Barry Lopez
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Resistance• Apocalypse I watched my best efforts turn to coal. I would gaze west over the city at the end of the day and not be able to recall even the names of the colors in the sky. I had lost, long before this, the ability even to write a sentence that might break through. For twenty-two years I'd kept a journal, writing out each day what I believed, what I hated, what I desired. Sometimes I would make small drawings in the margins, not illustrations really, but other ways to say what I meant. When I could no longer find the words, these lines would still reflect my beliefs and emotions. When I could no longer even draw the line, I put the journals away. My mother was a restaurateur. For many years she had a nice place on Avenida Alberdi in Flores, in the center of Buenos Aires. Many women who knew her revered, even envied her—suave, accomplished, vivacious. The restaurant was full every evening, and the food and service, extensions of her dedication and grace, were celebrated year after year in the local and international guides. When I came home from school in New Haven, Connecticut, I would host for her and give the regular maître d’ a few weeks off. At an early age, then, I began to appreciate the difference between sincerity and sycophancy, as people negotiated their reservations. I was able to separate those who wished only to be seen from those who admired the daring or intuition behind certain entrées on Mother’s menus. I could easily spot the braggarts, distinguish them from those who could host a conversation about something other than their own ideas while they ate. With the regulars, I came to know their flaws as well as their tastes, and to appreciate their allegiance. All this knowledge—about how people comport themselves around pleasure and indulgence, about social maneuvering and material expense—did me no good, however, when it came to my father. I didn’t take in as deeply as I should have the evidence for deception. I was so caught up with social spectacle, I didn’t perceive the transparency of life. My father kept Sonia Bendales a secret from Mother and me for three or four years. Then, in one of those accidents fate likes to arrange, Sonia drove the Mercedes 500SL he’d given her into another woman’s car on a busy corner of Calle Rivadavia. The other driver, one Beatriz Orchada, shaken up but not really hurt, happened to be a mid-level manager in the accounting firm my father used for his many ventures. As part of her regular duties it fell to Beatriz to review the comptroller’s report filed on the accident. But it was Sonia who had run a red light. If Beatriz Orchada hadn’t been making a right turn, Sonia might well have killed her. The report ended with a request, that the purchase of an identical car for Ms. Bendales be arranged right away. Beatriz went straight to my father and confronted him—a big miscalculation for all of us. She should have known to handle the matter discreetly through her own boss. Sitting there in his office, Beatriz quickly understood that it was just going to be swept under the rug, along with all the rest of the expense Beatriz knew about to accommodate Sonia’s flamboyant personality. Beatriz phoned my mother anonymously and filled her ear. When Father came home that evening, he found Mother had packed his suitcases. Until he came to his senses, she said, he should live somewhere else. Father was quick to make his decision. He divorced us, married Sonia, arranged an apartment for us nearer the restaurant, and moved Sonia into the only home I’d known since I was ten. Among other things, Mother and I lost the spectacular and consoling view across the Río de la Plata we’d had from the top floor of that building. I was twenty-four. I had finished my degree and also gotten a license to practice architecture in Argentina. I might have stayed in the States, but during the time I hosted those evenings for Mother, I’d felt such promise for the future of Buenos Aires. I was also fairly well connected locally through my parents, and during my years in America I had honed a certain aggressiveness. By the time I was twenty-eight I was running my own firm, and before I was thirty I landed my first American commission, a monument to striking steelworkers killed at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Between what I earned and what Mother made at the restaurant (Father still retained his part of the ownership), we lived comfortably. I am a reasonably attractive woman. Men, however, hardly inquired, except for the one thing. Better with oneself, I would joke with Mother, than with such men. She told me it was my penchant for contempt, a streak of belligerence in me, that kept men at bay. I said she knew too little about independent women. She said I knew too much. I said I was educated about people’s underhandedness and men resented my determination to do something about it. She shrugged. Then, often as not, the discussion