Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  * The man holding the flower vase on the right is Bernardo (Beco) Baytelman, and next to him is Eliana Albala. Beco and Eliana moved to Mexico from Chile in 1973, after the coup d’état that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. Beco managed to create an extraordinary garden of medicinal plants cultivated by the rural peasants of Morelos, and he left it as a living legacy. It is located in the garden of the Emperor Maximilian’s summer house in Cuernavaca.

  PART FIVE

  Childhood as a Collective Achievement

  God’s face

  In the Bible, there are two points where Moses oversteps his bounds. The first comes after the flight from Egypt, when God orders Moses to strike a desert rock with his cane to provide water for the Israelites. Moses does that and enacts the miracle, except that his performance appears to leave open the possibility that the power of miracle was his to wield, rather than God’s. So God punishes Moses for that, and he bars him from entering the Promised Land, and in doing so demonstrates, while he is at it, that God disapproves of the idolatry that is implicit in hero worship.

  Moses’s second transgression is even more interesting. In a moment of sublime ecstasy, he asks God to let him see his face. Instead, God responds by asking Moses to turn his back to him, and lets him know that he will only reveal himself indirectly, through the effects of his acts. Neither Moses nor anyone else may see the face of God (Exodus 33:20). We humans are expected to find God enciphered in the ways of the world.

  In the story of Noah, this was pretty much Ham’s sin, too: to have dared to look upon his naked father (Noah), and then make some wisecrack about him to his brothers. In doing this, Ham violated a taboo, for sure, but the biblical scene also conjures up a primal fantasy, namely, that we are actually capable of seeing our parents in their full nakedness. When they realized that their drunken father had inadvertently exposed himself, Noah’s other two sons, Shem and Japheth, picked up his tunic, walked with their backs turned toward their father averting their eyes, and covered him up. Japheth and Shem thus respected the taboo, and avoided contemplating their father’s nudity. In so doing, they also dodged Noah’s curse, which fell solely on Ham and on his descendants.

  I think that within Judaism, Ham’s transgression is a bit more severe than it would have been for polytheists. Ham violated a prohibition — seeing his naked father without averting his eyes — and he is punished for that. Up to here, the Jewish taboo operates pretty much in the same way as what one might expect among polytheists. In monotheism, however, there is an additional sin at stake, idolatry, because by judging his naked father, Ham has put himself in God’s position, and God must always be resolutely one. A son can never see his father whole, and pretending to do this is pretending to be God, which, I think, is why Noah’s curse is extended to Ham’s descendants. Like Moses, Ham wished to look upon his father as an equal, directly to his face.

  Something like this takes place between parents and their children. Children are born out of a moment of intimacy to which they can never have access, and about which they can only project one fantasy or another. Parents have lived experiences of which their children can never know. What our parents are to us is only a part of who they are, and to presume that we might see them in their naked wholeness not only humiliates them but also involves raising our own selves up as gods.

  Geology of Machu Picchu

  My father liked to translate. In fact, translation for us is a family-wide propensity, a kind of occupational hazard. This is because displacement requires translation, and it brings with it the joy of hearing the same thing being said by way of such different sounds, and also discovering the absurd in so many literal translations…or identifying “false friends” between languages with the kind of satisfaction that one might gain from spotting a counterfeit. All of this becomes an obsessive compulsion. “Between, and drink a chair” is a literal translation of “Entre, y tome asiento,” which actually means “Come in and take a seat.” In my house, we sometimes invited one another to “between and drink a chair,” and I’ve always remained fond of false etymologies and ridiculous translations.

  But it was my father who really had a gift for that sort of thing. For him, movement between languages was not only a necessary tactic to achieve social acceptance, it was also a habit that produced clarity and even induced the occasional epiphany. Translation was for Cinna both a pastime and a fascination. He oftentimes translated texts that caught his eye, usually into Spanish or English. His most ambitious project, I think, was to translate Pablo Neruda’s Las alturas de Machu Picchu into English, in a version that ended up pleasing Neruda himself.

  Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of my father’s translation of that long and difficult poem, but I think that I understand why Cinna obsessed over those verses in particular: they are suffused with petrified love. Thus, in one of the poem’s sections, Neruda invokes Machu Picchu:

  Cuando la mano de color de arcilla

  Se convirtió en arcilla, y cuando los pequeños párpados se cerraron

  Llenos de ásperos muros, poblados de castillos,

  Y cuando todo el hombre se enredó en su agujero,

  Quedó la exactitud enarbolada:

  El alto sitio de la aurora humana:

  La más alta vasija que contuvo el silencio:

  Una vida de piedra después de tantas vidas.

