Gloria had some gray hair now and she wore it short. She never married, she didn’t have children; during the first few years he visited her in Barcelona she used to tell him about her occasional adventures. It’d been years, however, since Gloria had updated him on her amorous escapades, as if she didn’t have the age for it anymore, or as if she believed that Diego didn’t care about that aspect of her life anymore. He didn’t know whether Gloria had completely lost all interest in men, or if, simply, and given that she enjoyed touching upon other subjects with him, she did it to make better use of the little time they had together; Diego wasn’t very keen on talking about his sentimental life around that time either.
It’s funny what some relationships are based on: on which subjects and premises, on which tones and unwritten rules. With Gloria, especially, he talked about art, about the last films they’d seen and the latest books they’d read. “What are you translating?” she would ask him in those early visits, and Diego told her what he was immersed in, what he’d translated the previous year and what plans he had for the following: the books he translated made up Diego’s biography, that was the truth. Nineteen eighty-seven was the year of Tolstoy; 1988, the year of Gogol; 1989 was the year in which he fell in love with Anna Akhmatova’s writings…Later on, when Diego Lazkano started to publish his own novels, they started to talk about the books he would never write.
Although in the past they’d had heated political arguments, these days they hardly touched the subject, except to mention people’s general meekness in the face of the incommensurable ability of neoliberal politics to poke fingers in our eyes, or to invent package bombs virtually placed in electricity and phone companies. They were childishly passionate in those areas – incendiary, even, some would say – but it never occurred to them that their passion might travel if they got emotionally involved. Or maybe it was so long ago since it had crossed their minds that they didn’t remember it anymore. Diego’s distant approaches toward her had been so timorous, Gloria could scarcely have interpreted them as approaches. Gloria didn’t know that Diego had joined the theater group because he found her attractive when he saw her putting posters up in search of new members. He feels vertigo now when he thinks how young they had been, as if more than eighty of Oteiza’s grandmothers stood between them. It was Diego’s juvenile hesitation that made him behave with excessive caution. Hesitation? Maybe it was only the simple, plain naïveté of his candid youthfulness that drove him to understand that a friendship like that was worth preserving, or maybe it was just the classic fear of outright rejection. Passionate conversations and carnal attraction can be compatible, but back then he thought that their relationship couldn’t reach such heights of compatibility; and now their ability to share bodies and intimacy had become lazy, or maybe they found it somewhat passé; Diego didn’t feel that taut arch he used to feel when he visited Gloria in Barcelona. He didn’t feel like Ulay anymore, holding the arrow pointing straight into Marina Abramović’s heart. From a certain perspective, it was actually kind of relaxing.
Although she came from a well-off family, Gloria never kept much of a relationship with her parents after she left home immediately after her eighteenth birthday. Not at least to ask them for money. The word Gloria used most often to refer to her family was facha – fascists. She led quite the Spartan life since she cast aside her theater experience to escape to Barcelona and become an artist. Although she had shown a great talent for leading groups back in the days when they worked together, she always worked alone now. She grew tired of hanging out with people; apparently, she wasn’t willing to put up with any egomaniacs (a word she used often). “I’ve enough with my own inner orchestra, thanks,” she used to say. She was now a visual artist – Lazkano had attended a couple of her very popular openings – though Diego suspected she hadn’t advanced very far in the jungle that was the art world: although her work was exhibited in several galleries, it hardly sold, and – at least as far as Diego knew – no museums or big corporations had ever purchased any of her works for their collections. Diego couldn’t help but notice that, lately, Gloria was losing friends: unlike in previous years, during this visit her phone had hardly made a noise. His friend was isolating herself in Barcelona.
“Another bottle?”
“Not for me, I’ve been drinking less lately.”
She had a loft in the foothills of Montjuic: a place to live and work; life and art all in one, in the Marina Abramović sense. Even after cooking, the smells of acrylic paints, emanating from abstract paintings finished long ago, imposed themselves over the grilled eggplant. Despite that, Lazkano liked dining there, especially in the summer, as they contemplated the enormous orange-scented marijuana plants that they’d sample with coffee, the distant cars and the city lights down there, both nothing but murmurs; auditory murmurs and luminary murmurs dulled by the distance.
That day they spoke about forgiveness. About shame and guilt. About the copilot of the Enola Gay, who decided to become a clumsy sculptor.
But dropping the Hiroshima bomb required something more than a feeling of guilt.
“So, according to you, what should he have done? Kill himself?”
“Some people have done just that.”
“One thing is to feel guilty, but, was he really guilty? Guilty of what? Of having chosen a profession? Of having become a soldier? It was his luck to be on a plane with a specific mission: he didn’t know they were dropping an atomic bomb. He was the copilot of Enola Gay, that’s all…what was he guilty of? Of having chosen to become a soldier instead of a whisky brewer in Kentucky?”
