My 14th Summer Was Revolutionary in All the Wrong Ways

Julia Kornberg

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An excerpt from Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg

If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009. With a time machine, a photo lost to the internet, a Daft Punk record.

I have little certainty about the past, except that it was hot. This was, above all else, the primordial quality of a Nordelta summer. The heat and the kids on the street, burning the asphalt of our dystopian suburb every Saturday morning, generating the je ne sais quoi that belongs only to January and only to gated communities. Like Darwinian monkeys, Nordelta boys played on their bikes and gave out first kisses, while Nordelta girls stole cigarettes and partied, devoted to their death-drive, until Pitu fell into a coma and they calmed down a bit and stopped buying drugs. In the afternoon, the sun came down on El Norte, and my peers slept the least deserved siestas in the world before going out. The streets were calmer then, and the asphalt hurt less.

As for me, if I ever did make it out, I almost never saw anybody, and I was always bathing, all the time. Out on Nordelta’s streets, I could feel the earth settling on my heels and in a spot behind my elbows, sand getting into my teeth whenever I bit my tongue and inside my panties when I walked slowly, so that arriving home at the end of the day, I had an absurd need to get the dirt off me.

I am not asleep

I am not asleep

I am not asleep

The words that I spoke in the bath only became spiritual with time, made mystical by the bored insistence of custom. A prayer, a sacrament. I sang it with my eyes closed, always to the same tune, the same chords, the same minimalist, contentless repetition that gave some meaning to being fourteen and always so sleepy, with so little motivation to go out.

          I am not asleep

I am not asleep

I

am not asleep.

Then I put the stopper in the drain and I waited, watching my feet. An act of contemplation: how pointy, how round. I noted how poorly painted my nails were and the strangeness of my clumsy stomach, always moving in different ways, following the anxiety of my breath. I liked to wash the depths of my body, to rinse my hands over and over, to try to outdo my last bath and see how unpolluted I could really become.

Sometimes I applied conditioner and closed my eyes, or threw in one of those bath bombs that Dad had brought back from the US, watching the wasteland of water and detergent as it started to resemble a pre-Raphaelite painting. The one in which Ophelia dies, the one Mom had put up on the fridge in May that looked like a Complot clothing ad. Then I’d submerge myself completely and let the water seep into all the electric tubes of my brain. I liked the weird, salty feeling that the chemicals gave to the water, my temples hardened by the artificial smell. And above all, the water. I counted on my fingers, reciting: I am not asleep. I am not asleep. I am not asleep. I came up to breathe and then did it again. Reborn every time, pure and child-like, bright, anew.

This was before Mateo left, and before Jeremías developed a long and painful Messiah complex. I was, of the Goldsteins, the first to be obsessed with the crucifix and its sacraments, hardly conscious that this was a betrayal of my people.

Back then, Angélica and I were obsessed with this Daft Punk record, Discovery. Mateo called it electronic garbage, but he didn’t know much about anything anyway. All he did was go for runs in the evenings at dangerous speeds, then attach himself to the TV in the living room and watch hours of TNT specials. Stupefied by action movies from the eighties, we spent that summer in a limbo of vintage American laziness, searching for authors who didn’t belong to us, but who also didn’t belong to anyone else. We collected our foreign books, and then Angélica and I—and only sometimes Mateo—shared the stories we were reading, pointing out our underlined sentences and pretending we understood what was going on in Raymond Carver or in English translations of Ruben Darío.

After Angélica left, I would lower the blinds and go to the kitchen, where our security systems were. Through the hidden camera I watched her, on the almost-blue screen, passing over the burning asphalt with her little black shoes and that long tracksuit with the three lines. I watched her light a cigarette and put it out instantly. Two puffs, that’s all Angélica ever smoked before she’d start to feel ashamed of the toxic fumes or run into a friend of her mother’s. By then I’d have already turned down the lights and hidden myself in the bathroom to submerge myself again. 

I am not asleep
I am not asleep
I am not asleep

My hair was like silk back then, it was always perfect. Angélica kept saying that it looked like the Olaplex vomit of an angel. She wasn’t wrong—there was something about my baptized head that approached divinity. I’ve never seen a Jewish girl with such virtuous, straight hair as I had at fourteen. For an imperceptible moment, I was the envy of all the Nordelta girls—though this, too, would soon disappear.

Inside the house and without Angie we burned things. Summer break always invited pyromania. Jeremías burned Dad’s books and Mateo his old toy cars. Afterwards, Mateo would stare, dazed, at the same point for hours, or lock himself in his room with enormous history books that he’d taken from the school library. The only excursion that Mateo ever made, once per week, more or less, was to go looking for ethyl alcohol at the pharmacy or a new aluminum trash can so that he could continue burning everything he set his eyes on.

