Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

The only suggestion I could think of for Pancho was to become more observant and, in that way, try to win back his ex-wife. But I didn’t dare say it. Anyway, he had gotten married again, while I was beginning to feel a bit hungry and a ham-and-cheese sandwich on wheat bread was clamoring to jump into the microwave. This wasn’t the best moment to urge anybody to go back along the path of our ancestors.

  I got up to get the sandwich as Pancho was telling me about his new wife, a mulatto from Ecuador.

  The book about Señora Osmany seemed like a splendid novella to me now, discreet, appealing, and I could find no fault in its plot development or its length. The beeping of the microwave seemed to be counting the years of my life: I thought about how many good books had missed the chance for a good review just because the critic hadn’t taken a few hours more in the early morning and hadn’t bumped into Pancho Perlman.

  “That would be all right,” I thought to myself, “steak and fries, crème caramel, a mulatto from Ecuador.”

  In his own way, Pancho Perlman had followed the family pattern. And I continued to admire his simplicity. But . . . why had Don Natalio Perlman committed suicide? I’ve already said—I don’t know. Nobody knows why people commit suicide. Neither do we know why we want to live. But committing suicide is strange, while wanting to live is normal.

  Natalio Perlman was a normal man. His food was normal, his behavior was normal, his love for his wife and children was normal. It was even normal for him to go to bed with the cleaning lady, the so-called shiksa.

  Mary was from Paraguay, and hardly exuberant. She had a decent pair of breasts, and in the club we talked about her along with all the other shiksas. But her breasts weren’t much bigger than Betty’s, and she wasn’t that young anymore either.

  Why had this wholly predictable event derailed into tragedy?

  Many husbands like Perlman had affairs with either their own servants, a friend’s servant, or a Madame X. The most that usually happened was that the servant was sacked, or sent packing, or maybe there was a proper separation. But a suicide?

  According to some people, Mary was pregnant. How would I know? It was also rumored that Natalio lost his head over this woman and that she had a husband in Paraguay. My parents didn’t believe either of these versions. In my house indulging in gossip or spreading it around was looked down upon. How relieved my parents must have felt when they witnessed the utter failure of simple people!

  That’s what happens, I could hear my mother say, to those who sneak a kiss at the door, to those who laugh inadvertently, to those who spread gossip, to those who exhaust themselves amid shouts and crazily make up again. That’s what happens.

  A whole life of constraint, of repressed passions, of measured-out sex was at last rewarded with an indisputable prize: we, darling, do not kill ourselves.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . In my family there was a suicide. My mother’s brother, no less. At the age of nineteen, my uncle Israel had committed suicide. It was in 1967, and I had just turned one.

  The difference between simple families and sophisticated ones in the face of tragedy! I first learned of the existence of my uncle Israel when I was fifteen years old. I mean, in the same moment I learned that he had existed, that he was nineteen years old, and that he had killed himself. As if it were an adoption, my grandmother had guarded the secret of her son’s suicide. But her son wasn’t adopted; he was dead.

  My cousins were told he had died in the Six-Day War. When I was an adult, some ten years after learning of the existence and death of my uncle, the memory of his name sent a shudder down my spine. He had the same name as the Jews’ own country, which had been about to disappear at the time my uncle killed himself. The Jews succeeded in defending themselves and their country, but my uncle failed to defeat his inner demons. Just as my young friend failed, and Natalio Perlman too.

  And why had my uncle committed suicide? I don’t know. Nobody knows.

  When my mother ran out of other options she told me some story about psychosis. But this was all very obscure: he’d been a normal boy until he killed himself.

  My uncle had been present at my birth and at my circumcision. He had held me in his arms, yet I knew nothing of him until I was fifteen. That’s how sophisticated families dealt with tragedy.

  The simple Perlman family had wept over Natalio’s coffin, they had invited friends and acquaintances to the ritual of tragedy, they had buried him in the Tablada Cemetery—an intimate ceremony with just Betty, the boys, and the grandparents. Jewish tradition exacts a penalty for suicide, and those who die by their own hand are buried against a distant wall and visited only by close family. But everyone around knew he had killed himself.

