Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  After the two men exchanged bows and insincere words of affection, Watanabe felt the old enmity resurface, disturbingly intact. And so he discovered that hatred—possibly more than love—is born with the will to survive. It would be interesting, he reflects now, completely distracted from the record he is playing, to examine to what extent that influences the cycles of war. Yukio Yamamoto appeared to be more or less informed about his life, and behaved in a suspiciously casual manner. Whereas he was unable to disguise his own facial tics or the tremor in his voice.

  Obliged for professional reasons to attend the same events and receptions, both men began to develop an unhealthy watchfulness, yet they expressed their mutual aversion in very different ways. As he had at school, Yukio Yamamoto was apt to mock him and underestimate his virtues. Mr. Watanabe preferred to humiliate him by being overly polite. He trusted that while in the short term Yamamoto’s attacks might harm his image in the eyes of some of their colleagues, such a crude strategy would end up working against his rival. Watanabe admits that this wasn’t at all the attitude of a pacifist. He earnestly, desperately hoped that his good manners would slowly destroy his enemy.

  As he was to discover during professional social gatherings, Yukio Yamamoto seemed to have built part of his personal success on his status as a hibakusha, using it to his advantage with supreme skill, appealing to the guilty conscience of the Yankees as a way of doing business. Watanabe cannot now recall a single occasion (including a couple of cocktail parties he went to with Lorrie) when Yukio didn’t make some oblique reference to his experiences during the war. Only to then declare, once he had the attention and admiration of those present, that he preferred not to talk about it out of respect for the peace between both countries.

  If he himself hadn’t resorted to such subterfuges, Watanabe wonders, abruptly switching off the music, was it out of so-called good taste? Or because he was afraid of being stigmatized? Out of consideration for those victims who hadn’t been fortunate enough to rebuild their lives? Or possibly because, by remaining silent, he prevented the damaged memories from creeping into his new reality?

  * * *

  During that period, he began to develop an increasingly complicated relationship with the figure of his father. Tsutomu had been the victim of a massacre, but he’d also been employed by a company that produced the armaments for the war that had killed him. Many years later, because of something his aunt Ineko had let slip, he discovered that his father had had friends among the officers of the imperial army. His father’s collusion with those who made life-or-death decisions had been greater than Mr. Watanabe had first believed. He swore to himself that this family secret would die with him.

  The mixture of veneration and reproach he feels toward his father reminds him, notwithstanding the obvious differences, of the legacy of the writer Masuji Ibuse. Before producing one of the most important books ever written about the victims of Hiroshima, the prefecture in which he grew up, Ibuse had worked in the propaganda department at the Ministry of War. In other words, he’d composed pamphlets to encourage people to continue supporting what would lead to their own annihilation. Japan was heading for surrender, but without the intense work of that department, who knows whether it might not have done so earlier. Possibly earlier enough to avoid the bombings. For this reason, he interprets Ibuse’s great novel as the reverse and the atonement for those pamphlets. The alternative writing of the war.

  Watanabe has always found it difficult to visit Kokura, the town of his birth, spared both atomic bombs only by chance. Toward the end of the war, the U.S. military faced a strategic dilemma. Conventional explosives had successfully razed the enemy’s largest cities. This rendered them useless as targets for the culmination of the Manhattan Project, which had to be put into practice to justify the gargantuan amount of money and research poured into it.

  Where, then, could they test this new weapon, which reports claimed would revolutionize the history of war? They carried out a detailed study of the few cities left standing. On August 6, several reconnaissance aircraft checked visibility conditions around Hiroshima. According to a record of alternative plans, had the sky been cloudy that morning, the bomb would have been dropped on Watanabe’s hometown instead.

  Three days later, the arsenal at Kokura was the priority target. However, the second bomber flew into fog, thick cloud cover, and plumes of smoke from neighboring Yawata. After circling the city for as long as its fuel levels allowed, the bomber made a detour and ended up destroying the nearest industrial town, Nagasaki, where the Mitsubishi arms factory was located, killing the remainder of his family.

  It was the weather that had dictated the final decision. The mood of the sky. It seems inconceivable, muses Watanabe, that such an elaborately planned destruction should leave this essential decision—what to destroy—in the hands of fate. In that sense, or defying any sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only targets of annihilation, but also of a lethal form of arbitrariness.

  Perhaps he, himself, resembles Kokura too closely. He, too, has been both spared and not spared. Caught unawares on the map. Nobody remembers Kokura, because Nagasaki had the misfortune to supplant it. His memory has the shape of a passed-over city.

  Mr. Watanabe feels that inside him is a simmering pot of contradictory emotions; he is randomly exposed to its churning contents. How this affects his inability to settle in one place, or to take a firm stand on the issues about which he feels most intensely, remains a mystery to him. Ironically, this lack of definition defines his character.

  Men who lack definition are excluded from the epic. Their only battle is with tension: the impossibility of trusting what they know. Maybe the doubters, Watanabe tells himself, are less useful to the state. Absolute certainty usually leads to destruction of one kind or another. And what if his peripatetic behavior were a ruse, so that in the event of disaster at least one of his lives might survive?

