Resistance Read Online Free
anonymously and filled her ear. When Father came home that evening, he found Mother had packed his suitcases. Until he came to his senses, she said, he should live somewhere else.
Father was quick to make his decision. He divorced us, married Sonia, arranged an apartment for us nearer the restaurant, and moved Sonia into the only home I’d known since I was ten. Among other things, Mother and I lost the spectacular and consoling view across the Río de la Plata we’d had from the top floor of that building.
I was twenty-four. I had finished my degree and also gotten a license to practice architecture in Argentina. I might have stayed in the States, but during the time I hosted those evenings for Mother, I’d felt such promise for the future of Buenos Aires. I was also fairly well connected locally through my parents, and during my years in America I had honed a certain aggressiveness. By the time I was twenty-eight I was running my own firm, and before I was thirty I landed my first American commission, a monument to striking steelworkers killed at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Between what I earned and what Mother made at the restaurant (Father still retained his part of the ownership), we lived comfortably.
I am a reasonably attractive woman. Men, however, hardly inquired, except for the one thing. Better with oneself, I would joke with Mother, than with such men. She told me it was my penchant for contempt, a streak of belligerence in me, that kept men at bay. I said she knew too little about independent women. She said I knew too much. I said I was educated about people’s underhandedness and men resented my determination to do something about it. She shrugged. Then, often as not, the discussion would veer into a denunciation of my father, my mother’s hands trembling occasionally at the memories.
After the divorce I viewed my life as a horse race. Whatever satisfaction I drew from my work— another commission, a prize, the growth of my billings, the expansion of my staff—I would match against what Sonia accomplished. She lived out in the open now, a kind of public farce which my father endured for reasons I will not get into. She had no work of her own, unless you would call the practice of insult work—her dramatic and indignant dismissals of whatever didn’t please her, that laughable hauteur she affected, all of it lampooned anonymously in the gossip and society columns. Her politics, like her wardrobe and her taste in art, came directly from supermarket magazines.
Sonia was an actress, not a person. A client of mine has a phrase to denounce the nouveau riche of America:
un populacho empeñado en no educarse
con un poder económico pasmoso,
“a willfully uneducated people with stupefying economic power.” That was Sonia.
Well, it was a lot of time, years in fact, given over to reviling Sonia and competing with her, and despising my father and waiting for him to be impressed. I would tell myself that my fabulous life (as I saw it) was an intimidating vindication, a triumph of determination. I fed on hatred and kept a measure of it in every box of my life. I should have seen what was coming, a long, slow slide down an incline of bitterness, but I imagined I was well past all that. I would say to myself, I do not need the validation of any man, husband, lover, or father. I do not require any evidence of my father’s love in order to receive another commission. I do not need for my father to be an honorable man in order to hold my head up at parties where I may encounter the two of them, her all dressed up like Marilyn Monroe, an idée fixe of my father’s.
This was the life I lived—energetic, creative, financially successful, professionally admired—but it was not a life I could fully believe in. I wrote in my journal about the conflict, year after year, describing unspeakable and sometimes incomprehensible angers, yearnings I could not satisfy—and then in the mornings I would waltz into my
Father was quick to make his decision. He divorced us, married Sonia, arranged an apartment for us nearer the restaurant, and moved Sonia into the only home I’d known since I was ten. Among other things, Mother and I lost the spectacular and consoling view across the Río de la Plata we’d had from the top floor of that building.
I was twenty-four. I had finished my degree and also gotten a license to practice architecture in Argentina. I might have stayed in the States, but during the time I hosted those evenings for Mother, I’d felt such promise for the future of Buenos Aires. I was also fairly well connected locally through my parents, and during my years in America I had honed a certain aggressiveness. By the time I was twenty-eight I was running my own firm, and before I was thirty I landed my first American commission, a monument to striking steelworkers killed at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Between what I earned and what Mother made at the restaurant (Father still retained his part of the ownership), we lived comfortably.
I am a reasonably attractive woman. Men, however, hardly inquired, except for the one thing. Better with oneself, I would joke with Mother, than with such men. She told me it was my penchant for contempt, a streak of belligerence in me, that kept men at bay. I said she knew too little about independent women. She said I knew too much. I said I was educated about people’s underhandedness and men resented my determination to do something about it. She shrugged. Then, often as not, the discussion would veer into a denunciation of my father, my mother’s hands trembling occasionally at the memories.
After the divorce I viewed my life as a horse race. Whatever satisfaction I drew from my work— another commission, a prize, the growth of my billings, the expansion of my staff—I would match against what Sonia accomplished. She lived out in the open now, a kind of public farce which my father endured for reasons I will not get into. She had no work of her own, unless you would call the practice of insult work—her dramatic and indignant dismissals of whatever didn’t please her, that laughable hauteur she affected, all of it lampooned anonymously in the gossip and society columns. Her politics, like her wardrobe and her taste in art, came directly from supermarket magazines.
Sonia was an actress, not a person. A client of mine has a phrase to denounce the nouveau riche of America:
un populacho empeñado en no educarse
con un poder económico pasmoso,
“a willfully uneducated people with stupefying economic power.” That was Sonia.
Well, it was a lot of time, years in fact, given over to reviling Sonia and competing with her, and despising my father and waiting for him to be impressed. I would tell myself that my fabulous life (as I saw it) was an intimidating vindication, a triumph of determination. I fed on hatred and kept a measure of it in every box of my life. I should have seen what was coming, a long, slow slide down an incline of bitterness, but I imagined I was well past all that. I would say to myself, I do not need the validation of any man, husband, lover, or father. I do not require any evidence of my father’s love in order to receive another commission. I do not need for my father to be an honorable man in order to hold my head up at parties where I may encounter the two of them, her all dressed up like Marilyn Monroe, an idée fixe of my father’s.
This was the life I lived—energetic, creative, financially successful, professionally admired—but it was not a life I could fully believe in. I wrote in my journal about the conflict, year after year, describing unspeakable and sometimes incomprehensible angers, yearnings I could not satisfy—and then in the mornings I would waltz into my
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