The jewish son, p.1
The Jewish Son, page 1
the
jewish son
a novel
DANIEL
GUEBEL
Translated by
JESSICA SEQUEIRA
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
new york • oakland • london
Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Guebel
English translation © 2023 by Jessica Sequeira
Originally published as El hijo judío by Literatura Random House, Buenos Aires, 2018.
First Seven Stories Press edition April 2023. Published by arrangement with Casanovas & Lynch Literary Agency, Barcelona, Spain.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. Visit https://www.sevenstories.com/pg/resources-academics or email academics@sevenstories.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Guebel, Daniel, 1956- author. | Sequeira, Jessica, translator.
Title: The Jewish son : a novel / Daniel Guebel ; translated by Jessica
Sequeira.
Other titles: Hijo judío. English
Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022053234 | ISBN 9781644212899 (trade paperback) | ISBN
9781644212905 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PQ7798.17.U254 H5513 2023 | DDC
863/.64--dc23/eng/20221216
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053234
Printed in the USA.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
THE JEWISH SON
What we fear most always happens.
I write: may Thou have mercy. And now?
—CESARE PAVESE, The Business of Living
An anecdote can explain everything, if you don’t forget what escapes it.
There wasn’t any food I liked as a child. Salty and sweet tastes, liquid and solid textures, big and small servings—I found everything disgusting. Feeding me was a real chore. Something made it through my lips, of course, else I’d be dead, but my dissatisfaction also increased this risk of death. What was it I wanted, instead of what they were offering? I can’t even say. Maybe, more than a whim, my pickiness was fury that I wasn’t the only child anymore; I found my sister’s birth indigestible.
Account for it any way you like, but my situation kept getting worse, so my parents took me to a pediatrician. He opted for the cold turkey approach: given that I was already eating so little, now I should be cut off from food entirely, until in my desperation I begged, oh please!, the error is mine, grant me the piece of bread I once scorned. The diet worked this way: Day One, total fast. Day Two, a single spoonful of tea, enriched with honey. Day Three, two spoonfuls. I don’t know how long the progression was supposed to continue, but within the week my paternal grandmother intervened, turning up and preparing a chicken soup with rice, which she served in a deep hot plate on a metal stand. As she guided spoonful after spoonful of soup to my mouth, she murmured, “You have to eat until your plate is empty, there’s something really lovely at the bottom.” The spoon plunged into the stew with its grains of rice and thick layer of fat that had melted off the chicken skin, forming a layer along with the little pieces of carrot, potato, and onion, and as it resurfaced, loaded to the brim, overflowing with contents, it created a suction effect, the liquid hollowed out by the spoon rippling toward the edges of the plate in heavy wavelets, briefly allowing a glimpse of something like a mirage under the dense concoction, an outline or future revelation, the promise of what had been promised. Captain Nemo couldn’t have felt greater anticipation than I did, plunging the prow of his Nautilus into the ocean for the first time. The imminence of knowledge, the possibility of accessing unexplored realms, presented itself. And then there he was before my eyes, a small Chinese gentleman printed on porcelain. He was bowing to a Chinese lady walking by, carrying a silk parasol she rested flirtatiously on her shoulder. I think that’s all, and maybe there wasn’t even a lady, just a man standing motionless, alone. Starting that moment, I began to eat the soup every day, the whole plate of it, to see the man appear wreathed in grains of rice, an edible filigree. The Chinese man was my first Eastern tale. From that moment, my childhood passion for the exotic would supply me with the nutrients I needed to survive in a world that failed to nourish my imagination. It must be said, in case it isn’t yet clear—by that point anguish had already taken its toll on me, and its expression was a kind of painful rictus that upset my parents. No one quite knows what to do with a boy; his existence is forever an enigma. He destroys his elders’ calm, ruins their emotional lives, burdens them with worries that are only alleviated in the days immediately preceding their own deaths, when their sons are themselves adults or almost old men, and the once-young parents, contemplating the horizons of the past, understand the cherished dreams and illusions they had for their offspring will be forever frustrated: deceptions. To accept this usually takes a couple of decades, in an effect of decantation that begins to accelerate with the end of adolescence. But in addition to all this, from a very early age I saw in my parents’ eyes not just premature disenchantment and irritation, but also, or so I believed, a desire to see me vanish by way of some catastrophic miracle. A