Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  * * *

  Between his second and third glass, Watanabe learns of the damage caused in the northeast of the country. Particularly in the Tōhoku region, where the army is carrying out rescue operations. If soldiers are involved, he deduces, the casualties must be greater than those reported in the news. This is his fourth glass. His unease spills over the map of the present.

  He is astonished to discover the magnitude of the earthquake he has just witnessed: the biggest in the country’s history. Bigger even than the Great Kantō Earthquake, which has always served as the legendary extreme. Today a record has been broken that nobody wanted to break.

  Mr. Watanabe reads the long list of places affected, and does so extremely slowly, as if by spelling out their names he could restore them. Sumatra, Valdivia, Alaska. Esmeraldas, Arica, Kamchatka. Lisbon. Mexico City. Japan, Japan, Japan.

  Every major earthquake with its epicenter in the sea is invariably followed by something worse. He knows they have been called seaquakes, maremotos, raz de marées, depending on where they struck. Until there were two hundred thousand deaths, and a million evacuees on the Indonesian coast. That was the tsunami, terrifyingly global.

  He searches for news in the U.S. media. An alert has just been issued in Hawaii, and a warning on the West Coast. Earthquakes are part of history. Or is history a slice of seismology? Watanabe imagines an underground tremor gradually expanding until it shakes the entire planet.

  On the screens of his devices, their reflections distorted on the surface of the empty wine bottle, he sees skyscrapers swaying, their tips almost touching.

  He sees cracks in the highways, chewing asphalt like a set of teeth.

  He sees turmoil in stores, aisles turned upside down, merchandise falling.

  He sees spinning houses, walls losing the perpendicular, rattling lights, a rebellion of shapes, their owners beneath tables.

  He sees the absurd strength of the tsunami, its sweep of filthy water, planes floating at Sendai airport, cars washed away like boats, the naturalness of liquid drowning civilization’s warren.

  Apparently, a dozen or so nuclear power plants have been shut down. And conflicting reports are coming in about the Daiichi plant in the prefecture of Fukushima. Watanabe learns that at the time the earthquake struck, three of its reactors were in operation. As soon as it was detected, they automatically shut down. When they did so, they stopped generating the electricity for the reactor’s cooling system, which works with boiling water. Under normal circumstances, the external grid would have been activated, but this was damaged by the earthquake. The emergency power generators kicked in. But instantly stopped when the tsunami hit. Simple. Or not.

  Watanabe realizes that the information is mimicking the shock waves from the tsunami: estimates of the damage are growing by the minute. To judge by their commentaries, many people regard the official figures with the same mistrust as they did the ceiling during the earthquake.

  Soon afterward, a state of emergency is declared in reactors one and two at the Fukushima nuclear plant. People are being evacuated in a limited area around the facility: three kilometers. This distance brings back dreadful memories for Mr. Watanabe. However, the government announces there have been no radiation leaks.

  For some reason, his cell phone still has no signal. In his inbox he discovers an email from Carmen, who is writing from Madrid. They haven’t been in touch for a while: that’s what disasters are for. Carmen has seen the news and is concerned. She wants to know if he’s okay, if he needs anything. She tells him she has found a Facebook group called Spaniards in Japan who have experienced the earthquake. She ends by saying: I can’t believe this is happening on March 11.

  Watanabe sends a brief reply. He thanks her for her concern and confirms that he is safe and sound. Then he sends a second message, adding that he is delighted to be back in touch, and inquires after her grandchildren. He immediately starts composing a third message, making it clear that of course they had never really lost touch, but that it means a great deal to him to be able to communicate on a day like this, when the people we are closest to, et cetera. He rereads what he has written, deletes it, and closes his email.

  How remote foreign disasters seemed in the past. And yet now, thanks to these screens whose technology he knows inside out, we cannot help but witness them. He wonders whether this has enhanced or diminished his sensitivity. Being a permanent spectator creates a filter, a shock absorber. But it also forces him to endlessly witness ubiquitous suffering.

