Errant Destinations (Jewish Women in the Americas) 166694226X, 9781666942262

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Errant Destinations

Jewish Women in the Americas Editors Rebecca Marquis and Elizabeth Goldstein, Gonzaga University Founding Editor Catherine Caufield Jews have been present in the Americas since the fifteenth century; there is a growing body of scholarship examining this presence from multiple perspectives. The Lexington Books series Jewish Women in the Americas expands our knowledge of Jews in this geographical area through its particular focus on the diverse experiences and perspectives of women. These experiences and perspectives are often communicated creatively―through literature, plastic arts, dance, and other modalities. Reflecting on these expressions of lived experience through a range of interdisciplinary approaches enriches our understanding of what it means to be Jewish in the Americas. Titles in the Series

Errant Destinations, by Andrea Jeftanovic; translated and edited by Jacqueline Nanfito Peak TV’s Unapologetic Jewish Woman: Exploring Jewish Female Representation in Contemporary Television Comedy, by Samantha Pickette Enchanted Dulcinea, by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, trans. and edited by Rebecca Marquis

Errant Destinations

Andrea Jeftanovic

TRANSLATED BY JACQUELINE C. NANFITO INTRODUCTION BY JACQUELINE C. NANFITO FOREWORD BY MARJORIE AGOSÍN

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jeftanovic, Andrea, 1970- author. | Nanfito, Jacqueline C. ( Jacqueline Clare), 1957translator. | Agosín, Marjorie, writer of introduction.   Title: Errant destinations / Andrea Jeftanovic ; translated by Jacqueline C. Nanfito ; introduction by Jacqueline C. Nanfito ; foreword by Marjorie Agosín.   Other titles: Destinos errantes. English.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: Jewish women in the Americas | Includes bibliographical references.  Identifiers: LCCN 2024004681 (print) | LCCN 2024004682 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666942262 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666942279 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Jeftanovic, Andrea, 1970---Travel.  Classification: LCC PQ8098.2.E38 D4713 2024  (print) | LCC PQ8098.2.E38  (ebook) | DDC 864/.7--dc23/eng/20240304  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004681 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024004682 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Marjorie Agosín

Preface: Other Rooms/Cuartos Ajenos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Introduction: Errant Destinations: Travel Narrative as Art . . . . . . .1

Chapter 1: Sarajevo Underground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Chapter 2: California Naked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Chapter 3: Watanabe’s Eye . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Chapter 4: The Rivers of Clarice Lispector . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Chapter 5: Doors and Ellipses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Chapter 6: The Intimate Palestinian-Israeli Circle . . . . . . . . . 105

Chapter 7: From a Bookshelf of Middle Eastern Texts . . . . . . 119

Chapter 8: Birds of Steel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Chapter 9: Nevertheless, Cuba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Translator Jacqueline Nanfito Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 About the Author and the Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Emblematic Miljacka River, which traverses the city of Sarajevo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Figure 1.2: The interior of the bathroom in the Hotel Europa in Sarajevo, destroyed during the Balkans War . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Figure 1.3: The interior of the war tunnel in the patio of the Kolar family, which served as a secret passageway during the Balkans War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Figure 4.1: Tree-lined avenue in the Botanical Gardens in Río de Janeiro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Figure 4.2: Bench in the Botanical Garden that alludes to the short story “Love” by Clarice Lispector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Figure 6.1: Photograph taken in East Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Figure 9.1: Photograph taken from the Isidora Aguirre Archives . . 152

vii

Foreword Marjorie Agosín

It is both a pleasure and a privilege to write these words as a foreword to the collection of travel essays by Andrea Jeftanovic with the magnificent translation by Jacqueline Nanfito, as an introduction to bring us closer to the work of this author, who in the last decade has emerged as a powerful and original voice in the contemporary Chilean narrative. Errant Destinations awakens in the reader a strong sense of searching for identities and belongings. One of them is the Balkan and Jewish heritage of her Bulgarian mother and her Serbian father. Moreover, one perceives a delightful complicity when the reader enters into these essays, taking in the exquisite lines that the author shares candidly about both familiar and literary environments. Empathy and the journey are revealed as a constant source of familiarity and knowledge. The voyage is also presented as a challenge in the face of adversities in a new space. At times, infiltrated by the gaze of literature, the reading of Errant Destinations possesses the magic of discovery associated with the act of traveling, walking, and wandering, as if one were in a library filled with books populated with magic and history. The task of the reader is to enter that library and read along with the author. In other words, the complicity of literature and of what one encounters during the journey are the routes of these Errant Destinations, and, at the same time, those shared with the reader. Errant Destinations can be read as an open cartography where the author ambles in search of signs of identity and of belonging. The essays are written in a poetic, enchanting tone and because of the magic of uncertainty, they are marked and defined by the perpetual theme of the

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search for an atavistic memory, especially that of the Jewish people, who have been condemned to persecution since the beginning of their existence. Jeftanovic hails from a family whose roots are found in the Balkans. The theme of the former Yugoslavia appears as a referential frame for this author who, despite the rubble and the ravages of war, sets out to search for her past. The theme of Judaism in the texts of Jeftanovic is employed as a sacred and symbolic space that attempts to recuperate the world from the perspective of that which is no longer, that which was an erased memory. In Errant Destinations there are references to distinct periods in which the Jewish people suffered extermination. Jeftanovic succeeds in exploring the maps of horror and those of memory with remarkable skill and with a delicate and subtle tone that permits us to approach the great themes of yesteryear, as those of the twentieth century that culminated in the Balkan Wars and in Europe becoming fractured again as with the case of the Holocaust, for example. Even though Andrea Jeftanovic doesn’t explicitly reference to her Judaism or her mother’s Sephardic family background, it is still fascinating to contemplate the spirit of Judaism in Errant Destinations, as it appears in various aspects of this extraordinary and complex collection of travel narratives. Andrea is an avid reader of universal literature, always in search of spaces to which she belongs. In an interview with her in my house in Concon, Chile, Andrea affirmed that she belongs to Judaism through her reading of texts, especially the works of authors like Canetti, Kafka, and Lispector—readings that are perceived in these pages and that form a significant part of her creativity and her unbridled imagination. The theme of the errant and diasporic journey is a recurring metaphor linked to the atavistic displacement of the Jewish people and that displacement is marked by tragedy and destruction. In her reflections about wars, and especially about the Balkans, there are profound allusions to the beautiful city of Sarajevo, which was under siege for three years by the Serbian army. I feel that through these texts, Jeftanovic creates a central metaphor in a perpetual mirror of the multiple destructions suffered by the Jewish people. These references appear in Andrea Jeftanovic’s essays with a moving subtleness, and even a desired x

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ambiguity. But this ambiguity is part of the literature that the author presents us in a diffuse cartography, mysterious and always in the process of remaking itself. The process of writing Errant Destinations is also that of a journey in search of an encounter in the presence of the missed encounters of a European history full of pauses and mutilations. It is in this space that we must find the voice of Andrea Jeftanovic, a voice that searches and one that questions. Andrea Jeftanovic speaks to us of the map of subjectivity in these texts and in reality. Errant Destinations is a marvelous map of the human condition, the collective, and the individual. The maps of subjectivity are accompanied by the maps of memory. Andrea and I have spoken about these themes. Memory, quintessentially, is the memory of the Jewish people with its mission to remember. But as she told me in a personal interview, memory also entails that which has been omitted. It is what is not said through omission or allusion that determines the reading of these texts. The world unfolds like an enormous map where history and subjectivity dialogue. Memory is the final destination of these errant wanderings, and it is the marvelous legacy that Andrea Jeftanovic offers to us. The reading of Errant Destinations is an open letter in search of an atavistic identity. Dialogue with vital texts in the history of Western culture is what we find in this work of creative non-fiction. Jeftanovic writes of encounters with writers like Clarice Lispector, in whom the reader can glimpse revealing instances of the vestiges of Jewish literature in her work, although she never spoke at length about her Jewish heritage. She longs for and seeks in the stories of Lispector everyday women who desire and search for and are part of a literature that questions. And as Andrea said in one of our conversations, she feels that Lispector is a writer who seeks, transcends, and questions. Sarajevo, Berkeley, California, and Rio de Janeiro are all places and part of a real geography. But more important than that geography, they are cartographies of the imagination where the author searches for signs of identity. The Jewish inheritance of her family in the Balkans and her intense spirit are what motivates this profound desire and questioning search. xi

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Errant Destinations is an open text, which the author penetrates through the art of questions. In this sense it is a Talmudic text where the author interrogates words, their relationship to literature and other texts, and to the possibility of creating meaning from what is said or not said, from what is chosen to be remembered and told, and what is omitted. Errant Destinations can also be read as an individual search for belonging to a memory beyond oneself, to a collective memory. Errant Destinations could be linked with the novel, Living Water, by Clarice Lispector in which the fluidity of the soul and words are articulated, and each word is a history of life and each history, a memory to be told. Moreover, it is linked to the perpetual condition of loss—be it cities, pens, or histories, but yet within that loss, literature creates possible routes to find once again the time lost by the avatars of history. This text is profoundly linked to the Jewish experience of a love of texts and the interchange of connections that exist within the readings. I feel that it is structured like a braided text, like the texture of the Challah bread, where each part contributes to the whole. Jeftanovic presents herself, at times, as a Jewish writer in search of identities and spaces in which to find her roots and herself in the immense desk of words, which is all that endures. As she affirms, literature is a search for memory, the reflections in the face of it, and especially the atavistic memory of the Jewish people, which is the pillar of compromise of the people of the book. Errant Destinations is a book evoking the memory of places that disappear. Cities lost and found and notated on a paper napkin, which perhaps by the art of magic, invite us to discover other imaginary places. The reader will delight with the openness and the vital experiences of these texts, which don’t fork into errant directions; rather, quite to the contrary, they are braided one to another, in search of transcendence, and as the author affirmed in a personal interview, to the union of the human and the divine. Each page is then a search and a return. Each cartography affirms a lost or wayward identity and the powerful persistence of remembrance. It is my impression that among all these virtues and signs that appear in these pages, Andrea is a Jewish writer. One who searches for displaced maps and finally finds herself in her roots, and it is her

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dwelling within a complex Jewish tradition that invites her to question, to transcend, and to imagine that which signifies the perplexing act of writing to find oneself and ourselves.

xiii

Preface Other Rooms/Cuartos Ajenos

I have traveled far away to resolve the most intimate matters in borrowed rooms. I wrote these texts in a residence in Alcalá de Henares, in a room rented in Sarajevo in the post-Balkan Wars, in a hotel room in Rio Janeiro following the itinerary of the characters of the short stories by Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. Or, even in the bedroom of Noam, a child victim of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, whose father is part of an organization that brings together relatives from both sides of the conflict to find ways of coexisting. Other locations were rented rooms in Berkeley, highway hotels along the Californian Big Sur, or between the room of Salvador Allende and the bicycle workshop of a cyclist detained during the Chilean dictatorship, Peter Tormen. Later, I was in a room where Fidel Castro stayed in the province of Cienfuegos, also in Cuban homes that welcome tourists, where once my family was received during a trip around the island, prior to the arrival of President Obama. I have not always traveled alone; at times, I traveled with my husband and children, with friends and family. However, because of modesty and a penchant for fiction, I have altered the circumstances, not the essential happenings. These stories are a combination of that which I have lived, imagined, read, and feared. There are some itineraries that I realized with a certain degree of guilt, that of being and abandoning, of saying halt to everything for a while and returning like a defeated heroine. There is a tendency to associate literature produced by women with enclosed, domestic spaces. I, myself, have written about intimacy. That women narrators walk and write upon that principle or upon the practice xv

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of traveling is to go against the idea of a room of one’s own or to think about an otherworldly room of one’s own. Since the nineteenth century in Latin America, we are familiar with fascinating diaries of women travelers, women who journey. I think about Flora Tristán and her book Peregrinations of a Pariah which narrates her trip from France to Peru, searching for her paternal legacy and coming face to face with differences and rejection.1 Or, I think about the English writer, María Graham, in her Diary of My Residence in Chile,2 a book with notes about how a foreigner lives the experience of one residing in my country. These short stories have revolved around the idea of borders, but borders are polysemic; they open a vast territory and signify many things. For example, literature is always a dialogue on the border; writing is to propose a barrier and extend an invitation to cross it. Or rather, literature is constantly “writing” those borders, whether geographic, historical, cultural, idiomatic, intimate, emotional, vital. There one can study the processes of blending, transference, and amalgamation, in which something new emerges. In these circumstances, something novel, spontaneous, beyond control is offered. At the last Puerto de Ideas Festival, in Valparaíso, when this book was already completed, I listened to the Cameroonian writer, Leonora Miano,3 whose words echoed my own. For example, when she affirmed that “the border evokes relations” (48). She spoke of the encounter between peoples, at times with violence, hatred, or disdain, but always generating sense: “My multiple being is a carrier of meaning” (48). In this mode, the limits are a challenge because of the crossing and the overlay that they imply, and because they allow access to diverse levels and textures. She spoke from her condition as an African woman living in France, but she aspires to a universal message. I liked her perspective of identity as hybrid, yet understood not as a place of rupture, rather, to the contrary, as a space of permanent adhesion. Furthermore, Miano pointed out the frontier as an evocative space, stating: “It is a place of constant oscillation: from one space to another, from one sensibility to another, from one vision of the world to another. It is the place where languages are mixed not in an amazing manner, rather impregnating each other naturally, to produce, on the blank page, xvi

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the representation of a heterogeneous and hybrid universe” (47). Then, in that unstable space, the layers are added, new dialects arise, and a new synthesis is facilitated. In turn, she referred to the experience of subjectivity in the movement in the global panorama, “the fact that we live in a world of tremendous identity tensions, there is a certain overvaluation of identities in detriment to what is communal. I’m in favor of extolling the particulars of each culture, but also, I am determined that this does not make us lose sight that humanness is incompressible, if you will allow me the expression” (17). Many times, I felt that these journeys were an internal process of recognition of familiar and literary heritage, to liberate me, in part, from my origins, even though it may seem paradoxical, to find that alienation and arrive at my own synthesis. Moreover, it isn’t just a matter of familiar origins, rather literary and imaginative as well. In other words, it is something like going to the source and reinterpreting it. Besides, every inheritance has fissures. It is a mobile legacy that is actualized; one can impose another direction to the text. After Foucault advises us to laugh at the solemnity of origin.”4 In other words, writing with a certain infidelity, with a certain betrayal. We all have something of foreigners and orphans. And to be precise, there appeared a verse of the Argentine poet, Alicia Genovese, which concentrated the spirit of this idea: “to go far off in order to elect one’s own”5 To write about travel is to leave blank spaces, to speak about that which you did not succeed in seeing. Writing is a physical exercise, among other things; it implies to move about, to walk, to fly, to navigate, all verbs in the infinitive. It implies coming to terms with the spectral presence of the past and the future. A common denominator of these chronicles has been the inclusion of the act of walking. They are journeys in which I walked by day, by night, following maps, lost, randomly, or going straight to a point. I liked the idea of turning walking into a methodology of meditation and writing. One walks physically and psychologically. One walks to return to one’s origins, to detour on the road and reformulate the destination. The same magma of thoughts and remembrances unfolds best during strolls. Walking as a cultural exercise has been reflected in several books. During this process of closure, I read Of Walking upon the xvii

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Ice by Werner Herzog,6 Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit,7 Walking a Philosophy by Frédecir Gros,8 Walking: A Praise by David LeBreton,9 and Theory of the Journey by Michel Onfray.10 In Wanderlust, a sociologist from the US asserts several original ideas about walking. For example, walking includes all the fields of knowledge, religion, philosophy, landscape, urban politics, and anatomy. Moreover, walking is a type of associative thinking, minimally structured, always improvised. The author adds: The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, a passage through a landscape that echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts, and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were more like traveling than making. (6)

Walking is also a visual activity, one views from another perspective, landscapes succeed in continuity, we see lines of trees, façades of building, we lose all notion of time, and we follow other referents. The outside is etched like the ancestral drawings on the walls of a cave. Walking is both means and end, travel and destination. Walking is an activity in which the following intersect: religion, philosophy, landscape, anatomy, gender, anthropology, culture, geography. Walking has created paths, roads, commercial routes, religious pilgrimages. In the face of individualism, profitability, and rapidness, walking is a subversive diversion, the scenic route that crosses a landscape somewhat abandoned by ideas and experiences; it possesses an imprecise time. There are varied studies about the European walker (Walter Benjamin, Roberto Walser), but they lack reflections on the peculiar mode of the Latin American walker/narrator. In these stories on walking, I have attempted to develop literary hermeneutics from my gaze as the Chilean daughter of immigrants. At times one walks to reconstruct the origin of one’s ancestors, parents, or grandparents, and one’s forced pilgrimages in times of crisis (pogroms, revolutions, wars, persecutions, extermination).

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The experiences of encounters and failed meetings are registered in travel diaries, peculiar biographies, or fictional exercises with personal archives. Whichever the format, it opens a varied gamut of narratives of displacement that search for a register and a “translation” of that genealogy like a space of mediation between an identity whose tension lies between the foreign past and the Latin American present. Or perhaps, walking should be considered movement and not a journey, because one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat. Or one walks over a place of memory to not forget and to experience those ruins—to be there. At the same time, I was reticent to write about my errant travels because walking is not always a thoughtless activity, a pastime, adventure, or pilgrimage. There are forced displacements, perhaps the most significant number due to war, political crisis, poverty, natural disasters, and religious persecutions. It suffices to evoke recent images of those infinite lines of refugees in Syria fleeing the destruction. Or the dead bodies of African citizens floating in the Mediterranean after the collapse of the precarious floats, or children dying on the shore of some beach. The walk, on the other hand, acquires the status of a political activity. To walk or march is a physical demonstration of political or cultural conviction and one of the most universally available forms of public expression. According to the approach of the author from the United States, walking is also a tool and a strengthening of civil society that can stand up to violence, fear and repression (Solnit 9). Some years ago, it was my turn to see marches in my country and throughout the world. Thousands of people marching to validate their rights. I think about the marches of student groups, or marches against the system of private pensions (No + AFP). The protests in which a crowd walks around demanding a reform of the socioeconomic model (Occupy Wall Street, Plaza Sol), or for a political cause (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo), marches against femicide (Not one less), marches for gay pride, and campaigns against street harassment. Or I think about the walk made by Israeli and Palestinian women demanding political agreements by their leaders. The March of Hope, as it is known, was created by the organization Women Wage Peace (“Mujeres que activan por la paz”), and its mission is to “create a nonpolitical xix

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movement of women to reestablish hope and work toward a peaceful existence for us women, our children and future generations.”11 They dress in white and walk for two weeks throughout Israeli and Palestinian territory. “We are women from the left, from the right, Arabs and Jews, from the cities and the periphery, and we have decided that we are going to stop the next war,” Marilyn Smadja, one of the founders of the group. proclaimed.12 The activist, Orna Ashkenazi, affirmed: “We will not stop until Netanyahu and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Majmud Abbás, sit down together at the negotiating table again, not simply to talk, but rather to do something.”13 While traveling, you realize that the cultural landscapes are like enormous texts. Some of them easily read, others require specialists. One knows the authors in some of them, but the majority are anonymous. They are written in languages that we understand well, or not, in other cases. They are written in many languages. Among many texts, there are correspondences, others lack a mutual reference. For numerous texts, the originals were lost and they only exist as quotes, indirectly, interrupted texts that pass on a task to posterity to resolve the enigma associated with a people, a historical moment of those individuals. One chapter follows another. At times, the series appears broken and bent. Entire specialists take it upon themselves to reconstruct, decipher, or interpret these texts. Literature is one of these. There are attractive lines of continuity that make the transition from one epoch to another, and then again, a total eruption, an astonishing discontinuity. One travels among people, among cultures and subjectivities, and in no time, you realize that there is a striking similarity between digital traces and contour maps. At first glance, they are not distinguishable. The relief of skin is like a mountainous landscape, the image of the fingertip is similar to the elevation of the land. The grooves of the skin approximate level lines on a topographical plane. I extend my hand and attempt to see where I have walked. Traveling has something akin to thinking while walking. On the journeys one measures time and space in another way.

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The travel narrative is a vector narration, it follows a secret arrow. History doesn’t go back only in time but also in space. Each epoch has its own image of what is a map, its own cartographic rhetoric in each “exploration of terrain.” Each person reconstructs a territory marked by routes and paths. I have attempted in each journey, in each narration, to trace my own cartographic narrative. When one travels, one is aware that one existence among many others has been chosen. Then, vertigo and the fundamental question: how many lives can one have?

Notes

1. Tristan, Flora. Peregrinations of a Pariah. Translated by Jean Hawkes. London: Virago Press, 1985. 2. Graham, María. Journal of a Residence in Chile. Charlottesville, VA: UVA Press, 2003. 3. Milano, Leonor. Afropean Soul et Autres Nouvelles. Paris: Flammarian, 2008. 4. Foucault, Michel. Las Palabras y Las Cosas: Una Arqueología de las Ciencias Humanas, Argentinia: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1968. 5. Genovese, Alicia. Ahí Lejos Todavia. Buenos Aires: Zindo & Gafuri, 2019 6. Herzog, Werner. Of Walking upon the Ice. New York: Free Association, 2007. 7. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust. A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. 8. Gros, Frederic. A Philosophy of Walking. New York: Verso, 2015. 9. LeBreton, David. Praise of Walking. Exeter: Siruela, 2015. 10. Onfray, Michael. Travel Theory. A Poetics of Geography. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2007. 11. Women Wage Peace. https:​//​womenwagepeace​.org. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.

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Introduction Errant Destinations: Travel Narrative as Art

Errant Destinations is a collection of literary chronicles by the renowned Chilean Jewish author, Andrea Jeftanovic, a poetics of travel with artful meditations on journeying in its multiple variations. While there is an abundance of travel writings by Latin American authors, this travel narrative is singular in its hybrid, literary nature, with personal reflections and ruminations on the art of wandering or venturing into unfamiliar places as a way of transcending borders and extending the boundaries of self into unknown territories. The author offers the reader a new optic or lens with which to see, understand and appreciate the other. Her errant, itinerant wanderings, her serendipitous adventures, and her intimate recollections of ordinary and extraordinary persons and places are the inspiration for artistic musings on the wonder of wanderlust, of voyaging beyond the self, and reading and translating the Other. With reference to diverse fields of study, including artistic references to cinema, literature and the visual arts, these travel narratives engage the reader with other cultures and countries, thereby mapping and bringing distant, dissimilar worlds closer, and universalizing the human experience in an ever-changing world. In addition to relating travel narratives, Jeftanovic’s narrative work is an exercise in the construction of an identity, as hers is hybrid. Her parents arrived in Latin America following the second World War, settling in Chile in the 1940s. Her father was Serbian Russian Orthodox and her mother Bulgarian Jewish; her grandfather died in one of the concentration camps. The first of the travel narratives in Errant Destinations, 1

Introduction

“Sarajevo Underground,” is a recollection of her travels to what was once Yugoslavia to discover her roots, traversing the tunnel that connects the two Sarajevos, a mirror image of the desire to unite her diverse identities. While searching for signs or vestiges of her ancestors in and around Sarajevo, she crosses the bridge over the Mjliacka River, likened to the Mapocho River in Santiago, and goes to the synagogue in the Jewish neighborhood, often staying for the Sabbath Services, listening to the prayers in Hebrew, a mesmerizing, melodic incantation filled with z’s. She longs to belong and searches for communalities in the foreign lands and peoples that she encounters during her errant wanderings. Through her many travels, Jeftanovic has endeavored to understand her Judaic background and her penchant for traveling. Her initial approach to Judaism was through literary texts, through the readings of Jewish authors or those of the Talmudic tradition. She discovered that a common thread in those texts is that of a loss and the desire for permanence, as well as the recreation of Jewish memory around the Diasporas and, in the contemporary era, the Holocaust. The Jewish story, for the author, is a collective narrative that cannot be represented as a continuous line, but rather as a series of discontinuities whose broadest space would be the act of remembering and writing.1 The travel narratives in Errant Destinations are founded and elaborate upon the concept of adventure and discontinuities: Jeftanovic, the wandering Jew, setting forth, venturing outwards, departing her homeland in search of the extraordinary, bringing exotic or foreign lands into the spectrum of her geographical and historical knowledge, which is then charted on the pages of the narrative cartographies to be mapped by the reader/ adventurer. For the author, the literary cartographer is also an adventurer, constantly moving through and across the pages and describing territories, people and objects which are sketched out in the narrative, filling in the white spaces on the map to illustrate the unknown and make it more fully visible to the reader. The story of the adventure is like drawing a map, the coordinates of which are charted in a dynamic interplay of the verbal narration and the visual text, the weaving of text and image to create a new or renewed vision of the world. She successfully deconstructs

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Introduction

the social fabric, explores the deep recesses of the human psyche, braiding human complexities with the personal and the poetic. The itinerant subject in these chronicles maps and remaps and transforms spaces, or significant places, as Jeftanovic occupies or traverses them, in a dynamic spatiotemporality, evoked from and within an experiential here and now. This passionate  journey  through  space is also an exploration of the recesses of the psyche, the hallways of the mind, calling for an  “unlearning” of the very rationalistic mode of thinking assumed in the philosophy of science. The poetic imagination, unlike science, is independent of causality, Bachelard  affirms in the Poetics of Space,2 and Jeftanovic allows herself to be receptive to immediacy and to images of poetry at whichever  moment they present themselves. She responds to the fluid and rootless, every changing environment that she discovers in her encounters with the other in a form of deterritorialization, founded upon a poetic logic unattached to spatial and temporal coordinates. Throughout history, in predominantly Catholic countries, as is the case with most Latin American countries like Chile, it is difficult to reconcile that a Jew can be fully Chilean, as one is subject to the fate and classifications of a religion that made it impossible for them to be the citizens of a privileged center. Jews have become the emblematic symbol for the foreigner, the “outsider,” the “Other,” who despite being from a family that has resided in the same country for generations, does not truly belong. Jews represent what is alternative: throughout history they have occupied the place of figures who appear in the maps of that which is foreign, as in the wandering Jew. Language is for Jeftanovic a means to not only redefine her identity but also to champion the defense of human rights. Words have become the most effective weapon in the face of ignorance and indifference, and Jeftanovic’s writing embodies a phrase from the cabala—Tikum olam— which means “mending the world” by acts of goodwill and kindness. Over the years, Jeftanovic has come to the realization that memory and the ability to see her country from the periphery heightened her sensitivity toward the situation of women in general and the state of human rights in Chile, Latin America and globally. Through these travel narratives, the author approaches what could be defined as the inner voice of poetry: a 3

Introduction

dialogue with memory, a mediation against forgetting. As a transmitter of the social consciousness of different peoples, the author is a moral historian who embodies a characteristically Jewish attitude toward the historically significant calling to remember and the need to bear witness. Works like Errant Destinations evidence the hybrid and multifaceted component of Latin American Jewish writers of the twentieth century. Diaspora is the link that unites all of them, a source of creativity, a possibility for transcending and reconstructing history based upon a time inhabited from exile and linked to a permanent state of memory. Latin American Jewish women writers oscillate between the fragile realms of memory and remembrance, not dwelling on the past, but rather opening a window onto a present and future Jewish identity. Andrea Jeftanovic participates in this communal and transnational act through her memories, through that which she remembers or chooses to remember. She has witnessed the historical accident of her life and is a daughter of Sephardic and Ashkenazi immigrants. Thus diaspora, the peregrination and the memories of what it meant to arrive in Latin America is ever present: a unique perspective of a family saga, for example. The metaphor for travel is the unifying axis that fluctuates between memories and the present. Also present is the feeling of being uprooted and displaced, which is seen as part of the atavistic condition of the Jewish people. The theme of voyage is underscored, whether it is in search of the lives of ancestors or a journey that leads to a more profound knowledge of one’s heritage and self. There is a powerful tradition of women writers whose work derives from their Jewish experiences and their symbolic relationship with the dispossessed and the marginal, thus forging an ever-stronger link to this universal experience. For many Jewish women writers, the unifying tradition is the memoir, in which they rehearse their own identities, but also remember the voices of their ancestors, all the while experiencing the world from their marginal positions as outsiders. The act of writing through memories is to document experiences and incorporate them into one’s identity. The nomadic condition with its metaphorical and real suitcases underscores the reality of definite and indefinite frontiers in the narrative skein of multicolored and faceted threads that Jeftanovic 4

Introduction

weaves together in this narrative travel tapestry. The Jewish woman writer in Latin America, and Chile in particular, is a chronicler who is divided between her desire to be faithful to the past through remembrance, and her desire to explore and incorporate her feelings about the new land and peoples that she has discovered. From the flight of converted Jews from the Inquisition to the great Jewish migrations of World War II and the Cold War, the Jewish world in Europe has been destroyed, but it has allowed for the consolidation of Jewish communities in the Americas. With the US closing its doors in 1924, the European Jews waited for a while in the Caribbean before seeking refuge in Latin America, in particular, the Southern Cone. Their literature is a hybrid mix of past and present, the folklore of a place and the presence of a “here,” but also a literature that can be tied to the postcolonial discourse of displaced peoples. What does Andrea Jeftanovic write about? How does she insert herself in Chile and a national identity? Her predominant theme of memoir doesn’t differ from other Jewish women writers from the Americas. The testimonial quality of Jeftanovic’s stories has an almost oral character and quotidian presence. Through the process of reconstructing memory, along with the penchant for invention of memory, her texts speak directly to us. She focuses on the elements of alienation, the experience of being on the periphery, and the search for the ineffable. Her prose works are acts of retrieval, engagements with the process of reconstructing a world and a past often recreated through the eyes of relatives. As a second or third generation immigrant, Jeftanovic’s works contribute to the creation of a cultural history, marked by its decentered marginal status as a minority discourse, functioning as a voice to the official discourse. A people who do not remember stop being a people, and it is through memory that one is an individual. Jeftanovic takes an artful approach to writing about travel in Errant Destinations. In this assemblage of travel essays, the Chilean Jewish author focuses her lens and reveals rich, colorful threads that she has woven into the fabric of her travel narrative, with the individual essays often structured as diptychs. In each work of creative non-fiction, she stitches a dynamic, visual tapestry with individual threads braided 5

Introduction

together, narrative strands that often seem disparate or unrelated, yet form complementary pairs that illuminate one another. In the words of Robert Tally Jr., the narratives in this literary cartography move back and forth between dynamic adventures, explorations of exotic lands and experiences, and narration’s static movements of description, as the itinerary establishes the contours of the map, as well as the affective geography and history that emerge from the narrative.3 The coordinates on this literary map correspond to a spatiotemporal register in which the adventure advances through the device of narration, accompanied by the impetus to explain matters or paint a picture. The author provides descriptive, visual detail to enhance the verbal narration, setting the mood and weaving imagery, color, and texture into believable narratives, which engage the reader and invite contemplation and reflection. She threads her travel essays with a personal perspective that is real, relevant, and reliably accurate, selecting and omitting details to provide the reader with significant moments and memorable images in the creation of a coherent ensemble of narrative engagement. In Errant Destinations, the travel narrative is transformed into a visual, spatial art form. The essays in this text are the literary equivalents of the diptych, which challenges and transforms traditional narrative, as they do not depend or hinge upon the suspense of the chronological structure of beginning, middle and end. Frequently the narrative begins in media res, which immerses the reader immediately in the ongoing action or dialogue between the author and the characters. The diptych form allows for the presentation of two stories in tandem, juxtaposed, of relatively equal weight and importance, often seemingly disparate, unalike. This artistic form of composition allows viewers to “see” the two “panels” and to reflect on the author’s memories and associations linked to the object of focus in her narrative lens. The reader contemplates the two parts of the narrative diptych, both of which convey the essay’s themes in different ways, yet are symmetrical and illustrative of one another, uniting the verbal and visual images with the mental hinge of their choosing, and coalescing these images into a unified narrative composite. The hinge approach allows Jeftanovic to pivot and shift her point of view as she moves through the pages, stitching scene to scene or 6

Introduction

experience to experience, remembering and omitting, as in the essay “California Naked,” where she alternates between “on campus” and “off campus” scenarios and, at the end of the essay, comes full circle after knitting together the different swatches of the narrative fabric. She makes artful transitions from one scene to another to create a sense of wholeness, “a plural process of assembling memories and personal files in dialogue,” she writes, providing both the background and the foreground, the larger context and a strong sense of the author’s personal motives and her state of mind. By drawing upon several sources and experiential knowledge, she succeeds in braiding the narrative strands to allow for the creation of a vibrant patchwork of impressions and reflections. Through the incorporation of the arts of fiction, which include color, rhythm, narrative tension, and dialogue, the author transforms non-fiction writing into an art form. Incorporating observation, experience, and memory; she captures the real world with authenticity and creativity, as her non-fiction writing involves poetry’s penchant for verbal imagery, fiction’s craft of storytelling, and journalism’s documentation of fact. Jeftanovic’s travel narrative aims to write the truth in a literary style that is accurate and informative, but also highly personal, and as provocative and dramatic as a work of fiction. In Errant Destinations, the author’s adventures are simultaneously the main source as well as the basis for the reliability of her testimonial account, which is elaborated by visual and non-visual evidential strategies, such as auditory and tactile sensations, as traveling for the author is a physical experience which is translated into written words that underscore and reinforce the physicality of her travel experiences. Jeftanovic adopts a reflective voice and writes primarily in the present tense to emphasize the immediacy of the evoked description, dialogue, or narration, stitching together the narrative fragments by segmentation rather than exposition, and charting her knowledge of places visited and peoples encountered. For the author, travel is an ocular activity, the traveling “I” is the traveling “eye,” and the visual narrative engages and invites the reader to contemplate and view the parallel threads together as a compelling narrative. Jeftanovic employs the diptych as an impactful storytelling tool with juxtaposed stories, and thematic, compositional, 7

Introduction

and other visual synergies that map and make the whole more powerful than the sum of its parts. Errant Destinations is written with a strong authorial presence, as the author introduces herself into the narrative as a secondary character in most of the essays. She tells the readers details about the life of the characters through dialogue, which propels the narrative forward, as in her conversations with the Peruvian poet, José Watanabe in “El ojo de Watanable,” and in “Los ríos de Clarice Lispector,” evoking the Brazilian Jewish writer whom Jeftanovic knew personally and whose work she has studied as a literary scholar; or her descriptions of and dialogue with the Chilean cycling champion, Peter Tormen, winner of the Vuelta a Chile and detained by the Pinochet dictatorial regime, in the essay “Birds of Steel.” She refrains from divulging every detail of the story, which creates tension and anticipation in the reader, who must become an active participant in the storytelling, as the author favors showing over telling, to animate the characters and engage the reader with them, as a strategy for personal survival, to affirm herself in the dialogue with the other. Jeftanovic often shifts from direct or indirect discourse to dialogue in Errant Destinations to modulate the rhythm of the narrative, reveal more vividly the individuals’ history, and paint a more dynamic portrait of the object of focus of the lens. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, in this work of creative non-fiction, the author often revisits the visual rhetoric of narrative, creating a braided text that allows the viewer to see the similarities and the differences side by side in the composite stands woven together, with striking resonances between them. Evocative metaphors serve to weave together the threads of her memoir, and underscore the aspect of visual communication, which is further evident in the photographs in black and white that accompany the narrative text, as the author shares stories, ideas and associations through artful narrative forms and visual images. The braiding of the narrative unites the juxtaposed fragments to create an intriguing pattern for readers to assemble, as this type of composition requires the reader to actively coalesce different, sometimes conflicting, images or perspectives simultaneously in the mind.

