Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  I think this happens to other men, especially with their first child. As women our initial experience is different. You may end up being a terrible mother, but from the very beginning, you feel you have earned maternity with your body. That you worked hard for this child. I sometimes wonder how our marriage might have been affected by that. Because at the time you can’t deal with it, you have enough on your plate looking after the baby and trying to snatch a couple hours of sleep.

  * * *

  When Yoshie and I got to know each other better, and as often happens with people I love, we started to exchange stories about our childhood. He spoke of his sisters. Of his school in Nagasaki. And the spirals he used to draw in the shape of eyes. He still occasionally sketched them, almost unconsciously, on paper napkins. I told him that when I was a little girl, I would draw a tree with wings. Looking at it made me anxious, because if you have roots you can’t fly. When I showed my father those drawings, he would stroke my head and say, Very pretty, my girl, very pretty.

  I remember how the death of Yoshie’s aunt affected him: she was the only close relative he had left. We were at his house in San Telmo when he received the news. Someone called him from Tokyo. A neighbor, I think. He answered in that funny singsong voice he had when he spoke Spanish. Then he instantly switched language, tone, and volume. The conversation can’t have lasted more than a minute. He barely said a word. He listened to what the other person was saying, repeating the same monosyllable. When he hung up, he looked awful. That’s it, he said, now I’m only one left. I think this loss closed something in him. Or rather, reopened it.

  Yo told me in passing a small detail that stayed with me, because somehow I felt it was important. He was a breech baby. He was born with his back to the world. His mother had remarked on it several times, he didn’t want to leave her, he didn’t want to come out and see the world. He had his reasons, that’s what I told him.

  His parents had died too young, but at least they were old enough for him to attach an identity to them. As for his sisters, what most tormented him—as I interpreted it—wasn’t having lost them. It was that he had never gotten to know them. He missed all the experiences they hadn’t had.

  I think that he most struggled with the memory of his father. In that story, he wasn’t just a victim. Yoshie was plagued by the fact that his family’s comfortable status had depended on his father’s job in the armaments industry. This put him at odds with the patriarchy, even though he never used that word, of course.

  Mostly, he blamed himself for not trying to resuscitate his father when he saw him sprawled on the ground. Not touching him more, not dirtying himself with his father’s corpse. Yoshie wasn’t one for this sort of thinking. In fact, he recoiled from it. Yet he spoke of his father’s smell, his build, his hands, his hair. Too physical a memory for a man to whom he’d never been so close.

  Once I suggested we go to La Plata to celebrate the Day of the Dead with the Japanese community. I said maybe we could pay tribute to his family and, clumsy me, honor their memory together. Yoshie gazed at me with a mixture of gratitude and bemusement. He said that his family had no tomb, that he didn’t need to go anywhere to commune with them. That he did so every day at home.

  It’s true he’d made a—what was it called?—a, oh, it escapes me. Like a little shrine, next to the dining room table. With photographs of his parents and sisters, and his aunt and uncle. He would give them fresh fruit, and sometimes rice or tea. I was going to say he left it out for them, but no. He gave it to them. As if they, too, needed to receive it. That seemed to me like a very sensible way of communicating with the dead. Somehow the food made them corporeal again, they were well-fed ghosts. I wish we would do the same here. We have no lack of dead people without bodies.

  * * *

  As the years went by, he got to know our customs quite well, and I learned something of his. I don’t know which one of us was more surprised.

  His descriptions of my country made me laugh. I felt that I was in front of one of those fairground mirrors, on the one hand you look disfigured, and on the other, you know that it’s showing your defects more clearly. In his view, the average Argentinian sees themselves as a leader, and is convinced that collectively, Argentina will always be a disaster. So they choose instead a ferocious individualism, which is at once part of their charm and also their problem. He may not have used those exact words, but anyway, that’s what I learned about us through the eyes of a Japanese person.

  Naturally, he had his own issues. I found it hard to understand how a country brought up with religions that worship nature could invest so heavily in nuclear energy, especially after what had happened. In nature, he argued, there are species that, when faced with an emergency, decide to self-destruct. It’s their instinct to distinguish themselves from other species. Like lemmings, Yoshie said.

  Well, actually, lemmings don’t commit suicide. I explained that to him one day. It’s a myth, Yo, that’s not how they die. And the way I see it, deep down, countries are never that different from one another. That’s something I’ve learned from translating. No matter how many differences and limitations you come across, in the end what endures is what’s translatable. What we succeed in doing with the things we understand.

  And yet the myth is seductive, isn’t it? If a Japanese person commits suicide, we look no further. They’re Japanese, after all. And we don’t bother to ask questions. Instead of introducing us to a culture, stereotypes prevent us from getting to know it. Just as Yoshie started out believing that Gardel made all Argentinians dissolve into tears, I discovered that he couldn’t stand Mishima. He found his militaristic nationalism very unappealing.