  When the clay-colored hand

  Turned into clay, and when the little eyelids were shut

  Full of rasping walls, teeming with castles

  And when the whole of man got entangled in his lair,

  Exactness remained there, unfurled:

  The perch of humanity’s dawn:

  The highest vessel that contained the silence:

  A life of stone after so many lives.218

  A life of stone after so many lives. Petrification and stillness as relief. And the infinite longing of the Andes as primeval origin. The life of rocks, their history: geology. “Most young people,” my father wrote regarding his youth, “are attracted by the world’s enormous multiform complexity. I was attracted by its simplicity and its immutable laws. Like Heraclitus, I saw life as a river in which no one bathes twice.”219 My father used to say, as I mentioned at the start of this book, that it was hard to live peacefully near the Andes, that everything was too dramatic, too young. I think that he meant to say not only that the Andes were geologically young, but that they also were a painful reminder of humanity’s infancy, as Neruda had said of Machu Picchu:

  Madre de piedra, espuma de los cóndores.

  Alto arrecife de la aurora humana.

  Pala perdida en la primera arena.

  Mother of stone, foam of condors.

  Lofty reef of humanity’s dawn.

  A lost spade in the primeval sand.

  My father understood the untimely life of rocks, because he loved stillness and oblivion. He knew how to find the poetry of life in what is frozen, unmovable, or petrified, because without that stillness, mimesis finds no relief and it just spins around in an unstoppable vertigo of translation.

  In his memoir, Cinna writes about an epiphany that he had about himself when he was fifteen years old or so. He was like a piece of wood, floating downstream.

  This metaphoric conception of life was exclusively mine: I hadn’t read it anywhere. I realized even then that it was essentially religious, but I wasn’t interested in knowing what religion it came from or with which religion it harmonized the best. Probably in those years I thought that it was a kind of pantheism. It wasn’t. Neither was it a form of resignation or passivity in the face of existence. Simply put, my attitude consisted in a great modesty in the face of the world, and in a wish to be light, and to go with the flow of existence.220

  Sina and Cinna

  The more I investigate the history of my family, the more I understand the achievement that was our childhood. It
is true that, even as children, we had at least some idea of our family’s past tragedies; I remember the convulsion that images of concentration camps and the Holocaust provoked in me when I first saw them, at the age of ten or so. People didn’t take as much pleasure in violent images back then. When I was a boy, I found movies like Dracula and Frankenstein absolutely terrifying, and the war scenes from Gone with the Wind, which I saw as a child in Berkeley, made me run to the bathroom to vomit, dizzied by the nausea of horror. And so those photos of living human skeletons wandering around Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz, and of piles of dead bodies surrounded by soldiers, were unassimilable and simply beyond belief.

  But it is also true that we had the means to distance ourselves from those images. Speaking of the past repetitively and out loud served to domesticate it, to separate it from us even as we learned to live with it. Even so, this sort of distancing was made a lot easier because, when I saw those pictures, nobody accented their impact by telling me that the parents of my beloved grandfather Misha had died pretty much in that way. Neither did my father tell us of the many aunts, uncles, and cousins that he had lost in precisely those camps. In fact, Cinna never told me about that, and when I asked him just a few years ago for information about the family members that he had lost before and during the war, he could not retrieve a single name. Maybe by that point he truly had blocked all recollection, I’m not sure.

  The war left my father with a very small family and, with the exception of our strong connection to my grandmother, we didn’t grow up very close to them. After Cinna died, however, I contacted one of his nieces on his mother’s side, on the Aronsfrau side, Vivianne, who provided me with a detailed genealogy of that family, from the mid-nineteenth century forward. I see in it a number of relatives who were killed during the war: Chaskel Aronsfrau (died in Paris, 1944); Leib Aronsfrau and his wife, Eva Holander (Auschwitz, 1943), as well as their daughter, Leonore Aronsfrau (Auschwitz, 1943); Chane Aronsfrau (Bochnia, Poland, 1943) and her husband, Israel Fallman (Lacko, Poland, 1942); Frieda Langenauer (wife of Jakob Aronsfrau, Auschwitz, 1942) and her daughters, Fanny and Monique Aronsfrau (Auschwitz, 1942); Leon Aronsfrau (Brussels, 1944). All of these people were close relatives of my grandmother Bronislawa; some were brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, or sisters-in-law, and some were nieces.

  The Lomnitz family, 1937, minus my grandparents and Aunt Wally, who had already emigrated: (top, from left) Walter, Leska, Gunther, Ferdinand Margulies, Augusta, Sydney; (bottom) Oma Betty, Opa Siegfried, Lieselotte, Magda.

  And yet, when I asked my father for the names of the relatives who died during the Holocaust, he seemed not to remember. He couldn’t identify a single one by name. And this troubled me, because he had known many — and probably all — of those who had died then: Cinna left Germany when he was already eight years old and he lived in Brussels until he was thirteen, but most of the family had also moved there. It was from Brussels that the Nazis deported those who died in Auschwitz. Others had been shot there, or else in Paris, where a few managed to hide and survive the entire war. These were my father’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. Was my father’s blocked memory an expression of trauma? Remorse? Desire to protect his children from fear and powerlessness, as he himself had been protected? I’m not sure.