  Gunshot? Poison? I couldn’t remember. And I wasn’t going to ask Pancho at two o’clock in the morning. My uncle, I knew, had put a shotgun in his mouth, sitting out on a terrace, after being a normal boy for nineteen years.

  The sandwich had made me sleepy and I had to go and get another coffee.

  When I came back I wanted Pancho to go so I could get back to work. Instead, I heard myself ask, “How was it your father killed himself?”

  How could I have asked that? Had I gone crazy? Was this how the scions of sophisticated families behaved? Was this how I followed the family path of rigor and restraint? What happened to the man I was, the man who knew that telling the truth resolved nothing and so the best thing was to talk about trivia and not bother anybody?

  Pancho seemed to be looking at me, I thought, as if a dozen questions were going through his head. Is this guy crazy? Is he asking how my father killed himself, or why? And the way he asked: Is that coldness in the face of tragedy or compulsion to question an enigma that weighed down on his whole childhood?

  I could have answered yes to all of them.

  Could there still be a tiny drop of coffee left in his cup? Why was he raising the shapeless white plastic to his lips?

  Whatever was still in the cup—damp sugar granules or just emptiness—Pancho drank it.

  He looked at the clock hanging on the wall—ten past two—he looked at the three adolescent girls—one of them had fallen asleep—and he said: “My father didn’t kill himself.”

  There followed a dialogue in which all my retentive capacities were overwhelmed. I didn’t know if I was asking what I wanted to ask. I didn’t know what I wanted to keep quiet about or what to say. I didn’t know what I wanted to know. I was sure, and I think from that moment onward I will always be sure that, whatever I knew, it would not be the truth.

  “Was he killed?” I asked.

  “No. He’s still alive.”

  The closed coffin, the cloth with a burn in one corner, the tears of a simple family—all a fraud.

  Natalio Perlman had run away with the shiksa. Betty Perlman couldn’t accept this and told everyone he was dead. She had held a vigil for him in her house. She had made the whole town believe he’d killed himself.

  Her father, mother, and in-laws had permitted her to say Natalio was dead. They had driven in the vigil cars, I don’t know where to, and then come back again. The children had been told the truth: that he had run away with Mary. But for the rest of the world, Natalio, his father, had killed himself.

  I saw Pancho for a few years after the death of his father. If I remember rightly, the last time was just after my bar mitzvah.

  I don’t know if, after that, he managed to keep the secret the way he did with me. And I didn’t ask him then, at two-thirty in the morning.

  I imagine he told his wife and children the truth. And I imagine that telling them the truth made no difference at all. There are few affections of the soul that can be communicated. Would he really have told his wife and children the truth? What for?

  Wasn’t it better to let them believe that their grandfather and father-in-law was dead rather than recounting the unrecountable tale of a woman who falsely grieved for her runaway husband?

  In my mind’s eye I saw the mark on the edge of the cloth, and I felt a wa
ve of nausea. I got up and ran to the restroom. But as I looked at myself in the mirror, instead of vomiting, I understood: the mark in the corner of the cloth wasn’t a mark of suicide—it was there to tip off the insiders that the coffin was empty.

  “Don’t worry, boys, the coffin’s empty. This is all a farce.”

  I went back to my table, mentally talking to my mother. “You see, Mother? People who sneak a kiss at the door, who laugh and yell, not only do they not commit suicide, they don’t die at all.”

  “That shocked you, didn’t it?” asked Pancho.

  I nodded.

  “How could you keep that a secret?” I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  “But I suppose my grandmother managed to wipe out the existence of her son, as far as I was concerned at least, for fifteen years.”

  “He’s in Argentina now,” he told me.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “My father. Natalio.”

  I looked to see if there was anything else to eat or drink, but nothing appealed to me.

  “The Paraguayan woman left him, probably about ten years ago now. They didn’t even get to Paraguay; he found out she was married. Or that she had a man at least. My father ended up subsidizing their marriage. The other one was the lover, and my father was the cuckolded husband.”

  “Did he come back recently?”

  “It was to try and make things up to my mother. He let her go on saying he was dead. Besides, my grandparents never forgave him for running off with a non-Jewish woman.”

  “Why did they let me go to the vigil?” I asked.

  “We never knew how you ended up there.”

  “I think I came to see you,” I said, “and suddenly I found . . . found . . .”

  “No,” said Pancho, “that can’t be right.”

  “Who knows,” I said. “We were very young.”

  Like a hologram hovering in the air, the image of Pancho standing next to me popped into my head, both of us with short pants, trying to work out how to be children, Jewish children, in the Once district in a gentile country. Now we were trying to work out how to be adults.

  I looked all around me.

  “Have you seen him?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen him for two months,” he told me. “He’s not too good.” And he added, with a hidden coherence: “Now that my mom can’t see her grandchildren, she needs company too.”

  “Have they seen each other?”

  “I don’t think so. He lives in a bed-and-breakfast place.”

  “What does he do for work?”

  “Nothing. He lives off what he made smuggling in Paraguay. Maybe he still has some of his ill-gotten gains.”

  The words ill-gotten gains sounded like a bugle at a wake. A real wake, this time.

  “I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight,” said Pancho, the simple man.

  “I have to work.”

  “I’ll leave you to it,” he said.

  I was going to say there was no need, but he left. They were, after all, a simple family. Simple people do not commit suicide. At most, they fake them.

  The Lady of Osmany was a great book. “It achieves the requirement of any fiction,” I wrote, as one of the teenage girls flaunted her enormous and very pretty rear end in search of a bowl of fruit salad, “which is to evade reality in a logical and realistic manner.”

  COLOMBIA

  Temptation

  SALOMÓN BRIANSKY (1902–1955)

  Translated from the Yiddish by Moisés Mermelstein

  Salomón (Shloym) Briansky was a Zionist from a Hasidic family in Poland. In 1934 he immigrated to Bogotá, where he published three volumes of fiction, all written in Yiddish. “Temptation” is a wonderful psychological tale with a Hasidic sensibility.

  NATHAN, THE SHOEMAKER from Porisov, a small Jewish village in Poland, came home one evening shortly before his departure for Colombia with a Torah scroll under his arm. With a slight shiver, he lay the holy object down on the table. His wife, Tzipporah, who at that moment stood skimming the broth, froze with the spoon in midair. “What can this mean?” her staring eyes asked in silence. What was a Torah scroll doing in her house? But Nathan—tall and broad shouldered, with a dense, pitch-black beard that framed his full, fleshy cheeks—hardly paid attention to his wife’s wide-open eyes. He took off his frock coat, wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve, and asked if supper was ready.

  “I was about to set the table,” Tzipporah said, coming out of her stupor. “But where are we going to eat if a Torah scroll is on the table?”

  Nathan quickly picked up the scroll and placed it in the cupboard. Only when husband and wife sat at the table, eating their kasha and broth, did Tzipporah ask whence the holy scroll had come. At first Nathan did not answer, but when his wife repeated the question, he said that an opportunity had arisen to buy it at a reasonable price.

  “What is a reasonable price?” asked Tzipporah with amazement. “Since when have you, my husband, become a dealer in Torah scrolls?”

  “You’ve gotten quite good at picking on me!” snapped Nathan. “What a plague of a Jewess you are! You were already told I got it for a reasonable price; now stop pestering me.”

  From the way the words were uttered, it was clear he could not explain why he had suddenly spent a whole hundred zlotys on a Torah scroll, especially on the eve of such a long trip.

