A Speech at Póvoa
A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail notifying me of the subject of this conference, “A Literatura Rasga a Realidade,” “Literature Tears Through Reality,” a very beautiful phrase but one that ultimately left me no more enlightened than I’d been to begin with. The first thing I did, after having spent a few minutes scratching my bald head, was write to Manuela Ribeiro, the director of the Correntes d’Escritas Festival, to solicit her help, and to ask her if the subject was the intersection between literature and reality, or rather the way literature bursts into reality, or what? And she wrote back to me right away: Yes, that’s it. The second thing I did, having seen the names of my fellow speakers, was to write to João Paolo Cuenca, asking him to please explain it to me, this matter of how it is that literature tears through reality. But my Brazilian friend—just as confused or nervous as I was, or perhaps already at work on his own fifteen-minute speech—didn’t take long to reply: I have no idea either. So, later that night, I sat down to watch an Ingmar Bergman movie, hoping to distract myself a little. But when it was over, when I wanted to sleep, the subject of this conference returned to assail me again, and I tossed and turned in my bed. Now desperate, at about five or six o’clock on a very cold morning, my thoughts returned to the Bergman movie and I realized that right there, at the conclusion of the movie, was my answer. That, however, is the ending to my fifteen minutes, and it is best to begin at the beginning.
I suspect that my insomnia was provoked by the subject of reality—even though at that time, I should add, I was also suffering great anxiety in an attempt to obtain a tourist visa for Belgrade, going through bureaucratic procedures of kafkaesque proportions in order to visit that agreeable city where, before coming here to Póvoa do Varzim, I’ve just spent a few days in pursuit of a ghost.
What is reality? I don’t know. How do I conceive of reality? No idea. But fortunately I understood that this wasn’t to be an epistemological conference, and so, thank God, I was able to discard immediately any reflections on our awareness of reality. And so I came to this strange verb: rasga. I presumed, stumbling through the darkness, that the verb rasgar means the same in Portuguese as in Spanish, and setting aside its musical sense—in Spanish, to rasgar a guitar is to strum it—I focused on the act of breaking something, cutting it, ripping it, tearing it into pieces. I can remember imagining three things. One: someone tearing (rasgando) a piece of cloth. Two: a broken (rasgado) car window. And three: the noise made when you tear (rasga) a sheet of paper in half. With these images as my starting point (when I write, or when I want to understand anything, which is almost the same thing, I always start from images), I asked myself how it was possible for literature to rasgar reality, to break or tear it. As though reality were a piece of cloth? As though reality were a car window? As though reality were a sheet of paper? And it occurred to me that the only possible way of understanding something, or at least of making an attempt or some movement toward understanding it, is to turn to one’s own experience. Like so: What link is there, in my experience as a writer, between literature and reality? Or like so: How has my literature torn through reality? The process is always one from a hot furnace to the finger to the brain to the scream. In other words, by induction.
I thought then, inevitably, of the story of my Polish grandfather in Auschwitz. A story that, until he told it to me, nobody in my family knew. When he arrived in Guatemala after the war, he clammed up completely. He refused to talk about the time he’d spent in the various concentration camps. But a few years ago, six or seven years, perhaps, I somehow dared to ask him if I could interview him. To learn a bit, to find out, to leave some record (not to mention evidence) so that I could perhaps then tell the story myself. And my grandfather, with absolute calm, said sure, gladly. We agreed on the day and the time, and I managed to borrow a video camera. I filmed him talking—for the first time in almost sixty years—about his capture at Łódź while he was playing dominoes with some friends, about the last time he saw his family, about his passage through the various concentration camps, about the Polish boxer who, he told me, saved his life in Auschwitz. And this short, simple story of the Polish boxer seemed powerfully literary to me. It goes something like this. My grandfather is in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He accepts the gift from a new prisoner of a twenty-dollar gold coin, which he will use to get more food, more soup. They find him out, beat him, and send him to Block Eleven at Auschwitz, to be shot against the already-infamous Black Wall. That night—the night before being put on trial—he’s thrown into a cell filled with people, and there he meets a Polish boxer. They speak the same language. They’re