by Jay Cantor
My wheezing—how loud it was for such a small boy!—entered their dreams, woke them. It wasn’t my fault though, it was my pain that disturbed them. And unless my consciousness was flickering out, reduced to the animal movement of my throat and lungs, I was filled with joy at my father bending over me in his loose white nightshirt. The feeling of rescue flooded me, a buoyant light.
But really there was no rescue, very little anyone, even he, could do. My father picked me up from the floor. My head lolled against the man’s sleep-warmed shoulder. He carried me back to my bed.
But by then the bad air was in the bedroom too, and it was impossible to rest. I lay in bed clutching the blanket edges, squeezing them rhythmically in my palms. The cracks in the ceiling moved about, the ceiling wavered, breathed in and out as I did. It grew intolerably light in the room, though there was only one lamp (made from a blue toy train engine), and its single bulb was softened by a square yellow shade. Still, the rays of light were thick, they had a nauseating substance. The light overwhelmed the furniture, washed at the wooden bureau, the large mirror, the light was a sickening acid fog that took away all contours.
I wiped my nose on the sheets. The cotton was cool against my lips, gave me a momentary sense of comfort, a reassurance that the world would not be washed away. But then I grew sweaty again, and again a hand was pressing down on me, crushing me into the bed. I gasped for air, my lungs fluttered painfully. The room shook with my effort to breathe; the painted nursery-rhyme figures on the wall, the bureau, vibrated, went fuzzy. The sheet I held against my cheek for reassurance thickened, till I felt all the fibers crawling like hard tiny worms against my skin. Convulsively I threw the bedclothes down around my waist. They bunched there like the folds of a statue’s drapery, pressing into my waist with dull heavy edges.
My father stayed by me throughout the night, to tend me as best he could. A muscular short man of great energy and strength, he sat quietly in a child’s wooden chair by the head of the bed, unable to act, to use his strength. My father’s eyes were set deep in his face, under bushy brows; he had a large straight nose, a large face, and a brown beard; he was, if he wished, a fierce-looking man. Now, his empty hands resting on his thighs, he watched me tenderly, until, I think, his consciousness was only an adumbration of his son’s shaking body, his son’s difficult breathing, until his own lungs strained within him. My pain took away my father’s moralism, his deepest habit (where was the fault here? where was the lesson?). He was a doctor, but he could do nothing for his son; there was no action to take, no use for his fortitude, his fierceness, his love. He could do nothing but make gestures: hold my arm, wipe my forehead with a washcloth. There were no injections yet for asthma, only a black powder that was burnt in a cup by my bedside. It made a thick foul smoke that did little to help. But it was burnt anyway, another gesture, a rite more than a medicine.
As the night went on the air began to stink to me, not only heavy but dank, bad smelling, like rotting meat. The attack clawed at my chest constantly, my body moved in spasms. My father held my body against his own (for once I’d told him that that made the pain less) and rocked me back and forth.
I was dazed. My father’s large neatly manicured fingers, his thick veins that showed clearly beneath the skin on the back of his hand, looked monstrous to me then, they pulsed and changed in shape, as if I were seeing, grotesquely enlarged, the life of the cells in his hand. With my own hand I grabbed at the tight scratchy curls of his beard, squeezed them weakly to tell him—though it accomplished nothing—when the pain was worst. Then he spoke to me soothingly—if only he could take the pain into himself! He told me of all the things we would do when I was better. But I was gagging, without will or thought, my throat and lungs moving in insistent, agonizing, frantic spasms, trying to bring up, to spit out, the thick black and yellow knots of sputum that had suddenly flowered inside my chest, that were choking the life out of me. My body arched upwards from the bed; the strain ran through me like a current. I was behind walls of pain: I heard distorted fragments of sound, saw my father’s lips move (they were too large now, rubbery, clownish) but I couldn’t understand what the man was saying to me.
And then, a little later, when I was six, shots were discovered that were effective for asthma, an injection of epinephrine that, if administered at the beginning of an attack, would, after a time, become a hand smoothing out the inside of my chest. But I barely connected the injections with the relief that came later. I hated the shots, hated them more than I hated the attacks.
Perhaps I was attached to the concern, the love, that my pain made for me in my parents. During the hard days my mother sat on the end of my bed and drew pictures with me on a big pad. And in the late afternoon my father left his paying patients to come sit with us in the small wooden chair. He put a book across his lap, so I could see the pictures, and read to my mother and me.
And perhaps I confused the disease with myself, my will; to lose one was to lose the other. For I was terrified of the needle, hated and feared my father when I saw him preparing the long glass and silver syringe. To give up my sickness to my father’s cure was, or so it felt to me, to fall, to lose power over myself.
He carefully raised the glass plunger to suck up the liquid. I promised him then that my attack would soon be over, it would be over in just a moment, it was only a little one this time. I promised that this was the last attack I’d have for a long time, if only they’d just talk to me they’d understand I was serious. I didn’t need the injection. I’d really never have another attack, if they would just not give me the shot (I was screaming now, crying from fear and the strain of breathing), I wouldn’t complain anymore, I wouldn’t have any more trouble breathing, I wouldn’t wake them up at night to help me.
