Afterwards we invent soothing stories to tell ourselves. The Holocaust was inhuman. The bomb was a mistake (Yoshie told me this is what one monument in Hiroshima calls it, a mistake that must never be repeated). Or that the disappeared were a bad dream, diabolical, and so on. As if there had never been a logic, even a bureaucracy, behind it, with thousands of employees conscious of their actions, following a plan. We invent all that so that kids can sleep tight. Or rather, so that their parents can.
* * *
I never quite understood why among my friends Yoshie had the reputation of being serious. My sisters (Sara more than Monica) found him too formal. Once again, I think this was a problem of translation and interpretation. We didn’t laugh in the same language as him. His sense of humor didn’t attract strangers, which is how we warm to people over here. His was inward, so to speak. You had to get close to him to learn to laugh at the things he laughed at.
He loved jokes about death. In his case, this was deeply ironic. The more I knew about Yoshie’s life, the funnier they seemed to me. His sense of the tragic was so strong that any joke could make him feel relieved. He knew lots of poems and fables by heart. They were very important to him, because his father had taught them to him. He would recite them in Japanese and then translate them for me. I think I found them more fascinating before I understood what they meant. This often happens to me with languages I don’t know. The translation disappoints me slightly, as if the original goes from meaning potentially everything to saying something very limited.
So, for example, I learned that Zen monks wrote poems about their own death. Yoshie explained that they would write them while they were still in good health, and then pretend later on that they had thought them up on their deathbed. I was surprised that many of them were humorous. There was one he used to repeat a lot that went something like this:
I thought I would live
for about two hundred years,
being pessimistic.
But death has come suddenly,
when I’m a mere boy
of eighty-five.
There was also a fable with a similar theme. A man fears he will die without leaving a worthy goodbye poem, and so he starts to practice from an early age. Each time he finishes one, he sends it to his master. Until on his eightieth birthday he sends him this:
Eighty years I lived
by the deeds and the grace of our sovereign
and my beloved family.
My heart is now at peace
amid moons and flowers.
Then his master (who must have been immortal or something) replies, When you are ninety, alter the first line.
It seems some of the monks would say goodbye with a few satirical verses. Yoshie told the story of a poet who, at death’s door, copies out another poet’s farewell. And he adds a heading:
This poem is the work of someone else.
I promise I shall plagiarize no more.
Whenever we had a barbecue, I would ask him to recite this other one:
When I die, bury me
in some old tavern
beneath a barrel of wine.
With a little luck,
the drops will reach me.
But the one I remember most, at least whenever I go into a hospital, is the one about the doctor attending to a dying man:
The doctor praises
his ode to death
then pushes off.
I once asked Yoshie whether he had thought of writing one. He became very solemn. When I’m dying, he said, I won’t say a word. If anything, I will listen.
When he’d had too much to drink, he liked to tell Zen riddles. He would relate them in the form of a dialogue and even do the different voices. Those were the only occasions when my friends laughed with him.
I can still hear Yo changing his tone. In a reedy voice, the young disciple asks, When you die, O master, where will you go? In a deep voice, the old master says, I have to go to the bathroom. He considered this the greatest Zen riddle of all time. He said that the disciple is expecting a transcendental answer, but his master understands how dubious those kinds of answers are. So instead, he moves on. Or maybe he is saying that the only thing we truly know about ourselves is our body and its needs.
Sometimes he had difficulty condensing these stories for me. Or he couldn’t find the right word, and so he would try in English or French. We would repeat each sentence until we were satisfied. He explained to me that in Japanese there are some essential words, like death, that don’t have an exact equivalent. If I understood correctly, they prefer to name the specific way in which someone dies. Of old age, in battle, of a broken heart, in an accident. That way, they evoke the sort of life a person had. Rather than one universal death, you could say that there are many individual deaths. It seems to me a good way of respecting each and every one of them.
But wasn’t that destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The concept and the language describing the concept were shattered because there, it was the Death. With a capital D, the sort that doesn’t exist for them. A noun en masse. In English, on the other hand, it’s incredibly easy to kill or die with words. To die for. I’m dying to. It’s killing me. To death. In Spanish too. Who knows what dying must be like in all those languages I’m going to die without ever learning.
A colleague told me that in Albania they have two different verbs for dying. One is generally for animals. The other is reserved exclusively for humans and bees. I wonder what sort of worldview lies behind that. The sting, what gives the bee its identity, is its most mortal part and can be used only once. In other words, it finds itself through self-extinction. Doesn’t death contain something of that Albanian sting? When you learn to speak it, you are left in silence.
* * *
Once, Ari, who was addicted to sci-fi, lent Yo his El Eternauta collection. Comics are a great way of starting to read in another language, I used them with my students in London. Yoshie promised Ari he’d read it. Every night before he went to bed he would devote some time to it. Only when he gave it back did I realize that at one point in the story an atom bomb falls on Buenos Aires. Yoshie didn’t comment on this. He returned it to Ari, ruffled his hair, and said, I liked it. I think I’m right in remembering that the junta disappeared the author the same year my son was born.
