The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer Read Free Book Online Page A

Spanish nor Japanese.
    Glumly, I leaned forward, thirty pairs of Japanese eyes following me as I did so.
    The tortured man looked back at me. “Do you speak Spanish?” he asked under his breath, in almost unintelligible Spanish.
    “Not really. I’m not Spanish, you see; I’m Indian.”
    “I see,” he said, looking gloomier than ever. “Okay.”
    “But if you speak very slowly and simply, I can probably follow.”
    “Okay,” he said, looking very much as if he had come seven thousand miles in vain.
    And so I began. “It was like a movie,” I found myself saying. “He put a gun at my head, and said, ‘Juan Carlos, you are a dead man.’ Then they put handcuffs on me and threw me under a blanket in the car.” Etsuko duly relayed this information to the goggle-eyed audience, and the narrative went on. “I will not go into the methods of torture they employed, but they laughed and joked at me, and I remembered that there was a school of torture in Argentina, a school for the members of the death squads.” On and on the torture ran, and all I could do was try desperately to tell the difference between
cabeza
, which means “head,” and
cerveza
, which means “beer,” between
esposas
meaning “handcuffs” and
esposas
meaning “wives.” Only a couple of weeks earlier, in the temple, I had read Scott Spencer’s
Waking the Dead
, about a family of Chilean refugees led around by radical groups to meetings such as this one. Now, as I tried not to say, “They tied me up in wives and wrapped a blindfold around my beer,” I felt as if I myself were waking the dead.
    “When I was released from prison, I was of two minds,” I went on, morosely. “I was happy at the prospect of seeing my wife and son, my only child. But I was very sad at the thought of all the dear friends I was leaving behind. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have embarked on something very dangerous and difficult, spontaneously forming their group. Some of them have themselves disappeared.”
    As the terrible litany ran on, I found more and more that the Japanese words that always deserted me when I needed them were now the only words I could remember. When I had arrived in Japan, fresh from Cuba, I had often found myself saying
Sí
or
Permiso
to frightened-looking Japanese who looked more alarmed with every syllable. Now, however, I found myself saying, “
Hai, hai
” to the anguished Argentinians and “
Ah sō, desu ka?
” to their heartfelt explanations of the “Dirty War.”
Tabun
in Japanesemeans
tal vez
in Spanish, I kept telling myself,
casa
means “house” in Spanish and “umbrella” in Japanese. Meanwhile, Reverend Farnsworth was squirming in his seat and muttering imprecations each time I uttered the words “liberation theology,” and the Japanese on the floor were looking increasingly unhappy and perplexed. Finally, the narrative ended.
    Before I could catch my breath, however, the audience, eager to hear more about these alien horrors, started firing questions at the long-suffering Argentinians. “Were there any Japanese among the detainees?” “Do you know of any Japanese who have disappeared?” “Are there Japanese among the prisoners still in jail?” all of which I deftly turned into Spanish sentences about wives and umbrellas.
    Then, out of nowhere, a Japanese man in the audience, unable to wait for the interminable process of translating Japanese into English and then into Spanish and back again, suddenly spoke directly to the family, in Spanish. “Do you know this friend of mine,” he began, “who disappeared? I lived in Argentina for many years, and I know all that you are describing.” Madre de Dios, I thought, my mind on anything but the
desaparecidos:
here was a man who was perfectly equipped to translate from Spanish directly into Japanese, and vice versa. I was off the hook!
    Which only shows how little I understood Japan. “
¡No, no, me olvidado de todo!
” the man cried out, with enviable