My mother held me hard against her to keep me still. She was standing by the foot of my bed, holding me to her. I was overpowered, I was falling, losing myself, falling. “Stop wriggling now,” he said; “we don’t want the needle to break inside you.” He took down my pajama bottoms and put the needle into my buttock.
Soon my father could no longer bear to give me the shots. He was afraid that his son would be formed by this fear of him, would grow up half hating him for these injections. So a nurse—whose wages I realize now they already could not afford—was hired to watch over me, to give me my shots, preserve my love for him.
My Asthma, Their Indulgence
Brought to the world frail, unable to tolerate its air, I bought with my infirmities all my parents’ indulgent love. Anything I wanted I was given, they were so thankful that I continued to live from moment to moment, a constant rejoicing. There was no discipline for me, not even toilet training. A child, my mother said, was naturally good, curious, and capable of learning many things for himself (given an occasional timely hint from an adult). Especially such a bright child as her own was.
These ideas formed for her after an exhaustive study of the newest books on child rearing. She particularly enjoyed studying those new ideas that went against the common grain, that went, if possible, against common sense altogether. And she liked those ideas that required no disciplining of the child—not from laziness, for she had an uneven but fierce energy for certain kinds of work—but because she herself was in rebellion against any form of imposed discipline. (Once, when she was a child, she had been told that children learn best from pain: they learn not to touch hot things by being burned. She hated this vulgar and cruel idea, and to show that it wasn’t true she immediately put her right hand on a flaming candle, and said, “It doesn’t hurt.” Someone pulled her hand away, but it was marked, her palm was scarred, puckered all over with fine lines.)
My mother had been born into a wealthy and aristocratic family—an ancestor of hers, of mine, was the last Spanish Viceroy of the River Plate—but she found she could not bear the tedious restraints of her class. A woman of great, if sometimes erratic, intelligence, she had come of age in the nineteen-twenties, and had set styles, been a leader of h
er generation. She was the first woman in Argentina to have her own bank account, the first woman to drive a car in downtown Buenos Aires (often on sidewalks according to my father, terrifying innocent people—like the Toad in an English children’s story she delighted in telling me). My mother had been an activist, a militant, of the Radical Party. She’d led demonstrations for women’s suffrage (failed: thirty years later that most hated woman, Eva Peron, would autocratically accomplish this pointless reform). She was a tall woman, often slightly stooped when she stood, as if embarrassed by her height. I think she was a beauty, with a fine face, long and thin, sharp, but lively and engaging features, a mouth that curved interestingly (if a little critically), downward. I think, from certain hints that my father gave in arguments (ones I didn’t understand but were charged enough for me to remember), that she had done some drinking, and had several affairs (though after her marriage her friends were mostly women, and I never saw her drink anything but quantities of black bitter coffee).
My mother believed that people could, should, do what they wished. The world could be remade according to our desires. (It would be easy enough to mock her and add, if you have the money. But I mocked her often enough during my childhood—following my father’s lead—and now I’d like to say something in her favor. For bound though she was to the ideas of her class—so thoroughly bound that she did not see how they betrayed her project, made it look stylish, a little eccentric—yet she wished to be free.)
So, a rebel herself, she never imposed any discipline on her son. I ate what I wanted, dressed as I pleased, rarely brushed my teeth (Oh, once every few weeks perhaps, when I was suddenly seized by a fear that they were rotting out of my mouth). Her pale son could ride his tricycle from the front door, through the long carpeted living room, past our guests, and out the back, if that was the quickest route.
And I was always en route, by preference the quickest, somewhere. I was a child possessed by an enormous amount of nervous energy. When I wasn’t in bed with an attack—and especially just after I’d recovered—I couldn’t sit still, had to move around. If I was excited, or frustrated—particularly if I didn’t understand something my parents were saying to each other—I had to use my body, to fling myself about until I came to an understanding, until the tension, the knot, had been worked out through my motion. At dinner in the Guevara home it was perfectly allowable for me to skate round and round the marble floors of the dining room in my stockinged feet. And while still eating my food—kept chipmunk-like in pouches in my cheeks—I carried on a gay conversation with my amused parents. They leaned back laughing in their carved wooden armchairs.
But despite my mother’s free and easy attitude, I was, at first, more my father’s child. Ernesto was my given name, named after my father, by my father, according to an Argentine custom that my mother (who hated the customary) was then too weak to protest against. (And how did he feel when I changed my name to that nonsense syllable, a cry in the streets?) When she left her childbed she refused to use his name, calling me instead Tete—supposedly to avoid confusion between myself and my father.
A confusion I did everything I could to encourage. I imitated him constantly, even to the harsh jokes he made about his wife, blunt remarks about the way she ate (too loudly, she chewed the way cows do, mouth open, it got on his nerves, how could he enjoy eating with her?—and a small orbiting voice added: Go moo, Mother). Or the way she wore her hair (too severely, it was unfeminine); or the way she kept house (a mess, with books and magazines all over attracting dust. It was bad for the child). My father was an anxious, angry man, but Celia was his equal in force. Tactically astute, she feigned indifference to his criticism. She didn’t care for his style of battle—crude complaint from an imagined vantage of moral superiority. So she waited till he was off guard—puffed up—and then struck. (For there were hard things to say about him. He was in the process of squandering her considerable inheritance in “cunning investments” in mate fields.) It was a fair fight—until her husband made an ally, one she loved and felt she had wronged. How could she reply to her son’s childish insults? Not until after I’d left home did I allow myself to think of the many evenings at dinner when my mother turned her body away from me—Go moo, Mother—so that I could not see her face.
