Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  Nevertheless, Bronis was content to allow her children to believe that a murder that had been motivated by class and racial hatred had been nothing but a common robbery gone awry. Maybe this was my grandmother’s way of displacing the horror of Nazism by turning it into a more diffuse fear of the lower classes, with their “dangerous infections.” Her father had been murdered by his neighbors. One should beware of one’s neighbors. My father rebelled against his mother’s dread of the poor, but he did not have the heart to force her to speak out loud of the terror she felt as a result of Nazi violence. He needed to protect her from that.

  My grandmother was forced to live with fear during my father’s entire childhood. Probably even my grandfather felt it. Given the rapid spread of Nazism during the 1920s and 1930s, it was wise to be secretive about Sina Aronsfrau’s murder and, if it was ever necessary to speak of it, to endorse the official story that it had been a common crime, a theft gone awry rather than a political execution. The assassins of the Organisation Consul were heroes of the Nazi Party long before Hitler’s electoral triumph, a fact that was recognized in the months immediately following his election. Thus, in July 1933, the new regime had the “martyrs” who had killed Rathenau reburied, and dedicated a new memorial stone to Fischer and Kern that reads:

  Do what you must

  Triumph or Die

  And leave the decision

  to God

  The commemorative speech that was delivered on that solemn occasion was delivered by SA chief of staff Ernst Röhm (who would be executed by Hitler a year later), and it recognized those assassins in the following terms: “Your spirit, Kern and Fischer, is the spirit of the SS, the black-uniformed soldiers of Hitler…”242 That same Fischer, “der Geist der SS,” was among my great-grandfather’s killers. It was safer to pretend that he had been murdered by common thieves.

  My grandmother then placed a veil over both the cause of Sina Aronsfrau’s death and her dedication of her son to her murdered father’s memory, by claiming that “Cinna” was a traditional family name, rather than a distorted version of her father’s name. It is understandable that my grandfather let her do this. My grandmother’s overprotection of Cinna — her “poor Cinna” — also allowed her to perform the protection that she had not been able to extend to her father, her siblings, or her nephews. Overprotecting Cinna helped her to forget her own impotence.

  A sketchbook drawing by Cinna presented as a gift to his father on his birthday, the first celebrated in Chile, on February 16, 1939, with a melancholic photograph of Bronis.

  I think that Cinna, who was very sensitive, understood this, and allowed himself to be “poor Cinna” during his childhood and adolescence, and maybe even until he began his socialist and Zionist activism and moved to Israel. Until that moment, at least, Cinna carried out a passive rebellion, which consisted in taking what his mother asked of him to the extreme: isolation. But alongside his rebellion, he always protected his mother. Cinna understood that, despite its extraordinary personal cost, vulnerability was something that his mother needed from him.

  The author of my days

  Parents no longer have the authority they once did. In what sense is a father the “author of his son’s days”? Today, the patriarch Abraham would be in jail for attempted infanticide, and it seems nothing short of grotesque to imagine one’s father as a sovereign who can deal with his children as he sees fit. This figure of authorship seems especially inept in the case of my soft-spoken father, who was so punctiliously respectful and also so painfully reserved. Was Cinna in any sense “the author of my days”?

  Given the inadequacy of this idea of paternal authorship, let us weigh one “minimalist” alternative. Perhaps I might consider my father as “the author of my days” because he was my genitor — that is, he had the faith to procreate as a conscious act. In this there could indeed be authorship, since the decision to reproduce can be a deliberate act, like the creative action of an author. Nevertheless, this image of authorship dissipates at the very moment a father meets his new child.

  A father is inevitably surprised by his children, because he will always find in them something of what Freud called unheimliche, which can be translated as “sinister” or “uncanny,” although it refers most precisely to the discovery or recognition of something profoundly known in what is apparently unfamiliar. More than anything, a father is surprised by his child, who is someone radically new, a stranger, but who then immediately begins to manifest a second order of strangeness that stems not from difference but from similarity. This eruption of deep familiarity in the child offers instants in which the father recognizes himself as author; but such moments are in fact movements in a dance of continual separation and encounter, of identification and radical differentiation.

  This dialectic between the unknown and the known can incite a father to try to mold his children in his image, to “straighten them out.” Because the father recognizes so much of himself in his child, he can feel tempted to use his power to make the child resemble him. This is the father as master, as a monster who wants his child to live up to the narcissistic image he has of himself. The opposite alternative is also monstrous — the absent or negligent father, who doesn’t even try to have a connection with his children.

  The education that my father gave me avoided these extremes. Cinna’s maternal language was German, but the indelible trauma of Nazism caused him not to teach it to us. In this sense, Cinna did not reproduce himself in us, not even in this fundamental way: we do not share his mother tongue. Neither did he make us study piano, which he — as the son of a musician — had been compelled to learn. At times I resented Cinna’s negligence, since it fostered a kind of intergenerational impoverishment: my father spoke six languages, and I only speak four. And while I do have musical inclinations, I never learned to play piano or read music well.

  Still, I also intuited that there was in all of this a desire to protect us from the monstrosity of his unspoken past; of the pain of survival, and of the difficulties that accompany holding on to customs in exile. Cinna tried to teach me to live both with emigration and assimilation. He wanted to show me also how to be like a stone, a part of the landscape. But there was also in all of this an inclination to respect the individual personalities of his children, and to allow us to flourish in the New World.

  Cinna forced neither German nor piano on us, and since we weren’t made to study, we never learned them. But in exchange he raised us in a free environment, filled with conversation and lived experiences, and he didn’t get in the way of each one of his children developing according to his inclinations. There was in this an idea of the overwhelming greatness of the world; a deep recognition that the world exceeded him; and in a place like that, it was better that each one of us exercised our own imagination. In the end, our fathers are never capable of rescuing us from what the world sets before us. In his educational stance with respect to his children, my father always emphasized this limitation.

  Bigger but smaller

  With the war now a distant memory, and with strong doses of intergenerational amnesia fully administered, my brothers and I were able to enjoy a dreamlike childhood, full of trips and adventures.

  I remember so much beauty from my Chilean childhood! All of those places outside of Santiago and the day trips to the country with the families of my parents’ friends. We called them all “uncles” and “aunts,” and we had in this way an enormous family: Uncle Chago and Aunt Ruth, Uncle Peter and Aunt Rebeca, Uncle Daniel and Aunt Chofi, Aunt Choli and Uncle Hans…We kids would disappear among the rocks at Cajón del Maipo, exploring its secret caves and scaling its granite boulders. We felt like heroes, and we never complained. We went wherever they took us, we slept wherever we had to sleep, and ate whatever there was to eat, having the time of our lives.

  Those places are still so powerful for me that just to say their names invokes them with absolute efficacy: El
Cajón del Maipo, El Quisco, Tongoy, Concón, Villa Rica, Vichuquén, Tatalafquén…The plot that my parents bought and then sold for a loss in Los Domínicos. It was then surrounded by countryside and was attached to the house owned by the writer José Donoso, who still wasn’t that famous back then. Their other piece of land, also sold for a pittance, on the beach at Cachagua…And the trip to Peru that made such a mark on me. Machu Picchu wrapped for moments in mist and everything wet with the tiny drops, empty, practically empty, for my brothers and me to run through it and lose ourselves among its stone houses. The floating islands of the Uro Indians on Lake Titicaca. The train down the narrow bed of the Urubamba River, with the steps of the Inca terrace farms descending from the hills.

  I always thought I came from the perfect family. I loved it so much! We had true freedom. Few rules, and the ones that were there seemed mainly to guarantee safety and respect. Authority was what it was supposed to be: legitimate power. There was openness to curiosity and there was liberality. There was respect for women and an unusual degree of support for my mother on my father’s part.

  Claudio and Jorge.

  My brother Jorge, who was a scientist from the time he was very young, always needed accomplices for his projects: how to distinguish a drone (which doesn’t sting) from a worker bee (which does), for example. There were experiments in physics and entomology, and if you made a mistake there were consequences. The bee would sting you, for example. During my childhood, I was stung by no fewer than twenty-three different bees. Counting the stings was as important as if they were scars earned in a duel of honor. As in every scientific matter, honor was important.

  Another experiment of Jorge’s: to make homemade gunpowder. He bought sulfur at the hardware store (I’m not sure why they sold it), he stole saltpeter from one garden or another, since in Chile it was still used as fertilizer, and so managed to generate toxic yellow clouds, though they never achieved the explosive effect we were looking for. I flourished in this environment, which was at the same time so free and also so silently protected.

  In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, there is a character named Lennie, a mentally disabled giant who loves the softness of animal fur but ends up crushing the little animals that he tries to hold and caress. My brother Jorge used to say that I was like Lennie. I’ve always loved blindly, crushing and smothering.

  Alberto’s laughter.

  When I was nine or ten years old, in Berkeley, I invented a battle cry that I let out every time I was overtaken by one of these uncontrollable attacks of crushing love and suffocation, and I repeated it as I chased after Jorge or Alberto to tackle them, smother them, and lick their faces. Lennie.

  “Cusi!” That’s how my shout began, and upon hearing it, poor Alberto ran like a terrified hare, while I bounded after him, completing the invocation: “Simi bubis cuaxi fatso hashi simi brain!” And then I fell upon him, while the poor kid struggled and kicked, desperate.

  I was happy being a giant Lennie, the faithful wingman for any proposal that came from my older brother, although the complicated effects of being big for my age, a “babysaurus,” as my dear friend Juan Pérez would have put it, increased once I started school.

  Claudio at the Alliance Française. Santiago de Chile, 1963.

  My parents placed me in the French school when I was five years old. Even so, I was taller than the majority of my classmates, who generally started first grade at six. Bigger but smaller. Later, when we moved to California, I skipped a year and entered third grade when I was seven. Capable, maybe, but discreetly small in the end. Free, but discreetly protected. Curious and awake, but secretly ignorant. Today I understand the immensity of that hard-won freedom and protection, and what it cost my grandparents and my parents, who are all gone, and I salute them from here.

