Coming to America

Troy, New York, Fall 1968.

I arrived in upstate New York during the fall of 1968, ready to transfer into the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the 'Tute as it was known, as a sophomore. I had seen Troy a few months earlier during my college tour of the Eastern US, but this time it was different; it was for keeps. Mom and Dad were dead and buried in Buenos Aires and, in spite of the assertions of my New Jersey folks that we were all family, I was alone.

I wasn't as much miserable as defiant. I'm gonna show all of them, I thought. I was going to brave the hills of Troy all on my own. Uncle Jack had offered to drive me up, but I insisted on doing this by myself. I had the same sense of release that I felt after Dad’s death: that I could move on with my life and do whatever I wanted, without anyone's permission or help. I didn't need any family to do this. Kristeva, the French philosopher of estrangement and exile, put it best: I was an orphan, "free of debt and duties."

I hadn’t really been free to stay in Buenos Aires; I had no choice, no matter my stirrings of independence.  Mom's confused messages had always been that Argentina was a historical blip. Since she had been unable to go to America, then her son Schorschi – my Austrian nickname -  would someday go. My fate was set in my veins and my freedom to do what I wanted was an illusion. Dad had played out the second act of her script. I moved quickly to complete the destiny she had planned. The surge of dismantling that followed their deaths had equal parts liberty and bitterness, like the feelings of a survivor who’s just been released from a camp. I was bitter with my parents for having died and left me stranded in South America without anyone. I would be reborn into a new life, a better one. I’d show them.

Nineteen-sixty-eight was a hell of a year to emigrate to the US. By the time I arrived, Nixon was president, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, the cities were burning, and scared GIs were being sent to die in the Tet offensive. And that was just in the Promised Land. There were also riots in Argentina and Paris, and the Soviets had marched into Prague to quash the Spring. The whole world was a mess. My contemporaries were engaged in a momentous struggle, one that would mark my generation forever. The Generation of ’68 we were called.

Yet I missed out on all the passion, focused as I was on my own travails of death and exile. I didn't demonstrate or march. I reduced everything that I had been into one suitcase full of clothes and moved from one spot on the earth to another, avoiding the rebellions. I was a spectator, not a participant, and I followed the news from airport lounges and bus depots, uncaring if the world around me was going to hell. My own world had already gone to hell. What’s all the fuss, I thought. 

I got off at the Greyhound bus terminal in Troy, and, as the bus moved on, stood there with my shiny valise that carried the remnants of a childhood cut short, and stared uphill toward the RPI campus perched on the cliff. It was hot, and the sun was beating down on the old clapboard houses. The street was empty except for a truck parked next to the post office, a postman in blue wearing a bush hat sitting at the wheel, sweating. The setting was out of a Hopper painting: a desolate scene with one or two disconnected figures lost in thought.

There was no shade anywhere, only the blinding light of summer midday. Nothing moved. I sensed the Hudson River, but the old warehouses blocked the view. Above them I saw a rusted crane suggesting the Troy of better days, before the Arrow shirt factory moved south and the place shut down. It felt as though the Great Depression had never left. This is what Troy must have seemed to Agamemnon as he went to seek Helen: the blighted provinces.

I was dizzy, as the weight of all that had passed came down on me. Que mierda estoy haciendo acá? What the f…. am I doing here? I thought. I looked uphill and then down at my suitcase, and dread overtook me. I heard the cobblestones of Bebedero, the street of my childhood home in Buenos Aires, and I heard the cold winds of Tablada, the Jewish Cemetery where I had buried my parents, and I looked around for Mom forever guarding over me from her cloud,  but there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

A wave of anxiety started rising up my chest like a rushing tide that would drown me. I decided that I simply could not afford to listen to the longings of my heart. I narrowed my eyes and refocused on the steep Trojan hill. I grabbed the valise, gritted my teeth, and willed myself to climb. And, just as quickly as the angst had come, it went away.

I have kept the old valise, no matter how battered and broken. I don’t have the heart to throw it away; it was the loyal traveling mate that emigrated with me half a century ago and the only one who witnessed my fleeting despair that hot day in Troy, when, all alone, I almost drowned.