by Jay Cantor
I became arrogant, rude, made others nervous by my anxiety, my knifing mean sentences, my fingers twisting my hair into knots and ripping the knots away, my foot tapping out the desperation samba. My old friendships had been grounded in their admiration for me. I was hard to admire now.
from a journal 9/50 Operating theater. They bring patients before us as if the whole thing were a show staged for our benefit, to gratify our already bloated egos.
And how cowed the sick are before us, the men in the white jackets. The men who will cure them. The men who will judge them. Judges like my father and I: doctors. Even if you don’t intend it the moralism invades your manner. Disease is a sign against the patient, it is his fault. We know better. We explain and treat the disease physically. But it always has an unacknowledged phantom dimension, a moral, a spiritual dimension: his soul. For if there weren’t this fault in the patient’s soul, if there weren’t his culpability, his complicity in his disease, then the world would be too senseless a place. The suffering would be too pointless, too out of control, for us to bear it.
So without even knowing what we are doing we affix responsibility for his sickness on the patient, we give coherence to the world. He has sinned, he has fallen. (My asthma had to be my mother’s fault. Or it had to be a sign.)
Perhaps the patient wants the coherence too. It gives him the illusion he has power over his own life, that somehow he did this to himself, brought this suffering on himself by his own bad character.
In any case, the white coat, the distant, scientific manner terrify him into accepting our judgment. It’s terrified everyone in my father’s life. (Except Mother.)
So much that I had thought of as his character is really his role. The doctors who train us are like him at his worst, cranky, bad tempered if their judgment is questioned. And like him they often fìnd things wanting. Why don’t things stay under control, obedient? Why does she chew so loudly when she knows it annoys him? Why is his home so disordered?
It has a terrible price. He’s in control of his own life, responsible. He is as exacting and severe with himself as with the patients. So many afternoons he simply withdrew from us, not speaking at meals. Or locked himself in his study, his withdrawal fìlling the house with lassitude, despair. He sat in judgment on himself: his failures were his own fault only.
How to be a doctor without becoming like him?
from a journal 5/52 This last summer is the only decent work I have done. I wasn’t particularly useful there. Anyone could have done as well. But I was in a decent relation to things. And I was learning.
I felt there was some warmth, some comradeship there (as if only certain knowledge of one’s death could release you from this fierceness). Their scabbed pustulant bodies filled others with disgust, had put them in exile. But they had absorbed their own disgust with themselves. They looked with dispassion on each other. All were under the same sentence. That is at least a kind of comradeship. And they didn’t concentrate so much on themselves (perhaps they couldn’t bear to, for that would mean concentrating on their own disfigurement, disease, death). They knew the shape of their death, were free of anxiety. They were released into the world.
Alvarados and I were popular with them. We were healthy, and would touch them. (So they weren’t beyond caring about others’ opinions.) The doctors wore face masks, ate wearing gloves, stayed over on their own side of the river, rarely crossing to the colony. Alvarados and I took them on monkey hunts, toured the Indian villages. And everything had a great clarity for me then, it was all sharply outlined.
The patients wanted our acceptance, and we could give it. A cheap trick. The other staff gave them their thermometers tied to long sticks. Alvarados and I, fearless children of the Enlightenment, put thermometers into their hands. As if that meant we did not despise them, did not judge them!
They poled themselves across the river on a raft to say goodbye to us. A farewell party. They pulled up on the shore where we lived with the other physicians. George played for us. He had been a night-club saxophone player in his other life, before his slow dying began. The music was frantic, sweet, tender, like George himself, with his quick motions, his kindness. (It was also a fire to burn his scabs, his skin, his disgrace away from his bones. He had lived a long time with self-loathing; he transformed it to this terrible heat.)
It was foggy and raining, but we came out on the shore to dance. The doctors and the nurses dancing on the green shore. The lepers bobbed unsteadily on their log raft. (But I couldn’t dance, couldn’t tell a mambo from a tango.) The rain made small circles in the blue-green river. The raft, held steady by long poles, rocked back and forth with a light swishing sound, accompaniment for George’s tune. They were losing sensation in their hands and feet, dying from the skin to the heart, turning colors like leaves before their final paleness. My friend George, the gentle high-cheekboned Negro could no longer feel the silver keys he played.
The lepers on the raft floated back to their quarters in the rain, grew invisible in the mist. Only sounds remained, the plunk of their poles, the raft gliding forward, the wail of George’s saxophone, still playing.
This whole year since has been spent in a fog. Now there has come this time, when nothing touches, nothing tastes. My chest hurts constantly. My hands holding a book, or a cup, shake slightly with an old man’s palsy. I have a vague achy restlessness all the time that makes it impossible to study. I feel as if there were a wound down my side, something pressing slightly on my ribs.
Anxiety breaks the contours of my world, and any pleasure I might take in it, its food, its women, its colors. My consciousness is broken, divided a hundred ways, as if I were making love, but it wasn’t reaching me, I am fìtfully momentarily conscious of everything, of my lover’s hands touching the small of my neck, of the crumbs in the bed, a slight pain in my stomach, a cramp in my leg, things left undone. My hands move over her legs, but I don’t have a constant feeling, touch too is in fragments. That is the way I feel now, nearly all the time. And the world proves to be a very discreet lover, and does not care to seduce me.
