The Kinship of Secrets

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, while I’ve been on leave this year to complete the revisions on a novel, I’ve also been serving as an “editor-at-large” for the website of Ninth Letter. Which means finding work that breaks out of the confines of our print magazine: video essays, multi-media collaborations, or serialization of work that pushes the borders of our length requirements.

Right now we’re running a five-part series of a long excerpt from Inside the Secret, a memoir of travel to North Korea by the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto (a winner of the Saramago Prize for his novel The Implacable Order of Things). The essay also includes beautifully unsettling photos he took while in the country that have never appeared anywhere else. Peixoto is a fine writer, and he is quite observant about the bleak playacting of the citizens of North Korea, especially when describing his visit to a bookstore, a grocery, and the rarity of a hamburger restaurant. His description of watching the paranoid dramatics of the country’s only TV channel is absolutely chilling.

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Elsewhere, though, Peixoto does what only the best writers can do—connect the foreign with one’s intimate self. Any decent writer can work up a good scene about a North Korean hamburger joint—the experience practically writes itself. But that’s seeing from the outside, keeping the North Koreans firmly in place as an Other. And certainly, all the lying and false claims of the country wear him down over the course of his trip. But in the 4th installment, Peixoto describes calling his family from the hotel, and now we see a first-rate writer in action, revealing what the best literature always does: making transparent what had been obscure.

He doesn’t want to upset his family during the phone conversation, and so he says everything is all right, though that hides a great deal of what he’s feeling. And he realizes that they are probably doing the same thing, that if something were really wrong, they wouldn’t tell him, because he’s so far away. They’re each keeping secrets. And then he says to the reader:

“We keep our secrets together with all the other things we don’t say. Up in that great big, shadowy attic there are things we don’t say because we’re afraid, because we’re ashamed, because we simply can’t; there are things we don’t say because we don’t know about them, really don’t know, even though they’re right there inside us. Secrets aren’t like that. They are there, we can visit them, observe them, know exactly the words to express them and, often, we want so much to tell them. But we choose not to.

“Our secrets are within us. Along with everything else that we know, we are made of our secrets. When we hold them in, when we are strong enough to contain them, they spread inside us. From within, they seep up through our skin. They keep on going until sometimes we catch sight of them when we turn around, or hear them in the silence. Then, at that moment, it’s not just our secrets that are inside us, it’s also we who are inside our secrets.”

Note the use of the first person plural, “we.” North Korea may seem like the most alien of places, but really, North Korean society is (among many other things) an institutionalization of a basic human impulse—we all keep secrets (secrets that are all too often capable of altering us). It’s secrecy and masking gone mad, yes, but in Peixoto’s view, the North Koreans are kin to us, and we are kin to them.

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May 14th, 2014 by admin

My Mambo King

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Of all the photos taken of him, the image above captures best, I think, the man who was my friend for thirty-eight years. Oscar Hijuelos and I met in graduate school at City College in 1975, two young writers in Frederick Tuten’s fiction workshop. Oscar was shy, even deferential to the other writers in the workshop, but when he first read his work to us in class, his head bowed over the pages on the desk, his voice low, everyone recognized his enormous talent.

We became friends, visiting each other often in his apartment on the Upper West Side or the house I was renting with old college friends north of the city. We read each other’s manuscripts (and continued to do so over the years), discovered that we were born within two days (and only a few miles) of each other, and we talked about our life-or-death love of literature, drank and joked and ate at any Cuban-Chinese restaurant we came upon in New York. To say Oscar had a good sense of humor is not quite right—he had a great sense of amusement, about everything in the world (and he also had a great curious appetite for everything in the world), and when I hear Oscar’s voice in my mind (and I listen to him a lot these days), I can hear his restrained chuckle, or the casual bemusement in the very tone of his speaking. That slight, gentle smile in the photo says it all.

When my wife Alma and I spent the summer of 1987 in New York City with our then months-old son Nathaniel, we rented an apartment a few blocks from Oscar’s place. He was just back from living abroad (he’d won a Rome Prize for his first novel, Our House in the Last World). Our first night in town, we walked over to Oscar’s, to introduce him to our first child. We were shocked at his hollowed-out apartment—he’d inadvertently gotten into a little trouble with the IRS over taxes while he was in Rome, and now he was selling his furniture piece by piece to raise money. As we spoke, my son began wailing in my arms, and Oscar reached over to a nearly empty shelf, picked up a kalimba, and began improvising a serenade.

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Almost immediately Nathaniel calmed down, and without hesitation Oscar made us a present of the instrument—one of his last possessions. That generosity was typical of Oscar. You can see that kindness in the photo, as well as some of the sadness that was never far away, through all the decades that I knew him, through success as well as failure.

The evening of Oscar’s wake, Alma and I took the train in from Princeton, where we’ve been living this fall, and then the subway to the Upper West Side, landing just a few blocks from the visitation. We’d arrived early, and because I wasn’t quite ready to put the stamp of finality on my friend’s sudden death, Alma and I walked about the neighborhood, which was filled with memories of when Oscar and I had first forged our friendship. At the wake we paid our respects to Oscar’s beloved wife Lori, who in her grief was overwhelmed by the large crowd of friends and family there to offer support. Oscar’s casket rested in a corner, and for a few minutes I foolishly spoke to it as if my friend could hear me from inside.

Later, Alma and I walked to the nearby Cuban-Chinese restaurant La Caridad 78 (“Comidas China y Criolla”), where Oscar and I had often taken a meal.

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The same spare décor, the heaping plates of food, and speakers in the walls played salsa music, the same joyful music Oscar had written about in his Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. It wasn’t the best meal I’ve had, but it tasted of history, and loss, and love, too: fried rice and beans, hunks of tender chicken, Chinese vegetables. By the end of our meal, I noticed a young couple at a nearby table, enjoying a side order of plantains.

I nodded toward the table and said to Alma, “I forgot to order plantains. The meal doesn’t seem right without some.”

“It’s not too late to order,” she replied, but our meal was almost done, the moment for that really had passed.

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Yet after I paid the bill and we gathered our coats, I found myself approaching the couple, and I explained that I’d just left the wake of a dear friend, and he and I had often eaten at this restaurant, and I’d forgotten to order a plate of what we’d always ordered, plantains, and would it be all right if I could have just one piece?

They happily agreed, offered me the entire plate, but no, a single slice would do. Then Alma and I thanked them and left, walking down the street to the subway station, while I nibbled slowly at my slice of plantain, each bite another little goodbye.

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For another remembrance of Oscar Hijuelos, which includes Oscar’s take on what constitutes a writer’s afterlife, you can visit this entry of the Ninth Letter blog.

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The beautiful photo of Oscar Hijuelos was taken by Dario Acosta.

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November 24th, 2013 by admin