The Lady and the Monk (6 page)

Etsuko delivered a brief introduction to the audience, in Japanese, and then, looking over in my direction, asked sweetly, in her bell-like English, “Shall we begin?”

Nobody else said anything, so I replied, “Oh, yes.” Maybe this was her way of acknowledging me?

And then the man began speaking, delivering a sentence or two of introduction, in the rough Argentine Spanish that turns
yo
into
zho
and
vas
into
vasch
. There was silence. The man looked at me. Etsuko looked at me. Thirty pairs of Japanese eyes looked at me. I looked at everyone else. And then, with a sinking heart, as the silence deepened, I realized what was going on: mine was not, it seemed, just a foreigner’s place of honor — it was the translator’s chair. Apparently, my Spanish-sounding name and vaguely Hispanic looks had been enough to have procured for me, unbeknownst to me, the job of interpreting from Spanish, a language I had never learned, to Japanese, a language Francis Xavier himself had considered the work of the devil. My only qualification for the task, I thought bitterly, was that I was probably the only person in the room who spoke neither 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 Japanese
means
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 fluency, when it was suggested he serve as translator. “
¡No me acuerdo de nada!
” And try as I might, I saw that there was no way at all of persuading him to speak a tongue in which he might possibly, just possibly, in the space of several paragraphs, make a single tiny error. And so I went back to my horrible task, stumbling through more accounts of torments made scarcely more pleasant by the dawning realization, as the Argentine speaker interrupted my translations and the whole family fell into animated debate about which parts I was distorting most, that the main speaker knew more English than I did Spanish; that his wife,
who had sat through it all with a look of great pain, spoke both languages well; and that their son, who was enrolled in a Manhattan junior high school, was fluently bilingual. “And so I say to you, my friends,” Juan Carlos said through me, my unhappy look a fair translation of his own, “that your efficiency and discipline and unity have turned this country into the third-strongest power in the world. Just think what you could do if you worked on behalf of human rights!”

Later that night, Mark and I went to a
yakitori
house nearby for dinner. Just as I happened to look around, in the midst of our conversation, the young Japanese man next to me caught my eye. “Excuse me,” he began. “May I talk English with you?”

“Of course,” I said, more than grateful to be back in my own tongue.

“What country do you come from? How long are you in Japan? How do you find Japan?” Trying to find answers compatible with these phrasebook questions, I felt as if I were being worked on by a student doctor eager to practice his still-unformed skills.

“I saw the American movie
2010
,” he went on, though whether in a spirit of bonhomie or bewilderment I could not tell. “I could understand the computer — Hal. No problem. But I could not understand the human beings.”

“Really?” I said, not sure how to take this.

“But she” — he pointed to his glumly chic young consort — “she is student of English literature.”

Ah, I thought, my years of study were not in vain.

“What courses are you taking?” I began.

“One course,” she said haltingly, and with some apparent pain. “It is in Henry James.” I registered surprise that they would be given the most byzantine of English stylists to begin with. “And,” she went on with a bulldozer determination, “in other course, we study nineteenth literature.”

“Nineteenth century?”

She nodded unhappily, her eyes never once leaving her bowl.

“Dickens, for example?”

“Not Dickens,” she said with some authority. “Dickens is twentieth. We do Swift.”

Ah, I thought: the inscrutable Orient.

“Don’t worry,” said Mark consolingly as we made our way home. “You’ll soon find ways of getting out of that. Everyone does, sooner or later.”

Back in his house, while making some tea, Mark put on an old tape of Ry Cooder: lazy, sunlit songs about the border.

“Nice album,” I remarked.

“Yeah. It’s funny! This was the very same tape that Ray had with him while he was living in the monastery. Did I tell you about Ray? No? Well, anyway, Ray was this huge, king-size guy from Dallas, who came over to join the Peace Corps in the Philippines and somehow ended up as a Zen monk over in Daitokuji. And somehow, he had this deal worked out whereby he kept a motorbike outside the monastery walls, together with his cowboy boots and leather jacket. And every few weeks, he would steal out to visit his girlfriend. Or occasionally he’d come over to my house. And every time he came, whatever time it was, it was always party time, because this was the only chance he was going to get. Jeez, he was something! He just had this incredible energy, which living in the monastery only intensified. And the monks couldn’t come down on him so long as he made it back before morning prayers at four a.m.