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Each chronicle, or travel essay, is comprised of two or more threads of material, each on a different subject, woven together to contribute to the ebb and flow of the narration and the creation of a diptych, as well as a dramatic arc of a spatialized time. The temporal element is often compressed or detained spatially, in an attempt to further underscore the visual plasticity and manipulation of time. Often the essays are divided into sections with white spaces without words much like stanzas in poetry, or with numerals or subtitles. The author advances the narrative by stitching one strand to another, alternating storylines. One thread is personal, based on the author’s lived experiences, perceptions, feelings, and associations; the other strand results from the narration and descriptive portrayal of actual or imagined persons, places, and entities, often woven with dialogue to heighten the immediacy of the interaction between the characters and the author. This mode of subjective perception and a detached analytical voice threaded in the narrative functions to combine the factual with the imagined, the descriptive with the affective. Based upon the writer’s personal experiences via memory, the individual narrative strands of the essay are woven together in a textual tapestry in which the author reflects on how those experiences have impacted her and contributed to shaping her Chilean Jewish identity and that of others. At the end of the essay, connections are revealed as the narrative often comes full circle, and the reader finds something to carry away, a new way of seeing the world. Jeftanovic critically engages the reader by presenting issues of contemporary society by means of an interdisciplinary approach— involving history, geography, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and cultural studies, to name a few of the disciplines informing the text—and provides an insightful site for the contemplation and analysis of historical, social, political, and cultural issues underpinning contemporary states of affairs, and illustrating universal truths. In the twentieth century, many visual and literary artists rejected the ideas and values of the past and began experimenting with new styles, forms, themes, and techniques, ushering in the Modernist movement, which began with the poetic movement known as Imagism from 1909 to 1917, inspired by the evolving art of photography, and concentrated on the direct presentation of images or verbal pictures. Like an Imagist 9

Introduction

painting, Jeftanovic’s narrative work expresses the essence of an object, person, place, or incident without lengthy explanations or generalizations; it seeks to freeze a single memory and spatialize its temporal form to render it visible to the eye of the reader’s mind. The essays in Errant Destinations are characterized by the segmentation of thought and remembrance in the construction of the artistic text out of fragments. Jeftanovic omits expositions, explanations, transitions, and resolutions, abandoning traditional plot structures and literary devices that serve to clarify the narrative work for the reader. Her non-fiction text is characterized by concision, in which the art of allusion and ellipsis tend to predominate, with emphasis on concentration—concentration in terms of the phrase or sentence, concentration in terms of the paragraph, concentration of the image, and concentration in the overall narrative ensemble of the text. These rhetorical devices function by way of the omission of words, phrases, and conjunctions (in the former), or conjunctions (as in the case of the latter), all of which the reader must infer from context of the text. As with Modernist artists and architects, Jeftanovic reduces the form to its absolute minimum in order to capture the expressive essence of the content, with each word functioning as an indispensable element in the visualization of the image or idea. Form in this work is no longer ornamental, rather it is functional, serving to underscore the fragmentary, disjointed nature of memory as it is re-constructed in visual, as well as verbal, style in the text, allowing for the reader to bring an individual response to the work, as a new sense of spatial relationships emerges. The author strives to establish the essential identity of the place and then takes the reader behind the scenes to discover the “other” history of a place, people or object. She immerses herself in the culture, becomes one with the Other, which enables her to translate another culture into a language more comprehensible to the reader. Jeftanovic is a seasoned, open-minded, wandering Jewish traveler, one who views landscapes and other cultures not with a foreigner’s gaze, but rather with an artist’s perception, attempting to poetically capture the other reality as accurately and precisely as possible, making the acts of seeing and scrutinizing central to her writing. The focus in this travel narrative is on vision, and the

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rendering visible of the previously invisible, charting the presence of an absence in visual cartographies of moments and memories. Travel writing has a long tradition of association with visual practices. To travel is to see the world; travel is a way of seeing anew, through another lens, an ambulatory mode of seeing, grounded in the eye of the “I,” in one’s visual capacity. Through the act of seeing, places and people are re-formulated and re-constituted. The gaze is transferred, translated into the text whether in written or visual form. Travel is translation, where illustrations often play a central role in the perception and transposition of people, places, and objects on the page into comprehensible concepts. In Errant Destinations, photographs in black and white serve to frame and record aspects of Jeftanovic’s movements and encounters, and render the presence of that which is absent, affirming an experience as authentic. The reader witnesses the interplay of the verbal and the visual in this travel narrative, in which the embedded gaze results in the weaving of micro and macro histories. Documented through time and space, the motifs of the journey corroborate the descriptive with the affective and allow for the creation of the travel essay as a unified, complete vision structured as variations on a theme. Travel is defined through the experience of physical mobility and the sense of sight. At the heart of Jeftanovic’s travel narrative is the interplay of the verbal and the visual. Vision is a cultural operation, shaped by places, objects, beings, images, and words. We see and perceive because we are part of everything within our gaze, as opposed to merely looking at the world from the outside. In the words of Pierre Bourdieu, the relation to the world is a relation of presence in the world, of being in the world, in the sense of belonging to the world.4 Both text and image perform complex rhetorical functions in Jeftanovic’s travel narrative, in which “showing” is more important than “telling.” Since antiquity, the visual and the verbal have been linked together, manifest in Horace’s analogy, Ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”) in his Ars Poetica.5 Before that, Plutarch had attributed to Simonides the saying that painting is mute poetry and poetry, a speaking picture,6 further emphasizing the reciprocal relations between the two art forms. In the Renaissance, a time when the imitation of the classics 11

Introduction

was the aesthetic norm, the dialogue concerning painting and poetry was animated, with two opposing camps: those who argued for the division of the two arts, and those that championed their unity. Through the eighteenth century, the sister arts were viewed as differing in form and manner of expression, yet almost identical in the basis of their nature, in content and in purpose. Also in the eighteenth century, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing7 attacked the theoretical core of Ut pictura poesis, arguing that there is a difference between painting, a spatial art form, and poetry (and literature, by extension), a temporal art form, and that they should remain separate as “two equitable and friendly neighbors,” though they often complement one another. Lessing’s work inspired the birth of the field of semiotics, with its emphasis on the connection of an image (icon) to a word that represents that image in language (linguistic sign) and influenced the works of linguistic scholars like Ferdinand de Saussure,8 who argued that both an icon and its symbol must be present for meaning to be created. To this day, many contemporary theorists maintain that poets and all writers are painters, thus affirming the close relationship between painting and poetry, the latter with its traditional literary pictorialism and visual conventions. Inspired by journeys to distant destinations, artists and writers for centuries have created artistic depictions—both visual and literary—of foreign places and peoples. Travel art as a genre began to emerge more prominently in the early Renaissance with the invention of scientific instruments, and the rise of global travel for exploration, expansion, and commerce. With the objective of accurately depicting and describing distant destinations and foreign peoples, artists and writers employed their mediums (paintbrushes and pencils for the artists, words for the writers of poetry and prose) to draw or sketch, literally and literarily, their impressions of a particular place and the unknown or unfamiliar other. The earliest explorers lacked the camera to artistically capture the essence of a person, place, or moment, and they turned to other artistic modes such as painting (portraits and landscapes), and poetry and prose to render visible momentous aspects of their travel experiences. Andrea Jeftanovic poetically paints in prose fascinating landscapes, intriguing individuals, and significant moments or objects, in response 12

Introduction

to her immersion in the place and culture of others. The essays in this award-winning work of creative non-fiction are literary chronicles, which document the author’s particular impressions during the journey, and afterward, as a product of memory and imagination. She immerses herself in the local culture and explores its many facets, and then paints a picture, both verbally, with words and pictorial conventions, and visually, with the insertion of black and white photographs and photocopies of maps and documents into the essay. The narrative and visual art in this collection of chronicles provide the reader with a portal through which new worlds can be glimpsed, and unique lenses through which the reader can discover, see, and imagine distant or lesser-known places and peoples. She goes beyond merely depicting the details of the trip; rather, she delves simultaneously into her personal journey as a Chilean Jewish female author in search of an identity in a parallel narrative that underscores the thoughts and feelings experienced in her errant voyages and encounters with the Other. The author is in search of a personal identity and a cultural homeland, evoked through the process of remembrance. Jewish Latina women like Jeftanovic are agential, invoking individuals who have been oppressed or silenced, and forging a strong link to the universal experience of persecution. Rather than seeing the Jewish female as a marginal being within the confines of her own cultural heritage, the author finds the traditions and the link recovered by memory as empowering women and giving them a voice and identity so that others no longer remain indifferent to their lives and experiences. Her writing gives presence to an absence in the cultural landscape of contemporary writing, giving voice to Latin American (here Chilean), Jews who have historically been relegated to the margins, often silenced or excluded from the official cannon. Writing about travel to distant locales becomes a means to rescue memory and invent a hybrid identity. Through her poetic prose, the Jewish Chilean writer Jeftanovic has forged for herself a homeland, constructing a house of memory with infinite rooms in which she articulates experiences that are, often, at once essentially personal and simultaneously universal. Through her writing she seeks to recover memory and connect it with an identity, to return to the 13

Introduction

historical past and reshape its narrative in the present. The construction of a Jewish identity is a nucleus of significance and belonging. Jeftanovic belongs to a generation that no longer finds its identification anchored in a commitment to Judaism as the historical and cultural core of their existence, but rather one that finds itself amid the complex panorama of global culture, a Latin American context of ongoing identity crises, and a contemporary Judaism with its own difficulties and controversies. The construction of Jewish literary identity is different for second and third generations, like Jeftanovic. Favored by growing social mobility and a stronger presence in the national social circle, the connection with their country of origin has been entwined with the strong spiritual legacy of Judaism passed down by their parents and grandparents. The literary voice of Chilean Jewish women writers like Jeftanovic has revealed the multifaceted expression of encounters between Jewish and Latin American cultures: the need to preserve Jewish values, the drama of generational tensions, the experience of being marginalized from the social majority. The contemporary way of life corresponds to that which is fluid and rootless, ever-changing and volatile, unstable and fragile. The construction of an identity is redefined in a new cultural context, mostly characterized by deterritorialization (founded on a logic unattached to spatiality and temporality, which distorts the correlation between identity and community); rootlessness, which entails the lack of institutional references and social bonds; and historization (where contrary to the Jewish conception of an unfolding temporal spiral that is forever bound to its origins, present times are compartmentalized and severed from the past). A new sense of spatial relationships and an extreme individualism emerge as strategies for personal survival, no longer sustained on the ideal of a historic community, though Jeftanovic still longs to belong and searches for communities in the foreign lands and peoples that she encounters during her errant wanderings. Historically, there is a proliferation of travel literature, such as memoirs, journals, and diaries with such titles as “Pictures,” “Sketches,” “Impressions,” suggesting a visual perception and a pictorial approximation to other countries and cultures, though these narrative texts are not necessarily accompanied by illustrations. In Errant Destinations, 14

Introduction

photographs in black and white are interspersed in the text and serve to assert the author’s authority as a reliable observer and participant, functioning to condense the multiple threads of the storyline into a single dramatic image. Photocopies of maps and pages of manuscripts are also incorporated into the texts to assist the reader in visualizing parts of the narrative, and to further emphasize the spatial, pictorial aspect of these travel essays. Andrea Jeftanovic is an audacious traveler, and she defies the traditional notion of travel writing by pushing the limits of the travel narrative genre. The uniqueness of Errant Destinations is its malleability, as it draws on numerous literary genres—chronicle, autobiography, essay, testimony, memoir, fiction—and engages the reader in a journey of discovery of distant places and people, thereby increasing the level of connection of individuals with the Other and contributing to a greater global understanding of the Other. Her travel narrative provides a unique prism through which the reader is introduced to other cultures and customs. It offers a rare window onto the world, a compelling, lucid, and lyrical account as she explores and embraces “otherness” in unforgettable journeys in which she transports the reader inside the author’s own experience and translates a palpable feeling of immediacy, of being in a specific moment of space and time. In a more globalized and increasingly connected world, travel is another form of reading, reading to look at the world and to understand it, the Other, and the self. Jeftanovic often situates her discourse in errant, liminal spaces, shifting from descriptive prose or personal associations to a conscious sensation or a more universal human condition to engage the reader and propel the narrative forward. The errant, frontier zones that the author explores are, at once, real and figurative spaces in which experience fuses with the imagined and the dreamt. She transforms travel into an art form, inviting the reader to participate in literary and geographical encounters in foreign places with indelible characters: the tunnel that unites Sarajevo bombarded during the Balkans War, and her search for her roots and the Yugoslavia evoked by her ancestors; the diffuse maritime delineation between Chile and Peru accompanied by Peruvian poet José Watanabe; an organization for relatives of victims of the Palestinian-Israeli War, 15

Introduction

who labor to make visible the humanity of the other; the hidden corners of Clarice Lispector’s characters, and the Brazilian writer’s capacity for contemplation and expressive plasticity; the room in Cienfuegos where Castro stayed in two very distinct historical moments, and Jeftanovic’s experience in Cuba as an invited judge for the Casa de las Americas’ literary competition; and California of the 1970s where the author endeavors to find Janis Joplin and the mythic era of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but encounters the California of the twenty-first century, overrun with ambitious young technocrats from Silicon Valley. Andrea Jeftanovic begins her errant wandering in Errant Destinations with “Sarajevo Underground,” a journey in search of her family’s roots, looking for a mythic place, Yugoslavia, heard of in stories told to her throughout her childhood. But she finds that it no longer exists, as if everything had been wiped off the map during the Balkan Wars. She compares the trip to the underground tunnel in Sarajevo to the descent into the circles of Dante’s Inferno. She traverses the seven circles of Hell accompanied by her guide, Edis, in a zone of limits, one that straddles the fence between the underground of the tunnel and the city above where hell and heaven seem to become inverted, as if questioning that line that separates the two spaces. In this first text, Jeftanovic traverses the vestiges of the Balkan Wars while seeking locales to confirm the history of her paternal ancestors: Serbian and Croatian, but essentially Yugoslavian. It is a profound and evocative narration where memory, resilience, and the capacity to survive intersect amid destruction, violence, war, and hate. Jeftanovic then narrates the time spent as a graduate student on a scholarship to study at the University of California, Berkeley. The essay, “California Naked,” alternates between the on campus and off campus spaces, invoking personalities of the academic and the cultural worlds: Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Woody Allen during a brief escapade to New York, to name a few. The author takes the reader to a post-hippie California in search of the mythic decade of the 1960s, the epic route of Janis Joplin, whom she is said to resemble, and the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. She seeks to satisfy her desire to have been born in that generation; however, this legendary era no longer exists. The

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prosperous proletariat of Silicon Valley and its technology seem to have erased it all from the map. In “Watanabe’s Eye,” the third chronicle, she narrates a surreal voyage by boat to the disputed maritime border between Chile and Peru with the Peruvian-Japanese poet, José Watanabe, for whom every immigrant has the right to invent his past. She listens to the narration of a descendant of the many Japanese refugees who arrived in Lima and together the two tackle the interrogatives about where fishing should be regulated and the maritime limits of each country, the dispute residing between a parallel and equidistance. When they each climb into separate boats to undertake the task of scientifically measuring the disputed area, the turbulent waters drag them in opposite directions, the Japanese poet to the north and the Chilean author to the south, with Jeftanovic drifting away, in possession of Watanabe’s poems and a moving memory of that controversial piece of sea. In the fourth text, “The Rivers of Clarice Lispector,” Jeftanovic submerges the reader in Rio de Janeiro in search of the Brazilian writer’s characters, recognizing and imagining certain places that might reveal the complexity of Lispector’s writing, her literary works, and her life. Again, the reader finds oneself between the imagination and the chronicle, here in the animation of the writing of Lispector, whose very identity is divided between Russia and Brazil. As with many of the narratives in this collection, in this text the author tends to seek out and establish analogies between the place visited and her homeland, her way of avoiding the sensation of unbelonging. Time is converted into trans-temporality and trans-spatiality where the world and literature become dissolved and coalesce to give way to intimate, memorable moments. Her chronicle allows the entrance of that which is foreign into that which is familiar, the same that happens in autobiography, in which the “I” becomes disfigured in multiple identities and identity is rendered borderline. At times it is almost impossible to decipher in the text which of the two is talking, Jeftanovic or Lispector, as the Chilean writer’s existence fuses with the other. Writing for Jeftanovic is a form in which intimacy becomes another. Writing is re-writing, re-creating memory and being able to give a different meaning to all that could have happened. 17

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The fifth chronicle, “Doors and Ellipses,” also evokes threshold images, as Jeftanovic states at the beginning that “we spend our lives opening and closing doors.” She wanders about the land of Quixote, passing between the Puerta de Madrid and the Puerta de Alcalá during her stay in Madrid while studying at the University of Alcalá’s Escuela de Letras, taking courses on the narrative, script writing for cinema, and the dramatic arts. Here she evokes the time spent in a boarding house among other writers, in a room of her own where the gaze of others does not penetrate. While there, she awaits the awarding of the coveted Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award in Spain to honor a writer in the Spanish-speaking world. She remarks on the marked difference between Spanish Peninsular and Latin American literatures, and the second discovery waiting to happen, in which Latin American writers will be the conquerors. She states that “Alcalá is the city in which I insist upon being a fiction, protagonizing novels that I have read and writing the book that I will never write. I am a character that rehearses her cartographic narrative, a rhetoric of doubts, of sentiments, of questionings. I am not what I seem and on a tangential path I try out transgression, fearlessness, and I manage to enunciate that, in a place in La Mancha, I am who I am.” “The Intimate Palestinian-Israeli Circle,” the sixth in the collection of chronicles, is a poignant narration about Jeftanovic’s stay in the Middle East living among individuals who are families of victims on both sides of the conflict. Together these Palestinians and Israelis are actively working for peace and attempting to discover the humanity of the other by their involvement with the Parents Circle Families Forum (PCFF) and Combatants for Peace. They are convinced of the need to stop the cycle of violence, vengeance, and blood; “to be part of a group of heroic persons that have chosen love over hate.” The message is clear and convincing: “If we can dialogue, why can’t others?” She converses with several of the members of these organizations, and experiences firsthand one of the projects of the PCFF, visits to Holon High School where students of both camps are shown the human side of the conflict in the form of a duo of speakers, a Palestinian and an Israeli. They ask that no side be taken, neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian, as there is a need to stop

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Introduction

cultivating a discourse of hate and to be, instead, in favor of a solution. As the author states so poetically: I have grown accustomed to seeing duos of Palestinians and Israelis, I educate myself in another way of putting things together. The vital exercise is distinct, it is a matter of assembling our choral narratives. They have created a new way of being a family, a people; they attempt to pass from the oppressive rectangle of occupation and enmity to the fluidity of circles.

The seventh essay in Errant Destinations, “From a Bookshelf of Middle Eastern Texts,” begins with Jeftanovic visiting a neighborhood bookstore in Santiago. She is searching among the books by Middle Eastern writers in anticipation of the arrival of an Israeli author whom she will accompany to an important literary event in La Chascona, the Chilean Nobel Prize Laureate Poet Pablo Neruda’s home in the neighborhood of Bellavista. Once again, she evokes another liminal space in which the difference between Palestine and Israel is blurred in her efforts to mix both identities, confusing the one with the other on the shelves of the bookcase. As she states, the bookstore is in need of an updating and adding new names, but in this universe of Middle Eastern classics translated into Spanish (imperfect, however, as her favorite author, Yoram Kaniuk, is missing) the authors coexist, sharing two shelves in which they can transit freely between one space and the other. Upon opening a page of Abraham B. Yehoshúa’s The Liberated Bride, Jeftanovic encounters the following statement: “The secret of a people resides in their literature.” At the literary event she sits in a row with members of the Jewish community (hers is a hybrid identity: Catholic, Russian Orthodox and Jewish) who participated in the governments of the Concertación (coalition governments following the Pinochet dictatorship). Here far from the Occupied Territories, those Chileans in attendance, sons and daughters or grandchildren of Middle Eastern descent in diaspora, open the pages of their own individual books in a gesture that the author compares to that of the tale of Scheherazade, of telling and retelling the arrival of their ancestors. According to Jeftanovic, in that “table-dialogue-library,” 19

Introduction

we read one another and put our versions in doubt. After the event, they all go out together, a veritable Tower of Babel, and when asked by the Haitian waiter who they are, they respond: “Cousins.” “Birds of Steel,” the eighth essay in the work, is a poignant narration of the horror experienced by many Chileans in response to the coup d’état on September 11, 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet. The narration moves between the bombing of Santiago by the military that day, with the complicity of the United States, and the history of the legendary Chilean cyclist, Peter Tormen, winner of the Tour of Chile in 1987, who was detained under the dictatorial regime of Pinochet. The eleventh of September divided the country in two: those of the left, who went into the streets to protest; and those of the right, who maintained a terrifying, solemn silence. Jeftanovic, who was only three years old at the time of the coup, describes the airplanes that bombarded her city as if through the eyes of a child; to her, they were flocks of black steel birds with sharp wings that emitted a buzzing sound as they flew over Santiago leaving devastation in their wake. She then describes Salvador Allende’s refusal to surrender to the military, barricading himself in La Moneda, Chile’s White House, and the democratically elected socialist president dying for his country when the building was bombed. Fast forward five years: the author is eight years old and tells of the indoctrination that occurred in her elementary school, the deification of General Pinochet and the justification for the atrocities committed against the “subversives” during Chile’s “dirty war.” She relates the profound impact that the military dictatorship had on her, her family and many of her neighbors; the horror and utter disbelief that they experienced upon learning about the detained and “disappeared,” the widespread torture, and the complicity of the right who viewed Allende as a communist pig and felt justified in supporting Pinochet. The narration then jumps forward fifteen years, and the author recounts the detaining of cyclist brothers, Peter and Sergio Tormen, in 1974 by the DINA, Chile’s Secret Police. The testimonial then advances forty-one years, with Peter Tormen describing his experience after having been interrogated and held as a political prisoner for his purportedly subversive activities. The penultimate section occurs years later, with Tormen talking to Jeftanovic in his bicycle workshop about his 20

Introduction

passion for the sport. In the last part, the author reflects on her visit to the house belonging to Allende, which, after the bombing, is now known as the House of Presidents. She convinces the guard at the entrance to let her view the home of the assassinated President (those on the right claim that Allende committed suicide in La Moneda) and recalls the day of the coup. The book comes full circle with the superimposition of the image of a cyclist bent over his bike resembling a steel bird, and that of the black steel birds bombarding Santiago on September 11. The ninth, and last essay is titled “Nevertheless, Cuba,” a play on words because the title in Spanish is “Sin embargo, Cuba, with sin embargo meaning both “nevertheless” and “without the embargo.” In section I, Jeftanovic recalls the visit to Havana in 1967 by the Chilean dramatist, Isidora Aguirre, with whom the author had conversed over three years; and describes the famed editorial house and cultural center founded by Fidel, Casa de las Americas. In the second section, she recounts her first trip to Cuba in 2011, invited by Casa de las Americas to be a judge in a literary competition, and reflects on Fidel’s testimonial book, History Will Absolve Me. In the third section of the essay, she describes one of the initiatives launched by Castro in the 1960s, the literary campaigns, while staying in the room where Castro stayed in Cienfuegos. Her visit to Cuba, forty years after the Revolution, coincides with the “Período Especial,” a period in which Cuba suffered a devastating economic crisis that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a country to which Cuba turned after the US failed attack on Cuba in the Invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and the US embargo, which began in 1962 when President Kennedy punished Cuba for turning communist. In section V she returns to Cuba in 2016, reflecting on the life and work of the Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist and communist activist, Roque Dalton, who is commemorated in an exhibit in Casa de las Americas. In section VI, the author relates some of the steps that Fidel was forced to take because of the US embargo, such as food rationing and coupon books, and her visit to the legendary UNEAC (Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba). In sections VII and VIII, the author recalls her last trip to Cuba, coinciding with the visits of Pope Francis and Obama to Cuba, the latter who spoke to the Cuban people in the Gran Teatro of 21

Introduction

La Habana and promised to end the embargo. The selection ends with Fidel mentioning “Brother Obama” in an article in the Granma, Cuba’s official newspaper, and insisting that he doesn’t need “the empire” to give him anything, as the noble Cuban people will never renounce the glory, the civil rights, and the spiritual wealth that the country has achieved with the Revolution’s educational, scientific, and cultural reforms and advancements. Braided together, the narrative strands in this work of non-fiction create a sense of anticipation in the reader about the something or someone or somewhere evoked in the text, and artistically paint with words and photos the lure of the journey, the attraction of the road trip, and the discovery of the other, lesser-known history of a place or people. Combining chronicle with fiction and testimony, the written text in Errant Destinations is artistically woven with compelling visual images in black and white, and narrated with a perceptive and very personal gaze, which reveals the extraordinary capacity of this author to contemplate, explore and poetically render visible the many facets of reality and the recesses of the human psyche. Errant Destinations is written in dazzling prose, offering the reader an intriguing poetics of travel and engaging meditations on the art of travel. In our more globalized and increasingly connected world, Jeftanovic presents the travel narrative as art, and travel as another form of collecting and assembling facts and recollections, reading and translating, reading as mapping the world to better understand it, the Other and the self.

Notes

1. Many of the ideas in this introduction are taken from conversations with the author. This discussion took place in September 2022. 2. Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space (New York: Beacon Press, 1994). 3. Robert Tally, Jr. Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013). 4. Pierre Bourdieu. Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 114. 5. Horace. Ars Poetica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929). Poem written ca. 19 BC, advising poets on the art of writing poetry and drama. 6. Plutarch. De gloria Atheniensium, ed. D. Campbell, Greek Lyric III, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 363.

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Introduction 7. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Laocoon; Or the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1836) (Miami: Hard Press, 2017). Lessing was a famous German writer, philosopher, dramatist, and art critic of the Enlightenment era. 8. Ferdinand de Saussure. Cours de linguistique générale (1916) (Columbia University Press, 2011). Saussure was a Swiss linguist considered one of the founders of twentieth-century linguistics and of semiotics.

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Sarajevo Underground

First Circle

“Ready?” Edis indicated to me to look down in order to not trip upon the first beam. I grasp the steel frame and descend, letting go of his wrinkled hand. He suggests that we continue along the meters of the tunnel that are still passable. We prepare a bag with water and dried fruit; we walk among the nettles in the yard until we reach the entrance. I think that he says without saying “I will serve as your guide along the places where we will be able to pass.” Then he continues: “Only one person at a time can enter.” My shoes sink into the mud, I hear the sound of a highway, it’s difficult to maintain my balance on the muddy ground. Edis tells me that the engineer, Nedžad Branković, sketched the tunnel and organized its construction with the idea of paving the way to the aggressor’s front and successfully laying siege to the city. The snipers never stopped shooting, as they knew that a tunnel was being built but had no idea as to how it was happening. While they thought that the tunnel was taking form in a certain direction, in reality, it went in another. At that point, around three hundred people died. Branković managed to cross twenty-four times in a day by way of the exterior line that divided the two sides. On July 20, 1993, at nine in the evening, after seven months of arduous work, two excavators that advanced from opposite sides met and shook hands. Sarajevo had a window into the free world.

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Figure 1​​​​​​​.1.Emblematic Miljacka River, which traverses the city of Sarajevo. Source: Photo provided by Andrea Jeftanovic.

I descended the hills toward Sarajevo. I circled down the curves of the geography of Mount Igman, which, during the Balkans War, between 1992 and 1995, was surrounded by tanks and snipers. When we were amid the Dinaric Alps, I caught a glimpse of the urban outline with asphalt bands, blocks of perforated bricks and wavy metallic sheets. From west to east the Miljacka river drew a crystalline line that divided the city in two. I descended among the steep, rocky gorges, and at every curve in the path there was a contingent of soldiers aboard NATO tanks. We advanced along the reddish stretch of land once occupied by peasants and shepherds. Curved, steep, vertiginous, Sarajevo resembled the geography of Santiago: a city in the form of a basin, cordoned off by mountains and a river that divides it in two. I traveled in a dilapidated bus that wound its way from Split, on the Adriatic Coast; I passed by towns destroyed in the last war. At the border, a couple of toothless soldiers laughed at my passport; I searched in them for some tribal recognition and only felt a distant rejection. We advanced at an unhurried pace along phantasmal highways in which the grass was beginning to grow among the concrete roadways. At the first stop I contemplated a landscape composed of a “still life”: the Mostar bridge, known for its elegance since the Turkish Ottoman Empire, was uneven and patched with rubber tires.

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I came in search of the tunnel. Because, almost like an image taken from the film, Underground, by Emir Kusturica, the city of Sarajevo resisted the attack during years of war, in part, due to the tunnel. An underground tunnel eight hundred meters long, one meter wide and a meter and a half tall, which extended from the airport in Dobrinja, until the free zone of Butmir. On the surface, hell; under the earth, a piece of heaven. Welcome to Hell?, I wanted to ask when I approached an office of tourism and was greeted by a salutation of mangled words. The graffiti continued to palpitate in my pupils. They extended a tourist map with indications for me to find the room: “Advance two blocks and turn to the left toward a stone building with a rusty door, number 76.” I climbed up a shadowy staircase and an older woman opened the door. Her head was covered in a silk scarf with a red bird perched on an olive-green branch. I smelled the scent of turmeric concentrated in the apartment. She indicated the floor with a slight arch of her eye. I understood that I needed to take off my shoes and don a pair of colorful slippers in order to walk along the mosaic tile flooring. I put my suitcase in the assigned room and went out to the avenue. “O Tunnel da Rat?,” I asked the first available taxi driver. I repeated “o tunnel da Rat” in Dobrinja. My reference disconcerted the driver. So, I added some gestures to my phrase. At some point he understood me because he took me to the outskirts of the city, where I had heard that it was located. During the journey I observed the buildings that arose like enormous deceased  animals. The tower of the newspaper, Oslobodenje, resembled a dinosaur collapsed upon the ground. They say that after the bombardment, journalists continued working in the basement. The driver also pointed out the National Library, devoured by the fire. I imagined the volumes crackling amid the flames. We continued on our way, passing by the façade of the Gavrilo Princip Museum, the building perforated by the military assault. I got out to take a photo of the emblematic corner and walked in the footprints of the Princip on the cement, the place where the member of the young Bosnia shot Archduke Francisco Fernando and his wife on June 28, 1914. Two 27

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parallel traces in the walkway. I separated my feet from the path and returned to the car. I left behind the corner of the ultimatum at Sarajevo. After bordering a suburban zone—I noticed it because of the low density of the constructions—the driver stopped the car and told me that I could not leave that perimeter. I got out somewhat disappointed and inquired about the tunnel to the first pedestrians that were walking along the dusty pavement. I didn’t make myself clear, and I spoke more carefully: “O tunnel da Rat.” There was a small uproar among the individuals that asked one another about the whereabouts of that place. After nearly an hour, a young taxi driver offered to take me. I got into his dilapidated gray Mercedes Benz, and we traveled along a dirt road with brick houses sprinkled sparsely  throughout the area. After several intersections he stopped in front of a small, two-story house. It’s here? Da, da, ovdje.1 Edis Kolar had caught wind of a rumor that a female foreigner was searching for him, and he came out to greet me. He was young, medium height, with a warm smile. He guided me along the passageways of the house in which they had improvised a modest museum with photographs and objects. I followed the wall, observing a camouflaged jacket, a bronze teapot, and two grenades. He showed me a construction plan, stopped for a recollection of the Chilean Carabiners, and I remained silent because that symbol provoked mixed emotions in me. Edis asked me to write down my name on paper because he couldn’t understand my pronunciation. I jotted down the sixteen letters of my last name, and he put his finger above the final “c,” wanting to confirm my writing. Indeed, the accent mark over that “c” was missing, a habit that I began losing with writing at the computer. It must signify something to lose that accent. He is very young; how old must he have been around the time of the conflict? I’m calculating his age when he presents me to the rest of his family, his grandparents, Alija and Šida, and his parents, Emina and Edin. During times of war, they would await the emergence of travelers from the tunnel with a teapot over an open fire and a piece of bread. In the city, hell; underneath a patio, heaven. 28

Sarajevo Underground

Second Circle

One must follow the course of subterranean waters, the laws of the abyss. We bordered the second-level area. There is an opening and railroad cars appear. The stalled trains go nowhere, and together they seem like an apocalyptic postcard of an abandoned station following a disaster. Edis adjusts the screws and moves the debris from the platform; we climb into a car that glides along rusty rails. The car continues along until it becomes entrapped in a narrow pass, and we pull some cables to ascend among the skylights. The shaky light of the lantern guides us among the paths. An underground moan unsettles us; the doors in the passageways are open traps. The beam that runs above the unexpected rooms of hell. We advance with inadequate and confusing maps, where the heavens sink and the abysms emerge. The frost on the walls appears like darts of fire above the timeworn coins on the ground. Losing one’s head at every curve, and with each step, the earth sliding beneath our feet. Landscapes dissolved by the drops of water from the stalactites. The palms of the hands of pious hostages.

Figure 1.2. The interior of the bathroom in the Hotel Europa in Sarajevo, destroyed during the Balkans War. Source: Photo provided by Andrea Jeftanovic.

