Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  * * *

  After a couple of relatively good years, I began to have money worries again. I reduced my budget, cut costs, and renegotiated my debts. I speculated from Monday to Sunday. I had become a maternal calculating machine. Ari took part in the crisis by saving little folded notes. I took my cues from the state, and my son took his from me. His earliest savings were in pesos ley. By the time he started school we had the peso argentino. And now his pockets were stuffed with australes. It pained me to see him plunged into this monetary chaos, the changing colors, national heroes, and numbers. He collected all the different notes obsessively, like stickers.

  Yoshie was struck by the way we Argentinians were so well informed about the exchange rates of the dollar, the French franc, and even the yen. The way we did mental conversions and followed the changes in interest rates. The way everyone talked incessantly about money. Even young kids, who still save in dollars, because they keep an eye on devaluations. This general awareness of the economy fascinated him. His surprise was short-lived. After the first crisis hit, he understood it as well as anybody. We talk about money here because we don’t have any, and when we do, it’s instantly stolen from us.

  One day, he described to me in a wealth of detail, which I couldn’t begin to replicate, how all our creditors claimed to support democracy, and yet none of them was willing to improve the terms of payment of the massive debt the dictatorship had run up. All at once, I understood the way our country works. It was about making money out of every coup d’état, and selling out the next government in order to control democracy. Just then, interest rates shot up again. Making the country pay its debts was far less important than ensuring they were impossible to pay.

  When everything started to get fucked-up again, Yoshie grew nervous about the future of his branch. He said that a new business structure like his couldn’t withstand this kind of collapse. He found it hard to believe that a currency could devalue so fast. Apparently the opposite was happening to the yen, and that made it less competitive now. Yoshie agreed with me that the States might be pulling the strings (You see, you see! I told him). Its industries were on red alert because Toyota was now bigger than General Motors, he always used that example. We couldn’t talk about it without quarreling. Everyone here knows that the States is behind all of this, Yo. Mah-riera, please, don’t oversimplifying! he replied (he rarely managed to use the imperative). They’re the ones who oversimplify us, those sons of bitches! Sorry, if you don’t live there you can’t understand them. To hell with understanding, d’you hear me?

  He used to complain about how weak our ties with Japan were, despite all the Japanese immigration into Argentina. He claimed that one of his tasks was to strengthen them through the business sector. To me this reeked of hypocrisy. Really, I said, since when were multinationals so culturally aware? Without cultural awareness business not last, he replied, offended. You silly goose, I said, sighing, no business can last over here.

  When the era of hyperinflation began, and the price of goods would increase while you were waiting in line to pay for them, Yoshie started to have problems sleeping. That was when we nationalized him. He was staggered by the situation, and spent days trying to figure it out. I told him not to waste his energy, that it was simply a coup d’état by another means. For you everything is a coup, he said. Precisely, I replied. Now you’ve understood my country.

  Apparently, in Japan they were having their own crisis, which I couldn’t help imagining almost as paradise. It was their first major tremor in a while. No matter how many earthquakes they’d suffered, they weren’t accustomed to feeling the ground shake beneath them. Yoshie was in a bad mood, and had little time for us. I was feeling more vulnerable than usual. I missed the courteousness I’d started to take for granted. I hated to ask him for money but Emilio had several mouths to feed, and my sisters were as hard up as me.

  It was around that time that we started to fight a lot. Yoshie’s angry side appeared, something I’d never seen before. During one of our quarrels he threatened to leave me. Although we patched things up, I’m not sure I got over it. Emilio always said that when a player talks about leaving the team, he has already left. I think the same applies to couples.

  It was the year of the first pardons. The ones Menem imposed without consulting Congress. What did we expect our most unpunished president to do, other than legalize impunity once and for all? Emilio voted for him, although he doesn’t like to remember that now. That’s the way it goes, we live in a country of secrets and conspiracies. The people responsible for the Malvinas were released from prison, together with hundreds of torturers and coup-mongers. Judging their crimes as equal to those of the state, they freed a few terrorists into the bargain. In the second wave, the other dictators, Videla, and even his minister of economy were released. Yoshie couldn’t understand what was going on. Why imprison them if afterwards they let them out? he asked.