  IF HE’S BEING HONEST, Watanabe now regrets not having returned to Nagasaki when the horror was still fresh. He fears he has done to the city of his childhood what others did to its victims: averted his gaze as quickly as possible.

  Besides his fear of radiation, for a long time Watanabe believed that by staying away from that place, he was protecting his prenuclear memory. The one he’d preserved in a glowing capsule of play, affection, and ignorance. Without the erosion of the future.

  The whole world had a habit of reducing Nagasaki to its destruction. He realized that when he told people where he had grown up, it left him trapped. If he mentioned the bomb, he promoted a stifling association. And if he didn’t, he was deemed a cynic or pro-American. The city remained shrouded in a “long cape,” which was what its place name meant. No one could see it anymore.

  Mr. Watanabe belongs—it astonishes him to describe it this way—to the last generation that can still remember the bombs. Very soon there won’t be a single person on the face of the earth who was there. When that happens, Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be only broken things that no one saw break. How dreadful, he tells himself. How wonderful.

  With the passage of time and the overlapping of collective images, his memories are starting to look like a movie. His own experience of the genbaku has become interlaced with other people’s imagery and fictions. While there has been an accumulation of books, documentaries, and even manga about Hiroshima, Nagasaki has inspired fewer tributes. It is saddled with its bomb and its relegation in the tragedy. Truly, muses Watanabe, if any city were worthy of love—an intricate love—that city would be Nagasaki.

  He regrets having deemed that his experience somehow exempted him from going to these places of pain, and yet he would find it meaningless to visit them now, when the original damage is almost invisible. They have been transformed into museums, and are so universal that they no longer belong to him. As he explains to any tourist who is interested, Hiroshima means “large island.” Something small that grows bigger. What size is an island, in fact? Can it be separated from the surr
ounding sea that touches other shores? Aren’t all countries joined by water, memory, and money?

  However, no amount of distance can help him escape the conflict. Because, why deny it, he reads obsessively about the cities that he eludes. He’s aware of the splendid boulevards of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their confident skyscrapers, impeccable parks, cool cafés, designer stores, their peace monuments, their happy (happy!) children, their gardens filled with white flowers.

  They say that Hiroshima has more bars than any other place in Japan. How could anyone have the moral right to judge that fact? If no one had looked to the future there, all they’d have would be a pile of rubble. Watanabe thinks of the doctors at that time. If a good soldier prolongs the war, a good doctor helps undo it.

  He sees that Nagasaki has kept its cathedral bell, a mute symbol of the thunderclap. That its mayors write manifestos and mobilize protests against nuclear testing. And that on August 6 each year, Hiroshima Bay is covered with lanterns bearing the names of the dead: the permanent memory is that of the river. Sometimes he has the eerie feeling of having failed to keep a promise he never made.

  But what if it wasn’t too late for him to honor other places? To set foot on another patch of earth that is being abandoned now?

  Mr. Watanabe stands up. He fills his pockets, slams a couple of doors, and goes out to the Somewhere. He needs to consider the idea that has just occurred to him.

  As soon as John sees him, he nods in greeting and reaches for a glass to spin. Watanabe raises a hand. Places it on the bar. And he draws close to whisper in John’s ear. I’d like to see the cellar, he says to him.

  * * *

  He walks home, trying to make his thoughts and feet work as one.

  The city has regained a semblance of order: it’s possible once again to walk around believing in the mirage of the world as a safe place. The evening burns reflections.

  As he moves along one of the teeming pedestrian streets of Sanchome, he comes across a string quartet. Two boys and two girls who look like students, playing with the utmost delicacy, as if all of Tokyo were listening to them. Or possibly, Watanabe corrects himself, with the freedom of knowing that nobody is listening to them. He slows his pace without realizing, until he’s almost stationary.

  All of a sudden, an ambulance bursts in at the far end of the street. The siren bounces from side to side like a pinball. A path opens up amid the crowd. The young quartet endeavors to carry on, despite the noise that has started overwhelming their strings. Those strings bowed with increasing conviction and intensity; increasingly in vain.

  The siren goes past the music and eclipses it. The musicians’ arms trace silent perpendiculars, their fingers climb the masts like sailors in a storm.

  The ambulance moves on. Gradually, the notes reemerge. The waves of people close again.

  Mr. Watanabe stops walking. He stays where he is, one leg raised as a quaver, listening to them play.

  When the movement of the piece and also that of his foot ends, he has made a decision that he has been postponing all his life.

  At the entrance to his building, he greets Mr. and Mrs. Furuya, who are taking their little dog out for a walk. Mrs. Furuya is flanked by her two loves, holding the leash with one hand and her husband with the other. For some reason, Mr. Watanabe envies the dog.

  He inserts the key, opens the door, crosses the hallway, opens the second door, and rushes in. At the far end of the living room, stretched out on the sofa, silence awaits him.

  Barefoot and resolute, Mr. Watanabe steps onto the striped rug, like someone jaywalking.

  He brews himself some tea. Although it won’t help calm his anxiety, it will at least confine it to a definite space: his anxiety floats there in that cup. He drinks it. Absorbs it. Metabolizes it.

