At the same time that I was taught to believe in human benevolence, striving and progress, that people were basically good at heart, as Anne Frank famously and mistakenly wrote, that virtue would be rewarded but in any case should be practiced for its own sake, and that if everyone obeyed the Golden Rule, all would be well (in school, every classroom had a poster displaying the Golden Rule)—at the same time, the Nuremburg trials were going on. I didn’t know about them; I never heard any adult mention them. I don’t know when I became aware of them, maybe not until I saw the movie with Maximilian Schell and Montgomery Clift. Montgomery Clift played a victim who had been castrated, which seemed to have affected his mind as well as his body. He couldn’t summon the words to say what had been done to him, but I figured it out. I still remember his halting testimony on the screen, and the roiling it worked up in my gut. It was inconceivable that such things could happen. That people could do such things to one another. And this not even in the ancient days of chariots and gladiators I knew about from books. Not even so long ago.
I don’t imagine that past generations of American children were burdened with such innocence. Without any public pretense of progress and decency, they couldn’t have helped but notice early on that human beings can be bestial, though some are more bestial than others. Surely today’s children, wedded to television and video games, cannot remain innocent. And for all I know, my experience, that is, my ignorance, was typical only of my neighborhood, my schools, my family. Every family, after all, is its own minuscule, distorted reflection of the culture at large. But even if other children knew more, those with fathers and brothers returning or not returning from the war, those with mothers working in wartime industries, the public optimism and euphemisms were pervasive.
And short-lived. My own children, born in the 1960s, were knowing early on, even ironic, about the human bent for violence and destruction. They knew there was a war winding down in Vietnam and they knew about the assassinations that had taken place in their infancy, and not only because I told them. It was impossible not to know. The 1960s, which were really the late 1960s and the 1970s, are maligned now, as if all the ruckus was simply drugs and sex and adolescent rebellion, but that is bad press, the opposite of whitewashing. One of the pleasures of the 1960s was their no-holds-barred truth-telling; more truth was spoken in public during those years than ever since, and the truth-tellers were loud.
There were loud words spoken in my household too, and often truthful ones. While my mother was being good and preaching goodness, my father stomped through our small, cozy rooms shouting his bitter views: that religion was the opiate of the people, that altruism was the mask of self-interest, that the Marshall Plan was not so much generosity as a way of insuring eventual markets for American goods. “Markets, markets, it’s all markets,” he sputtered, waving his arms in the air and making the venetian blinds and the knick-knacks on the mantel tremble. Yet loud as he was, he couldn’t shake my mother’s quieter belief in the triumph of moral benevolence. And she was the more reliable guide to the zeitgeist.
I think I didn’t take my father’s views seriously because they were expressed with such vehemence; there was a quality of parody to his rages, and if they hadn’t been so frightening they might have been comic. Their over-the-top volume spoiled whatever force of truth they might bear. It was a kind of preview of what happened with the 1960s, although my father could hardly approve of the countercultural antics. Still, the pattern was the same: if you don’t like the messenger’s style, just dismiss the message. But a calm demeanor doesn’t guarantee reliability; some screamers are screaming truth.
I started school after the war was over. Captivity. The walls of the prison house closing in. That any school was a wretched place to spend one’s childhood, I grasped from the first day. In the mornings, each class of about thirty had to form a double line in the concrete, fenced-in school yard, holding hands with our partners, sweaty in spring, mittened in winter. The lines had to be kept straight, and no talking was allowed. We were supervised and silenced by older children called guards (their real title was guides, but we always called them guards). The guards wore white bands diagonally across their chests to show their status. The captain of the guards was a sixth-grade boy, the only black child in the school. Later on, in junior high and high school, there were a few black kids among us and they blended in, but I never went to their houses and only once invited a black girl to mine. Racial tension was beyond neighborhood boundaries, out of sight. The black people we saw were maids who came once a week to scrub, then conveniently disappeared, back to their unknown regions, about which no curiosity was ever voiced. It wouldn’t be until the mid-1950s that the people on our block would notice that the maids and their families were not entirely contented with their lot.
In fact, curiosity about anything, curiosity as a character trait, was faintly mocked at home, as were travel and adventure. Curious probing would let in information, knowledge that might threaten received wisdom. Every time my wanderlusting uncle took off on another trip to some exotic-sounding place, my mother would shake her head and chuckle, as if to say, Why on earth would anyone bother? I liked that word, exotic. I would ask my mother to cook something exotic for dinner, or implore that we go somewhere exotic on vacation rather than to the stultifying mountains, until exotic became a household joke, as if my hankering were both quaint and foolish.
School, at any rate, was anything but exotic or adventurous. At the clang of a bell, we were allowed into the classroom, where the regimentation continued, everything done in unison, in silence, in perfect order. Why did we have to line up, anyway? We weren’t attending a military academy, just an ordinary public school in an ordinary lower-to-middle-class neighborhood. Why couldn’t we stand around in spontaneous clumps? For the convenience of the authorities, so they could keep track of us more easily. Why couldn’t we speak? To teach discipline, I suppose, because from discipline sprang order and all good things. One junior high school teacher forbade the opening and closing of the metal rings in loose-leaf notebooks. Random clicking created noise, noise led to disorder, and disorder led to communism.
