by Ilan Stavans
“‘Naturalmente, of course, we’ll give you asylum, a visa, ma’am. No le quepa duda. Don’t doubt it.’
“‘That’s a promise?’
“And I said yes.
“And she said: ‘Swear it on your son.’
“‘I don’t have a son,’
“‘Swear it on the life of your unborn child.’
“And that’s what I did, Ricardo. I swore I was telling her the truth, swore it on your life.
“I never saw her again.
“Because your mother came into the room as soon as that woman had gone.
“She looked at me. ‘You really are too good to be true.’
“She did not say anything else. Just waited. Like you do, so often, let the silence grow until somebody like me, somebody who feels uncomfortable with stillness and has survived by filling the universe with words—since I can recall I would jump into the space yawning between my father and my mother. I would leap in, vault in, rush in to see if I could bring them closer, because I could tell they were going to separate, that I was the one who had kept them together. My existence had done that, my birth had made my father stay, and I spent the first eight years of my childhood going back and forth between them, saying in English to my dad what my mother meant in her Buenaventura Spanish, extricating from my dad’s Ohio accent what he wanted from my mother, back and forth, ida y vuelta, giving them refuge in the common territory of my tongue, holding them to each other as I felt them drift apart. Their home, I had to become their home if they were to stay by each other’s side, and your own mother knew this, merely by instinct and cunning and command, that she didn’t need to do anything other than let me dangle in the silence of her puzzlement, her challenge that I explain myself.
“And I did.
“It took me less than a minute, not even a minute to close that file, snap it tightly shut.
“‘Asylum denied,’ I said. ‘No visa for either of them. Not clear if they have terrorist connections.’”
“She didn’t say anything, again she just let me swing awhile in the dark sun of her gaze.
“‘I just didn’t have the heart to tell the woman,’ I said. ‘To her face, I mean, I just didn’t have the heart.’
“And now Cynthia answered. ‘Yes,’ she said. Just that one word. She said yes to me.
“So that night . . . I like to think that was the night when you were conceived, Ricardo, I like to think that something good came of this, not just our marriage and my training and my promotion and my future citizenship and my new country—you, I like to tell myself that you were born because I did what I did, because of what happened in Colombia, what the messages demanded of me, that I tell you. That’s what I have to say, what I need to tell you before you are seventeen.”
Barrera stopped.
Behind him he sensed his son, told himself that the boy had been there for who knows how long, reading over his shoulder for who knew how long. And somehow this time Barrera found the strength not to turn around and address Ricky. He found the patience to swallow any word of welcome or of dismissal, was given the strength by someone, perhaps his wife, perhaps his mother, both of them dead. He discovered the strength to wait and let his son say something first.
“So who is it?” Ricky asked, finally. “Who is sending us, you and me, these messages?”
Almost as if he were a child asking a magician to explain how the rabbit could disappear, be cut to shreds and then reappear, one last moment of innocence before he outgrew it, one last chance.
“It can’t be the husband,” Barrera said, taking his time, “because he’s dead, that man called Esteban.”
“And the woman? The woman whose name you can’t recall?”
“Not her,” said Barrera. “And not her son, Luis or Lalo.” And then he added: “They were executed. The night before your mother and I left Bogotá.”
“How did they die?”
“Not that,” he said. And then, still without turning around to look at his son: “There are things you really don’t need to know. Not yet.”
“I don’t need to know what was done to their bodies?” Ricky asked. “How slow it must have been?”
“You don’t need to know.”
Ricky didn’t speak for a while. Barrera could barely imagine him there at all, thinking all this over. Then: “Alright. So who else knew what happened in that room, what you promised? A colleague, someone, anyone?”
