AFTER NEARLY TWENTY YEARS WORKING IN NEW YORK, where he felt lost, exhilarated, alienated, happy, and alone; and at the end of a fruitful relationship with Lorrie, with whom he learned as much about himself as he did about love, Mr. Watanabe was obliged to move again, this time to the unfamiliar south.
Now that the recession produced by the oil crisis was over, and the foundations were conveniently in place for the rise of neoliberalism, Me had been developing a project to expand its business throughout the continent. This project was summed up in a set of concentric charts that involved the prospect of a tentative promotion for him. From marketing director on the East Coast—an attractive position, but with few possibilities of advancement due to internal competition—to deputy director of the future branch in the Southern Cone. At first, he made no attempt to apply for the position, although something resembling an internal calendar made him think that this was the moment for his next move.
According to the reports he received, surveys charting the market for technology products in Latin America appeared as promising as they did uneven. Below the Tropic of Capricorn, Watanabe learned, there was zero production. That imaginary line separated producers from consumers.
The majority of Latin American factories owned by the competition were based in the industrial cities of Brazil or Mexico, where markets were potentially much larger. From there they exported to the rest of the continent, their path smoothed by the military governments in the region, who had decided to do away with all state interference by means of massive tariff reductions and favorable exchange rates.
In this context, Me’s strategy consisted first and foremost of gaining a foothold in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, without for the moment exposing itself to any direct confrontation with the leading companies on their territory. The intention was to establish itself as a model in the Southern Cone before launching a second phase, which was a progressive occupation of northern markets. Because of its convenient amalgam of initiative and vagueness, Why not? was one of the first expressions Watanabe had become accustomed to saying in English.
Following his arrival in that strange country, so committed to its own passions, so awash with local codes of behavior and heterogeneous last names, he began to notice that life in Buenos Aires had a few things in common with life in New York. Both possessed a kind of electric quality of permanent vigilance, as if the streets had been designed for a type of creature with peripheral vision. A daily swordfight, where every gesture appeared dramatic, but was in fact unimportant. A ceaseless stimulus that tried to avoid depression by acting on its reflexes. The impression that everything was urgent, impossible, and simultaneous.
Of course, he encountered major differences. Regardless of how honest they were, the residents of the great U.S. cities cited their laws as if quoting the Bible. By contrast, in Buenos Aires the gray areas seemed infinite; you could act against the law, despite the law, according to a parallel law, or even zigzag between contradictory laws. Rather than a guarantee, the system was seen as a threat. Instead of adapting, it was better to mistrust it, question it, fight it.
Whereas Americans tended to leave the state out of their calculations, Argentinians seemed to have a profound need of it, whether as enemy or protector, as a structure to be feared or to militate in. It was customary to explain violence as a repressive system rather than social alienation. The political temperature on the streets of Buenos Aires was without a doubt the polar opposite of New York. He started to suspect that democracy and dictatorship didn’t work the way he, as an outsider, had assumed they did, like two regimes that repel each other. They were, if anything, two shorelines riddled with bridges and tunnels.
There were even some similarities, Watanabe felt, to Paris. The city of Buenos Aires was a hodgepodge made up of bits from many parts of the world. You could go from the financial districts, like those of Tokyo or New York, to the most touristy colonial quarters, and from there to its many squalid shantytowns and back to Parisian boulevards. Whereas the French capital was prone to behaving like a museum obsessed with self-preservation, the Argentinian capital did the exact opposite: it eradicated all tradition, it stormed the museum. It was the same as far as pretentiousness went. Its driving force was the opposite. For some years, Paris had been showing signs of exhaustion, a measure of paralysis that affected any dreams of transformation. Buenos Aires exhibited an extraordinary anxiety to always be otherwise, a compulsion to relaunch itself.
And, at the center of this chaos, Mariela awaited.
* * *
If he began studying French out of youthful romanticism and a love of slow movies, if he got to know English through work and the influence of rock music, then Mr. Watanabe didn’t learn Spanish: he collided with its words and fell in love with it. He let himself be conquered by its music, he murmured it in his sleep, he misconstrued it with a passion. After a period of extreme effort, when he had overcome his initial impotence, he realized that with this change of language he had once more shed his skin.
Rather than someone who spoke different languages, he felt that he was as many different people as the languages he spoke. In French he tended to be oblique, more fastidious, and a little grouchy. In English he was surprised by his own conviction, the self-assurance with which he made what for him were unusually forceful assertions, his casually dry wit. And what about Spanish, what was he like in Spanish? Perhaps a little vociferous in his opinions. More cheerful. Less concerned with his image. The Spanish language taught him the pleasure of speaking improperly.
Accustomed to living in dictionaries and their minutiae (those symbols that seem to suggest a coded message, those barely recognizable abbreviations, more elaborate than the language they are attempting to explain), he often wonders about the people who write the most redundant entries. In dictionaries for students of English, for example, all those universal terms like shock, zoo, crack. Or in the bilingual French–Spanish dictionaries that were so indispensable to him in Buenos Aires, entries such as avion = avión, frac = frac. Can there be any greater commitment to a language than to transcribe thousands of words that designate themselves, that peer at their own reflection?