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He tells me about a couple that married in the free territory after traveling in the car along the railways at breakneck speed. They were wed in the middle of the tunnel, neutral territory. I see a photo of the bride, with her white dress and a bouquet of yellow flowers, seated on the lap of her betrothed with her arm around his shoulder. They both smile from the chair made of woven nuts and bolts. The tunnel also facilitated the trip of government officials and members of parliament out of the country for important negotiations with NATO and world leaders. Edis stops over the rails and continues his story: “You see, circulation was in one direction at the time, in groups of twenty to one hundred persons, and it took them two hours to cross from one side to another, transporting twenty tons.” Each one of the pedestrians had to push between two hundred and three hundred kilos of cargo, traveling along a path of curves, descents, and ascents. I listen to how amid a dust cloud twice the tunnel was flooded and closed for a couple of days, until the extraction pumps cleared it. He tells me that necessary maintenance halted its use between eight and eleven in the morning. He shows me some copper tubing that was part of a donation of cable by the German government, which permitted the construction of an electrical system and telephone lines. He pauses and drinks water from the canteen as if recalling a forgotten fatigue. I am grateful for the silence while I observe the tubing. He stops at a wall and signals me forward. I follow his hand, which points to a dark place. “The night was the best time for moving people and heavy cargo, because the movements were less visible for the enemy, given that they knew of the existence of this corridor. One winter morning, a grenade killed a group of individuals that waited at the entrance; we no longer permitted long lines during the light of day.” Edis sinks in the depths of his patio while the dust of memory hovers above the streets of Sarajevo, covering the minarets, the dead of the market buried under a mound of tomatoes. The abuses had an impact, opening holes in the fog, amid the chilly breeze. In 1994 twenty-two people were in line at a bakery, when a grenade exploded, and all that remained was a heap of scattered breadcrumbs. 30

Sarajevo Underground

On distinct occasions I pass by the corner imagining those atoms of life. “Anyone could shoot in a city under siege; on the rooftops there was always someone counting my vertebrae and aiming at my silhouette.” He tells me that he used to cross the pathway of the snipers at two hundred kilometers an hour, stretched out on the backseat, sweating profusely, touching the bulletproof vest and observing the tram cars heaped together. Sarajevo was the death trap of the Balkans, the city with its entrails exposed. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was fractured into six pieces of a puzzle that never fit together due to a lack of factories. “Let the crusades of the great Serbia stop, as there is no wood with which to make caskets.” I have been visiting Sarajevo for years, when the men in the family toasted with šljivovica following the meal and vowed “next year in Yugoslavia.” Sarajevo was a promised land, the destination by which we swore at every gathering with that crystal clear Serbian liqueur made from moonshine and prunes. The toast motivated the clinking of glasses before the alcohol went to the head of the adults, brimming with vivid remembrances of childhood around the Drina and the Miljacka, rivers which became blurred with the Mapocho River and became navigable. Or rather, the stroll down Maršala Tita Avenue, which merged with Bernardo O’Higgins Boulevard, wide pathways in which there was traffic both ways. Saint Sava, the familiar patron of Serbia, appears descending from the Andes Mountains and stands in the middle of the monument to the war of Chacabuco. Sarajevo became present each time I accompanied my father to the Russian Orthodox Church at the intersection of Holanda and Doctor Johow streets in Ñuñoa, a neighborhood in Santiago. The small temple with its needlelike cross, a dome of two spheres and a pope with a long beard who dispersed incense, until everything became immersed in an aromatic cloud while he repeated prayers in ancient Russian. For Holy Week we would eat hand-painted eggs, while the people greeted one another with:

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“Hristos Vaskrse!”2 and “Vaistinu vaskrse!”3 To believe in two religions is like having two heads.

Third Circle

We passed by a grotto of sharp rocks. The temperature drops here. An icy breeze passes through the catacombs. In 1984 one watched the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo on a Zenit television with lifeless colors. The images of the future war will occur in the same snow-covered mountains that I remember during the fourteenth edition of the Winter Games, with their little flags and the image of the mascot, a small wolf named Vučko. Could Vučko guess what was to come? The mascot, designed by the Slovenian illustrator, Jože Trobec, was perhaps the announcement of danger lying in wait; Vučko, the fierce wolf, the wolf that would howl when the moon appeared over the valley of Sarajevo. We were able to follow the journey of the Olympic athletes on the television screen at home: from the highest point of Igman Mountain to the mountainside where snipers would shoot years later. The skiers would line up to descend the slope of Trebevič. In that opportunity Yugoslavia won a silver medal in the men’s giant slalom event, thanks to the athlete, Jure Franko. I tell Edis that my paternal side of the family would make jokes about the Balkan formula: six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, two alphabets and one party. They would say: “It’s an encumbrance to be the city that triggered the First World War.” They would ask one another obsessively: “Do you have Ustaša or Četnik relatives?” Sunday they would stretch out in lawn chairs after a lunch of sauteed peppers and sip šljivovica celebrating while they chant dobro, dobro.4 Midafternoon they would mount horses bareback, dig in their spurs and kick the sides of the animals yanking the reins from one side to another. Their heads were covered with a red felt cap, their beard emerging, their gaze clouded from an excess of alcohol. They galloped about, striking the horse with the riding crop, speaking in that language filled with sonorous “z”s:

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Ja sam. Ja sam. Sam ja? Za, zabada, zabada.5

Saint Nicholas, with his purple cloak and beckoning black eyes. Saint Sava, patron saint of Serbia and founder of a monastery, who abandoned the court to don a religious habit, appeared descending near a lagoon to preach compassion and the truth at the monument of the battle of Chacabuco. The ascension of Christ, like a pagan god that invites us to a celebration each new year, the Messiah that arrived not via Jerusalem but rather by way of the Andes Mountains. When I could finally travel to Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia no longer existed. I arrived at Sarajevo looking to visit familiar sites: an apartment on the third floor of a busy street, an artisanal brick factory, a hotel in the ancient quarter of the city, properties confiscated by the Tito regime. More than a patrimonial vindication, I was impelled by an emotional itinerary. First of all, I went in search of a small brick factory on the outskirts of the city. As a point of reference, a black and white photo of some ovens with clay among meadows. The taxi circled several hills following a map of the city folded into four sections. When we arrived at the address we came upon a cemetery. The driver looked down. The green hill was covered with numerous  graves with orthodox crosses, Muslim half-moons and stars of David. We walked among the tombstones, which were already covered with moss and marks made by humidity. Only a few centimeters separated one from the other. The inscriptions with the dates 1992, 1994, 1995 were repeated as though they were epitaphs of death. We walked among the tombstones without completing the perimeter of death that ended at a distant point in the valley. We retreated in silence. The apartment above Maršal Tito Avenue was part of a building that still had perforations produced by the mortars, an image that we had seen in the relevised reports of the war on CNN. When I arrived, I rang the bell of the intercom system. In the face of the impossibility of understanding due to the traffic and language, I managed to climb the three floors so that they would open the immense door. The current residents weren’t thrilled about allowing me to enter. I stood there, at a

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Figure 1.3. The interior of the war tunnel in the patio of the Kolar family, which served as a secret passageway during the Balkans War. Source: Photo provided by Andrea Jeftanovic.

thirty-degree angle that permitted me to see a wooden floor, high ceilings, and a mobile with red letters with the phrase I love Paris. The hotel, named Europa, was situated near Baščaršija, the great market that is a mixture of the Turkish Ottoman tradition, which is the heart of the ancient quarters of the city. During the war the hotel housed two thousand Muslims, when its capacity was two hundred people. It is said that almost one hundred and twenty grenades fell upon the building. I walked among the rooms and hallways, and it was still possible to find scraps of children’s clothing, blankets, slippers missing their mates, piles of mattresses, beverage cans, and kitchen utensils. The roof was covered with weeds. In a bathroom of blue artifacts, I found a dove plastered against the bathtub. Perhaps one would have to learn to decipher the anthropology of waste in order to read the message of debris. Yugoslavia kaput.

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Fourth Circle

If you succeed in advancing, you will find one door after another until you arrive at the door of your choosing. Rats gnaw at the threshold of the other edge. A pair of phosphorescent tracks illuminate my pants on the two sides of the basement. We make our way among a foggy frieze. I see a broad moat that winds like an arch and embraces the meadow. According to my guide, the water descends from one circle to another. There were a few letters from Nenda. He was my father’s twin and lived in Croatia at the time of war. His letters had exquisite handwriting, they evaded the hill by means of United Nations’ convoys and arrived at my home on Santa Brígida Street in Santiago, Chile. At times he would write to me from a clinic; other times from an island. He would tell me that there was a hole opened by a mortar shell that passed between two hospital beds. Slowly we advance and Edis indicates to me the firebreak lines. “In order to leave this circle, we have to cross through flames.” I remain in the curved frame of the doors connecting hinges and murmurs. I recall an unmarried uncle who never drank šljivovica and looked at the bottle with distrust, and one day he whispered a phrase that I have archived: “The Ustashas in the Second World War, used to carry out the killings after having imbibed that alcohol. Men that never killed a fly until they drank. Do you know what it is like to see an official photo of young soldiers posing with a smile in front of a mound of skulls? To go out into the city and come across the heads of your neighbors nailed upon gnarled stakes?” Josip Broz Tito, burly body, face of burnished steel, with the air of high society. Always dressed impeccably in white. Dark glasses perched upon his nose. A wide belt circling his military uniform. Hands that shook when he gave his speeches. Gold rings that also shook, his military Maršal insignias on his jacket. Tito repeating: “We are the only socialist country that does not depend upon the Soviet Union.” But one day it became known that he was ill with diabetes. He made his way with his Buddha-like body, in a wheelchair, his right pant leg wrinkled following the amputation. He advanced with his cynical smile, his perfect teeth. Until the end, he posed for photos alongside his wife, Jovanka, 35

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brandishing a shotgun in Brno Castle. When asked why he lived amidamid so much luxury, he would respond: “None of this is mine; it belongs to the Yugoslavian people.” Yugoslavia Kaput. “Let’s go, the air is thinning in this chamber.” We creep through the fine sand of the rocks.

Fifth Circle

“Come along the edge, let’s find a path that a person can climb. You first, I will follow you.” On the surface, cemeteries invade everything: soccer stadiums, hillsides, and the patios of homes. Tourist hotels were occupied as shelters and centers for international journalists. I visited the Holiday Inn building with yellow mosaic tiles, whose images have been seen by the world. It had a dismal lobby, and I drank a tasteless Turkish coffee where once there was an immense crystal chandelier with glimmering pendants. I climbed the stairs to see the upper stories that were perforated with gaping holes. While I was there, a small electric lightbulb flickered on and off. In this hotel Juan Goytisolo stayed while he wrote Sarajevo Notebook, as did Susan Sontag when she went to stage Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by candlelight amid the bombings. Vladimir and Estragón wait for Godot. Who is Godot? The European Union? NATO? President Clinton? In the afternoons I would often cross the Miljacka River, observing its crystalline water. In the riverbed a couple of cranes slowly removed debris. I often arrived at the synagogue, in the Jewish Quarter, a rose-colored building with the six-pointed star above the window ledges and four ochre-colored domes. Once there, I remembered having read the words in Ladino of the head of the community during wartime, addressing a Spanish newspaper: “I am Bosnian, I am Jewish, and I am Spanish. The savages there above shoot indiscriminately. They kill us because we live together, and we want to continue living together. The idea of an Islamic threat is a fabrication on the part of Miloševič. The real fanatics are he and his followers.”

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Sometimes I stayed for the Shabbat service and left in the middle of prayers in Hebrew full of “z”s. I was accustomed to crossing the same bridge in the direction of the Hebrew pharmacy, Apoteka, where I bought medicine. Once, upon climbing the steep slope that leads from the Miljacka River to the cemetery of the Sephardic Jews from Sarajevo, I saw graves with Hebrew letters and stars of David, the dates recent.

Sixth Circle

“You should refuse all assistance. Some souls cry, stretched out on the ground, face down, but they are not trustworthy.” I place my attention upon the shadows, listening to them cry. We walk among silhouettes of sunken eyes, emaciated faces. Camped there are rusty trains with the doors open. Advancing, descending in circles. We make our way among narrow walls. I want to extract a story from the quarry of the tunnel and follow the vein of its stones. I try not to lose the thread and I become accustomed to seeing out of focus. At some point, I see myself stretched out with a shroud. We sit down to rest, hoping that the cloud of smoke clears. When we meet, he draws near with his grooved fingertips and offers me water. The thirst should fit in the cup of the hand. At times I feel like we are but one person. We advance surrounded by a constellation of drunken fireflies. I see a hole that twists like an arch and embraces all the meadow. According to what the guide says, water falls from one circle to another. “I had never seen anything like that, it is a new tomb. I don’t know how we will get out of here.” Edis pronounces the omitted word and within me I feel a collapse of the galleries. Integral zones of mine become flooded. The dust installed in the forgotten dates of the concentration camps of Koprivnica is stirred, as well as the common grave in which, it is said, my grandfather’s body was heaped upon others. I imagine the undifferentiated figures, the shining backsides, the teeth chattering with fear. An execution after being transferred from the jails and hospitals, an August morning in Zagreb. I do not come to leave ashes but rather to search for them in the hills of the north of Maksimir Park. Perhaps by way of the tunnel I may arrive at 37

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his grave and recuperate his body. I extend my arm; I touch beyond the surface, I submerge my hand, and I think that I am reaching that which is beyond time. With Edis we rehearsed our death. Each one descends to his tomb. We fall onto an earthen bed. We stretch out in our own hole. Night enfolds among us. We lie on our sides in a crouching position, as if we were about to be born. April, the month of the German bombing of Sarajevo. April of 1941, April, a thousand bombs. The letter that I recovered from a family file quotes the threats from the officials at the entrance to the house. I imagine the wide door of the apartment on Maršal Tito Avenue and the military growl: “Ma’am, if you don’t leave this country, the next victims will be your ten-year old twins. Perhaps, if you baptize your Orthodox children in the Catholic faith, we will pardon them.” On June 25, 1991, the Croatian Parliament (Hrvatski Državni Sabor) proclaimed the separation of Croatia from Yugoslavia and declared its independence and sovereignty. Fifteen thousand kilometers away the Yugoslavian Stadium, situated in the Santiago neighborhood of Vitacura, was reinaugurated as the Croatian Stadium. Five percent of the Serbians, we included, were expelled. We had been members for thirty years. Where would we go in the summer? Goodbye to the Olympic pool with the celeste blue high dive, and to the tree trunks painted with a white band to disorient the ants. Shame and fear prevented us from doing anything and we renounced our membership without protest. My family was divided in two: those who defined themselves as Croatians and those who defined themselves as Serbians. The excessive correction or consciousness of “the former Yugoslavia” was now transformed into Yugonostalgia.

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Sarajevo Underground

Seventh Circle

“It’s time to return, as there is no longer an exit at the airport.” Our feet continue sinking in the mud. We advance the last meters amid the trickling of the lights and the stalactites. The shutters of the lanterns open, we find ourselves against a backlight. We converse with our eyes half-closed. We advance by force of the light, listening to the terrestrial rumbling. Shovels dig; in the distance the sharpening of knives lurks in the vicinity. We arrive at the end of the tunnel. Together we poked around the tapestry of history. I’m fatigued, I feel asphyxiated because of the narrow space. I have difficulty breathing, my heart beats faster. Edis repeatedly tells me: “Don’t give up.” He promises me a sumptuous dinner if I persevere. I draw a deep breath and find strength. We must contrive secret passages toward the open sky. Return by way of the insane path, searching for a glimpse of skylight. Advance by looking upward, gazing down. We ascend, he goes first, and I follow until the sky is a black hole. We have come full circle. As I advance, I begin to lose the prayer-like posture. My body acquires height, loftiness, anddelirium. Edis comes to me and, in the voice of an aged gentleman: “Squeeze your arms tight.” He pulls my hand, and I climb out, totally covered in mud, head to toe. From the depths of the tunnel, I sculpt my new human form. I think that this precise moment belongs to me. The sky, above; the earthly realm, below. Earth, rock, digging and gathering. There was a lightning bolt of glances in the midst of the light from the yard covered with nettles. The clamps were removed from our eyes, and we gazed at each other. Edis and I are a single figure that defies the well. Silently we advance. Each footstep closes with a seal on all of the paradises promised. We exit to contemplate the stars of the emerging night. His grandparents, Šida and Alija, have placed a winepress in the garage, along with a fire pit. We speak of free windows while we dine on lamb and drink a liqueur made of prunes.

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They serve us glass after glass of šljivovica and we toast—Živeli, živeli6—until the sky ceases to see us. Perhaps one would have to learn to decipher the anthropology of waste in order to read the message of debris.

Notes

1. Yes, yes, here. 2. Christ has risen! 3. He has risen! 4. Good, Good. 5. I am I. I am? Always, free, always, party. 6. To your health, to your health.

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Chapter 2

California Naked

In 2003 there was a curious image on the television screen of a woman walking a man with a dog collar. The image that was presented on the newscast was from the jail of Abu Ghraib in Afghanistan. I observed the image: it was the second time in my life that I saw a woman walking a man attached at the neck. The first time was live and direct, in the city of San Francisco, California, in 2000. An experience that corresponds to me as a graduate student in the United States, specifically to what I called my life off campus. When I arrived in the United States, I carried with me a suitcase and a brand-new marriage certificate. As soon as the driver of the shuttle looked at me, he said: “You are Janis Joplin.” Others had said the same on several occasions, but I never imagined that they would point it out to me in their own land. We spent hours in customs explaining why the I-20 form was chewed by a dog and missing a corner. We repeated the story again and again— the letter tossed into the garden, a mischievous Labrador, the expiration date—until the immigration agent, tired of the absurdity, allowed us to pass. We had a J1 visa and a J2 visa, the acronym of a student with the right to a salary and that of the accompanying partner with a license to work for a few years. But the “J” status was also a sentence: one must return to the country of origin. Along the way we hummed to ourselves the song “San Francisco,” by Scott McKenzie, while we advanced on the highway, crossing the Bay Bridge and driving around the Bay area. It was

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a singular experience to be beneath that iron Mecca, which had been filmed many times in the movies and to now be a part of the set. The instructions were to wind along Route 66, which borders the Pacific, and search for psychedelic beats with a stroke of bebop, satisfying my desire to have been born in the seventies and have worn tee shirts with the phrase Peace & Love, and shaking my head in rock concerts. But we arrived in California in the years of the success of Silicon Valley and the delirium of a group of computer professionals named dotcom, who radiated throughout the state: hyper-technological youth, with stratospheric salaries, creators of computer programs. Their economic prosperity made rent impossible for normal individuals, and even less so for those on a graduate scholarship. We inherited an apartment from some friends in Oakland, right on Broadway Avenue, a street filled with automobile sales lots with colorful balloons. I began to forge my circuit on and off campus. Off campus was a matter of continuing to confirm that I had arrived as a straggler to the Beat years, those years of sex, drugs, and alcohol; if there was sex, it was clean and regulated. A clear example was the fair on Folsom Street, which happens on the last Sunday of September, dedicated to celebrating the subculture of sadomasochism. I have a clear memory of those outings: making my way among older, seminude individuals, dressed in latex, with tattooed arms and piercings in distinct places, including the genitals. A piercing that sparkled among the mucosa of the tongue, on a penis, emerging from the hair of the vulva. There were stands with leather goods and erotic toys, and in one they sold whips for five dollars. It was difficult to believe in the sincerity of this celebration, a safe space for adults who cultivated an alternative lifestyle, with emphasis on freedom, fun, and partying, while raising money to benefit charity organizations in San Francisco. The protagonists at the fair strolled along in jeans, spiked heels, luxurious leather, and lace corsets. Suddenly among the multitude a woman appears, strolling with a man wearing a dog collar around his neck. They both must have been around sixty years old, and they were nude; their skin was white and flabby. The woman, with her breasts sagging, smiled as she led this man who walked on all fours with a spiked collar. He dragged 42

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along the ground, caressing her knees from time to time. Three years later the same image would circulate on the Web, but it was a video taken in the jail at Abu Ghraib. The slogan was not Love & Peace but Sex & War. I would see the image in the version of the Colombian painter, Francisco Botero, in his exhibit “Botero: Abu Ghraib,” which traveled from the Doe Library on the campus of UC Berkeley to the gallery of the Museum of Memory in Santiago, with a selection of thirty-seven works, from a total of eighty, inspired by the torture suffered by prisoners in the Iraqi jail. An obese man, a dog with a wide snout and sharp teeth, a spiked collar. A hand with the cell phone, taping the same scene in the cell. My life on campus was a matter of attending seminars among companions from diverse nationalities. Those not from Spanish-speaking countries spoke Spanish from Spain or Argentina, thus pronouncing the letters “c” and “z” as “s,” combined with the vos form, the smooth tone of the Andean region, the shouting of the Caribbeans, and everything producing the sensation of a Tower of Babel within a single language. That mix of dialects created an ambiance of party and laughter, the texts of lengthy readers prepared in the Bancroft Copy Center, the roundtable discussions in class, the frenzy of papers at the end of the semester. Of all my companions, the one who most caught my attention was Joseph, a boy from India who spoke seven languages, a nurse by occupation—more than once he gave us a hand in the urgent care service of the Alta Bates hospital—and now he was venturing into the study of Hispanic literature, with a delightful sense of medieval humor. Off campus was transformed into a search for my Beat or neo-Beat years. It was a search that often included the two of us. I set out to rediscover Route 66 in the iconic sixties, known as The Mother Road or The Main Street of America, which unites the extreme of Illinois with California. An exploration of the landscape along hippie communes, highway motels, concert venues. Retracing Route 66 to later drive along Route 1 bordering the Pacific, with its cliffs of greyish rock. Or going through Big Sur, while we read the homonymous book of Kerouac seated in the shade of the redwood trees. In the car we listened to Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix and Jim Morrison: Janis, Jimmy and Jim were the conspiration. “Yeah, easy rider, don’t you deny my name, pretty baby doll.” Before arriving 43

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at the correct route, we traveled along, lost for hours, amid the intricate network of highways whose exits we discovered after the corresponding fork in the road. Those were times predating GPS, and the geographic disorientation made us do roundabouts on the cement cloverleafs, while extending maps of the state and all roads looking the same. Getting lost was part of the journey, realizing that the United States was a series of small towns with barns and houses without fences—making the map coincided with the sign that announced that we were in Muir Woods, Alameda, Colma, Half Moon Bay, Pleasant Hill. Rural places without movie theaters or plazas, where each inhabitant revealed an immense solitude. In some evasive eyes I imagined potential mass serial killers. My life on campus was all about taking courses and exams, running from one room to another among the buildings of Dwinelle, Wheeler or Barrows. Swimming at noon in the heated pool in the Hearst gymnasium and, floating in the water, looking up at the infinitely cloudy sky of Berkeley. Also applying for grants to travel and conduct research and living the ironic dream that from the United States, I had opportunities to become more knowledgeable about Iberoamérica while on my academic breaks. Off campus the Beat years were a “still life,” which I insisted on contemplating. The desire for a navigation chart above a coastline with its lighthouses intact. The sixties were found in the Rasputin record shop, filled with vinyls and posters; in the Bear’s Lair Bar, or the Jupiter Beer joint, which refused to modernize its rusty chairs and dirty tables. In my off campus life, I would dress differently, wearing granny-rimmed glasses, lengthy necklaces, curly hair covering my face. I even changed my voice, feigning a high pitch, earthy in tone with each syllable. The real Janis, delved into the blues, soul, gospel, country and rock with unquestionable authority and enthusiasm. When I went to the site of the Monterey County Fairgrounds, I closed my eyes and tried to feel the effervescence that she generated in the spectating public when she participated in the Pop Festival of that city, singing “didn’t I make you feel like you were the only man, yeah! / An’ didn’t I give you nearly everything that a woman possibly can?”

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When people die young, they are transformed into legends. There are many myths about Janis. They say that even though she wasn’t beautiful, she had a tremendous sexual magnetism among men and women. Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen, and Eric Clapton count among her lovers. They say that after a show she went to a smoking bar and told one of the assistants: “Get out of here and bring me the first handsome guy that you see, as I am going to fuck him.” In a while a young man with a beard appeared, a guitar hanging on his back. Janis said to him: “Today is your lucky day, what is your name?” And the young man replied “Eric Clapton.” Years later, Janis Joplin spent a night with the Canadian singer Leonard Cohen, who dedicated to her the song “Chelsea Hotel.” They say that her last song in life was a birthday salute on the phone to John Lennon. It is also said that Janis Joplin’s performance at Woodstock was one of the worst that she realized in her short life, which ended when she fainted on stage. I have always asked myself to whom she dedicated the song Piece of My Heart. To Morrison? Clapton? Cohen? or to another? On campus I would listen to Susan Sontag, with her perfect white locks, in the Zellerbach Playhouse, talking about her recollections of the California eucalyptus, and her experience in staging Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in the midst of the Balkans War. In the same setting I listened to the barefoot Cesárea Evora sing while smoking cigarettes naughtily on stage. She would breathe in and exhale clouds of smoke and smile, aware of the puritanism of Californians with regard to tobacco. On campus also entailed taking a three-day workshop with the Brazilian photographer, Sebastião Salgado, and listening to the captivating story around each of his photos in order to better understand the precursor to the image captured in his exhibit, Children. Going one by one, comprehending how he arrived at the child carrying in his arms his little brother in the encampment at Kamaz, Afghansistan; the girl with a dress and no hair in a schoolroom for the Tutsi in Zaire, Rwanda; the smiling boy with a wool cap in the enclave of Krajina, Croatia. Listening to Judith Butler, Slajov Žižek, and Wendy Brown seated at a table and discussing postmodernism or something confusing for my head, which was still in the process of intellectual formation. Focusing on the tiny hands of Butler, which have given form to impressive books 45

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on the construction of gender. On the nervous movements of Žižek, who tugged at his shirt and expressed himself in refined English, but with a marked Slovenian accent that reminded me of an uncle. Sometimes in the summer, I would see Butler and her partner, the attorney Wendy Brown, in the Strawberry Canyon Stadium swimming pool with their daughter, the fruit of an urgent selection of Jewish sperm, a decision that destroyed, in my estimation, her performative theory of gender. Off campus it was a matter of proving that California was a distinct zone, because in bars I no longer found my heroine’s favorite drink, Southern Comfort, a type of Bourbon with lemon to drown the demons. Bartenders looked at me strangely; one remembered that old-fashioned drink, but the majority left me repeating that swarm of consonants. When I retraced the route of the last house of Janis Joplin on mythical Haight Ashbury Street, the epicenter of the world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, the building was converted into a center for refuge and rehabilitation of drug addicts. The center, Oak Street House, had the capacity to house twenty mothers and their babies. The women could stay in the house for two years if they participated in counseling programs for addiction. An ancient house, three hundred years old, Victorian style, four floors, very different than what it once was in the days when it was painted black, when there was an abundance of liquor bottles, and the walls were papered with posters of a seminude Janis. The image and the explanation of the woman at the door were the message that I needed to listen to: California was different, a rehabilitated space, “Trouble in mind, I’m blue / But I won’t be blue always, / ’Cause that sun is gonna shine in my back door someday.” On campus it was all about collecting pamphlets and manuals. The United States is a country of manuals of conduct: manuals about safety on campus, about the health program, pamphlets on depression and suicide attempts, telephone numbers for counseling, an informative guide to sexual identity with all its variations. I remember the instructional manual to avoid getting into situations of harassment with students, among which was getting off the elevator if a student got on, and keeping the door open during office hours. It was also the experience of being an instructor in Spanish and teaching a grammar of which I had 46

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no awareness until then, battling with the phonetics of Asian students who tried to pronounce Spanish, and, at the same time, seeing myself attempting to learn, with difficulty, a basic Serbo-Croatian in a room full of Russians. Accompanying my advanced Spanish students to the production of The House of Bernarda Alba by García Lorca, which ends with virgins committing suicide. The invitation by a student to attend a dinner at her sorority, as if an honor, and not understanding very well the protocol of such a dinner in a house where many young women live in a congregation. The distastefulness of some social movement against migration, another in support of the power of unions, or the candidates for academic positions. The signs at entrances announcing gay, transgender, LGBT, and queer mothers. The announcements offering to buy sperm samples with indicators of race and age for two hundred dollars. The myth of the naked man walking around campus without being taken prisoner by the police. The mail announcing meetings in which it was prohibited to wear perfume, the announcements on the gate advertising pet friendly houses, the few that were available. The nasally “have a nice day” or “glad to see you” is all too correct but devoid of meaning. On campus I saw the philosopher Gianni Vattimo eating a banana in the Free Speech Café before a lecture, without knowing who he was. Then I listened to him without being able to forget the image of this man with an elegant blue tie peeling a banana like an ape, while he gave a lecture with a marked Tuscan accent. Going up the elevator of the bell tower in order to have a better view of the bay area. Giorgio Agamben, on the floor above my office, teaching classes filled with students, and I, looking at this slight philosopher who has written the most suggestive books about the blind points of extermination, memory, and trauma. I lacked the audacity to approach him and ask a question about the contradictions of the homo sacer. Off campus it was necessary to be receptive to better understanding the California of the twenty-first century. The images of Beat vanished like puffs—in vigorous blank spaces—that separated the rhetorical breath of my search. I was left with the texts of trips plagued by speed and superimposed images, equivalent to experiences with LSD. It was impossible to avoid the psychedelic deception in the farmer’s markets and in 47

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the flyers of Whole Foods in this pure, organic, tolerant California. One had to go out beyond the ideologized urban buffer of the “hip culture.” For example, visiting the nude thermal baths at Harbin Hot Springs in Caledonia, beyond the Napa Valley. The place offered its guests the enjoyment of natural swimming pools, massages, suntanning in wooden cubicles, yoga, workshops and walks among the hills. The Web page said that it was not a congregation, but rather a group of volunteers that adhered to a universal spirituality. But the place also had very strict rules. It was obligatory to walk about naked and behave as only gringos know how to do, even in a situation like the following: shun all visual contact, avoid bodily touch, bathe at night in a pool with a Buddha surrounded by candles without losing composure. In the zone of unisex dressing rooms, where one leaves in lockers sandals and the keys to the cabanas, I ran into a man, shoulder to shoulder, and our rear ends bumped, which should have caused a fit of laughter, but both of us were shocked and dodged the situation. There were entire families, parents and children, reading or playing naked in the thermal baths. I confess that seeing the mix of infantile and adult bodies made me uncomfortable. At lunchtime, everyone came dressed to the macrobiotic dining room where the individuals engaged in the most curious conversations, such as those about sexual practices according to the tantra. I held onto my tray while listening attentively to their advantages while choosing tofu croquettes and a spinach salad with oatmeal. In the evening, I would lose myself in the pool with the Buddha in the center, submerging myself in that liberating water until dawn. The next day at breakfast I whispered into the ear of my J2 companion: “Don’t say anything to Janis.” On campus it was the discovery of the Lusophone world, thanks to professors and visiting writers. Reciting the Dog Without Feathers, by João Cabral de Melo Neto. Discussing Capitú’s guilt in Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assís. I became fascinated by the cedilla and by the guttural sounds of Portuguese. And, by contrast, I felt that my English was insufficient, and that I was a Pygmalion learning in the moments of being corrected as to the infinite sounds of vowels in that language. The potlatch parties, in which everyone brings a typical dish of his or her country: mole, sushi, limoncello, tortilla de patatas, hamburgers, Vietnamese 48

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wraps, Belgian pancakes, Chilean empanadas. Those formal parties that indicate an ending time on the invitation. Smoking pot with professors and hiding my surprise upon seeing such counterpoise. Off campus it was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on a bike amid the orange Meccan and feeling the wind of the Bay Area tousling my hair. Discovering under that bridge the location of a Hitchcock movie, and following the cinematic route all the way to Bodega Bay, where The Birds was filmed, leaving with some souvenirs of that phantasmal town which made of suspense a genre with unforgettable symbols and scenes, such as the knife in Psycho or the flock of birds in the telephone booth with the actress, Kim Novak. On campus it was the accommodations for the disabled and seeing students in wheelchairs or with canes for the blind, accompanied by docile Labradors that attended classes without the slightest noise. I went to study in the Robert Morrison Room of the library and read on the comfortable couches until I fell asleep. There, in that very same room, where I listened to a poetry recitation by the Polish Nobel Prize Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz. The library stayed open until midnight, the spiral staircase and the shelves where it was easy to lose oneself, as with a short story by Borges, cranking handles to pass through aisles filled with books. The dimmed lights, spotless tables, the infinite number of books that one could check out and that would furnish my house for weeks at a time. On-off campus would involve traveling to another state in the US, arriving in New York and bumping into Woody Allen on 52nd Avenue. Approaching him shamelessly to tell him that my favorite movie was Crimes and Misdemeanors and having him respond that his new movies were distinct (later I would watch Match Point). That in those minutes of small talk he might ask me about Pinochet, and I would reply demurely with a phrase ending in “at his home.” But I really wanted to ask him how, after so many years of therapy, he could fall in love with his stepdaughter. Soon Yi graciously taking the photo with him that I have. He is not smiling, I am. I have become Californian, and I say goodbye to him with a nasally nice to meet you. The photo is on the bulletin board in the office where I work and I see the slogan “Psychoanalysis doesn’t cure” on the wall, without it being written. 49

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Off campus I was able to celebrate the tea ceremony in the Japanese Garden, just to open the wise saying inside the fortune cookie. Eyeing suspiciously the neighborhood of Castro because it was too chic and heterophobic. Asking myself, among so many possibilities, if I had constructed my true sexuality while the multicolored flag of the rainbow waved in the middle of Market Avenue. To go hear a talk in Citylights, observe Ferlinghetti’s beard, and touch with fascination the books of his publishing house. On weekends, biking through Tilden Park amid hills and cows, and admiring with captivation the blue line of the bay, searching for the inspiration point. Going to the bar La Peña to revive the nueva trova of Latin America from the 1970s and meeting the exiled Chilean families that were stuck in those places, detained by the decade of the 1970s. Compensating for the discomfort of lost nostalgia by buying Ikea furniture and home goods, handsome in design and at affordable prices, and dreaming of the tranquility of the Swedish home. Balancing such an abundance of high culture with a slam poetry recital in Oakland and seeking the melodic guitar of Tracy Chapman. On campus, knowing that you are nobody without a social security number, and that a zip code is, indeed, very important. Off campus, it was September 11, when we began to look at each other differently, with the image of the Twin Towers collapsing in the background. Going to dramatic theory classes that day and hearing the accusations fly. On campus, the overinterpretation of a biopsy that had my health and my life expectation hanging by the ropes; the time that English seemed to me like a threatening language. Off campus, the last photo of my parents as a married couple during a trip to visit me, enjoying a glamorous picnic in a Napa Valley winery. On campus, a massive march along Telegraph Avenue protesting the commencement of an era of governors who acted as if they were deities, bombarding Bagdad, and encouraging a porn war. Off campus, the first thought is the best thought. On campus, the last thought is the soundest. Off campus, nudity is the norm, drugs that are unadulterated and measured. 50

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On campus, the bell tower marks midday on the Bay. Off campus, carting boxes of books and Ikea furniture to a container ship that will take them to the port of Valparaíso. On campus, leaving behind a life in California while telling myself: “Cry baby, cry baby, cry baby / Honey, welcome back home.” At lunchtime, everyone came dressed to the macrobiotic dining room, where the individuals engaged in the most curious conversations; for example, about sexual practices according to the tantra.

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Watanabe’s Eye

The slanting eye of Watanabe rests upon my round eye. His Asiatic eye unfolds upon my Latino eye. His eye comes from afar, advancing listlessly, confronting, resting. His Japanese eye appears outlined by a brush that has sketched its internal angle, an inverted curve toward his temple. It is an elliptical fissure in his skin, a rectilinear eyelid, without wrinkles. When his eye focuses, leveled, the pupil moves restlessly, freely in its orb. It isn’t sculpted in his skeleton, as with the Western eye. I imagine that when he falls asleep, his eye performs a slight operation: it only traverses the area that completely encloses it. The calligraphy of the Japanese face is also different: flat cheeks, discreet nose, clear forehead, defined lips. The skin is polished, a dense white. Western navels are slanted, Asiatic ones are round. I have read that many Japanese females undergo an operation to have a slanted navel. The procedure is called Hesodashi. The motivation of these women is to have the navel similar to the eye. Latino writing is a mold, Japanese writing is the stroke of an ideogram. The Japanese poet articulates the interrogative that unites us: Where does Peru end and Chile begin? Where does Chile end and Peru begin? This is the question that we must clarify during the voyage. I have come from Santiago to the port of Pisco, between the Paracas Desert and the Nazca Valley. The disagreement between the countries is produced by the projection of the land border toward the sea. The diplomatic discrepancy is being analyzed in the courts of The Hague. We are going to navigate the thirty-five thousand square kilometers of the disputed coast in order 53

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to draw an equidistant line. We will undertake this voyage to learn how to operate navigation instruments, occupying ourselves with the cleanliness of the boat and conversing every night about an essential event in our lives and our relationship with one another’s nation.

