A CALL IN THE NIGHT
Dr. Tomás Hudson, reclining in his therapist's chair in his high-rise consulting room in Villa Freud, listened attentively as his patient, Claudio G, spewed out his rage at his adoptive parents.
Claudio, twenty-two years old, a talented painter, was the son of left-wing people who'd been arrested and subsequently disappeared during the time of the Proceso. His mother had given birth to him in prison. Immediately afterwards he was snatched from her arms, then adopted by José and Prudencia Soler, a conservative, childless military couple.
"They wanted a blond blue-eyed boy, you see, to match their Northern European heritage."
Claudio, whose typical gesture when agitated was to repetitively brush away the shock of blond hair that hung across his forehead, was in the midst of a mortifying description of the Solers, whom he couldn't bring himself to call "dad" or "mama," or anything other than "he," "she," or "they," the pronouns enunciated with such revulsion that at times Claudio nearly spat them out.
"I can imagine them shopping in the prison birthing ward, moving methodically from bed to bed, shaking their heads over infants who looked too Italian. God forbid their child would have an olive skin. Or show the slightest sign of Indian blood! Or be female. 'No stinkin' girls for us!' No! They knew exactly what they were looking for, and when Captain Shitface, the fucker in charge of handing us out, brought them over to me, they practically pissed in their pants. 'Isn't he darling!' 'So cute!' 'So sweet and tender!' 'So just-like-us!' 'He'll make a fine little soldier.' 'An outstanding cadet-officer!' 'We'll take the little tyke.' 'Don't bother to wrap him. We'll take him "as is"!'
"Then the pompous little lieutenant slyly slipped a hundred pesos to Captain Shitface. 'A little something for your trouble, sir!' 'Oh, thanks, José. And if you need a godfather for him, I'm sure Colonel Cocksucker would be proud to fulfill the role.'"
Claudio fell into a fit of coughing. The young man was exhausting himself, yet Tomás did not interrupt. Claudio's fantasy, he understood, was a way to release his venom, hopefully clearing the way for a more accurate appraisal of the Solers later on, an appraisal which, Tomás felt strongly, must encompass a view of his adoptive parents as mediocrities rather than outsize personifications of evil.
Tomás had been working with Claudio for six months, seeing him once a week in face-to-face therapy sessions. The young man inevitably turned up for sessions in a black T-shirt and black jeans, "in mourning," as he put it, "for my lost boyhood."
Tomás considered Claudio's case exemplary on account of the way his adopted-orphan identity crisis intruded on his work. He was immensely gifted. Tomás had seen that immediately. But Claudio's development as an artist was now blocked by his rage, which he could only express in a cycle of devastating portraits in which his adoptive parents were depicted wearing halos, kneeling at an altar, taking communion, or in some other posture of public piety—the piety refuted by the contortions of their hands, the cruelty in their eyes and their fierce, tightly-drawn, smirking lips.
A gallery in Palermo, which had taken Claudio on, had managed to sell several of these canvasses. But Claudio was frustrated. As he told Tomás when he entered therapy: "I don't want to paint pretty pictures. But am I doomed to spend my life making images of their phony rectitude?"
It was a difficult case, for the young man seemed unable to find an exit. His hands, Tomás observed, shook all the time, except, Claudio informed him, when he was drawing or painting. He also had difficulty maintaining intimate relationships. He was good looking, attracted girls, but inevitably his attempts at romance would fail. Sooner or later the young woman would complain of coldness or find herself unable to deal with his stress. Yet, Claudio confided in Tomás, he wanted more than anything to have a steady girlfriend.
Often, as Tomás listened to Claudio, the boy's agony would rend his heart. He desperately wanted to equip him to cope in the world and to fulfill himself as an artist. Over the months he had led Claudio through the labyrinth of childhood events that had aroused his suspicions that he was not really the Solers' child. Then his euphoria when, at age sixteen, he discovered who his real birth parents had been: María G, a principal dancer in the National Ballet, and Inigo G, chief set designer for the company.
"They were artists! Artists, Dr. Hudson! Which meant that all the creative impulses I'd always felt were in my genes, that same 'bad seed' he and she despised in me...."
Claudio, having discovered his true identity, located his aunt and asked her to take him in. His aunt had been thrilled to do so, and then to fight and win a custody battle against the Solers. Claudio, taking back his birth parents' name, refused even to nod at the Solers in court.
"Perhaps the most ironic aspect," he told Tomás, grinning, "was that they always ridiculed my artwork, because, knowing my birth parents had been artists, they feared I'd inherit their politics."
For Tomás, Claudio's use of the word "ironic," was the most promising event in the session. If Claudio could find irony in the behavior of the Solers, then perhaps he could begin the process of reframing them in his imagination.
"You know, Claudio," Tomás told him, "there were men among the torturers and murderers (and we know Lieutenant Soler was merely a bureaucrat, nothing more) who would take Holy Communion from an Army priest before abusing and killing their prisoners. Think about that. Diabolical yes, but can you also see how pathetic that was?"
Claudio nodded. "Of course! They were idiots! Of course I find that pathetic!" Claudio peered at Tomás. "But still I'd kill them if I could. And the priest too, him first of all."
"Okay, today you presented a rich fantasy of your adoptive parents shopping for a baby. Now let's see if you can imagine something different. Imagine them apologizing to you, begging your forgiveness."
"Apologize for deceiving me, bringing me up to believe in lies?"
Tomás nodded. "How would you react?"
After a long pause, Claudio smiled slightly. "I think I'd want to kick them in the teeth."
The session was nearly over. Tomás did not want it to end on such an angry note.
"Here's a suggestion. Try and make a little drawing of them—nothing big or important, just a little sketch in which you imagine their faces as they ask you to forgive them...even though we know it's doubtful they ever will."
Claudio didn't think much of the idea. "What would be the point?"
"To see if you can find it within yourself to depict the pathos in them. Remember, you came to me because you wanted to let go of your obsession.
I think if you could do so with your pencil...that could be a start."
Claudio pondered the idea a while. Finally he shrugged. "Okay, I'll try it. Maybe something will come of it...." He shrugged again.
After Claudio left, Tomás paced his office. It was a classic psychotherapist's consulting room: dark upholstered recliners for therapist and patient; beige leather couch if the patient was to undergo a classical psychoanalysis; display of primitive masks on one of the walls, excellent for associative work; discreetly positioned digital clock so both therapist and patient would be aware as a session neared its end.
Orphan patients were Tomás' specialty. He was currently treating five—three young women and a boy in addition to Claudio. And although therapy sessions with them were often exhausting, he reveled in their intensity.
He was fond of all his patients, would even say he loved them. And among them Claudio, the most gifted, in some ways the most troubled, was his favorite because of the extreme vulnerability he sensed beneath the boy's anger.
For Claudio, Tomás felt, a particular problem was that José Soler did not outwardly resemble the prototypal torturer-murderer. He wasn't crude or uneducated, didn't have the requisite overhanging belly, vacant stare or sadistic smirk. Moreover, he had never physically beaten the boy. Soler was just an ethnically nordic former military officer with simple beliefs, whose bland personality could not be reconciled with Claudio's demonic images.
Tomás stared out his window at Buenos Aires. The city appeared lonely this grey autumn afternoon, a labyrinth in which millions of people moved about, passing one another, yet always walled off and alone. Looking out, he was struck by the notion that perhaps it was only in certain strange corners of the metropolis—brothels, tango halls, torture chambers, psychoanalysts' consulting rooms—that porteños could fully connect.
Poised behind the lectern, Tomás looked out at his audience. Every seat in the auditorium was filled, there were standees in back, and the overflow was seated on the first and second floor stairs as well as in the adjoining Board Room where his voice would be carried by loud speaker.
He knew many of the people sitting before him: colleagues, students, friends of many years standing. His beloved mentor and training analyst, Carlos Peña, sat in the center of the first row, accompanied by his practice associate, Victoria Fabiani. Two rows back sat Tomas's former long-time lover, Ana Moreno. Looking further he spotted two other women with whom he'd been intimate, Leonore Guzman and Beatriz Cohen, both among the more distinguished of the Institute's younger analysts.