“Well, he had the stamina to keep this up — slipping in just before four a.m. every time he left — for months. But one day, on New Year’s Day, he left when he shouldn’t have, and the head monk, who had never much liked him in the first place, seized the opportunity to get back at him, and told him that he would have to go back to the beginning of the course — become a training monk again! After seven years in the place! So he put all his things in a wheelbarrow and rolled them out of the
monastery gates. And he went off to his girlfriend’s house and spent a month with her. And of course, after seven years in the temple, he was totally defenseless — totally unprepared to live in a regular domestic situation — and she just sliced through him, completely ate him up.”

He paused. “It’s funny; many of the so-called Zen masters in America have the same problems — with money or sex or alcohol. Anyway, Ray decided to go off to Berkeley to write. He’d been corresponding with Anaïs Nin from the temple, and she’d given him some really good contacts in the Bay Area. So he had a book of poems published — by a press in Santa Barbara, in fact — and he was going really strong until an old girlfriend from high school came over and dragged him back to Texas. So suddenly he ended up in this clean suburban town where everyone thought he talked funny and nobody could begin to understand what he’d been through. He got a few odd jobs and tried to write a novel. But pretty soon, his relationship fell apart, and he did too. The trouble was, poor guy, he just wasn’t ready for the world. The monastery had prepared him for everything except the world. Last thing I heard, he was a bouncer in a reggae bar.”

A
S AUTUMN BEGAN
to draw on in Kyoto — and the first touches of color to grace the eastern hills — Mark invited me one day to attend a special private initiation ceremony. A longtime friend of his, now a head priest at Tōfukuji, one of the Five Great Temples of Kyoto, was about to ascend to a new rank, the youngest Zen master in Japan to attain such a position. It was a closed ceremony, of course, but Mark had been invited, as a friend, and he thought that I might be interested too. Certainly, it sounded like a rare opportunity to see a little behind the enigmatic transparencies of Zen, if only to the next layer of its public face. So when the day arrived, I dusted off my best jacket and tie, put on a black motorcycle helmet, and, thoroughly incongruous, popped onto the back of Mark’s Honda. Whizzing through the crowded streets, we veered along a maze of narrow lanes and ended up at last outside the temple compound, all abustle in the brilliant morning.

By the time we arrived, sober parishioners in their best suits were already heading under purple banners into the temple, along with monks who looked like giant bats, black robes billowing out around them. “That’s Soto-san,” Mark whispered as one such figure hurried past. “I knew him in California.” In the glorious sunshine, the thickly forested hills that rose above a plunging gorge were glowing almost, and the maples, through which the sunlight streamed, were just beginning to turn. In the shadeless gravel courtyards of the temple, monks were scattering this way and that, some of them in special orange-and-black raiment, some waving tidy scarlet flags. Inside one of the temple’s
Buddhas, I once read, the beautiful poetess Ono no Komachi had secretly stashed her love letters.

Slipping off our shoes at the entrance to the monastery, we followed a shaven-headed monk (from California) into an antechamber and there were offered tea. This, I gathered, was the
gaijin
’s corner: it included a middle-aged American student of Zen with his teenage Filipina bride; another eager-eyed American; and a New York woman with granny glasses who handled words as if they were thorny roses. Beside her, and next to me, sat a seamlessly elegant Japanese lady in a flowing dress, who apparently found it incumbent on her to make conversation with me. Where did I come from? she began hesitantly. How long had I been here? What was I doing in Japan?

At that moment, bells began tolling, and we were led off again, in our little group, around a rock garden and over the famous hanging causeway and along a wide stone pathway to the great
zendō
, a celebrated National Treasure usually closed to the public. There, under a dragon-writhing roof, the ceremony commenced. Drums sounded sonorously as the monks walked in, one by one, in purple and orange robes, with orange sashes and pointed Chinese shoes. A screeching came from within, and the
rōshi
himself appeared, followed by a long, muttered wailing that sounded like a coyote’s howl. A monk waved a bamboo whisk above us all, extending a skinny, but commanding, hand in each of the main directions. The solemnity was broken, in our corner, as the Filipina, giggling brightly, asked if we knew where the rest room was. Four men blew on bamboo flutes, piercing, mellifluous, and sad.

Outside once again in the radiant morning, men in dark suits, women in kimono, stood on the Tsūten Bridge, bowing with the ceremonious elegance of characters from
The Makioka Sisters
, One woman glittered like a brooch in a blue-and-golden sari and metallic blue fingernails, her temple dancer’s features sharp under kohl-ringed eyes. Old men in grave suits sat on Coca-Cola
benches, reclining in the autumn sun like ageless school friends of the Emperor.