Resistance (3 page)

We never considered it.

I tried to hide my deterioration from her, the loss of meaning which seemed like dry rot working its way deep into a house. I left the apartment purposefully every morning, moved briskly down the sidewalk, but had no intention, no aim beyond completing the most routine of errands. The fawning insincerity of people I met at the occasional party I still attended, the ubiquity of every kind of noise in the streets—jackhammers, radios, fights— the long rows of prescription drugs, hers and mine, in the bathroom, the attitude of entitlement with which perfect strangers would shove you aside at a counter were like a series of punches that gave me a headache every day. I was consumed with indignation at the least evidence of injustice. The smallest manifestations of privilege or prerogative incensed me. But no sense of not being implicated protected me.

Many an afternoon found me on a bench somewhere, looking back on my work as some sort of burlesque. I’d lost completely the distinction between what was true and what was false in my life.

On the worst days, I would make the long walk to the Río de la Plata and stare off across the river to the shores of Uruguay, hoping the expanse of that eternal water would give me hope. But on my return I would always find myself in the same narrow, dispiriting alley. When Mother died, I decided, I would just end it.

As her Parkinson’s advanced, she was not always sure of her words, but she was quite sensitive to the subcurrents in our apartment, those rivers about which no one speaks because they fear the waters are too deep or that all will drown, once the dam is breached. Sometimes when I walked into her bedroom she would give me a sign that she was lucid, the movement of one finger or an almost comical look of self-awareness, amazement she was still alive.

One evening in 1985, after dinner, we were sitting together having our tea and she handed me a book. I turned it over in my hands, not knowing what to make of it, or of her gesture. It was Viktor Frankl’s
Man’s Search for Meaning.

“You need to read this now,” she said.

I gave her a sardonic smile. “Will it comfort me?”

“I met your father in Bergen-Belsen, fourteenth of July, 1943,” she said. She did not pause for this revelation to sink in. “When you have read this, when you think you understand what it means, and not just in that analytic mind of yours, you ask your father to tell you how we came to be there. And then how we came to be in Brooklyn when you were born, and finally here in Buenos Aires. Ask him about all the things we were trying to escape.”

I felt such a sense of shame before her. And she gave me such a look, the compassion only a parent can offer her self-absorbed child.

I began the book that evening stunned, which made it almost an act of distraction. But Frankl’s description of his spiritual crisis in Auschwitz pulled me forcefully in and I read it straight through. His triumph over despair, his refusal to become the victim of his own sense of injustice, was mesmerizing. I scrawled questions in the margins. “Who is the family, waiting at home, for whom you choose life?” I wrote. “What comes after freedom from suffering?”

The next morning I dug out an old journal, the one I had last kept, and tried to write. I tried to get the tumble of emotions and thoughts I was experiencing to come together: my mother’s revelation, which she may have chosen to make to me now because she knew she was dying. My strangely euphoric sense of renewal on finishing the book. The choices I might now make.

I knew I did not want to see my father, not right away. Instead, after writing out more of the flood that was pushing through me, crossing words out, rearranging sentences and paragraphs, I went to find Ernesto Guadalquivir. Ernesto and I had gone through architecture school together in the late sixties but had not spoken much since those days, now long past. Two or three times I’d been to openings at a print shop he owned in San Justo where he had broadsides and limited-edition books he’d published on display. He also had a small list of trade books, many of them about the culture of the Guaraní Indians. He was Marxist-Leninist when we first knew each other but, to judge from what he had published, his views had softened over time. He had apparently given up strident accusations for accommodation.

I wanted to share with Ernesto what I had written. For the first time since I had put away my journals I felt as if I had thrown off the fever of a jungle disease, that I was now able to make a coherent and even penetrating statement. My words were not punctuated with anger or built up on abstractions. They opened out onto possibilities that were strikingly new to me. I was not at all sure about the courses now possible, my thoughts still so compelled by Frankl’s genius; but I felt I might realize again in conversation with Ernesto the beliefs and emotions of my early years, find a politics now that did not paralyze me with wrath, and that could lead to a statement as vital and unambiguous as the monument to the steelworkers at Homestead.