sunstroke on the beach, doubly assured by a collapse of the cliff where we picnicked, the stones hitting me square on the head; an automobile accident with myself as sole casualty; a timely kidnapping followed by my assassination and the sale of my organs; or a simple disappearance, reported in the police bulletin: “Kid gone up in smoke.” Since this never happened, and I couldn’t help but be who I was (or what I was), I fantasized about some kind of reparation, also miraculous, which would make them accept me by changing me into whomever—or whatever—they hoped I would be. Obviously I didn’t know what or who that meant, even if I listened carefully to the names they called me (“crybaby,” “pain in the ass”) and adjectives they used to describe me (“insufferable,” “clingy”), and started to think it would’ve been better had my grandmother let me die of hunger. But every essence persists in its being, and every being persists in its essence, with humans no exception. And so I made myself constant promises to reform, strived to be likable in the eyes of my parents, exerted myself in every possible way to survive and be accepted, even if I didn’t know how to do so or why this was necessary. It’s naïve to think love’s constructions can triumph over the wear and tear of time’s passing: what is not given, whole and from the start, is never given at all. I saw my efforts dash against the wall of my parents’ bewilderment, as they took such attempts for impulses and eccentricities; but in consequence, instead of withdrawing to the solitude of my room, I threw myself once again into the struggle for love, multiplying my attempts in the belief that, eventually, I would pierce through the wall of incomprehension. I couldn’t manage it. Everything became an offering that sought to procure the love denied to me, and I doubled down on my efforts to please. Yet time and again, receiving my father’s icy gaze or my mother’s apathy, I, who had gone toward them smiling and with open arms, had to draw back, questioning what the appropriate gesture or word should have been, and telling myself that since I hadn’t achieved the miracle of love, I had to accept the responsibility for its rejection—in the form of both my original, irrevocable error and its logical consequence. “I’m an idiot, I must die,” I told myself.
This might sound cruel to the reader; I was just a boy. But it was even crueler to speak these phrases to myself in the conviction I was grasping my parents’ true message: “You’re an idiot, you must die.”
How could I bring about an end to that torment, and a beginning to acceptance, provisional as it might be? I tried to make myself tirelessly and constantly visible, with the aim that my mother and father would be unable to forget me for even a second. But the only thing this achieved was that my whole family united to claim I was jealous of my sister, whom they’d nicknamed “Chuchi” and called “precious little thing,” “beauty,” “loveliest teeny-tiny babykins conceived since humanity’s inception.” They exalted the porcelain tone of her little hands, her rosy cheeks, her perfectly modeled features, her chubby legs, her tantrums, grunts, babbles, vomits, defecations. Everything added to the charm of that little princess who stole attention from me, and who, to top it off, I was expected to celebrate too. And so I did, exaggerating my affection and concealing my spite, pinching her cheeks and hugging her whenever they passed her to me to hold. I hugged her with such enthusiasm she soon had to be wrenched away, to prevent suffocation. It’s not that I didn’t want to give her love. Just the opposite. Overcoming my first, brutal impulse to destroy her, I tried to offer care, and to be a real older brother, even as with small, secret torments I continued preparing her for the moment she’d be forced to embody the moral pain that I’d suffered, when the cycle of family fascination over her aura of novelty reached its end and neglect swept her into its mantle of denial.
Of course, it was still too early for this to happen, and in the meantime, Chuchi
***
And so the years slipped by, in that thrombosis of the affections, that stasis of a repeated dream. I grew up dry and hard as a reed, and my caprices and insolences began to adopt the form of hate, as a treacherous program of harm to others. In a preliminary diagram of the family architecture, my father was the strong one in the house, my mother the weak. In my politics of resentment, I decided to sabotage those links and test my mother’s patience with the “thousand and one.” To put it another way, I hoped to make the course of her days an inferno, with a thousand and one nights of nocturnal intimacy ruined through an accumulation of laments about my conduct, succeeded by reproaches from my father, who would accuse my mother of not leaving him in peace. That mode of operations revealed itself to be sterile and counterproductive, and if I’d possessed an ounce of cunning, I would have abandoned it immediately. Yet I pressed on with the assault, transforming myself into an unbearable element within an unbearable situation. And maybe there was a certain logic to this persistence, whose reaches I did not yet understand.