  I’ve always been fascinated by Mishima’s death by seppuku. Until I met Yo, I thought he had committed hara-kiri. So many different ways of doing yourself in! According to Yoshie, Mishima wasn’t really following the samurai code when he killed himself. Rather, he’d found a convenient pretext to glorify his self-destructive urge, and to pass it off as an act of patriotism. Yoshie considered that tragic end, when he failed to complete the ritual, to be the most profoundly Japanese thing about his life. But there’s a huge difference, I think, between self-immolation and sacrifice. Hara-kiri requires the total responsibility of the victim. And during World War II, an entire population was sacrificed, of two cities in particular, without being given any say over its fate. It was, so to speak, a suicide perpetrated on the body of another. The authorities over here are familiar with this practice. Go and ask the boys who fought in the Malvinas.

  I was very shocked by the stories about Okinawa. When they lost that last battle, the army convinced civilians that the enemy would torture them and massacre their families if they didn’t take their own lives. They say that many people got their friends to kill them. Others lay in a circle around the grenades they had been given. Whole families committed suicide together. The father was usually the one who removed the pin.

  For the few who didn’t kill themselves, falling into enemy hands proved less deadly than obeying their own army. That must have felt very odd. The survivors ended up strangely grateful to the invaders for having spared them. A Japanese-style Stockholm syndrome.

  Yoshie once told me a story about Hiroshima. He’d told me several already, but this one was special, because he wasn’t sure if he had seen it with his own eyes, heard about it there, or read it in a book. It seems that after the bomb, in the midst of the destruction, a regiment had received the order to commit suicide on the spot. Out of the entire regiment, only one young soldier disobeyed the command. The narrator of the story.

  * * *

  We spoke quite a lot about that. He even confessed to me that, over the past few years, he had the impression of having more and more memories of the bomb. He never seemed to find raising the subject difficult. He would bring it up himself, if it was pertinent. The day he asked my permission to talk to Ari about it, I knew that our love was serious.

  He used to say that we visuali
ze our personal memories in three speeds, like the videocassette players made by Me. There are memories that come to mind over and over again, obsessively, in slow motion. Then those that seem to skip constantly, as though missing some important scenes. And those that always go by too fast, that we’d like to slow down but don’t know how. If there’s any truth in this, it occurs to me that the first and second speeds would be the speeds of trauma. The third would be more like pleasure.

  Following a similar logic, it seems to me that one could distinguish three types of collective memory. The re-recorded one, you might call it, where the official account is recorded over memories to conceal them. Memory on pause, which is frozen at a key moment. And fast-forwarded memory, where part of the story is deliberately omitted. I mentioned this to Jorge recently. Can I write that down? he asked again.

  Apparently, societies that have gone through wars have higher rates of senile dementia. That sounds reasonable to me. As we age our memory starts to engage with the distant past, and that’s precisely when our ghosts can come back to haunt us. In that case, madness and forgetting seem like natural reactions, don’t they? Maybe that’s why I’m trying to recount everything I remember about my life. In order to tell my son, who doesn’t share those memories. And to tell myself, in case I’ve started to forget.

  Yet I like to think that memory fulfills a creative function as well. Not just because it invents what it can’t recall, or didn’t fully comprehend. To me, a good memory asks itself: What can I do with what was done to me? Who do my memories turn me into, how do they reinvent me? I think I learned that when I was in exile in England. And here, with Yoshie.

  Of course, there are always plenty of people who say you should forget to some extent, that there are things you’re better off not remembering. The problem is that this condemns you to an endless contradiction, because a trauma that isn’t spoken about can’t truly be forgotten. It literally can’t rest. Like those ideas you don’t write down, which keep you from sleeping or thinking about something else. That’s what my therapist always said to me, may she rest in peace. What hasn’t been inscribed cannot be prescribed.

  I once asked my therapist, who was a big shot, how she would apply that same principle to a genocide. According to her, for the first generation of every genocide, the experience defies description. There are no words for it. For the following generation, it becomes unmentionable. Inconvenient. And for the one after that, it is already unthinkable. It can’t have happened, let’s say, or it could never happen again. Which of these three are we in?

  Obviously, no country in the world wants its tragedies repeated. That doesn’t mean they’re willing to deal with the victims of their previous tragedies. Those are two different desires. Are they two different desires?

  Half-joking and half-serious, I would sometimes give Yoshie a hard time about Japan being one of the few countries to receive Videla. He was also the first South American president to visit China. So it seems the general had Asian inclinations. At the time, we were still in London. I was outraged to see those influential countries legitimizing the dictatorship. They wanted to go on buying meat and wheat from us. And I imagine we bought much more expensive goods from them.

  Anyhow, there was a military ambassador in Tokyo who had been a colleague of Massera’s, and in charge of ESMA. A real gem. That son of a bitch went around boasting about the ethnic homogeneity of Argentinians. Clearly he had never visited the North and I doubt he mentioned our immigrants and Jews, either. Under Menem, that guy was president of the Argentine Japanese society. Later on he was jailed for crimes against humanity. The point I’m making is that they all went to Tokyo, ministers, businessmen, bankers, priests. They weren’t exactly traveling incognito.