My own body has begun to displease me. I am uncomfortable with my own stink. My asthma has become severe now. Perhaps it is the season. The shots barely keep the attacks under control. Difficulty eating. Weight 120.
Father, you were insistent this year that I finish up quickly, not go on any more trips, come join you in practice. You were worried that I’d change my mind, wasn’t going to work with you, would go off on another of my desperate trips. (But I cannot join you, cannot compete with you for her.)
We stood together in my room. We faced each other, you in a badly fitting brown suit, I wearing baggy pants held up by a piece of rope. The apartment, you said, was slovenly. Dishes crusted up with food. One day’s meal making the sauce for the next. My shirts, you said, reeked. Hadn’t anyone mentioned it? You picked up a piece of my underwear, and smiled, after our fashion. Was I old enough, you wondered, to care for myself?
I understood, Father: Your work was being wrecked before your eyes. You tried to prop things up, get them back under control with your moralism, bind my will to yours and raise it. You went on at me about my returned invalid’s stoop, my poor work habits. “And you know what would be especially painful to your mother? The way you look now.” And it would: my face was broken out, my hair was matted, oily. She’d grown neglectful of her own good looks, but she still took pride in mine.
Silent, each of us enraged, we faced each other. We couldn’t touch each other, not in the casual ways of childhood, hugging each other, kissing for greeting. And the absence of contact was palpable to both of us. The air itself was thick and resisted our motion. You moved to touch my arm, and I flinched as if you meant to cause me pain. As if nothing we could do with each other would be understood! Our actions, thwarted, turned back on ourselves; we were forced to watch our hands; the smooth motion of reaching out became self-conscious, crooked, a gesture. Our love was impotent. And then the great anger ca
me that follows in each of us when our love is misunderstood, rejected. We looked at each other in the middle of that small dirty room, by the foot of my unmade bed, wanting to make contact, to be able to speak, wanting to touch, to strike each other, to hit hard across the face.
I felt constricted in your presence, Father, as if you used up all the air in the room. It was impossible to talk, to tell you my thoughts, for my words had to cross an enormous distance. To speak even one sentence, some joke intended to turn aside your worry, left me spent, empty of breath.
I am standing in front of a tall wooden door with words chalked on it. I am pacing about the living room, trying to remember the sound of a word, terrified that you might frown, that you might send me tumbling into that void where I am worthless. I cannot be that child. I need a world where the feelings between us are unambiguous, permanent, even hatred will do, so long as it’s sharply defined, without those dizzying drops into nothingness you sent me on by your disapproval, a thinning of the lips. Yes, even hatred will do, unreconcilable opposition, if only it is clear. But I can never attain that clarity with you, only this bewildering fuzzy anger that is too much like love.
I have to leave Argentina, put some distance between us. I cannot stay here and be a doctor the way you are. I do not want to be like you, a sad stern isolated moralist. I cannot compete with you.
Father, you are poisoning my air.
from a journal 6/52 I stood in the dirty corridor outside Alvarados’s cell, and I could not reach out to him, could not, honestly, and with my own voice, speak to him. My own voice! My mother’s voice spoke in my head, took my cousin’s words a little after he spoke them, as if they were words from a newspaper article, and mocked them. She made him, the voice made him, sound foolish, crazy, suicidal.
That voice closes me off from my world still, closes me off from my own possibilities. I cannot test myself, act, make myself known, for it makes all action seem silly, foolish, absurd. Everything goes into that sausage machine for epigrams.
So my boldness in front of Alvarados: Give me a gun! That boldness was merely speculative. What a terrible fierce fighter I’d be against fascism, when the Voice told me the right time had come. But would I, would It, ever think the right time had come? I must have known that we couldn’t fight them on my terms, for life or death. We’d lose, all be indifferently killed by those young dour soldiers. Any reasonable person could see that (I expected them to see it and stop me). Alvarados was at least keeping alive the idea of resistance.
No, any reasonable person, Tete, could see that he was only keeping alive the idea of defeat.
Then I was right? I don’t know. I can’t act, and so can’t ever know. But Alvarados has fought the colonels and I haven’t. He at least knew there were some things he wouldn’t stand for. And I? I am all talk? A coward?
I couldn’t reach out to him. And when he took my hand I was filled with confusion and shame.
But the political talk at the university is stupid. The voice comes and takes the words and shows me that.
And the students here sound no different from my parents. I can hear my parents’ tones in theirs: pride, isolation, moralism, the bitter edge of some solitary rightness carried on too long, the edge of madness.
I want to silence that voice, the voice of reason. I want to have one voice, one action. I want to make myself known, directly, and without irony.
There’s glass between me and the streets of the city, thick as the veil of asthma. I can’t reach out, can’t connect. The only time I’ve felt free these last few years was when I was walking the continent, working as a ship loader, or a nurse tending the lepers. Do you remember our walks, Father, when I would scurry along beside you? Now that I have a man’s step, as long as yours, I think I have the step of a giant—I can take a continent in my stride. I am going to walk America awhile, be a tourist, without class or country, gain knowledge, go to and fro, perhaps find a way that I can be a doctor, act decently.