from the same town. The Polish boxer is still alive because the German soldiers like watching him box, presumably (with a certain amount of license) rather like watching a cockfight. An old, experienced resident of Auschwitz’s Block Eleven, the Polish boxer spends the whole night telling my grandfather what to say and what not to say at his trial the following day. Training him, as it were, with words. And the following day, my grandfather says and doesn’t say what the Polish boxer told him to say and not to say, and this does indeed save him. The end. I liked this story straight away, perhaps for its simplicity or its apparent simplicity, perhaps for what it implies about the use of words for salvation, for our salvation. I already had the reality—I even had it on film. And now I needed to bring it over into literature. But how to recount this reality? From what point of view? From what moment in time? I tried in many different ways, and using many different narrative techniques, until finally, six or seven years after I’d walked away with this story under my arm (as a friend of mine would describe it in his apartment on Conde de Xiquena), I managed to write a piece in which a grandson interviews his grandfather about his experiences in Auschwitz while he’s looking at the five green numbers on his arm and they’re drinking a bottle of whiskey together. And that was it. All done. I had managed to carry reality over into literature. I had managed, through literature, to penetrate reality. All lovely and perfect and smelling of printer’s ink. Until recently. One morning, I opened the Sunday supplement of a Guatemalan newspaper, and even before I’d managed to take my first sip of coffee, I saw a photo of my grandfather on his butter-colored leather sofa, showing those five pale numbers and saying in an interview that he’d been saved in Auschwitz thanks to (I had to read it twice) his skills as a carpenter.
What? A carpenter? What skills as a carpenter? What happened to the Polish boxer, to Scheherazade in disguise?
And that’s it.
Literature is no more than a good trick a magician or a sorcerer might perform, making reality appear whole, creating the illusion that reality is a single unified thing. Or perhaps literature needs to construct one reality by destroying another—something that in a very intuitive sense my grandfather already knew—that is, by destroying and then reconstituting itself from its own debris. Or perhaps literature, as my old friend from Brooklyn used to argue, is no more than the precipitate, zigzagging, rambling discourse of a stutterer.
It was something like this that I was reasoning out and brooding over during that cold, sleepless dawn, just about to understand or at least to find something important, when all of a sudden, now smoking a cigarette in bed, I remembered Ingmar Bergman.
The movie is called Skamme in Swedish, Shame in English, Vergonha in Portuguese. And it’s about the experience of a musician couple who take refuge on an island during the Swedish civil war, but being Bergman, it’s also much more than that. It goes something like this. Having lost everything—their house, their belongings, their marriage, their dignity, even their shame—the couple board a boat full of refugees trying to flee the island and the war. The boat’s engine fails and they are stranded in the middle of the sea. They share the last pieces of bread, the last lumps of sugar, the last drops of water. One man kills himself. The boat gets trapped—in a marvelously horrific image—surrounded by a mass of floating corpses. And in the final scene, the beautiful Liv Ullmann
, in a laconic, lost voice that anticipates her death, tells us of a dream she’s had. She says: I had a dream. I was walking down a lovely street. On one side, the houses were white, with large arches and columns. On the other side, there was a shady park. Between the trees ran a brook of dark green water. At last I reached a high wall covered in roses. And a plane passed by and set fire to the roses. But nothing happened, because it was a beautiful image. I looked at the water and saw the reflection of how the roses burned. I was carrying a little girl in my arms. Our daughter. She hugged me close. I could even feel her mouth against my cheek. The whole time I knew there was something I mustn’t forget. Something that somebody had told me. But I forgot it.
That is exactly what literature is like. As we write, we know that there is something very important to be said about reality, that we have this something within reach, just there, so close, on the tip of our tongue, and that we mustn’t forget it. But always, without fail, we do.
Sunsets
My grandfather’s body was a vague shape on the bed. I could see it from the doorway, face-up, rigid, quite small, totally covered by his maroon-and-black-checkered quilt. It was Saturday. He’d died early that Saturday morning while he and my grandmother were sleeping. It was forbidden, until dusk, until the end of the day, to move or to touch this small, vague shape that a few hours earlier had been my grandfather.