  The Japanese government declared Videla an honored guest. It put him up in a palace, he had two audiences with the prime minister and even met with former emperors. If you search in The Japan Times, you can find a daily record of his visit. There’s not a single mention in those articles of his military rank. Nor is there a single word about the disappeared, the prisoners, the exiles. In the photos the general is wearing civilian clothes, something he rarely did over here. I suppose that in Japan military uniforms stirred painful memories and were less suitable for doing business. According to the press, the meetings were about Japanese investment in Argentina.

  That same year the Japanese Gardens in Palermo had been renovated. They looked beautiful and whatever, but they were reopened by Videla. The Japan Times reproduced a comment from a local Tokyo newspaper in which the dictatorship—this I’ll never forget—was described as a “moderate government.” In Argentina at the time, there were approximately as many people of Japanese origin as disappeared people.

  Yoshie reminded me that, prior to Videla’s trip to Japan, Argentina had won a youth football championship in Tokyo with Maradona on the team. Even he had heard about it through the media. He explained that Argentina’s popularity had grown in the wake of that triumph, and somehow it had smoothed the way for Videla’s visit. Honestly, I had no recollection of that. You see how memory has the ability to skip or to fast-forward?

  I was never really sure whether Me had started operating here thanks to the dictatorship. I think its Buenos Aires office opened after the debt was nationalized. What I do know is that Yo landed just before the Malvinas. He would always say that his first experience here was war and that he couldn’t believe it, because in the States the same thing had happened to him with Vietnam. But I don’t know much about his company. I was falling in love, so I didn’t want to ask too many questions.

  * * *

  Talking with Yo, I realized that his country also had its disappeared people. He told me there was even an association of mothers, the Hiroshima Mothers’ Group, although they didn’t have the impact of the mothers here. As I understand it, there is no precise data about the number of victims. Many disintegrated as if they’d never existed. Others were cremated, and with the city in ruins, it was impossible to carry out a proper body count. So their names were crossed off by simple elimination. If they didn’t turn up, they were considered dead.

  Yoshie was never able to bury his mother or sisters. His dad, at least he was able to say goodbye to him. He saw. He knew. But in their case, nothing. Even when dead, they were untraceable. They ceased to exist twice over.

  The inability to mourn is something we’re very familiar with in Argentina. To disappear or to be obliterated belongs to another dimension of death, you might say. It impedes what my therapist (did I mention she was a big shot?) called psycatrization. In other words, it prevents mourning. Which means that memory is more endangered than life itself.

  As soon as the war was over and they began to uncover the effects of the bomb, the American occupiers banned the broadcast of any testimony. According to them, testimonies could disturb the public peace. Some peace! But I don’t think it was just about Japan and the States. The whole world needed to believe that the good guys had fought the good fight.

  Before any information became available, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were like a horror with no official images. I think this somehow contrasts with the Holocaust. Beyond all the differences, of course, the Shoah remained visual in everyone’s imagination, didn’t it? When you hear concentration camp, you don’t see an empty space. You see people, victims. The piles of bodies in Mauthausen function as a collective memory. The dead in Japan, on the other hand, were vanquished and their silence belonged to the victors, who fortunately were on our side.

  If you think about it, the first image that springs to mind when you think of the atomic bomb isn’t of the victims. It’s the mushroom cloud. You see the explosion, not all the people it killed. Isn’t that the height of disappearance? That’s why the survivors, whether they realized it or not, were already rebels. They didn’t need to behave heroically. Their mere existence was a radical act, because they weren’t supposed to have survived. To me, that was Yoshie’s political side. He was radical because he wa
s alive.

  The number of times my dad used to argue with me: What has anti-Semitism got to do with those bombs! That was a war between countries! When it comes to human rights, these kinds of distinctions amaze me. Is everything fair game during a war between countries? Let’s say there’d been a Jewish state at that time and it had fought against an anti-Semitic power, would the concentration camps have seemed any less unforgivable to us?

  Take Palestine, for example, which was the issue we most clashed over. Doesn’t killing children and civilians in those territories warrant as much condemnation before as it does after the recognition of a Palestinian state? My dad was livid. How dare you compare the concentration camps to…! I’m not comparing, Dad, I’m not comparing, I would say. I’m just trying to understand the way we think.

  Regardless of who won the war, in my opinion there’s another link to the case of Japan. The productivity of death. The gas chambers and the atom bombs are—what should I call them? Products of killing industries. Pure deadly efficiency. Only an industrial power could’ve invented them. Other countries can at best try to emulate them. Here, for example, we did a pretty good job of following the Nazi model.

  Although they occurred at almost the same time, to me it’s as if the two exterminations were from different eras. The gas chambers were supposed to be secret, there was nothing to show the public. But the bombs were dropped for the whole world to see. In the concentration camps, or in the clandestine prisons over here during the dictatorship, the aggressor was sickeningly apparent. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was invisible, there was nothing to rise up against or to surrender to. It was something against everyone and for no one. I’m not saying it was worse. I’m saying it was the future.