Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

  You’ve got to see my ocean-view apartment, Kalnicky Kamiansky had proclaimed on the little beach. You’ve got to see it: it’s wonderful, amazing, a gift from my parents when I graduated from medical school; you’ve got to see the ocean from the seventeenth floor of the Santos Dumont Building, what a sight, you can’t miss it, you’ll have to see it.

  I don’t want to go to bed with you, Laurita told him. No, silly, you’ve got a dirty mind; you can only think of one thing. I want to show you the ocean, the ocean view, you’ll see what an apartment it is; besides, it’s empty, there’s no bed; it’s all mine, a gift from my parents. I’m not going to bed with you, Laurita had repeated in the elevator, as he carefully abstained from touching her in order to demonstrate the purity of his intentions; it was merely a question of showing off his property, his horizontal wealth.

  I’m not going to bed with him, Laurita said to herself. So then why are you here, you stupid fool, when you know perfectly well what comes next? And it was true: it had an ocean view, Kalnicky Kamiansky’s one-bedroom apartment did, just as he’d claimed, and he insisted on leaving the door open so you’ll see what a dirty mind you have, and it was empty, I’m going to furnish it next season, we’ll see if the exchange rate improves, completely empty, just a portable radio on the wooden floor, it’s so hot in here, he said, aren’t you hot, it’s awfully hot, why don’t you take off your shirt? Wanna dance? I said dance, that’s all, don’t think I meant something else, said Kalnicky Kamiansky, that heartbreaker, with incredible subtlety, I can’t stand the heat, what a miserable climate, as he stepped out of his pants, a nice boy from a good family in underpants moving to the beat of “Hey Jude” sung loudly over the radio by the Beatles, one of them anyway, whom Laurita’s terrible auditory memory was unable to identify.

  Laurita’s head throbs as she stands there for a moment, pausing but about to leave, with her hand on the knob of the half-opened door, halted by the sobs of Kalnicky Kamiansky, who sits on the floor, crying, invoking his Grandpa León. Why? asks Kalnicky Kamiansky between hiccups and tears, Why does this have to happen to me, Grandpa León, why did you die, Grandpa, why did I have to break up with that nice girl who really loved me, Grandpa, and now I have to get involved with one of those psychoanalyzed Jewish chicks who thinks she’s so smart because she’s read Mahatma Gandhi’s latest best seller, when any woman of mine would live like a queen, Grandpa?

  The Closed Coffin

  MARCELO BIRMAJER (b. 1966)

  Translated from the Spanish by Sharon Wood

  In literary terms, Marcelo Birmajer sees himself as a descendant of Isaac Bashevis Singer. His work re-creates life in El Once, the Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires. He is the author of Three Musketeers, among other novels. He also wrote the screenplay to Daniel Burman’s movie Lost Embrace, released in 2004. “The Closed Coffin” is a vivid tale of friendship and intrigue.

  I’D SPENT THE whole day trying to do this review. I intended to read the book early in the morning and write my comments in the afternoon. But I’d only managed to finish reading just as the evening light was fading, and that was only by skipping numerous pages.

  I pride myself on being a reviewer who actually reads the whole of the books he is writing about: if the book is such hard going that I have to deviate from this principle, I don’t review it and that’s that.

  I couldn’t entirely blame the author for the fact that the book couldn’t be read in one shot. Over the last few months I’d been developing a sort of symbolic affliction: it was harder to read when I was being paid for it.

  This book in particular wasn’t bad, but you could see the author had let a short story run away with him and it had turned into something else. The publishers had seen fit to publish it as a short novel. Actually the story wasn’t so much a long short story as a long drawn-out one, and you could see the difference between those two things in the last part of the tale. It was called The Lady of Osmany, and it was about a widow who went to the police because, over a period of several days, she had heard the sound of violent hammering coming again and again from the apartment below in the middle of the night. The incident was part of a police drama of murder, mystery, and maybe ghosts.

  Recently I had only been able to sit myself down to read a book with a critical and productive mind when my son had gone to sleep, around twelve o’clock at night. And I still had to wait another half an hour for my wife to take off her makeup and go to bed before I could type the first letters with no fear of any sudden noises interrupting me.

  But, as if we were living in a fantasy story, shortly before one o’clock, someone, somewhere in the building, presumably just below me, started shifting furniture around. You could hear the sound of it being dragged, of chairs falling over, even a few blows with a hammer. Maybe someone was moving, or cleaning up at an odd time (when we are awake we always forget that other people are sleeping). Or maybe a neighbor was being robbed and murdered. Whatever it was, I couldn’t write with that racket going on. The benign influence bestowed by the early hours of the morning on anybody who was prepared to forgo hours of sleep in order to finish off his labors was being eroded by this unplanned cacophony of sound.

  I switched off the computer, picked up a notebook and pen, and whispered to my sleeping wife that I was going to a bar to finish my work. She answered with an alarmed murmur, as if she were replying to one of the creatures that populated her dreams.

  Just in case, I tore off a sheet from my notebook, wrote down the same message, and left it next to the door.