Like me, Ernesto understood how much thinking had to go into the design of a building that stood strong but lithe. It was the same process that once opened the walls of the French cathedrals to the passage of light. With the newly discovered flying buttress in place to take the weight of the roof, the once solid walls could frame expanses of glass. The dark caves of the eleventh century transformed into halls of light.

That morning, before going to visit Ernesto, I called Deirdre to see if she might give me some work, a project that would focus my initial efforts to turn this new clarity of purpose into solid dimensions. I looked in the papers for a studio. When I was back into a good rhythm, I decided, then I would go and see my father. I did not want to ask about Bergen-Belsen but to ask him instead to explain to me how love compels. And when he finished I would ask him to listen while I spoke. I wanted to articulate to him what I believed and what I opposed. And then ask him to describe the world he felt we were both caught up in. In that way, as I imagined it, we might reach the shores of Uruguay together.

Lisa Meyer, installation artist,
landscape architect, the Arabella
Memorial, Minneapolis, the Damien
Monument, Damascus, Syria, on
leaving La Plata, Argentina

Mortise and Tenon

When I was five I was raped by a man who told me he was a doctor, that this was a treatment I needed. To deflect my mother’s suspicion, he gave her money for rent and occasionally bought us a piece of furniture or gave Mother a physical, no charge. He took me into the backseat of his car on side roads or to his hovel of an apartment, year after year, and then my mother fell in love with a man who asked her to marry him. They moved far away from that place and took me with them. When I could bring myself to speak about it, her new husband told me that I would have to get over it, that the doctor had run a hospital, that he had done many good things. I needed to get past it, to get on with my own life.

With this instruction, then, I went ahead. I made it work. As I grew older I understood that some parts of me were inaccessible, frozen or asleep, but others weren’t, and that by relying on these parts I could have a good life. I wasn’t one to deny the brutality or insidiousness of what had happened—the painful sodomies, the fears of inadequacy around women, the early departure from home—but I perceived myself, accurately I thought, as a young man with only a slight limp, a defect few noticed and one that did not slow me down. As my working years began to accumulate— work in many different circumstances on four continents—and as I was confronted more often on the streets by the emaciated, the burned, the limbless, even the crucified once, the feelings of self-pity that I still harbored came to seem like cowardice. I was careful not to nurture them further when things went wrong. In those years I saw destitute fathers on their knees in the roads, begging of other men, who ignored them. I saw children, pawing in refuse for food and things to sell, beaten senseless by the police. I saw indentured prostitutes standing catatonic in their doorways, and the elephant men of the region on display for a small charge. In the light of these terrors, I came to see my own experience—the sudden flash images of choking, of being pummeled like a rag doll, rammed, and then thrown aside—as a kind of instruction. It was through the vividness of my own memories, I believed, that I could truly understand something of the lives of those for whom harm never slept.

I nursed no hatreds in those years, no desire for revenge that I was aware of; but neither had I any true companion, nor any experience of life as I imagined it could be in a home—support given without judgment, food prepared as an act of love, the guardian silence, the kiss good-night. I made an itinerant’s living as a finish carpenter and fine woodworker. I had good hands and a good eye, and a sense of proportion that made my designs widely acceptable. I moved between furnished room and furnished flat, first in my own country and then in the countries of other cultures, carrying my tools and making things I believed were beautiful: armoires, dining tables with matching chairs, sea chests, tansus with their many sliding doors and compartments. I worked in exchange for meals, a clean bed, some private space, and a few books, and for money enough to keep traveling, for gift giving, and for keeping up a reliable set of tools.

I was conscious of the emotions of love, so the necessary partings sometimes made me feel like a cracked vase, something from which the water had drained and in which the flowers had withered. It was a long while, of course, before I understood that my arduous efforts to be kind to each person, my expressions of compassion and acts of generosity, my will to accommodate were all a sort of mask. I could express love strongly, but I could not accept it, could not allow myself to be loved.

I could not, then, really claim to know love.