If we heard virtually nothing of the recent war, we did hear a lot about communism. Communism—or rather anticommunism—came along to fill the space in the collective brain that should have been occupied by pondering the war, its origins, its meaning. Teaching us to hate communism replaced teaching about the methodical extermination of millions of people, or that there had been a war at all. A similar displacement, in quite different circumstances, happened after the 2001 attack on our country. There was little public effort to examine its historical causes. As long as we have an undisputed and fanatical villain to blame, further thought gets shut down. To understand forces at work larger than Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda doesn’t grip our imaginations or engage our energies. What enlivens us instead are fears and threats. Just as I was trained to crouch under my school desk in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians, today we deepen the color of the terrorist threat—yellow to orange to red. Moral righteousness calls the tune, and fright is the beat we dance to.
Miss Koslowski, the seventh-grade history teacher, was hunchbacked, tiny, and embittered, the terror of junior high. She was famous for making strong boys weep if they hadn’t done the homework or forgot the reasons for the Boxer Rebellion. In method and sensibility she was a Stalinist through and through, who would stride up and down the five rows of desks kicking any feet that were sticking out in the aisles. But regardless of her Stalinist sensibilities, her ideology was fiercely anticommunist; her warmest words were reserved for Alexander Kerensky.
Miss Koslowski’s pedagogical strategy—and in this she was emblematic of the times—was to reduce all complexity to outline form. Three reasons for British imperialism, and three subreasons for each reason. Three reasons for the Sino-Japanese war. Three reasons for World War I. History, according to Miss Koslowski, had been considerate enough to arrange itself in an easily parsable
network of reasons, and if we simply memorized the outlines and categories, our understanding would be complete. Unraveling that notion took quite some time.
For the five months I spent in her classroom, I lived in dread, a miasma of the soul. I always kept my feet out of the aisles and did my homework in neat outline form and was prepared to answer any and all questions in case I was called on, to avoid the mortification Miss Koslowski inflicted daily. Each night before I went to bed I crossed off the day on a calendar I kept in a night-table drawer and counted how many of my days remained in her classroom. It was a secret misery. I never—none of us ever—thought of complaining to our parents or to anyone at school. We accepted without question that we must endure whatever school imposed on us. Collective action or rebellion was inconceivable, which is probably why I feel sympathetic to the student rebels of 1968. I would have gladly have joined them on the barricades, but I was recently out of school and having babies at the time. I wish it had occurred to me in junior high school to refuse and resist. But acquiescence to authority had the force of learned routine. It was like brushing your teeth; you simply had to do it.
I think another reason we kept silent about Miss Koslowski and similar petty school sadists was to protect our parents. (In my case, my mother. My father knew plenty about sadism: he’d spent his first eleven years as a Jew in a small town near Kiev. But for that very reason he would have dismissed the minor barbarities of Miss Koslowski.) We were hesitant to shatter the idea of the benevolent universe they were trying so valiantly to foist on us. We were being kind, bearing the burden ourselves.
Something else I never told: I was thirteen, crossing a street near home just after dark, when a boy my age or younger suddenly appeared in the dim light and grabbed my left breast. He squeezed and let go and hurried away. I was so startled that I didn’t even speak. The whole thing didn’t take five seconds. It is taking far longer to write about it. I wasn’t frightened. He disappeared before I could feel any fright. Before I could even think, he was gone into the gathering night. Besides, what did I know to fear? Nothing ever happened in our little neighborhood. There was no one more dangerous on the streets than the toothless old woman—the witch, we called her—from the shabby end of the block; she kept chickens and glared when we rode by on our bikes (any passing cars kindly slowing down). We walked around at all hours and never got mugged; I didn’t know what mugging was.
What I was, was stunned. Why would anyone do that? What could impel him? It wasn’t like the boys at dimly lit parties trying to inch their fingers towards a breast. I understood that. But this? The only pleasure he could find in his act was the pleasure of startling and distressing me. I had no notion of sexual politics back then, so the fact that I was a girl alone on the street didn’t enter into my thinking. What stunned me was the gratuitousness of it, that someone would choose to cause pain and shock in a total stranger.
I didn’t suffer any physical harm, only the insult. And beyond that, the affront to my notion of what could happen in my safe, familiar backwater. It was like a match struck in the dark, murky pit of human motivation, just long enough to show a darkness, not long enough to illuminate it. It was one of the great shocks of my life, not of course the act itself but the sheer surprise. Of course it’s nothing compared to what I’ve known and witnessed since, to what I read in the papers every day. As we used to say in Brooklyn, that should be the least of my troubles. When I recall it, I no longer feel insulted; his act seems ridiculous. But I do recall it. And I still feel a residue of shock. It was a baffling bit of aggression for which my childhood in America left me totally unequipped.
