I was born in America, but my father, Joachim, was born in Spain, not far from Cadiz. He was twenty when Franco began to build his power. Joachim argued with his mother and father over politics and left home. He saw what was coming and left Spain too, emigrating to France. There he made a life for himself working for a baker in Provence, and fell in love with a French woman. They married, but in less than a year the news from Spain began to trouble him badly, endangering his marriage. At last, when the Civil War was in full swing, his wife sadly agreed that he must return to Spain and fight for his principles. Thus he came to fight against Franco at last, as a guerrilla.
The war went badly, of course, because Franco had endless supplies of weapons and tactics from Hitler.
Papa made friends among the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. When the war ended, he escaped back into France, but saw that Hitler would conquer that land, too, and realized that America would be safer than his wife’s homeland, especially for a Spanish partisan and his wife. She agreed, and they came to America.
Even there, Joachim chafed as Hitler conquered nation after nation. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, his wife, no doubt strained to the breaking point, packed him off to the army. He could not fight Franco, who, with his own war won, was wise enough to stay neutral… but he could help to defeat Mussolini and, at last, Hitler himself. He came back to his new home limping, his body wounded, but his soul at peace at last. A year later, I was born.
I grew up in the Bronx, speaking both French and Spanish at home, and English in the neighborhood and at school. My mother sang to me in French, then later taught me the old songs, of Roland and the knights of Charlemagne; my father taught me The Song of El Cid and told me tales of Don Quixote. They were both determined to give me a better life than they had had, and sent me to college. Then, since I did well, they encouraged me to go on to graduate school… and what should I study, with their songs ringing in my head, but comparative literature?
In that I found joy, but at Rutgers College I found more, for I met Jimena and, by some miracle, she loved me as I loved her. She was a Cuban exile whose family had barely escaped as Castro took over, and they lost everything, all their money and property. She learned English after they came to New Jersey and still speaks with a heavy accent, but thank Heaven, it is from Havana, not New Brunswick.
She can make herself understood in English… but she is an absolute spellbinder when she recites poetry in Spanish. I can attest to that, because listening to her chanting of poems and seeing the excitement they raised in her eyes, I fell under her spell for all my life.
We made plans to marry once I received my doctorate, so I attacked my dissertation with zeal. I spent my evenings in the library researching criticism and my days in my office and classrooms, for once I passed my comprehensive examinations, I found a position and began to teach, first as an instructor, then moving to another college as an assistant professor.
I finished my dissertation, was awarded my doctorate, and applied for tenure. Six months later, I married Jimena, knowing I had secured a comfortable future for both of us.
My Jimena bore our first… and, sadly, our only… child, so we bought a house where we could afford to: in a neighborhood where everyone else worked in factories, and looked at me oddly because I wore a suit to work and carried a briefcase. I did not mind, knowing that it would only be a few years until we could move to a neighborhood in which there would be people who wished to discuss Voltaire and Proust as often as diapers and plumbing. Still, I did my best to be a good neighbor, winning most of those good working people as friends.
But fate played a cruel joke on us all, for the neighborhood went downhill slowly but steadily, and the recession and inflation of the seventies ate away my earning power. Since I was more skilled at teaching than at currying favor, and cared more for the students than for research, I was never given tenure, and therefore never promoted, but remained an assistant professor for twenty-one years.
No, let us not make excuses. I failed as an academic. However, I succeeded as a husband and father, which was far more important to me.
Not having tenure, though, I had to move to a new college every seven years… fortunately, there were several within commuting range.
It was well that I had made friends of our neighbors, for we stayed in that neighborhood for a quarter of a century.
In my last college, my department elected a Marxist as chairman. He tried to make me teach the plays of Moliere as documents of class struggle, and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur as an indictment of the bourgeoisie, which scarcely existed in Malory’s time. I refused, of course, and was denied tenure again… of course. Disgusted, I looked for another means of making a living. A man came to my office and told me he was from the Taxpayers’ Organization for Reduction in the Cost of Education; one of their goals was to persuade faculty members to leave teaching, now that the Baby Boom had passed the colleges, and go into more profitable kinds of self-employment. He offered me a modest grant to buy my own business, explained how to arrange a small-business loan, and offered to enroll me in a correspondence course in bookkeeping. I was so exasperated with being exploited as a professor that I accepted his help and went looking for a profitable business. We did not need so much money anymore, since Matthew had graduated from college and was working his way through graduate school as a teaching assistant.
My neighbor told me he was ready to sell his store and retire, so I discussed it with Jimena. It was not as though I was planning to quit a job… with no tenure, I would be out of a job in May, and being fifty and only an assistant professor, there would be little chance of employment in a time when colleges were trying to reduce faculty. In fact, we realized we had little choice, though Jimena might still be able to find a position. I took out a small-business loan and bought.
I worked hard, and at first we prospered, earning a little more than I had as a professor. Then, though, a pusher hooked the neighborhood boys on a new drug, and before long, they would do whatever he told them. They had always been rowdy, but now they became a plague. I think it was actual malice, that they meant to close my store. With their brains riddled with that drug, I am surprised they could form the intention and hold to it. It was almost as though someone else did their thinking for them, told them what to do and how. Perhaps one of them was not so sodden as he seemed.
However that may be, they scared away the customers, and even tried to frighten me from delivering orders to my senior citizens. They failed in that, of course, partly because I know how to fight well enough myself, and they knew it… but more because they all remembered me from their boyhoods, and were still somewhat in awe. I never had to lay a hand on any of them, of course, not even now when they acted against me, though I did have to speak sharply to them once or twice.
Still, I feared I might have to declare bankruptcy, for no one wished to buy the store. We sold our house to have money to live until one of us could find a new job. I don’t think the bank had any idea what to do with the store, and I suspect it will stay closed. A nice young couple bought the house… and though they seem good-humored and easygoing, there is something of the trained fighter about both of them. I hope many others like them will buy into the neighborhood and make the boys behave.
So I planned to close the door and walk away from the house, telling myself I would begin a new life even though I was past fifty. I never dreamed it would be so splendid a life as our son Matthew gave us.
After all, what more could a professor of comparative literature ask, than to live in a medieval epic?