Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  We tied the knot the day before Working Women’s Day, not that it meant much to us then. Minister Fraga celebrated our first anniversary by taking a dip on the beach of Palomares with the U.S. ambassador, to dispel rumors about those nuclear thingamajigs that they’d lost there.

  Soon after Nacho was born, the first physiotherapy convention was held in Barcelona. I look back on it with regret, because I wanted to attend but couldn’t. By the time Sonia was born—no, Rocío—we’d already been incorporated into the public health sector. After that things became more regulated. Sometimes I envy the training young people get here nowadays. It’s so specialized and advanced. Well, at least I worked in a country where things were improving.

  * * *

  As I see it, you fall in love twice. With the same person, that is. Once when you meet them and a second time when you lose them. That happened to me with Enrique. We weren’t getting along so well during those last years, why lie about it? He had his ways, like everyone, but time led me to forget them. After he died, I started to appreciate him again, like I did on our first day. It felt like I was losing him again. Not just my husband, but somebody who’d already left long before he did.

  I didn’t break down while he was ill, there was too much to do. Nor did I want him to see me depressed, as he had enough on his plate. Whenever I take care of someone I get a strange feeling of euphoria. I want to control everything, and I feel stronger than I am. The worst part came afterwards, once his suffering had ended. Then I saw my own pain, and that he had been caring for me too.

  I went through a very bad patch but I got over it as best I could. I didn’t lie around on the sofa. People suggested I see a psychologist or something. No way, not me. Once you start, you never stop. You become a junkie of your own problems. Seriously, that happened to a couple of my friends. Moving forward was more important to me than looking back.

  I went back to work the week after Enrique died. People said that it was too soon, that I shouldn’t ask too much of myself, and all that other nonsense. Burying myself in my work was the best thing for me. What I found hard was going home. The house closed in on me, it felt alien. Thankfully, the children were grown up, so I could invent excuses to stay out late.

  In the beginning I was fearful of everything. Going to the bank, taking the car out. Cinemas, Christmas. Traveling on my own. But when the routine of doing those small things became normal again, I felt doubly contented. Isn’t getting something back more fulfilling than having it? I enjoy being by myself now, I quite like my own company. I had to work for that.

  My physical energy gradually came back and I started to have fun again, but differently now. Life was sad but at the same time more real, if that makes sense. I met Yoshie when I was going through that phase, though in some ways I was still reluctant. Afraid of making another commitment to something and losing it again. I preferred not to face love head-on, as it were.

  It seemed unthinkable. I thought it was all over, and in any case, what was the point? Then suddenly, whoosh, he appeared from so far away. I’ve never believed in Prince Charming. Princes make me laugh, we’ve had more than enough of them here. This was different. Here was a person who had lost more than I had. Someone who knew how to say goodbye. And, oddly enough, learning how to do that teaches you how to love.

  We kept some of our stuff at each other’s places. But we didn’t move in together. We were too old for that, and we were happy that way. With time to breathe in between so that we were pleased to see each other again. Sharing some things and not others. Together yet apart. When you’re alone by choice, you find a different kind of serenity. As much as you may enjoy sharing it, you feel the space is yours. Pretty or ugly, it belongs to you. Just like your own backside.

  We loved going away together almost as much as we liked returning to our homes. A weekend, a few days, just enough. It was like marriage with a return ticket—I recommend it to everyone. Not that we had that many opportunities. He worked like a maniac, way too much for someone his age. Interestingly, Yoshie swore he’d never had so much time off. Not because we work any less in Spain (I’m fed up with all those clichés), but because here, according to him, we know how to enjoy our holidays.

  He was surprised at how I tended to accumulate my days off, to use them all at once. He needed a bit of reeducating. That was one of the things he admired about Europe, our awareness of leisure. He called it a philosophy, because it had to do with notions of emptiness, and goodness knows what else. One day, he informed me that in Spain and France, people take ninety percent of the time off they are allowed by law. This statistic puzzled me. What the hell did we do with the other ten percent?

  The fact is that with Yoshie I was rejuvenated. Or perhaps better yet, I felt excited about things in a way that I hadn’t when I was young. I was filled with a new energy that was more mental than physical. I’d grown a kind of tiny antenna. My children told me they hadn’t seen me laugh like that in years, loud and hearty, the way laughter should be. Those things aren’t part of your character, they come with practice. That’s what I used to tell my patients. The more you do something, the better you are at it, and the more you need it. This applies as much to a kneecap as it does to a heart.

  According to my friends, I started to dress better. Were they implying that before meeting Yoshie I went around looking like something the cat dragged in? The only difference was that I wore brighter colors and the occasional plunging neckline. When you’re young you look good without doing anything, but now I had to work for it. And that’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror. My desire to see something pleasant looking back at me.

  My children insisted they were delighted for me, especially Nacho and Sonia. She adores everything Japanese. Yoshie won them over in no time and Nacho’s partner, too—husband, sorry, I can’t get used to it. Rocío took longer to come around. At first she was resentful. As the youngest, she was closer to her dad, I guess. As for my grandchildren, who came along a few years later, they loved this strange-looking gentleman who played with them. We would take them to the park, and give them presents I could never have afforded on my own. No children, but grandchildren! he would joke. What a bargain!