1

We embark at the time of the midday sun. I’m about to stretch out my hand, but he bows in reverence. I respond with a slight inclination of the body. It pleases me that his eye becomes infinite toward his eyelids. Might he see me as an ellipse within his visual field? The motors sound, the propellers are started, we feel a slight propulsion, the boat takes off. We begin losing sight of the launching pad for boats, the coastline. On the deck we extend maps and the territorial treaties of 1881 and 1954. The high sea is not a desert of water, it is a flatland of breakwater with underground currents. I ask the first question of the voyage. —How does the eye travel from east to west? —Between Japan and Peru there are 8,600 nautical miles. The first contingent of Japanese immigrants arrived in Peru in the Vessel of Cherries, the Sakura Maru, on April 3, 1899. Hundreds of Japanese disembarked to continue the century savoring sugar crystals. They were married from afar by a notary, with portraits of Japanese females. As the ship advanced from Yokohama Port to Callao Port, they said that love was a cold pot that was warming up. Near the west, pain was hidden with dignity and words were measured. A boat docked in the bay in the Meiji Era. —The Pacific was the Red Sea in an end-of-the-century exodus, he concluded. —My father, for us, was a mystery; his life in Japan was an unknown. Every immigrant has the right to invent a past. Undoubtedly, he forged a series of stories somewhat certain. That he came to Peru because they had wanted him to marry a woman that he didn’t like. He said that he had fallen in love with an actress

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whom he met because upon turning the corner, he ran into her and broke the umbrella that she was carrying. —What happened to your father in Peru? —My father sank the umbrella little by little during the sugar harvest amid the cane fields of a sugar plantation where he worked for many years. But he had to open the umbrella again for the rain of 1925: the largest flood of the century in Laredo. It rained twenty consecutive days until the cemetery collapsed and the caskets floated out to sea. —They say that the same thing happened in the earthquake of Valparaiso in 1906. —Peru is not Chile. —But we share the same coastline. I observe him and discover the same regularity in his veiled, sunken eyes. The uniform Oriental head. His ancestors made artic voyages that annoyed the gaze of the vessels beyond the Japanese empire. Sailors that longed to reappear on the other side of the sea. We are crossing the meridian 69 degrees longitude west. I interrupt his silence. —Doesn’t it matter that I am Chilean? —Why would you ask that? —Because of the plundering during the War of the Pacific. —Are you familiar with that verse by Neruda: “They robbed us of everything / but they left us words”? —But it’s different. I found this silver goblet in a museum in Santiago. —What other Peruvian objects are there?

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—In the National Library there is a document entitled “List of books brought from Peru.” It contains thousands of volumes. —Did you bring any? I shake my head and feel ashamed, but I remember my hesitation and note: —In the Museum of Gold, I saw the handgun belonging to General Manuel Baquedano. What is it doing there? —We already know; at times collectors have no scruples. —I understand, but why would they also have a handgun belonging to Salvador Allende? Watanabe looks to the horizon, and I recall the small pistol in the museum case.

2

We navigated toward the southwest. The sea has become illuminated with the sun’s flickering rays. The drops of water splashed by the crest of the waves cling to the sails. In a second mirage an afternoon appears above the horizon, or is it the opposite? The nisei poet is in charge of the compass; I handle the astrolabe. Both instruments allow us to navigate far from the coast. The compass always indicates north; here is Máncora, Piura, Tumbes. The astrolabe allows for the calculation of the height of the stars and the determination of the geographical latitude. Guiding me by the Polar Star, I know that we are at the latitude 12 degrees south, longitude 77 degrees west. —My father never said: “the gringos killed thirty-seven thousand persons in Hiroshima, for that we can’t forgive them.” No, he never said it. He hid among the cane fields and kept silent. At the end of the Second World War, the government of Prado did not accept the return of deported Japanese, and many were sent back to Japan.

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He looks at me and continues. —The reading and study of haiku is an homage to my father, who began reading them to me when I was very young. He read them to me in Japanese and I translated them. He contemplates the horizon and continues the thought. —My father was an issei, an immigrant; I am a nisei, my daughters are sansei, all the other generations are nikkei. —Why have you never traveled to Japan? —We were born with the promise that the entire family would go to Japan one day, but we became trapped in the mestizo fabric of Peru. We returned to our mission and analyzed the maps. We confirmed that the established interstate limits conform to the parallels. He points out that this aquatic frontier, which appears equitable, hurts two Peruvian regions, Ilo and Tacna. It encloses them in a triangle that restricts fishing. The parallels do not take into consideration the South American curvature beginning at the end of the Chilean coastline. —But if we reconfigure the borders, what would happen to the promise of access to the sea to Bolivia?, I ask. —We all like to eat anchovies, he replies, and we share a hearty laugh.

3 —The last time that I journeyed by ship was when I returned from Germany following a grave illness. I traveled for two months hypnotized by the Atlantic Ocean. I was like a figurehead on the prow with a scar on my back.

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“Your eye pries into your slow disaster, travels your limits until it invades your lungs. The fury of illnesses penetrates the body, in the eye that sinks out of exhaustion. First, a pain in the thorax that never disappears. Then a whistle in your breathing, or rather, the lack of breath. Finally, a hoarseness and an inflammation in your neck. Suddenly, a smoky series of cells with small nicotine torches. In each organ there are numerous indications of adenocarcinoma. Then a hospital in Hanover pronounces the sentence with a CAT scan: lung cancer.” “How do you say pain in German?” “Upset and furious, I ask the doctors.” “How do you say pain in German?” “Believe me, people do not die from an unhealthy organ.” “How do you say pain in German?” “Until it becomes a mature animal and is willing to abandon us.” “How do you say pain in German?” “They inject me. Science digs into an unbearable knowledge.” “How do you say pain in German?” “Seven surgeons will open your chest with scalpels.” “How do you say pain in German?” “No, don’t be dramatic, don’t forget that you are the son of . . . Don’t repeat it again: the only impurity in that sterile room is I. I was in a room where wealthy Peruvians were the reservoir of the drainage from the bathroom. With each flush of the toilet, one of them slipped through the cold German forest.” —And how does one survive in a foreign hospital? —Everyone that spends a brief period in the hospital feels something akin to protection, because they are all attentive to you, doctors and nurses. I could still write; I didn’t want to leave. I remained twenty-one days in a hospital in Lower Saxony. When they released me, I suffered from depression. —In the north, you are cured, and in the south, cancer returns.

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—Depression makes you forget, and words evaded me. I cried because I had decided to be a poet, abandoning my studies and all, but suddenly I didn’t have a declaration. I used a dictionary to remember words. A friend would say to me: “The poet cannot speak; he is learning syllables.” —Depression is lying horizontal, cold, for too long. Why didn’t you get out of bed for six months? —I didn’t even get up to go to my desk. Generally, we perceive briefly the absurdity of life, but the depressed person knows that to walk ten steps to the desk is something irrational. Why are you going to do it? It’s pointless; going or not going is all the same. I acquired an ironing board and began to write in my bed, where they also brought me food. That is how I wrote the book The Spindle of the Word in 1989. —Does it have to be that way? An extracted organ in exchange for a book after seventeen years of poetic silence? Watanabe coughs, chokes, a breath of sea air cleanses his lungs. —Breathe with me, I say. A lung awakening, a feeble gasp attempts a word, but not a sound. The silence of that tumor removed in the Panama Canal or of the forgotten lung in the operation room in Hannover.

4

We support ourselves on the railings crystallized with salt, observing how the rubbish from the boat has been discarded. We are the sentries of the shining nautical surface that is now spoiled with milk cartons, plastic bags, papers with erasures, vegetable peels. In the midst of the wake float slices of oranges from the morning’s juice. —Does poetry employ waste?

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—A child goes outside to have a bowel movement, which is also poetic. I think that poetry is born of the vulgarity of life. I write a poem previously in my head based upon an image that I see. —What are the verses that you strike out? —Those that have words that function like mirrors. —What is a poem? —It is a letter to an unknown someone; you organize the material trying to convince that someone that what you say is certain. —Would a dried dog in the desert suffice to create a poem? —What can I tell you? To aspire to leave oneself and define the object with flexible precision. My dog went out into the desert; I lost him; I later discovered him and saw him humiliated like a dried hide. Sand had shamed him and preserved him in that way. —At fifty-nine, do you already know that not one God will speak to you clearly? —My life depends upon tirelessly copying the color of sand. I am a shovelful of organs buried in the sand. At my age, one is belching fear.

5

On the table of nailed planks, where other times we have displayed maps of the land and nautical charts, the Japanese poet installs objects chosen for his composition. He has assembled bottles, jars, boxes, and dried flowers. He is seated, immobile, under the clear light following the storm. He balances a small jar of paint in the palm of his right hand. —I wanted to be a painter, perhaps influenced by my father. My poems are scenes that, had I not written them, I would have painted.

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He changes the order of the objects. Where there was a bottle, he places a white box. He removes the flowers and the bottles. He opens a bottle and puts it upside down. —Is it a matter of textures, a thigh against a rock? His eye blinks, the retina roves to achieve the first framing. He writes on a piece of paper: “The thigh of a woman against a rock / an interplay of textures, a contrast of materials. / Her thigh was a warm, white mass, an animal asleep in winter.” My eye blinks; Watanabe’s eye closes. His eye guards against words in excess, sketches condensed phrases. —How was your eye formed? —My eye has its reasons, skilled in vast landscapes from the north; my eye is attentive to extracting the parable from day to day. It takes photographs through the hole in my fisted hand.

6

Nautical charts are useless on stormy nights, we lose the coastal perimeters. The violence of the whining of the wood terrorizes us, we run from starboard to port to defy the crests of the waves that shake the boat. Soaked, we await the horizon in search of some sign that will guide us. But to no avail, we merely see a rocky mass that intimidates us. We fight against the sea all night while the mast creaks. At each sound of the canvases, the roaring of water. When the storm subsides, we look at one another astonished. —Prow or stern” I ask. —Prow. He heads to the front part of the ship, where he cleans the damp deck. He stops, follows the tail of a whale that is striking the hull of the boat. A whale fleeing from the Humboldt current toward the equator. 61

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—Why don’t you fear death? —I was born after two deceased brothers; they were the model of a life between two tombs, between two empty chairs, between visits to the cemetery with chocolate and nuts. My brothers died the same week in the village of Laredo. We find ourselves in the middle of the boat, push broom in hand. We walked prudently amid the detergent foam because a blow to the head could damage an artery and take with it a memory of life. —Why do you write “the name of the mother comes slowly”? —The recollections that I have of my mother are of her speaking of my deceased brothers. She gave birth to them again upon remembering them. One day I will write that poem. She would say to me: “In that corner, your three-year-old brother sat in that small chair; it was very white, with a blue stripe in front. Before he died, he was seated there.” Regarding my five-year-old brother, she pointed out: “On that mat, he played, and he was also very handsome, with brown hair; what a beautiful racial mix, Japanese with Peruvian.” I knew that she was inventing. —Tell me about an event from your adolescence, I demand impatiently. —I ceased being a peasant by a stroke of luck. My father won the lottery, stopped working and dedicated himself to living the good life. I could go to Trujillo, to the school where César Vallejo had studied. I will never forget it: I am the curled up, well preserved child that snuggles in an empty bed.

7

I contemplate the sky, the clouds announcing rain head to the west. Favorable winds and currents allow us to complete the journey in the stipulated time. The faint roar of the sea blends with the whistling of his breath. My voyage companion is occupied with his instruments. 62

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—You are worried. What does the compass indicate? —That we are approaching the controversial area. And what does the astrolabe reveal? I am situated near the largest mast, where the boat is most still, I point the astrolabe, the light enters the holes and I look at the measuring devices. I confirm that we are located within the indicated quadrant. —Do you feel the turbulence beneath the calm sea?, I ask. —Yes, indeed, extend the nautical charts, please. In the distance, a buoy adrift indicates the four cardinal points. The sky clears. We toss the anchor until the boat is stationary. We take out compasses and rulers. Watanabe gives me a snack for the trip. —I am supposing that you will be hungry and saved some fish with salt. —You didn’t have to do that. —Wouldn’t you have done the same for me? After having traveled thirty-five thousand kilometers of sea, we must solve the interrogatives regarding the place where fishing is regulated, and the maritime limits of each country. Everything takes leave of us: the flagpole, the salt-covered railings, the portholes of the rooms. It is a matter of drawing the hemistich. The wind causes the ropes, pulleys, and capstans of an attained destination to creak. The space wavers, and when the north wind blows, the masts sway. —The war with which we are concerned developed in an insignificant corner, and there were only two warring ships: that of Iquique, the twenty-first of March of 1879, and that of Angamos, the eighth of October of the same year.

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—For Peru and Bolivia, your country was a barbaric territory, violent and hostile, inhabited by savage Indians, envious of the material wealth of those neighboring lands. Forgive me for insisting, but was it necessary to arrive at Lima and burn down everything like some Barabbas? —I tell him that I am ashamed; and I don’t know if I should ask for forgiveness for something that I didn’t do. —Don’t feel guilty. We were always a Viceroyalty, whereas you all were just a Captaincy. We bring out measuring instruments, a large metric tape that we hold at extremes. Each one climbs into a small boat, and we move away until the tape has been fully stretched. The dispute is between a parallel and an equidistance. We begin to row, making the sea murmur with each stroke of the oar. At the precise moment in which we were going to proceed to the Solomonic operation, a marine current carries each boat to a different zone. The turbulent water drags us in opposite directions, while we struggle to not let loose of the tape. But it is too late. The nisei poet is headed north and I, to the south. I place my hands around my mouth forming a megaphone. Scream without refraining yourself for your brothers, for your father. Scream in the desert for the mark on your back, for your forgotten thirst. Scream, don’t lose the elegance and sobriety of a checkered shirt, the inherited refinement of the Japanese, the mark of being the son of someone. Let’s cleanse the fine dust from the phrases. I have looked at streams out of the corner of my eye. When we scream, my occidental eye will be superimposed upon your Asiatic eye. We will cover our navel with the back of our hand. I travel more to the south, where the Antarctic wind blows. There is red tape at the protrusion of that rock. I aim the boat toward the port of Iquique. 64

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I carry your poems and this bit of sea. East. South. We are the sentries of the shining nautical surface that is now spoiled with milk cartons, plastic bags, papers with erasures, vegetable peels. In the midst of the wake float slices of orange from the morning’s juice.

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The Rivers of Clarice Lispector

Río de Janeiro is the city of open arms. Its souvenir image, which motivates hundreds of churchgoers and tourists to climb up the hillsides of the Tijuca National Park to Corcovado, is the figure of Christ the Redeemer with his outstretched arms. But it is not Christ awaiting me but rather Clarice Lispector. There are authors that have awakened in me a certain faith in the human condition; she is one of those cases. I have confirmed my personal salvation in some of her books. The itinerary of my journey counts among milestones the places that she and her characters have traversed.

Figure 4.1. Tree-lined avenue in the Botanical Gardens in Río de Janeiro. Source: Photo provided by Andrea Jeftanovic.

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Río is known as the Marvelous City. Few urban spaces concentrate such a heterogeneous texture, which darns an Atlantic coast with a tropical forest, hills, open beaches, national parks, extensive coastal avenues, and a moderate climate throughout the year. Lispector herself said: “Of all the cities where I have lived, Río is the one that most astonishes me.” Perhaps for this reason she urges her characters to traverse its river—personal tributaries through the Botanical Garden, Copacabana, the neighborhoods of Leme, Cosme Velho, São Cristovão, among others. In Brazil, Clarice Lispector is “Clarice.” Everyone understands Brazilians call dear ones by their first names. This writer, born far away in Chechelnyk, Ukraine in 1920, was the daughter of Russian Jews who decided to emigrate to America to escape religious persecution. She was just months old when she arrived at Alagoas, and then the family moved to Recife. The author suffered a kind of karma of the foreigner. The fact of having been born abroad, her ‘r’s marked by a phonological phenomenon, and the nature of her creations were signs that she was an outsider in the Brazilian literary panorama. She was criticized for having moved away from regionalism, from social realism, and from political contingencies in moments of the military dictatorship. She would say in an interview for the magazine Manchete: “In what way does a painter, a writer or an artist not form a mirror of the times? I speak about anguish and human sentiments. Is there something more participatory than that?” Her literature made its way to the rhythm of a vital latency. The renowned author Guimarães Rosa remarked: “Clarice, I don’t read you for literature, rather for life”; the musician Chico Buarque remarked upon meeting her: “I am reading you with candor”; the translator to English, Gregory Rabasa, pointed out: “I was impressed upon meeting a person that resembled Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” The French philosopher, Hélène Cixous, proposed an enlightening definition: “If Kafka were a woman; if Rilke were a Brazilian Jewish woman born in Ukraine; if Rimbaud had been a mother and had arrived at fifty years of age; if Heidegger had been capable of no longer being German.” I confess that I experienced love at first sight upon reading the text Live Water. By chance, I visited a bookstore in Barcelona in 68

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1997 accompanied by a Brazilian friend. We passed by a table and there were her works translated into Spanish by the publisher Siruela. “I think that you are going to enjoy this author.” I read that book as if a storm had landed on my head. She told me that she writes what is difficult to verbalize—fear of the other, fear of solitude, the epiphanies of our daily routine, the terror of life, the curiosity and fear of death, the contemplative enchantment with language, the vertigo of the present. What is it about that ambiguous novel-essay-register? About instances. “Now that it is being transposed to writing, that which I captured has the desperation that words occupy more often than the gaze. More than an instant, I want its fluidity.” She herself had been hurled to that anguish from early on, that of being she and her birth an unsuccessful wager. Clarice spoke about her mother who, having been sick, allowed herself to be carried away by a superstition that said that a newborn child cured a woman of pain. But Clarice failed in the assigned mission because her mother died. Then came the mourning and poverty, her widowed father in search of better horizons, the move with the three daughters from Recife to Río de Janeiro. There the young woman earned a Law degree, even though she never worked as an attorney. In those years she emerged on the literary scene with her first novel, Close to the Savage Heart, in 1943, and continued surprising her readers with other novels, collections of short stories, chronicles, children’s books, and editorial columns. “I was born to love others; I was born to write and to raise my children. To love others is so vast that it even includes forgiveness for myself, with what is left over. To love others is the only individual salvation that I know: nobody will be lost if she gives love and, at times, receives love in exchange.”

Might she have pardoned God?

Vectors and Characters

The first vector on the map launches me to the shore of Copacabana beach. I set out walking along the sinuous paving stones. I advance and 69

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experience a sublime sensation, between genuine and inconceivable, which reminds me of the fullness felt by the protagonist of “Forgiving God.” I wander along its black and white wavy mosaics, I make my way among cyclists, sports enthusiasts and kiosks with caipirinha. I feel empowered by the sensation of freedom and glory that invades the protagonist while she observes buildings and the blue band of the sea. An instant of ecstasy that is abruptly ruined when she steps upon a white rat in the middle of Atlantic Avenue. Embellishment changes into a tremendous remorse, to anger for the supposed vengeance of God upon her. Was it a sign for off-guard love? Can God be so vulgar? How to deal with the vulnerability of a lone creature? Perhaps for that reason I look at the ground when I should be looking at the Pão de Açucar on the horizon, because I am also afraid of coming upon the rat with the long tail and crushed legs. The woman in that short story belongs to a constellation of protagonists—homemakers that Lispector launches to peregrinate the city following escape routes. They are not flights from intrafamilial violence, rather from an imprecise restlessness that had them meandering along the streets until they encountered a nondescript incident that will mark a before and an after in their lives. Timid homemakers that call the plumber, go shopping, move about in the kitchen, take public transit, care for their children, but whose subjectivity lurks among hallucination and obsessive existential meditation. These ordinary women speak in a raised tone of voice, are interpreters of human existence; they unfurl their subjective conquest in front of the reader’s eyes. Lispector is photographed in front of a typewriter while seated in the living room. She detested it when they called her an intellectual. She would say that she was a homemaker that wrote while taking care of the home. She refused to be part of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, as she found it to be too formal for her taste. She was involved with the universe of anecdotes about her children, the ritual of coffee, the dog that sleeps at her feet, and the trips to the store. I keep walking, I stop at the stand A Cantinha de Mama and I order a “ridiculously cold beer,” as the Brazilians say. I look at the sector of three- four- and five-star hotels that form a continuous façade of blind 70

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tourism with their dreadful air-conditioning units in plain sight. From one of those doors another of her characters should emerge, the protagonist of the story “The Beast and the Fiend or a Severely Open Wound.” A woman from high society leaves the beauty shop all dressed up and runs into a vagabond that has a large wound on his foot. The woman waits for a taxi and the vagabond speaks to her, while she looks at the oozing wound out of the corner of her eye. The car never comes, which facilitates a relaxed conversation between the two of them in the middle of the street. She, who accepts the cheating and indifference of her husband in exchange for a certain degree of economic well-being, is as much a beggar as he is. Cruel epiphany for this beggar wearing high heels and jewels. As Lispector said, in Copacabana anything can happen. I continue along Atlántica Avenue and when nearing the end, after having walked four kilometers, I arrive at Leme, the author’s neighborhood. I have arranged to meet with Teresa Montero in the La Fiorentina restaurant. Five years ago, Teresa came up with the idea of an itinerary called The River of Clarice, which traverses all the neighborhoods where she has lived, her favorite places, the settings of her characters, combining Lispectorian information with the cultural and natural patrimony of the city. And it happens that surrounding the writer, there is a huge community of readers and fans. Proof of that is the fact that her creations are bedside books for many individuals; there are more than two thousand entries (taking into account blogs, web pages and associated communities) with titles like “I love Clarice Lispector,” “Clarice Lispector speaks for me.” Admired by the public and the experts, the author was immediately added to the canon and conferred with canonization. I ask myself about the fetishization that some authors cause. I assume my fascination; I am one of the readers that collects photos, quotes, editions, postcards and objects. But I want to be a different kind of follower. The bohemian crowd would gather in the La Fiorentina restaurant in the seventies. The waiters relate, in a script that they have learned, that the writer would order pizza or breaded chicken with French fries. Nothing glamorous. They point out her usual table, where she would get together with her friends, the artist María Bonomi, and the writer, Nélida 71

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Piñón, and we seated ourselves at the same table. I’m not lucky enough to arrive on the day of the tour, but Teresa, about to travel to the interior, helps me configure the itinerary on a map from the office of tourism, which we fill with the numbers of buses, the names of persons and places that count among my impressions. After all, journeys are personal odysseys that no one can duplicate. She tells me how the “hour C,” the day of the celebration of her birthday, December tenth, has gained momentum, and is repeated monthly with assistants that traverse that vital and literary map on foot and by bus. At some stops a theater troupe emerges and stages one of her texts. Teresa, who circulates amid the world of literature, theater, culture and ecology, has successfully forged all that knowledge into the tours. Her passion is exemplary. One must teach with faith and, hopefully, outside the classroom. I walk for a block, and I find myself at 88 Gustavo Sampaio Street. Her residence for the past eleven years. Located in the southern zone, between the beach and the city, it is situated in a residential sector with plazas and small buildings, fruit stands and kiosks on the corners. An austere building, grayish pink in color, a plaque with her name and significant dates at the entrance. It is here that she wrote many books and suffered a serious accident. I look up to the seventh floor. Early one morning in 1967, Clarice, the inveterate smoker that she was, smoked a cigarette in bed. She fell asleep and the fire spread among the bed, the curtains, the desk, the wallpaper, part of her face and her right hand. She would then spend several days fluctuating between life and death, delirious due to the physical pain provoked by the burns and the stitches. Some years before that, in her capacity as a journalist, she had interviewed the plastic surgeon, Ivo Pintanguy, who reconstructed part of her hand and face. She will forever remain with an anomalous facial expression. “Writing is a curse that cures. It is a curse because it obliges and drags one along, like a painful vice from which one is unable to escape. It is a salvation because it saves the day that one is living, and one would never comprehend oneself without having written.”

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On that same street is the hotel, the very Tulip Regente de Lima, in which she stayed to finish her books. The owner of her actual house needed an oasis in which to enclose herself to be able to write or edit her writing. Five hundred meters away was her family, her room, her housekeeper who resolved domestic matters, her neighbor who was an admiral and spied on her with a pair of binoculars; five hundred meters away was her son with schizophrenia, who was becoming worse over the years, having been committed time and again. In that solitary room she had to battle with her apprehensions. “I am afraid of writing; it is so dangerous. Whoever has attempted it, understands. Danger of examining that which is hidden; and the world does not go adrift; it is hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write, I have to place myself in the abyss.”

I am in the Atlantic Hotel, on Copacaba Avenue, forty years later, ruminating over her apprehensions and my own. For example, why write if Lispector already exists?

The Garden of Epiphanies

From Barcelona to Río de Janeiro, I have followed Lispector’s path: in her books, in studies about her books, unedited materials, in her city. I was young and single when I began reading her works; now, I am an adult, married with two children, like the woman that ambles about the city in her short story “Love.” I, too, am a homemaker, among other professions, and now I am aboard a bus bound for the Botanical Garden in search of a blind man that chews gum. Yes, just like the protagonist, Ana, who, while out shopping, sat down by chance in front of a blind man that chewed gum and this provoked a rupture in her calm, pleasant life. From that moment forward, the abysm, the questioning of adult life. The sensation of love for the blind man and for life overwhelms her to the point where she drops the shopping bag with eggs and is paralyzed among other passersby, who observe her in puzzlement. The protagonist misses her stop and gets off the bus at the entrance to the Botanical Garden.

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My bus stops several minutes at the Botafogo Shopping Center, and about ten people climb on board. I continue to search among the passengers for a blind man that chews gum. A man with white eyes and prominent jaws. We circle around the small lake, and I only find a nearsighted gentleman with large thick glasses and two young girls with a rhythmical laugh and rapid speech. My hope is in the Garden. Upon arriving at the avenue, I ring the bell and get off at the rear of the bus. “Writing is using the word like bait to catch that which is not a word. When that non-word, the between-the-lines, bites at the bait, something is written. I write because of the incapacity to understand.”

The Botanical Garden is a natural oasis within a city. It is far superior, in my opinion, to Central Park in New York or Hyde Park in London. It is a park that is two hundred years old, with fifty-five hectares of trees, groves, hothouses, and a sensorial garden designed for the blind. I advance along Palmeras Street crossed by several chiaroscuros; I circle the Imperial Palmera. The diagonal walkways are multiplied, there are scattered signs with the scientific names of plants: Roystone oleracea, Theobroma cacao L., Recento de Mangueiras, Magnifera índica. One hears the sound of animals and insects lying in wait in the Macacos River. Evening falls and there appears a tamandúa, a type of anteater bear with a pointed mouth, which I barely managed to photograph beneath the splendid Ipê roxo tree. Hundreds of crickets hover around Frei Leandro Lake. I close my eyes in the sensorial garden and run my fingers over the braille dots that explain the vegetal species without gaining much more than caressing dashes, and to one side, as if a trap, the cacti; its needles prick fingertips like a small punishment. Which bench might be the one where Ana sat and allowed her personal river to flow? “The moral of the Garden was another. Now that the blind man had guided her toward him, she trembled in those first steps of a brilliant, somber world, where the magnificent victories floated, monstrous . . . But all the weighty things were glimpsed by her with her head amid

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a swarm of insects, sent by the most delicate life of the world . . . The Garden was so beautiful that she was afraid of hell.”

Lispector wrote not only about homemakers, but also about children and animals. Illuminated little girls. Mystic animals.

All the Rivers Run into the Sea

Clarice Lispector did not live her entire life in Río de Janeiro. She married a career companion, Maury Gurgel Valente, with whom she had two children; and whom she accompanied on his diplomatic missions in Italy, Switzerland and the United States, until the couple separated in 1959, when she returned to Brazil. In those years she reinforced the threads that tied her to her city by means of extensive correspondence with her sisters and friends. Similarly, she sketched an imagined Río, one missed, outlined, written in her characters. And another river. She paraded the personal river of her characters, whose conscience and desires flowed from the caverns of their psyche. A map of Río de Janeiro and a map of subjectivities that cross one another in the tributaries of her characters, in the infinite fountainhead of their consciences, in the discovery of beauty in the quotidian, in the impact of triviality, in that arduous process of conquering liberty, always swimming against the current. In her journeys during the time when she was a separated woman, back in Río, her favorite corner appears: O Largo do Boticàrio. A row of seven houses from the nineteenth century and an exuberant vegetation of Atlantic shrubs are situated a few meters from the climb up to Corcovado, in Cosme Velho. Her friend, the artist Augusto Rodrigues, lived there. In that place they dined, drank; it was her bohemian space. I have passed numerous times by that place unaware of this little plaza surrounded by mansions abandoned among ferns. I spy through window frames the evidence of an antiquated splendor. In that period, the author consolidated her participation as a columnist in various journals. There she wrote quite a bit about what happened to her in the journeys that she had to make throughout the city. The real Clarice moved about in taxis and conversed with the drivers. It was her 75

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bourgeois whim, she would say. Therefore, several of her chronicles speak of those small interviews in which, it seems, she was examining the soul in each minute. On the route from Leme to the imperial center of the city she was accustomed to asking: “What is everlasting love for you? Have you ever been burned?” Between the National Museum and her old neighborhood of Catete, more questions: “Have you felt death in your bedroom? How does one forget someone that caused you pain?” Now the Lispectorian vector pushes me farther away, to a place outside of the tourist zone. Three buses, one mistaken, four people that direct and lose me with their indications. I walk along dirt streets beneath the implacable midday sun. All this to arrive at São Cristovão. A neighborhood near the airport is more rural and impoverished. One mustn’t be naive; every city has its other side. From here I observe the cable car that offers a trip around the favelas for tourists in search of a set from some Third World film. Finally, I reach the area of the Feria Nordestina de São Cristovão, to search for Macabea. The timid protagonist of The Hour of the Star is the semiliterate girl that works as a typist and lives in a miserable boarding house. Río can be intimidating for a provincial girl, and in the shacks of this popular party she searches for people that speak with her accent, that dance to her music. I look for the slight girl with an outmoded hairstyle that was the protagonist in the film version of Susana Amaral. I search for her in that small tavern where they confuse me with a gringa and speak to me in English, where I purchase a greasy Bahian bean cake. “What was the truth about my Macabea? It suffices to describe the truth so that it no longer exists: the moment passed. I ask: what exists? Answer: it doesn’t exist.”

I follow the marks of my Río de Janeiro journey. A few meters away, in that same area of São Cristovão, is the zoo in la Quinta Boa Vista. It is strange for me to enter a zoo without children asking to see the elephant or the giraffe, or demanding cotton candy or popcorn. I pass by one cage after another without paying much attention to the species on exhibit, as I am going to find the buffalo, following the steps of the woman from 76

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the short story with the same name, who decides to grieve an amorous deception in front of the encaged animal. What does one do when another no longer loves you? The crime could be to not return the love in a corresponding fashion. The protagonist begs the beast for love and hate, but the animal simply returns a calm look, and she feels as though she is a prisoner of the desire to commit an assassination.

Archives and Blemishes

One morning I submerge myself in the archives of the Rui Barbosa Foundation. In the entryway of the heritage building there is a pleasant garden with children in the heart of the Botafogo neighborhood. I have requested sheets of recycled, office-sized paper. I was in this place ten years ago and I know that now they have made available new materials. I request them at the counter. I feel like an archeologist of her past, of her secrets. The new documents begin appearing one by one: the divorce decree by mutual consent, and the pension that establishes that one-third of the husband’s salary shall go to the wife. On the following page is a letter by the diplomatic ex-husband, who asks his mother to help Clarice in her return to Río Janeiro, requesting that she treat the latter “as if nothing had happened,” that she and the children will need her help. Regarding himself, he states that he is serene, but that he doesn’t regret those years of living together, that “if he were to return to the past, he would take the same path.” There are also letters from foreign editors that congratulate her for her work but excuse themselves from publishing it, or they tell her that her anecdotes are too trivial; not one of them suspected that she would be compared to the most relevant of philosophers of the twentieth century. What was Lispector looking for? In several of her writings, she verbalized it: “Pegar a coisa,” “Grasping the heart of something.” A vehement desire to reach the innermost essence of things, capture the “it.” A constant reflection on language and its frontiers: “The word has a dreadful limit. Beyond that limit is organic chaos. At the end of a word begins a tremendous eternal outcry.” Many photos appear. Through the ages these images have become familiar to me. She appears thin, with a face with cubist features, large 77

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eyes, delineated eyelids, and cheeks high and shiny in every photo. Her beautiful portrait is by the Italian painter, De Chirico. The photo is of her dog, Ulysses, at her feet, while she strikes letters on the typewriter. Or the other image, in which she inclines her head to smell the scent of a flower in the south of Italy, outlining her curved forehead. Wrapped in a coat with a fur collar and, in the background, her children playing in the snow in Washington, DC. With her long legs over skis at a winter resort in Switzerland, or with a scarf covering her head in Poland, giving her the air of a Russian peasant girl. Among other objects is the comb that was given to her as a gift by the writer from Sâo Paolo, Lygia Fagundes Telles; I try out the accessory, as if in that gesture I could take a strand of DNA from the friendship between both authors. An enigmatic woman, around whom swirled countless myths: that she was hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals, that she had read little, or that she was a refined reader. Or that she walked about drowsily due to the medication, that she was neurotic, unbearable, charming, solitary, and dependent. Or that she was a very good friend to her friends, that she wouldn’t even go to the movies unaccompanied. That she had an ambiguous relationship with Olga Borelli, her secretary and intimate friend. That she constructed impossible loves during her life as a separated woman. For example, there is a cruel anecdote in which, joking about herself, she told the manager of the newspaper where she worked that she had difficulties establishing a relationship with a partner: “You don’t understand, I cannot have sex with anyone, my body is entirely burned.” Regarding her role as a mother, we know about the intimate relationship that she had with Paulo, her youngest son. There is extensive correspondence with him, while he was spending time with his father in the United States. Affectionate letters, filled with blessings, jokes, and Lispectorian advice: “Paulo, the feeling of loneliness is one of the most difficult to endure, but you will take advantage of this experience. You will see.” And, at the same time, in letters filled with jealousy, she asks him not to grow accustomed to his “American family.” Around this time Maury Gurgel married for a second time. She tells him that Pedro is not at all well, which diminishes the joy of living. And she closes by saying, “You are the best book that I have ever written, there is no doubt about that.” 78

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Little is known about her intimate relationships as a couple. A prohibited relationship seems to have left her disillusioned. The material remains lost or retained somewhere. I’m not certain why I remember Joana’s voice, the protagonist of her first, mysterious novel. “I have to search for the basis of selfishness: everything that I am not can never interest me, it is impossible to be something that doesn’t exist—nevertheless, I surpass myself, even without delirium, I am more than what I tend to be—I have a body and everything that I may do is a continuation of my foundation.”