would veer into a denunciation of my father, my mother’s hands trembling occasionally at the memories. After the divorce I viewed my life as a horse race. Whatever satisfaction I drew from my work—another commission, a prize, the growth of my billings, the expansion of my staff—I would match against what Sonia accomplished. She lived out in the open now, a kind of public farce which my father endured for reasons I will not get into. She had no work of her own, unless you would call the practice of insult work—her dramatic and indignant dismissals of whatever didn’t please her, that laughable hauteur she affected, all of it lampooned anonymously in the gossip and society columns. Her politics, like her wardrobe and her taste in art, came directly from supermarket magazines. Sonia was an actress, not a person. A client of mine has a phrase to denounce the nouveau riche of America: un populacho empeñado en no educarse con un poder económico pasmoso, “a willfully uneducated people with stupefying economic power.” That was Sonia. Well, it was a lot of time, years in fact, given over to reviling Sonia and competing with her, and despising my father and waiting for him to be impressed. I would tell myself that my fabulous life (as I saw it) was an intimidating vindication, a triumph of determination. I fed on hatred and kept a measure of it in every box of my life. I should have seen what was coming, a long, slow slide down an incline of bitterness, but I imagined I was well past all that. I would say to myself, I do not need the validation of any man, husband, lover, or father. I do not require any evidence of my father’s love in order to receive another commission. I do not need for my father to be an honorable man in order to hold my head up at parties where I may encounter the two of them, her all dressed up like Marilyn Monroe, an idée fixe of my father’s. This was the life I lived—energetic, creative, financially successful, professionally admired—but it was not a life I could fully believe in. I wrote in my journal about the conflict, year after year, describing unspeakable and sometimes incomprehensible angers, yearnings I could not satisfy—and then in the mornings I would waltz into my office, an apparently confident woman I felt more and more apart from. I willed myself to believe that my mother was strong enough to overcome the indignity of her betrayal, to let go her losses expeditiously, as if they were broken limbs pruned after a storm. Many people came to our apartment to offer her their support; more often, they went to the restaurant, under the impression, I suppose, that dining there more frequently would help. But when she did not revive the measure of gusto they expected, when she appeared too acquiescent, most of these women drifted away. The ones who kept up their prodding were the ones most bitter about their own lives, at a loss for a solution to their own particular hatreds. They smoked cigarettes with her in the kitchen while she worked up the day’s menu, urging her toward some sort of revenge, variations on plots they all knew from the soaps, but which, they emphatically concurred, had been carried out too ineffectively. She’d had grief enough. The day Sonia moved into our old apartment, she hired a janitorial service to clean it. In that rite of exorcism and purification, many of my mother’s most cherished things were broken, dumped into a box, or simply thrown out. One afternoon, just before my mother arrived at the restaurant, Sonia showed up to claim the two most valuable paintings on the wall, cityscapes by Antonio López Garcia. She donated them to a fund-raising effort for a new hospital in Palermo, the part of the city where she and my father lived. And then one day I came home from work to find Mother in the living room with an envelope in her lap, and with the look of having been there in the blue wing chair for a long time. She was gazing out the front window into the pine trees growing in Parque Avellaneda, their crowns churning in the invigorating spring blow I had just come in out of. She extended the envelope without looking at me. It was a handwritten note from her physician, sentences of comfort and encouragement which could not obliterate the two words: Parkinson’s disease. We arranged our lives to accommodate her loss of strength and mobility. Her sister’s eldest daughter, a woman who ran a restaurant in another part of Buenos Aires called La Boca, a very competent and likable person, took over the restaurant. When I could no longer see to all of Mother’s needs I brought in private care, a decision which made it disturbingly clear to me that, apart from her, I had nothing to hold my attention except my work. I felt I’d arrived at a dead end. I was thirty-five. I had no prospect of children. I could not say that I knew anyone who had taken the trouble to know me—nor had I done that myself, so that now someone might give me a sympathetic ear. I’d lost track of my close friends from school. I didn’t