“Only me,” said Barrera, “I’m the only one who knows. From time to time, I ask your mother, ask her picture—not with words but with my eyes, you know, I suggest that maybe there could have been another way, that maybe we could have found a different . . . Even if I know that she was also acting under orders, only following protocol. This Esteban had been fingered as sympathetic to the guerrillas, was a subversive. The son had been videotaped chanting slogans against the US, was a rabble-rouser at the local high school. And above your mother in the pyramid of power there was someone else, and then the head of that department and the man above them, and somebody upstairs would have eventually seen the asylum granted and would have reprimanded her, maybe demoted her, maybe denied me my transfer or my residency or my citizenship one day. It was me or that woman, our son or her son, that’s how things are—” and by now Barrera was speaking to the computer, straight to the screen or what was inside the screen or beyond it. “All of us, just doing our job, just securing the border, just keeping our children safe, better to be safe than sorry. That’s what I say silently to your mother, have said to her since she died.”
“And what does she answer?”
“Nothing. Not a word. What could she tell us? What could she answer?”
“Unless . . .”
“Unless . . .” Barrera said.
But neither of them dared to add another word, tell each other what they were thinking, what they were both . . .
This was as far as he could go. This was the end.
Barrera sensed a sudden absence, was certain that his son was no longer behind him, that Ricky had decided to return to his room before dawn arrived, that’s where he wanted to greet this day when he would be seventeen, when he would be of age.
Barrera waited. He gave the boy time to cross the corridor, open the door to his room, sit down in front of his own computer. He waited until he was sure Ricky was ready, and then, without looking one last time at the letter he had written, without correcting one word of it, he pressed the send button.
It was on its way, his response, what he needed to do.
He prayed it would be enough.
And he wondered, Barrera also managed to wonder, as the sun began to rise into that foreign sky, if he would sleep well that night, if he would sleep at all in the nights to come.
PERU
The Conversion
ISAAC GOLDEMBERG (b. 1945)
Translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin
Used as the opening door to Play by Play (1984), the writer’s second novel, this story narrates the physical and spiritual plight of Marquitos Karushansky, like the author half-Jew, half-native Peruvian and “injured existentially” by the discovery, during adolescence, of his ambiguous ethnic identity. The protagonist’s identity and history—narrated with verve, irony, and playfulness—are symbolized, most painfully, by his ritual circumcision. Goldemberg is also the author of The Fragmented Life of Don Jacabo Lerner (1976), among other works.
FIVE THOUSAND SEVEN hundred and thirteen years of Judaism hit Marquitos Karushansky like a ton of bricks. At the age of eight, shortly after coming to Lima, classes in Hebrew and the history of the Jews at León Pinelo School; bris at the age of twelve; bar mitzvah at thirteen, when he was a brand-new cadet at Leoncio Prado Military Academy. Bris was the little word taken from the Hebrew and used by the Jews in Lima to avoid saying circumcision, which left a bad taste in the mouth and made them bite the tip of their tongues, as if to spit it out. “Never you say circumcision, correct word is bris; circumcision is from Lati
n circumcidere, ‘to cut around,’ and has no historical weight. But bris means ‘covenant’ and is in Bible from time our father Abruhem sealed pact with Adonai.” That’s how Rabbi Goldstein, with his weeping willow beard, explained it to him. Adonai, of course, was also a word Marcos had recently picked up. Saying God, which seemed to have a cholo, half-Indian ring to it, was absolutely out of the question. And it was really something to watch him swearing, Chai Adonai here and Chai Adonai there! Whip ’em in the front and whip ’em in the rear! Chahuee! Chahuaa! Pinelo, Pinelo, rah, rah, rah! First you’ve got to promise not to tell. I swear to God, who is my shining light! What? To God! No, that doesn’t count. C’mon, do it right. Chai Adonai! You’re a liar. Let’s see if you can swear it’s true. Chai Adonai! Swear you didn’t steal the ballpoint. Chai Adonai! Marcos gradually became used to the word, it was like not swearing at all, and he got a big kick out of it.