For days, no one would leave the living room. And when we did, when we had the courage to find ourselves out in El Norte with a number of interchangeable friends, Mateo came back drunk, and Jeremías didn’t come back at all, at least for a couple of days. Jeremías, I think, had started to do drugs. Mateo never would have done something like that. Drugs are for idiots, he’d say, and that’s not me.

The pool is there for no reason, Mom would often complain, protesting Mateo’s hangover and Jeremías’s dry, red eyes. No one so much as splashed, nor took any sun. You’re not really one to talk, we’d respond. Our mother, Natalia, hardly ever made an appearance. Sometimes in the morning we’d glimpse her running out to work, or to her new boyfriend’s; then came the empty hours she left behind, our gigantic living room, the delivered food still in the freezer. Her schedule was drawn on millimeter graph paper, always busy, and in those dead spaces, the house was ours, a liberated terrain. Dad was traveling, always. It wasn’t like this before. But 2009 was the summer everyone began to disappear.

Without the sensation of movement but with its insistent necessity, on the day when the temperature reached its highest point, I went for a walk alone down the little street leading out of the Oshiros’ neighborhood. I’d ended up spending two or three days at Angélica’s because Jeremías had decided to drop off the map, Mateo was drunk, and Natalia was with I-don’t-know-who. We’d been listening to the same record for twelve hours, Angie and I. Along the way, we’d invented a story to go along with Discovery, and every time we put the record on, the story became more complex, covering new matrices, renovated with a freshness only she and I understood. It was about a girl who was Japanese, like Angélica, and Jewish, like me, who was saving the world from some kind of artificial intelligence apocalypse. She took vitamins and Peruvian maca powder, she was a black belt in tae kwon do, and she bathed six times per day. Basically, she was us. Or a projection of us. While we listened, I would kneel down and draw her story out like a comic book while Angélica recited its dialogues to me from above. We painted the girl with deep colors and put glitter on her body. At some point during those days, between the fourth and fifth tracks of that record, I felt something like the loneliness being scrubbed out from inside me.

Later we would draw ourselves, too. Angélica, gazing intensely to the south, shoulders broad, with her I-don’t-care-about-anything face on, but looking just as scared as everyone else. Me with my awkward arms, my nose of troublesome dimensions, and my crooked feet that still today don’t know how to dance. When I left Las Glorietas, the neighborhood of that weekend, I had under my unshaved armpit a portfolio filled with improbable colors and stories in which I still find no narrative coherence today.

I went home, walking down the middle of the road, even though it hurt my feet to do so. The sidewalk, Angelica told me, is for tourists. The locals walk in the street, and if we get honked at, it’s just some furious neighbor, with whom our mothers could deal with at the end of the day, in private. I already knew this, but I was reconfirming it now with my circular journey back home, bordering the richest row of houses, the ones in La Isla (pas-de-France, as Mom said in her good French accent), while I let the sun burn my skin, always so white, so completely clean. I remember coming back sunburnt, that Jeremías was home for the first time in several days, and that I didn’t want to go out anymore. I remember that was also the afternoon I met Agustín.

Agustín was a tennis coach. He came from the sprawl of the south conurbano, the surrounding areas of the city beyond the gate, and he was twenty-three. I remember his age because of a little rule we had invented, having to do with men and democracy. Throughout that summer break, Angélica and I had been developing a series of ideas about what was and was not okay to do with boys, and which boys specifically. This was an important one: if a man had been born and lived in a period of sustained democracy, beginning in 1983, then the lion’s share of romantic acts were allowed. This created a cushion for us of approximately a decade. We could tell each other anything about the things we did with men born during this time. The conservative girls at school didn’t subscribe to the same rule, but their opinions didn’t matter, not during summer break. A boy born during the dictatorship is a broken boy, said Angelica. And I didn’t really believe her—democracy wasn’t that big of a deal, but hooking up with older men wasn’t great either. When Agustín told me his age, I made some rapid calculations and was marvelously surprised: born in ’86, approximately. He passed with flying colors.

The day that we crossed paths for the second time—he with a beard that looked like four days’ growth, but which in reality was the fullest he could ever get—Agustín repeated an almost formal invitation to drink whiskey with him, after his classes, at the edge of a park. He seemed old but sophisticated, because he drank whiskey, drove his own car, and often bragged, though with dubious insistence, about how much he loved his work; there were so many old ladies he could rip off. He talked about these housewives a lot, these ladies of the house, the ones with sagging jowls, who looked like lizards and whose kids had already gone to live in Buenos Aires. Profiting from their leisure was Agustín’s principal work, and there was something admirable about this, like he was getting one over on someone. In the end, though, it was the ladies who allowed him to work, who made it possible for him to be an activist for the Workers Party and continue his philosophy studies.