have the scaffolding of a religion to turn to. And I had not discovered anything in recent years to revitalize me—no book, no performance, no movie. I no longer even made the effort. In fact, I couldn’t stand to read more than one or two stories in the papers anymore—it all seemed to be about adapting life to machinery, or scenarios for creating wealth, or politicians promising a future for us that had already come and gone. Worse, the news came festooned with ads, hounding the reader, imploring him to improve his looks, his appeal, his temperament, his prospects with one or another sort of purchase. The manic opportuning, page after page of it, every day, alternately depressed and infuriated me. I did not resent my mother’s illness, the burden of worry that she had become for me; but she began to stand out as part of an indictment I felt for leading a life that had become little more than an expression of irritation. Outside of my creative work, those actual hours of imagining and drawing a building or a monument against the restrictions of a set of specifications, I felt no relief from my anger. And then, finally, I could no longer manage to squeeze any satisfaction out of my work. I would pour myself into some high-minded, pro bono project only to discover that something crucial in me would not engage, and the project would fall apart like mercury spilled across a table. I gave up trying to explain to myself what my anger was about. It was more than Sonia and my father, more than the empty-headed boosterism of the papers and the venal commerce of their advertising pages. It was rooted in a vast and seemingly intractable injustice that plagued the precincts of every city. I understood it better when I was young, because I simplified it; and I had long believed that my life stood in opposition to it all, that it was a renunciation. But I couldn’t maintain this now. I felt increasingly detached from the principles that were supposed to be behind everything I did. What had begun to weigh on me more than anything was the silence of everyone in the city, myself included. We moved from scandal to scandal—sexual, political, fiscal, environmental—with a shrug of the shoulders. Children killed themselves in the barrios and we turned the page. For reasons that ended with the Second World War or that had to do with national pride, I forget which, we attacked the British in the Malvinas. Businessmen cheated, powerful men could pay to circumvent any law, things fell apart that shouldn’t—buildings, airplanes, human lives—and no one was to blame. Factories closed and men went down the drain. There was no enemy, or the enemy lived in another country, or it was God’s will. One morning I opened a letter from the mayor of Buenos Aires, inviting me to discuss the design of a monument to the city’s longshoremen. I called a friend, Dierdre Cantelaria, instead, and offered to sell her my business. It took five minutes. I went to the bank and set up funding to keep Mother and me in reasonable comfort. We moved from Flores to a smaller apartment in San Justo, way west in the city, and far from the river I had grown up next to. I was relieved initially, but I knew I was still running away. Images of the disjunction in my life pursued me like a dog that never tired. And it never lost my trail. I offered my mother nothing but silence at our meals. That same year, Sonia was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When she died Father asked us to move back in with him, in Palermo. Mother rolled her eyes when she read the letter. We never considered it. I tried to hide my deterioration from her, the loss of meaning, which seemed like dry rot working its way deep into a house. I left the apartment purposefully every morning, moved briskly down the sidewalk, but had no intention, no aim beyond completing the most routine of errands. The fawning insincerity of people I met at the occasional party I still attended, the ubiquity of every kind of noise in the streets—jackhammers, radios, fights—the long rows of prescription drugs, hers and mine, in the bathroom, the attitude of entitlement with which perfect strangers would shove you asked at a counter were like a series of punches that gave me a headache every day. I was consumed with indignation at the least evidence of injustice. The smallest manifestations of privilege or prerogative incensed me. But no sense of not being implicated protected me. Many an afternoon found me on a bench somewhere, looking back on my work as some sort of burlesque. I’d lost completely the distinction between what was true and what was false in my life. On the worst days, I would make the long walk to the Río de la Plata and stare off across the river to the shores of Uruguay, hoping the expanse of that eternal water would give me hope. But on my return I would always find myself in the same narrow, dispiriting alley. When Mother died, I decided, I would just end it. As her Parkinson’s advanced, she was not always sure of