It is 1969 and her handwriting has changed, as has her style of writing. She states that she is mentally fatigued; that she writes by hand because the doctors have asked her to do exercises following the accident. The letters from her friends aim to contain her during her crises of nervousness and depression. It’s evident that she navigates in an ocean of anguish. And yet another proof of that difficult period, I single out a handwritten note from her friend, the visual artist, María Bonomi: “Clarice, only imbeciles succeed in being happy, happiness is a promise of capitalism.” On a piece of paper that is kept in the archives, originating perhaps from a notebook with jottings regarding her projects, she writes the following, on the correction of her book Live Water: “Abolish the critics, they dry up everything.” Suddenly a drawing on matte paper thirty by twenty centimeters. Did she paint? A piece of block paper appears, a drawing with earthy colors and prolonged forms among the documents. I smile, I laugh in this intimate tributary. And when the mystery of her life and work are confirmed in constant findings and failed meetings, I stumble upon the Rorschach test performed by the psychoanalyst, Clarisa Valente, eight typed pages in French for the ten pages of the personality test. Ten sheets that exhibit personality traits with colored forms and those in black and white. Forms that suggest hideouts, couples, animals, organs, monsters, heads . . . and should be described by the patient under evaluation. Why does such a personal document figure among the materials accessible to the public? Why is it written in French? Is what is revealed not that which has been 79

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Figure 4.2. Bench in the Botanical Garden which alludes to the short story, “Love” by Clarice Lispector. Source: Photo provided by Andrea Jeftanovic.

said by literary critics? I imagine her exotic green eyes describing the forms of the ink blots. Ink blots, the report states, that reveal a superior intelligence. Ink blots that indicate multiple talents and internal struggles. Ink blots in which energy and precision are concentrated. Ink blots that indicate that she should discipline herself in terms of logic. A purple ink blot that sketches a whimsical, self-centered character. In her relationship with the world, it is recommended that she direct her intentions, that she not lose sight of the details. Ink blots point out the fluctuation between significant values, artistic intuition, and scientific abstraction. Ink blots that dramatize her capacity for contemplation and plastic thought. I pick up the drawing that I had found as if she had painted with watercolors one of the pages of the test. It is said that her answer traces an unpredictable interval for feelings, what would that mean? Perhaps it signifies loving akin to something discontinuous. One would have to ask the 80

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reason why the reports of all the Rorschach tests realized during therapy or in the processes of work selection are in circulation. One must burn the evidence of our miseries and pain. Not even leaving the ink blots. Giving up our abnormalities is a sacrifice. From Barcelona to Río de Janeiro I have followed Lispector’s path: in her books, in studies about her books, unedited materials, in her city. I, too, am a homemaker, among other professions, and now I am aboard a bus bound for the Botanical Garden in search of a blind man that chews gum.

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Doors and Ellipses

We spend our life opening and closing doors. The Puerta de Alcalá is in Madrid, the city where I lived in 1997. I had an internship in the School of Letters, which offered courses on the narrative, cinema, and theater arts. More than a formal educational institute, it was a space of creativity because the methodology of each course entailed writing exercises by which we ventured from narrative statements to dialogues, to dramatic scenes whereby character A recounted to character B grave news about character C, about whom the latter knew nothing. A situation, thirty minutes of writing, and a reading of those disconnected fragments, possible seeds of something. The professors indicated our errors, clichés, overwrought constructions, and, with luck, one phrase or another survived for that which we call literature. It was the era of Alejandro Gándara, Juan José Millás, Jesús Díaz, José Sanchís Sinisterra, José Miguel Corrales, Carlos García Gual. I doubt that they remember me. They were tough, demanding, sarcastic, but after class we went out for drinks, a situation that struck me as curious, given the formal, hierarchical nature of professor-student relations in Chile. I was intrigued that a third of the class was “on strike,” a tangible example of what is a state of wellbeing. As an example of the humanist landscape of that time, there were only two of us foreigners in the entire School: a Venezuelan and me. Globalization and migratory waves would come later. The Puerta de Madrid is in Alcalá, the Puerta de Alcalá is in Madrid. I cross the Puerta de Madrid in 2010 to stay in Alcalá, where I was invited to take up a literary residency in the university as part of 83

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the Festival of the Word, an eclectic event that incorporates art, music, theater, and literature, and the essence of which is the awarding of the Cervantes Prize. On my first trip I recall that the taxi driver that drove me early in the morning from the Barajas Airport to my residence in the Puerta del Sol pointed out the Puerta de Alcalá as the first monument of the city. While we circled the roundabout in the scant light, he recounted the story of its construction by King Carlos III and urged me to examine the semicircular arches with the head of a lion, the Ionic capitals, and cornices. He was a taxi driver accustomed to transporting foreigners and he kept a well-worn tourist guide. While I listened to him, I glanced sideways at the Cibeles Fountain and the sculpture of two nude children. This time, upon arriving at Alcalá, the official driver of the University indicated for me the Puerta de Madrid: a façade of reddish brick, narrow streets, ancient walls. He tells me that we are crossing through one of the doors of the old walled sector, rebuilt in 1788 by the very same Carlos III. Three times Carlos, three doors: I remember the statue of the king mounted on a steed in the monument of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. I return to Spain twelve years later to a new literary adventure. The residency encourages us to be ramblers in Alcalá, to investigate poetically that city which is far removed from pragmatic. The event’s program states that “we are invited to reside, converse, stroll, read and write.” I search for the significance of Alcalá de Henares: “castle upon the Henares River,” and a glimpse at the shield and the flag of the city. It’s true, we live in a castle within a castle, like in a novel by Kafka. One must trace itineraries within a walled enclosure, with towers, drawbridges, trenches, secret rooms, and bronze doorknockers. Everyone attempts to make us feel welcomed. Everyone greets us, the professors and the doormen; and the students that recognize us on the street from the photos on the Festival brochure pass us and whisper among themselves: “There go the authors.” During this residency I have established a corridor between both cities, in elliptical sketches between the Puerta de Madrid and the Puerta de Alcalá. Thanks to the network of commuter trains, I travel roundtrip from Alcalá de Henares to Madrid almost daily, in a dialogue between two eras. On the one hand, Madrid is in the past, old friends, visits to the museums, theater, and enormous libraries. Alcalá is the present, the 84

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activities related to the Festival, new friends, the Cervantes Prize, the hosts from the University, the taverns, stone buildings. I resume the trip almost in the same place where I had left it. I need to confirm the maps. Bodies are not like places; they never retain traces of evidence. Here I am, bent on finding a bodega on some corner.

1

I am the last one to join the group and I ask myself what it will be like to live with other writers, if it will have something of a reality show, if we will love each other or end up hating one another. I have written with and read two of them, and a sort of complicity has arisen. The first day I feel somewhat like a straggler, given that there is a certain intimacy among them, and I find myself in second place. Jesús, the one from the invitation by mail and phone, escorts us to the bars. He walks with long strides and moves through the city like a strategist. Along the way he has us try pig’s ears, which we savor, clothed by the laws of hospitality. My palate becomes rough because of the oil that coats the cartilage, which I dilute with a beer in the next bar. The San Ildefonso Residence bears a resemblance to a convent or a castle, massive stone walls, arches, elegant rugs, antique furniture, a long and silent hallway, which is lighted for us to find our way. The room is spacious, luminous; I put down my laptop, move aside the television, organize the desk and books; I am happy to be alone in this cell belonging to a nun-writer. My room, number 212, is named “Canarias.” I like to feel that I am on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, between Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. After more than a decade I have a room of my own. I will not share this space with anyone: I sleep, read, and work as I desire. A place with its own rules, where the gaze of others never enters. But after examining the interior architecture, the self-demands begin to surface: if I don’t write here, does that mean that all this about literature is an illusion? There is something ghostly in the building, as if we are the only guests. I know that when we arrive after our outings, another evening commences for each one. I ask myself what they might be doing behind the closed door: calling home? Visiting porno webpages? Reading? 85

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Writing? Plucking hairs from their eyebrows with a tweezer? Making an inventory of all the inaccuracies that they uttered throughout the day? It seems like nobody sleeps, despite the solid architectural structure, as I hear noises from the faucets (someone showers early in the morning), from the locks on the doors (someone goes downstairs to prepare a cup of coffee), from the stereophonic voices (someone speaks by Skype in a tone that is stronger than recommended). I encounter one of them on the Web, we greet each other and say good night, and I close the message inbox. I suspect that in some place there must be a camara registering our movements. After responding to urgent emails, reading something, beginning a story that I have no idea how to continue and not feeling sleepy, I go downstairs to converse with the person on the night shift (before that I have looked at the light coming from the keyhole in Giovanna’s door). I speak with Mario, a forensic doctor from Sao Paulo who has his practice in the city’s hospital and works here on his days off. I address him in Portuguese, and he responds to me in Spanish. He tells me that he prefers to assist deceased patients over ones that are alive. Moreover, he is terrified by living patients, ones that are ill and agonizing, for whom he can barely, if even, practice medicine. I am horrified by his skepticism toward the science to which he has dedicated his life. I try to counter his pessimism by arguing with closely related cases of persons that have recovered from terminal illnesses. He retorts with the answer, “it could be.” Neither the melatonin nor the clonazepam has any effect, and I remain on my delayed schedule from Chile. I try to sleep. At some moment, I am successful, as hours later the phone rings and awakens me. By now, Alcalá has its soundtrack, which is activated each time that I put on boots and, like a princess, cross over the courtyard in full bloom. I have breakfast in the glass-enclosed patio and write until the battery of my computer dies. I have seen myself split into two, into a dominatrix, with high heels and a whip, that tells me: “write, write, write” while I type on the keyboard, drink my coffee with milk and chew a small roll with Manchego cheese. “Write, here there are no children, household chores, work, nor procedures, nothing to complain about.” I write without any excuses to rescue me.

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Giovanna is my neighbor. I insist on offering her my hair dryer so that she doesn’t catch a cold. We leave our rooms at the same time and approve of each other’s appearance. The intense and unexpected cold impels us to go shopping for clothes together while we converse in our South American slang, as if nobody could understand that intimate dialogue which sneaks in among scarves, hosiery, and coats. Together we quelch the homesickness for our children back home and converse about the ancient dilemma, “books or children?” We speak about guilt and the realization, the eternal dilemmas, of the obstacles in the private and the public spheres. I am with her when I find a book in the Fondo de Cultura Económica Bookstore, one that will make a lot of sense to me while on this trip: Women That Write Are Also Dangerous, by Esther Tusquets (the “also” is there because there already exists the text Women That Read Are Dangerous). She understands the question, children or books? A contradiction previously for women that had no access to birth control methods and lived in oppressive societies. According to the book, we women supposedly were born in the era of “books and children,” but it is not exactly like that; there are hitches. Women that write are accustomed to being interrupted; they write in the living room; they rarely exist on an official level; they almost never enter the canon. I spend a great deal of money on long-distance phone calls to speak with my children. I still resist using Skype. My six-year-old son reminds me again and again to buy him the gigantic pirate ship as promised. My two-year-old son, who is only beginning to speak, says to me from the other end of the receiver: “Mamá, juice, car.” I hang up devastated, glance at the calendar like a prisoner that looks at the time remaining in his sentence and crosses out another day. There are still eleven days. Children or books? Children and books? Be it out of guilt or hypercorrection or the pervasiveness of delusions, I purchase the week’s vegetables and fruit on the Internet. I select from Cristián’s online page, “My Farm Fresh Produce”: pears, lettuce, eggs, vegetables, oranges, squash and almost everything that we consume as a matter of routine. It’s ridiculous, I know, from Alcalá I am buying the vegetables and fruit that will arrive tomorrow at the door of my home in Santiago.

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Train 2344, track number three, headed to Chamartín. Prior to every encounter there is a trajectory of forty minutes, in which the sun bounces off the train’s glass windows like balls of fire and blades of a knife, alternately. The yellow line of the horizon of cultivated land unfolds amid signs, tunnels, and escalators. I wander through the microclimate of the tropical garden of Atocha, searching for the exit.

2

The Festival opens with a conference by the Catalonian author, Enrique Vila-Matas. There are several interesting ideas in his talk. I jot them down in my notebook. Being faithful to our points of view. Poetic truth is not the same as factual truth. Writing to modify our originals. He refers to a suggestive image: he alleges that when people share the same humor, it is like when one throws a ball, and the other person returns it to you. It is not kept in a pocket or ignored. I like the image; I believe that we spend our lives tossing balls. I throw the ball to Giovanna, and she catches it in the middle of her chest. I toss the ball to Juan; he makes a pass to me and then dunks it in the basket. I pass the ball to Tryno, and he hits it with his head. I toss the ball to Jesús, and he keeps it without wanting to give it back to me, like a naughty child. I throw the ball to Pepa, and she catches it and tells me: “Come now, gorgeous, as far as Valparaíso.” I toss the ball to Ismael, and he catches it with catlike movements and his noble smile. I pass the ball to Fernando; he catches it and winks at me; I remind him of the coffee that is overdue. In roundtables or in interviews, they ask us about the importance of Spain in our formation as readers and writers. For me, Spain is an enormous variety of postwar novels and dramatic works that guided us as to how to write about the memory of violence in our dictatorships 88

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of the seventies and eighties. Spain also appears like the presenter of contraband, as in erotic literature with the collection Sonrisa Vertical by Tusquets, when in our countries nothing transgressive was permitted in the culture controlled by the authoritarian state. What was Pinochet going to suspect by some pink colored books that appear destined for girls? Iberian culture is also the mediator between literatures in other languages: Anglo-Saxon, Lusophone, German, Japanese. Everything comes betrayed from Spain: Lispector by Elena Losada. Kundera by Fernando de Valenzuela. Mishima by Andrés Bosch. Simona Vinci by Ana María Moix. Dostoyevski by Ramón Vásquez. Lobo Atunes by Mario Merlino. Günter Grass por Miguel Sáenz. Koltés by Carla Matteini. Kawabata by Pilar Giralt. Freud by López Ballesteros. In the roundtables they also asked us what we thought about the meaning of writing, the why and the wherefore. Perhaps one always writes about a crisis: a couple, an individual, a family; a social order that enters into conflict and its collapse is narrated. One of the times, I believe, I state that I write because of a centripetal force that generates each book; that force which, for ages, has trapped all that I have read, lived, imagined for that book, which is in the process of becoming, being composed of fragments of movies, of other books, conversations, theatrical works, stories heard, fantasies, personal investigations. A precise and prolific axis that multiplies associations, activates searches. I continue to be fascinated

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by the process, the novel on a slow burner, the cooking delayed, where each ingredient, each phrase, is chosen with the spirit of a collector. And in Alcalá, that centripetal force arrives again, and with it a project that is in the making, its current of air strikes me. I begin three new narrative works. What I don’t say—terrible that I am, given I am invited as a resident writer—is that, at times, writing seems absurd to me, dispensable. Nor do I have the time to comment that once I read that when Einstein’s lab assistant heard the news on the radio about the nuclear attack on Japan, she stopped what she was doing and hung up her apron, never to return. Writing for me is my personal “hanging up the apron,” my resistance to time and to the times. Writing is to unfold vital and bibliographic quotes in the body of the characters. Writing is a staging of a scene where things happen once, twice, three times. Writing is for the reader that I carry within, so that my intimacy enters into contact with another, which it doesn’t nor will ever know, so that, at least, my biography intersects with history. Writing to modify our originals.

3

When I lived in Madrid, almost every Sunday I went to the Museo del Prado. I lived close by and that day there was no entrance fee. I would take a book for the wait in a long line; it was worth the wait. Each collection is enormous and deserves more than one visit. I recall the fullness that I felt upon entering the spacious room which housed Velázquez. I confess that this time I escaped from collective coexistence; I left suddenly, without notice, somewhat overwhelmed by so much classification and intelligent utterances. I visit the temporary exhibit by Francis Bacon; I like this monstruous painter who says that he wants to “paint mouths like Degas.” In the various canvases I observe teeth, tongues, gums, jaws. The scream of Munch arranged in another register, with an obscener brushstroke. I stroll through the room reading the titles and informative paragraphs, I watch the video, buy a book and a souvenir cup that reads, “Francis Bacon Museo del Prado—03.02/19.04.09.” The cold that seeps through the windows convinces me to stay inside. I sit on a bench, open 90

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the book, and begin to read in this exhibition hall of the developed world, with perfect lighting and temperature. His canvases are a wall of anguish, the tedium of transmitting a story or rather telling it while transmitting that weariness. Bacon, from his visual narrative, questions me about leaving raw, naked zones. I ask myself about such a motivation in literature, that of transcending the narrative aspiration. How to leave naked zones on the page? I like the painting Study According to a Portrait of Pope Innocence X by Velázquez. It rewrites the image of power and corruption. I also stop to linger in front of the painting Study of a Crouching Nude. It is a bodily position that unsettles me, oscillating between eroticism and submission. If someone is crouching, they can embrace or kick him from behind, inflict a stinging, sonorous lash of a whip, or a run a sensual caress along the curvature of the buttocks. It is said about this Irish painter that his work “opens valves of feeling, appealing to the nervous system,” sketched in arches and deformities. I would like to achieve that effect in my texts. In his painting Study for Two Figures, Bacon speaks of a sexual copulation with the canvas, similar, I think, to the pairing with the computer screen, although limpid. The white speckles are like flecks of semen. I am about to touch the ejaculated texture, but the disapproving look by the guard stops me. When everyone else was working in abstractionism, he painted a particular form of reality. He anticipates the images of Naziism, Eichmann’s glass booth in Head VI. His paintings relate a story by means of a lengthy detour around the brain. In an ironic wink there is a painting with the title A Piece of Waste Land, which is a map of the world with an arrow. His art studio is chaos, a random collection of objects and images, brushes, clippings, books, jackets of records, magnifying glasses, paint jars. Photos are the seeds of his paintings. I distinguish the photogram with the actress Emmanuelle Riva, from Hiroshima, My Love, and experience a humble understanding with this painter: it is one of my favorite films, and I use it as a detonating image in my second novel. Being faithful to our points of view. I glance at my watch, the last train to Alcalá is about to depart. I run to the Recoletos Station. It begins to rain; I board the car and sit down in front of a group of youths that are drinking as they come from 91

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or go to a party. I look out the window, imagining in the darkness the landscape of the route that I have been memorizing in these elliptical journeys: wooden fences, factories, shafts of wheat swaying in the wind. The young people get off at La Garena Station. Alcalá also has its ground zero, a space in which its railroad lines come apart from the network of commuter trains. We retrace the path of the attack on March 11, 2004. Each time we pass by the stations of El Pozo, Santa Eugenia, and Atocha, I experience dizziness. I examine backpacks and cell phones and think about the ten bombs that exploded in the three stations at the same time. A newspaper headline read: “Cellular phones ring on earth as they do in heaven.” While on the daily trip I am a witness to intimate explosions. One day, it is a couple of adolescent girls that show each other their wounded forearms, small incisions; one says to the other: “Mine are already healing.” They get off the train with the headphones from their musical device hanging from their shoulders. Youthful self-mutilations to the beat of some pop song. I want to tell them that the agony of adolescence passes, but they have put their headphones on again and I am clueless as to what melody they are listening to on the platform. Another day it is a woman that speaks loudly on her cell phone, insisting “your mother is going to drive me insane,” accentuating the “your,” recounting an incident the previous evening, when she surprised the woman in the kitchen, as the latter was preparing something in the oven in the wee hours of the morning; and she no longer knows what to do. Overwhelmed, she continues relating another anecdote about the elderly woman, who appears to be suffering from Alzheimer’s. All of us in the train car are privy to this family drama as we pretend to lose ourselves in the landscape of the Spanish meseta. The passengers’ eyes flutter like captive animals in the crystals of the windows. Upon descending at my destination, the rain intensifies. I don’t have an umbrella, just a thin jacket. In the early hours of the morning, I walk along innumerable streets that are quite a distance from my room. I am soaked; in each alley I experience a slight trembling; there are unaccompanied men; the bars have emptied. I tell myself that I shouldn’t feel afraid, I am merely closing the curve on the daily ellipse between both cities. I keep walking and my clothing becomes heavier, my shoes squeak, 92

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large drops of water fall from my hair. But I know that I will arrive at my room and change clothes with the heat at twenty-eight degrees. Finally, I glimpse sight of the castle. It is a little red light flickering in the distance. A reflection of dead things, the mirror of water. I bathe and read until dawn; tomorrow is Sunday and there are no plans.

4

In Madrid, there are bars; in Alcalá, there are taverns. Taverns with age-old patrons, smooth beer, house wine, ham legs on the counters. High barstools, wooden tables, tiled walls, crumpled napkins on the floor. The ambiance of the taverns is hypnotic: the noise of glasses, of conversations in unison, vapor from the kitchen mixed with smoke from tobacco, the movements of the waiters removing empty wine glasses on wooden trays. The steam from the frying of anchovies seeps into some confession of indifference, of disaffection. It is in the taverns that I most feel the presence of the old Quixote. And it is in the tavern when he loses his discernment and extols the virtues of Dulcinea, the lady who inspires his fights against evil and to whom he dedicates his deeds. Aldonza laughs at the extravagant gentleman and thinks that he merely wants to possess her, just like all men. But Don Quijote is distinct: he serenades her with a beautiful song and rehearses an ambush, confusing the wine barrels with villainous ogres, and attacks them with his sword, causing the barrels’ contents to leak and thinking that it is blood. Being faithful to our points of view. I keep quiet, in the distance everyone converses. I think about the last call to my home. My youngest son is sleeping, the older son relays the message that he is busy watching Krusty Krab and reminds me that I mustn’t forget the boat. I restrain myself from leaving instructions as to how I put my children to bed. I look at my watch, eight in the evening; I recall in my fingertips that routine which corresponds to me every other day. The storybook that the older one improvises from memory. The stuffed animal that the younger one hugs until he begins to snore. Now I measure time by the bodies of my children, announced by the T-shirts that no longer pass over their heads, by the pants that reach their ankles, by the shoes that are too small. I am far away, enjoying my solitude. In 93

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my room I can get dressed alone, calmly. Here I have the time to look at the tags on the items that I have purchased, recognizing the touch to the skin and spelling out the textures: cotton, Lycra, silk. I head toward places full of light. I cross over the pavement and am dazzled. In Al-calá there is Al-chemy. On the weekend I call home and am answered by the recorded message with my voice announcing: “You have called such and such and we are not at home.” I refuse to leave a message. They call me when the night watchman at the residence is not there, and it is impossible for me to be informed. My students write to me to ask that I change the date of a quiz that I have scheduled during my absence. The emails from my father become more distant. By now, I can only imagine that my dogs are seated like sphinxes near the front door around six in the evening. I feel for the first time that, even though it may be an existential exercise, I do not want the life that I have so enjoyed constructing. How many lives can one inhabit? The traveler within me clamors for more freedom. Choosing leaves us thirsty. I feel trapped in a narrative figure that I always teach in my courses on literary technique: metalepsis. Two planes of reality in which a character crosses from one side to another, bearing a mystery. A character capable of inhabiting two ontological spheres. Alcalá begins to emerge like an autonomous world in which I feel at ease. To transit from one side to the other, I need the frame of fiction. At times, before crossing, I peek through the eye of the door lock. Quijote confronts Alonso Quijano. Unamuno confronts Augusto Pérez. I confront Passenger A. There are no victims in the duel; it isn’t necessary to break membranes, rather penetrate illusions. I know that I need to commit an esthetic crime. I want to connect things and words in another way. A crime without any remorse. Many say that one cannot write without personal cost or loss. A scar is the smooth wound that remains of the fight with an adversary that is stronger and more furious. I read the world, people, to compare them 94

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with books and find savage semblances. I awaken my numb gestures, I trace an indelible groove, I inhabit the interior of language. I go in search of the large graphic of Quijote. Writing to correct our originals. The empty glass and the waiter who looks at me with annoyance after the second “another beer?” returns to my table. How does one summon a waiter in Spain? Hey? Listen? Guy? Sir? How much of a tip should one leave? I like the arrogance of the Spanish waiters. They never note down anything, they never mistake an order, they do you the favor of attending you, they look at you with disdain if you hesitate. Meanwhile, here I am demanding eternity of travel. Expecting experience, voyage, and transformation. When I travel, I glance sideways at other lives, and I am conscious that I have chosen one among many others. Then, the vertigo: how many lives can one have? I unfold the map and run my fingers across the towns of Castilla and La Mancha. It is me and my two suitcases: nothing more, nothing less. Toward where should I go? Why not arrive at Vladivostok? Being faithful to our points of view. My eyes are closed but crossed, from continuous lightning. My insomniac nature makes me see a sky full of holes. At night, it is as if everything were to come down upon me. I should take charge of the idleness of the days, listening to the sound of the Henares River in the distance.

5

On intercontinental trips I experience vertigo, flying over the Atlantic Ocean for so many hours. Upon losing sight of the American coastline, I feel anguish because of such a distance from my loved ones. But, at the same time, there is the impulse to go out into the world, to conquer new lands, to read other cities. As a traveler, I confess that I have the obsession of searching for resemblances between the places that I visit in order to feel at ease. It is a trick to ward off the sensation of feeling unconnected. When I arrived in Madrid, I looked for Santiago among the streets. I compared, cross-checked, balanced the two. I now look for Madrid in Alcalá, and more than anything, search for that twenty-six-year-old girl 95

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that was free, that still had not written a book, that looked at everything for the first time. Europe traveled in the ellipse of connections offered by the network of trains, staring at the posting of arrivals and departures at each station, and choosing whichever. On that journey I was another, many others. I was Ulysses in search of the fatherland, the one that became emotional alongside her father in Sarajevo because the childhood home had been impacted by mortar, the one that was familiar with the underground tunnel uniting the airport with the outskirts of the city during the years of the siege. I was the one that insisted upon following the journey evoked from maternal memories, planning a trip to the concentration camps of Germany and Poland, but that, after visiting Sachen Hausen in Berlin, left totally distraught. Europe, the continent of high culture and the industry of horror, trapped in its paradox. It is for that reason that certain places are seared in memory, and that points of reference are erected in the collective memory, so that the horizon is configured and will give parameters to generations to come. I was the one that never made it to Sofía, Bulgaria, the land of her grandfather, because the cost of the visa was prohibitive. The one that once took a train in Italy in the opposite direction and arrived at Sicily instead of Trieste, or the one that landed by chance in a hippie commune in Dahab, in Sinai, where she looked at coral in the Red Sea and listened to the sacred songs of the minarets five times a day. I also was the one that was in a cousin’s kibbutz in Israel, where I tried ice cream made from camel’s milk; the one that traveled in taxi to Petra, in Jordan, discussing with the Palestinian driver if peace with the Israelis was possible while we penetrated the desert; the one that slept in a discotheque in Amsterdam, because it was a long weekend and there was nowhere else to stay; the one that got off the ferry in Greece thinking that she had spent those days in Mykonos and that the map didn’t coincide, because of her cartographic ineptness; but at the moment of setting sail for Santorini, she realized that Mykonos was not Mykonos, rather Milos, and felt an uneasiness for those three days of deception, of searching for markers indicated in the Lonely Planet guide and adjusting all that was seen and that didn’t fit, according to her need as a tourist to say that “I was there”; the one that crossed the English Channel by ferry, from Calais to Dover, reading Virginia Woolf ’s novel, 96

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The Waves; the one that arrived at Prague to the house of a relative where the children didn’t listen to Mozart or read Kafka, rather spent the entire day watching stupid cartoons on the television. Writing to modify our originals. A book by Karl Schlögel, We Read Time in Space, accompanied me on this adventure. He says that cultural landscapes are like enormous texts. Some easily readable, others require specialists. Who is the author of Alcalá? The most obvious answer seems to be Cervantes or the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes. Many texts have lost their original, and their existence is referred to by bibliographic citations. They are written in languages that we understand well, or sometimes not so. Among many city-texts there are correspondences, whereas others lack all mutual reference. Between Madrid and Alcalá, one traces the Complutense territory. To encounter any city is always a matter of reading fossilized forms toward the past. I ask myself who might have lived initially in the residence: nuns? Nobles? Alcalá 2009 also is evidence of a certain contemporary cartographic dynamic. Inscribed there is the post-Perestroika Russian migration toward the West. The go west oriental wave takes the shape of the demographic composition of the course on Latin American literature to which we are invited: twenty-eight females from Vladivostok, an Irishman, three Spaniards. The Russian genetic makes us invisible to our Iberoamerican colleagues, dazzled by these girls with porcelain skin and perfect bodies. Why was the movement from the East mainly that of women? Surely, they knew that their attractive physique was a bargaining chip. The beauty and youthfulness of these girls is striking; I have the feeling that more than four of us writers in front of a group of students are judges of a beauty competition. I try to maintain a certain nobility by speaking to them, but I am to the point of tossing my scarf to the Russian female seated in front of me, for her to cover her provocative neckline. One of the girls asks about the meaning of mirrors in our narrative. We hesitate in the response. She has read a clue. In a meeting in a Spanish institution a high-ranking diplomatic official explains to us with more clarity that the pairing of the phrases “forward-moving metropolis” and “backwards colonies” is still valid. His 97

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manner of speaking to us from that place makes me uneasy; I think that he lacks subtlety. The world is a tapestry woven of cultures, civilizations, and different eras. The official throws out a phrase worthy of Benetton, which strikes us like a slap to the face: “Where there is hunger, there is no culture.” A thousand images cross my mind in ten seconds refuting his thesis, but I am unable to express them. Between Spaniards and Latin Americans there is still a need for a second discovery, and this time, we are the ones that conquer. En Al-calá there is Al-chemy. Schlögel proposes another evocative idea: that there is a striking resemblance between fingerprints and orographic maps. The relief of the skin is likened to a mountainous landscape, the image of the fingertip, the elevation of terrain. The skin’s grooves look like the level lines on a topographical plane. We are here to discover the relief, the traces, the grooves of the city, its people and ourselves. I glance out of the corner of my eye at the hands of my companions: small, brown, large, cracked by the cold, youthfully smooth, square, round, with profound wrinkles, soft lines. Out of shyness I don’t ask them to extend their hands so that I can read their destinies, but I can imagine them. Writing to correct our originals. I know that in Alcalá I am searching for that traveler with little baggage, boots and a backpack, brilliant eyes. But nothing prevents me from creating illusions every time that I cross the Puerta de Madrid and the Puerta de Alcalá. In those games I am the Quijote who believes that he sees similarities in each new place or confuses windmills with giants. Alcalá has the form of an ellipse, and I traverse it in that way, and the Plaza Cervantes is another perfect ellipse. In its perimeter there is a veritable quixotic installation, the trees appear to be windmills with their blades truncated. At night, on one of its corners, there is an automatic teller machine of the Banco Santander where an ill-tempered vagabond sleeps. Alcalá is the city where I insist upon being a fiction, the character in novels that I have read and in a book that I will never write. I am a character that rehearses his cartographic narrative, a rhetoric of doubts, of sentiments, of questioning. I am not what I appear to be, and in a

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tangential journey I rehearse transgression, fearlessness, and I succeed in enunciating that, in a place in La Mancha, I was what I am.

6

The day of the awarding of the Cervantes Prize the residence seems like a fortress with a display of security: official protective detail, undercover bodyguards, policemen, cordons. They are ready to close the doors. I imagine that at ten in the morning they will raise the drawbridge and dozens of crocodiles will circle around the perimeter of the castle. Moreover, we are surrounded by cables and antennas of the media. In the morning I come face to face with a cameraman from TVE in my window, while putting on my fishnet stockings. I smile at him with cinematographic effort. Before the ceremony, by chance, we were with Juan Marsé in the cafeteria of the residence. He is timid and nervous. I, too, am like that. He arrived with a nasal compress because he had a nosebleed in the morning. He is afraid that his nose might be an issue when he reads the speech. We reassure him and he predicts that, if that happens, he will say that writing comes with blood. We chat with a certain uneasiness; I notice it because of the languor with which we are seated, the anemic tone of our voice, the curvature of our shoulders. Pepa’s vibrancy interrupts our despondence, she comes and goes, makes gestures, tells jokes. I am facing the awardee and I don’t know what I will ask him, even though I would like to know the personal price that he has paid by writing: but he only responds by talking about a happy life (a loving wife, children close by, mischievous grandchildren, dear friends), which he enjoys immensely. If there were a price for his life, I believe that this was poverty, orphanhood, or war; not writing. Marsé takes a tranquilizer after confirming the dose with Pepa. For a few brief seconds I have the hope that he will offer us some, like smokers that share their cigarette packs with others. But no, he puts the pillbox away in his pocket. His presence continues to inhibit me because of a domestic detail. In the residence there is an operative imperfection; there are no laundry facilities in the vicinity. I must wash my clothes in the bathtub and improvise a clothesline that runs directly over the head of Marsé, who asks for a tranquilizer and a whiskey for the occasion. 99

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I know that I am blemishing the official meeting, the majesty of this building, which even has a certificate from UNESCO. While we attempt to converse, I cannot help but see my underwear, tee shirts and pants hanging above the head of the new recipient of the Cervantes Prize. But at the same time, I think that we somehow share an affinity: in the photography exhibit, “The Worlds of Juan Marsé,” there is an image of him with his son (we have met the photographer with beautiful curls in the patio) washing the dishes in shorts. The author’s hands are covered with detergent, and he is scrubbing a salad bowl under the faucet, while his son dries the dishes. I ask myself if Chilean male writers wash dishes if they would allow themselves to be photographed on the occasion of something so pedestrian. Never. They would prefer the image of them leaning against their libraries or a photo of them in the windows of their beach houses. There is a photo of our encounter, taken by Pepa. Marsé is seated with his rented tailcoat, with cotton in his nose, and all of us surrounding him in our improvised outfits. The award recipient smiles cautiously; the rest of us are a bit pallid because we haven’t had breakfast or because we have had to arise early and are betrayed by the lack of sleep. Marsé leans upon the reddish-brown cafeteria table, we smile with satisfaction. Giovanna’s hair and mine are still damp from the humidity of the recent shower; the volume of our hair will diminish as the day goes by. For the three of us, the details give us away: a jacket that doesn’t fit, cheap coats, shoes that don’t match. Through the lace curtain I have seen elegant women enter, with bouffant hairdos, high heels, two-piece outfits, and lustrous fabrics. None of us thought about bringing formal attire, and even though we have made an effort, we look ridiculous, although enthusiastic. It is time for the ceremony and Marsé is called. It seems that the Ballantine’s and Pepa’s compliment—“Juan, you are as handsome as a bullfighter”—animate him and he walks erectly to the stage. The Scotch vapor having rubbed off on us, we believed ourselves to be the bullfighter’s assistants; we are his entourage, raising our arms. No one thinks to ask us for the official invitation. As if Pepa had predicted, he has prepared a speech in which he speaks of the fabulist as a being that should penetrate the labyrinth of fiction, to enter and leave in order to recount 100

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his struggle with the minotaur that is his work, his obsessions, his fears, his memory. And the minotaur makes perfect sense; we are in Spain and that figure is one of a man with the head of a bull. Then in each phrase, each page, the writer is a bullfighter that taunts the beast with a skilled handling of his cape. “Because the truth is that I never saw myself where you all see me now.” For me, Marsé is not an unknown writer. I remember the dramatic effect upon me after reading his novel, If They Tell You That I Fell. I later taught the text in a class of mine and the students complained about the crudeness of the images, because they found the pranks of the Post-War children repulsive. The characters held aventis contests which consisted of recounting aloud real or invented stories of the disaster. There is no better aventis than Marsé’s own biography: a child adopted hastily in a taxi; a recently widowed father that takes the son surviving a tragic childbirth to a home where there are many mouths to feed; an inconsolable couple that leaves the hospital where their son has died; shall we exchange destinies?