What were the “thousand and one” I inflicted on my mother? I jumped, I shouted, I smashed plates on the table, I didn’t answer her calls, I refused to wash my hands, I played marbles all over the house then didn’t pick them up (so others would step on them, slip and fall, break their necks), I pinched Chuchi . . . All an inventory of youthful treacheries that, according to my mother, cried out to the heavens for reprisal. But instead of immediately supplying me with a punishment equivalent to the dimensions of my offense—yanks on the ear, hair, or nose; slaps, smacks, or blows of her sandal—my mother warned me: “You’ll get what’s coming to you, when your father gets home.” I shouted at her, I begged: “No, please, I want you to hit me.” But my mother refused: “I won’t be the one who does it, he’ll be the one who lays down the law.”
***
Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father is one of my favorite books. If I had to choose between rescuing this handbook of self-disparagement and reproach from a blazing fire, or Ulysses, I’d abandon Joyce’s pyrotechnic novel to the flames and burn my fingers to save the few pages written by the Czech Jew. But that decision (soul over exhibitionism) does not blind me to the knowledge that, in the Letter, a perverse breeze blows. A naïve reading of the text might lead us to believe young Kafka is an innocent victim, as we identify with the injured tone of his prose suggesting a sensitive spirit at pains to explain to his father and himself who he is, knowing or believing we know that within the father, Don Hermann, abysses of brutality and incomprehension are hidden. In fact, Kafka didn’t even have the courage to hand over the letter to his father, choosing instead to give it to his mother so she would know its contents and work as an intermediary, softening the irate response of the recipient as far as possible, or in the best of cases, serving as its translator. What the text constantly says is: that which I am, Father, you shall never understand. If you like, it is a testimony to the vast confusion woven by the threads of inheritance, proof of the absorbing sensation of strangeness a father always feels before the singularity and otherness of his progeny. Thinking in this way, it would make sense to ask the Christians, that is, the Jews with polytheistic inclinations, what they believe God experienced when his son, Jesus, decided to surrender himself in sacrifice to humanity. And it would also be interesting to find out what Jesus thought when confronted by the terrifying absence of the Father, who made a dash for the abyss without taking any measures to prevent a suicide by the Son. If Christianity, or Catholicism if you prefer, elevated the Virgin Mary (Miriam) to the highest celestial hierarchies, it is because she was understood as a necessary condition to explain the meaning of that sacrifice to God. Yeshua (whether ben Pandera, or not) required Miriam for this process to take place. But, as is also well known, a father is often incapable of understanding, since in him, far more than in the mother, it takes time for the consciousness to germinate the idea that the birth of a child inscribes, in the books of destiny, the date of one’s own death. That delay is the true womb of punishment. And that is why Franz Kafka delivered the letter to his mother, so she would read it, and understand the sort of husband she had, and having grasped this, refrain from giving him the letter. Franz’s mother, who understood everything immediately, did exactly this, and returned the pages to her son. Did she read the letter or not? I take it for granted that she did: that, in fact, she was the true recipient of the writing. The scene of the message’s aborted delivery, and its return, with one false recipient and another true, completes the reading. Why would Don Hermann Kafka ever take upon himself the work of scrutinizing that inventory of lamentations and complaints? He was no more than a peasant who early on had stopped trying to understand a son sophisticated in his cultural decisions but clumsy in his sentimental ones, a scatterbrain incapable of giving him what he dreamed of: a grandson. A grandson to offer him solace and consolation in his final years.
