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century transformed into halls of light.
    That morning, before going to visit Ernesto, I called Deirdre to see if she might give me some work, a project that would focus my initial efforts to turn this new clarity of purpose into solid dimensions. I looked in the papers for a studio. When I was back into a good rhythm, I decided, then I would go and see my father. I did not want to ask about Bergen-Belsen but to ask him instead to explain to me how love compels. And when he finished I would ask him to listen while I spoke. I wanted to articulate to him what I believed and what I opposed. And then ask him to describe the world he felt we were both caught up in. In that way, as I imagined it, we might reach the shores of Uruguay together.
    Lisa Meyer, installation artist,
landscape architect, the Arabella
Memorial, Minneapolis, the Damien
Monument, Damascus, Syria, on
leaving La Plata, Argentina
     

Mortise and Tenon
    When I was five I was raped by a man who told me he was a doctor, that this was a treatment I needed. To deflect my mother’s suspicion, he gave her money for rent and occasionally bought us a piece of furniture or gave Mother a physical, no charge. He took me into the backseat of his car on side roads or to his hovel of an apartment, year after year, and then my mother fell in love with a man who asked her to marry him. They moved far away from that place and took me with them. When I could bring myself to speak about it, her new husband told me that I would have to get over it, that the doctor had run a hospital, that he had done many good things. I needed to get past it, to get on with my own life.
    With this instruction, then, I went ahead. I made it work. As I grew older I understood that some parts of me were inaccessible, frozen or asleep, but others weren’t, and that by relying on these parts I could have a good life. I wasn’t one to deny the brutality or insidiousness of what had happened—the painful sodomies, the fears of inadequacy around women, the early departure from home—but I perceived myself, accurately I thought, as a young man with only a slight limp, a defect few noticed and one that did not slow me down. As my working years began to accumulate— work in many different circumstances on four continents—and as I was confronted more often on the streets by the emaciated, the burned, the limbless, even the crucified once, the feelings of self-pity that I still harbored came to seem like cowardice. I was careful not to nurture them further when things went wrong. In those years I saw destitute fathers on their knees in the roads, begging of other men, who ignored them. I saw children, pawing in refuse for food and things to sell, beaten senseless by the police. I saw indentured prostitutes standing catatonic in their doorways, and the elephant men of the region on display for a small charge. In the light of these terrors, I came to see my own experience—the sudden flash images of choking, of being pummeled like a rag doll, rammed, and then thrown aside—as a kind of instruction. It was through the vividness of my own memories, I believed, that I could truly understand something of the lives of those for whom harm never slept.
    I nursed no hatreds in those years, no desire for revenge that I was aware of; but neither had I any true companion, nor any experience of life as I imagined it could be in a home—support given without judgment, food prepared as an act of love, the guardian silence, the kiss good-night. I made an itinerant’s living as a finish carpenter and fine woodworker. I had good hands and a good eye, and a sense of proportion that made my designs widely acceptable. I moved between furnished room and furnished flat, first in my own country and then in the countries of other cultures, carrying my tools and making things I believed were beautiful: armoires, dining tables with matching chairs, sea chests, tansus with their many sliding doors and compartments. I worked in