  Watanabe switches on his sound system, which is connected to speakers as tall as a man. A man of his modest stature, at any rate. He chooses one of his favorite recordings. A growling trumpet, meditative piano, smoky double bass. He turns the volume down to the lowest setting. He closes his eyes to cut off the optical torrent. Immerses himself in one of the most pleasurable activities he knows: listening to music without the sound. Re-creating it in his mind. This isn’t something that Mr. Watanabe does with just any recording. He is always incredibly meticulous when he chooses what he’s not going to listen to.

  * * *

  The only thing he does hear is the telephone. The landline clamoring from his bedroom. Annoyed at the inconvenience of the call and yet aware of its possible urgency, he struggles up from the sofa. He feels a sharp twinge in his lower back. He runs, more or less. Pants. Picks up. Answers.

  The voice isn’t one Watanabe expected, or recognizes. To his surprise, the caller is an Argentinian journalist who says good morning to him and then good evening. Who apologizes. Who has been up all night working. Who hurriedly explains himself. Who says his name is Quintero or Gancedo. No: Pinedo. And who tries to ingratiate himself by mispronouncing a greeting in Japanese.

  This last gesture irritates Watanabe. He considers it condescending, a sort of rhetorical souvenir. To make things worse, the journalist offers to speak in English, even though Mr. Watanabe has a perfect grasp of Spanish.

  In any event, he has neither the energy nor the patience. Pinedo stutters slightly, which makes him confusing to listen to. Watanabe gathers that he, he would very much like to, to interview him about the, about the earthquake and the tsunami, yes? because he’s planning a catastrophic investigation, or an investigation into who knows what catastrophes, for who knows where.

  He finds it strange that this fellow has tracked down his home phone number. He’s infuriated that the man intends to ply him for information. And, above all, why the hell interview him? Wouldn’t he do better with a politician, someone from the embassy, or a fellow journalist?

  Watanabe brusquely interrupts Pinedo’s stammering. Addressing him in a Spanish that indignantly stresses unexpected syllables, he suggests the man search elsewhere for his sensationalist material.

  Taken aback, Pinedo explains that, that this isn’t, this isn’t at all what it’s about, because, honestly, on the contrary, what he’s writing about, is, in fact is.

  Watanabe responds by saying he isn’t interested in making any statements. He hangs up and pulls out the cable to disconnect the telephone.

  After the call, he finds it impossible to regain his composure. He walks up and down the old striped rug. He debates whether to return to the news, eat something, or go to bed. As so often when he doesn’t know what to do, he freshens up his flowers.

  He removes the fallen leaves. Crumples the petals between his fingertips. Replenishes the water in the slender receptacle, which wasn’t upset by the shocks. Arranges the flowers, so that they overhang as far as possible. Adjusts the willow fronds. He positions them more for the shadows they cast than anything else. He observes the secret hydrography they trace. Once he is satisfied with the result, he discovers fretfully that one of the stems doesn’t reach the water.

  A few last temperas stain the glass of the picture window. Reflections splash. Night drenches the skyscrapers. Human shapes move across, are framed, then vanish. Mr. Watanabe wonders if they can see him, if anyone is watching him.

  All at once
, a banjo string snaps, emitting a shrill note that continues to reverberate.

  Watanabe decides to take an ofuro. That’s what he needs. To scrub his nakedness and envelop it in heat. First exposure, then refuge. A bath that softens him and slowly dissolves him.

  He disappears into the rectangle. He tries to allow his skin to absorb the water’s compassion, the steam’s abandon. He fixes his gaze on the ceiling. He remains motionless, listening to the silent gurgle baths make.

  As soon as he gets out, he eats an apple and takes a sleeping pill.

  IT IS ALREADY MORNING and Mr. Watanabe’s body is tossing and turning in his bed. His pale, flaccid limbs twitch like a puppet with its strings snarled.

  He hasn’t slept on a tatami for more than fifty years. After he retired and moved back to Tokyo, he forced himself to readjust to the hardness of futons. He soon had to admit that lying down like that, he felt embalmed. All those years on Western beds changed his idea of sleep. After all, when we dream we carry with us all the places where we have slept.