  Seeing them walk free, I thought of leaving again. But neither Ari, who had only just started high school at the Nacional Buenos Aires, nor, if I’m honest, I myself felt capable of uprooting ourselves again. That precipitated a crisis in my relationship. Exciting as it was at first, the idea of being with someone who could leave at any time destabilized me. There was talk at his company about closing the Buenos Aires branch, or relocating him. That hurt me. Then I was the one on the verge of ending things, but I was afraid to add another separation to my CV.

  As if this weren’t enough, politically speaking we were increasingly at odds. He favored privatizing public companies. He insisted that what mattered wasn’t to preserve them in their disastrous state, but to modernize them, and so on. I think at that moment, in the nineties, I started to have that same weird sensation I’m experiencing now, you know, when you feel that history is running backwards? That the world is set on rewind.

  * * *

  While Yo and I were separating, rumors started up again about the nuclear waste dump in Gastre, province of Chubut. After a quiet period, there were reports of dubious comings and goings in that part of Patagonia. It seems they sent twenty guys to a uranium mine that had been closed for years. Later on, some mysterious deaths were uncovered in the vicinity and bodies turned up showing signs of uranium poisoning. This indicated that the dump that had supposedly been shut down was being secretly rebuilt at another location. Just a fortnight after they declared that the project had been abandoned, the state purchased tons of a substance used, what a coincidence, to help seal nuclear waste facilities.

  As always, it all began long before that. Jorge has done a lot of research on the subject. He explained to me that during the dictatorship there were plans to build six nuclear power plants, as well as a waste dump near Gastre. Under Alfonsín it was announced that the chosen location was that town, which would become the first of its kind on the planet. The Chubut Antinuclear Movement sprang up and, in the end, it was put on hold. This was only a few months after Chernobyl.

  So that was the plan that Menem resuscitated until thousands of people marched through the snow like an apparition. They came from all over, from Trelew, El Bolsón, Bariloche. They say that no one had ever seen so many people in Gastre. Once again the planned waste dump was buried. The nuclear phantom, less so.

  You don’t even have to travel far. Just over a hundred kilometers from Buenos Aires, the Atucha power station is still operational. It’s already more than forty years old, but I doubt they’re in a hurry to shut it down. The new one, which they called Néstor Kirchner, quickly reached full capacity. And yet we have more wind power in the south of Argentina than any other country.

  The other day I saw that they were commemorating those protests in Patagonia. When I went to pick him up at the newspaper in Avenida Belgrano, Jorge showed me the Greenpeace report. It said that a French company had offered to finance the construction of the dump, in return for several thousand hectares of land in the same area. If we’d accepted that offer (did we?) Argentina would have simply become the nuc
lear dump for France. Who the hell wants waste that lasts thousands of years? And even if some countries do find a place to store it, how can they guarantee it won’t end up polluting them?

  Sometimes, when my pessimism gains the upper hand, I imagine that the history of the world was written by an Argentinian economist.

  * * *

  As for our breakup, well, we are what we are. I need to feel a certain amount of pain. Not because I like it, but because it measures my willpower. Losing someone is a test of your limits, isn’t it? Neither Yo nor I was quite sure where ours were, and things gradually worsened. We accused one another. We would speak on the phone, hang up, and then call back. We tried to leave each other several times. We hurt each other enough to be sure that we needed to split up.

  When Yoshie stopped coming home, Ari kept asking about him. Even Walsh seemed ill at ease. Seeing how my son missed him was what upset me the most. I started making up stupid excuses and I ended up talking to him about the complexities of love, the fragility of human relationships, and God knows what else. I wished I hadn’t. Excuses were probably better.

