Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories

VI. MEMORY/LAME CR

VI Memory/Lame Crónica 22 agosto 2001 Los Angeles Para JHS, in memoriam Daddy, were you really that mean? Mi hermanita Laura—y mi abuela Eunice Chávez también for that matter, whom you adored, who loved you—te recuerdan bien mean. Bien sarcastic. Con todo el mundo. To mom. Laura se acuerda de un fight daddy and mom got into over politics (maybe the death penalty? No, era over legalizing la mota! Yeah, that was it), donde no se hablaron por días. Or, Mom went to a motel for two days. Pero quizás este es el mismo (sub)urban myth de cuando ella nos llevó a un hotel en la playa en Santa Mónica and all we ate for a while was hot dogs? (Les dicen “panchos” en Buenos Aires, can you believe that?) Pero no. I’m sure that fight was about celos, y que se estaban chasing around the bed in our old house, in the Valley, on Rubio Ave. Or maybe it was the one before that, en Van Nuys? Pero anyway, they were swinging wire hangers pathetically at each other, y mami took me and my other sister, Sarita, a un hotel near Pacific Ocean Park. Laura ni siquiera había nacido. Yeah, that’s it. I’m sure. Or am I? Daddy, try as I might, no te puedo conjurar mean. Oh, I know you were ruthless con tus enemigos. And you had tons of them. Que anti-semitas coming out of the woodwork. Que people who didn’t vote your way en los comités en UCLA. Esa vez que no te quisieron dar, al principio, un ascenso to Super Professor Step 8 overscale or whatever they do in the UC system, and you got into a rage. Bigtime. Enemigos ideológicos. Intelectuales. Académicos. In your journal articles, in obscure footnote vendettas, and in Letters to the Editor columns you waged your battles, esas épicas batallas letradas que te carcomieron, finalmente, por dentro. Esa rabia que te tragabas por lo general, only every so often letting just a flicker of it cloud your Robert Goulet, Harry Belafonte, Lucho Gatica surface, ignite and explode, en un perfectly timed and hurled sarcastic put down. To mami. And to us? Así dicen. Even to me? Yo te recuerdo como un expansive huraño. Ya sé, Daddy. That’s an oxymoron. And so you were. Un cool-warm Libra. Un dulce melancólico en tu study en casa, shaking your head back and forth en ese gesto milenario, casi rabínico, about some historical injustice, alguna tragedia you felt as keenly on your own skin cual si te la hubieran perpetrado—tatuado—a ti. Daddy, te reconozco en los versos de “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” de Wallace Stevens, que recité full- and lowvoiced , dry-eyed, en tu yahrzeit. Just days after my birthday. El 25 de marzo, 1990 fue. One year and two days after. 40  KILLER CRÓNICAS    He had to choose. But it was not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choice Between, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony.    Ese día te sentí—I conjured you—en esos reconfortantes, sencillos, casi parcos versos. Y dije, entonces, “Thus, my father was able to be, harmoniously, a boy from the Bronx and a renowned Golden Age scholar, someone impassioned by Sephardic ballads, Cervantes and Lope de Vega, but also by Peter Sellars or The Beatles.” Concluí citando—y diciendo querer emular—otra de tus frases favoritas: “[La vida] es el arte de no renunciar a nada.” Don’t remember now who said that. Lope? Cervantes? Think so. Pero part of me never wanted to sip from the same cup que te nutrió a ti. I didn’t want—yet I was fatally drawn to— los clásicos. Hell, si no hubiera sido por Pizarnik, habría hecho, casi seguro, una tesis sobre Cortázar. O Quevedito. Remember, Daddy? I remember, now, clearly, you and I , escribiendo late late into the night, juntos, en tu casa en Santa Cruz, inspirados encendidos, hours and hours thinking about that one line: “polvo será, mas polvo enamorado.” What bullshit, Dad. How could I have written, how could I have said that day, tan smugly, tan literarily, que you were able to be both...