Nearly everyone he knew had shown up tonight. Strangers too, members of rival institutes—Jungians, Lacanians and also people outside the profession. His office had been flooded with phone and email inquiries ever since the event was announced. For who in Buenos Aires psychoanalytic circles could resist his title: "Orphans From The Time Of The Proceso: The Psycho-Therapeutic Treatment Of Sons And Daughters Of The Disappeared?"
It was eight-thirty p.m. The crowd was settling down. Tomás waited for silence, paused...then began to speak:
"The orphans I will speak about tonight are prisoners of history, victims of our authoritarian politics. I'm talking about young people whose identities have been stolen, trapped in a web of lies. Some cannot bring themselves to discuss their situation. Others can only speak of it with fury. Still others suffer from severe physical and mental symptoms: obesity, bulimia, untreatable rashes, debilitating depressions, obsessive fantasies of vengeance and suicide.
"Through the years we've read much about these tragic young people, now approaching their mid twenties—how they were, as one witness put it, 'given away like kittens' to the very people who had arrested, were holding, and sometimes even tortured and murdered their birth parents.
"The birth mothers, as we all know, were soon taken back to the cells in the same building, there to meet terrible fates. All were disappeared, their burial places unrecorded and unknown. And their infants, born in captivity, delivered into the hands of their birth parents' enemies, were brought up to be obedient, well-behaved military children...or so their adoptive parents hoped.
"These adoptive parents rarely came clean with them. Often the orphans discovered their true identities only by accident: a slip of the tongue, a story that didn't add up, curious looks directed at them by 'grandparents' and 'cousins,' whispers overheard when the adoptive parents assumed they were asleep.
"When, as young adults, they come to us in states of agony, it becomes our job not only to try and salve their pain, but also to bring out the truth about the crimes committed against them. This is necessary so that what has occurred may be examined by all concerned—the orphans, their surviving blood relatives, even by the adoptive parents in those rare instances when they're willing to listen. The entire nation must hear these stories. These orphan/adoptive parent relationships derive from cases of unprosecuted murder. Until the wrappings of secrecy are torn away, our nation will continue to be ill."
Tomás paused. He was speaking without notes. It wasn't his intention to deliver a cool lecture or present effective treatment strategies. Rather he wished to reach his audience in the most tender corners of their psyches. He wanted, most of all, to speak with an eloquence commensurate with the pain felt by his patients.
He began by explaining how this category of patient had become his specialty. It was a typical psychoanalytic practice story—a referral from a colleague, followed by a coincidental referral from another, a paper delivered, a seminar conducted, an article published then widely discussed. After word spread that he'd devised effective treatments, members of The Grandmothers Of The Plaza began to recommend him. Finally there were so many referrals he was forced to turn patients away.
In an ideal world, he told his audience, many therapists would be performing this work. But, he reminded them, only a few were willing to take such cases on. There were many reasons: the patients were considered difficult, the prognoses were poor, the political implications were serious, and the guilt evoked was severe.
"Many of us," he said, "who lived through the Proceso, remember the cowardly neutral stance of this Institute toward the crimes of the military regime. As a result many long-time friendships were broken. Splinter groups formed. The individual tragedies of the disappeared and the orphans were subsumed by the collective tragedy of our community, itself but a microcosm of a vast national tragedy which has yet to be resolved.
"Yet," Tomás asked, "how can we even begin to reconstruct our community and our nation if we do not try to heal those who may be its greatest living victims?"
He paused again, took a sip of water. Then he took a deep breath to steady himself.
"Some of you know my personal story, how my beloved wife, Dr. Sarah Shahar, whom I first met in a seminar room in this very building, was disappeared...."
Total silence. People sat rigid in their seats. Though many in the audience knew Tomás and Sarah's story, this was the first time he'd spoken of it in public. It was, he knew, often mentioned in whispers behind his back: 'Oh, you're taking Hudson's seminar; of course you know what happened to his wife?' It was like a dark cloud that followed him. Some believed it gave him a tragic aura. Others were less kind: 'Hudson treats the orphans because of what happened to his wife. He's mired in the past.'"
Tomás had not decided to evoke Sarah's name tonight to respond to such remarks, rather to suggest that Sarah's disappearance had given him an important therapeutic tool: an ability to empathize with those who felt they had suffered a huge injustice, an injustice the nation had done virtually nothing to cure.
This was his lead-in to the principal lesson he wanted to convey: the need on the part of colleagues dealing with such cases to put aside orthodoxy, resist adherence to conventional technique, and, instead, to allow themselves, guided by empathy and compassion, to share their patients outrage.
"It has been said of our specialty," he told them, "that it is both a science and an art—that it is based on objective scientific principles yet should be delivered to patients in a warm and artful way. It is my position, in these special orphan cases, that the art is everything and the science virtually meaningless."
He could feel a stirring in the hall. There were people who would take that statement as an affront. Even as he continued, two former Institute Board members made a conspicuous exit, men he hadn't spoken to in twenty years.
He paused in mid-sentence so that their departure would be noticed. Yes, please leave! he thought, for he recognized the two as having been among those who, on grounds of professional neutrality, had refused him when he'd beseeched the Board for help and intervention after Sarah's disappearance.
When they were gone, he briefly outlined his five orphan cases, speaking not only about his treatment successes but also about his failures. He spoke of his personal reactions to these troubled young people, how he had striven to create transference bonds that would transcend the parental-based analytic relationships of standard therapeutic practice. He explained that even in cases where the patients were rescued by their grandparents or other surviving relatives, these rescuers often had deep-seated problems of their own.
Finally he ended with an appeal:
"Sadly, although we have had a so-called Truth Commission here, we have never properly dealt with the matter of Justice. Unlike other countries where authoritarian regimes also produced forms of mass psychosis, we have not created an opportunity here for the practitioners of evil to publicly confess and show remorse. Instead our politicians have criminally, in my view, signed amnesty laws without setting any of the necessary preconditions: public confrontation, public confession, public remorse.
"As psychoanalysts, we must not only give our highest priority to the healing of these patients, but we must also seek truth and reconciliation within our profession. Only if we do that, will we regain our self-respect. And then perhaps we Argentine analysts may become exemplars to our nation, encouraging it to fulfill its needs for truth and reconciliation."
He had spoken for slightly less than an hour. When he finished and looked out shyly at his audience, he wasn't sure what to expect. Perhaps polite clapping mixed with a few cheers from admirers and boos from professional enemies.
Nothing prepared him for the absolute stillness that followed, then the clapping that began slowly as listeners in the forward rows rose to their feet—clapping that built, turned rhythmic, then swelled into thunderous applause as it was picked up by those listening from the Board Room and the stairs. Then the entire audience rising, still applauding, men and women seeking to engage him with their eyes, many facing him shamelessly as tears streaked down their cheeks.
It took him a while to extricate himself from the crowd. Everyone, it seemed, wished to offer congratulations. Several younger Institute members took the opportunity to present their cards and request referrals. Older members thanked him for finally saying in public what so many already knew: that the psychoanalytic community itself was in dire need of healing.
When, finally, he made his way out of the building, he hurried away, finding relief only after he turned the corner.
The speech had been a draining experience. The faces of his audience had seemed blank to him, attentive but without affect. Only Carlos Peña had appeared receptive, encouraging him with subtle nods of his head and the warmth Tomás always found in his eyes. Yet it seemed now that he had misread the hall, that there were hundreds tonight who had been moved.
It was fear, he decided, that had blinded him—fear of failure and rejection.
He hurried the few blocks to Los Inmortales, where he'd arranged to meet his closest colleague-friends. They were already assembled, waiting for him, when he came through the door—Carlos Peña, Victoria Fabiani, Ramón Cafiero, Hugo and Tanya Vargas and Ana Moreno.
Ana called out to him: "Tomás! Over here!"
The restaurant, decorated with period photos of Gardel, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and other "immortals," was jammed with people. The table of shrinks was in a corner of the front room. As Tomás approached, his friends rose to greet him. Each hugged and kissed him several times.
"You were fabulous, Tomás!"
"Fantastic!"
"Best presentation in years!"
"Hopefully a turning-point for the Institute."
"Did you see the look on Bukovsky's face when he and Weissman walked out?"
"I was so proud of you tonight," Ana told him. "So proud of what you do."