  Looking back, were we happy? To be honest I never asked myself that question, so I suppose the answer is yes.

  * * *

  It wasn’t that Yoshie liked order. What terrified him was disorder. They seem like the same thing, but they aren’t. More than once I opened my eyes in the middle of the night and found he wasn’t in bed. I could hear him filing away papers or tuning his banjos. To me, it was lack of medication.

  His obsession with those banjos! Scarcely a day went by without him checking up on them. He explained something to me about the change in humidity between Buenos Aires and Madrid. He would sit on the sofa with several of those instruments and disappear. He spoke to them in a separate language, composed of clicks and vibrations. He reminded me of myself when I’m examining my patients’ joints.

  When you impose too much order on things, something strange happens. Instead of owning them, they stop being yours. They could belong to anyone. They lose some of their character. They go back to the store. Why have them if you’re not going to shake them, squeeze them, let them wander about the house? A bit of mess is healthy. The same applies to having children. It teaches you to accept that nothing stays still. When you’re the mother of several toddlers, you never expect to find things where you put them. And you know something? In the end you’re grateful for that.

  I was surprised by Yoshie’s lack of punctuality. He was forever arranging books and straightening paintings, and then he’d arrive late to everything. Aren’t the Japanese supposed to have the most reliable trains in the world, and all that other nonsense? He tried to blame it on Latin America, but he couldn’t fool me. He liked making people wait, and he had found my weak spot. Thanks to a couple of asshole boyfriends, I’ve dreaded being stood up ever since I was a teenager. So when he did finally show up, inst
ead of getting angry, I all but thanked him.

  The closer we got, the more he talked to me about Japan. Sometimes, depending on the kind of day I was having, I would feel a little hurt. I sensed he wasn’t altogether happy here with me. If he missed his country so much, why had he never gone back to live there? Yoshie maintained it wasn’t so simple. That place he remembered didn’t exist anymore. I have no place, he said. No matter where I am, I’m far away.

  He would spend hours listing the differences between our two cultures. At first, I thought he was hoping I might change my habits. In fact, he just needed me to realize that we seemed as alien to him as he did to us. When you were least expecting it, he’d come out with one of his cryptic sayings. Frog who lives in well, he’d say, doesn’t know size of ocean. Bottom of lighthouse is always dark. And so on. All right, I countered, if you get me started on Spanish proverbs, you’ll be in that chair all night.

  Once he got used to it, Yoshie realized he could learn a lot about himself by doing business over here. Argentina was like a mirror in which he could see his own back. According to him, our two empires had responded to modernity in opposite ways. He asked if I could dig up some history books for him. He’d read them when he couldn’t sleep and the following morning would regale me over breakfast. I’d told him I liked to wake up slowly, but he was raring to go. There he went again with feudal traditions and honor or siguiriyas and haiku. He made my head spin and he was only on green tea.

  Yoshie believed that, in some ways, we Spaniards resemble the Japanese more closely than we do the Argentinians. This sounded far-fetched to someone like me who had relatives in Córdoba and Rosario. It was much harder for him to be invited into someone’s house in Spain than in Latin America. People here like you only in bars, he complained.

  Sometimes our gestures made him uncomfortable. Too much arm waving for his lordship. Men must keep a balance between what they express and who they are, he used to say. You must be kidding! All that self-control will give you constipation. And yet at the same time I think we fascinated him. You only had to hear the words his colleagues used to describe us. Passion, fire, Spanish madness. Mainline baroque. Although I recognized none of those things in myself, I shouted ¡Sí! and ¡Olé! and they were enchanted. It was all part of the guided tour. Afterwards, on my way home, I would think, Could they be right?

  * * *

  Let’s be straight. It took time for me to get to know my body, to know what it likes, I mean. Young people having endless orgasms might happen in porn films, but at least for me, it was a struggle. I’m not saying never—well, hardly ever. That’s not the point. It’s about feeling like you can do whatever you want with another person, even if you don’t in the end. Because you’re free inside. Not in there, I mean your head.

  When I was twenty I had a nice pair of boobs and a mass of preconceptions, mostly about myself. Those are the worst kind. Let’s just say that I had to stop caring so much about my body before I could take care of it. I was worried that everything would end with menopause. Then I realized this wasn’t true, that with it, other things began. Because desire is something you’re always learning. It’s true that as you get older you become invisible, but with those who do see you, you make magic.

  Strangely enough, in the end you find good company more satisfying than the act itself. Pleasure tends towards friendship. That doesn’t rule out the physical by any means. On the contrary, as you get older your body becomes everything, from when you get up in the morning to when you go to bed at night. Not everything about it has to be erotic anymore. Of course the erotic is still there, and sometimes in an even better way. Ask Yoshie, who was constantly begging for massages.

