Resistance Read Online Free Page B

squeeze any satisfaction out of my work. I would pour myself into some high-minded, pro bono project only to discover that something crucial in me would not engage, and the project would fall apart like mercury spilled across a table.
    I gave up trying to explain to myself what my anger was about. It was more than Sonia and my father, more than the empty-headed boosterism of the papers and the venal commerce of their advertising pages. It was rooted in a vast and seemingly intractable injustice that plagued the precincts of every city. I understood it better when I was young, because I simplified it; and I had long believed that my life stood in opposition to it all, that it was a renunciation. But I couldn’t maintain this now. I felt increasingly detached from the principles that were supposed to be behind everything I did.
    What had begun to weigh on me more than anything was the silence of everyone in the city, myself included. We moved from scandal to scandal—sexual, political, fiscal, environmental—with a shrug of the shoulders. Children killed themselves in the barrios and we turned the page. For reasons that ended with the Second World War or that had to do with national pride, I forget which, we attacked the British in the Malvinas. Businessmen cheated, powerful men could pay to circumvent any law, things fell apart that shouldn’t—buildings, airplanes, human lives—and no one was to blame. Factories closed and men went down the drain.
    There was no enemy, or the enemy lived in another country, or it was God’s will.
    One morning I opened a letter from the mayor of Buenos Aires, inviting me to discuss the design of a monument to the city’s longshoremen. I called a friend, Deirdre Cantelaria, instead, and offered to sell her my business. It took five minutes. I went to the bank and set up funding to keep Mother and me in reasonable comfort. We moved from Flores to a smaller apartment in San Justo, way west in the city, and far from the river I had grown up next to. I was relieved initially, but I knew I was still running away. Images of the disjunction in my life pursued me like a dog that never tired. And it never lost my trail.
    I offered my mother nothing but silence at our meals.
    That same year, Sonia was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When she died Father asked us to move back in with him, in Palermo. Mother rolled her eyes when she read the letter.
    We never considered it.
    I tried to hide my deterioration from her, the loss of meaning which seemed like dry rot working its way deep into a house. I left the apartment purposefully every morning, moved briskly down the sidewalk, but had no intention, no aim beyond completing the most routine of errands. The fawning insincerity of people I met at the occasional party I still attended, the ubiquity of every kind of noise in the streets—jackhammers, radios, fights— the long rows of prescription drugs, hers and mine, in the bathroom, the attitude of entitlement with which perfect strangers would shove you aside at a counter were like a series of punches that gave me a headache every day. I was consumed with indignation at the least evidence of injustice. The smallest manifestations of privilege or prerogative incensed me. But no sense of not being implicated protected me.
    Many an afternoon found me on a bench somewhere, looking back on my work as some sort of burlesque. I’d lost completely the distinction between what was true and what was false in my life.
    On the worst days, I would make the long walk to the Río de la Plata and stare off across the river to the shores of Uruguay, hoping the expanse of that eternal water would give me hope. But on my return I would always find myself in the same narrow, dispiriting alley. When Mother died, I decided, I would just end it.
    As her Parkinson’s advanced, she was not always sure of her words, but she was quite sensitive to the subcurrents in our apartment, those rivers about which no one speaks