Once, on a train between Madras and Bangalore, I realized, watching feral dogs fight over food on a platform, that I regarded myself unconsciously as a pariah, beyond anyone’s touch. My regular stints as a good neighbor one place and another, even the attractiveness of my work, the flawless cutting of a dovetail joint, were a wall behind which I dwelled. What I, in truth, feared were not the repeated departures from a well-made life, with the comfort of its routines, the loyal companionship, the sweet conversation over meals. I feared that a desire to stay on would overwhelm me, that I would not leave. My life would then include reciprocities I was not prepared for. I would have to fake the life unfolding in my blind spot.

To understand myself as a pariah, a person who chooses to be an outcast, was a relief. On disembarking in Bangalore that time, I was willing to concede that I was less than what I had imagined— a man with only a slight limp. The damage, I could say, had been more extensive. If I accepted myself in that moment as an outcast, a species of leper, it was not out of self-pity, however. It was out of humility, as I understand the word. I was going to play to exactly what I was. I would give up my hazy notions of someday living a different life, and fully embrace this life I had: useful, harmless, and chosen freely. I would now live as if I were even more fully the result of my own decisions.

On the walk from the train station to the home of my acquaintance, I realized I was making a new peace with my past. I had not gotten away as uninjured as I wanted to believe from the episodes in that shabby room; but considering the number of homes open to me, that I traveled without restraints, and that I possessed so many stories I could create a place for myself at nearly anyone’s table, from Addis Ababa to Christchurch, I had not paid too high a price.

My friend Gileathal opened the door at my knock that night, pulled me through the opening with an embrace, introduced me to his four children, then to his wife and her brother, and we sat down right away to eat. Gileathal related to the others the circumstances of our first meeting, exaggerating it all to encourage laughter; and I of course embellished his version. The evening then grew quieter and I entertained Belinda, Gileathal’s youngest daughter, with cat’s cradle tricks. I tied her a string loop of her own and taught her how to make “the fish” and “the wagon.”

Gileathal sent one of his sons to the station after my bags and tools and then showed me to quarters at the back of his house. I stretched out full length on the narrow straw tick mattress, satisfied and pleasantly exhausted. I felt, after my insight on the train, more honestly engaged with my life now. I was just at the edge of sleep when Belinda came into the room. She walked directly to the bedside. Our eyes met, hers gleaming dark in the rays of an alley lamp slanting through the window. She took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead, then walked from the room.

The sound of the door latch closing, the bolt sliding slowly up the striker plate until it clicked shut, expanded the volume of space in the room and created a kind of vacuum into which I silently tumbled. I fell through memories that appeared to have no common thread. The impression of Belinda’s kiss was as vibrant on my skin as a clapper’s strike on a bell wall, and in the harmonics of it I lost my composure. I pulled my knees up to my chest and tried to hold my breath. What a laugh! The humble pariah. The courteous itinerant, the carpenter and cogitator Ishmael! I lay there staring at the expanse of my ache, the size of my anger.

In the morning I went off with Gileathal to his cabinet shop. He was kind enough to introduce me to his workers as someone who could teach them enough about joinery, about hiding feather blocks in miters and about customizing lap joints (to hold even the softest woods together) that they would be able to eliminate, even more than they already had, a reliance on nails, screws, and other metal fasteners. I had a gift, he said, for imagining a tight and lasting joint.

For my part, I eagerly took in Gileathal’s instruction on the character of local woods, lumbers I’d never handled before, and we discussed which job orders I might take on. Clients came in. Gileathal introduced each one around. When we took breaks for tea I began to get acquainted with the other men, in the banter of politics and neighborhood news. I felt that morning, however, the urgency of an errand I couldn’t define. Perhaps it was only the need of a few hours to myself after my rough night. As he was closing the shop that evening, I told Gileathal I was going to explore this quarter of the city further before coming home, and asked him to recommend a restaurant.

The city unfolded around me, all seemingly haphazard and percolating, houses with intricate chalk designs on the stoops, rug stalls, two men in a courtyard playing the veena and nagara, the smell of wood smoke and spiced food. I was not surprised when the proprietor of the restaurant I chose figured me easily for who I was. My waiter presented me with a local beer, a good one, and it was his treat. The food was excellent and I felt refreshed. When I paid the bill I thanked each person individually and stepped outside, more or less certain of the route back.