For people like Agustín, coming into El Norte was like entering a new country. To get inside, he had to show an ID and undergo inspection; he had to open the trunk of his car, show his invitation from the Tennis Club, flash a pleading smile. A handsome boy from Lanús, he was exotic to my eyes and, more than anything, seemed experienced, alive. Whenever we passed Nordelta’s beautiful houses, he looked a little stupefied. This would last a couple of seconds, and then he would go back to speaking really fast and criticizing the whistling way we had of pronouncing our s’s, or our annoying tendency, according to him, of opening up certain vowels too much. But he couldn’t really get it right. He didn’t understand that the sound wasn’t quite so nasal.

Agustín didn’t know much about a lot of things, but he spoke of politics with fervor. He said that the revolution would come to pass and that everything was really a trick of capitalism. The word propaganda slipped off his tongue every other sentence. He used it rapidly, without thinking, the way people had been using US dollars for the last few years. In retrospect, maybe I was bathing so much because of the taste this kind of revolution left me with after our talks—cheap, juvenile, papier mâché. In any case, I believed everything he said. He made me take my mom’s old edition of 1984, steal Brave New World from Jeremías, buy The Communist Manifesto. He got me to try weed and the slow songs of Lisandro Aristimuño, and, for a moment, when he told me about his first history professor and his dead dog, I thought that something in him loved or could possibly come to love me.

Democracy or no democracy, if I had told Angélica that I’d decided to fuck a tennis coach from the south she probably would have stopped talking to me for a couple of days. I don’t know what it was about sex that produced this effect, but everything felt a little like a bitter sickness, yet desirable—contradictory. It was like menstruating—a sign of growth, a tacit race between the girls at school, but once you won you felt lamentable, a pain, a particular stab in the gut. If you won, you lost. If you lost, you lost. The difference was that menstruation was inevitable, and sexuality wasn’t, so it left you with a strange sensation of responsibility between your throat and your vagina, as if you’d done something wrong. The other difference was that with sex, there was only blood the first time.

We saw each other for a good part of the summer. I liked him. His eyes were light, and he belonged to the subtly intellectual class for which ostentation is a sign of vulgarity and rock bands are the first line of ideology. He had an enormous chest that felt like the field where we made out on the weekends. He was too stupid, I realized over time, and tender, like a scripted boyfriend. At one point I tried to give him Daft Punk records, to show him my contraband comics and European mangas, but he said no—he was a little bit of a Peronist, too. He didn’t like imports.

Agustín and I saw each other once a week, on Sundays, and afterwards I bathed three times and immediately threw the clothes in which I’d fucked him into the washing machine, sure that there was evidence of my wrongdoing in the pink panties and undone straps. A couple of times I burned the white t-shirts with grass stains on the shoulders, taking one of Mateo’s stolen lighters. I also covered my body in moisturizer and sunblock, in order to smell like something else, and waited on the floor in my room for it to dry, between twenty-five minutes and half an hour. No one ever suspected a thing.

One weekend, Jeremías, Mateo, and I went to the beach at Punta del Este. By the time we came back, Agustín had disappeared, his conurbano charm with him. It was a shame, because until then I’d thought that summer loves could only end with romantic goodbyes, with a promise that wouldn’t be kept but sounded pretty when you shouted it at each other anyway. Agustín simply left, a ghost. He abandoned the tennis courts, his students with their gigantic, wrinkled necks, the oil stain that his car left behind sometimes. The day I boarded the plane for Punta with my brothers, I’d been thinking about a little mark that I’d left on his neck the night before, and I asked myself if it would stay there, like an unavoidable testimony to the fact that this—we —had existed. I hoped so. No one, I thought, should have the right to see me naked, body unfurled, without leaving so much as an IOU.

Come to the park tonight, by the golf course. I’ll meet you there, okay?

This had been the prelude to us doing it the first time, after three weeks of sustained kisses and drinking Jameson on fake grass. He showed up in his work uniform, as he almost always did, a black spot below the knee and a white t-shirt with the letters RF between his nipples. I hadn’t fixed myself up, but I didn’t look bad, either. I had on the most perfect shorts in the world, the kind that made you sigh briefly for your conscience and your self-esteem, an Arsenal jersey that my brother had brought back from the last game, and clean black sneakers, the name of some band just barely sketched on them with whiteout.

We spoke for hours about things that at the time felt deep, real, and that now dissolve into a torrent of posturing that can’t be justified merely by the fact that we were so young. He told me many things about his life, explained his latent ideology again, and it was then that I started to understand the curious way he used the word truth. He also talked funny, said things like ranchear instead of hang out, and sometimes, when he wanted to imitate the Nordelta kids who were my age, he said man, in English, but pronounced it men, as if he weren’t referring to a single man but a series of men, anonymous and schizophrenic in the universe of conversation.