7

The last day, appealing to popular religiousness in my country, I write on a wall in the city: “Thank you, Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, for a favor granted.” Speaking to follow a thread, writing to wind it around a spool. Exalting images like comets. Learning to not wait, to not seem distant. Traversing the whispers of a tenuous conversation. Daring to be another declaration. I take one last stroll around Cervantes Plaza. It grows dark. The blades of the tree spin, spinning left to right. I have seen a giant, my giant. In Al-calá, there is Al-chemy. The spell is broken, my flight, LAN-705, departs at 12:10am on Sunday, the twenty-sixth of April, and like Cinderella I hurry the carriage that, in this case, is Jesús’s car, which is taking me to Terminal 4. Alcalá comes to an end, as does the fantasy of being a writer twenty-four hours a 101

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day, instead of the person divided into diverse daily tasks that leaves writing in a secondary place. Someone who protects herself with a thousand excuses because of the fear of confronting that which she can and cannot write. I don’t want the illusion to end. I hand over my Cinderella slipper to Jesús, he gives me a gift that I open in Santiago. I advance, others move away. I take another step, hand over my passport, show my boarding pass, I am at the point of crossing over the line that will leave me fragmented in two, in a permanent dilemma. The spell is broken again when I see people with face masks because of the threat of an unprecedented illness known as swine flu. There is a hostile environment on the part of the workers that also wear these sterile masks. I feel intimidated when they take my temperature and make me cough; the thermometer reads 98.6 and I am thrust onto the airplane. A flu that runs counter to the globalizing message and the experience in Alcalá: don’t mix, don’t travel, don’t have confidence in another. The health officials don’t understand, it is already late. Another variable is added to the politics of migration: not only is it the credit card number and a certain racial phenotype, but also bodily secretions and temperature. Writing to correct our originals. In Al-calá there is Al-chemy. Being faithful to our points of view. I hear the clock on the Barajas Palace strike twelve midnight. I look at myself in the clouded window and search for my face among the lights of the plane’s wing and the celestial stars. I intuit future heights, beloved instants that unfurl in a chain. I don’t know very well what I wrote in Alcalá. One never travels forever; one needs a return beyond the necklace of anecdotes and dates. I count one, two, three, four. I hold fast to my son’s boat in order to not be shipwrecked. I toss keys and locks into the air. I cross over a threshold, close a door and open another. In that interim I remain suspended in a long corridor, walking blindly. Alcalá is the city in which I insist upon being a fiction, being the protagonist in novels that I have read and writing the book that I will 102

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never write. I am a character that rehearses her cartographic narrative, a rhetoric of doubts, of sentiments, of questionings. I am not what I seem, and on a tangential path I try out transgression, fearlessness, and I manage to enunciate that, in a place in La Mancha, I am who I am.

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The Intimate Palestinian-Israeli Circle

A non-governmental organization with its latest video showing the rugged faces of its members states squarely: “We do not want you here”; in another one they categorically invite one to not be a part of them: “Go away”; or they announce “we don’t want new members.”1 Such slogans are expressed in Arabic and in Hebrew by young people, elderly people, men, women. They don’t want anyone else to be a member of the Parents Circle Family Forum (PCFF), which brings together Israeli and Palestinian citizens who have lost a direct family member, at times more than one, in a conflict dating back more than sixty years of their existence. Those belonging to the PCFF are convinced that it is necessary to stop the circle of violence, of vengeance, of blood. The message is clear and convincing: if we can dialogue, why can’t others? They are fathers without sons, sons without fathers, or brothers without brothers, mobilized to give meaning to that line of filiation that was interrupted dramatically. There are approximately 650 families from both sides, whose members had to confront not only emotions encountered when they were invited to participate in the group, but also questioning on the part of their own and designated as “traitors” when they became a part of the organization. They know that from the moral condition of victims, their message of reconciliation is more irrevocable than the official discourses. They work together to stimulate mutual understanding and transmit it to the rest of society. Toward that end, they visit high schools, organize summer camps for youth; the group of parallel narratives coordinates seminars; an alliance of academics draws up the “paper 105

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Figure 6.1. Photograph taken in East Jerusalem. Source: Photo provided by Andrea Jeftanovic.

of reconciliation”; a group of women meet and plan debates, culinary and sewing fairs. Some of their slogans are: “It won’t stop until we talk”; “we can make a change.” When I arrived in Tel Aviv in February 2014, the PDFF was living a moment of positive frenzy. Two of its members, Mazen Faraj and Nir Oren, were traveling to receive the Unsung Heroes of Compassion Prize from the Dalai Lama in California, in the United States. Robi Damelin attends the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Congress in Washington and, together with Bassam Aramin—both are the international spokespersons for their group—were preparing a trip to various North American and British universities. Aaron Barnea and Bassam Aramin were wrapping up the details of a trip to Colombia to participate in the Day of the Victims.

Dana: Between Heroes and Victims

The first person with whom I meet is Dana, the daughter of an Argentine Israeli citizen who was a victim of the attack in 2002 on an Arab restaurant in Haifa. There are circles around Dana, from her crossing through Europe and Argentina; there are circles to hell when she recounts for me the attack, when she recreates the bond with her father, with her family, with her forced immigration. She shows me photos. I see a young father,

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with a full head of blonde hair, wearing bell-bottom pants, a seventies father, idealist and affectionate with his daughters. At the moment of the attack, my father was recuperating from cardiovascular surgery and went to a restaurant. When we learned of the attack, we called each other on the phone, as we always did in those cases, but his cell phone was the only one that didn’t answer. My sister turned on the television and recognized the sticker on the car parked outside the locale.

In a news clipping that Dana sent me, I see the place of the disaster, the doors and windows shattered, the table strewn with pieces of glasses and plates, a package of matzah wrapped in cellophane. “When I found out the news, it was as if someone had blotted out the sun for me. I was his princess.”

Dana tells me about her work as a visual artist. “Before my father died, I had an exhibit. It was a collection of videos. Among them was an installation of a person that was setting off a bomb in a café. Later that piece acquired another significance for me: it was a veiled message of the future to come. Afterward, I left with my family. For many years I wandered through France and Spain. I finally overcame my fears and flew to Israel. I wanted to contribute to changing the situation. First, I participated in Combatants for Peace, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who had been involved in the armed struggle, but who now had sworn to resolve the conflict by peaceable means. I then became familiar with the Parents Circle, and I understood that it is from that place that I could best influence the process and work comfortably.” “In the year 2012 I launched another project: a camp for Israeli and Palestinian youth. We made announcements, searched for families here and there, and it happened. Forty young people attended the first summer camp. It was on that occasion, ten years after what had happened, that I had to recount the attack in public. It was a very moving 107

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experience for me to be able to relate my story to the youth from both sides of the conflict.”

I watch the video that helps me understand the camp. I observe youth constructing their tale and experiencing a change in the gaze of the other: “Before I saw them as enemies.” “I was fearful of all of you.” “What is it like to live in a refugee camp?” I then saw them cooking together, practicing capoeira, performing drama, teaching one another their language, carrying out activities with their eyes closed, conversing on the grass under the sun. “What happened is that it changed my life, the path of art was transformed into the path of education and activism. You can be a victim or a hero, I could not overcome the idea of being a victim. Once I became familiar with the Parents Circle, I understood how to achieve that: by being a part of a group of heroic individuals that choose to love rather than hate.”

Aaron: The Son’s Room

At 8:00 a.m. I am at the first crossroads of Holon. Aaron awaits me there. He is Argentine but he has lived in Israel since 1958. We go to his house, an immaculate, welcoming home. Aaron’s hair is white, his voice calm, his gestures firm but smooth. While we were enjoying coffee, he tells me how he lost his son, Noam. His voice pauses and I follow the curvature of his personal circle. “My son died in the final days of the Lebanon War in 1999. He didn’t want to participate, but he was enlisted and felt that it was his obligation. He wore a pin that provoked problems among his superiors: To leave Lebanon in peace. He had only five days left before his military service ended. An unnecessary war, filled with lies. He had to deactivate an explosive device left by Hezbollah.”

He then showed me Noam’s room: a single bed next to the wall, photos of a young boy, smooth features. The metallic pin was white with blue letters, To leave Lebanon in peace. Everything intact. Aaron, without knowing me, 108

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opens for me his most intimate space: the bedroom of the son who is no longer there, soldier number 18.939. Before leaving, I retain a special image: the boy with his legs crossed, smoking on a mountain, like some sage whose smoke elevates his thoughts. “Now my grandchildren are left.” “Noam had many dreams and friends. After his death I began to paint, I had an exhibit of oil paintings of him.” I approach the walls and see the paintings of Noam’s face, the brushstrokes of his tanned skin, his youthful musculature.” “Some days before his death I saw on the television a group of PCFF visiting the house of President Weitzman. The organization called my attention, and then I understood that destiny was sending me a message to join them sometime later.” “I was against that war; I have always been involved in the movement for peace. After the seven days of mourning for my son, the shivá, I went back to the protests in front of the Ministry of Defense.”

I read the letter that he wrote to his son on the website of the organization: the doubts that his son had about participating in the army, his resistance, and the lines that he dedicated to the guilt that the leaders of both parties should feel for their lack of courage and imagination in this insane conflict. A moving letter, a political document, the anguished cry of a father. “Noam, you are my flag, my symbol, I carry your pain to remove others from apathy. Our common struggle is not yet ready, I return to you time and again in order to draw spiritual strength from you.”

School of Holon: “The Palestinians Lag Behind”

Aaron has invited me to a meeting in a high school. Among the PCFF’s projects is that of visiting secondary schools to show them the human side of the conflict in the form of a duet, Palestinian and Israeli. We arrive at the building; the director welcomes us, and we move to the staff

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room to share a coffee. A phone call alerts the group that the Palestinian members are running behind and will arrive at ten o’clock. They visit hundreds of schools a year, and with this project they have reached more than twenty thousand high school students. It is a labor that requires adding grains of sand, a labor from classroom to classroom, family to family, youth to youth. And just as predicted, the Palestinians Osama, Bassam, Rizek, and Sbeik arrive at ten o’clock. They are coming by taxi from Beit Jala, Bethlehem, and East Jerusalem. The Palestinian members of the PCFF have special permission to cross the burdensome border posts or checkpoints. Permission to cross back and forth, but not to be citizens with the same rights. We enter a room on the second floor. There are twenty adolescents seated in a semicircle. Aaron opens the meeting with a categorical: “Occupation is not a normal situation.” He recounts briefly the story of his life; he speaks about Noam, about leaving Lebanon in peace, of the televised scene, of being against the war and an active participant in this process. Afterward he introduces his Palestinian companion, placing his hand on the shoulder of the other. Something that I wasn’t expecting in these meetings was the tenderness transmitted by this duet of men who have experienced a similar situation of decisive mourning, and now are just a single body connected that resists decades of hurtful narratives. Osama is young, tall, from Bethlehem. When his turn comes, he stands up. The veins in his neck swell. I notice that there is an Arabic accent in his Hebrew, which was learned as a second language. I believe that he speaks with each one of his muscular fibers: “I was taught to be a martyr, a liberator: my future was to blow up a bus.” I confront my own prejudices; I think that perhaps if I should I see him climb onto a bus, I would be attentive to his movements and would follow him with my gaze. He calls himself “a fallen son.” But there is a new sensation when I listen to him: electricity is emitted in his honest and compassionate story. I search in the eyes of the professor and the students to see if they didn’t observe the same, the magnetic field that he has established with his body and his words.

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He tells how each morning he must cross the wall, passing through the inspection by soldiers. A boy in the classroom asks, with natural naïveté, about which wall he is talking. Most of the students shake their head in disbelief with the tone of “impossible.” A classmate approaches and explains to him: “The security wall, in the West Bank.” He says it in Hebrew, then in English. Undoubtedly, it is the first time that he has heard that. Every country has citizens with blind spots. I recall that in my country, during the dictatorship there were neighbors that were unaware of what was happening in the vicinity. I, who now have been in this country for two weeks, sense that the wall is a ubiquitous presence. And it is hostile, with its watch towers and barbed wire aesthetic reminiscent of a concentration camp. How has it been possible to acknowledge the fears so close by, the most recent historical nightmares? The defenders of the wall say that it has reduced the number of paralyzing attacks; those against the wall maintain that it has only provoked pain and segregation. I see the wall, even if I don’t want to, on Highway 434 on the way to the Dead Sea, crossing Roads One and Six, when traveling to Jerusalem. An enormous cross-stitch that separates both territories. The female professor, dressed in pants and a denim jacket, pushes the wrong button when she says Netanyahu. The facial expression of the entire group changes. The classroom is a conflicted territory; it always has been; adults and youth dispute a truth, an understanding of the world. I continue looking at the boys that exchanged sneakers and think about the parallel: it is, indeed, a matter of changing clothes and putting on the shoes of another, trying them on and seeing how uncomfortable they are. In fact, one of them with a blue sneaker and another yellow lifts his head and scolds a companion: “Hey, why don’t you stop repeating what you hear at home and listen to a person that comes to give us the testimony of someone who lives in occupied territories?” The class divides into two bands, the discussion becomes heated. The classroom with celeste-colored walls and a corkboard with three scattered newspaper clippings is more important than any official meeting room of the United Nations. Outside the classroom I ask Aaron if these meetings are repeated in the West Bank. He responds in the negative because the Palestinian 111

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National Authority does not authorize them: “It is understood, the situation is not symmetrical. The Palestinian part has a lot of pressure to not participate in these activities, as they can signify situations of ‘normalization.’ They also are awaiting word from the Jewish religious schools, which haven’t accepted them.” In the interval we return to the staff room. I feel like I am in one of those rest periods that boxers take before returning to the ring. It’s clear that they have made the effort from within to stop being adversaries, the atmosphere is relaxed, they give each other pats on the back, they laugh, converse, make telephone calls, remind each other of appointments, ask about each other’s family. We drink coffee, eat rolls and in a few moments, it is time for the second meeting. I follow them with my notebook up the stairs, glancing out of the corner of my eye at these eight giants: Aaron, Rizek, Ben, Osama, Abu, Avraham, Bassam, Osama.

Robi: “No one should die in my son’s name”

Sunday afternoon, in the hallway of the Hotel Mercure, I meet with Robi and Bassam. I accompany them to a talk that they will have with the Telos Foundation, a group from the Presbyterian Church that has organized a trip to better understand the conflict. They tell me that they have traveled a lot. Why are we always looking for heroes? Why don’t we make the effort to be heroes? Their journey to the Middle East culminates with this meeting. Afterward they will fly back to Chicago. I look at Robi and Bassam, both somewhat intimidated because I know the details of the story of their lives. I prepared this trip two months ago and, as English-speaking spokespersons, their testimonies have been accessible to me. Robi introduces herself in front of the group: “We are two survivors, I am from the South African apartheid; Bassam, from Nakba.” For the Palestinian world, the creation of the State of Israel is a date that records a disgrace and is called Nakba, which means catastrophe. Robi continues: “I was born in South Africa, I have been a witness to the processes of reconciliation, justice, cease fires, and I wanted to get away from all 112

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that. The conflict has costs for real people, human costs. Reconciliation is possible when the conflict is humanized, when you see that behind that victim, there is a father, a mother, brothers, all inconsolable. When David, my beloved son, a talented musician, activist for peace, was assassinated by a sniper, I told the army official that knocked on my door: ‘No one should die in my son’s name.’ I thought that no one killed David for being David, rather for being a symbol of the politics of occupation. What are we doing there? What do I do with this feeling? After a long internal process, I joined the PCFF. In the beginning, I wasn’t convinced; now I believe that this is what motivates my life.”

Robi also is the leader of a women’s group “Neighbors: Women Creating Reconciliation,” a very active association that organizes meetings, expositions, culinary and sewing workshops. I examine the digital photos in the exhibit The Presence of Absence in the Tel Aviv Museum, an exhibit which suggests the presence of those dear ones who are absent: a wristwatch burned and stopped at nine in the morning, pants and a shirt stretched out on a bed, the photo of a young person framed above the back of a child that sleeps among white sheets. “We women must be called to the negotiating table; we should be part of the peace process. We made seven hundred jars of marmalade to sell at a fair. One time, a Palestinian woman—who, I should say, at times surprises me, the way in which women are subjugated under patriarchy—told me that it was the first time in her life that she earned some money.”

For Robi, it is important to allow people to have self-esteem, not merely compassion; to that end, she also promotes a space for parties and coexistence. I see it in the photos of their celebrations, with sumptuous tables, the greetings on the days of each religion’s festivals or the exhibit of clothing from the sewing fair. There is a festive air to her as she walks, when she plants olive trees, in the meetings centered on one of the cuisines, or in the visits that they make as a group to the Yad Vashem Museum or to the refugee camps.

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Bassam: Discovering the Humanity of the Other

Bassam has kept silent, but when his turn arrives, he speaks with firmness. He expresses himself with an undaunted calmness, that of a wise man. He says that he came from a meeting with people that are extremists, pleasant folks. That at times the enemy is within oneself. He is a father of six and a grandfather. “I was taught to be a warrior. I made a couple of explosions, but nothing serious, without injuries. The Palestinian people don’t have anywhere to hide where they are safe, so being a warrior or liberator in life makes sense. It’s easy—you take the flag, and you fight. At the age of sixteen they arrested me; I spent seven years in an Israeli prison. I was fighting against occupation. During that time, I said to myself: “What am I going to do to not lose my mind in this confinement?” I began to learn Hebrew, the language of my enemies. One day of commemorative activities I saw a film about the Holocaust. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I was totally unaware of that. I saw the barbed wire, the bruised bodies. Have my enemies suffered such a fate? Years later in England, I obtained a master’s degree on the Jewish Holocaust. I needed to understand why the soldiers were so aggressive and to understand the legal process of justice and reparation. For me, the Israelis didn’t have a face, they were simply enemies. Prison can destroy anyone’s presence of mind, and I conquered my dignity. It wasn’t easy, I made friends with one of my guards. He brought me Coca-Cola. He later became a member of the Palestinian fight. We were both transformed. “In 2002 four of us Palestinians and seven high ranking military officials met. It was a meeting filled with lies. The idea was to set aside our arms and begin talking of the occupation. Later I was cofounder of the organization Combatants for Peace. I participated in the meetings about the Geneva Initiative. In 2007 a patrol of soldiers was close to my daughter’s school, someone shot in the air and the bullet hit her. Then is when you realize that what is most sacred, your family, cannot be protected. During days of agony, I was accompanied by thirty Israeli families, who were by my side in the Hadassah Hospital. That is how I discovered, in this painful way, the humanity of the other.”

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“I decided to not avenge myself, to not be a hero for some. My battle has been to see that Abir’s crime is acknowledged, and the assassin ends up in prison. It has been a difficult battle, nobody taking responsibility for the shooting; I had to turn to experts, attorneys, and the courts. A couple of years ago, the case was won, the guilty one was identified, it was in the news. Abir had an acknowledgement, her death was not in vain.”

We are left hanging from a thread of silence in the room, fighting back the tears. I think that for so many years we have been drilled into the genuine understanding of the drama of Anne Frank, and then we don’t know how to name a ten-year-old girl that dies on the other side, in the town of Anata in Jerusalem. Her name is Abir, and she is one of so many victims who could be writing their lives from an attic. I look at the photo of Abir on the internet; sje jas a sweet face, neat bangs, and is an exemplary student; I recognize the gaze, her father’s eyebrows. “The occupation still exists; we live in occupation. The symbol is an occupying army. Two, three, five States, each solution will be better than two tombs.”

Robi looks at us. “You all go abroad to your countries. I have a message. Don’t be pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, we do not need people spreading a discourse of hate, be on the side of the solution. Help us to make comprehensible the tragedy that we are living. At times, an entire society is being placed in the same bag. We do not want to perpetuate the conflict.”

In the Robi-Bassam there is charm, respect, and humor. They say goodbye with a smile, cross their fingers, and the talk ends with jokes. Robi then discloses her latest project, a beautiful cookbook, Jam Session, which brings together the recipes for marmalades and pickles of Israeli and Palestinian women, accompanied by the narrative of their lives. It is a book with a large print format, in color, an attractive text. She 115

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asks us how much she should charge. “Would 35 dollars be too much?” We all look with fascination at the design.

The Concentrated Image

I travel to Ramat Efal to meet with Doubi, the general manager of the PCFF, an Israeli citizen expert in Arab affairs. Doubi calls when I am at the reception desk to inform me that he won’t be arriving because he has an important meeting with an eventual sponsor in Tel Aviv, but that Tima will meet with me in his place. I understand and climb the stairs. Tima is the assistant in the offices of Beit Jala (Palestine) and Ramat Efal (Israel). When she opens the door, I notice that we resemble one another. She is younger, but our hair and skin tones are the same. We sit face to face at a table, with a carafe of coffee and two cups. I think that until that moment, I haven’t been able to meet with a Palestinian by myself. None of my appointments ever took place, for one reason or another. This is my opportunity to pose questions that no one else will be able to answer. I ask her how she manages to pass from one side to another. She responds that she was born with that condition, that she is an Israeli-Palestinian citizen. “I live here; when I speak Hebrew, I don’t have an accent; when I speak Arabic, I don’t have an accent. I went to school with Israelis where the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holidays were respected. I don’t feel discriminated against. Rather, I feel like I am a secular, modern individual.”

I insist, but it is not the same, there are many differences. I ask her about her daily life, and she asks about mine. I suspect that we must be imagining one another’s lives when we pause for a moment of silence and look out the window at the garden. “I want for the situation to improve for the Palestinians, that there may be two states, but I don’t want to be near any fanatics. I once went to a refugee camp, Fátima Al-Jarafi, and the conditions in which they live are horrendous.”

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I tell her that I was touched by Bassam’s case, a struggle so basic. I’m not certain how we arrived at another situation. She recounts the story of an Israeli woman in the group who lost one of her sons and whose other son committed suicide because of the conflict. “Can you imagine what that is like?” Tears fall from her eyes, and I am inclined to take hold of her hands, but I don’t dare. We close our eyes, each one on her side of the table, sipping the last drop of coffee. We only have our empathy to negotiate. Tima moves gracefully among the shelves as she hands me pamphlets, documentaries, stationery, stickers written in Hebrew, Arabic and English. I tell her that I only understand one of those languages. “You should learn,” she responds, and I glance at those foreign signs. The keys to the office in Beit Jala are on top of the table, I see them as one that ponders an invitation, and I want to ask her to take me there, but my flight to Santiago departs in the evening and I fear that I might not arrive in time. “Come back.” She says goodbye and hugs me. I have grown accustomed to seeing duos of Palestinians and Israelis, I educate myself in another way of putting things together. The vital exercise is distinct, it is a matter of assembling our choral narratives. They have created a new way of being a family, a people; they attempt to pass from the oppressive rectangle of occupation and enmity to the fluidity of circles. They say that every journey is a concentrated image of our existence. I want to think that I don’t walk the horizontal and misguided line of history. I want to think that I have the keys to another lock and that I advance in circles. I want to think that I enter the circles of Aaron, Bassam, Robi, Osama, Dana, Mazen, Ben, Time, Rizak, Osama, Doubi, and so many others. That I walk in circles to encounter them in their tenderness, their fine sense of humor, their commitment, their creativity, their love of life. Walking in circles until one loses sight of oneself and sees the other. Walking until I no longer see myself those days in Tel Aviv and see, instead, Tima in Beit Jala. Closing the circle of violence, inaugurating another of coexistence. 117

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If we can dialogue, why can’t others? I have the keys to another lock and advance in circles. Why don’t you stop repeating what you hear at home and listen to somebody who comes to give us testimony about someone who lives in the occupied territories?

Note

1. This video is available at https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=DgoIMpWuwgE.

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From a Bookshelf of Middle Eastern Texts

Every two weeks I visit a municipal library; I check out books, renew others. There is something attractive to me in this civic gesture of exchanging books, of being the anonymous user of those tomes shared by neighbors, also anonymous, the observer of the dates when they were borrowed, and the faint marks made on the pages. A few days ago, I journeyed there again and approached the aisle with foreign books. I want to clarify that this is a neighborhood library, rather small. The first aisle is dedicated to books from England and New Zealand; the second is comprised of books from Italy, France and other European countries. The third is a well-stocked and extensive aisle of Chilean literature. The next aisle could be designated as foreign literature, and within it, almost at the end, is a section on books from the Middle East. I visit this section in search of an Israeli author whom I will be accompanying at a literary encounter. One of the bookshelves has the tag “Hebrew novel,” and another, “Arabic novel.” Both shelves are filled. One can barely move the books. If you take out one, another falls, the plastic jackets are stuck together, the pages of one are incrusted in the pages of another. I realize with a certain satisfaction that Israeli/Hebrew/Jews and Palestinian/ Arabs are not differentiated. Their names are confused, as are their exotic backgrounds, the rarity of their native alphabets, their stories of uprootedness and suffering, the discomfort with their religions and family mandates. Then, here, on the shelf, scrambled together, are Scholem Aleichem, Aaron Appelfeld, David Grossman, Amos Oz, Gatya Bur, Aba Korner 119

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with Naguib Mahfouz, Gibran Khalil, Amin Maalouf. Authors whom I have read and others not, of whom I have heard or who are new to me. Of course, the library needs an updating and should add new names, but in this universe of classics translated into Spanish (imperfect, however, as my favorite author, Yoram Kaniuk, is missing) the authors coexist, sharing two shelves in which they can transit freely. I remove the book by Abraham B. Yehoshúa, The Liberated Novel, as a way of following the chain of readings by the invited author. But when I select that book, I also pull out the fifth book of The Thousand and One Nights and take the two of them. Upon opening a page of Yehoshúa’s book, I find a phrase that echoes for me: “The secret of a people is found in its literature.” During the war in Gaza, I maintain correspondence with Israeli and Palestinian friends. I recently took a trip and am familiar with intercultural groups that work together. It is for this reason that, barely reading the news of this escalation of violence, I write messages asking about their situation. As the days of the conflict pass, I notice changes in the syntaxis of their messages or how lengthy correspondences are resumed in tense silence. Long letters disappear, desperate phrases are repeated: “It is horrible.” “I’m safe for now, pray for us.” “I am writing to you from a place of shelter, but don’t get all dramatic; there in Gaza they don’t have anywhere to hide.” “I am tired of myself, repeating the same thing among the sirens that announce the entrance of new missiles.” “This is terrorizing.” “They attack us in the marches.” “There are mobs of fanatics in the plaza.” The Israeli author writes to me, in one of the messages that we have exchanged: “This weekend I went to the south, to Sderot and its vicinity, and the people have lost all parameters.” His message has multiple exclamation points and more exasperating phrases; I have the feeling that since we have begun writing to one another, this is the first time that he is screaming from the other side of the screen. I recall the image of the six circles that the NGO Parents Circle Family Forum (PCFF) assembled every night in the Cinemateca Plaza in Tel Aviv. I followed them on the web after having had the opportunity to visit them a few months ago. Palestinian and Israeli citizens who spend the evening seated in circles and talking during the fifty nights of the war. At times, when the siren 120

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that announces approaching missiles sounds, they all run to the nearest shelter. On the occasions that the borders were closed, they invited the members from the West Bank to join them via streaming, and on summer nights, their faces were projected on a screen covered by a large curtain amid white chairs. One way or another they resisted breaking the human circle that they have been configuring for the last twenty years. Seven months later, I will find myself on the same border as that of the library bookcase, in a meeting in Chile between groups of Palestinian and Jewish communities defined by the phrase “for peace.” Small, tight-knit groups whose initials stand for “consensus,” “coexist,” “letter of organization,” “progressive group,” and they want to resume the dialogue following the last war, taking advantage of the visit of the Israeli writer to this country. The event will take place at the Fundación Neruda in Santiago. I arrive before the conference and wait in the passageway Fernández Márquez de la Plata. There is a young couple on a concrete bench. I walk near them and suddenly realize that they are fighting. I try not to pay attention, but the tone of the argument is growing louder. I glance at them out of the corner of my eye, both are wearing jeans, leather jackets, and have long hair; they are probably university students. I wish that I had the earphones to my cell phone to listen to music, but I have forgotten them, and even though I try thinking of something else, I hear the echo of their voices. They observe each other suspiciously, they reproach each other about things in the past. I become distressed; I remember all the times that I was embroiled in arguments without a way out. I share the announcement of the event with an activist friend, and he warns me about being careful with the messianic tone and the caricature of these events. Neruda’s house, la Chascona, in the neighborhood of Bellavista, is also a house of books and versions, a refuge of violent histories. The room is always filled, the chairs occupied the entire day, with some standing on the stairway. A few minutes after seven in the evening the panel begins. In the front are a Chilean woman writer of Palestinian descent, a female attorney, specialist in human rights, who serves as the moderator, the Israeli writer, and a translator. It has been agreed upon that each one will briefly relate his or her view of the conflict. The

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moderator provides a suggestive presentation of the role of diasporas in this situation. The interventions of both writers are solid. Upon finalizing the first round of talks, several hands are raised among those in the audience. The caricature doesn’t take long to surface, when the first person that intervenes tells the panelist of Palestinian origin, in a clear gesture of confrontation, that she seems like an idische mame, Jewish mom, hurling a satirical remark like a dart. She also states loudly her inability to remember the names of the panelists at the table. The name, recognition; negation. The lack of a narrative, prejudice akin to a cartoon in poor taste. When she alludes to the moderator of the table as someone of Jewish origin, she says that it can’t be, there must be an error, that her last name must be that of a converted Jew and affirms that she is here because she is “neutral”; she uses the word goy. The narrator of Palestinian descent affirms that she has written a lot about the Jewish Holocaust and mentions Primo Levi. The Israeli author adds: “I, myself, am an Arab Jew, my parents were expelled from Syria and Egypt, and I am learning the language; there are almost no Israelis that speak Arabic.” The moderator remains pondering the erroneous affirmation of her origin; the author of Palestinian heritage continues talking about Primo Levi, and the Israeli writer relates something else about his Arabic origin and declares that it is not possible that a government determines the destiny of two and a half million persons from another country. The moderator continues thinking, until she says: “We have known one another for forty years and have you always thought that I am Jewish? Dear lady, that is not important, we have been in all this together the entire time.” Confusion, at times, can be a blessing. They think about equations of work, sketch out alternative modes of coexistence. The leader of the Palestinian organization raises his hand and states that he is in total agreement with the proposal made by the Israeli panelist: the solution of a secular state with free movement, without walls or control checkpoints. I think that they both should go to the Assembly of the United Nations and not the characters that say that they represent us. The Israeli author states that peace is a zombie concept, and all of us roll our eyes. That one must be pragmatic and speak about concrete 122

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solutions, that we shouldn’t become enamored of the “process.” By this time the first translator is weary and begins to confuse the words of the foreign writer, who speaks in English but thinks in Hebrew. The second translator continues the task, translating from Spanish to Hebrew, and from English to Spanish. There are murmurs, accents. The Tower of Babel climbs to the dome of the Estravagario room in the house of Neruda. I, who have an easily distracted mind, follow the soundtrack of the couple that is outside, who continue arguing and who, at this point, are insulting one another. Someone in the audience says that he is afraid. From the table they ask if the person who is frightened is going to stay or leave. I have remained in a row in which are seated officials of the Jewish community who have participated in the governments of the Concertación, and who murmur among themselves: “How can I say that I am in favor of the Palestinian cause without being labeled a traitor?” “Say it quickly to avoid controversy.” “Speak with Noam Chomsky or don’t speak at all.” One of the female leaders of the Chilean-Palestinian community states that she has seen how the members of Jewish descent have been threatened for having signed a letter petitioning a cease-fire. It was recommended to one of those who signed the letter to go to therapy to deal with issues of origin, but it happens that the one alluded to is a renowned neurologist who specializes in dementia. We all agree when we remember how in our communities, the survivors of exile and persecution are converted into prosperous businessmen that are indifferent to the Chilean military dictatorship. Moreover, they were silently complicit regarding the Pinochet regime and were focused on their economic wealth. So much self-compassion, so little compassion for the Other. I recall another moment when I was at the border, a few months ago. My family and I traveled throughout Israel in a rented car. We searched for an address on the GPS, which gave us three options, we pressed the third in Judea and Samaria. The screen on the device read: “You are about to enter the Occupied Territory. It is a decision that you take at your own risk.” We arrived at the checkpoint of Modiin. The car seemed so small next to the structure of the wall. When we approach the fence the car vibrates, I ask my son to close the window so that the air conditioning is more efficient. My son complains, closes it for a moment, but in the 123

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rear-view mirror I see that he has opened the window enough to stick his nose outside, and his hair is tossed about. There is a thin Israeli soldier with an enormous machine gun across his uniform. I feel like asking him why he agrees to carry that, implying that he be nicer to those who are crossing. When we want to cross, the official asks for our passports. Which passports, we ask? The car is Israeli, but we are not, we are Chilean. We entered by way of the Ben Gurion Airport and presented all the documentation. We are going to visit some friends in Ramallah, my husband says, as if it were nothing important. I say that we are going to cross the border; moreover, I add that we are determined to cross the border. My eleven-year-old son asks if this isn’t the same country. No one responds. I add: we are Chileans, we are against the occupation. We waited for minutes and decide to get back in the car to protect ourselves from the midday sun while the officials debate our case. We turn off the motor, but that activates the electric lock mechanism, and the lock is stuck. The car doesn’t turn on, we try repeatedly to enter the code that they have given us to start the engine, but the car remains immobile, without making any clicks or allowing us to open the doors or the windows. The heat is stifling, we are surrounded by the cement wall and the sand from the Modiin Valley. My younger son says that he is thirsty, very thirsty. I pass him the bottle of water that is half full. My son squeezes the container and a stream of water flows, emptying the bottle. The window that my son opened partially allows us to solicit help from a woman, asking that she have mercy on this Chilean family trapped in an Israeli car with the desire to cross to the West Bank. We give her the phone number of the rental company, Sixt. After several attempts she succeeds in contacting someone in customer service. My husband explains in his forgotten Hebrew that the code given to us doesn’t work, and that the electrical system of the car doesn’t turn on, and she repeats the information aloud. The scrawny soldier with his machine gun looks at us strangely. Through the crack in the window, we tell her the credit card number, our passport number, the office number, the four-digit code. My son smiles to himself with a certain irony. She screams over and over the license plate of the car: 7812, Shesh, oshmone, ejad, shtaim. 124

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The misunderstanding is resolved, the code on the card had an incorrect digit. Everything is fine and the car starts up. The Palestinian official laughs and tells us that perhaps we can return in forty years, when there no longer are borders. If, by then, one of you remains alive, he adds with a certain familiarity. “Do you care about the conflict or not?” “Is peace or war important?” “Is peace or war exported?” “One or two states?” “What can individuals in diaspora do?” “The topic of conflict is for those living within it, right?” “Why look for volunteers?” “If they want heroes, let all of you be the heroes.” Years detained in the eternal process of the agreement, enduring cyclical wars and repeating questions without answers. But now we are in a refuge, protected by the ghost of Neruda. We are surrounded by figureheads, even without a ship. Are we or are we not going to speak of the 48? If we were sufficiently brave, we would speak about Shejaiya, in the east of Gaza. Perhaps we need some historical distance. In this moment I think that we should turn off the light and change shoes, using those of another companion, cover our eyes with a blindfold and listen to his story while he guides us blindly throughout the room. I would ask my duo to hear that part of the war in which I spent days listening to the news in a rental car in Germany, listening every thirty minutes to the news in German, a language that I don’t understand, repeating the five words of the moment: Le Isralien, Le Palestiniean, Netanyahu, Hamás, Gaza. And feeling four basic emotions: fear, shame, sadness, frustration. In the morning when I examined the cover page of the Die Welt newspaper, not caring that I didn’t know how to read the headlines, I saw those images in which the buildings were no longer buildings, in which children were no longer children. I intuit that all of us who, until now, have our hearts pierced by missiles and military operations, have spent fifty nights calling relatives, dreaming about Dantesque images. We need to reconstruct ourselves in this monstrous time, not allow ourselves to become disfigured in the barbarism. Here, far away from the Middle East, in diaspora, all of us Chilean participants, sons and daughters or grandchildren of those forebears from over there, open the pages of our individual books in order to insert them. There is something akin to the gesture of Scheherazade, recounting 125

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time and again the arrival of our ancestors, those who came with “one hand stretched in front and the other toward the rear,” and imagining or dreaming of ways to solve the conflict that we hear echo from afar. In this “table-dialogue-library” we read one another, put in doubt our versions of events. When there is no longer a narrative, when one no longer understands the narrative of another, propaganda then ensues, accompanied by fear and the use of force. The event comes to a close with a wine reception. The Israeli author remained by my side, and we advance around the room. I feel like I own something, a simple handful of threads, when I present him to friends from both communities and they exchange contact information. At times I present them mistakenly, confusing the two. The Israeli author looks at me with surprise, I tell him, “Look at the arched and dark eyebrows, Palestinian eyebrows are more emphatic.” We head out to the street, I glance at the bench and the couple has disappeared, the passageway is projected like a dark tunnel. A small number of us go to a bar, and the Tower of Babel, the murmuring, the accents continue. We need to ease up, grab onto life. At the table they exchange information about the nightlife in Ramallah and Tel Aviv, and where it is possible to meet someone and make a match, where it is easier to get a divorce. The Haitian server that is attending us asks at the end of the dinner: “What are all of you?” “Cousins,” we answer in unison. That is the last image, some leaning upon others, like books in the library. Fifteen thousand kilometers away, quite messianically, we support one another this evening. At that moment, the couple that had been fighting entered the bar, sitting down at a table next to the window. I stand up to go to the bathroom and we cross glances. We are three anonymous individuals imagining our hesitant impressions. I don’t know if they are telling me, “Don’t get involved, this is our matter.” I don’t know if they are telling me, “We wanted to go to the event, but we never went inside.” I don’t know if they are telling me, “Look at us, after everything we are still together.” I only want to know their secret, to become entangled with them and cross their border at my own risk. I, who have an easily distracted mind, follow the soundtrack of the couple that is outside, who continue arguing and who, 126

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at this point, are insulting one another. Someone in the audience says that he is afraid. From the table they ask if the person who is frightened is going to stay or leave.