her words, but she was quite sensitive to the subcurrents in our apartment, those rivers about which no one speaks because they fear the waters are too deep or that all will drown, once the dam is breached. Sometimes when I walked into her bedroom she would give me a sign that she was lucid, the movement of one finger or an almost comical look of self-awareness, amazement she was still alive. One evening in 1985, after dinner, we were sitting together having our tea and she handed me a book. I turned it over in my hands, not knowing what to make of it, or of her gesture. It was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. “You need to read this now,” she said. I gave her a sardonic smile. “Will it comfort me?” “I met your father in Bergen-Belsen, fourteenth of July, 1943,” she said. She did not pause for this revelation to sink in. “When you have read this, when you think you understand what it means, and not just in that analytic mind of yours, you ask your father to tell you how we came to be there. And then how we came to be in Brooklyn when you were born, and finally here in Buenos Aires. Ask him about all the things we were trying to escape.” I felt such a sense of shame before her. And she gave me such a look, the compassion only a parent can offer her self-absorbed child. I began the book that evening stunned, which made it almost an act of distraction. But Frankl’s description of his spiritual crisis in Auschwitz pulled me forcefully in and I read it straight through. His triumph over despair, his refusal to become the victim of his own sense of injustice, was mesmerizing. I scrawled questions in the margins. “Who is the family, waiting at home, for whom you choose life?” I wrote. “What comes after freedom from suffering?” The next morning I dug out an old journal, the one I had last kept, and tried to write. I tried to get the tumble of emotions and thoughts I was experiencing to come together: my mother’s revelation, which she may have chosen to make to me now because she knew she was dying. My strangely euphoric sense of renewal on finishing the book. The choices I might now make. I knew I did not want to see my father, not right away. Instead, after writing out more of the flood that was pushing through me, crossing words out, rearranging sentences and paragraphs, I went to find Ernesto Guadalquivir. Ernesto and I had gone through architecture school together in the late sixties but had not spoken much since those days, now long past. Two or three times I’d been to openings at a print shop he owned in San Justo where he had broadsides and limited-edition books he’d published on display. He also had a small list of trade books, many of them about the culture of the Guaraní Indians. He was Marxist-Leninist when we first knew each other but, to judge from what he had published, his views had softened over time. He had apparently given up strident accusations for accommodation. I wanted to share with Ernesto what I had written. For the first time since I had put away my journals I felt as if I had thrown off the fever of a jungle disease, that I was now able to make a coherent and even penetrating statement. My words were not punctuated with anger or built up on abstractions. They opened out onto possibilities that were strikingly new to me. I was not at all sure about the courses now possible, my thought still so compelled by Frankl’s genius; but I felt I might realize again in conversation with Ernesto the beliefs and emotions of my early years, find a politics now that did not paralyze me with wrath, and that could lead to a statement as vital and unambiguous as the monument to the steelworkers at Homestead. Like me, Ernesto understood how much thinking had to go into the design of a building that stood strong but lithe. It was the same process that once opened the walls of the French cathedrals to the passage of light. With the newly discovered flying buttress in place to take the weight of the roof, the once solid walls could frame expanses of glass. The dark caves of the eleventh century transformed into halls of light. That morning, before going to visit Ernesto, I called Dierdre to see if she might give me some work, a project that would focus my initial efforts to turn this new clarity of purpose into solid dimensions. I looked in the papers for a studio. When I was back into a good rhythm, I decided, then I would go and see my father. I did not want to ask about Bergen-Belsen but to ask him instead to explain to me how love compels. And when he finished I would ask him to listen while I spoke. I wanted to articulate to him what I believed and what I opposed. And then ask him to describe the world he felt we were both caught up in. In that way, as I imagined it, we might reach the shores of Uruguay together. Lisa Meyer, installation artist, Landscape architect, the Arabella Memorial, Minneapolis, the Damien Monument, Damascus, Syria, on Leaving La Plata, Argentina Barry Holstun Lopez. All Rights Reserved. |