I lit a beedi and made my way up the street.

I did not feel the cut across my hand or notice the convergence of shadows until a blow to my sternum sent me backward through a doorway.

“Hello. Hey, hello!” said a man poking me in the chest with a knife, a staccato pinprick.

“What the hell,” I mumbled. “What is this?”

No answer. A match flared and a small boy lit a candle. There were three others, the one with the little knife taller, clearly their leader.

“We don’t have to talk to people like you,” this boy said, “but we can kill you right now, you white bastard, how about that? Would you like that?” His pupils were weirdly dilated in the flickering light. He wore bell-bottom trousers and a windbreaker with a torn zipper, and he began to deliver a melodramatic screed I’d heard many times from street toughs, in good English. I didn’t sense in the three smaller boys the resolve to do serious harm, let alone kill me. On the dirt floor at my heels I saw part of a broken chair. There would be no reasoning with the tall boy, but I could land one blow and run. The door to the street had been shut but had no lock.

It was only as I flexed against the insistent and now bounding pain in my right hand that I realized the tendon over the thumb had been cut. I had no grip. The tall boy sketched the air in front of me with the knife, in a singsong way, seething with indignation. He offered a religious rationale for his indictment of my culture. Transfixed, his friends studied him, then me. The cat, the mouse.

“Listen to me!” I interrupted. “Listen to me now. I can take you to the place you want.” I had no idea where I was going, but the boy stopped ranting. “What you hate, I hate,” I continued. “Yes! You see? And I can unlock the gate that keeps you out, and let you in. Yes, I can. And then what? You’ll have it just as you want. And then everyone—your story will be big, everywhere.”

The boys listened closely. The tall one took a step toward me as I pretended to sit down, to demonstrate I was prepared to talk this out, to make my meaning clearer. I moved the chair leg out of the way with my left hand and came up with it, swinging full into the boy’s head. The wallop turned the boys’ faces as one, like birds on a wire. The little scimitar knife went flying. The lanky boy spun against the wall, his tongue lolling, his eyes gone half white as he slid to the floor. Complete stillness; then one of the smaller boys scrambled after the knife and I went down with the other two punching me in a struggle for the chair leg. I burst to my feet with it, throwing them off with a roar that staggered the room. “Nooo! Nooo!” I bellowed. I drove the three of them backward with the leg, lashing at them in a fury, knocking the knife into the air.

“You little shits,” I screamed. “Never, goddamn you,
ever
touch me!”

The stunned boy on the floor was turning slowly onto his knees, groping to raise himself. “Nooo!” I bawled, and charged. I swung as hard as I could left-handed, straight up into his face. He pitched up, dropped, and was still.

I flung the chair leg in front of the other boys. They stood aghast, as if there had been a complete misunderstanding.

“Get this guy to a doctor,” I said, disgusted now with them all.

They didn’t move.

“He’s sick. He’s very sick,” I said. “Do you understand? He needs a doctor.”

They stepped around me and began to look after him.

I took the few steps to the door and went out. My trousers were sopping with blood, my shirt the same. I could feel the onset of delirium, the tremors of acid fury coming, the desire for revenge ballooning. I could not keep my attention focused on the pattern of the streets, but went with what pieces I recognized and eventually found the restaurant. They walked me to a hospital and called Gileathal. A night doctor sewed the tendon together. She had a knowing and amused look, an ironic manner, perhaps from having read in my face the fear of what it would mean to a man like me to lose a thumb.

The sense of injustice over what had occurred and the urge for vengeance had by now intensified, though what I most wished for just then was sleep. I talked it through with Gileathal. He said the hospital had called the police, and that they had caught the boys. Tomorrow they would come around to the shop. Gileathal’s attitude seemed to be that cruelty simply abides, wickedness always festers, despite our efforts. We are only fooling ourselves, trying to be rid of these infections. He speculated that the older boy had just gone too far—with drugs, with an act of daring, possibly with the excitement of the many frustrations he felt. Families today, he said, are no longer able to keep such a person in check. Too many of them burst in the street now, a pomegranate thrown in a fire.