When read as an adult, Letter to His Father awakens pity for the poor man who wore himself out lifelong to honorably provide for his family, and at the dawn of old age had to face the evidence he’d raised a weakling son, an emaciated vegetarian miser who hated him while feigning the greatest submission. I’d like to have had a father like him; it would have been much simpler. Instead, I . . . I, who hoped only for a little acceptance and respect and love, and who did not bear in my spirit the slightest desire to be rebuked, merited only blows. I highly doubt Don Hermann ever dared to raise a hand against Franz.
***
“Just wait until your father gets home, then you’ll have a real treat,” Mama said.
I begged her, “Please,” I said, “You hit me right now, please.” But she said, “No, you have to wait.” Those situations produced the feeling of an imminence that took hours to be made concrete: a delayed anguish that unfurled over endless minutes, in anticipation of the punishment I implored her to execute straight away. “My Lord,” I prayed, “give me every pain necessary, but in the present!” Ever since then, time has become for me the form assumed by the sinister, and life a prolonged investigation into the forms of enduring punishment. In suffering them, you discover how much you can tolerate without breaking, or if you do, what promises to interject, what requests for forgiveness, what pleas, what demonstrations of repentance: the number of times it is necessary to sink your knees into the earth.
My father. He came back from work each day, fed up with his labors. He opened the door (how much I feared that moment and those that preceded it, the squeak of the garage door, the muffled rumble of the entering car, the hum of the switched-off motor). His first question was always: “How did the kids behave today?” And then the response came: “With Chuchi I had no trouble, but he . . .” Without naming me, my mother started in on her list of infractions committed. Then my father raised his eyes to the sky, in a gesture that encapsulated his infinite fatigue, and with a slow hand he unloosened his belt, which came off him whistling like a snake. After pulling on the two ends to confirm the robustness of the strap, he raised it and said: “Come here.” And before the first blow, he uttered a statement whose meaning for me constituted the greatest enigma: “This is going to hurt me more than it does you.”
A belt isn’t a knout or whip bristling with nails, and my father lashed me with the leather, never using the buckle to tear into me or strike my face. At the beginning of the session, he let fly his usual questions: “Why did you behave so badly, when are you going to start being a good boy . . . ?” Over the course of that interrogation, during which I begged him to stop the punishment, and offered no answers but sobs, the speed and intensity of the blows increased. I don’t remember now if I remained standing during those moments, or if my father bent me over his knees and flogged me in that position. I doubt it was the latter, because in that case the operation would have been complicated by the proximity of the implement to the part of the body being struck. Thus I assume my father maintained a convenient distance, twisted his wrist and began with the strappings. Nor do I remember whether, after I pulled down my trousers, I stayed in my underwear, or whether my ass was exposed to the air. I don’t need to spell out that the gradations of pain varied; since my father wore trousers with narrow loops, the width of the belt could not have exceeded five centimeters, and each blow thus necessarily fell upon a different area: his was not a methodical “sweep” of the totality but a partial intervention dictated by chance, at whose discretion the belt landed on new zones or applied itself entirely or partially to a zone already hit. Even worse than the strokes on the rear were the ones that fell on the legs or waist: they burned and stung with a hundredfold greater harshness. The tears surged forth of their own volition, involuntary liquid responses fired into the air that my father, since he was behind me and could not see my face, did not take into account as a sign he should stop. What’s more, as the blows escalated in intensity, I shut myself away into the greatest silence, which he took to be a proof of resistance to his punishment or a protest against his convictions, and increased his fury. Under those circumstances, he lost track of his strength, or perhaps the rhythmic cadence made him enter into a disturbed state, and from a certain point onward, return became impossible. This was the point he saw himself driven to reach. Then he not only yelled, but from the corner of his lips a foam began to emerge, which flew into the air in sputtering droplets. It’s true that this happened on only a few occasions, since the majority of times he stopped beforehand, either because he retained a sliver of consciousness, or because of Chuchi, who interrupted at her own risk and more than once received a couple of blows intended for me. My sister would let out a shriek, and say: “Stop it, Dad, you’re going to kill him!” Then he would emerge from his frenetic dream, refrain with a shudder, and hurry to lock himself away in the matrimonial bedroom. Through the closed doors we could hear his crying, a soft, convulsive, anguished moan from a strangled throat.