I entered the bedroom slowly, trying to detect the smell of death. But it didn’t smell of anything, or it didn’t smell of anything other than the medicines and ointments and the sedentary air that always accompanies the elderly. My grandmother was seated on the far side of the bed—that is, on her side of the bed—with her back to my grandfather’s body. I thought she seemed much more stooped now. Her eyes downcast, she held a bag of ice on her left knee. Facing my grandmother was a fat, bald man with a disheveled red beard, dressed in black except for a cream-colored shirt. He was seated in a chair that clearly didn’t belong in my grandparents’ bedroom and that someone had probably brought in that morning. The man adjusted his skullcap and greeted me with a nod but said nothing, his face set in a permanent grimace. I walked over to him. He got up straightaway and offered me a doughy hand. My condolences, he whispered in poor Spanish and I don’t know why, maybe it was my nerves, maybe it was the huge effort he made to sound solemn, but I let out a small laugh. Solemnity, among strangers, is always farcical. He became even more serious and was about to say something to me or ask something of me, when my grandmother finally looked up. Leibele, she stammered, reaching out for my hand. That’s what she called my grandfather, Leibele, which is León in Yiddish. I crouched down, gave her a kiss and then a hug, and my grandmother held my hand between hers, gripping it tightly, clinging to it as though it were a buoy at sea, it occurred to me then, as I began to feel slightly dizzy and noticed that the bag of ice was about to slip and fall on the carpet. I asked what had happened to her knee. My grandmother tried to say something to me but couldn’t and just managed to purse her lips.
You should put this on, the man said to me somewhat brusquely, handing me a white skullcap. Out of respect, he said as I stood looking at the white skullcap in my hand. Kipa, in Hebrew. Yarmulke, in Yiddish. Respect for whom? I thought of asking. But I just put it on. Sit, sit, he said. He moved to one side and pointed to the chair and I thanked him. The chair was warm.
My grandmother whispered something, as though to herself, as though merely to make her presence felt, and carried on lightly shaking her head. She remained anchored to my hand. The bag of ice still sat precariously on her knee. She had the dull, abstracted gaze of someone who had been given a few sedatives.
Shlomo, said the man. I looked up. I tried to focus but all I could see was that his reddish beard, around his mouth, was full of biscuit crumbs. I’m Shlomo, the rabbi, the man said. We haven’t met, he said, you and I, and maybe he noticed that I was looking at his dirty, matted beard, because he immediately rubbed it and crumbs fell like snowflakes onto the carpet. But I know who you are. The grandson, he said. The artist, he said, and I felt a bit insulted and didn’t know if he was confusing me with my brother, but I was too lazy to ask or correct him, so I just said yeah, that’s me.
He spoke slowly, the rabbi, haltingly, with a heavy foreign accent. Possibly a Yiddish or an Israeli accent. It occurred to me that maybe he was the new rabbi, since in a Jewish community as small as Guatemala’s (a hundred families, they usually say), the rabbis are always imported. I remember that when I was a child, there was a rabbi from Miami Beach, more serious than Orthodox, who always had a runny nose, was always clutching a damp handkerchief, and who always said the prayers in English. And a rabbi from Panama who ran off with stolen money. And one from Mexico who only showed up every now and then, for holidays, and another one, also from Mexico, who used to sweat so much when he was praying that he’d have to change his skullcap halfway through the service. But the vast majority of the rabbis, as I remember it, were from Argentina. One, who was always extolling the virtues of the Boca Juniors soccer team and preaching against mixed marriages, got a local Catholic girl pregnant and later married her (own goal, as my grandfather rather philosophically put it). Another Argentinian, a nice young guy named Carlos, who arrived just in the years when I began to distance myself from Judaism and from my family (you can’t do one without the other), used to talk to me about music and nothing else. I’d begun listening to jazz. He also listened to jazz, or he knew about jazz, or maybe he just knew three or four names and used them as a way of bridging the gap. In any case, I was really mixed up at the time. I was very sensitive about everything and very frustrated by everything. I’d recently left home, which also meant leaving behind my father’s religion and everything about his glass-house world. And I really appreciated the fact that Carlos, instead of pestering me, would just talk about Armstrong and Coltrane and Parker and Monk. All except for the last time I saw him (he later moved to Israel with his family). It was in the street, in front of a kids’ ice-cream parlor. We greeted each other. We chatted a little. I told him what was going on with me, possibly a bit anxiously or unhappily, and so Carlos, out of the blue, asked me if I remembered the story of Abraham. The first Jew, he added, smiling. No, I told him. Well, more or less. Still smiling, he quoted a line from the book of Genesis: Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee. Lech l’cha, he said in Hebrew, with a wink, and that was all.