  When I pushed Cinna a bit more on this subject, he responded:

  My parents didn’t tell us anything, because they were overprotective; they didn’t want us to suffer anxiety. Sure, my brother Eric and I knew that there were some evildoers out there named “Hitler” and “Goering,” but what had they done? Why were they so bad? Who knew? Eric and I liked to look at animal pictures in Brehm’s Life of Animals,221 and when we came across some ugly toads, we named them “Hitler” or “Goering.” There was never any talk of the relatives who had stayed behind, nor of anything that might be traumatic. My father was by nature discreet and reserved, and my mother knew all about the psychological complexes that were so fashionable then, and she had read Freud.222

  On the Lomnitz side of the family, my grandfather Kurt’s brother Sydney was killed at Auschwitz together with his wife, Magda, and their two children, Lieselotte and Klaus, and so were his sister Augusta and her husband, Ferdinand Margulies.

  Still, I think that my father remembered more than he let on. Maybe his parents had been able to hide less from him than he cared to admit, or else he found things out that he had later suppressed, forgotten, and did not wish to tell me about.

  One moving thing about writing this book is that it has gifted me with information that I lacked when I had those frustrating conversations with Cinna. Writing is a transformative art that provides writers with space and time for reflection — this is well known — but I had thought less about how writing also mobilizes friends, fellow travelers, and loved ones who may reach out to help in whatever ways they can.

  Just a few weeks before this book entered production, my aunt Barbara, who is the widow of my uncle Eric and so my father’s sister-in-law, and who lives in London, found and sent me my grandmother Bronis’s autobiography. This manuscript, though very brief, is especially precious because silence was such a cardinal fact in her and my father’s lives. Its five pages made me understand that my grandmother Bronis was a much more formidable character than I had given her credit for, and it also offered information that I had long thought was irretrievable.

  My grandmother Bronis in a dress reminiscent of the Viennese style painted by Klimt, with Cinna (right) and Eric (left). Santiago de Chile, c. 1940.

  For instance, Bronis writes a few lines about how she and my grandfather heard of the plight of their families back in Belgium while they were already safe in Santiago. That is, about their experience of some of the facts Cinna seemed to have forgotten:

  We had escaped — but there they are, our brothers and sisters who had not believed in the threat and the danger. The news are bad — the visas we had sent, they came too late. The countries had closed their doors — even our friendly, hospitable Chile. The letters which came in the beginning now they don’t come any more. New words like deportation, camps, extermination, Auschwitz are daily heard in our community — and there is silence…

  I should feel guilty. There they were dying, our whole family, millions. Here we are closing our eyes, our minds, and enjoying selfishly every minute of the children’s lives…A big garden, full of flowers and trees, big enough for the children to play, to have animals, to invite friends.223

  I think that Cinna’s somewhat sarcastic reference to Freud as the source of his mother’s overprotectiveness is a kind of obfuscation, because if concern with trauma was once an intellectual fashion, this didn’t mean that my father and his parents didn’t suffer from it. And of course Cinna knew this, and indeed Freud’s exploration of repression might have helped him better to decipher his father’s silence and his mother’s overprotective impulses.

  After Cinna’s death, while I was still engaged in basic research for this book, I wrote to Barbara, and I asked her for information on Lomnitz family history. She is a relative by marriage rather than by blood, of course, but there appeared to be no one else left to ask, and although Barbara didn’t know all that much about the family, she did tell me one thing that I was surprised not to have known about before, and this was that my grandmother Bronis’s father had been murdered. According to Barbara, he had been killed by an employee who wanted to steal from him. She didn’t know anything else about the case, though. She didn’t even know the man’s name, though he was her late husband’s grandfather, and the father of a mother-in-law who had lived very close to her for a couple of decades, suggesting that neither Bronis nor Eric had said much about it.

  I then asked my mother if she had heard this story, and much to my surprise she had. My grandmother Bronis had confided to my mother in secret that her father had been murdered, and that the deed had been the work of the Nazis, very early in their moveme
nt. My mother likewise couldn’t remember my great-grandfather’s name. Cinna, for his part, never mentioned him to me or to any of my siblings, and he was now dead, so I could no longer ask him about it.

  The few discussions that I did try to have with Cinna about his family had often ended up frustrating us both. I was especially irritated by one of his answers in an email exchange on the subject of our family’s losses: “It was extremely useful to me to read Ernst Jünger’s war diary,” he wrote, “because it’s a single thread of memory. Jünger writes at one point that life is like one of those Gobelin tapestries with lace made from a single thread. Our history is like that. I lived through the Holocaust as Jünger did: through distant, sporadic, and disconnected news that nonetheless formed a single thread.”224

  Distant and disconnected news? Apparently, the Nazis had killed his maternal grandfather for being Jewish, years before the war had even begun! The family then left Germany just months after Hitler’s election. Some emigrated to Belgium and others to France, and they were then murdered in concentration camps or on the street. Cinna, his brother Eric, and their parents managed to find their way to Chile. Where did Cinna’s sense of distance and disconnection come from, if not from that cloud of obfuscation that Cinna chalked up to Freud’s influence on his mother, rather than to trauma itself?