  Watanabe uses earplugs in bed, a habit he acquired when his work obliged him to spend a hundred nights a year in hotels. During that period, he discovered that a hundred nights is a lot longer than three and a half months. That they form an independent unit of time, an interval that casts doubt on the notion of home. As he always used to say, when the minibar at the hotel becomes more familiar than your kitchen cupboards, there’s no going back.

  That’s why he has kept up his practice of safeguarding his sleep with the slightly rounded foam plugs that penetrate his ear canals until they create the comforting sensation of a vacuum. Watanabe thinks that to sleep without them would foster the belief that he is at home, whereas using them is to accept that he always dreams somewhere else.

  It is already morning and his body tosses and turns, flees. Until a nightmare expels him from beneath the sheets. One of those nightmares that has the feel of a premonition.

  * * *

  Watanabe gropes around on the bedside table. As startled as he, his cell phone has just regained its signal. Instantly a deluge of texts, voice mails, and missed calls is unleashed. The device leaps about, convulsing.

  Among the calls he finds several from Mariela in Buenos Aires. Also a message, imploring him to pick up the phone if he’s there. He sends her a few reassuring lines and promises to call her soon.

  A sudden convention of crickets: the mobile network seems to have been restored throughout the city.

  He sits up and turns on the television in the bedroom. It’s made by the same manufacturer as all the other devices in his apartment. The thickness of the screen is next to nothing, as if the weight of its images has stretched it out.

  There are updates about the Fukushima nuclear power station and by now they are truly alarming. The radius of evacuations has tripled, extending to ten kilometers. The authorities have admitted that there are a few small leaks. They have ordered the valves in the reactors to be opened, to lower the temperature and reduce the pressure inside. For a second, Mr. Watanabe misconstrues this sentence, the pressure inside, and reads it as directed at him.

  On the one hand, the government is appealing to people to remain calm and trust in their security measures. On the other, it announces that the prime minister will be taking an inspection tour of the plant at Fukushima, where, according to the Nuclear Safety Agency, radiation has reached abnormal levels.

  Watanabe realizes he isn’t going to get back to sleep. He switches on the lights and the room is inundated with a white glare. He leans his back against the cold wall. He checks the Yomiuri and the Asahi newspapers on his phone and continues in every language he is able to read.

  He soon discovers that many of the media outlets are translating one another, mistakes included. In some newspapers there are reports of several explosions. Others speculate that the accident could have international repercussions and that the evacuation zone extends to twenty kilometers, twice what it was only a few hours earlier.

  Amazed, he reads that the previous day’s earthquake may have moved the whole country by a couple of meters, and shifted the earth’s axis by ten or fifteen centimeters. Nothing occurs in only one place, he reflects, everything occurs everywhere. He wonders whether the meddling journalist who called him at home knew more than him.

  Unable to stop searching, he trawls YouTube for homemade videos of the explosion at the nuclear plant. Filmed at a distance, by unsteady hands, out of focus.

  He sees the shape of the smoke. That shape. The bulging mushroom. That mushroom. The head of the cloud swelling, swelling in his head too. Growing like a tumor.

  And it is these images, perhaps more than the previous news bulletins, that galvanize his muscles. With surprising agility, Watanabe leaps off his bed.

  He walks along the swath of light on the floor. Through the picture window he observes with bewilderment that, although it will soon be spring, it is snowing as dawn breaks. The flakes have an air of retrospective insistence.

  Mr. Watanabe recalls the winters he spent in Paris, where he loved to marvel at the buildings beneath the snow. Facing the hyperbole of the Tokyo skyscrapers, he thinks about the collapse of beauty and how easily it can be destroyed. All artistic, technical, monumental achievements, everything that is meant to last, in the end proves absurdly fragile. He remembers his fascination and anguish as he walked for the first time along the Parisian boulevards, which he couldn’t help but imagine bombed out, in ruins, nonexistent. He wandered around its neighborhoods in a kind of trance, visualizing them as they might have been had history shifted by a few centimeters.

