Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  Around that time I was having difficulty making ends meet. I already knew what that felt like. My children didn’t. Nacho had left home and was sharing the bills with his friend, or boyfriend, I wasn’t really sure at the time, but Rocío and Sonia were still living with me. They were studying for their degrees, and they realized they might not end up getting a job in their field. This left them disillusioned. I had to tighten the screws when exam time came round. Of course, we could never have imagined today’s circumstances, which have grown direr. When I look at my grandchildren and think they might be forced to go abroad, I feel like I can’t breathe.

  Yoshie’s company had its ups and downs, too, even though by then Me was the fifth-largest TV manufacturer in the world, as he reminded me every five minutes. At first, things went full steam ahead. It arrived in style and opened its headquarters in Madrid. It was based in Castilla, past the towers, just before you get to the old Real Madrid stadium. The branch made tons of money, which it then reinvested. For every million pesetas it made, it spent a million and a half, according to Yoshie. Then it started to invest in cable TV, and bought up channels all over the country. I imagine that was a blunder.

  Yoshie once told me that he didn’t really understand how the Socialist Party in power here worked. He had always thought socialism was something else. He used to say there were lots of opportunities for business in Spain. As soon as he got here, Yoshie became one of the sponsors of the Japanese pavilion at the Expo ’92 in Seville. He went to see the work and came back terribly excited. He told me that the whole building was made of wood from his country’s forests, held up without a single screw or nail, and exposed to the weather. He was proud that their pavilion was like no other, and built by people from all over.

  He went on so much about his blessed building that we went to Seville that summer to see it, not long after we got together. We traveled on the high-speed train for the first time. No one knew how ruinous it would be. Seville, hot? An inferno! As soon as we arrived, we went straight to the pavilion. When I saw it in front of me, I forgot everything. I even stopped feeling thirsty, I swear. I remember embracing him on the walkway, and it was like crossing a frontier.

  The Japanese pavilion ended up being the most popular exhibit, yet it lasted no time at all. As soon as the expo was over, they dismantled it, strip by strip, as if it had been built only so that we would remember it. It turned out that the building was made not of wood but of memory. I thought it was a pity. He saw it differently, he thought this made it invincible.

  I suppose that by spending lots of money, Yoshie increased the promotion of Me’s products during the Barcelona Olympics. I can still remember one of its commercials. A huge guy, dressed like a samurai, his face in shadow, approaches, dribbling a ball. He pauses in front of the camera, yells something in Japanese, then tears off his samurai outfit to reveal a gypsy costume. He gives a flamenco wail. Tears off the gypsy costume and underneath he is wearing the colors of the American basketball team. All of a sudden the lights come on. And you see that the guy is the spitting image of Magic Johnson. He says with a smile: It’s me. He shoots, he scores. Applause, then the slogan appears: Me. You. Us. My children explained the play on words to me.

  Despite my children’s current objections, the early years of that administration were good. Afterwards, the whole thing about Felipe González got darker and darker. My children criticize the way I vote. They try to convince me that everyone from the past is useless. Does that include me? How should I know if joining NATO was the right thing to do, or if the constitution needed revising? All I know is that I was able to save when he was first elected, and that by the end I could scarcely get by. I’ll leave the rest to the experts, who are everywhere, apparently.

  Even Yoshie had begun complaining about how the economy was being managed. I can’t remember what problems his company ran into. He had to attend some meetings in Japan. They were recovering from a terrible earthquake. This affected him deeply, because when he was a child, his aunt and uncle had told him about an earthquake that was impossible to beat, and this one had come close.

  I was shocked when Aznar won the election. I had voted for him, but not so that he would win. It was more of a wake-up call, wasn’t it? Lots of people nowadays omit the fact that they celebrated his victory.

  Thanks to liquid crystal screens, Me hit the jackpot again. Half the country bought a new television. Meanwhile, I clung to my old German gadget, of course. Yoshie was determined not to fall behind his rivals. It was Samsung here, Hitachi there. His main concern was how the image shifted as you moved around the screen. Wait a minute, I’d say, isn’t that normal? Don’t images change when you look at them from a different angle?

  The markets were buoyant, business was thriving, things were fucking great, but I don’t know who for. The hospital was hiring fewer and fewer staff. Suddenly they were talking about the public healthcare system as a drain on the economy. Energy was privatized. But they also lowered taxes, which we are always grateful for. The housing bubble has burst, they announced, and the only thing I could think about was my grandchildren blowing soap bubbles.

  Then came that whole thing with the weapons of mass destruction. That’s when I changed my mind about the government of the day, and Yoshie did, too, I think. We even went on a protest march. I couldn’t remember the last one I’d attended. Causing havoc in the streets isn’t my thing—my thing is treating lesions. The Iraq War made him angry, I’d only ever seen him like that when the Twin Towers were blown up. That day he called the company to say he wouldn’t be going in. Yoshie, missing work.

  * * *

  After several years of studying the Spanish economy, he began to explain to my family and me what was going on. I don’t know if he actually knew what was going on, but he sounded as if he did. That’s what our family meals were like, him talking about interest rates and me about broken joints. They weren’t all that different.

