Spaces within: The Portable Interiors of Childhood

Some years ago a friend gave me a wooden stacking doll of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland Alice. When pried apart, each figurine yielded a smaller shape that snugly fitted, and yet also jarred with, the contours of its host: thus, a blonde Alice housed the red-faced Queen of Hearts; the angry Queen contained a smiling Cheshire Cat; the Cat carried an earless White Rabbit within it; and the Rabbit itself yielded a bean-shaped creature that looked more like a tiny foetus than the playing card it was supposed to represent.

The incongruity of these forms-within-forms strikes me as an apt symbolic starting point for certain questions I should like to explore. If our older selves are composed of layers of former selves, is it possible for us to make our way back into some originary childhood space? Or are all attempts to enter such remembered nooks conditioned by the pressure of later memories of other, related, spaces? Since any notion of a unified "childhood" is fashioned by hindsight, can we ever peel away the impact of later occurrences when trying to bestow meaning on some primary "spots of time" (as Wordsworth called them)? Is not the shape of that bean-shaped creature at the innermost core of my Alice doll necessarily determined by the configurations of all the outward husks I must remove before I can expect to reach it?

I want to test these questions by aligning events that transpired in four vividly remembered childhood spaces. I shall begin with the earliest, yet hardly the simplest, of these memories and then move forward in time in order to reconstruct, as best I can, the perceptions and meanings that each event might have held for the child—and, finally, for the adolescent—who experienced them. Still, by placing my four "spots of time" into a chronological sequence, I am necessarily distorting the significance each event may originally have held. Indeed, had I reversed their order by starting with the last of these four memories rather than with an arbitrary beginning, I might have more fully acknowledged the revisionary operations of a hindsight that inevitably blurs the topographies of early childhood.

 
I had just turned five when my mother took me to a crowded public swimming pool on an extremely hot summer day. A section for smaller children had been roped off at the pool's shallow end; having satisfied herself that the water was barely high enough to reach my chest, my mother reclaimed her armchair and magazine at the other end of the pool's deck. Children were jumping and jostling all around me. But I was fixated on a new plastic swimming doll that had been specially purchased for this occasion. I carefully wound her up and watched, delighted, as she slithered rhythmically, arms and legs akimbo, through the water. Suddenly, a hard shove from someone nearby made me lose my footing. I slipped and fell. And as I lay on the green tiles, I noticed that I had landed on something—my delicate swimmer-doll had been smashed, flattened. Lying at the bottom of the pool, I retrieved her and stared disconsolately at her deformed shape. Her eyes, seemingly sad and accusing, were on the same plane as mine.

I could easily have stood up again. Instead, I maintained my prone position on the green tiles, firmly clutching the mutilated swimmer-doll. Water began to enter my nostrils and half-open mouth. I kept returning the doll's gaze; she was clearly beyond repair, lost forever. But the pain of losing her now seemed to be replaced by a strange and new feeling of well-being. It was rather comfortable to lie there, I discovered, hardly unpleasant to breathe in some more water. I could no longer hear the shouts of the children around me. It was quiet here. And in my deaf and dreamy acquiescence, I suddenly felt myself being forcefully lifted into the air by familiar strong arms, shaken, carried out of the pool and propped back into a vertical position. My mother, having vigilantly noticed my failure to resurface, had knocked bathers aside in order to reach me. After coughing up all the water I had swallowed, I mutely held up my battered swimming doll as if to explain the logic of my failure to get up on my own two legs.

In trying to come to terms with this vivid personal memory, I am reminded of Trelawney's dubious anecdote about the near-drowning of Percy Shelley: fished out from the bottom of a tide-pool in which he had been passively lying, the poet putatively rebuked his rescuer for having deprived him of an opportunity to unveil the curtain separating life from death. But there are other Romantic and Victorian analogues. Tennyson's youthful poem "The Kraken"—much ridiculed by reviewers who chided the poet for the presumed puerility of his imagination—may better capture a primordial childhood than Wordsworth's allegory, in his famous Immortality Ode, of mythical cherubs sporting at the edge of some eternal sea. Tennyson depicts the "uninvaded sleep" of a sea-monster who blissfully battens on organisms while lying on the ocean floor. Forced to rise up and come in contact with "men and angels," Tennyson's abruptly wakened sleeper experiences the pain of Milton's fallen angels when they, too, had to give up their horizontal position in the torpid, mind-erasing waters of an underground Lethean lake.