My grandmother let go of my hand and shifted slightly and the maroon-and-black-checkered quilt also moved a little, and I thought with a fright that I was about to see the face of my dead grandfather.
My grandmother wanted to say something to me, but the words wouldn’t come to her, or maybe she didn’t know what words to say. I leaned a little closer to her, as though to help. Oh Eduardito, she whispered, and then, with a half-smile, added: That was what your grandfather used to call you, wasn’t it? And she repeated the diminutive of my name a couple of times, her jaw trembling, her voice gradually fading, her pale blue eyes sinking floorward again. I considered her face. A sweet lady, my grandmother, very compassionate and good-natured, but overly sentimental as well. She told me once that her father, my great-grandfather, a Jew from Damascus who lost all the family’s money at cards, would never allow his children to kiss him except on the hand. Nothing else. Just kiss him on the hand. Never, my grandmother said with an amazing sadness, I never got to embrace my father.
Far off, the growing murmur of visitors could be heard in the dining and living rooms.
The rabbi was talking to my grandmother about Noah and the Flood and a rainbow among the clouds and I began looking around my grandparents’ bedroom. There, next to the bed, still hung the only photo my grandfather had managed to keep of his family in Łódź, all of them dead in ghettos or concentration camps: his sisters Raquel (Ula) and Raizel (Rushka), his younger brother Salomón (Zalman), his parents Samuel (tailor) and Masha (washerwoman). Gray, bland faces, all
too distant for me. I thought about the last time I’d said to my grandfather that I wanted to travel to Poland, to Łódź, and about his reaction that had bordered on violent. What do you want to go to Poland for? he said. You mustn’t go to Poland, he said, but later he jotted down for me on a small piece of yellow paper (as though it were a small inheritance for a grandson, or a key to a long-buried family secret) his address in Łódź, in precise detail: ground floor of the building on the corner of Źeromskiego and Persego Maja, number 16, near the Zielony Rynek market, near Poniatowskiego Park. And I thought about the number tattooed on my grandfather’s forearm, 69752, a faded green number that as children he told us was his phone number, and he’d smile, saying he had it tattooed there so he wouldn’t forget it. And I thought about Rena Kornreich, another Polish survivor of Auschwitz, who years later, as she herself told it, had her number surgically removed, 1716, but instead of throwing it away, she had kept that small piece of skin, that small piece of herself, in a bottle of formaldehyde. And I thought about Primo Levi, about the number tattooed on Primo Levi’s forearm, 174517, and how, whereas my grandfather avoided his number, hid it, made a joke out of it so as not to acknowledge it, and whereas Mrs. Kornreich tore hers off, Primo Levi left instructions for his to be engraved on his tomb. And so there, on a tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Turin, both his name and his number are engraved: his family name and that other, more sinister name. Both, I suppose, like it or not, intrinsic elements of his identity.
Now the rabbi was talking to my grandmother (who was taking no notice) about some pact of God’s (Hashem, he kept saying) after the Flood, and I went on studying my grandparents’ bedroom. I noticed three things that were out of place. On my grandfather’s bedside table, a candle was burning; the wall mirror above the dresser was covered with an enormous white sheet; the window, always kept shut because of the draft, was wide open. Shlomo had finished his little homily now and I asked him about these three things. Still standing, he seemed to get a real kick out of being able to explain them to me. Whispering, he said that when a Jew dies, a candle is lit because the flame dispels negative energies; that when a Jew dies, all the mirrors in the house are covered so as to eliminate vanities; that when a Jew dies, a window is opened in the room where his body lies, symbolically, so that, as it says in the Torah, in the Book of Daniel, his body might be aided in its ascent to heaven. Shlomo smiled beneficently and topped it off with a few words in Hebrew and I could have sworn I heard harps. He suddenly came a little closer to me, leaned in a little closer. I thought he was about to tell me something else, something very ceremonious and deeply Jewish. I gritted my teeth. Yesterday, he whispered, I came back from Tikal.
The Polish Boxer Page 15