  Ari took it badly, and I could feel he was blaming me again. I resolved to swallow my pride for my son’s sake, or for my own, or both. I contacted Yoshie and asked if he could at least call Ari from time to time. He promised he would. Much to Ari’s delight, he called once or twice. Then he vanished again.

  I felt bitter about it. There are some types of rejection you can’t subject teenagers to. I find it hard to accept when someone I trust breaks a promise. I’m quite rigid about things like that. The only promises I don’t keep are the ones I make to myself.

  I couldn’t say exactly when I discovered that he was leaving the country. Our accounts of that part of the story never coincided. Yoshie swears he told me. And that he even suggested meeting up, but that I said no because I was upset with him. That’s not how I remember it.

  I assumed that was the end of it. Wouldn’t that have been the most natural thing? To my surprise, a few years later he wrote to me on my birthday. A brief, friendly message, without any rhetoric. I liked it and wrote back. I was polite, nothing over-the-top. He replied at once, asking me about Ari, about my life. It was quite a long message. I told him stuff, he told me stuff. We kept at it. We bantered. And before I knew it, we were in touch again.

  We called each other on the phone again. At first with those calling cards that sold you minutes, and later over the internet. The first call lasted two hours. We grew nervous. I teased him about his use of typically Iberian expressions. I asked him if he wanted Ari’s number and he said no, that he felt ashamed but that he would send him a present the next day.

  Every now and then we’d exchange photographs, book recommendations, or a few words of the sort that need no explanation. We saw each other once in Madrid. He introduced me to his madrileña, who seemed neither here nor there. He looked both the same and older, I don’t quite know how to put it. He said I was prettier than ever. Which means he thought I had aged. It was late when we said goodbye, with an embrace.

  As I said to Jorge the other day, there are people whom you’re always close to but who don’t change your life at all, and others who change you in a short space of time, just like him. That’s why I wish Yoshie the very best. In life as well as in love, I mean that sincerely. More or less.

  7

  THE FLOWER IN THE RUBBLE

  THE SUITCASE GLIDES ALONG beside him like a red pet animal. As he walks to the taxi stand, Mr. Watanabe observes the undulating roof of Sendai airport. The rhythm of its curves and the reflections on the glass bring back the images of this same building engulfed by the tsunami. The airport floating amid a sudden sea, transformed into an absurd ocean liner.

  The earthquake’s epicenter, he recalls, was located a little over a hundred kilometers from here. He repeats silently the formula, part arithmetic, part nightmare, that hundreds of millions of people all over the planet have had to learn. If a tremor of more than seven on the scale has its epicenter in the sea, there will be a tsunami; the time it takes for the waves to reach the shore is the time you have to run for your life.

  He is only a few minutes from the city of Natori. There he can get a car from any of the rental companies. Operating like this, without booking ahead, will allow him to carry out an initial reconnaissance of the area. With the dearth of visitors, he is sure he’ll have no difficulty finding somewhere to stay. As the taxi starts up, so do his doubts. Watanabe wonders whether it was a good idea to improvise this trip to such an extent. Everything that seemed simple before he left home suddenly strikes him as complicated.

  * * *

  On the far side of the desk, the young receptionist eyes him with a look of amazement verging on alarm. His face gives the impression of having just woken up. His left nostril is pierced with some symbol that Mr. Watanabe can’t recognize.

  Sorry, he says. I wasn’t expecting any customers this early, or at all, to be honest. The town hasn’t had many visitors recently. My name is Tatsuo, at your service. Are you a journalist?

  When he says no, Tatsuo seems even more astonished.

  We only see foreigners, says the young man. Journalists and photographers. A photographer, then? (Watanabe shakes his head.) Oh, how strange. The only Japanese people who come here are either soldiers or politicians, you know? Or nuclear technicians. You aren’t a politician, are you? (Watanabe smiles and makes a gesture of denial.) Well, that’s obvious. You’re alone. Politicians go around with bodyguards and all that. They’re unable to take care of themselves. From your appearance, I don’t think you’re an army man, either. And, with all due respect, the nuclear technicians that come here are usually younger.