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Birds of Steel

This is the first mental image that I have: airplanes flying above the neighborhood and my parents with their arms crossed above their heads. I am almost three years old; they have not gone to work and seem uneasy. Early in the morning of September 11, 1973, strident aerial sounds erupt. I don’t live near La Moneda, I live a couple of blocks from Tomás Moro, the home of Salvador Allende. In the sky there are five gray silhouettes of planes and helicopters that are projected like a flock of birds. My parents are disconcerted, I know because their eyes are wide open. From the automatic bodily reaction, I intuit that they are familiar with that gesture of protecting something or someone from the unutterable. I don’t understand the weight of those events, but I do perceive the urgency of the untimely outings, the phone calls in a reticent tone of voice. The first recollection is a form of clinging to the world. My father says that his is a countryside of unharvested corn, while the sirens sound all around. My mother mentions a road silhouetted by rows of rotten plums that she sees from the window of the car in reverse gear. The flock of bird planes display their black fuselages and feathers outlined with metallic edges. A bird with oil-stained feathers. I feel as if I am in an ornithology lesson: observing and counting the birds one by one, a flock linked by steel threads that undertake and then don’t undertake flight, the buzzing of warplanes, the rotor of the helicopter wings, the low flying planes that almost skim the earth, the ensuing rubble, the blanket of powder, the sparks of fire and the wood-splintered landscape.

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The whistling of the rocket in its diagonal trajectory from the heavens toward Tomás Moro. Reading news articles and testimonies about this memory, I know that the first bombing was the Tomás Moro house. At ten in the morning the explosives began to fall, and the helicopters took off to fly overhead. The first rocket fell mistakenly on the school of the British nuns on Santa Magdalena Sofia Street. It destroyed a classroom and the windows exploded. The second was carried out behind the patio, and the third struck the outside wall and from there, some companions jumped with the expansive wave. Individuals of GAP1 happened to be struck by a helicopter that crashed at the Air Force Hospital. Voices are confounded in relation to that day. “In Tomás Moro we defended ourselves, in La Moneda they fought.” “We left the presidential house with bursts of gunfire, and we didn’t see any military, even when we knew that they were there; they were just as fearful as we were.” “In the midst of bullets firing, a car swiftly carried la Tencha to who knows where. At three in the afternoon there was already a curfew.” Ring, Ring . . . “Tell Salvador to take care.” “In the house there were some three hundred weapons that hadn’t been distributed because Allende refused to do so. In fifteen minutes, we taught them how to use guns and they took shelter.” I keep a photo. I am with my father, he is wearing black tortoiseshell glasses, similar to those worn by Allende and perhaps all of the men of that era; I have on a pair of denim overalls. My father is seated upon a border of flagstones, I am standing at the edge and hovering over us is a sculpture that is a flock of steel birds. In the plaza of Tomás Moro, at the corner of Apoquindo, there is a sculpture created by the artist, Sergio Castillo, who in 1964 chiseled a flock of birds taking flight with a certain

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visionary force. The plaza is not called Tomás Moro, but rather Martin Luther King Plaza. I count the birds: one, two, three, four, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, fifteen  .  .  . If I try to count them, I only approximate a tentative number. There are more than thirty and they are linked one to the other. They are undertaking flight in the form of a flock heading southeast. I believe that we went there to see if it was true that they were plundering the home of Allende. When we arrived, the massive wooden door was wide open. We looked through the beveled glass of the bedroom that faced the garden, a mass of hydrangeas, the pond. People were leaving with “souvenirs of war,” among them, the Lenin Peace Prize gold medal, furniture, several works of art. They asked loudly: where are the Picassos, the Mattas, the Mirós, the Siqueiros, the Guayasamíns, the Portocarreros, the Balms? The flock of birds recurs each time that I visit my grandparents’ house. Before entering their apartment, it was necessary to pass through the vestibule of the building where there was a sculpture very similar to the one in Tomás Moro Plaza. The same steel birds are like wires discharging force toward the heavens. I will later come to learn that the sculptor, Sergio Castillo, is a neighbor and has given the work to the community. His sculpture utilizes metal plates and pieces in the creation of a composition of geometric equilibrium that he welded in a bicycle workshop. I ring the doorbell and my grandfather opens the door, moving aside the boxes of bananas from Ecuador from his distributor with the seal “Isidoro Avdaloff. National Importer of Fruits.” He returns in the afternoons exhausted from his work in La Vega market, where he arrives at five in the morning, and brings home the boxes of fruit that didn’t sell that day. I listen to the sound of the cardboard against the tile while I wander around beneath the curved wing of the black birds that pave the way to this apartment in the center of the city. A helicopter is a steel bird emitting a drone over the landscape. Following the image of the airplanes, I have fragments of that time without kindergarten: the comings and goings of my older female cousins in search of provisions, my grandfather’s worried face as he sinks into the sofa, my grandmother cooking endlessly and storing food in the 131

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refrigerator. In the evening, all of us huddled together on the living room couch, turning the dials of the radio until it tunes into a wave distorted by the low-flying helicopters, and suddenly “Chile Listens” occupies the space of the living room. How many birds take flights to Moscow? An exam of observation, of feathers, claws, aligned eyes. There follows something that I ought to remember but I don’t register: my parents traveling to the United States for two and a half months in search of a way to emigrate. I stay with my grandparents. Their efforts were in vain, and they returned home. My mother has recounted to me those forty days and forty nights like a biblical curse. I either imagine or dream about, I no longer know for certain, my parents like two birds flying near the heavens. It isn’t bitterness, it’s deception. On the television screen a grave voice interrupts the cartoon, The Roadrunner, with his beep, beep: “Beginning immediately all transmitted programs will be interrupted to give way to the national channel.” Military music, a drum roll follows, then the national anthem, fused into black and white. Pinochet repeating: “Gentlemen, we are at war.” The very nasal voice, that of an elderly father and dodderer, always angry, continues to repeat “gentlemen, we are at war,” while his chubby-cheeked face trembled. I remember the silence at the table, from the adults to the younger ones, everyone terrorized, sinking their forks into the first vegetable on the plate. My family experienced echoes of war. When they became hushed and listened to the drone of the airplanes flying above Santiago, they relived the route of rotten plums, the fields of unharvested corn. That is why they would shudder when they listened to Pinochet bellowing on the television screen. “Gentlemen, we are at war.” The beep, beep of the Roadrunner chased by the coyote would return with interference, with the coyote falling off a cliff and leaving a cloud of dust on the screen.

Forty-One Days Before

President Allende is in pajamas, putting on a pair of grey corduroy pants, a tweed jacket with four buttons, turning on the motor of his Fiat 125 en 132

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route to La Moneda. Allende, with his mottled sideburns, dapper elegance, white mustache. The decisive look from behind the thick crystal of the windows. “Salvador, Salvador, you won’t escape this,” muttered the neighbors that saw the procession descend down Apoquindo Avenue, and then along Kennedy Avenue. Allende refuses to surrender. Allende seated on the red velvet couch with his AK47 rifle preparing the vertical spasm. The occupants of Tomás Moro escaped unharmed. Could it be true? I see and I don’t see that flock of birds with sharpened wings and feathery edges, taking flight at four thirty in the afternoon.

Five Years Later

The massive front door of Allende’s home is no longer wide open, rather closed shut. The solid wooden bars, the black lock of rigid iron, the numbers in bronze, the number two and two zeros. The school bus driver, Yolanda, tunes into Cooperativa informa, the morning news show which briefs us at home in sketchy fragments: the raids in the settlements, the disappearance of Rodrigo Anfrus and his body found in a deserted wasteland, the attacks on the electrical towers, the burned bodies of students, Rodrigo Rojas and Carmen Gloria Quintana, the professors beheaded in Lonquén. Yolanda drives swiftly but reduces speed with a solemn silence upon arriving at 200, allowing us to observe the coat of arms at the entrance. The national shield was covered with successive layers of oil, one every year, painted by the butlers of the generals’ wives, a wall of dark, dirty colors. Hovering in the background was the flock, creating spatial tension between the plaza and the street corner. It numbered one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . , ten . . . , fourteen birds. Then came the sequence: the flock of birds about to take flight, the vision of the massive front door shut tightly, and then Tomás Moro with an extensive main road, followed by a part of Príncipe de Gales Avenue and Vicente Pérez Rosales, where we would get off the bus one by one to walk to the classroom. 133

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Twenty-six desks placed in rows of four. I would arrive at school with the flock of birds swirling among my thoughts. There one found an implicit sign: “politics have no place in education” or “here one comes to study, not to get involved in politics.” Every Monday we sang “God Save the Queen” in an act of civic duty while the British flag was raised alongside the Chilean flag. The flag with the red and blue cross of Saint George climbed next to the blue and red stripes and stars. None of us had a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood nor ties with England, but we attended a “British school.” British by the blue and ochre yellow tie that we knotted every morning on top of an impeccably white shirt. The school’s slogan was that “English would open doors,” a seductive message for middle-class families that aspired to a more certain future for their children. A marked British accent would open the doors even more so. That is why we spent hours and hours enunciating colour instead of color, theatre instead of theater, center of the city instead of downtown. One-half of the class was comprised of children of Spanish immigrants from the Civil War, Palestinians expelled from their land, poor Italians from the south of the Boot, Jews somewhat assimilated, or children of mixed marriages, as the school, along with the promise of British English, offered private secular education, which was hard to come by. The other half came from distant corners of Chile: Coyhaique, Mulchén, Vallenar. We all shared a bit of newly arrived in our own, timid ways. We hadn’t imagined the immensity of the Chilean estates. The only movement that we knew of was that of moving from unnamable places that we had never seen, or more centralized neighborhoods, like Avenida Matta, to the newer communities of Providencia, La Reina, Las Condes, Vitacura. Occasionally, on some street corner, one would see a soldier with a machine gun over his chest. Always a young soldier, with a wide chin and lips tightly closed, standing with his legs apart. “Gentlemen, we are at war.” Blackouts, blackouts. Do we have candles? Doing chores by candlelight imagining the gunshots in the distance. Bang, bang, bang. 134

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Following the national statistics, “we were half and half.” Which is to say, one-half of the families were in favor of the regime, the other opposed. One-half attended classes on the days there was a protest, the other half absent, with the justification for the absence noted in the communications notebook as “for reasons of safety,” along with the signature of the guardian. No one dared to write the words “as a show of support for the movement of opposition to the dictatorship.” One-half sang the verses “Valiant soldiers”; the other remained silent and looked down at the gravel floor. Among those voices, totally unaware, was the son of the doctor who tortured others in the concentration camp of Tejas Verdes, near San Antonio. An Italian last name that began with “Or,” as if announcing the horror with a misspelling. A guardian whom I had seen a couple of times when he went to pick up his son. I remember that he had rapid and distant gestures, was bald, chubby and slight in stature. There was a curious detail about him: he wore a smock with buttons. One afternoon in 1991, I read in the newspaper La Segunda the names of the doctors cited in the Truth and Reconciliation Report, by the Rettig Commission. The last name “Or . . . ” appeared most frequently among the names mentioned in Tejas Verdes. Almost every one of the survivors agress with his description: short, bald, the build of a boxer. A doctor that didn’t worry a lot about staying hidden. Many of them saw his face when he removed the hood. Memory determines thresholds in stories. Play-stop-rewind, and one had to reconfigure the threshold that allowed for the visiting of memories from school. Writing always entails something like “DENOUNCING”; writing crosses out, indicates, underscores. How could we not know that there was a torturer among the parents? I tried to slip the question in a conversation during an alumni reunion, but I was met with silence, and evasive, disinterested looks. Wasn’t “Or” some average official, the chief doctor in charge of designing torture methods in Tejas Verdes? The professional who painstakingly dedicated himself to continue the whipping, calculating the balance between pain and death, administering the electrical shocks, reviving the injured in order to continue inflicting pain upon them. Until 1991 he was only mentioned publicly as “the doctor” of Tejas Verdes. That year, while 135

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occupying the position of Acting Director of the Military Hospital, the former political prisoner, Mariel Bacciarini, denounced him. I finished reading the article entitled “The Doctor of Death” and recalled that schoolmate from another class, short, olive colored skin, dark, curly hair, well defined lips, with a beaten-up nose like that of a boxer. On various occasions I have asked myself if an individual ought to carry the guilt of one’s parents, their beliefs, their actions. Or the inverse, if being the son of some exemplary individual makes him an exemplary individual. A dilemma of generations: how, as in the first example, one attempts to correct history; in the second, typically one is reduced to ruin. Or never attains such lofty heights. Every Monday we would sing both the Chilean and British anthems. A handful of obedient children turned their back on history and intoned a hymn that didn’t pertain to them, as they watched the flag of another country raised up the flagpole. God save the Queen. O Lord, our God, arise, Scatter her enemies, And make them fall, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On thee our hopes we fix: God save the Queen. “Gentlemen, we are at war.” In the year 1982 we refused to sing the hymn God Save the Queen when England was at war with Argentina over the Malvinas Islands. Malvinas or Falklands? Just who does she think she is, that lady wearing a crown, sending armies to attack Argentine youth? What God was going to save our neighbors? We prayed to Our Father in English every morning. Our Father, Who art in Heaven, 136

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Hallowed by Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done On Earth as it is in Heaven. Whenever I visited the house of some classmate, with a quick glance at the decoration I knew to “which side” the family belonged. It sufficed to see a couple of objects to know what to say and what to keep silent in that space. If there was a decanter of wine resting in the library with books that were maroon and gold in color, they belonged to those who would joke lightly about what in Chile was not a dictadura, a harsh regime, rather a dictablanda, or a “soft” regime. Mainly because Pinochet represented a very homey aesthetic: the Ercilla collection of blue books about the history of Chile, showy objects bathed in gold, walled and gated homes, paintings of seascapes and naval battles, windows with tinted glass, marble in the bathrooms, furniture in the style of Louis the Fifteenth, a tie clip with a pearl; it was a matter of an English saddle, silver spurs, the shout of the mule driver that takes tea at five in the afternoon from a porcelain tea set. The other houses had artisanal objects created of bronze on top of bookcases with weighty tomes, burlap hangings on the wall, posters in the rooms with the phrase “We will defeat,” photos of the Pope’s visit with the phrase “Love is more powerful,” and on the nightstands, photos of cousins in heavy coats who lived in distant places. In those families, it was as if they were short of breath, speaking in a hushed tone, but they all dined together sharing a redolent, savory stew. On September 11, the neighborhood street was divided in two, those who protested on that date, and those who maintained a solemn or fearful silence. We children rode our bikes and would sniff out the neighbor, Marcia, the only adult female without children, who played Allende’s last speech at full volume. She didn’t say Salvador or Allende, rather Chicho. Impassioned words resounded from the speakers, repeated until four in the afternoon, in the style of a news flash. From oldest to youngest, we would remain seated on our bicycles: The Mizarelli on their Caloi half-track bikes, the Elfenbein on their cruiser bikes with leather saddles, the Rojas on cruiser bicycles with huge tires, and I, seated on an 137

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ochre-hued Oxford bike with a flying saucer-like handlebar. We were all awestruck by that energetic voice, the promises of a better world that included workers, women, and children. Allende viewed children and adolescents with fondness: “I direct my words to the youth, to those who sang, unleashed their joy and fighting spirit.” Pinochet only looked at young people with suspicion and violence: “The immolation of seventy-seven youthful heroes of Concepción.” Allende spoke with well-wrought words, in an epic style. Pinochet edited all communiqués, banda uno, banda dos. When the speech was over, and Marcia and her husband removed the speakers from the front yard, we would go to look at the closed shutters of Peter Tormen’s bicycle workshop. Peter always had them open from sunrise to sunset, but on September 11 the shop remained closed. It was there that we fixed brakes that didn’t work, broken spokes, misaligned tires that resulted from running into the curb, a horn that no longer sounded, a deflated inner tube. Peter offered us his nimble, diligent fingers, and almost never charged us for the work. While he inflated the tires on the bikes, we timidly slipped in a few questions: “Peter, you were . . . ?” “Where is your . . . ?” “Is it true that your brother was involved in a me . . . ?” Peter is thin, has sinewy legs, the knuckles on his hands are swollen. He moves about with a kind of electricity in his shop located on Las Condes Avenue. On one of the walls of the workshop there is a photo of his success in the Vuelta de Chile in 1987, sporting a Crystal Beer cap, a Pilsener jersey, his sinewy left arm held high, supported by his trainer; a wide smile, the gaze downward, the aura of physical fatigue. The Vuelta de Chile was one of the most prestigious cycling competitions. His first time was in 1976 and was comprised of twelve stages from Puerto Montt to Santiago. In the beginning he fell behind a couple of Colombian cyclists who were nicknamed “beetles.” It was for that very reason that the expectations of the journalists in Parque O’Higgins were 138

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so high, and TVN, which broadcast the competition, approached Peter to interview him at the moment that he crossed the finish line. “To whom do you dedicate the triumph?” the journalist inquired. “To my brother, detained-disappeared,” he managed to respond before the radio station suddenly interrupted the broadcast. After our visit to the workshop, we would return to the street with our tires inflated and our thoughts confused, a silent admiration for his integrity. The spokes of a bicycle spin and spin to the point of creating a metallic vortex.

Fifteen Years Later

Words begin to lose connectors. For example, when I say “night” I mean to say “night,” but in other meanings of which I am unaware. A small bird becomes disoriented, and even more disoriented. The planes approach like a swarm of flies, but I am standing in front of Peter’s bicycle workshop waiting for him to inflate the tires and to listen to him. “A bicycle is a skeleton upon which the force of your legs act. When I won the Vuelta de Chile, I was riding the bicycle that had belonged to Sergio.”

Sergio Daniel Tormen Méndez, single, national champion of cycling, militant of the MIR movement, was detained on July 20, 1974. At twenty-five years of age, he was the two-time national champion in the fifty-kilometer race and pursuit. He won in the Rengo Tour and in the Jaime Eyzaguirre; placed second in the ascent to Farellones in 1971; and third in the double Rapel. “That Saturday I had accompanied Sergio to my papa’s workshop. He went to see his bicycle because the following day he was supposed to compete after several months of inactivity. That day everything began.”

It was close to one thirty on San Dionisio Street 2554, San Miguel. Three DINA (Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional in Chile) agents forced Sergio Tormen and his younger brother, Peter, into a yellow Chevrolet truck,

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blindfolded them and took them to Londres 38. One of the apprehenders was identified as agent Osvaldo Romo Mena. They say that they had kidnapped, from that very same place a few hours earlier, the leader of MIR and cyclist, Luis Guajardo. “The president of MIR dazzled my brother. He wasn’t an idealist, but soon this intelligent young man appeared, and he followed him. Sergio kept his backpack as a show of loyalty. The weight of that backpack sunk our family.” On Londres 38 they insist that the case of Sergio Tormen is not understandable without Luis Guajardo. Sergio’s bicycle remained in the holding cell for a long time and was used to instill fear in the recently detained: “If you don’t confess, the same thing will happen to you that happened to Tormen.” They pointed at the blue bicycle leaning against the wall of the room that they called “the dungeon”; it was the place for interrogations. The case of Sergio Tormen and Luis Guajardo is part of Record 1528. There is an appeal gathered, an accusation of kidnapping authorized. No one knows the destiny or the whereabouts of the victims. The members of Club Ciclista Centenario were left with their sight blinded. Witnesses relate that in the detention center of Londres 38, there was a prisoner who, after repeated torture, reiterated a hallucination: he used to repair bicycles. He would repair them in the air, imagining chains, frames, spokes, wheels, adjusting saddles. He would place a spoke, turn the screws, inflate imaginary tires with his breath. “When I was detained, they told me: ‘We are going to let you go, but not your brother because he is involved in a serious problem.’ I was fourteen years old. After two days they left us at the corner of Matta Avenue with San Diego. I don’t know how I arrived at my house in San Miguel.” “When Sergio disappeared, a dark period followed. No one in my family knew what to do. Every day that we awoke, we were more miserable. Those were very dark years, nobody had projects of any kind. I’m not certain how, but we forged ahead.” 140

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Training Regimen:

Sunday, December 23, 1973, 140 kilometers (controlled training). Going by way of the tunnel and returning along the Chacabuco Hill. Taking off from Copec pump. Panamericana North at 7 a.m. “I withdrew from cycling at the age of eighteen due to an existential crisis. I was behind my brother, and I was the relief, the hope. It was complicated. When I returned, I no longer had a bicycle. I ended up with a mediocre bike. My brother told me: ‘I have Sergio’s bicycle.’ I had the frame. I raced on that bike.” “After I withdrew from cycling, I would dream about bicycles. I enjoyed it so much that I used to fantasize about competitions. Then I said to myself: “How do I do it? Well, I race for others. I knew that I had conditions. But I told myself that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t the peon that just stayed there because he didn’t possess talent; in my case, it was sort of a mellowness. I only wanted to return to pedaling. A good domestique is important, even though he might not be a superstar of the team.” “The only part remaining of my brother’s bicycle was the frame or skeleton. We have changed the tires numerous times. I had that bicycle, then a nephew had it, and now another brother.”

Training Regimen: Saturday, January 5, 1974, 200 kilometers (controlled training). Turn at Curacaví, roundtrip via the Lo Prado tunnel. Departure from Las Rejas at 7 a.m. “In the race one must recover his breath, at times maintaining the thumb upwards. What is most important in cycling is the wind, breaking the wind. As such, your body and the bike are converted into a swift arrow following the sinuous slopes. The steel cables tense for your body to recover from the fatigue in the curve. There are three kinds of cyclists: climbers, time- trial bikers, and domestiques. Each one is a specialist in his area. A level climb or tour. Teams are composed of eight riders. As a time-trial rider, you take off each minute, racing against

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time. In a race, what matters most is regulating the force and designing strategies, thinking about the position of privilege.” “In the first stage from Puerto Montt to Osorno, I attempted to win at the finish line, to be the definer of the stage. The better prepared you are, the better you organize your strategy. We were in fifth place, then first. We tried a breakaway. When a large breakaway group was formed, I remained in first and moved ahead to neutralize the pack, and I was fine, resting. They bet on me to advance. I was proceeding well; I had reflexes. If you are not advancing well, your brain is consumed. But then, in the stage from Villarica to Temuco, there were eighty kilometers, and we were moving effortlessly, to the point that we were even conversing. The Colombians made a spectacular break to attack and gain an advantage over us, but we caught up with them.” “The routine for a race is breakfast at seven in the morning, you race until 1pm; you have a large lunch and then you take a nap. The nap is sacred. Then a massage. You take tea and pastries, once, and you converse about strategy for the following day. That meeting is strategic. Then you have dinner, walk, and then go to bed. You prepare every day in the same way.” “The bicycle should adapt to the body of the rider, to the point where he feels welded to it. The lighter the structure, the better the riding. The wheels exert a centrifugal force. There are thirty-two spokes in a wheel. You must be inclined over the bike and that causes your back to ache, but the more inclined you are, the more velocity you gain. The saddle is narrow to conform to the human anatomy.” “At times the wind blows as if it were your ally; other times, it is as though it were your worst enemy.” “In cycling, working in teams is very important; everything initiates with the pack, that figure which is formed by a knot of cyclists composed of a swarm of iron and legs, of pedals and gloves, which advances whistling along the pavement. That figure established a dynamic 142

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between the domestiques, the slower racers that work to benefit the leader, and the rider with the most capability of sprinting across the finish line. The pack can close in on and annoy the leader of the group, often due to rivalries, or it can try to save energy for a pronounced slope or pedaling against the wind. You have to know how to take advantage of the tactics of the other.” “In the Vuelta a Chile I was breathing cold air, the steam would leave my body, I was pedaling over the pavement generating a whirring. A slope was ahead, and I was about to hit the wall, as I had little strength. In a moment like that it is necessary to measure the distance, the power of the watts of energy left, and the thresholds. I was zigzagging over the asphalt when I saw a message: ‘Pedal, Peter, pedal.’” “Painted just like that, with capital and small letters. I experienced a change, the sprocket roared, I felt my body lighter and my spirit more balanced. I reviewed the bolts of the pedals to perfection. I concentrated on the motion of pedaling. The pack continued bunched together with strikes and maneuvers. The wheels of the bicycles collided. I descended whirring around the curves of the timed climb of Portillo. I remembered how many carbohydrates I had consumed the night before. The other competitor, a Colombian, rode alongside me, almost attached to my tire in the Cuesta de Los Libertadores. My jersey tugged at me, each spin of the wheels in that journey was a maneuver to deliver an underhanded advantage. In the last stretch I whizzed among the twisted jumble of metal and flesh. ‘Pedal, Pete, pedal.’” “When you pedal for nine hours straight, you come to know a threshold of pain that you never experience in life.” “In cycling, your feet are glued to the pedals, and it is necessary to move your legs at the speed of thirty-seven kilometers an hour. It is important 143

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to cross paths, adapt to the saddle to drink sips from the water bottle without stopping. To avoid resistance, you must shave your legs, wear a Lycra jersey that keeps the perspiration cold, use gloves to minimize the irritation from the handles. The jersey is like a second skin. It hugs the body, rain makes it cling, and the cold chills to the bone.” A cyclist needs both lung capacity as well as muscular tone in his legs. Falling behind is akin to having the bottom fall out. I would pedal to move ahead, gain advantage.

Peter Tormen won the Tour of Chile, La Vuelta a Chile, in 1987 with a total time of 45:38:34, having pedaled from Puerto Montt to Santiago in twelve stages. And he attained the maximum mileage permitted: an average of one hundred fifty kilometers per day. “I became a symbol of human rights. It’s not that I was thinking about Sergio when I was pedaling, but when I had a couple of minutes in front of the television, I said what I said: ‘This prize is in honor of my brother, who is detained and disappeared.’ The screen went black. Later the sponsors stopped supporting me and I found myself alone.” “People say how courageous, but it isn’t like that at all; there was no longer fear; the only thing that I wanted to do was disappear, be reunited somehow with my brother. When they threatened me, I would say that hopefully something happens to me, in order to see my brother.” “When I raised my arm after crossing the finish line, I was with an older, sickly gentleman that assisted me. It was Isaac Fraimovich. He sponsored the team, and I made the sign of Silo, transmitting the message of the transformation of humanity from within oneself. Adhere to a non-active violence. Silo is a humanist movement to which my family had belonged since 1972.” A cyclist that rides with his back curved forward and races at top speed appears to be a metallic bug, a bird of steel.

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Forty-One Years Later

Peter makes a comment to me about the pain that he suffers in his joints. He blocks the pain in the knuckles of his fingers with an injection of steroids. On Saturday he received the last injection. In the time that I was in his workshop, an individual came in to have the brakes fixed on a Chinese bicycle; a woman stopped by with her children’s bikes and asked him to adjust the saddles and the training wheels; a young man adjusts his frame and tightens the wires of the brakes; two professional cyclists come to take their Tormen bicycles, recounting in detail the recent climb up a hill, and then pedal away. “You cannot live in the past; it makes you ill. One must generate something from the present. I subscribe to freedom; freedom takes you to a higher state. I could never be a member of a party that restrains me. I need freedom of thought.” He moves from one side of the workshop to the other while I remain seated on the wooden floor. I observe his thin, sinewy legs, with the muscles outlined in his mechanic’s overalls. “Perhaps I was brave to have accepted that cowardice was a part of me. But humans are fearful, selfishness is prioritized, and everyone looks out for himself. One is willing to endure what we suffer out of fear. “Once I went to Londres 38 and got lost. I walked but did not find the house, I was confused. I returned home without having found it.” “Every morning I go downtown and buy spare parts, and then I open the workshop.”

The iron curtain of the workshop is lifted around ten in the morning and remains open until seven in the evening. The list of items to buy attached to the wall reads: screws, wrenches, cable tensors, pedals, wire, pliers. “A couple of months ago I visited Londres 38 and thought that I was going to collapse, but I remained composed, thinking. I went through the place, from the hallway to the bathroom, the same tiles. I went through the Valech proceedings. In order to be a victim, you must feel like a victim. My case was easy, there was an abundance of proof. Next year I am going to study Psychology with a Valech scholarship.” 145

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Forty-Two Years Later

Every afternoon I return home by getting off the bus at the Martin Luther King Plaza, the grass covered with the light evening frost. I stand there observing the birds of steel flying to the heavens of Castillo. The foundation of the place was painted time and again, a rough texture, a filthy colonial red. The president’s house converted into a home for the elderly. At the base of the door, at which I always glanced, there is now an official government sign that proclaims: “Long term stay for elderly adults. Our Lady of the Angels. Resolution number two hundred ninety. On May 9, 1975, Augusto Pinochet handed over the use of this house to Conaprán, free of charge, by way of Decree Number 165.” “I’ve come to visit Allende’s house.” “No, no, this house never belonged to Allende.” “The Presidents’ House, with capital letters.” “By reason or force.”

I examine the remnants of the national shield, created by the sculptor, María Martner, which once covered the front door, three by five meters. My fingers trace the form, guessing which points belonged to the huemul, a South American deer, sculpted in agate, and which ones to the condor, made of jasper and quartz. The shield combined stones of lapis lazuli with a background of quartz incrusted one by one in the exterior wall. The next sign is “Visiting hours: Monday to Sunday, 10:00am to 6:00pm.” “Allow me to enter and have a quick look at this house, which I have always wanted to see.” “The guard, with his hair slicked back, prominent belly and navy-blue V-neck sweater, consents in silence. He now passes from being a cantankerous security guard to becoming a pleasant guide.”

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“The idea is to see the central hall, pass by the desk and bedroom of Salvador Allende.” “Where did la Tencha sleep? Did they sleep in separate beds or together?” “The entire first floor was occupied by him.”

Not one vestige of ashes, food, not even a pillow in the room. “Look at the cracks in the façade. Do you see them? Those are the traces of the bombing. The window frames were left sooty, and the crystal panes are different than the former hexagonal glass.” “This house is full of subversive old ladies, with dreams of equality, who talk about their youth as hippies. Look, she is the most ill. She walks as she can, trembles, shudders, complains. Her dress, her breasts, her hair are all in place.”

The curvature of his belly moves with every breath he takes, stretching the navy-blue V-neck sweater with lint, and continues his narration. “This pool was always filled with water. Allende would swim twenty-five laps. He had the shoulders of a swimmer.”

I am about to pass through the heavy door, but from within toward the outside, lowering my head, because of the bombing  .  .  . the swarm of wings . . . the birds of here and there. The flock of birds spreads out. “Gentlemen, we are at war.” Writing is always a denouncing, it crosses out, points to and indicates. In cycling what matters most is breaking the wind. God Save the Queen.

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“I dedicate this triumph to my brother, who is detained and disappeared.” Our Father Who Art in Heaven. The Roadrunner with his hops, beep, beep. Training regimen. Cooperativa informa. A cyclist that rides with his back curved over his bicycle is a metallic bug, a bird of steel. Play-stop-rewind. “Pedal, Peter, pedal.” Ready, aim, fire. Boom, boom, boom. In the Vuelta a Chile I was breathing cold air, the steam was leaving my body, I was pedaling over the pavement generating a whirring. A climb was ahead, and I was about to hit the wall, as I had little strength. In a moment like that it is necessary to measure the distance, the power of the watts of energy left, and the thresholds. I was zigzagging over the asphalt when I saw a message: “Pedal, Peter, pedal.”