I’m going to show you something that’s going to change your life. It is the best—seriously—in the history of Argentinian music.

Men, I’d realized by then, had an obsession for didacticism. Agustín knew with complete certainty the best record of every period, the best moment of each album. Mateo was the same with the history of Europe, Jeremías with classical composers and modernist books. All men were always waiting to teach you something.

What is it?

It’s called “Cantata de puentes amarillos.” You should really listen to the whole record, but this is the best song.

Why?

It tells a story.

I asked him what story, and he didn’t know what to say. But he grabbed me firmly by the hair and shoved his mouth against mine. It was cold, and smelled like he had been working all afternoon, a blend that only red clay dust and sweated-through sunblock can generate. He opened his jaw wide and kissed me exclusively with his tongue. The lyrics—I was listening to them—didn’t make any sense. Spinetta sang, with a very sharp voice, insipid aphorisms like las almas repudian todo encierro, mañana es mejor, and todo camino puede andar—souls repudiate all enclosure, tomorrow is better, every path can be walked. I asked myself what in the world he was talking about. Luis Alberto, or simply El Flaco, as Agustín called Spinetta, had always seemed like a pretty confused guy to me. The only line that really stuck with me, but also made me afraid, was Los hombres te miran te quieren tomar. Men watch you, they want to take you. My body spun around in angles I didn’t understand, almost jumping. It was hot, and the guitar was piercing, and I was sad because I couldn’t figure out what made this rock star so special.

Here and there during that makeout session Agustín would pause for a breath and touch my ears. With his hands on my face, he breathed, very heavily, without kissing me, as I assume he’d seen in some ad for a novel or a rom-com. It was intense, Agustín with El Flaco’s repetitive guitar. The kind of boy I’d laugh at if we were to speak today. Whose face full of tenderness would cause me rage or abdominal pain. He took a few seconds, as though wanting to consume me, make me part of his own shaking body, and, although it didn’t work, although I was simply thinking about how little sense it made to say Yo te amo tanto que no puedo despertarme sin amar, he took my neck between his strong fingers and resumed our activity, the almost sportsmanlike romanticism that it was to kiss, hidden inside a golf cart.

Let’s go somewhere else, Nina.

Where do you want to go? We can’t go to my place.

Back over there. Between the forest and where the forests begin.

He passed his fingers cautiously over the waist of my jeans, without opening them all the way. No one has to know, I thought. Not even Angélica, no one except for me. If no one knew, it would basically be as though nothing had happened. Nor would I have to feel ashamed. But if I didn’t do it, I’d always have this curiosity stuck in my head, a curiosity that had originated the first time I watched porn, reluctant but fascinated, my uncomprehending face glued to the screen.

Okay.

I think that until I turned eighteen, I didn’t know what it meant to have an orgasm, and this was certainly not something I was going to learn with Agustín. He was simply too romantic; he made gestures of loving grandeur, he pulled my hair as though we were in a physical fight, and he was the only one who finished. The same song was playing on repeat in the background, and he took my pants off quickly, without giving me a chance to wonder what it was I could possibly be so excited about. Turn around, he said. I did what he told me. The first time didn’t hurt, though I’d always been told to prepare for discomfort, that it would be an intense and hard experience that you must go through with someone you loved. I didn’t love Agustín, but fuck it. It felt good. Even with the cheap whiskey and the smell of sunblock and the fallen summer leaves of that fateful summer in Nordelta. El Flaco’s voice slipped into extinction and said, each time more softly, mañana, mañana, mañana. Then, only then, for a moment, I felt something that resembled satisfaction, an asymptotic approach towards complete release.

For seven years I would lie about everything that happened in January 2009. I would say nothing of Agustín, nor of being fourteen, nor of the golf course or the three morning-after pills that I took two days later, stolen from the pharmacy, just in case. I would say nothing about the diarrhea that they gave me, nor the infertility I imagined while I bathed on repeat, nor would I talk about the back pain, the guilt, or the pleasure. For a long time, I made up stories, changed names, altered dates maniacally and secretly. The only certainty that I had was the sharp guilt that enjoying it had given me, and a white sports bra covered in blood and dirt, the Abercrombie logo now stained with wax.

The next morning I woke up definitively without love. I am not asleep. I bathed for six straight hours, changing the water once in a while and using almost all of my bath bombs. I thought that I should have felt different, that something about passing into maturity should have hit me all at once, making me grow thirteen centimeters all of a sudden. But no. Like the first time I had menstruated, it just hurt, and I felt a little upset. I didn’t feel less pure than before, perhaps a little emptier. But Agustín was hot, and I wanted to see him again. When he sent me a text message four days later, I spent two and a half hours thinking up the perfect response.

I listened to the whole record. You were right. How are you?