Since he often leaves us to go on concert tours we have become so used to father’s departures that we barely cease playing to embrace him. I remember now the day he was leaving to go on tour. He was standing at the door, elegant, aristocratic. He looked the same as always. Suddenly, moved by an acute premonition, I threw myself on him and clung to him passionately. “Don’t go, father! Don’t leave me!” I begged. I had to be torn away. I wept so violently that my father was startled. Even now I can feel again the effort my mother made to loosen my clutch. I can still see the hesitancy in my father’s face. I begged and implored him to stay. I clung to him desperately, my fingers knotted in his clothes. I remember the effort he made to wrench himself loose and how he walked swiftly off without once looking back. I remember too that my mother was surprised by my despair. She couldn’t understand what had possessed me to behave as I did.
Since that day I have not seen my father. Twenty years have passed. He is coming to-day. I am thirty years old…
We entered New York harbor, my mother, my two brothers and I, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. The Spaniards aboard the ship were terrified; some of them were kneeling in prayer. They had reason to be terrified—the bow of the ship had been struck by lightning. When finally we came alongside the pier a group of newsboys clambered up the gangplank shouting “Extra! Extra!” We learned that war had been declared. I saw the passengers reading the papers excitedly. I knew that something terrible had happened, but I was indifferent, I had no desire to read about the war. I busied myself making a last minute entry in my diary, the diary which I had begun when we left Barcelona.
I had intended to send my father the first volume of my diary as soon as it was finished. It was a monologue, or dialogue, dedicated to him, inspired by the superabundance of thoughts and feelings caused by the pain of leaving him. With the sea between us I felt that at least I might be able to reveal to him my innermost thoughts. that I might be able to reveal to him with absolute sincerity the great love I bore him, as well as my sadness and my yearning.
We arrived in New York with huge wicker baskets, a cage full of birds, a violin case and no money. I carried my diary in a basket. I was timid, withdrawn. I caught only fleeting patches of this new reality surrounding me. At the pier there were aunts and cousins awaiting us. The negro porters threw themselves on our belongings. I remember vividly how I clung to my brother’s violin case. I wanted everybody to know that I was an artist.
Entering the subway I observe immediately what a strange place New York is—the staircases move up and down by themselves. And in the train hundreds of mouths chewing, masticating. My little brother asks: “Are Americans ruminants?”
I am eleven years old. My mother is absent most of the day searching for work. There are socks to darn and dishes to wash. I have to bathe and dress my brothers. I have to amuse them, aid them with their lessons. The days are full of bleak effort in which great sacrifices are demanded of all of us. Though I experience a tremendous relief in helping my mother, in serving her faithfully, I feel nevertheless that the color and the fragrance has gone out of our life. When I hear music, when I hear laughter and talk in the room where my mother gives singing lessons, I am saddened by a feeling of something lost.
And so, little by little. I shut myself up within the walls of my diary. I hold long conversations with myself, through the diary. I talk to my diary, address it by name, as if it were a living person, my other self perhaps. Looking out the window which gives on our ugly backyard I imagine to myself that I am looking at parks, castles, golden grilles, and exotic flowers. Within the covers of the diary I create another world wherein I tell the truth, in contrast to the multiple lies which I spin when I am conversing with others, as for instance telling my playmates that I had travelled all around the world, describing to them the places which I had read about in my father’s library.
The yearning for my father becomes a long, continuittle. plaint. Every page contains pleas to him, invocations to God to reunite us—hours and hours of suffocating moods, of dreams and reveries, of feverish restlessness, of morbid, sombre memories and longings. I cannot bear to listen to music, especially the arias my mother sings—”Ever since the day,” “Some day he’ll come,” etc. She seems to choose only the songs which will remind me of him.
I feel crippled, lost, transplanted, rebellious. I am alone a great deal. My mother is healthy, exuberant, full of plans for the future. When I am moody she chides me. If I confess to her she laughs at me. She seems to doubt the sincerity of my feelings. She attributes my moods to my over-developed imagination, or else she lays it to my blood. When she is angry she shouts: “Mauvaise graine, va!” She is often angry now, but not with us. She is obliged to fight for us every day of her life. It requires all her courage, all her buoyancy and optimism, to face the world. New York is hostile, cold, indifferent.
We are immigrants, and we are made to feel it. Even on Christmas Eve we are left alone—she has to sing at the church in order to earn a few pennies.
The great crime, she makes us feel, is our resemblance to our father. Each flare of temper, each tragic outburst is severely condemned. Even my paleness serves to remind her of him. “He too always looked pale and ready to die, but it was all nonsense,” she says. Every day she adds a little touch to the image we have kept of him. My younger brother’s rages, his wildness, his destructiveness, all this comes from Father. My imagination, my exaggerations, my fantasies, my lies, my beautiful edifice of lies, these too spring from my father.
It is true. Everything springs from him, even the lies which originated from the books I had read in his library. When I told the children at school that I had once travelled through Russia in a covered wagon it was not a lie either, because in my mind I had made this journey through snow-covered Russia time and time again. The cold of New York revived the memories of my father’s books, of the journeys I longed to take with him whenever I saw him go away. To face the cold of New York required a superhuman effort. Standing in the snow in Central Park feeding the pigeons I wanted to die. The dread of facing the snow and frost each morning paralyzed me. Our school was only around the corner, but I had not the courage to leave the house. My mother had to ask the negro janitor to drag me to school. “Po’ thing,” he would say, “you ought to live down south.” He would lend me his woollen gloves and slap me to get warm…
Only in the diary could I reveal my true self, my true feelings. What I really desired was to be left alone with my diary and my dreams of my father. In solitude I was happy. My head was seething with ideas. I described every phase of our life in detail, minute, childish details which seem ridiculous and absurd now, but which were intended to convey to my father the need that we felt for his presence. Though I detested New York I painted a picture of it in glowing terms, hoping that it would entice him to come. And when at last I had finished the first volume of my diary, when I had wrapped it tenderly and addressed it to him in my own hand, my mother informed me sorrowfully that it was useless to send it to him because mail from America would never reach Paris. She bade me wait until the war was concluded.
And so once again I am thrust back into my world of illusion. When, in order to amuse my brothers, I impersonate Marie-Antoinette as she marches proudly to the guillotine, I stand on a chariot of chairs with a white lace cap and I weep real tears. I weep over the martyrdom of Marie-Antoinette because I am aware of my own martyrdom. A million times my hair will turn white overnight and the crowd jeer at me. A million times I will lose my throne, my husband, my children, and my life. At eleven years of age I am searching, in the lives of the great, for analogies to the drama and events of my own life which I feel is destined to be shattered at every turn of the road. In acting the roles of other personages I feel that I am piecing together the fragments of my shattered life. Only in the fever of creation can I recreate my own lost life. When in the thunderous voice of Marat I demand a hundred thousand heads I am demanding the vengeance which later I will take with my own hands.