Watanabe muses upon that legion of linguists, perhaps young interns or exploited assistants, devoting their time to compiling definitions they know no one will read. Then it seems to him the saddest, most beautiful job in the world: unknown patriots of foreign languages.
He remembers Mariela, who occasionally copyedited English textbooks, telling him that many dictionaries and encyclopedias contained false entries to identify plagiarisms. If another publisher printed any of these made-up concepts, their rival’s copying was obvious. This fascinated him. And he asked her, if ever she had the opportunity, to include in some volume an imaginary equivalent to kintsugi. He felt that the absence of that word in other lexes, the nonexistence of the concept itself, was an important omission.
As for his tastes in literature, which have also traveled widely, he considers himself a capricious reader. He seldom proceeds with the thoroughness of some of his friends. As in life, he prefers to jump around. His successive libraries have ramified in an endless diaspora.
Chekhov is one of the few authors to have always accompanied him. In addition to his stories, Watanabe is fascinated by his incessant wanderings. What with his work, his health, and his doubts, Chekhov was never quite sure where to settle. His stories seem narrated from that very lack of definition; the habit of looking in all directions had allowed him to adopt any point of view. Watanabe often repeats an idea of Chekhov’s, which at times he has agreed with and at other times not: our interest in new places lies less in our getting to know them than in escaping from a previous somewhere. And what about the languages we speak? he wonders. Do they run away from each other, or try to catch up with one another, to merge into one?
However, most memorable is the story of Chekhov’s own death. One night, Watanabe recalls having read, he was delirious with fever in a German hotel. When a
doctor succeeded in bringing down his temperature, Chekhov, perfectly aware of his condition, told his colleague: Ich sterbe. I’m dying. The doctor ordered a bottle of champagne to be brought up immediately. Chekhov accepted and said: I’ve not had champagne for a long time. He drained his glass. He lay back. And stopped breathing.
In Watanabe’s view there could be no better death.
* * *
During the early stages of his emigration, his visits to Tokyo were very intermittent, and their main purpose was to visit his aunt and uncle, whom he missed a great deal. Over the years, his homecomings became more frequent and prolonged. The excitement at meeting childhood friends was equaled by the pleasure of cultivating new relationships. The more past he accumulated, the greater his need to balance the scales with some experiences in the present.
During those homecomings, Watanabe had the opportunity to meet other survivors. Whenever this occurred, his empathy matched his unease. They would recall lost relatives, who became present in the act of telling. The rest of the time, however, they were content to sit facing one another. They would sip tea in silence, gaze over each other’s shoulders. Then say goodbye.
Back then, he believed that some things needed no words. Now he’s not so sure. He remembers that old Japanese tale. Whoever sees hell and speaks of it, a devil warns, will be dragged down to hell a second time.
One of the things that most affected him about the victims he met was the difficulty they had in telling their stories. Few were able to get beyond platitudes. They couldn’t find the words for their memories, were bound by verbal conventions, which in a sense were other manifestations of silence. Some of their testimony was inconsistent, as if they hadn’t actually been there. Or as if they’d been there too much, and hadn’t yet completely emerged.
Many people returning from wars and massacres are quieter than they were before. Their communicable experience seems diminished. Survivors no longer share a common space with their fellow human beings, they have set foot in a land without a tribe. That’s why many victims develop a misanthropy that continues to harm them for a long while afterward. He’s well aware of this: he has spent all his life starting another life, moving to a different place so that certain emotions cannot catch up with him.
As these meetings continued, he noticed that the extent of people’s silence seemed to correspond to their proximity to ground zero. The farther someone had been from the epicenter, the more likely they were to talk about what had happened. This would explain, muses Watanabe, the (very) relative fluency he himself has achieved. The waves of silence, the map of victims, the evacuation zones: always a matter of concentric circles.
The unspeakable nature of suffering, with which he himself has struggled on many occasions, was intensified by the victors and vanquished alike. First came the prohibitions imposed by the occupying forces. American and Japanese agents were charged with enforcing them at the Civil Censorship Department, where they scrutinized every public utterance. They even went as far as to confiscate from many presses typefaces bearing the ideograms for atomic bomb and radioactivity. A decade after the slaughter, Hiroshima newspapers were literally incapable of expressing it.
He remembers a second tyranny. Virtually no one seemed willing to disclose the effects of the bombs. Not the people who had dropped them, nor those who had suffered them, and who saw in the bodies of the hibakusha the most hideous portrayal of their own defeat. Mr. Watanabe has never forgotten his summers in long sleeves. Even on the hottest days, his aunt and uncle insisted he wear those shirts for grown-ups that were so uncomfortable to play in. Children like you must always dress elegantly, his aunt Ineko explained, petting him as she helped him into his clothes.