  Mesohippus

  My family moved to Berkeley when I was seven years old. It was 1964. As a boy, I caught a glimpse of the Free Speech Movement and later on the flowering of the hippie movement. The arrival of Bob Dylan and rock music. The golden age of Telegraph Avenue, with its throngs of beautiful dropouts, in long skirts or flared jeans, their long hair flowing freely. The black light on phosphorescent posters announcing Jimi Hendrix concerts at the Filmore. The arrival of the Hare Krishnas and incense. Leopold’s Records and Moe’s Books. I’ve always loved Berkeley.

  In December 1964, while my brothers and I were busy discovering the infinite pleasures of color television — nonexistent in Chile at that time — on a gorgeous Sylvania TV set, student activist Mario Savio gave his famous speech against the mechanization and serialization of the university: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part!” It was the start of a generational rift in a struggle against what was then known as the establishment.

  My parents bought an old house in the Kensington section of the Berkeley Hills (250 Cambridge St., telephone no. 524-6447), where we played incessantly. Young professors could still afford those kinds of places back then. We also spent a lot of time on the university campus, because we would often go to pick up my father at his office, and above all because my mother, who had begun her undergraduate studies, brought us at times to the parks for us to play while she read. Three years ago, I gave a lecture at Berkeley, and I strolled through the parks that we had played in: the stream with its cantilever bridge, the dwarfed white oak with its hollow trunk, the shade of the giant redwoods…

  Those were years of discovery for me. My brothers and I attended the Kensington Hilltop School. The hill that led to the school was steep, so we would walk our bikes a good portion of the way up there, and we would coast downhill most of the way home, smelling the wet ivy on people’s front yards. At home, my parents watched the news with Walter Cronkite, which showed the war in Vietnam. In 1968, my brother Jorge, who was turning fourteen, began to let his hair grow and brought home our first Jefferson Airplane album, Surrealistic Pillow.

  My father worked in the Department of Geophysics, which shared a building with Paleontology. Its entrance displayed fossils from the Cenozoic and Mesozoic eras, including a few dinosaur bones. All of that fascinated me. As kids, my brother Jorge had introduced me to obsessive study: a passion for insects, for instance; a fascination with fire, gunpowder, and rockets; for putting together plastic models of planes, cars, and warships with epoxy glue, and a fascination with the heroes of the Iliad, the return of Odysseus, Tintin, Babar, and the Hardy Boys. We built a platform high up in the pine tree behind our house, and Jorge designed a system of cords and pulleys to transmit handwritten messages that, like so many of our inventions, was pretty much useless. But there it was, just in case. We also put together useless collections of stamps…All that.

  Cinna in his study in the Berkeley house with a drawing by Alberto of an elephant and a possible femur.

  One day my father asked a colleague to recommend a good place to go fossil hunting. He suggested a site that wasn’t so very close — the Diablo Foothills beyond Walnut Creek — where they had cut into a hill to make way for a railway line. It was a perfect place to find them, because you could walk along the tracks inspecting the exposed wall of the hill, and start digging wherever you liked. My father chose a narrow cave, and we began to chip away. We would have been happy to have found the fossil remains of a clam, but surprisingly we made a much larger find: the remains of a prehistoric horse. A Mesohippus. It took us hours to remove its skull from the hillside, still full of teeth. We also removed a few vertebrae and returned home late in the day, with our treasure stuffed in plastic bags. We spent months cleaning that fossil with toothbrushes. Thanks to Cinna, the paleontological zeal that beat in our childish hearts brought us a true discovery connected to the evolution of the horse.

  My generous father died on July 7, 2016. My scientific education was mostly in Jorge’s hands, who was also responsible for bringing the counterculture
to our home. But the enchanted world in which we grew had my father as both condition and reference. Today I think that his laissez-faire attitude toward our disorganized investigations was influenced by the libertarian spirit of the Mario Savios of Berkeley, and perhaps also by that unforgettable stanza of Dylan’s, which reads almost as if it were a blessing from my father:

  May God bless and keep you always

  May your wishes all come true

  May you always do for others

  And let others do for you

  May you build a ladder to the stars

  And climb on every rung

  May you stay forever young…

  Rainbow scarab

  We arrived in Mexico from Berkeley in June 1968. We moved into an old house in the Pedregal, which had originally been a kindergarten and was demolished after we moved out. It was full of empty rooms that we could use for whatever we liked. To keep us entertained, my mother placed Jorge, Alberto, and me in an entomology class at the Museo de Historia Natural.

  This was the year of the student movement and the Olympics in Mexico City, and soon after our arrival the army occupied the National University (UNAM), where my father worked. I remember seeing a burning bus one day when we went to get him. I remember also the hazing that was practiced on UNAM students back then, you could see young men with their shaved heads riding the city buses. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid played for a full year at the Cine Insurgentes. The horror of Mexican conservatism, after all of the experimentation in Berkeley, was also in full view, and the brutality of its class structure, too. Yes. But above all, I remember marveling at the landscapes and all the towns and villages that we came to know by way of a tireless search for beetles and butterflies.