The nineteenth-century imagination frequently associated childhood spaces with the oblivion of a death-by-drowning. Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, whose tiny footsteps vanish at the edge of the snow-covered bridge from which she fell, reaches a limbo in which she can forever freely move; George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, seen first as a little girl dangerously poised at the edge of the waters that will eventually claim her, can be preserved in her childhood habitats by the remembering narrator of The Mill on theFloss. These and other such coordinates may capture a relation between endings and beginnings: a death-wish, after all, involves regression, a return to an unconsciousness of external barriers that these writers associate with the small child as much as with the extinction of self.

But literary coordinates can only go so far in answering the specific questions that still puzzle me now as I try to reconstruct what may have gone through the mind of the five-year-old who had failed to rise. Why did I revert to the recumbent position of an infant? Would I have immediately stood up again if my swimmer-doll had not been crushed? I remain convinced that the death of the toy I had fetishized must somehow have licensed my own refusal to return to air and life. But, if so, why did the experience of drowning, of breathing and tasting water, not only seem unfrightening but also curiously empowering?

An answer to these questions may emerge by considering the drowning boy's contrasting relation to the two female figures in my story. The boy's attachment to the swimmer-doll intensified after his mother detached herself from him by going to the opposite end of the pool. Before being knocked down, the boy had rejoiced in the doll's controlled mobility on the water's surface. But as soon as the doll became immobile, unable to rise from the bottom of the pool, he adopted its own inertness. I seem to recall that the damaged doll had to be dislodged from a position under my chest or abdomen. But even if this memory should be unreliable, the product of some later elaboration, it could still be argued that the boy regarded the motionless doll not only as a version of himself but also as his own child, or, more likely, as the equivalent of a more primitive attachment he had accidentally managed to recapture and was now reluctant to shed.

For the doll's paralysis offered the boy an opportunity to recover a symbiosis with the mother who, rather than joining him in the wading area, had positioned herself among grownups on the deck at the pool's opposite end. The boy's memory of that early union would have been reactivated by the mere stimulus of water: even much later in his life, as we shall presently see, his mother figured in weekly rituals of joyous bathings, scrubbings, and towelings. Water thus continued to act as a highly pleasurable reminder of an elementary bond between parent and child. (The intensity of that bond would also have survived, of course, through the boy's familiarity with countless baby photographs of himself being safely pressed against his mother's body or being placed by her, just as safely, within the soft swaddling of his favorite perambulator). The boy's refusal to rise from his watery cove thus suggests more than his passive retrogression into a maternal space. By allowing himself to be smothered in that makeshift womb with his destroyed doll-self, he could bring about his mother's return. She had not joined him in the water. She had preferred to immerse herself in her magazine. He would compel her to come to him, even at the risk of swallowing more water. There was a potency in his paralysis.

 
Dry land, rather than a watery underground, dominates the landscape in the second of my four reminiscences: declivities of brown Andean earth baked by the sun have replaced the earlier setting. At ten, I am far more aware of explicit social and historical pressures. I have undergone ordeals of separation that the five-year-old at the pool could hardly have foreseen. Only a year after that earlier experience, my mother and I would have been barred from a pool hereafter reserved for Aryans. We were in Austria then; I am now in Bolivia, and I have lately become aware of my difference, even in this far more hospitable setting, that as Jew and gringo I remain unassimilable, foreign. My school is nestled against a huge mountain; behind the paved playground and the flat basketball court is a rising canyon, full of unexplored hollows and furrows that can act as hiding places. During our long afternoon recess, I wander away from the other children into the canyon. I find a child-size crater that perfectly suits my needs. I crouch into it, take a toy revolver out of my pocket, remove my glasses, and, then, in a moment of intense exultation, replace them with a dark green leather mask.

The mask has been fashioned by my mother out of a discarded remnant she carefully measured and fitted to the contours of my face. It is soft, pliable, textured, with an elastic band at the back, as snug as the warm adobe concave into which I have pressed myself. Perched at a considerable height, I cautiously watch the running children in the playground below. I fondle my cap pistol. Yes, I am none other than the masked Phantom, the "Fantomás" of my comic books. I am happy in my solitude, secure because unknown and invisible. I feel empowered by the protective mask and by my safe and aloof position. I do not want to descend. There is plenty of time before the school bell will ring again.