  Since I got married, I don’t usually go out at that time of night, and certainly not to go to a bar. But I had no choice: my deadline for the review was the following afternoon, I had lots of things to do the next morning, and with all that noise I couldn’t write.

  Before my marriage I would sometimes go out during the early hours of the morning. I suffered anxiety attacks that I could only control by getting out of my house and finding a place where I could watch other faces, cars, or any movement that was more or less normal. Thanks to God, marriage and fatherhood had turned me into a tranquil man once again.

  I crossed through the streets of the part of town where we lived and headed for a bar open 24/7 on Agüero and Rivadia. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel the heavy melancholy that might have gone hand in hand with the recollection of a habit from a previous age in which I had been a lonely and sometimes tormented man. I felt only the sweet euphoria of the married man, happy to recall the vestiges of freedom that he no longer imagined possible. I chose a large can of beer, a bag of salty snacks, and sat down behind a trio of teenage girls. Their chatting didn’t distract me: on the contrary, I began to work eagerly, and looking at them filled the necessary pauses before correcting a paragraph or starting another one. I was so pleased that I treated the book better than it deserved. The beer helped.

  Then a man came up to my table, smiling.

  He stretched out his hand.

  For a moment I thought, “He’s the author.”

  Along with the bangs coming from the apartment below mine, this coincidence could have changed the natural course of my life. But a moment later I realized that the book had lain for the whole time with its front cover facing down on the table and that, from where this man had been sitting, it would have been impossible for him to see what book I was reading.

  The man said my name and asked if it was me.

  I looked at him, astonished, and finally I exclaimed: “Pancho!”

  It was Pancho Perlman.

  He was still smiling. I don’t know exactly how fat he was, but his face looked as though it was about to burst. It was blown up so much it made his eyes look slanted. He must have been about three or four years older than I was. (I worked it out as if it were his face, and not our actual dates of birth, that marked the distance of time between us.)

  The name itself was hardly a difficult one to remember. After all, there aren’t many Jews nicknamed Pancho or called Francisco, and he was t
he only one in the Jewish club where we had met.

  But there are details that erase all other traces. Pancho Perlman’s father had killed himself when he was a child. And when I was a child too.

  I don’t know why, but I had gone to the vigil. The Jewish vigil, with the coffin closed. I remembered a cream-colored cloth with the Star of David embroidered in the center of it covering the coffin. I also remembered that the cloth had a cigarette burn on one of the corners, and this had seemed to me to signal the fact that the man had taken his own life.

  I didn’t ask my parents about this, but for years I remained silently convinced that, when a Jew commits suicide, besides burying him against the cemetery wall they would make a cigarette burn on one of the corners of the cloth with the Star of David on it covering the coffin.

  I think I only freed myself of this heretical way of thinking—if I really freed myself of it—when I had to go to the dreadful vigil of a friend who had killed himself in the flower of youth, in the flower of his success, and in the flower of his life in general. I never knew why he killed himself.

  I wasn’t sure why Pancho Perlman’s father had killed himself, either.

  I invited Pancho to sit down at my table and began the task of working out how to tell him that I had to hand in a piece of work the following day. Yes, we hadn’t seen each other for twenty years; yes, I had been at his dead father’s vigil (or suicided father, which sounds weird); yes, we had a whole life to tell each other about, and fate had brought us together like an old married couple. But, I had to explain to him, my family needed me to earn money and I had to finish my work.

  “Those of us who don’t commit suicide, Pancho,” I thought with a cruelty that frightened me, “have to get on with things.”

  “I read everything you write,” he said. “You are one of the few journalists I find interesting.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I do what I can.”

  “I’m going to get a coffee,” he said.

  “Look . . .” I began.

  But Pancho was already on his way to the counter. He came back with a coffee in his hand.

  “They don’t let you write everything you want, right?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “But I have to finish a review now.”

  “Right now?” he said, disbelieving.

  “Right now,” I confirmed. “And what about you, what are you doing here?”

  Pancho took his time answering.

  Finally, unsure as to whether he should open himself up to me or not, he replied: “There are some nights when I can’t stand being on my own in the house.”

  This confession defeated me. I could insist that I had to work, but I no longer had the will to seriously suggest to Pancho that we put off our meeting for another day.

  “Did you get married?” he asked.

  “I have a son,” I said.

  Pancho had left the coffee on my table but still hadn’t felt sufficiently invited.

  “Sit down,” I capitulated. “What about you?”

  Pancho squeezed his body in between the bench and the Formica table as best he could. A blue shirt, thrust into his pants, pressed against his belly. He wore blue jeans that were frayed at various strange points and suede shoes with no shoelaces.

  He hesitated too before answering my question.

  “Mine’s quite a story,” he said. “I married twice and I had two children with the worse one.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Seven and nine,” he said. “But my ex-wife doesn’t let me see them.”

  In the silence that followed his dramatic revelation, I decided I would listen to Pancho for however long he wanted and only afterward, whatever time it was, would I finish my piece. I’d get back home just in time to put it on the computer and sleep a few hours before going to my first appointment tomorrow morning. I needed strong coffee.