“Now you’re adding flowers from your own harvest, Gloria: I don’t think he was from Kentucky, precisely. It says here that Robert Lewis was from New Jersey…and a soldier.”
“I don’t fucking care if he was a soldier or if he worked at a gas station…”
“I do: that’s the difference between you and me.”
“It’s a choice to be a soldier, an option that can be the consequence of a certain kind of education or very limited life expectations, an option that can be hard, unavoidable, or innocent, or can well be free, intentional, and vocational…Who knows what his case was…On ninety percent of occasions, it’s a lack of consciousness that drives us to do things. They must have had their reasons, but you’re mistaken if you put all soldiers in the same bag.”
“In the same duffel bag, you mean…”
“Yes, he took part in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, so what? He didn’t know what it was, exactly, he couldn’t have guessed the effect an atomic bomb would have. In a sense, he just did his job…”
“Following your logic, the Nazis did the same…”
“The Nazis did the same, true: the idea of the chain of command is very well thought. We all carry inside an obedient being, willing to work for the Devil.”
“I believe in individual freedom, I fought so that things would change…”
“And did they change?”
“Maybe they didn’t…or at least not in the sense and in the direction we hoped. Things…things seemed possible back then. But if we hadn’t fought the present situation would not be what it is, and I doubt that if we’d been more docile…”
Lazkano could see ants in his mind. “Dale una pasara con esto. Wipe with this. “We’re going to let him go, right?” “Let’s submerge ourselves in subjectivity.” Differently, perhaps, but he also felt guilty. Had he ever crossed paths, unknowingly, with some relative, some friend of the engineer?
“You’ve Soto and Zeberio in mind, don’t you?”
“They never even had the chance to fight…They held up a bank…with toy guns…”
“I think about them too…I warned you, I told you you’d end up badly…”
Diego Lazkano was uncomfortable. He didn’t want to go down that path.
“We’re detouring. We were talking about the atomic bomb.”
“About Robert Lewis: twenty-five years after dropping the bomb, he started sculpt
ing a piece of marble, a statue, in his garage…”
“Do you call that art? It’s a crude image.”
“What matters is that he found a means of escape from his anguish…and the title he gave the piece, God’s Wind at Hiroshima? With that question mark and all, because he hesitated between calling it God’s Wind or Devil’s Wind…because Robert Lewis didn’t know, couldn’t tell if God or the Devil were responsible for it. It’s good to remember what he wrote in his diary too: “My God, what have we done?”
“And do you think he redeemed himself with that? That the soldier was healed by the months he spent sculpting a block of marble? That it was good therapy for him? Please! He killed a hundred thousand people…”
“He at least had that gesture. He realized he had to somehow fill the black hole of bitterness he had inside…”
“Cheap semiotics, don’t talk to me about symbolism now…”
“…that he needed a symbolic stone, it couldn’t just be any stone, and he came to believe that one that was sculpted by his own hands…”
“…a ridiculous atomic mushroom…”
“He turned himself into a sculptor to be able to do that work, don’t you understand? It was a complete transformation!”
“But in the end he was an American soldier through and through.”
“We don’t know that. As for the nuclear matter, you know that the first few tests were carried out on the Bikini Atoll…Nuclear energy has always had a sexy, playful side, as well as its deadly side…That positive understanding of nuclear bombs led to the two-piece swimming suit being named for the atoll where the first nuclear tests were carried out, because the expectation was that this swimsuit would have the same effects as a nuclear explosion on women at the time…Wait…Look at this…”
Lazkano looked at the photograph Gloria had uploaded onto her screen.
Admiral William H. P. Blandy and his wife appear in it, and next to them an older, red-faced military man. They are cutting up a spectacular cake in the shape of the atomic mushroom. It’s not just any cake, it looks like a wedding cake without a bride and groom. The photo dates back to 1946, so it was taken after the massacres in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Admiral Blandy looks very elegant, just like his wife, who wears a hat mirroring the atomic mushroom shape of the cream and meringue cake next to them. The astonishing similarity between the hat and the cake is what’s made that photograph so famous, that brutal contrast between frivolity and sacredness, not to mention the cold-bloodedness of the crass gastronomic reinterpretation of the iconic symbol of a massacre. Crime repurposed as aesthetics; the mushroom, embraced by fashion, turned into a chic pastry. Bikinis, cakes. The “newly married” joyfully hold the knife with which they’re about to cut up that cake in the shape of an atomic mushroom, holding hands, although doubtlessly the person who’s having the most fun in there is the third military character with his moonshine drinker’s face.