Years later I learned that everyone in my neighborhood, even my innocent-seeming mother, knew and did all sorts of things I would never have dreamed possible. Mr. K., two houses to the right of ours, beat his wife; she sometimes screamed from the upstairs bedroom window, but when she walked out and greeted the neighbors she was super genteel, the most ladylike of all the local ladies. The father of a friend of mine, Mr. B., a buildings inspector married to a schoolteacher, was being investigated for bribes and kickbacks; that explained why he was home from work so much of the time. Dr. S., a podiatrist and father of another friend, lived half-time with his secretary. I had once gone to his nearby office—also her apartment—and met the scarlet woman. That explained why Dr. S. was so rarely home for dinner. Rumor had it that Dr. G. had performed an abortion on his late wife and inadvertently killed her. One of my cousins married a woman who at age eighteen had eloped with someone highly unsuitable—I never found out in what way. She was damaged goods, but the family generously overlooked that brief escapade and turned out in force for the wedding. Long ago one of my mother’s cousins had run over a pedestrian while driving; this explained why his wife always drove, in those days an unusual practice. And on and on.
I found these stories delectable, better than what I read in books because they were true. My mother and older sister would drop them into conversation offhandedly, as if I’d surely figured them out by that time. Hearing them, I felt I’d had a deprived youth. As if there were a whole range of colors or musical notes I’d never been aware of, some of them ugly but all of them exciting, opening up vistas of possibility.
The urge to blame someone or something for my deprivation is very strong. Blaming was a strategy I grew up with; it went hand in hand with the faith in human decency. Blaming was a comfort, and comfort was high on our scale of values. For the older generation, which had endured the war, having a clear villain to blame—Hitler and the Germans—was so satisfying that this brand of comfort became irresistible, addictive. If villains could be found to blame for everything, then evil could be localized and kept in check, like an epidemic. Decent people could remain immune, not just from corruption but from thought.
But who can be blamed for one’s own innocence? The spread of illusions about human nature (that it is benign) and human possibility (that it is small) was not deliberate or ill-intentioned; those who fooled me were fooling themselves as well. I can hardly blame a whole era, either. Others of my age caught on faster to what we are and do. The evidence was everywhere, for those with eyes to see.
I can conclude only that some people are born with a tendency to innocence, like a tropism. Or a caul over the eye, the mind. Every day, I rip off the caul, or it’s ripped off by the morning news—the war, the tortures, corporate theft, government lies on one side and pusillanimity on the other, the litany that accompanies the first cup of coffee. Every night, as I sleep and dream, the caul creeps back, like a bad habit. I don’t prize innocence, yet it clings to me. I don’t want to believe I could do the things I read about in the papers, even under extreme pressure. If nothing human is alien to me, then maybe I don’t want to be human. A dead-end notion if ever there was one.
In the end, the need to believe in human decency is too deeply buried to be unearthed, too tightly knotted in my history to unravel. If it has any use at all, it is to keep me in a perpetual state of wonder. And wonder makes for writing, which is one way of redeeming our failures. If not effective, it’s at least clarifying. Consoling.
Carlos Saura’s Cria!
Whenever Cria!, the 1976 movie directed by Carlos Saura, is shown in my vicinity, I have to see it. This doesn’t happen very often. Saura has been one of Spain’s most prolific and admired filmmakers for nearly half a century, but in this country, he hasn’t had the popular success of his mentor, Luis Buñuel, or younger compatriot, Pedro Almodóvar. Not long ago, though, Cria! was shown in New York City along with some two dozen of Saura’s more than forty films, so naturally I went.
There are only a handful of movies I’ve felt compelled to see more than once, and what keeps me coming back are the most flagrantly obvious moments. In the realms of literature and music I may be an educated consumer, but when it comes to films, my tastes don’t run to the subtle. The Third Man, for the way Alida Valli, at the very end, turns her back on nerdy Joseph Cotton and walks down the road from the c
emetery, alone and haughty. The Prize, one of the all-time great bad movies, for the mistaken-identity ploy that has Edward G. Robinson croaking, with his last breath, “But I’m an actor! Only an actor!”
With Cria!, a brooding yet exhilarating family drama set at the end of the Franco era, it’s nothing so specific. If I had to choose one scene, it would be the three sisters, recently orphaned, dancing in their bedroom in a well-appointed, gloomy house in the middle of Madrid. Their dancing goes on for quite a while; Saura loves dancing of all kinds and did a documentary devoted to flamenco. I wouldn’t mind if it went on for hours. It’s that magical—for me, an enduring image through which the rest of the film is refracted. This time, when I saw Cria!, I wanted to deconstruct its spell.
What entrances is not only the music, the Spanish pop tune “Porque te vas,” about love and loss, plaintive yet lively. I can hear it in my head as I write. Nor is it the dancing itself, though the girls are beautiful to watch, each in her own way. Irene, the oldest, around twelve, in her jeans and tight shirt already shows intimations of a woman’s body, and her swaying gestures verge on the sexy, yet she’s still a child. Slender Ana, the protagonist (played by Ana Torrent) and middle girl, about eight or nine, moves like a twig in a faint breeze, her face an enigma, partly amused, preternaturally wise. Maite, about five, has the round stomach and rooted stance of early childhood; her face is jolly and serene and her body bounces with enthusiasm as she imitates what her big sisters do.
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