As soon as Yoshie was able to understand them, I recommended he read Argentinian short stories. He had very little spare time, and I thought the shorter texts might appeal to him. Finally, I got him interested in a few by Silvina Ocampo and Hebe Uhart. I felt proud, as if those two women and I had won a battle. When he started to nose around in my book collection, I hid the volume by Lamborghini, just in case. The one with a story that poked fun at Japanese honor, and featured a tasteless joke about Hiroshima. I don’t know, maybe he might have found it amusing, had I explained it in my own way as a satire on the errors of translation.
It was thanks to him that I read Tamiki Hara. His suicide had a profound effect on him. After the war, all books in Japan had to pass a kind of inquisitorial filter. That New York chick he’d dated told him this was an outrage, how was it possible that his own country had set, blah, blah, whatever. I remember my friend Silvia. She had a bookshop in Barrio Norte and they carted her off, pregnant. The three of us fled a few months later. Pregnant, she was. They’d forced their way in as she was closing up shop, because she sold dangerous books.
Maybe the most brutal thing is not that you were bombed. Most brutal of all is that they don’t even allow you to tell people you’ve been bombed. During the dictatorship here, they would kill one of your children and you couldn’t tell anyone. Except that over there, in Japan, they were trying to implant what we in the West call democracy, weren’t they? This never even occurred to me before Yoshie. It’s totally nuts. Thousands of deaths don’t bother you, until you meet just one survivor and then they start to matter.
Mind you, once books about the bombs started appearing, there was a whole avalanche, a sort of bel
ated catharsis. People had started to forget, when all of a sudden they were swamped by a whole library. As with the Holocaust, many of the testimonies were anonymous, or by people who stopped being anonymous when they told their stories. A whole community that had lived in silence now lived in order to speak.
Speaking of victims, it always struck me that in Chile, which after all had its own massacre, the military organization in charge of maritime alerts is called SHOA. Not long ago, after the Concepción earthquake, I read that acronym again. I guess that’s randomness for you.
There is the direct pain of those killed or tortured, and there is the almost spectral pain of their relatives. It happened and didn’t happen to them. Whenever we touched on the subject, Yoshie didn’t say much in the first person. He talked mostly about his sisters and father, who hadn’t been able to tell their stories, as though to him, speaking was about making the dead talk.
Then, of course, there’s the rest of us. Those who survived relatively unscathed, and were seemingly able to get on with our lives. That can also be painful. I’ve never been fully able to assess what it means not to have died, not to have been tortured. The effects of the trauma of what might have happened to us. I believe that there are secondary effects. They’re not a smashed body, radioactive vital organs, a scarred back, but they’re in everything we do, or everything we don’t say.
When he got back from his trip to Tokyo after his aunt’s death, Yoshie told me about the Delta Group activists. They had started off in Hiroshima, and were making a name for themselves. I knew from my English friends about another women’s group, which had protested for years at Greenham Common air base. They would have parties and hold debates next to the barbed wire fences. They camped out there during the Malvinas war, and the British police had arrested a few of them. I had been following their activities ever since. Shortly before I returned to Argentina, thousands of women gathered to link arms all around the base. My friends and I planned to go and show them our support, but in the end we never went.
Yoshie had mixed feelings about the Delta women. I couldn’t make him see that, in the long run, the aim of these women-only groups was true integration. I tried to explain the need for women to learn to fight our own battles, to get angry together. Otherwise, we end up playing second fiddle yet again.
But look what’s happened now. Since Fukushima, women have organized the biggest protests. Women who are more concerned with the well-being of their family than the company’s future. I don’t see this as the thinking of a housewife, this is politics that begins in the home. The Plaza de Mayo mothers and grandmothers started off that way too.
Sadly, if you do an internet search for the Delta Group these days, what comes up is a multinational technology company.
* * *
Yoshie used to make business trips to Brazil and Chile and occasionally to Colombia or Mexico. If it was Ari’s turn to stay with his dad, we would travel together. Yoshie barely left the hotel, he slept, ate, and had meetings there. Half the time I don’t think he was quite sure which city we were in. But he never seemed fazed. He simply arrived, spread out his papers, and got to work. If he needed to go out, he called a cab.
I would sleep in and linger over breakfast, a rare luxury for a mother. I would read the local press, translate for a while in the bedroom, and then take the opportunity to walk around and get to know the place a bit. That was the agreement we reached. I didn’t have to go anywhere with him, or attend any of his business lunches looking like an idiot. Each of us was free to do what we wanted until evening. Then we would have a drink together, and all the rest. We slept on our sides, me hugging his back. The opposite of how I slept with other men. In winter it was perfect. He gave off an uncommon amount of heat.