Marquitos Karushansky’s circumcision, or rather his bris, took place on the same day as the opening of The Ten Commandments at the Tacna movie theater. What’s more, Dr. Berkowitz’s office, where the operation was done, was only half a block from the theater. Marcos was operated on in the afternoon, sometime between five and seven, and the show was to start at eight. But he and his father missed the opening. The saddest part of it, old Karushansky said, was not being able to see the film together with the rest of the Jewish community of Lima. They had to see it four or five days later, sitting among Peruvians, and it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the right atmosphere. What did those cholos know about the Bible anyway?
It had all started when his father announced, like a patriarch in the Old Testament: “Next year you be ready for bar mitzvah but first is necessary you have bris.” Marcos remembered his eyes wandering to the smudgy windowpane and then his voice, mocking and at the same time trying to reassure him, he shouldn’t worry; they had also snipped off the foreskin of Jesus the Jew.
They showed up one day in Dr. Berkowitz’s office, where the physician, very professional, very freckled, explained: “Bris is an extremely simple operation. All it amounts to is cutting off the prepuce, the end of the skin that folds over the head of the penis and covers it. Then it’s much easier to keep the glans clean. No sebaceous matter collects around it, and this reduces the risk of catching dangerous infections.” Marcos didn’t know what he was talking about and went back with his father to the doctor’s office the next day. The nurse had already left, and they were greeted by a silence like the Sabbath’s in the homes of Orthodox Jews. Before he knew it, Marcos was stretched out on his back on the operating table. Dr. Berkowitz was standing beside it, scalpel in hand, arm poised, and his father, sweat running down features drawn tight in pain and disgust, his father was lying across his chest, pinning his arms, papa’s chunky body on top of his. Would he ask him for a camphor ointment rubdown later? Every night at bedtime the ritual of the rubdown would begin, and Marcos would massage him furiously, as if he wanted to tear off his skin, as if he were trying to draw blood from the heavy body with an oval head. He would pass the palm of his hand down the slope of the thick short neck, up the incline of the shoulders with their overgrowth of hair, matted like the fur on a battered old grizzly, his body stripped of every shred of nobility, letting out low grunts, soft moans of pleasure.
His penis had been put to sleep but not enough to kill the pain from the clamp holding on to his skin as if it would never let go. Then the doctor, warning him not to exaggerate, because too much anesthetic could leave him paralyzed for life, raised the needle to eye level to make sure he had the right amount in the syringe. His whole body shuddered when the needle entered his glans. His father pressed all his weight down on his chest, and on his lips and chin Marcos could feel the rough beard, soaked with sweat and tears. Now his penis was a soft mass, a spongy mushroom, an organism with a life of its own, capable of tearing free with one jerk and slipping all over his skin, looking for a way into his body, or capable of dissolving and leaving a smelly, viscous fluid on his groin. He knew his penis was already in the open, and he tried to imagine its new, hoodless look. In his mind, he compared it to the image he had of his father’s member, its extreme whiteness, the perfect distribution of its parts, the scarlet crest topping the head of the sleepy iguana, with its vertical blind eye. He wanted to examine his phallus, to hold it above his eyes like a flower, to fall under the spell of the rosy calyx snug around its neck, to weigh it in his hand and stroke it warmly back to the familiarity it had lost. He was conscious of the small pincers clutching his foreskin tight: they were fierce little animals with fangs, beady eyes, and metallic scales on their backs. At the same time, he felt the pressure of his father’s dead weight on him as a reproach, the embodiment of all the insults he had ever had to take. He thought about how, when he went back to school, he wouldn’t have to hide from his friends in the bathroom. He would be able to piss casually now, to pull out his prick, take his time shaking it out, boldly pressing hard to squeeze the last drops out, and then turn around defiantly and show it to the others, to all his schoolmates at León Pinelo, proudly. Now let’s see who is man enough to say I’m not a Jew.