  According to him, our economy grew thanks to the euro. Just imagine that now! Besides—and this was what really caught his attention—thanks to a surge in immigration, consumption had gone through the roof. Yoshie always insisted that immigration was the most important aspect of our economy, and that anyone who didn’t understand that would ruin everything. Nacho and Sonia, who are all for lost causes, loved that idea.

  He also claimed that when the next crisis hit, Asia’s influence would become clear. Our idea of Eastern countries had to change, because we still believed that they needed to learn from us. He tried to explain to us how the system (for heaven’s sake, what system?) had been founded on Western values, and now that Asia was superseding us, it was only natural to adopt a few of its principles.

  I remember when they opened that tiny cultural center near Chamartín that offered courses in Japanese arts and crafts, calligraphy, ikebana, that kind of thing. We became friends with the director, Rikako. What a nice woman she was! She’d been educated at the oldest school in her country, in Kyoto or somewhere like that, and she was so pretty. Yoshie didn’t admit it, which proved I was right.

  That reminds me, Rikako died recently, poor thing. I went to visit her at La Paz hospital, and I did what I could to help her, through the few contacts I still had. The last time I went, we talked solely about flowers. At one point, we fell silent. She looked at the arrangements her students had sent to her. She asked me to change the frower water. Then she asked me, in that frail voice she had by then: Did you know that my name means “scientist”? I’m not sure why she told me that. I never saw her again.

  * * *

  One day I found him rearranging his banjos. He took them down off the wall, dusted them, and replaced each one on a different hook. I stood watching him for a while, without saying a word. I went to make a green tea and a coffee. I came back with a cup in each hand, and, playing dumb, I asked him what was going on.

  Yoshie told me he would be retiring the following year. He said this as though informing me it was going to rain the next da
y. He was gazing at the wall as he spoke. It was like he was reading the subtitles of his own words projected there. I said that at last we would be able to eat supper whenever we liked, and enjoy proper weekends. I asked him to take note of what it was like, because it would soon be my turn.

  As well as his age, I think what made him unhappy was how the times were changing. It’s the first thing those bastards mention when they give you the sack. Sales were in free fall because of the rise of home internet, and the company wasn’t sure how to reinvent itself in order to survive.

  Me broke with a tradition of goodness knows how long: it closed branches and reduced personnel. Yoshie was so upset that I became an expert at the problems his company was facing. The owners warned that unless measures were taken, they’d be forced to sell the company to Panasonic. But don’t you have a say in any of this? I asked. I get to decide only how to do what the directors decide to do, he said.

  All of a sudden, the most senior executives were seen as a burden rather than a fount of knowledge. This was new for Yoshie as well. He would speak nostalgically about an old model that was dying out. He complained that everything was changing too fast. Sales strategies, client relations, meeting formats, everything. He was being asked to perform an increasing number of tasks, just when he had less energy for all that.

  The younger employees respected his seniority, but didn’t understand his way of thinking. Moreover, he declared in astonishment, he’d never had so many female colleagues. Is that maybe what’s bugging you, darling? I said. Kah-men, please! he protested.

  When Yoshie first arrived here, he didn’t have a clue about work-life balance. To him, a work problem was a life problem. To stop working was, in a sense, like dying. He couldn’t understand that for me it meant the opposite, having more time and starting a new life. Of course, he had no grandchildren. And for that, I feel sorry for him.

  During his last year of work, he thought constantly about leisure time. That summer, he tried taking his annual leave all at once, to see what it felt like. He discovered that he had a fear of emptiness. This made him feel terribly disappointed, because his parents had taught him that emptiness is the true meaning of existence. What kind of parents teach their children that? Yoshie concluded that all the years he’d spent working had made him stupid. I’d take him out to get some air, we’d eat some ice cream, and he would calm down a bit.

  If what health experts say is true, overtime ends up making you sick. In Japan they even have a special word for people who drop dead from overwork. I can’t remember what it is right now, but I swear they have one. Apparently, their government is worried, and they are considering passing a law obliging people to rest. If I’m to believe Yoshie, measures like that are always aimed at saving money, because sick leave and medical bills are costlier than just giving a few days off, and because people spend more money when they’re on vacation, which is good for the economy.

  I used to find this kind of argument outrageous. My surprise surprised him. Everything is economics, Yoshie would say, good and bad. Pleasure, family. Violence, war. Economics is life. Well, for me the body is everything—you either break your back working, or your accounts don’t add up.

  For reasons best known to her, my daughter Rocío is seeing a shrink. Sometimes she even insists that pain can be psychosomatic. In my day, we didn’t have the time or the money for that sort of thing. When you raise several children, I can assure you there are more pressing things to think about. Besides, I don’t believe in such superstitions. For your information, sweetheart, our bodies are far more complex than all your self-help manuals put together.

  * * *

  He changed a little, or a lot, it depends on how you look at it. On the one hand I thought he seemed, I don’t know, more lighthearted. Liberated, having done his duty. On the other, he had a haunted look, as if amazed that he’d made it that far. To old age, to retirement. That he was still alive.