Yoshie wasn’t too interested in museums and that kind of thing. He claimed to have seen them all in Paris as a young man. Now he preferred to watch people. According to him, a conversation with a stranger was worth more than any monument. On the other hand, he was a master when it came to hotels. He found in them nuances and mysteries most of us didn’t see. He would register them instantly, while I was still unpacking. The soap brand, the newness of hair dryer, the towel absorbency. Number and condition of hangers. Location of electrical sockets. Lamp angles. Size and thickness of the pillows. The type of DO NOT DISTURB sign. The contents of the minibar. And, of course, the make of television (ah, those days when remote controls were a source of wonderment!). He hated to go to bed in front of an inferior model.
He never allowed himself many consecutive days off. A week and a half seemed excessive to him. I managed to persuade him on only one occasion. It was Yoshie’s fiftieth birthday, I think, and we decided to mark it with a special trip. He suggested New York, as I’d never been there. I raised every objection I could think of, except for the main one, of course. No way was I prepared to run the risk of him suddenly deciding to call Laura or Laurie, and ruin our holiday. I always suspected he was still a bit in love with her. I could deal with that. We all have to negotiate with somebody’s past. But to stir up the unconscious, that is going too far.
In the end I won, and we went to London, where he had never been. The thought of showing him my haunts, my friends from there, made me happy. Emilio went out of his way to arrange everything so that Ari could stay with him. I’m not sure whether this was because he had started to warm toward Yoshie or because he didn’t want our son to go to London with someone else, or what. But he did it. At my age you don’t believe in intentions, you believe in what you get.
I had no money, and Yoshie was keen to pay my expenses. With a very male mind-set, he seemed excited to be the one footing all the bills. In the end we agreed that I would at least cover the cost of the hotel. I longed to go back to the first apartment the three of us had lived in when we arrived, in Bloomsbury, near Tavistock Square. I found a decent enough hotel in the square itself. We were lucky, in fact.
Yoshie made a daily list of places to visit and ticked them off one by one. The amazing thing was that he never seemed in a hurry. It was interesting to see the mixture of relief and surprise he showed while interacting in English once more, in an English that was different from his. As if he were carrying around a second foreigner inside himself.
Every morning after breakfast we would sit by the tree in the square dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima. He said it wasn’t because of the tree, but because the benches were nicer on that side, and the morning sun at that time, and so on. So we would sit there for a while, without speaking, and I would think of Virginia Woolf. I gazed around the square in search of number 52. The first time I went to London, I couldn’t believe a hotel had replaced her house. I know it was bombed, but my point is, why didn’t they rebuild it afterwards? The woman died for a room of her own and they demolished her house.
* * *
It was impossible during that trip not to talk about the Malvinas, which was still very recent. I told him how the Americans had participated on both sides. How they had propped up the regime in Argentina, especially before Carter, and in the war they had sided with the British. Yoshie didn’t really understand our connection to the islands. And it wasn’t that easy to explain. In the end everyone, supporters as well as opponents of the dictatorship, was programmed to insist that the Malvinas were Argentinian, although most of the time they’d been a Spanish colony, and then, above all, British. The islands weren’t so much something that had been taken away from us as something we’d hardly ever had. Obviously, I didn’t put it to him quite like that, because I wanted him to take our side.
That same year, or the following year, I’m not sure, we beat England. Thanks to the hand of God, Maradona’s feet, and who knows what else. Ari was beside himself with joy. He always says it was the first World Cup he remembers properly, and the last he would wish to have ever witnessed. See how poor Messi gets us to every final and then we lose? I always tell Ari that to me this seems in a way more Argentinian. To promise a lot and to end up losing.
When the team went to La Casa Rosada to celebrate, President Alfonsín didn’t come out onto the balcony. We all watched it together on TV. I was moved by such a gesture. Rather than making the most of the opportunity, he stood back. The trial of the military juntas had just ended. There, too, you could say we had reached the final. And while we were celebrating that, we scored an own goal.
Yoshie considered the Argentinian state courageous for acknowledging its crimes, and apart from Germany, he couldn’t think of any other country that had the guts to do that. My sisters and I tried to explain to him that this was all well and good, but the trials had been very limited and in the end they had legislated to forget. It took us twenty years to begin repairing the damage of that oblivion.
In my view, Alfonsín’s greatest achievement was to stop the constant alternating between democratic and military governments. Before that could happen, they had to deal with the armed forces in a way that caused the minimum amount of distress (for them, of course). As I see it, from the very start, they intended to try only the generals. No lower ranks, no torturers, none of the other murderers were to be brought to justice.
Soon after we won that blessed World Cup, it was impossible to continue investigating those crimes. We lost with the Full Stop Law. The military achieved the rest with the Easter revolt. I can still remember Ari sitting on Emilio’s shoulders in the Plaza de Mayo singing to Alfonsín. After that it was “Happy Easter, everyone,” and they changed the head of the army, and if you’d been given the order to violate human rights, then you got off scot-free—that’s what we call reconciliation.
A few days before the Easter revolt, a terrible storm struck Buenos Aires, and the Nichia Gakuin School was flooded. Yoshie arranged for a group of Japanese companies, including Me, to help pay for repairs. The next day, I went with him to inspect the damage. The basement looked like a river. The kitchen, classrooms, and refectory were full of families bailing out the water.
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