Survivors with noticeable scars were also discriminated against by their fellow countrymen. Facial disfigurements kept them from making new friends, forming relationships, finding employment. They inspired shame rather than compassion. This, he reflects, was the other bombing. Day after day. Wars that are lost, Mariela used to say of the Malvinas, have no heroes.
Watanabe knew one or two women whose fiancés had stood by them, but who had been rejected by their in-laws. Within the survivors’ own families, many relatives had behaved similarly. A fear of spawning some sort of monster—a monster whose features mirrored each and everyone’s worst nightmares—was the main anxiety of those young women. One of them once confessed to him: I’ve been harboring a bomb inside me for thirty years. I can feel it in my stomach, about to explode, like a baby unable to be born.
Her words horrified Watanabe, who had secretly feared passing on to a child of his not just a deformity resulting from the radiation, but also some of the postwar suffering. This fear increased during his time in Paris, where he succumbed to reading several authors who had studied the ways such trauma is transmitted. Bequeathing a massacre, he learned, is a terrible thing. Bequeathing the cover-up of a massacre is worse.
By the time the victors lifted their restrictions, few among the vanquished were interested in hearing the survivors’ stories. It took the authorities twelve years to provide them with specialized medical care and other state subsidies. For many this came too late.
For decades, the Ministry of Health, in accordance with other international organizations, resisted admitting any link between cancer and radiation. He believes that deep down this reluctance implied an acknowledgment of shared responsibility. Something prevented the state from portraying itself solely as a victim of the enemy. Especially after the enemy had become its ally and a sponsor of the country’s reconstruction.
He first heard about this change of policy toward the survivors—Watanabe remembers as if it were yesterday, as if it were always yesterday—when he was reviewing for his final exams in Paris, underlining textbooks on accountancy and staying up through the night. This was his excuse for not making an immediate decision. As he also considered himself in perfect health, he refrained from taking the initial steps to register on the official census of victims. He told himself that he had time and could do so at a later date.
To what extent would he have felt acknowledged, he wonders now, or permanently stigmatized? Would the cracks have been closed, or would they open again?
What gets you drunk, thinks Watanabe, sighing and opening another bottle, is asking yourself questions.
When I realized what had happened to us, another survivor once told him, I began not to care about anything. At first, do you remember, there’s a sort of gratitude. All you can think about is whether you’ll soon be joining the dead. But as time goes on, you become accustomed to surviving. It was then—the man went on, and Mr. Watanabe has the impression of rescuing that voice from the well of his ears—that the fits of rage started. I think my friends began to feel awkward in my company, like those drunks no one wants to invite to parties. And so I shut myself away. Incidentally, come to think of it, this is the first time this year I’ve made two cups of tea, you know?
When he met a hibakusha who had been severely scarred, Watanabe would mention only the loss of his family in Nagasaki, and would conceal his own experiences in Hiroshima. He was ashamed to have emerged from there almost unscathed. He felt that placing himself on an equal footing with the others was unjust. He wasn’t like them. He didn’t want to be.
He was surprised at the many cases of blindness. Maybe, after glimpsing hell, it was impossible to see anything else. Others developed a specific type of cataract, very noticeable close-up. That gigantic flash of light seemed to have stuck to their retinas and, with time, risen to the surface.
This was the case of one of his aunt and uncle’s neighbors, an extremely thin lady called Kioko, who had lost the sight in one eye at Nagasaki. As a child, Yoshie had been frightened of her and did his best to avoid her gaze. As he grew older, he became interested in the old lady’s life. During her final years, Watanabe would make a habit of stopping by her house to visit, and bringing her candy that she never touched.
One afternoon, he at last plucked
up the courage to ask her about her right eye. Kioko seemed oddly pleased. She maintained that it wasn’t lost. Now, she explained, it simply looked inward.
* * *
With his accumulation of comings and goings, transfers and moves, Mr. Watanabe developed an emotional ubiquity. Each of his emotions was, partially at least, always somewhere else; he had started to feel in harmony.
This rootlessness wasn’t confined to space. Intimacy with his loved ones became problematic. He no longer knew how to be with anyone undividedly. No sooner had he attained an instant of fulfillment than half of him was already envisaging his next move, going over travel arrangements, planning tasks in distant places. Nor did making those journeys alleviate his restlessness: his other half, no less sincerely, longed for the refuge of home and to lounge about in pajamas on Sundays.
As people have pointed out, Watanabe constantly gives the impression of being unintentionally absent, concerned about some matter that isn’t what’s at hand. He has tried all his life to suppress this tendency. Which might, according to Mariela’s theories, be derived from the traumatic hiatus in his childhood. But for this to be true, he used to protest, first of all he would need to know what a hiatus is.
Not deterred by his skepticism, Mariela insisted on the disruptive nature of tragedies, which she maintained were characterized by the impossibility of giving them one’s full attention, of looking straight at them. That’s exactly how trauma works, do you see? she exclaimed, with her distinctive syntactic zeal. He recalls with sudden tenderness his Argentinian partner’s declarations, which he would often start off by rejecting, and which later on, when he was alone, would end up getting the better of him.
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