  The first time I gave him a back massage, he got slightly emotional. He confessed he’d never been touched by a left-handed woman before, and he told me a few things about his school in Nagasaki. I told him that the nuns had put me through hell to make me right-handed but it was no use, and they’d finally given up. Who’d have thought I would end up using my hands for a living.

  We made love very slowly, almost without moving. Sometimes we seemed to be falling asleep. You feel more pleasure that way, and at that rhythm, even what’s ugly looks beautiful. In my profession, you stop making those distinctions. You see all kinds of things and all of them are interesting, especially to the touch. When the hand knows what it’s doing, no body is unworthy of attention.

  It exasperates me when men see old photographs of me and tell me how cute I was. It turns me off. What do they mean, was? If children can be cute (my grandkids, for starters), why can’t there be cute old people? People who think that beauty just evaporates, who can’t see that it’s transformed the way energy is, those people don’t deserve to be touched. Yoshie knew how to appreciate every season, so to speak. Perhaps he got that from reading haiku.

  I don’t mind going into details, really. He let me lead and I was grateful to him for that. Other men are so busy giving you instructions they leave you no room to maneuver. Occasionally he would go limp, or I would have an attack of sciatica. We’d have hysterics over these things and laughing got us excited all over again.

  Yoshie used his tongue and his nose—it’s not what it sounds like, but if only it were! What I mean is he talked to me, and he smelled me. He said I gave off the aroma of a guitar. Not of the wood but of the strings when they’ve been played. I’m not sure it was a compliment, but if I was a guitar, then I felt like playing him a concert.

  Another of Yoshie’s quirks was his lack of concern about bedding. We were at odds over that. He could sleep just as well with two blankets as with none. He considered it an advantage that he didn’t feel the cold. I felt sorry for him, as being warmed by your loved ones is a pleasure from the gods. I think the poor man was actually cold, and he didn’t even realize it.

  He could certainly move his body. We took up ballroom dancing. Yoshie wanted to lose a few pounds, and claimed that pasta in Argentina had been his downfall. Some evenings we would go out to dance tango. He knew the essentials: starting off, the tango walk, the short basic step, but not much else. I could see that he especially enjoyed it. A lot of men our age have a fondness for tango. I don’t think it’s because it reminds them of their youth or anything, but it’s the only way they have of smelling young skin and clasping slender waists. The women allow themselves to be led, because it’s part of the ritual. As soon as I cottoned on to that, I started to leave the club before him. I’d let him walk me to the cab. Then I’d suggest he stay awhile, and he raised no objections.

  * * *

  Whenever Yoshie spoke to me about those memories, it gave me the shivers. I would listen, of course, but if he wallowed too much in all that horror, I would cut him short or distract him. I was worried that poking at his wound would only hurt him more. In my experience there are things you get over and leave behind. If you don’t want something to be repeated, you don’t go around talking about it all the time. It’s pure common sense.

  The day of the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, I remember it clearly, Yoshie didn’t say a single word on the phone. In the media they talked of nothing else and yet he remained silent. He was immersed in his work. I thought he might need some company, so I went to spend the night at his place. As soon as I opened the door, I found his television lying on the living room floor, smashed to pieces. He claimed he had an accident while cleaning. I didn’t ask any questions, and we watched a comedy movie on the small set in the bedroom.

  But the next morning he did talk, as soon as we’d got up.

  He told me he had a splitting headache, that he had spent all night dreaming strange things and thinking about everything he had heard. He was furious that the bomb had been turned into a kind of symbol, for politicians, the peace movement, or whatever. It was no longer something real. Nowadays everyone denounced the bombs, but no one wanted to think about the burns, the pus, the scars, the tumors. Yoshie was shouting as he said this to me. I had to agree with him. People never think
enough about the body. Eventually he calmed down, accepted the pill I gave him, and went off to work.

  As you grow older, you’re as likely to forget one thing as you are to remember another. Yoshie started to go back. As time went on, he became increasingly concerned about things he couldn’t change. I tried to help him turn the page, but he saw only what he was leaving behind, like someone running backwards.

  Reliving past ordeals is something I don’t understand, honestly. Imagine that you suffered an injury in the past. Do you put a strain on it? Make it work harder? If you pull a muscle, you put a cold compress on it and rest. You gradually resume normal activity. That’s the way we work, what can you do? The same applies here. No one denies atrocities were committed, but you can’t become obsessed by the suffering, the pain, the bitterness. There’s been enough division in this country.

  Some people are on a mission, the people my children admire so much these days. They speak as if they are the owners of the past. They didn’t even live through it, and yet they think they can tell you what it was like. They try to convince you that you’re a victim of war, poverty, the elites, the nuns, there’s always something. And you must continue to be that all your life. If you so much as step out of your role, heaven forbid! I won’t go on because I’m starting to rant.

  Politics aren’t really my thing. I have my opinions like everyone else, but they belong to me, not the entire neighborhood. There’s a reason the ballot is secret. There are some who value controversy above friendship. Yoshie and I had similar ideas about that. He knew how to avoid arguments, change the subject, and go on. He told me he’d learned this while living with the Yankees.

  * * *