The watering in her beautiful eyes told him that she meant it. He hugged her, stroked the lovely shoulder length grey hair that framed her face, taking in her familiar scent. How many times had they lain together lightly stroking one another after making love? Now fifty, she was still extremely attractive...as Sarah, her friend, would have been too, he thought.
"I just try to pick up the pieces," he told her lightly, "salvage something out of all the wreckage."
"I wish Javier had come," she said. "He would have been so proud of you."
Tomás shrugged. "Javier and I are touchy these days. Hopefully soon we'll work things out."
"Ah, sons!" Tanya Vargas nodded. She and her husband, Hugo, had just the day before returned from a trip to New York. "Our son is incredibly touchy with us. For him, a self-styled 'man of the left,' everything is political."
"While for us, of course, everything is due to the unconscious!" Hugo Vargas added.
They all laughed.
"What is it with shrinks and our kids?" Victoria asked.
"Maybe they're jealous of our patients," Hugo said.
"Well, wouldn't you be?" Ana asked. "How would you feel brought up in a house with troubled strangers coming and going all the time?"
"A kid watches as a patient goes into a room with one or another of his parents," Tanya said. "The door closes...and when the patient comes out the kid can tell he or she's been screaming or weeping. What a nightmare! It's enough to make any kid want to run away from home!"
During the ensuing laughter, Tomás sat down between Ana and Carlos Peña.
Carlos' pride was written on his face. "You made an enormous impression," he whispered. "Everyone was moved."
"Well, you trained me well, didn't you?" Tomás whispered back.
It had been in Carlos's seminar on adolescent psychopathology that he and Sarah had first met. Carlos had been Tomás' training analyst. For years Tomas had thought of him as his "good father," the man he loved and respected most. Carlos was a charismatic figure at the Institute. People were in awe of him; he even looked the part of Great Man due to the way he carried himself—leonine head, thick grey hair swept back over his ears, compelling voice, the crystalline quality of his ideas. Of all those on the Board to whom Tomás had turned for help when Sarah was taken, Carlos was the one who'd done the most, standing with him in his time of need.
But Tomás had come to Los Inmortales to escape the subject of his speech, to eat, drink, hopefully laugh a little too. His friends knew this and soon they settled down, ordering wine and the pizzas for which the restaurant was famous. Then Ana and Victoria took turns recounting the latest in Buenos Aires psychoanalyst jokes, most of which began with either one of two openings: "A shrink walks into a bar...." or "A guy comes into a bar and sits down next to a shrink...."
Listening to the jokes, Tomás and his friends doubled over with laughter.
Later, Ana reminded them how analysts in other countries often smiled disparagingly when discussing the psychoanalytic movement in Argentina, finding it amusing that Argentines were so self-involved that the country had the highest ratio of analysts to general population in the world, exceeding the ratio in New York by a multiple of three.
"If they could see us now," she said, "they'd see how unpretentious we are."
Carlos shook his head. "They wouldn't see it. They'd still think of us as self-indulgent provincials. I wish some of them had been here tonight to hear Tomás speak. I think then they'd begin to understand what we're about."
Just before midnight, after more kisses and embraces in front of the restaurant, the group dispersed. Ana's goodnight was especially tender.
"Let's have dinner one night soon," she whispered.
Looking into her deep grey eyes, inhaling the scent of her skin, he thought again of the many hours over the years they'd spent in one another's arms.
For months he'd been tempted to approach her about resuming their affair, which had ended four years before on an angry note. For a year afterwards they hadn't spoken, then, slowly, had renewed their colleague-ship. But he'd been afraid to ask for fear she would sweetly shake her head.
Carlos offered him a lift home to Villa Freud, but Tomás declined.
"Thanks, but I'm going to walk a while."
Carlos smiled. "I forgot, Tomás, how much you like to walk at night. It's your best thinking time, isn't it?" And, when Tomás nodded: "Thanks again for giving such a wonderful speech. You gave us all a hell of a lot to think about."
He loved to walk the city after midnight, striding the streets, the "labyrinthine grid" as Borges had called it, seeing the city artificially lit, drained of color. Though he greatly admired Borges' writings, he did not walk to emulate the man he thought of as The Poet of the City. He walked at night because he loved to. It was the best way he knew to relax.
