“It’s nothing, son, it’s nothing. Jaime isn’t used to drinking, and the alcohol and happiness together have gone to his head.”
I could hear snippets of my father’s voice. “Let me out of here, I’m going to break that thief ’s face! He’s not worthy!” Then a few grunts; tense hands were covering his mouth. Then silence. The party continued. Sara rose to offer a toast, but instead of speaking uttered theatrical wails. Jashe took her in her arms and comforted her. Fanny gave three cheers and shouted, “That’s enough; it’s a wedding, not a funeral!” She called for another freilaj and rescued Jashe, pulling her in to dance with her, followed by the three hundred guests, paying no heed to the distress — real or feigned — of her sister. Everyone moved without restraint now, because the group of cripples had gone home, as had Raquel and Saúl. After jumping around for another half hour, the guests, bathed in sweat, began departing. The only ones remaining were Sara, munching on silver sugar balls — the last remnants of the huge wedding cake — at one end of the devastated table. and I, at the other end, leaning over, my tie swinging like a pendulum. Jaime’s snores accompanied the orchestra’s final paso doble.
This marriage spelled the ruin of my father. He was furious for months, begging manufacturers for deferments, borrowing money from loan sharks, trimming costs. For a while our principal nourishment was bread and cheese and café con leche. Then, as if by a miracle, Jaime’s economic problems went away the moment that Raquel returned home. When Saúl came looking for her my father kicked him out the door, using skills learned in his circus career.
The marriage was annulled. Apparently, as I learned from our housekeeper, the new husband had turned out to be even more jealous than Jaime. Raquel had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Saúl’s jealousy was so great that he had forced my sister to wear ankle-length skirts, broad-brimmed hats that hid her face, and a corset that hid her breasts. She was allowed to go out into the street only for brief moments, measured by a stopwatch, and only to do the day’s shopping. Raquel, forbidden to have a social life, acquired a chick to keep her company. The bird followed her around the apartment, taking her for its mother. One morning, when she returned from the market, she found the chicken hanged with a shoelace. Another day, Saúl, thinking that his wife devoted herself too much to the piano, took advantage of a moment when she had gone out to buy aspirin at the chemist’s and sawed a leg off the noble instrument, making it fall on its side. He then explained to Raquel that ants had eaten away the leg. Four months after the wedding, my sister still had her hymen. Saúl’s excuse was that he could not attain an erection due to hemorrhoids, and he required his wife to anoint his anus with banana pulp every night.
Jaime got out of his slump, paid his debts, bought delicious food, and resumed hiring criers to attract customers. Sara, for her part, began to degenerate, locking herself in the bathroom to smoke cigarettes in secret all day or spending hours making strawberry-filled pastries to send to her mother. Raquel, entrenched in her room, had decided to devote herself to poetry for evermore.
With so much going on, who could care about me? For Raquel, Sara, and Jaime, I did not exist. I knew, through our maid, that Sara had gotten her tubes tied after my birth, declaring, “The tubes are traps!”
With no photographs left to burn, I took a handful of ash, dissolved it into a glass of wine, and drank the grayish mixture. There was no doubt about it now. I had buried the past inside myself.
Now I understood the abuses to which my family subjected me. I saw the precise structure of the trap. They accused me of being guilty of every wound that was dealt to me. The executioner unceasingly declared himself the victim. In an ingenious system of denial, by depriving me of information — by which I do not mean oral information, but rather life experiences that were largely nonverbal — they stripped me of all my rights and treated me like a beggar, with no possessions of my own, to whom their disdainful magnanimity had granted a fragment of life. Did my parents know what they were doing? Not in the least. Devoid of awareness, they did to me what had been done to them. Thus, as the emotional wrongs were handed down from one generation to the next, the family tree had accumulated a load of suffering that endured for centuries.
I asked the Rebbe, “You, who seem to know everything, tell me what I can expect in this life, what is due to me, what my basic rights are.” I imagined the Rebbe answering me as follows:
“First of all, you should have the right to be conceived by a father and mother who loved each other, through a sexual act crowned by mutual orgasm, so that your soul and flesh might have pleasure as their root. You should have the right to be neither an accident nor a burden, but an individual, hoped for and wished for with all the force of love, a fruit to give meaning to the couple, creating a family. You should have the right to be born with the sex that nature intended for you. (It is abusive to say, ‘We were hoping for a boy and you were a girl,’ or vice versa.) You should have the right to be acknowledged from the first month of gestation. At all times, the pregnant woman should accept that she is two organisms on their way to separation, and not just one organism expanding. Nobody can blame you for the accidents that occur during childbirth. What happens to you in the womb is never your fault. Sometimes, due to anger against the world, the mother does not want to give birth and, through unconscious action, wraps the umbilical cord around the child’s neck and aborts it. Sometimes the mother does not want to give birth because the child has become an appendage of power, so she retains it more than nine months, drying up the amniotic fluid and burning the child’s skin; or making it turn until the feet, not the head, slide toward the vulva, sending the child feet first into death; or fattening the child until it cannot fit through the vagina, requiring a frigid caesarean birth, no more than the removal of a tumor, in place of a natural birth. Or, refusing to accept the responsibility of creation, the mother might call for the help of a doctor who squeezes the child’s brain with forceps; or due to a neurosis of failure, the child might be born blue, half-suffocated, forced to represent the emotional death of the parents. You should have the right to a profound collaboration: the mother should want to give birth just as the boy or girl wants to be born. The effort should be mutual and well balanced. From the moment that this universe produces you, it is your right to have a protective parent who is always present while you are growing up. Just as one gives water to a thirsty plant you have the right, when you are interested in some activity, to see before you the great number of possibilities that may develop along the path that you choose. You are not put on Earth to fulfill the personal plans of the adults who have set goals for you that are not your own; the greatest happiness life gives you is to allow you to become yourself. You should have the right to your own space where you can be alone in order to build your imaginary world, to see what you want to see without your eyes being restricted by antiquated morals, to hear what you want to hear even if the ideas are contrary to those of your family. You are not put on Earth to fulfill anyone but yourself, you are not here to take the place of any dead person, you deserve to have a name that is not that of a family member who died before you were born: when you carry the name of a dead person, it means that they have grafted a destiny onto you that is not your own, usurping your true essence. You have full right not to be compared to any sister or brother; they are not worth any more or less than you. Love exists when essential differences are recognized. You should have the right to be excluded from all quarrels between your family members, not to be used as a witness in their disputes, not to be the dumping ground for their economic woes, and to grow in an environment of trust and security. You should have the right to be educated by a father and mother who are ruled by common ideas, their intimacy with one another smoothing their contradictions. If they get divorced, you should have the right not to be required to see men through the resentful eyes of your mother or women through the resentful eyes of your father. You should have the right not to be torn away from the place where your friends, your school, and your favorite teachers are. You should have the right not to be criticized if you choose a path in life that was not part of your parents’ plan; to love whomever you want without the need for approval; and when you feel capable of doing so, to leave home and go live your own life; to surpass your parents, to go further than them, to do what they could not, and to live longer than them. Finally, you should have the right to choose the time of your death without anyone prolonging your life against your will.”