidating vindication, a triumph of determination. I fed on hatred and kept a measure of it in every box of my life. I should have seen what was coming, a long, slow slide down an incline of bitterness, but I imagined I was well past all that. I would say to myself, I do not need the validation of any man, husband, lover, or father. I do not require any evidence of my father’s love in order to receive another commission. I do not need for my father to be an honorable man in order to hold my head up at parties where I may encounter the two of them, her all dressed up like Marilyn Monroe, an idée fixe of my father’s.

This was the life I lived—energetic, creative, financially successful, professionally admired—but it was not a life I could fully believe in. I wrote in my journal about the conflict, year after year, describing unspeakable and sometimes incomprehensible angers, yearnings I could not satisfy—and then in the mornings I would waltz into my office, an apparently confident woman I felt more and more apart from.

I willed myself to believe that my mother was strong enough to overcome the indignity of her betrayal, to let go her losses expeditiously, as if they were broken limbs pruned after a storm. Many people came to our apartment to offer her their support; more often, they went to the restaurant, under the impression, I suppose, that dining there more frequently would help. But when she did not revive the measure of gusto they expected, when she appeared too acquiescent, most of these women drifted away. The ones who kept up their prodding were the ones most bitter about their own lives, at a loss for a solution to their own particular hatreds. They smoked cigarettes with her in the kitchen while she worked up the day’s menu, urging her toward some sort of revenge, variations on plots they all knew from the soaps, but which, they emphatically concurred, had been carried out too ineffectively.

She’d had grief enough. The day Sonia moved into our old apartment, she hired a janitorial service to clean it. In that rite of exorcism and purification, many of my mother’s most cherished things were broken, dumped into a box, or simply thrown out. One afternoon, just before my mother arrived at the restaurant, Sonia showed up to claim the two most valuable paintings on the wall, cityscapes by Antonio López García. She donated them to a fund-raising effort for a new hospital in Palermo, the part of the city where she and my father lived.

And then one day I came home from work to find Mother in the living room with an envelope in her lap, and with the look of having been there in the blue wing chair for a long time. She was gazing out the front window into the pine trees growing in Parque Avellaneda, their crowns churning in the invigorating spring blow I had just come in out of. She extended the envelope without looking at me. It was a handwritten note from her physician, sentences of comfort and encouragement which could not obliterate the two words:
Parkinson’s disease.

We arranged our lives to accommodate her loss of strength and mobility. Her sister’s eldest daughter, a woman who ran a restaurant in another part of Buenos Aires called La Boca, a very competent and likable person, took over the restaurant. When I could no longer see to all of Mother’s needs I brought in private care, a decision which made it disturbingly clear to me that, apart from her, I had nothing to hold my attention except my work.

I felt I’d arrived at a dead end. I was thirty-five. I had no prospect of children. I could not say that I knew anyone who had taken the trouble to know me—nor had I done that myself, so that now someone might give me a sympathetic ear. I’d lost track of my close friends from school. I didn’t have the scaffolding of a religion to turn to. And I had not discovered anything in recent years to revitalize me—no book, no performance, no movie. I no longer even made the effort. In fact, I couldn’t stand to read more than one or two stories in the papers anymore—it all seemed to be about adapting life to machinery, or scenarios for creating wealth, or politicians promising a future for us that had already come and gone. Worse, the news came festooned with ads, hounding the reader, imploring him to improve his looks, his appeal, his temperament, his prospects with one or another sort of purchase. The manic opportuning, page after page of it, every day, alternately depressed and infuriated me.

I did not resent my mother’s illness, the burden of worry that she had become for me; but she began to stand out as part of an indictment I felt for leading a life that had become little more than an expression of irritation. Outside of my creative work, those actual hours of imagining and drawing a building or a monument against the restrictions of a set of specifications, I felt no relief from my anger. And then, finally, I could no longer manage to squeeze any satisfaction out of my work. I would pour myself into some high-minded, pro bono project only to discover that something crucial in me would not engage, and the project would fall apart like mercury spilled across a table.

I gave up trying to explain to myself what my anger was about. It was more than Sonia and my father, more than the empty-headed boosterism of the papers and the venal commerce of their advertising pages. It was rooted in a vast and seemingly intractable injustice that plagued the precincts of every city. I understood it better when I was young, because I simplified it; and I had long believed that my life stood in opposition to it all, that it was a renunciation. But I couldn’t maintain this now. I felt increasingly detached from the principles that were supposed to be behind everything I did.

What had begun to weigh on me more than anything was the silence of everyone in the city, myself included. We moved from scandal to scandal—sexual, political, fiscal, environmental—with a shrug of the shoulders. Children killed themselves in the barrios and we turned the page. For reasons that ended with the Second World War or that had to do with national pride, I forget which, we attacked the British in the Malvinas. Businessmen cheated, powerful men could pay to circumvent any law, things fell apart that shouldn’t—buildings, airplanes, human lives—and no one was to blame. Factories closed and men went down the drain.

There was no enemy, or the enemy lived in another country, or it was God’s will.

One morning I opened a letter from the mayor of Buenos Aires, inviting me to discuss the design of a monument to the city’s longshoremen. I called a friend, Deirdre Cantelaria, instead, and offered to sell her my business. It took five minutes. I went to the bank and set up funding to keep Mother and me in reasonable comfort. We moved from Flores to a smaller apartment in San Justo, way west in the city, and far from the river I had grown up next to. I was relieved initially, but I knew I was still running away. Images of the disjunction in my life pursued me like a dog that never tired. And it never lost my trail.

I offered my mother nothing but silence at our meals.

That same year, Sonia was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When she died Father asked us to move back in with him, in Palermo. Mother rolled her eyes when she read the letter.