  These visions were to haunt him for the rest of his life, increasing his awareness of the drastic magnitude of each thing, the simultaneous possibilities of it resisting or imploding. This, he senses, is what could be called emotion.

  2

  VIOLET AND THE CARPETS

  I REMEMBER IT WAS SNOWING when I met him. I don’t remember the date or the exact address, but I haven’t forgotten the snow. Memory is so trite: it retains only the details that make for a good story.

  I remember the party. I don’t remember the host. I remember their parents were spending the weekend out of town. I don’t remember where. I remember the sofa we all fought over. I don’t remember the rest of the house. I remember it was late. I don’t remember how much I’d had to drink. I remember that the food quickly disappeared. I don’t remember what he was wearing. I remember being annoyed when I discovered a red wine stain on my new blouse. I don’t remember if I managed to get it out. I remember we looked at each other several times. I don’t remember who spoke first. I remember he had withdrawn to a corner and smiled the whole time. I don’t remember if I thought that was a contradiction. I remember his straight black hair. I don’t remember how I wore mine. I remember he was the only foreigner. I don’t remember who invited him to the party. I remember that at that point in my youth foreign men always seemed more interesting to me. I don’t remember how long this naïveté lasted.

  * * *

  Yoshie had come to study in Paris. He said he loved languages, although he spoke approximately one and a half. He had an almost desperate desire to travel, to visit the most far-flung places possible. Just as I did, I guess. Now that I think about it, our idea of traveling resembled an escape plan. He gave the impression that he was testing out his identity, like someone constantly trying on clothes to see if they fit. When he arrived in the city he had a romanticized idea of the Sorbonne, as does everyone who hasn’t studied there.

  To be fair, the atmosphere was starting to become interesting. A lot of us had earnest fantasies of change. That’s to say, ’68 was still a few years off. Those were very different times, it seemed that everything was about to happen. Libération didn’t even exist! What we read, as a kind of alternative bible, was L’Humanité. My friends and I felt so important, so sure of ourselves as we repeated those pro-Soviet slogans.

  The point is that I met Yoshie at a student party. Partie
s nowadays just seem like parties, I never know how to explain this to my grandchildren. In those days, having fun was something of an act of defiance toward authority. A political response. I suspect this was partly a moral justification, because we wanted to make our simple desire to enjoy ourselves seem more worthy. Or maybe we could only do it like that, because we were so repressed we needed lofty excuses for doing what every young person wants to do. But it was also partly a generational truth. Pleasure didn’t come easily, we had to earn it. I think of that whenever I see my granddaughter, Colette, who is so clued in about all the pleasures in life, and yet somehow so conservative. Honestly, I understand less and less what direction we’re headed in.

  Someone introduced us, I’ve forgotten who, and we struck up a conversation. We talked and we didn’t talk. We told each other very little and thought we’d understood a lot. That night, I don’t know why, I felt particularly awkward. It wasn’t just how much I’d drunk. It was a different, rather pleasant giddiness.

  To begin with, at least, there was nothing remarkable about our conversation. There was, how can I put it, an acceptance that was wordless. Or rather, beneath the words, which in his case were peppered with small, amusing grammatical mistakes. It was as if we had too much to say to each other, and yet there was no need to say anything. He gave the impression of being a shy young man. This of course hopelessly attracted me. Because I, as a rule so haughty with men, had to flirt a lot more than usual.

  We danced for quite a while, he better than I. That’s often the case with timid men. They either don’t dance at all, and hate to be asked, or they end up outdancing everyone. Yoshie couldn’t stop moving. He glided around with amazing agility, dodging people on the floor. Some were stretched out on the rug just to take a breather, others the better to drink in comfort, and still others for neither of those reasons. A little tipsy myself, I think, I asked what he had been drinking to give him so much energy. I remember his reply very clearly: nothing. We must remedy that! I laughed. What an idiot. He laughed a lot. What a sweetie, and what an idiot.