The doctor left them alone in the back office: he told them he’d return in half an hour, they’d have to wait for the anesthetic to wear off, and Marcos watched his father nodding yes. Then the old man started to pace with his hands clasped behind him. He marched up and down next to the operating table, eyes straight ahead, without bending his knees, swinging each leg sideways slowly in a semicircle, before setting his foot down on the tiles. The controlled stiffness of his body, the deliberate halt after each about-face, before he started pacing again, reflected all the misery and resignation stored up in him. But Marcos knew every detail of this tactic his father had used, over the past two years, to put a certain amount of distance between them, to make him understand that behind this temporary withdrawal, all the things he had ever silenced were crying out, louder than words, against his bad luck and his unhappiness. If he had had any hope of crossing into his father’s world, he would have asked him to come over to the table, dry the sweat on his forehead, take his hand in his, and help him clear away the skein of solitude unraveling endlessly in his chest. But he was sure the old man would avoid his eyes, as he did whenever he pounded on him with his fists, only to feel sorry afterward and break down like a vulnerable Mary Magdalene.
His senses had become dulled. His father looked older now: his beard had taken on a grayish tint, and a hundred wrinkles had formed around his eyes. He tried to think of his mother, but he couldn’t retain a solid image of her behind his eyes. He had closed them and felt himself rushing down a toboggan run, rolling over and over without being able to stop. Only his father was solid; all the objects in the room had melted into ribbons of vapor swirling around him, and only his father’s presence kept him from turning into a gaseous substance too.
He didn’t move a muscle when the doctor’s voice burst into the room like a garble of voices and sounds, and asked him if he was feeling better. He nodded without unlocking his eyelids, and the doctor and his father helped him off the table. His eyes were still closed, he staggered as if whipped by a blizzard, and the weight of his nakedness embarrassed him. The mere brush of the doctor’s gloved hands on his member, the slight pull of the threads sticking out from the skin under the glans, made him feel wretched and he had the urge to piss. He guessed the pain this rash move would bring on and stopped himself just in time; the doctor was fitting a jockstrap stuffed with wads of gauze on him, and he had the sensation that he was pissing inward. His bladder was tightening up and his inward-flowing urine plunged through his ureters, was picked up by the renal tubes, flooded his kidneys like a winding current, and was pumped, bubbling and humming, into the bloodstream. He felt that he was burning up inside, explored by the fine probe of an intense blue flame. The doctor’s voice jolted him back to reality. A sudden smile lit up the doctor’s face as he put out his hand in an outlandishly formal way and made a big show o
f shaking Marcos’s father’s hand, saying, “Mazel tov, Señor Karushansky, congratulations, mazel tov . . .”
The lights on Tacna Avenue woke him all the way. Walking to the corner, they passed the Tacna movie theater, its front covered with giant posters showing scenes from the movie: a beardless Charlton Heston, dressed as an Egyptian warrior, was giving a wasp-waisted princess a he-man’s hug; over to the right, Charlton Heston again, beard and wig, tunic and sandals, on a promontory, arms extended like a magician’s: abracadabra, let the waters divide.
As they stood on the corner trying to get a cab, Marcos thought of the late afternoon when he had arrived in Lima, four years before. Through the smoke rising steadily from a charcoal pit, where some shish kebab on tiny skewers was roasting and giving off a tempting aroma, he saw his father with his hands in his pockets, coming toward the El Chasqui travel agency, where he and his mother were waiting. Then, like now, they had stopped on a corner, loaded down with bundles and suitcases, to get a cab. He looked out the side of his eye at his father, sitting cross-legged next to him; his arms were folded stiffly across his chest. Through the window on the other side of his father’s aquiline profile, he watched the streetcars stretching, lumbering over the flashing tracks. Tall buildings loomed up unexpectedly, swaying like the carob trees back home, and then, with the speed of a fist coming straight at his eyes out of nowhere, the slender pyramid of the Jorge Chavez monument, like an airplane full of lights—manned by a crew of graceful winged granite figures taking off into the night.