My reverie is sharply interrupted. "Who are you?," someone behind me asks. I spin around in disbelief that anyone could have snuck around my vantage point. My classmate Willie Visbeek, the Dutch girl I adore, whose disdain has been so painful, repeats her question. I remain silent, aware that my voice would give me away. "Are you Carlos? or Tommy?," Willie ventures. I now wonder whether she might be teasing me: surely she can tell who I am by simply looking at my attire; the coveralls and that plaid flannel shirt should readily give away my identity as the bespectacled boy who loves her from afar. But Willie seems genuinely puzzled. Like the young woman who fails to guess Rumpelstilskin's name, she tries out some more names, and yet omits my own. Frustrated, she finally decides to return to the playground. I resume my former posture. I cannot believe this confirmation of my impenetrability. The mask—and with it my private fantasy of omnipotence—has been successfully tested. It is a magical moment.

This incident, too, can be embroidered by literary analogues at an English professor's fingertips. My green mask and the caul that covered the head of David Copperfield the Younger appear to bear some resemblance as special, but dubious, marks of maternal favor. But the emotions I felt when Willie Visbeek failed to uncover my identity now strike me as coming close to those dramatized by Christina Rossetti in her wonderful poem, "Winter: My Secret." There it is a female speaker who masks her identity from a male intruder. Her defensive strategies are sexual: her impenetrability is teasing, a sign of her strength, her desirability. Yet beneath what can be read as adult banter lies the coy speaker's ability to tap the inviolability of childhood spaces that are at odds with the drafty corridors and passages of adult life. It is no coincidence that, in her later Sing-Song Rossetti should have produced the best child lyrics since Blake's Songs of Innocence. This poet for grownups never deserted the secret spaces of her remembered childhood.

But I want to make sense of the green-mask incident by relating it to its earlier counterpart at the swimming pool. For the two narratives seem pendants to each other; they contain similarities within their differences, and differences within these similarities.

What they have in common is, first of all, the same trio of protagonists: a boy, the mother to whom he is strongly attached, and a female figure through whom he tries to rework his powerful primal attachment to the maternal other. Willie Visbeek, a healthy, red-cheeked, real-life girl, has replaced the fragile plastic swimming-doll. She cannot be molded by desire, reincorporated and appropriated as an extension of a regressive child. Instead, it is her distance, her inaccessibility, that has to be reckoned with. That inaccessibility has, in fact, prompted the boy's defensive posture. He must distance himself by masking his vulnerability. Like his earlier incarnation at the pool, the masked boy needs to protect himself against separation. He must devise a strategy that will allow him to deal with the painful recognition that he is no more connected to Willie than he is to a mother who has ceased to act as his prime prop. He therefore welcomes the mask as a maternal token, a token, however, which—like David Copperfield's caul—cannot really protect him from rejection, sexual difference, the approaching vicissitudes of puberty. His play-acting—pistol and all—depends on male bravado, on a displacement of the feminine.

Yet if the earlier story involved three figures—boy, doll, and mother—the second story really features four. The doll's equivalent, after all, is not only the live Willie, as I have suggested, but also the mask itself, which easily adapts itself to the contours of its wearer's face and thus provides him with a more satisfactory screen than did the enveloping water for his counterpart in the pool. The water, though transparent, had blocked out sight, muffled all sound, and, potentially, snuffed out the breath of life. The opaque mask, however, only dulls the boy's eyesight: by replacing his glasses, it removes him from a world of signs, from reading and being read. The silence of the drowning boy might have resulted in his death; the silence of the masked boy allows him to evade the sophistications of a boy-girl dialogue he has not yet mastered. The mask thus protects the boy as much as the hollow into which he had crawled. It is a maternal guerdon that serves him better than the doll who has turned into Willie, herself a replacement for the mother on whom he still depends and yet whom he also recognizes as a source of his vulnerability. (The brandished toy gun marks a contrary wish—but still barely acknowledged—not to be fully identified with the maternal.)

Did the boy in my narrative ever wear his green mask again after he had trudged down from his eminence in those hillocks behind the schoolyard? I cannot really remember. Did it serve him as an adaptive tool by allowing him to develop new and better guises in the sexualized worlds that lay before him, to turn to new substitutes, to other Eves in other Edens? Such a happy ending, as wishful as the boy's feelings of omnipotence during that recess, is belied by my next two "spots of time." For, in each, the dubious memories of empowering childhood landscapes are subverted by analogues that only yield the painfully sharp confusions of adolescence.