Yet he did love her, too (though the rebelliousness, wit, and energy that had once been so attractive to him became a more uneven joy, I suppose, when he was the authority she turned on.—But he loved being the authority).
One day, I remember, when he was feeling close with her, my father wrote in chalk letters on the tall brown doors that led to the dining room: “This is what Ernesto Guevara said to his mother …” and then there followed some of my mean remarks, ones that even now I would rather not recall. It was unbearable to me that the children who came to see us that day should see my father’s sign.
For those children were my mother’s friends as much as mine. On her walks downtown she recruited playfellows for me. Newspaper boys, her friends’ children, the maids’ children at her friends’ houses, caddies, shoeshine boys, they were all invited to come visit us. Perhaps this was a contemptuous gesture towards her parents, her upbringing, a way of shocking her friends—for she certainly wasn’t beyond using people that way. But there was something more to it: she liked gossiping with people from all over town, finding things out from them, adding to her never completed education. (Isolated and without theory, anything might be a clue to her nameless project.)
So it was a special shame to me that these children should see how I had treated her when they weren’t there. I cried in front of those chalk marks until I was overcome by a tightening in my chest. I vowed I’d never again be nasty to her (within a few days I’d broken my vow). But I cried most strongly because he had betrayed me. A hole had opened in the world, and I’d fallen through. For hadn’t I simply been doing what he did? And was there no safety in that either?
My Vocation
I was to be a son worthy of my parents, a prodigy (no matter how meager my abilities were). I was to become, as my father was, a doctor. But I would be a surgeon also, a famous man certainly, one who discovers the cures for many diseases.
When I was six years old my father began to prepare me for my calling, teaching me, each evening, a few of the bones of the body. We sat together on the deep white sofa in the living room, our thighs touching, holding across our two unequal laps the large red anatomy book my father had used in medical school. My father’s strong fingers, red and rough around the knuckles from so much scrubbing, outlined the pictures of the bones, and traced for me their gray spidery covering of musculature.
He pointed to places on his body, and asked me the names of the bones beneath. I rose from the cushions and paced about the room, swinging my arms back and forth as I recited the Latin words in a rapid singsong. It meant nothing to me. I didn’t want to imagine a connection between the shadowy pictures and the life beneath my father’s skin. (That would mean he could die!) But I learned the right responses, for my father, because it meant so much to him. Soon I could chant the names of thirty or so bones for my parents’ guests.
My parents took me everywhere with them, to educate me, to show me off (and perhaps, too, they liked my company). I was entertained, when we still lived in Buenos Aires and they had money, by plays where I didn’t understand a word. But the ritual of showgoing, the feel of the plush seats, the lukewarm fruit juice, the bitter taste of the program that I chewed on during the show, all this pleased me (even though I had to sit more or less still). I told myself I would be an actor too, a great doctor-actor. I practiced for it by being the entertainment at parties, where Mr. Bones did his Latin routine, and was rewarded by the hostess with bogus praise and delicious greasy hors d’oeuvres.
Newspapers
I was invited, too, despite my precarious health, to stay up with my parents most of the night, to listen as they discussed the newspapers with each other. This newspaper reading was a serious business for
them, was ritual, was their way of having commerce with forces greater than they were, of connecting themselves with a more impassioned life, with their nation, with history. I felt the pleasure and gravity in them as each evening they cleared away the dinner dishes, laid out their hot drinks and papers on the glass kitchen table. They were serious, even courtly with each other in the white stone kitchen. It would be a good time. There would be nothing said about how my mother chewed her food, or my father’s stupid investments.
My father, in a loose brown sweater with big wooden buttons, rocked back and forth in his wicker chair as he read from the paper to my mother and me. My mother, like me, couldn’t sit still while being read to, she had to be moving about, even when engaged in some essentially still activity—though she managed to confine her motion (or over the years it had been confined) to her hands. They fluttered about her constantly as her husband read. (I wanted to reach out, to trap her scarred hand, but I couldn’t; it might annoy him; I was only his assistant.) She bit her fingernails, ran her hand through her red hair, cut out something from one of the papers, tapped her leg with a pencil, dug the point into her thigh, reached for one of the dozens of black notebooks she had scattered across the tabletop, made a note to herself. She chain-smoked cigarettes, rarely using the ashtray, for she would forget in one of her argumentative gestures that there was something held between her long fingers, a cigarette burned down to a shaky gray worm. As she spoke her hands strewed ash on the glass table, on the stone floor, on her blouse—all her blouses had charcoal stains—or into her coffee. Not noticing, or not caring (it was the vitality she wanted, not the taste) she drank it anyway.