Note

1. Group of friends of the president.

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Nevertheless, Cuba

1

Nevertheless, despite every prediction, one can enter a country by way of a window. I entered Cuba by means of the photos of Isidora Aguirre from her journey there in 1967, where she appeared in animated conversation seated next to the poet, Roque Dalton, and the painter, René Portocarrero. Or practically hugging the Argentine dramatist, Osvaldo Dragún. Or in the Isla de Pinos, strolling around a farm, later seated on a bus next to an enormous, nearly bald Alejo Carpentier. Or dining alongside Haydée Santamaría at a long, cloth-covered table, or standing by her side, while she spoke around the microphone with an intense body language that mobilized the swaying of the ovals in her round face, ovals in which I read the circles of the months that she spent in jail, the eyes of her brother gouged out at the door of his cell. It is the same Haydée who will tell Isidora and the rest of the judges: “Get out and see the good and the bad of the Revolution, as perfection is divine.”

Isidora Aguirre, the Chilean dramatist with whom I conversed for three years, experienced a Copernican tour in her life when she was invited to Casa de las Americas and knew the Cuba of the sixties. The Revolution was effervescent, the utopia of socialism, the country recuperated from the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a model of society that was in the 149

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process of being constructed in an epic way. Isidora kept an album with those images, which she showed me with enthusiasm. There were the photos of her meetings with Che Guevara when he was Minister of Industry, or her visit to the house of Lezama Lima when they saw him in a wooden rocking chair and asked him sarcastic questions about “the new man.” “Do you see that woman with a cigarette in her hand seated on top of some reeds of sugar cane? That is I.” “Do you see that man with a guitar? That is a young Silvio Rodriguez.”

That trip can also be read between the lines of her novel, Letter to Roque Dalton, a book dedicated to the Salvadoran poet with whom she shared her sojourn in Havana and a very special friendship, a book which concludes with the phrase “Where are you, Maestro? Are there windows?” Isidora had me roam around that island before even embarking for Havana. That is why, when I travel, I go in search of recognizing places and geographies about which I have read. Her archives inspire me; I travel to circulate from another’s archives to those of my own. The right to gaze is an effective means of filling the empty space of memory. I have looked at those images with the optical prothesis of the camara; I scan them to take note of them and go back to observe them on the computer screen. In other words, I travel because of the desire to see “for myself ” the proof of victory and catastrophe. The dialectic of seeing for oneself.

2

Cuba is an archive country, a country in which objects and buildings are conserved and detained in time, and an archive is an exercise in absence and presence. I travel to Cuba with a load of foreign images, with the objective of constructing my own archive. A country that awakens a game of ambivalences. An island of marvels with original pieces that no longer fit. A country without replacement parts. A do-it-yourself project

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of overlapping pieces, where the most commonly used verbs are “resolve,” “devise.” Cuba, in and of itself, is an archive country because behind the surface is history: in each face, a former slave or a guerrilla fighter from the 1950s; in another, students that were educated in the glamorous former Soviet Union. I see elevators stuck in the walls of the shaft in buildings. The Soviet electrical appliances of the Aurika brand were converted into flowerpots, pantries, and improvised refrigerators. I amble along the streets observing the luxurious mansions of the Batista era destroyed and divided into housing for several families. How can Cuba get past the setting of decadent beauty? In January 2011, I boarded a Copa airplane with Havana as the destination. Nevertheless, despite my skepticism, I arrived at a later scene of the Revolution. Countries have something akin to the staging of historical successes, and that summer I believed that I was outside of time. But history made itself present when I arrived at room 614 of the Hotel Jagua in Cienfuegos, and in the doorframe, hung the following sign: “Here Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz stayed on his visit to the Province of Cienfuegos on August 18, 1960.” I entered searching for phantoms, invoking spirits. Where I placed my suitcase, I imagined the olive-green jacket with a red star hanging over the back of the chair. I stretched out upon the full-sized bed and imagined the lengthy and bony silhouette of Fidel upon the bedspread. I closed my eyes to recall his argument in the testimonial book, History Will Absolve Me: “Never has an attorney had to exercise his profession under such difficult conditions, never have so many overwhelming irregularities been committed against an accused man.” Sleeping in the same bed as Fidel is not the same as sleeping with Fidel, of course. We would share the bed forty-one years later, in a way that differed, and where Fidel Castro extended his long body, I extended my limited stature. I fell asleep with that wordplay, until a knock at the door brought me back to the present. I open the door and find a cardboard box with several manuscripts, the label written with a felt-tipped pen stating, “category novel.” I look over the list and count eighty-nine manuscripts. Afterward

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I know that it was Inés, the person who organizes the nominations and has the task of distributing the material. They have invited me to be a judge for the Casa de las Americas literary competition, edition number 52. At the airport, an official takes me by way of the VIP entrance, and I understand the solemnity of the event. Casa de las Americas has a lot of “houses,” you feel at home, embraced, among family. Moreover, it is converted into our home for two weeks, while we select readings. I read ring-bound novels in the pool area, on beach chairs, in my room, in the dressing room. I read as if life were to jump from one manuscript to another. I complete the index card of each one, absorb each story, and pronounce aloud the pseudonyms. In the evening we drink rum and listen to songs. The Casa de las Americas prize begins in the Che Guevara salon. The session opens there while I observe a painting by Matta and another by Jesús Soto, which serve as the backdrop of this version dedicated to the centenary of José María Arguedas. The poster of the event gathers the ceremony of Yawaar Fiesta with symbolic strength. The following day they take us to the city of Cienfuegos for the reading of the manuscripts. Beyond the Hotel Jagua, there is a coastline with houses imported from New Orleans forming a small esplanade. If I look at the bay, a

Figure 9.1.Photograph taken from the Isidora Aguirre Archives. Source: Courtesy of Archivo Patrimonial USACH

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half-moon of the ocean is sketched and, even farther off, some hills from which emerges the Russian nuclear center, which never was opened because of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. It stands there like a tiny atomic temple. I walk around the receding radioactive seashore. “Condemn me, it doesn’t matter, history will absolve me.”

3

The 1960 Revolution was misplaced with that of the year 2011. History, of what will it absolve me? It made itself present, nevertheless. No one suspected that each time that I crossed the threshold and entered the room, I was evoking the Revolution, and my time was another time. I sit down on the edge of the bed to wait for something to manifest itself. Sitting down to await an intimate revolution, even await the end of the world or, why not, the demise of poetry. The hotel of the writers who are now judging their colleagues, pointing out their innovation, their masterful control of language, their coherence and literary expression. We read deliriously amid the undulating movement of the palm trees, the purring of the Caribbean. Farther away, the whispering of Roque Dalton, saying: “Anguish exists. Man uses his ancient disasters as a mirror.” When I am in room 614, I look out the window and imagine the Sierra Maestra mountains, the convulsive cough of Ernesto, the hyperkinetic lankiness of Camilo, the fierce will of Haydée. Farther off, plants making chains of thorns around your ankle. I imagine the line of fatigued men advancing along the mountain range with mosquito bites, walking beneath a blistering sun in the sugar cane fields that bounce off the green mountains. I read in an announcement of the reception that the revolutionary triumph on January 1, 1959, surprised the construction of the hotel was nearly finished. Missing was the platform that should be located on the west side for maritime strolls. Now there is a small pier from which we set sail to cruise around the bay. Don Roberto Fernández Retamar, the Director of Casa de las Americas, is the captain of the team, our Calibán, and we are the troupe of invited writers and readers. We are in Cuba for two weeks, never registering the lashes of the North American embargo.

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In 1960, the country participated in massive literacy campaigns. The wonderful miracle is the Cuban reader, who exhausts the editions of three thousand copies in a country where nothing is ever in excess. Cubans have many stories, and the members of Casa de las Americas are no exception. Several of the directors went to fight in the African wars, to study in the former Soviet Union. I try to imagine Jorge Fornet, Director of Literary Research, as a typist of a submarine in the Angolan War. The driver that transported us studied Marxism and political theory in Moscow. One of the members of the jury is a writer born in Saint Petersburg. The director of the press lived in Bulgaria but returned as soon as she could. She tells us in a bar, beer in hand, that the Revolution is defended from within. Each time that I cross the threshold of my room I read “Here Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz stayed on his visit to the Province of Cienfuegos on August 18, 1960.” I submerge the magnetic card and while I push open the door, I imagine the broad back of Castro bumping against the doorframe. In that room surely Fidel finished gathering his strengths. It was 1960, and seven months had passed since the triumph of the Revolution. Might he have had a map sketched on the wall? How did he see the curve of the bay? Would he have regretted some deaths? I extend my map on the wall, fastening it with pins to project assaults and intimate revolutions. I look at the tenuous cobwebs on the ceiling; at times I try to understand my insomnia and imagine that the bed is a daily sepulcher. And I remain alert to that silence of solitary rooms. But I haven’t arrived during the effervescence of the Revolution, rather forty years later, in the midst of the “Special Period” or, as it is called in a more extensive way, “Special period in times of peace in Cuba”; and it was, or continues to be, a long era of economic crisis that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and became more critical with the North American embargo worsening in 1992. It is a complicated band of time regarding material goods and replacement items. My friends always speak about a former splendor and a lengthy crisis that never ends. Neither resourcefulness nor discipline could liberate them from something crucial during the critical years between 1992 and 1995: hunger. A period of hunger, the incentive of tourism of Spanish hotels in exchange for the 154

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local population not being allowed to enter. Those were the years when it was customary to raise pigs in the terraces of apartments in order to later consume them. Also surfacing were the “jockeys,” prostitutes against which the very Revolution had fought, when the island was the brothel of the United States during the Batista years. It is a pleasure to stroll down the promenade where the waves crash and splash the walkways, but it is a pleasure that is shattered into pieces when you see a young girl with a provocative miniskirt flirting with a gray-haired European gentleman.

4

Casa de las Americas was founded in 1959 under the direction of Haydée. “The House” established the promotion of the values of José Martí in Our America, something like “Casa is our America, our culture, our Revolution.” The institution, created by Haydée, published numerous books by the literary giants of Latin America, whose controversial texts might have remained unedited in the midst of an atmosphere of artistic repression that prevailed throughout the Continent in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Casa was also responsible for bringing to the island dancers, musicians, painters, and theater groups, as part of the revolutionary urgency to rectify decades of cultural elitism and facilitate the arrival of art to the Cuban people. It was born as an institution to house the culture of the different countries of America, and to navigate the blockade of the United States, at least, in terms of culture. What is clear is the spirit of encounter, of sharing and creating a Latin American culture. They are rigorous, meticulous intellectuals and artists. Casa was transformed into a kind of refuge for artists of all genres that were fleeing from political persecution in their own countries. I think about the very little that other countries of the Continent have given back to them in terms of a helping hand. The Cuban Revolution is a determining factor for the diffusion of Latin American literature. They brought Latin America to Cuba. “When the extraordinary becomes ordinary, that is the Revolution.” “Come to Casa.”

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“Invited by Casa.”

Of all the readings, what most calls my attention is a stack of handwritten pages. It is the testimony of a “jockey” during the decisive years of the “Special Period.” In this artisanal ringed photocopy, the reader finds the narration of the hapless adventures of a woman that turned to prostitution as a means of helping her family when hunger was critical. There is desperation, doubt, blame, and later, acceptance. The picaresque narrator, nameless, recounts the daily blackouts that lasted sixteen hours, the empty streets, the factories paralyzed with their employees at home, the steak of grapefruit peel as the main meal, marmalade made of cabbage. The woman begins to have clandestine dates in the hotels for tourists, and then after various encounters, leaves the country with a Swedish gentleman. The second part of the novel takes place in Europe. I read with fascination this narrative about a woman that crosses the Atlantic and is treated badly by an older millionaire in Stockholm. He keeps her locked up in his house. The woman peers at the icy landscape through the window, pulls at her hair out of desperation. She then forces open the door and escapes by way of a forest, where she wandered about with hypothermia for days. When she stumbles upon the first town, she works as a cleaning lady in a cafeteria, and then continues her journey. She recounts her adventures in escaping from love and abuse. She arrives at Berlin, passing through Copenhagen. Along the way, two male foreigners have courted her with ambivalent conditions. The text produced controversy from the beginning: to which category did it belong, whether it was a testimonial narrative or a novel, if it should be awarded a prize. I would have singled it out, but no one supported me. I insist upon a solitary reading and imagine this mulatta with wide hips making her way down the Champs Elysée. I advance fantasizing about the swaying of her pelvis, getting on and off trains. I shake my head because I don’t understand why she didn’t embody the revolutionary spirit. Will history absolve her? At lunch, I share a table with the poets, Nancy Morejón, with a curly Afro, and Pablo Armando, with penetrating green eyes. Suddenly they begin to cry recalling Ana Mendieta, the artist that gave performances 156

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with clay and blood. Her figure positioned against the sand with a silhouette of red flowers. Her face distorted against the glass. The artist fell several floors from a building in New York, with the suspicion of suicide or having been pushed by her partner. Her last act was the fusion of her artistic work: the feminine body and blood, her face deformed against the cement, her body sacrificed. Will history absolve her?

5

Before departing for the second trip, in February of 2016, I look through the files of Isidora Aguirre, archived in boxes. Following her death, we have collected and organized letters, folders and all her material. There is an inventory of almost twenty thousand documents. I am moved by an impulse to go specifically to box 22, which contains her intimate diary, material which served as the basis for the writing of the novel, Letter to Roque Dalton. I take out a document dated December 3, without a recognizable year, and I mark it with a yellow sticker. I believe that I should follow the thread of this novel. I open files 9 and 10. I have several versions in my hands, the first one typed and with corrections. A novel that begins like a travel diary or a letter. The novel commences with the word “Inside” on a piece of celeste blue tracing paper, and begins in medias res with a “Yes, of course, things that remain.” I look at the wordplay “incubating with me” and how it splits into in-CUBAting, or rather, “a love incubating in Cuba.” I still wonder why she wrote so many versions of this novel. I continue with box 22, file 6, with “Forgive me, teacher, for articulating your name, the eleven letters, those which you beg to not be pronounced in your poem. I am not certain if it came spontaneously, or I was calling it. Anyway, the best time to speak with the dead is around two in the morning. One must watch over them and care for them.” I stop and look at the time. I am forcing that dialogue at an unadvisable time. After reading that fragment, I ask myself how I, too, attempt in this process to comprehend the difficulties of her creation, the fluctuations of her absence, the projects that she left pending, her passion for her children and friends. I find another version of the novel in box 23. It is bound with cardboard paper recycled from some greeting cards, with ink letters and tied 157

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with a white string. It reads “original photocopy 1/45 pages.” In a note the author asks herself: “Is it a short novel or a long letter?” On the cover, another title: “In a dream the soul has keen eyes . . . ” On the second page is the dedication to Roque Dalton and the epigraph: “Things belong to the one who loves them the most. And the poets, teacher? Then let’s suppose that I loved him, and he loved me, and the ephemeral is everlasting.” Further on are the pages in which she recounts how she learned of his death on the television program, Sábados Gigantes. In this unanticipated and absurd context, she mentions her impression: “His death: a silent cataclysm in some place of the Caribbean.” The death of Roque in 1975 and the unbelievable circumstances in which she is informed motivate her to act definitively, and transform into a novel the travel diaries, letters, and notes from the encounter of 1967 in Casa de las Américas. It takes time for her to finish it, as it is published in 1990. A novel that advances, for a time, dubiously between the format of intimate correspondence and the narrative tone. There are several scraps of paper inserted as corrections in the manuscript; for example, written over is the phrase “recognize that I learned how to adapt myself to that love which you proposed to me, the only one possible, somewhat miraculous and somewhat marginalized.” She remarks that it is a matter of a writing from the early morning hours. She assigns a time and date; for example, 3:45 a.m., January 21, file 2. The typescript reads “Letter to Roque, Havana, 1969.” I observe the imperfections, the cuts, the deletion of a “sigh and Read,” the replacement of “a name” for “his” on a strip of paper. She says that there are “deceased that disturb individuals while they sleep, crossing the threshold”; she asks, “are you aware of what follows?” I wonder what phrase there might be beneath that which is legible, I search for what was replaced, but I don’t succeed in elucidating the original phrase. I declassify the counter-writing, the one beneath. This novel has always been examined in its romantic, erotic aspect, but not as a novel of mourning, perhaps because the novel of mourning is associated with the death of a parent or a child, not with that of love and nontraditional friendship. In this type of text, absence functions like a motor that sets presence in motion and makes one examine the present in another way. It is a novel that visits and treasures the memory of the one absent, 158

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and dialogues with the painful presence of the dictatorship; for example, when on the 4th of July, 1979, he states: “And you, Teacher, continue the chat with Roque, he who kindly visited me the other night, being so far away (do the deceased go to the Galaxies?) . . . I meant to say that the idea of death doesn’t frighten me, since you form a line in those ‘silent multitudes.’ But what terrifies me is the rejection that I feel toward the present. A dark, gaping hole, parallel to his memory.” The absence of Roque prompts her to speak about the ambivalence of death, of that which remains in remembrance, that which leaves and that which stays and dwells within us. The attempt to seek beauty in that barren land. In the diaries Isidora remarks that she is learning to read the spectral images left by the absence of Dalton. She also recalls a difficult passage of violence that was out of control, “the deceased one that is left remaining.” When they are opened, the archives are never again closed, they trace infinite paths. We continue raising the building.

6

Abel, the photographer of Casa, tells me about the “Chilean quota of sugar cane” and leads me to another archive, that of Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity. Abel recounts how he grew up hearing about the “quota of sugar,” that they should give to Chile to support Allende. He continues, with his Caribbean accent: “To think that a couple of decades ago, they took from us a pound of the Pyrrhic quota of sugar that belonged to us to ‘give it as a gift’ to Chile, and now that country has advanced so much that it is going to export food and beverages to Cuba.” In those years, Castro also recommended to Allende that he maintain Chilean copper in the orbit of the dollar and assured him that Cuba was going to sell sugar to Chile in unlimited quantities, without demanding payment in foreign currency. The Cuban president decided to subsidize that quota by eliminating a portion of sugar from the Cuban food stamp booklets in favor of the Chilean citizens. I arrive after decades of the failure of the sugar harvest of ten million, the goal imposed by the government in those years, which they never achieved. It is said that Allende would tell every Chilean visiting Cuba “don’t miss stopping by Casa de las Américas.” 159

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The testimony about the sugar quota makes me remorseful. I err in this discomforting, ambivalent country. We are in debt to them for sugar crystals before the arrival of the toxic replacement of the beet. Sugar, life less sweet, less syrupy. We have a white debt; I understand some of the guilt that I experience when I am in Cuba. Forty-three years later, I exchange hair dryers for the sugar quota in a belated trade. I exchange sugar crystals for bed warmers, creams, cosmetics. For all that is luxurious, that which we have in excess. When I find free time in the morning, I like to go to work in the café of UNEAC (Union of Cuban Writers and Artists). I order a strong coffee, open my notebook, and take notes beneath the Ceibo tree, with its enormous trunk and massive leaves. In my wanderings around Havana, I stop for a moment of silence when I pass by the Hotel Rivera and count the number of flights from which Allende’s daughter threw herself: one, two, three, four, five, six, and the seventh floor is a ledge. Tati, the collaborator, the doctor married with two children, decides to use the gun to kill herself. I walk among the promenade and Línea Street, ambling down the Avenue of the Presidents. The monument to Salvador Allende is between streets 21 and 23. I glance at it out of the corner of my eye, then stand face to face with it: the frame of his glasses, the jacket without a tie. The monument is signed by the sculptor, Carmen Bunster, and was donated in 2000 by the province of Nueva Extremadura. My last utopia was “the state of well-being” and it also was shattered. Nevertheless, before crossing over the threshold, I write with a felt tip pen: “Here Comrade Andrea Jeftanovic stayed on her visit to the Province of Cienfuegos on January 25, 2011.” Upon my return to Chile, I declassify my archives in a rhizomatic model between that which is narrated and that which is seen, that which belongs to one and that which is of another. When I arrive, Isidora Aguirre has had a second stroke, which has left her semi-conscious. I visit her to tell her about the adventures on the Island, to give her greetings from Marcia Villaseca and Fernádez Retamar, but she has entered a convalescent stupor from the medications, and no longer listens to me as she once did. Archives do not sustain memory; rather, they substitute it. She dies ten days later, and I recall that fragment of the novel: “What a 160

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wretched bitch, death! Suddenly it removes people from the chessboard of existence, without a sign, without warning, obliging us to continue to play by ourselves and go it alone, with an invisible opponent.” She is now my invisible opponent. Forgive me if I don’t articulate your name. Teacher, where is . . . are there windows?”

7

I travel one last time to Cuba between the visits of Pope Francis and US President Barack Obama on March 22, 2016, and the Rolling Stones concert a few weeks later. Given the progress in the relations between Cuba and the United States and the visit by President Obama, there is an almost morbid curiosity about a country that is distinct and whose infrastructure is in shambles. The trip to Cuba seems like an archaeological visit. There is something in the atmosphere when traveling against a deadline, against a country on the road to extinction, against a model in which the days are numbered. A journey against an imaginary deadline, the fear of the fall of an imaginary wall. Instilled in the hurried travelers is the chant “I want to come to Cuba before it changes,” which mobilizes the mass of tourists from the United States that invade the island this year. Havana is a warm winter’s night, windy, with swaying palm trees, and the principal restaurants are filled with tourists from Europe, Asia, and South America, who listen to the serenade by guitarists who sing tirelessly: “Guan-ta-na-mera  .  .  . guajira  .  .  . guan-ta-na-me-ra”; Juan Tanamera Guijira Juan Tanamera. I am a simple man, Juan Tanamera, where the palm tree grows.” The overflow of tourists from the States tosses us out of the hotel system, and for this trip, I must turn to private homes for lodging. A blue anchor on the front of the house indicates the houses that can receive foreign currency, but which must fulfill their duty by providing a daily guest register to the offices of the state. Tooling around the Island in a Chevrolet from the 1950s and initiating a road movie. Traveling to Cuba is somewhat like traveling against time when you look at the landscape of parabolic antennas made with 161

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frying pans. Becoming accustomed to driving down the road in those spacious cars until the motor, with Lada replacement parts, overheats and you find yourself on the side of the highway awaiting another car that follows the same route, and offers to take you to the next town. Strolling through small towns and observing the dreariness of the beauty parlors installed in garages, with rusty seats and combs with missing teeth. Everything that is liberated from time and space distances itself from velocity. A rejoicing in the town when another Chevrolet awakens among whistling sounds, and the accelerator roars. It is one of the secrets of the road trip: an unhurried approach to the landscape, so that it becomes familiar. Following another driver along other routes and arriving five hours later to the destination, but arriving who knows how, with the ingenuity of Cubans. The immemorial inertias beneath the shade of mango trees, the forgetting of self and others. It’s not a matter of things drawing near, it’s just that they have a more profound impact upon our body. That erratic and disengaged rhythm in combination with the urgency of before it changes. In Cuba there is no advertising, the billboards along the highway are propaganda or civic education. “Remain faithful to our history,” “Educate you child,” “The Revolution always.” “Being cultured is the only form of being free,” “Eight hours of the blockade is equivalent to the materials needed to repair 400 nursery schools.” “Cuba needs it, electricity now,” “We are a people of fatherland or death,” “Gossip and suspicion are also acts against the Revolution.” We travel through Cuba moving from one private home to another. Ada’s old mansion in Vedado, where María dances a waltz each time she serves us breakfast. The dreary, rear house belonging to Arturo, the lifeguard at Varadero Beach. The more extended stay at Yolanda’s Faro Luna house. Each house on a beach well outside the tourist circuit, a curious house crammed with objects: the garden with ceramic gnomes in the empty swimming pool, medicine on silver from another time. The open kitchen where there are glass jars for the marmalade, with fingerprints that once belonged to divorced daughters with the desire to 162

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revive the house of Russian dolls. The breakfast room is among ferns and thousand cats are stalking the tables. The most exotic is the refrigerator with cockroaches crawling all over a box of frozen hamburgers brought by some tourists. The freezer where my son stores his growth hormone, with disgust, with resignation. Every morning I pay Yolanda one hundred euros. She licks her lips and makes a face. There are clever punctuation marks in her hurried speech. She departs for the city of Cienfuegos to register our stay. She returns with a manicure, her hair colored, new clothing. Her assistant, Dios Miley, who cleans the place and complains, tosses buckets of water to the floor. Yolanda, tell me about your life: Where were you for the Revolution? Do you have a driver’s license? Did you ever have a regular job? Do you have family in the provinces? As she responds to my questions with a crestfallen tone, I take notes of all the details, which often are the only ones that give testimony to a person having passed through that place. To be family in a strange home, sleeping in another’s bedroom, propping your head on a pillowcase with Mickey Mouse images, curtains with flowers, clothing left on the moss-green plush armchair. Extending oneself some nights in the hammock beds hanging in the garden of ferns and palms and listening to the music of the grasshoppers. And, nevertheless, will Cuban time warp with the wind?

8

Barack Obama arrives, exits the plane with his panther T-shirt, speaks of knocking down the barriers of history and ideology, the barriers of pain and separation. He speaks of boxing and baseball. He speaks of differences, but also of commonalities. He advances through Havana alongside his wife, his daughters, and his mother-in-law. Windows in time are superimposed. The freedom is suspenseful. Fidel is staying in room 614 in the Hotel Jagua. He hides from the spotlight for the three-day duration of Obama’s visit. I knock on the door and only hear him walking in circles, bumping into the furniture, turning on the faucet of the washbasin in the bathroom. I sit outside of the room, leaning against the door, with the confidence of those who have 163

Chapter 9

shared something. I leave for the city, read newspapers, watch television; and in the evenings, through the door I tell him the new ideas of the US president. Not only will I write with hands, but also with the feet of someone who has seen, who has marched to the beat. “Fidel, you have an unobstructed view from the sixth floor, you can enjoy the clear air of the Caribbean. Today Obama spoke about water, of the waters that have transported generations of Revolutionary Cubans to the United States, where they found support for their cause. And that short distance has been crossed by hundreds of thousands of exiled Cubans, in airplanes and improvised boats.” “Fidel, what do you think? Come now, open the window, allow the new airs of history to enter. One has to provoke departures.” Obama speaks in the Gran Teatro of Havana. He states “As President of the United States, I have called upon Congress to lift the embargo. I have come here to bury the last vestige of the Cold War on the American Continent. I have come here to extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We share a national pastime, baseball, and this very afternoon our players will compete on the same field in Havana where Jackie Robinson played, before his debut in the Major Leagues.” Fidel rolls his eyes and smirks, knitting his brows as he is taken to a scene in the past. He recalls his duel with Hoak, the player from the States who was training to play baseball for the team of Cienfuegos. In those years, Fidel was a tall, lanky law student who was famous as a student leader, and for his ability in the sport. Castro began to warm up, while Hoak didn’t understand what was happening, as baseball is a sport that employs the language of signs. Castro insinuates that the other go to the batting cage. He makes a wide movement with the bat, begins the fanlike wind-up, and throws a curve ball that hugs the body in the first pitch. Castro is on the pitcher’s mound and prepares for the third pitch, hurling the ball in a straight line at such a velocity that the batter hits a foul toward the stands filled with spectators. Hoak’s temperament becomes agitated, and he complains to the umpire to take the unknown player off the field, and he does. Years later Hoak states that Castro should have been a pitcher.

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Nevertheless, Cuba

Obama enjoys the game seated next to Raúl Castro, the photo chisels phrases on his lips, marking the punctuation of the movement between two strangers that shortens distances. “When the extraordinary becomes ordinary, that is the Revolution.” But everything is a déjà vu; Castro doesn’t want to play ball with the United States. He doesn’t participate in the game and loses because of a walk over, an absence. Five days after the president of the United States departs from the island, Castro writes in the newspaper Granma his weekly column, an essay entitled “Brother Obama.” In the text he affirms that he doesn’t need “the empire to give him any gifts,” that the people of this “noble and selfless country” will not renounce “the glory, the rights and the spiritual richness that it has achieved with the development of education, science and culture.” If I am not I, who will it be in my place? Fidel walks toward the dock and climbs aboard a ship, raises the anchor, loosens the moorings, and navigates around the bay of Cienfuegos. I look at the tenuous cobwebs on the ceiling; at times I try to understand my insomnia and imagine that the bed is a daily sepulcher. And I remain alert to that silence of solitary rooms. But I haven’t arrived during the effervescence of the Revolution, rather forty years later, in the midst of the “Special Period.”

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Acknowledgments

Translator Jacqueline Nanfito

This book was published in the original Spanish by Editorial Comba (Barcelona, 2016), with a second edition by Tajamar Editores (Santiago, 2018) I wish to thank Chilean Jewish poet and author, Marjorie Agosín, for graciously offering to write the introduction; the contemporary Chilean artist, Angélica Besnier, for granting permission to use an image from one of her paintings in the collection, Caminos al corazón/Pathways to the Heart, for the cover of this book; and to the author, Andrea Jeftanovic, for the faith that she has placed in me as a translator. I also  would like to thank Joy Ward, Former Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, now Provost of Case Western Reserve University, and her colleagues for supporting this publication by awarding me an Expanding Horizons Initiative Grant. I am extremely grateful to the Chair of Modern Languages & Literatures, Damaris Puñales-Alpizar, for her encouragement and continued support of my scholarly projects. And a special thank you to my dear colleague in the English Department, editor Barbara Burgess-Van Aken, for her invaluable assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication.

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Bibliography

Agosin, Marjorie. Taking Root: Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. Agosin, Marjorie. Oy Caramba! An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America. Ed. Ilan Stavans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: Beacon Press, 1994. Barbal, María. País Íntimo. Madrid: Ediciones Destino, 2007. Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Cristoff, María Sonia. Inclúyame fuera. Buenos Aires: Mardulce, 2013. Dante Alighieri. “The Inferno,” in The Divine Comedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Elkin, Judith Laikin. The Jews in Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Foucault, Michel. Las Palabras y Las Cosas: Una Arqueología de las Ciencias Humanas. Buenos Aires: Siglo Vientruno Editores, 1968. Genovese, Alicia. Ahí Lejos Todavia. Buenos Aires: Zindo & Gafuri, 2019. Glantz, Margo. Geneologías. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2014. Graham, María. Journal of a Residence in Chile. Charlottesville VA: UVA Press, 2003. Gros, Frederic. A Philosophy of Walking. New York: Verso, 2015. Herzog, Werner. Of Walking Upon the Ice. New York: Free Association, 2007. Horace. Ars Poetica. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon; Or the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1836). Miami: Hard Press, 2017. Kerouc, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking Press, 1957. LeBreton, David. Praise of Walking. Exeter: Siruela, 2015. McCann, Colum. Thirteen Ways of Looking. New York: Random House, 2016. Milano, Leonor. Afropean Soul et Autres Nouvelles. Paris: Flammarian, 2008. Onfray, Michael. Travel Theory. A Poetics of Geography. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2007. Orozco, Olga. Poesía completa. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Adriana Hidalgo, 2012. Plutarch. De Gloria Atheniensium, ed. D. Campbell, Greek Lyric III, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Riberyro Ramón, Julio. Cuatro reflexiones de Julio Ramón Ribeyro sobre el arte de escribir from Prosas apátridas. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2007.

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Bibliography Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale (1916). New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Solnit, Rebecca, Wanderlust. A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Tally, Robert, Jr. Spatiality. London: Routledge, 2013. Tristan, Flora. Peregrinations of a Pariah. Translated by Jean Hawkes. London: Virago Press, 1985. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia. New York: Columbia University: Press, 1974. Yehoshùa, A.B. The Liberated Bride. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

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About the Author and the Translator

About the Author

Andrea Jeftanovic is a narrator, essay writer and university professor. She studied sociology and then obtained a Doctorate in Hispano-American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of seven books. Among her works in fiction are Escenario de guerra, Geografía de la lengua, No aceptes caramelos de extraños, y Destinos errantes. Her published essays include Conversaciones con Isidora Aguirre, Hablan los hijos, and Escribir desde el trapecio. Her work has been translated to other languages, including Portuguese, English, Danish, and Serbian. Her literary production received critical acclaim, including the Pen Translates Award (United Kingdom), Art Circle Critics of Chile, Municipal Prize, National Council of the Book, and the Gabriela Mistral Literary Prize. Over the years, Jeftanovic was invited as a resident artist in many countries. As a scholar she has researched and written on memory and post-memory by authors from Europe and the Southern Cone. She also explored Latin American drama, with special emphasis on the figure and work of Isidora Aguirre, editing a book and participating in the archive that conserves her legacy (https:​//​isidoraaguirre​.usach​.cl). In her search to rescue women writers and creators, she has anthologized the work of Chilean writer, Pía Barros (Una antología insumisa), that of Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and realized an extensive collaboration with the Chilean photographer, Julia Toro. She combines her literary work with her pedagogical role as Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Santiago, Chile. She is a member of the artistic collective AUCH!, a feminist collective of Chilean women writers. 171

About the Author and the Translator

About the Translator

Jacqueline Nanfito is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Case Western Reserve University, where she teaches Latin American Literature and Culture at CWRU; she is also a faculty member of the interdisciplinary programs of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Ethnic Studies. She is  the author of articles in Latin American literary journals, and has published several books on Latin American women writers: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,  El sueño: Cartographies of Knowledge and the Self (2000);  Gabriela Mistral: On Women (2001), a compilation  and Jacqueline’s translation of selected prose writings about women by the Chilean Nobel Prize Poet, Gabriela  Mistral; the  translation of short stories (microcuentos) by the award-winning Chilean female author, Pía Barros, Marks Beneath the Skin/Signos bajo la piel (2009); and the translation of an anthology of short  short fiction (microcuentos) by Chilean female authors denouncing violence toward women, edited by Pía Barros, ¡BASTA! + de  100 mujeres contra la violencia de genero/ENOUGH! 100+ Women Against Gender Violence (2015). Jacqueline’s most recent publications include the translation into English of the award-winning novel by Chilean female author, Beatriz Garcia Huidobro, Hasta ya no ir/Until She Goes No More (2022); the translation of 70 poems by the Chilean Jewish author and human rights  activist, Marjorie Agosín,  The White Islands/ Las islas blancas (’2016); the  translation of  Agosin’s prose poems about Anne Frank,  Anne: An Imagining of the Life of Anne Frank (2917); and the translation of the novel, Fish Hair Woman, from English into Spanish, Mujer pelo pez (2017), by the Filipina author, Merlinda Bobis. Her translation of the travel narrative, Destinos errantes, by the award-winning Chilean author, Andrea Jeftanovic, will be published by Lexington Books (2024). Jacqueline’s translation of the collection of short stories about family dysfunction, Familiar Setting/Ambiente Familiar, by Maivo Suárez was published in January 2024 by Austiin MacAuley Publishers. Her translation of Suárez’s award winning novel, Sara,  is under review for publication.

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