I am a tourist here anyway, living outside Eva’s mausoleum. Peronism is like a foreign language to all of us, one that I can’t speak, should speak. It is like nights I spent in bed as a boy, overhearing your voices in the kitchen; it trembles always, frustratingly, on the edge of sense. The people in the Plaza for Peron, there is an energy there that I want, but cannot share. (And so it fills me with fear. The words are like stones. The words are guns pointed at my head—I dream I am in a crowd at the Plaza, a small boy, lost in between their legs. I can’t move. I’m rooted with terror.) I can do nothing here but feel purposeless. And, like you and Mother, have opinions, make gestures.
Do you remember, Father, we would go out walking through the town, where the poor lived. You don’t have to be a master diagnostician, you told your eleven-year-old, to diagnose poverty. You shook your fist at the yard, and through it at the imperialists. A gesture of opposition that speaks, by being a gesture—this is all a man can do, make gestures—of your innocence. Nothing, nothing you can do. You are innocent Father. But neither you nor Mother believed that. And that voluptuous sense of guilt, how you cling to it, poke at it like a delicious hurting bruise! Mother sits at the kitchen table, cutting off her fingers with a razor blade, pasting them into one of her notebooks. You pour a pitcher of hot water on your lap. Your guilt shows how much better you are than others of your class. You at least feel guilty.
I don’t know what’s to be done. I have nowhere to stand. I don’t know what’s to be done that will not be more terror in a world overfull of violence. But I know that I want to feed what I am, feel it, nourish it with my own body. And I will never do that here.
For now I have no voice, or many different voices, none of them mine, parts of you and Mother, and the radio, and the books I read, political speeches, and movies, magazines, and each of them has an opinion. I want to have one voice, one single action. And if that’s not possible I want to quiet those voices, learn silence, achieve silence.
I hardly have the words to say what I want; such words do not yet exist for me. Unhappy, this pampered doctor cannot explain the lack, the insufficiency, that makes him unhappy. I have to work constantly to make my unhappiness my own, to keep it before me, my possession. And nothing is more ridiculous than working at one’s alienation. But if I don’t, this feeling easily cuts loose of me, permeates my world, as a disgust that makes everything slightly distasteful. I become then like Mother and you, a kind of aristocrat. I give way to—no, I find everywhere—a despair, a disgust that is simply the existence of things.
So I speak of action, but that is not exactly what I want, that is the barest simulacrum of my need, for my need is not that at all. It is more like rest, stillness, pleasure. An action is not what I need, but what I will accept, for I am unable to get, even express what I need.
Father, I can hear your voice. Your voice says there’s something more, that I want out not because of some rigmarole about wanting to make a new character for myself, find the work I can do for people. No, I’m leaving because I’m lazy and impatient, and spoiled. I can’t sit still. I don’t want to work at anything with an adult’s patience. That’s why I want to wander aimlessly.
And—though you won’t say this, will never say this, only show that you are thinking it—you think I am leaving because I am pointlessly spiteful about your help, your concern, your love, because I hate you, I want to smash down all your hopes, all that keeps you alive. I want to destroy you. I want your death. Every child’s dream. But I can do it simply by absenting myself. Because you allowed yourself to trust me. Of all people, you allowed yourself, as best you could, to love me.
You see, letters written late at night, like this, eventually engorge too much irony. Never sent, they go a little crazy.
So a hug, Father, from your son,
Ernesto
My Farewell
My father never made much money in Cordoba. The people of the region were peasants, or the children of peasants. They found my father too severe, unsympathetic. They w
ere wary of him. And though there were few doctors, still many of those who could afford medical care went to folk doctors, astrologers, curers, magic men, rather than to my father.
My father had bought us the smaller house, in a decent section but, as I said, abutting a slum. It was to this small stucco house, its red paint flaking off, this constant symbol of their sacrifices for me—of me, I thought moodily as I walked in the door—that I came to offer my ingratitude, my betrayal.
It was evening. My parents were in the kitchen, reading their newspapers, sipping their hot drinks. Lapsed Catholics, the newspaper was their wafer. Not that they would have said this—for who would admit that his connection with the deepest life of his time was a newspaper? I remembered that in my childhood these newspaper sessions had been the best part of the day. My parents were calm, kind to each other, intent. Perhaps it was simply that these evenings were a time when they still felt comfortable with each other, as they no longer did in their bedroom, for they were engaged here in a common project, were free even to argue with each other without bitterness. But that moment was past. The bitterness now was everywhere.
My mother’s drink, her potion, had grown more bitter too. A few years before, with the joy of Balboa, she had discovered instant coffee. She made it with hot water, directly from the tap, not bothering about boiling. I think over the years she must have tanned the inside of her mouth, for I had tasted this stuff once and it was, as my father said, “a truly vile drink.”
So I refused her offer of coffee, poured myself some hot water from the gray pitcher, and made myself a cup of mate. I took a seat over in the corner, pushed back against the wall, as if I were joining them.