  Such were the circumstances that had led to the unexpected purchase: a notification from the post office had arrived that afternoon announcing a certified letter. It occurred to Nathan that this must surely be related to his departure, because the mail he received—such as it was—always had to do with some momentous occasion. He took off his apron, put on his frock coat, and went to claim the letter. It consisted of a thick stack of papers regarding his trip. But they were written in gentile letters, which he was unable to read. He did not trust his daughters to decipher them, even though they had some understanding of the language, so he decided to go to Mordechai Mezritsher, whose son was versed in gentile matters and spoke many tongues.

  Mordechai Mezritsher was a small Jew about fifty years old with a pair of lively black eyes that darted around like birds in a cage. He was pleased that Nathan had come by.

  “Ah, a visitor. Have a seat, Nathan. What’s new?”

  “To be frank with you, Mordechai, I have not come to see you but your son. I would like to have him read some papers I have just picked up at the post office. People say he is quite the expert in such matters.”

  “I wish he devoted his mind to the Talmud instead of immersing all his senses in those heretical books. Then I would have a learned son,” sighed Mordechai. “Come in, you are needed to do a favor,” he called.

  Mordechai’s son was a comely, dark-skinned lad with sparkling eyes who sewed bootlegs on a machine all day long and studied during the night. Everything became clear to Nathan after the boy deciphered the papers and explained the details to him.

  In the midst of their conversation, Israel-León, the tailor, stopped by. All three of them prayed at the same synagogue, where many craftsmen gathered. The arrival of yet another guest pleased Mordechai, a joyous and animated fellow who did not frown at a drink with close friends. He asked them to sit down and wiped the sweat from his face. “It’s terribly hot outside,” he remarked. “A cold glass of beer would be a delight.” So they sent the apprentice to fetch some bottles of beer.

  “What do you think of that, Israel-León?” Mordechai said. “Nathan is fleeing from us. He just got all the papers.” He asked Nathan when he planned on leaving, but instead of waiting for an answer he went on.

  “Tell me, dear Nathan, what kind of place is that Colombia you are off to? Do Jews live there? Do they have a rabbi, a kosher slaughterer, a synagogue to pray in? And, finally, dear Nathan—may you ever be healthy—how does a Jew like you, close to fifty years old, decide to escape to the devil knows where?”

  “Well, what can one do, Mordechai? It’s hard to make a li
ving here. And besides, I have daughters to marry off,” Nathan said with a sigh.

  They remained seated for a while in deep and heavy silence. Nathan’s simple words went right to their hearts. The bitter present and uncertain future of all the Jews in Poland were clear to them. Suddenly, Israel-León’s voice cut through the silence: “Why should we add more weight to the heart of a Jew who has decided to throw himself into such an adventure? Anyone who wishes to remain a Jew and follow Jewish law can do so, even in the desert. A Jew like Nathan would not undertake such trip lightly. Do you know, Nathan, what has just occurred to me? It would be a wonderful thing if you could take along a Torah scroll. You’re setting off for a land where there will be few Jews, if any. Even if a congregation could be gathered there, who knows if they have a scroll? And perhaps God has appointed you to be the first Jew in that faraway land to assemble a quorum for prayer.”

  “It certainly would be a wonderful thing,” agreed Nathan. “But a Torah scroll could cost several hundred zlotys, and where am I to get the money?” For a long moment the wrinkles on Israel-León’s brow deepened. Then his face lit up.

  “You know what, Nathan? In our small synagogue we have several Torah scrolls. We could give one of them to you, and with God’s help you will someday send us money to pay us back,” he said.

  That very day, between afternoon and evening services in the tailor’s synagogue, some ten men gathered. At first, these simple Jews could not grasp what Israel-León was asking of them. Just think, to take a Torah scroll out of the Holy Ark and send it off to a remote place! Israel-León explained that this would be a good deed of which each of them would partake, and they owed no less to one of their members who was about to set off on such a long journey. At that moment, Berl Israel, the main trustee, intervened: “Listen to me. Nathan is one of us. He has worshiped among us for over twenty years. Many of his hard-earned zlotys lie in these walls and in the holy books we have here. I propose that we ask him for a down payment of a hundred zlotys, and with God’s help he will mail the remainder to us later.”