  Then he goes on the internet, and, his breath quickening, begins to search for flights.

  * * *

  Once he has bought his flight, he resorts to pornography to calm himself a little. Amid the ocean of virtual sex, home webcams have become his island. In them objects of desire are transformed into talking subjects: through a game of inversion, the observed impose their will.

  What most excites him about these videos is their mix of communication, porn, and trivia in randomly varying proportions. The impossibility of predicting the erotic exposure—at times swift, at times leisurely, at times absent—brings him back to a state of candor: Will they undress? Will they touch themselves? Will somebody else appear? Will they do anything? On those screens, each and every sign of nudity regains its importance, restoring the incredulous joy of glimpsing a breast, a buttock, a testicle. Home webcams are unadulterated life at the window. They can satisfy or frustrate, delight or pass by the neighbor, provide you with company or leave you to yourself.

  In his close study of webcams, Mr. Watanabe has noticed that the majority of younger broadcasters put exhibition before pleasure. They copulate to be looked at, rather than to let themselves be seen copulating. The older broadcasters usually have sex in a nonchalant way, watched by strangers they pretend to forget. The youngsters perform with vehement calculation and constantly change position. They are trying their best, he thinks, to be conventional. The veterans adopt relaxed postures, their moans are unscripted, and they climax naturally. In their disconcerting simplicity, they become transgressors.

  For a wide variety of reasons, Watanabe prefers watching English, French, or Spanish-language webcams. He can’t think of a more stimulating and interactive way of practicing a tongue. By going back to the same broadcasters, not only has he gotten to know their bodies as if he were sleeping with them, but also their linguistic habits, obsessions, and singularities.

  One of his favorites, a college student from California, whose nickname is Kate Mmhh, has strictly forbidden her watchers from calling her a whore. It’s one thing, she maintains, to exercise your freedom temporarily and behave like a whore, and quite another to be labeled as one. That’s the difference, Kate argues, between playing and people using you. One day, Watanabe asked her what would happen if someone played at calling her a whore, without believing that she actually was one. Kate Mmhh paused for a few seconds and then replied that, in that case, she’d appreciate it if people used quotation marks.

  Another of his favorites, a Latin American lady married to a large, hirsute individual who occasionally participates in her broadcasts, says she detests diminutives, and won’t allow people to use them to address her. Bitch is okay, depending on who and how. But little bitch, no way. Go sweeten the pill with someone else.

  Watanabe also follows a young Andalusian woman, whose behavior alternates between verbal pedantry and sexual narcissism (assuming they aren’t one and the same). Her nickname is Persephone, and she employs adjectives such as benevolent, refractory, and sublime while undressing herself. When one of the chat users hints that her breasts aren’t natural, she accuses him of being a skeptic or even insidious. She intersperses that sort of vocabulary with declarations like “I need more fingers inside me,” or “I’m a virgin around the back.” For him these outbursts are the epitome of style: obscenity is possible only alongside modesty, as a contrast power. Persephone has a boyfriend and believes profoundly in faithfulness.

  When he likes a webcam, he leaves comments that are slightly quirky, partly due to his grammar. His interventions succeed in making some users pay more attention to the chat than to the images, a minor conquest that stimulates Watanabe’s libido. A few find him ridiculous, others play along, and still others accuse him of being a party pooper.

  Mr. Watanabe isn’t a proponent of excessive promiscuity where webcam porn is concerned. Constantly switching from one to the other doesn’t have the same effect on him as revisiting those he feels a greater affinity to: one of the conditions for him becoming aroused is knowing the people who are displaying themselves. Rather than watching a striptease in a club, he has always preferred spying on neighbors undressing.

  This year, he has become addicted to a c
ouple who reside in a Czech city and speak English with a Slav sentence structure. Each recognizable gesture, such as the girl’s laughter or the boy’s faces during their shenanigans on the roof terrace, reinforces his sense of cohabiting with them. Thanks to the multiple camera angles, Watanabe has an idea of the layout of the apartment where his unknown Czechs live. It’s the closest thing, he feels, to being in a couple alone.

  THE SITUATION AT THE Fukushima nuclear power plant is growing steadily worse. Or maybe, suspects Watanabe, it’s just that the information about it is starting to coincide more closely with reality.

  According to UN experts, he reads, nuclear lobbyists have ensured that the health authorities disregard the victims of such disasters. An agreement signed between the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency fifty years ago, he is astonished to discover, has a great deal of bearing on the matter. Why didn’t he know this? Why isn’t the whole world talking about it?

  The summit meeting on Chernobyl, which has just ended in Kiev in commemoration of its twenty-fifth anniversary, gives little cause for hope. The scientists complain that the organizations responsible for controlling the companies are full of people from the industry. In Fukushima, not exactly for the first time, they have failed in their job of overseeing the management of the power stations.

  Mr. Watanabe reflects upon the repetition of tragedies, or on tragedy as repetition. He tries to remember those opening verses in Ōe’s book on Hiroshima. For years, he knew them by heart. He digs deep in his memory like a child in an empty cookie jar. In the end he gives up, searches his shelves for the book, and reads: