Part II: Dreaded Words

Buenos Aires – Troy, NY,  1961-1971.

Losing my parents at an early age messed up my life for decades, although you would not know it by the way I reacted. You’d be right, of course, if you thought that such losses would cause a profound emotional debacle. But I moved on stoically, as if little had happened: I’m OK; don’t worry about me; I’m a big boy; I don’t cry.

Mom’s death came suddenly. It was in 1961 when she was barely fifty and I was a boy of eleven. She had gone to bed the night before as if it was just another night. None of us knew that she would never awaken. Her moans shook us up in the early hours of the next day. It was a typical Buenos Aires dawn in the middle of winter: cold and dark. Our small apartment was unheated and I could see my breath as I rushed to my parents’ bedroom. Mom was gurgling loudly, her eyes were shut, her teeth gritting. Her moans went on and on, like a ghostly lament from the afterworld. We could not wake her. It did not matter how much Dad shook her, or called her name, or how much I, sitting in my pjs in the living room and vomiting air, prayed to someone up in heaven. Nothing worked. (That morning I realized that there was no one up there.) By the time the neighborhood doctor arrived, she was gone. A long time would pass until I learned that the little green pills she regularly took for her breathing troubles were nitroglycerin, a drug used to treat anginal chest pain. “A sudden cardiac arrest, maybe a stroke,” is the way my doctor explained it decades later when I finally started asking questions. No one explained anything that day – or afterward.

Mom’s passing thrust Dad, then in his seventies, into an unexpected widowhood with a rebellious teen age son whom he had trouble raising. He died seven years later, when  I was eighteen. His passing was no surprise. It was “a death foretold,” to use Garcia Marquez’s words. He grew old and frail before my eyes.  I saw him slide into a lengthy depression and suffer two strokes.  (Yes, strokes run in the family and I do watch my  health.) I took care of him during the intervening years, I a difficult adolescent, he a sad man whom I saw more as a curmudgeonly old Grandad than a Dad. I wanted him gone, so I could be free of ailing parents to take care of. Free to move on with my life, to leave BA behind.

Dad and I struggled about many things those years, yet none remained as deep in my guilt as my wish for his Emerson transistor radio. It was a cool little radio and I was itching to use it from the day he bought it. But he would not allow me to do so without prior permission. The evening when I received the news from the German Hospital of Buenos Aires that he had passed away, my first thought was, “The Emerson is mine.” I brought the radio with me to Troy in my baggage. It was one of the first things out of the brown valise and it sat on my desk for a long time.

When Mom died, following the bad advice I received from the grown-ups in the room, I played the big boy. I did not cry. I was told to be strong for my father and to take care of him. When Dad died, I didn’t cry either. This time I felt relieved, experiencing the freedom of being on my own. I remained the same old stoic self. My first years in college were in the same mode: I’m fine, just like everyone else; nothing to see here. If people asked about my home back in BA, I lied. “I’m a foreign student and I’ll go back home when I’m done. Yes, my parents are down there waiting for my return.” I did not want to discuss their deaths. I did not want to explain that I no longer had a home in BA. It was too complicated and it was better to dissemble. That performance went on for quite a while.

But two years after arriving in Troy it came to a halt. In 1970 I returned to Buenos Aires during summer break. My trip started like a non-stop set of visits to my friends, and my Tantes and Onkels, back and forth from my hotel room. It was a frenzied merry-go-round of appointments, all of which left me tired and dizzy.  Yet at the same time curious things started happening. I went to Tablada to my parents' graves but the cemetery left me cold. I tried to cry, thinking that I should, but I couldn’t. I went to my old apartment and asked the new owners to let me walk around and, after I had done so, felt empty. I tried hard to connect with the shadows of my lost family but I wasn’t able to do so. My alienation was deep: While in the US I pretended that my parents were alive and, while in BA, I wanted to mourn but the tears did not come. Regardless of where I was, North or South, I couldn't wrap my mind around the fact that they were dead.

It was worse than that. I remember watching little Jorgito – my kid nickname - from afar, skip-hopping to grammar school happily attacking the mounds of crackling leaves in the old neighborhood. I saw him walking slowly down the long alleyways of the cemetery. I noticed him having pastries with his parents at Steinhauser, the European coffee shop that was a regular meeting ground of expats. These sightings were out-of-body experiences, where the boy wasn't me but someone else. It seemed as if my break wasn't just from my parents, but from myself. I was in exile from my own life. There was a profound distance between my past and my present, as though I was standing on one side of a deep gorge and watching my younger self on the other. I knew that the little boy I spotted there, going to school or standing by a grave, was Jorgito, but Jorgito wasn’t me. I watched him with a cool detachment that scared me.

And I was still scared when I returned to the US. I talked to my Aunt Bertha about the split between me and the little boy. She nodded and commented, how, in the two years I’d been in the US I had not once mentioned my parents, their deaths, or my feelings. “Not once,” she repeated, to make sure I got it.  She told me that she and Uncle Jack were worried about my mental health, and that I should find someone who could help me.

She gave me the telephone number of Emerick Friedman, a psychiatrist in Albany, and urged me to go. By then, I was no longer pretending to be strong and self-reliant, needing no one and being fine. The uncanny experiences in BA had shaken me.  Looking back, I realize that I was as close to a mental breakdown as I have possibly ever come. Aunt Bertha’s advice saved me.

So, in the fall of 1970 I went to Friedman and started talking. I sat across from him at his desk and, when our work started I said, in answer to his first question, “I’m here because I’m afraid that I have no feelings left; none. I’ve been lying to everyone. I’m a mess.” I told him about my recent visit to BA and seeing my younger self across the ravine, as though it was not me but someone else.  I told him that my father’s death filled me with guilt. I talked about Dad being a difficult man, from whom I felt no love. I had wanted him to die, so I could get his Emerson radio, be free to come to the US, and start my life anew. And now that I was here, it didn’t feel good at all. In fact, it felt terrible. I might as well have complained that I was close to falling off a cliff, but I didn’t yet know how fragile my inner exile had become.

Friedman looked at me in silence for a while and said, “. . . hmm, no feelings, eh?” Then, out of the blue, he asked, “Do you remember last spring, the student demonstrations that closed down RPI after the Kent State killings?”

“Of course, I remember,” I answered, annoyed that he was changing the subject.

“And what did you think of the Kent State killings?”

“I was pissed off! The whole thing reminded me of Argentina during the Onganίa dictatorship. I hate Nixon.”

Friedman looked at me in silence. “You seemed annoyed when I asked . . .” he said seriously. “And pissed off. . . and you hate Nixon,” he added breaking into a smile. “It does seem to me that you have feelings after all.”

And we took it from there. Friday after Friday, during my last year of college, my dialogues with Friedman suggested that perhaps the person I deceived most by my lies was none other than me, and that I should stop lying to myself. That I was rejecting the pity of others because I didn’t want to feel sorry for myself, and that I could, perhaps should, feel sorry for my losses and cry as much as needed.

“There’s nothing wrong in wanting to cry forever when one has lost both one’s parents and is alone in the world,” he said. “Wishing to cry forever under those circumstances seems pretty normal. And the crying will stop,” he assured me. He had seen it stop, he said, “. . . not to worry.”

Then he added, “And there’s nothing strange in wishing to kill someone when you’ve been wronged in a grievous way. A wish shouldn’t fill you with guilt. . . You didn’t kill your father, no matter how much you wanted him gone. Teen-agers want to be left alone, haven’t you heard?  It’s too bad that your Mom wasn’t around, and that your father was ill, but you were a normal adolescent and you wanted to be left alone and there’s no need to feel guilty for being a normal adolescent. It isn’t the world that needs to forgive you for the death of your father, Jorge. You need to forgive yourself for having had nothing more than the age-appropriate wishes of a growing teen-ager.”

During those weekly dialogues, I caught sight of the treadmill of delusions I’d been on, attempting to run away from the deaths inside. In Troy there were no deaths to speak of, only lies. And in BA I couldn’t even recognize my past self; no deaths to mourn there either. Friedman helped me slow the treadmill long enough to get a grip on reality. I was able to start feeling empathy for my younger self, and to recognize how much I had suffered in silence. For the first time in my life, I was able to utter the dreaded words, “I am an orphan.” My weekly therapy woke me up from a stubborn refusal to deal with what had happened. It didn’t take me to full sunshine but some of the clouds started lifting. 

After graduating from RPI I decided that the time had come to try and find out more about Dad. I knew then that I had not caused him to die, no matter how much I wanted it, but his ghost gave me no peace. I remembered him as tough, absent, unloving. For the first time in years, I went to the valise and anxiously opened my box, the one with the photos. I spread them on the bed and looked at them, searching for my father. I found one photo marked "Bruno and Carola Montanari, Trieste, 1965." It showed a group of five: a thin man sitting on the floor sporting a pencil-thin moustache, two elegant smiling women who looked like sisters, and two teenagers, a boy wearing a suit and tie next to the man with the moustache, and behind him, an older girl with the good looks of an Italian actress. That photo rang a loud bell. I remembered Dad mentioning that he had family in Trieste. He called them the Montanaris, and they seemed to be sisters and brothers in law, and nieces and nephews. The photo showed Dad’s long-lost Italian family, my unknown relatives.

I decided to pack my bags and go visit them during the summer before starting at Harvard. I would find out who this man was before becoming my Dad, when our years crossed in Buenos Aires, late in his life, early in mine. And not only who he was but also, why was he the way he was? What had made him into the stern and silent Dad I knew? He had told me nothing about his parents, his childhood, his siblings, his emigration to Argentina. He didn’t even talk about his life in BA before he married. He didn’t talk much at all. The Montanaris of Trieste would have answers to all of my questions. They would tell me about him.

Little did I know.