  Some mornings he woke in a state of euphoria. He raised the bedroom blinds, yawned, and seemed to devour the sun. Other mornings his alarm would go off (he still used one, but set it an hour later—how daring of him!). He would reach an arm out to switch it off and duck beneath the covers, intimidated by all that free time before him. Yoshie reckoned he had been living like a European, but when he stopped working, his reaction was completely Japanese.

  Now that he had the entire afternoon to have lunch, he found it difficult to spend more than an hour at the table. He never understood why we Spaniards took so long over meals. According to him, we confused eating with socializing. I tried to explain to him that eating is a communal activity and that socializing is also a form of nourishment.

  He became more concerned about his health. Before, he used to avoid doctors like the plague. In the old days, he would rather endure pain than have them run tests. Setting foot in a hospital makes you feel ill, so he thought. It used to drive me nuts. Finally, when I persuaded him to get a checkup, we caught a few things. If I hadn’t thought of keeping the test results at my place, I’m sure he would have thrown them in the garbage.

  Yoshie became convinced that he would be struck down at any minute by something connected with the radiation. He would attribute the slightest twinge or feeling of malaise to the contamination inside him. He believed that working so much had distracted his cells, that he had been able to fool them by moving around. Now the moment had arrived, and to stay still was to awaken the monster.

  I suspect that the death of his old classmate played a big part in that. The guy he went to school with in Nagasaki. Yumi or Yuri, I don’t know, his name escapes me. He found out through an American colleague. Terminal cancer. He seemed fine and then all of a sudden, goodbye. Yoshie was quite down when he heard the news. Clearly they had been close as children. He got hold of his photograph and placed it on the shrine in a corner, away from the others. He would even go over to it sometimes and whisper. I’ve no idea what he was saying.

  Maybe that’s why he stopped smoking overnight. Like someone cutting off their arm. Speaking of limbs, he started to practice aikido. He gave up ballroom dancing and enrolled in a class at Rikako’s cultural center. He explained that aikido had been developed when he was a teenager (I thought it was much older, or that we were much younger) after the war, when there was a ban on martial arts. It all shocked me a bit. That martial arts could be banned, that he should start practicing them here, and that we were both postwar children.

  He explained that aikido was all the rage while he was living in France, and so it was something he’d always wanted to try. Yoshie became fascinated by the idea that each movement could be perceived in terms of circles and spirals. He would even do drawings to show me. He loved the idea of proportionate self-defense. He said that you learned to put yourself both in the position of the assailant and the assaulted, which led, actually, to peace. I nodded, just to be on the safe side.

  I must admit that aikido had a few things in common with my work. Joints and how to immobilize them. The importance of inertia, balance, and displacement. Turning, twisting, and stretching. Yoshie explained that the word roughly meant “way of energy.” That’s what it was all about, knowing how to use your energy properly.

  Given that his own energy was all over the place, as soon as I took early retirement, we decided to go out on walks together as a serious form of exercise, an hour every day. Yoshie didn’t know how to stroll. He would speed ahead. As this was great for my cardiovascular issues, I tried to keep up with him.

  Whenever we stayed in Leganés, after breakfast we would leave my apartment, walk down Calle Getafe, and take a few turns around the Casa del Reloj gardens. He would check his watch while he walked, as if he had a meeting to get to or something. And he couldn’t help pausing to look at the bullring, which still seemed really exotic to him. What we enjoyed most about those walks was observing the changes in things that seemingly stayed the same. When you are rushing from one side of the city to the other, you don’t notice anything—
the city is so big you don’t even see it. That’s another good thing about retirement. Although you’re getting old, you learn to look at things anew. You have more and less time, if you see what I mean. You fall in love with little things and you pay attention to them, like those children who are forever asking questions.

  We never got bored of our daily excursions. On the contrary, they gave us things to talk about. We would invariably discover something we’d missed the last time round. You see, Yoshie would say to me, we’re not going in circles. We’re moving in a spiral.

  With all that walking around the same places, he took to repeating stories he had already told me. He would talk about his house, his mother’s hands, his sisters’ toys, his father’s body beneath a fallen tree. I didn’t have the heart to interrupt him, and yet I felt that spinning around in circles like that couldn’t be good for him. We started to have our differences—or to realize that we had them. Sometimes we would argue during our walks, and you know where that leads. A couple that can’t go for a walk in peace is going nowhere.

  I still take that same walk through those gardens. Or rather I did, before I became like this. Up until recently, I would always go if the weather wasn’t too chilly. A half-hour stroll at my own pace, a little more slowly, of course. And I would remember him.

  * * *

  As I said before, he changed very little, or a lot, it depends. He had never looked forward to retirement. Yes, he was keen to work less but not to stop altogether. On the other hand, I couldn’t wait, because I was tired, because of the atmosphere at the hospital, the chaos in the public health sector, my grandchildren, because of everything. When the time came, I could feel my age catching up with me even as a weight lifted from my shoulders. I filled out the paperwork, my colleagues brought me a cake. My children arranged a surprise party with a few of my friends. The next month, my life was completely different.