  As they’re alone, the two men continue to chat while they complete the paperwork. For a while now, Tatsuo has been alone in the office. His employers, he explains, insist they maintain a minimum service even if there are no customers. So he and his colleagues do shifts, mostly serving no one. Seemingly desperate to talk, Tatsuo tells Mr. Watanabe that his family are all in Sendai, the largest city in the prefecture, he declares, with a mixture of pride and sorrow, and the place where, for that very reason, most of the tsunami victims are to be found.

  Tatsuo asks him if he saw Emperor Akihito’s televised speech. Although Watanabe didn’t pay the slightest attention to the event, he implies that he did. From what he glimpsed in the press, the emperor emphasized the need for national solidarity, the collective spirit, the aikokushin and all that stuff. In other words, epic anesthesia.

  All of a sudden, he is assailed by vague fragments of the speech made by the current emperor’s father, Emperor Hirohito, days after the bomb at Nagasaki. If his memory serves him correctly, no such broadcast has ever been made again until this year.

  Hasn’t he had this thought before? Mr. Watanabe wonders. Is he turning into one of those old people who repeat themselves without realizing?

  When his focus returns to the conversation, Tatsuo is making fun of the dark suits the emperor wears on important occasions. Oddly, he praises the empress’s traditional kimono. Young people nowadays think it’s cool to be conservative.

  At least this emperor didn’t fall from the sky like some of the others, says Watanabe, and he has tried to promote peace with our neighbors since he took over.

  I don’t know, replies Tatsuo. Possibly. I was born the year after.

  According to the young man, some social networks are saying that a passage from the emperor’s televised address might have been censored. Watanabe asks if he knows what the passage referred to. Tatsuo says he doesn’t, but other comments suggest it could be related to the radiation in the worst-affected areas, like the neighboring prefecture. Watanabe thinks that, except for nuclear waste, nothing can remain hidden for long. Lies have changed pace.

  He prefers a small car, one he can park anywhere, and which doesn’t stand out. When he fills in the form, he realizes he isn’t sure how many days he wants it for. Odd though it seems, he hasn�
��t yet decided. In fact, at this moment, he doesn’t feel too sure about anything: why he has flown here, why he wants a car, and where exactly he will go. Before he can arouse suspicion, he rents it for a week.

  As a special service, Tatsuo insists on offering him the intermediate model for the same price as the economy one. Given the way things are going, he remarks, he doesn’t think his employers will object to the discount. Watanabe accepts with a slight nod. It’s a Toyota Verso, the youth announces.

  At full speed, Tatsuo explains that the Verso has enough space to accommodate four pieces of luggage (but I only have a small red suitcase, Watanabe thinks). A direct fuel injection system (and what might an indirect injection system be like?). An in-line four-cylinder engine (no idea what happens when the cylinders aren’t in line). One hundred and twelve horsepower maximum (why would I want more horses? he wonders, remembering the Olympic rider Hiroshi). And a panoramic sunroof (ah, Watanabe says to himself with a smile, that I like).

  After consulting the map Tatsuo gives him, and making a couple of quick searches online, he aims to visit Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, the three most devastated prefectures.

  Then he goes and purchases a radiation meter.

  * * *

  Before setting off, Watanabe maps a route and its possible alternatives. He tries to find his bearings by comparing the foldout map with the online ones, which give very different perspectives.

  Instinctively, he tends to trust everything he sees in print as if the mere investment in paper, ink, binding, and distribution guaranteed an effort that wouldn’t allow for negligence. What floats on the surface of a screen, by contrast, has the transience of a puddle of water. And yet, on his analog map, Mr. Watanabe keeps coming across slight variances, omissions, and inaccuracies, which the GPS resolves with an ease that makes him feel as astonished as he is grateful.