  “I’m going to get a coffee,” I told him.

  Pancho nodded. A smile of extraordinary happiness spread over his face. It was the serenity of the lone, tormented man who, in the early hours of the morning, had found someone to talk to.

  I walked over to the counter thinking about Pancho’s simplicity. Sancho Perlman, he should be called. All his life he had been a transparent man. His feelings, his desires, were written all over him even before he could express them himself. With his slightly twisted face, his gestures were even clearer.

  Passions and pains did not come to the surface so easily in my family. Each member of my family possessed a fixed expression that bore little relationship to real experience and ran the gamut from sadness to joy, depending on who was standing in front of them. Words came later. And beneath them, without ever being made public either for ourselves or for others, our tragedies and joys. Nobody is sufficiently intelligent to know his own feelings, and my family would never have permitted itself to say something that was not intelligent or about which it didn’t know at least 75 percent.

  The Perlmans were not necessarily poorer than we were, but they were certainly more vulgar and less educated. The dish they most aspired to was steak and fries, and their classic dessert was crème caramel. They thought we were strange because we liked fish that wasn’t simply cod fillet. Betty Perlman dressed very badly, but she tried to swap clothes with my mother. This meant that my mother lent clothes to Betty and, just once in a blue moon, accepted something from her that was always left hanging in the closet and deliberately wrinkled, so Betty wouldn’t realize that my mother hadn’t actually put it on. Natalio Perlman was more of a practicing Jew than my father, but he knew much less about Jewish culture in general.

  My family wasn’t especially sophisticated, and we easily fit into the middle class. The Perlmans, however, were squeezed in with the barely definable segment of people whose basic needs have been met but who have no interest in any other kind of need. The Italian grotesque and the Jewish sense of overwhelming bewilderment came to mind with their open mouths when they ate, their clichés and commonplaces when they spoke, and their general lack of interest in the world.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . the Perlmans laughed. Not the maniacal laugh of my father or the polite laugh of my mother. They laughed unselfconsciously. They laughed at silly jokes or something that had happened to any one of them. Natalio and Betty Perlman kissed each other. They would go on trips and leave the two children with their grandparents. At times the Perlmans, Betty and Natalio, would scream bloody murder at each other in front of us, and my mother would say to me: “You see, they’re all lovey-dovey but really they hate each other.”

  I never dared to answer her: “No, they don’t hate each other. Human couples also yell at each other and get angry at each other. Hatred is what’s between you and my father, who never kiss and never yell.”

  But I had no right; nor did I know enough about couples, whether my father and my mother or Betty and Natalio.

  And today I still don’t know much about my relationship with my wife; nor did I think Pancho knew why, exactly, he had separated from his wife or why she didn’t let him see his children.

  “Why did you split up?” I asked him, coming back with my coffee.

  “Do you know about the Lubavitch?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “They even get mentioned in one of my stories.”

  The Lubavitch were a sort of Jewish “order,” with their Orthodox ideas and reformist methods: they used vans with loudspeakers, they organized activities, and they tried to spot who was Jewish in order to offer them a prayer.

  “Now you can put them in another story too,” said Pancho. “My wife became a Lubavitch. I was always strongly Jewish; in my house we observed all the holidays. But my wife really overdid it. She cut her hair, she wore the skirt, she threatened to let the boys’ side-locks grow. Can you believe it? I couldn’t stand her. I’m a Jew to my bones, but I also have my traditions and my way of doing things. Now the Lubavitch are telling my wife not to let me see my children.”

  I was about to say
, “What do your parents say to all this?” when I remembered that Natalio Perlman could no longer be counted among the living.

  “What about your mother?” I asked.

  “She’s a wreck,” he told me. “She says she doesn’t want to live anymore. I’m trying to reach some kind of agreement with my ex-wife, to let my mother see them once a week.”

  “How often do you see them?”

  “Whenever I can,” said Pancho.

  And he drained the cold coffee still left at the bottom of the plastic cup.

  Pancho Perlman, the simple man, wasn’t that simple after all. And yet despite it all, he still was. All families, everybody, suffered tragedies throughout their lives: accidents, terrible quarrels, or, as in this case, divorce. What differentiated the simple from the sophisticated was their attitude in the face of each cataclysmic event. Pancho Perlman hadn’t taken his neo-Lubavitch wife to marriage counseling. Nor had his wife tried to overcome her frustration with macrobiotic food and yoga. At the first hurdle within her psyche, or her marriage, or whatever it was that was coming apart, Pancho Perlman’s wife had cut straight to the chase, gone back to the shtetl, to the pious customs of her forefathers.

  And divorce—no dialogue, no calm exchange. Passion and hatred: I never want to see you again, and don’t even think about seeing your children ever again.

  It was no way to resolve things, and yet it’s true that there is, indeed, no way to resolve things. Pancho Perlman and his wife simply knew this before many others did. I just implored my wife not to walk out on me, to be able to stay in my home until my son reached his thirtieth birthday. This was all I needed to keep within the limits of what I thought of as normality.