“Apparently, Blandy was an old-school Admiral: he took part in the first bombing of Iwo Jima, and was well known because, before firing the cannons, he liked to place his ships as close to the coast as possible, to the point of putting his own ships at risk. “I want to see the white of my enemy’s eyes,” they say he said once…Imagine, Diego, the white of his enemy’s eyes! When the war ended he took part in the nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll, where, apparently, he pronounced the sentence that would make him famous: “I am not an atomic playboy.”
Gloria showed him a Wikipedia entry on her laptop.
“The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy – as one of my critics labeled me – exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.”
“I am not an atomic playboy,” that’s what Blandy had said, but the photograph completely contradicts his words.
“Apart from meringue or cream cakes that look like atomic mushrooms and ladies’ hats in the shape of atomic mushrooms…they also made pop songs about it…and the people cutting up cake ever so joyfully, like it was a party…There is a very thin thread between the frivolous and the sacred, and whoever manages to swing on it without falling, wins.”
Muslims had often stated that Western societies had lost all shame: the tendency to feel guilty had spread in the West, but shame, not a speck of it. In the East, however, they didn’t feel guilty, but they had clearly interiorized the feeling of shame, and it was a shame that surpassed guilt by far when they acted in morally reprehensible ways according to their own parameters.
It had all started as a result of a new performance that Gloria had in mind. Lately, she’d been analyzing the works of Esther Ferrer, and she would call Diego, very often way after midnight, under the euphoric effect of marijuana, to tell him about an idea she’d thought up that evening that was as genius as it was fleeting, and would be useless come the following morning.
“This, for example: twenty-four hours praying the Our Father in an art gallery…Completely still, unmovable, praying hieratically…I’d have to prepare myself physically, though, for sure. In this way I’d be making a critique of Christian redemption…All I need is to come up with a good title, Redemption for Six Murders or something like that. What do you think? Hang on, no, something more provocative: Christian Redemption of the Atocha Murders…I might be able to do a whole series, changing the title and the length of my prayers on each occasion, purging a different crime and portraying the issuers of prayers as executioners…Fuck! I could spend a year going from gallery to gallery, crisscrossing the whole of Europe, at least Christian Europe, to then write about my experience! You could help me write the book…what do you think, Diego?”
She said everything, and at that point there was not much that anyone could add to what Gloria said; Lazkano couldn’t do more than, as that Mexican writer once said after visiting Borges, intersperse the conversation with “wise silences” here and there.
It was three a.m. when the phone rang in Lazkano’s house.
“Were you asleep?”
“What do you think?”
“I have bad news, Diego, very bad news…”
“What happened? Has there been an accident?”
“Rauschenberg died.”
Gloria appeared to be drunk.
“Rauschenberg…the artist?”
“Who else?”
The man who built art and humor with garbage, taxidermied animals, car tires, old radios, and other objects that he’d picked up in gas stations, ditches, and scrap yards had died.
“Souvenirs without nostalgia, that’s what he used to call his pieces.”
“And you’re a receptacle filled to the brim with nostalgia, Gloria…”
“That’s not true…he was a rescuer…Rauschenberg! A true artist! My favorite artist of all time!”
That wasn’t completely true, but she always took refuge in hyperbole when she got sentimental. Diego tried to shoo away her sorrows, telling her that they’d talk in the morning, that it wasn’t so bad, that Rauschenberg was eighty years old already…but he didn’t have many friends like Gloria and when she got sentimental it was better to proceed with caution, he didn’t want the depressive tendencies of her youth to resurface.
“Are you all right, Diego?”
“Hanging in there, thanks for asking. What about you?”
“I’ve been drinking…”
“I can see that: nonstop since dinner, am I wrong?”
“You aren’t completely right: I didn’t eat dinner. What for? I want to dissolve, like Joseph Beuys.”
“You have to go to bed and, when you wake up tomorrow, have pan tomaca, toast with tomatoes and olive oil, in full sun on your terrace.”
“It’s raining, Lazkano: will you please banish, once and for all, your idyllic perception of the Mediterranean? It’s all a bunch of junk.”
“Rauschenberg would do something with it, don’t you think?”
“I’d need his talent for that.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
“I won’t be picking up the phone.”
“At midday, then.”
“No, don’t call me. I wanted to tell you something else, Lazkano…You know I love you lots, don’t you?”
“Me too.”
“You’re just saying that, but I really love you. And one more thing, as for Miró…”
“Miró?”
“Joan Miró, you know who…That argument we had the last time: you said that he was an escapist of color, and I rejected that repeatedly…”
Lazkano didn’t remember having that particular discussion. They had so many that it was difficult to keep track.
“Yes, I remember,” he lied.
“I found something he said when they asked him what had he done to counter Franco in one of his catalogs. Wait…I’ll tell you the guy’s name now: Georges, Georges Raillard. It was him who asked Miró what had he done to fight Francoism. Do you know what he said?”
“I haven’t the slightest.”
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