On Avenida Santa Fe, he passed store windows where luxury goods were artfully arranged—shoes, handbags, fashionably cut leather garments. These displays, among mannequins positioned in suggestive poses, reminded him of the self-indulgence of his fellow porteños, their fascination with expensive purchases, surgically enhanced beauty and empty sexual encounters.
Pausing before the window of a bookstore closed for the night, he searched it for literature. But all he could find were multiple copies of the current bestseller, 30 Days To A Stress-Free Life.
More like thirty years, he thought.
He turned west toward the heart of the city. Coming across the words "Evita Vuelve!" scrawled on the wall of a bank, he felt a surge of disgust. Why, he wondered, did people still idolize that woman who had howled for social justice while wearing a neurotic, other-worldly, painted-on half-smile?
A taxi pulled to the curb, hailed by a pair of young women, foreign milongueras, Tomás could tell, on account of the way they were dressed. They were off, he guessed, to one or another of the all-night clubs where they'd dance, perspire, flick their legs between the legs of strangers, seeking yet resisting contact, becoming drunk on the dance.
He and Sarah had loved to dance. In the early days of their courtship they regularly hit the tango halls. Sarah, the superior dancer, had taught him, encouraged him, then sent him off to practicas in the hope he'd become her equal on the floor.
He often thought of her on his late night strolls. It was a way to be with her again. Though nineteen years had passed since her abduction, at night, in the city made surreal by shadows, the memories flooded back.
On Avenida 9 de Julio, he paused to watch a group of cirujas, so called because of the surgical precision with which they cut into black plastic garbage bags in search of the city's detritus. They were poor people from the shanty towns concealed within the interstices of the capital, who came out at night to scour the avenues for treasure.
Spotting a swastika boldly painted on a building just behind, Tomás turned hurriedly toward Corrientes to lose himself in the caffeinated crowds that haunted the all-night cinemas and pool halls.
At the corner of Esmeralda and Corrientes he passed an aging Gardel impersonator mouthing words to a scratchy old tape played from a battery operated machine set between his feet. Passersby ignored him. The plastic cup before him held only a few coins. But still the old man pretended to wail out old tangos from the 1930s—songs about love, torment, destiny and shattered dreams.
Heading back up the Diagonal Norte, he thought about what had happened to this great city where he was born, had lived his entire life, and which, for all its faults, he continued to love. It was a louche city in many ways, grand and even stylish in its decay, a city of balmy "good breezes," public buildings with magnificent facades, splendid tree-lined boulevards, perhaps the most gorgeous opera house ever built. Yet for all its grandeur, he thought of it as a city of lonesome wanderers like himself, struggling to find their way through the luxuriously-appointed and sometimes-criminal fantasy called "Argentina."
Two a.m.: entering his dark apartment in Villa Freud, he noticed the red light blinking on his answering machine.
A patient awakened by a nightmare? Who else would call so late?
He listened to the message. Though the male voice was unfamiliar, he found it chilling. In it he heard the same combination of toneless arrogance and servility from that terrible time when, years before, he'd made the rounds of government offices in his frantic effort to find some trace of Sarah. But then, as he listened to the man's words, he was chilled even more, for what he heard was worse even than a threat against his own life:
"You do not know me, Doctor, but I was present in your audience tonight. I found your speech most interesting. I have valuable information for you—to wit, the name of the person who denounced your wife. When and if we manage to come to terms, agree, that is, upon an appropriate fee for this priceless knowledge, be assured I will be able to document everything I tell you and provide appropriate bona fides. Perhaps the thought of paying for such information is repulsive to you. But, sir, we are not all of us doctors! In these difficult times some of us barely manage to survive. We are forced to sell our furniture, clothing, even our bedding on the street. So if we possess some other asset, such as the precious information to which I refer, then are we not permitted to sell that as well so that we too may occasionally enjoy a decent steak as all good porteños like to do? Please, sir, give this some thought. I will contact you soon to discuss the matter further. Until then please be assured that I hold you in the highest personal esteem."
Tomás, trembling, rewound the tape and listened to it again. It was vile...yet, in a strange way, also seductive, and, for that reason, artfully conceived...as, he recognized, the most evil acts of men so often are.