 
The sunny outdoor scenes of pool and canyon refuge are now replaced by two dimly lit interiors. They are rooms in the same house—a house whose elaborate floor-plan surprisingly still seems more sharply edged in my mind than those of our later Bolivian residences, perhaps because in it I moved from childhood to puberty. The first scene takes place in a primitive bathroom that, together with an adjoining storage room that is totally dark, occupies a detached little building which opens on the L-shaped inner courtyard around which all the other rooms of the house are assembled. The second scene takes place, less than two years later, in another dark room, adjacent to our huge kitchen; it, too, is used for storage, but formerly contained smelly rabbit hutches taken away from my mother while she and I vacationed in a warmer, sub-Andean summer resort.

Bathing, as I have already hinted, had by then become a precious restoration of an earlier childhood bond, a drawn out ritual that culminated in my being enveloped in a huge towel wielded by my mother. The antiquated water heater required hours of careful manual fueling; it had to be teased with the dry sagebrush sprigs we used for kindling and be artfully fed by successive heaps of llama pellets before it produced enough steaming water to fill the huge, four-footed, cast-iron tub. The bath itself went through lengthy phases of latherings and rinses administered by my mother. I especially looked forward to her brisk scrubbings as a reinstatement of a communion that had—or so I felt—been severely undermined by two outside events. My mother had given in to a prolonged period of excessive melancholia after her own mother's death; she wore black to signify her mourning, and, to my mind, lavished more affection on her ever-increasing hordes of rabbits than on my father and myself. Perhaps as an attempt at compensation, or, as it was presented to me, as an effort to help socialize an overly sheltered only child, my parents had decided to take in two of my school-fellows as boarders. I deeply resented this intrusion. Although slightly younger than myself, now almost twelve years old, Edgar and Kai were, I soon discovered, far more sexually knowing than I. I stood by, affronted but powerless, as they smirkingly looked up my mother's skirts whenever she bent over in the courtyard garden. And I was more puzzled than shocked when I surprised them in sexual play one Sunday morning: I had no idea why the more placid of the two was willing to expose his bared buttocks to his aggressive and excited partner.

The existence of these two intruders made my weekly bath more precious than ever before. I could be a child again, revel in games I had delighted in as a tiny tot. Such regressive games somehow assured me that my mother and I still shared a private universe. The warm bathroom was poorly lit; the totally dark storage room next to it was screened off by a burlap curtain. I welcomed this reentry into the penumbra of a maternal space. As the naked and shameless recipient of my mother's scrubbings, I harbored none of the deep misgivings that would certainly beset me today, as a father, if I were to find my wife seductively lathering our pre-adolescent son.

One evening, after cavorting in the foamy water, I eagerly stood up to be enveloped in the huge bath-towel my mother had extended toward me. Suddenly, I heard a distinct titter in the adjoining storage room. As I swung around, squinting my eyes, I recognized the grinning faces of Kai and Edgar, peeking out from the burlap curtain. I screamed. In a frenzy, I scooped up and furiously splashed waves of tub-water against the curtain, again and again. It was in vain. Kai and Edgar had ducked and disappeared; I could hear their retreating laughter. But my intense hatred of these two voyeurs quickly gave way to even more painful feelings. I turned on my mother. Had she known that the two boys were in the adjacent storage room? "Yes," she admitted. Why, then, had she issued no warning, why had she allowed me to assume that we were as safely alone as always? How long had the boys watched our private ritual? Her replies were unconvincing. I felt betrayed, embarrassed by my nakedness. Like Adam after the Fall, I covered myself. There would be no more returns to innocent childhood play. Innocence itself seemed polluted, in doubt.

A year must have passed between this scene and what I now recognize as its indirect, though logical, sequel. Kai and Edgar no longer lived in our house. And my mother had divested herself of her mourning attire. Her black silken blouse was now proudly worn by Elena, a buxom and coquettish housemaid in her early twenties. The room which once housed my mother's rabbits had been turned into a storage room in which Elena lingered each evening before leaving. The rabbit hutches in the back had been replaced by heaps of burlap sacks. But Elena had converted the front of the room into a small boudoir.

On a shelf, there was a flask of the potent perfume (also cast off by my mother) that Elena always over-applied before leaving the house. Creeping into a faraway corner of the dark room, well before Elena had finished her work in the kitchen, I covered myself with burlap sacks and waited in eager anticipation. It was all a game, I assured myself. But I had become the disciple of Kai and Edgar, a voyeur.

My expectations were quickly rewarded. The room was feebly lit as Elena turned on the single light-bulb and approached a shelf on which she kept trinkets and ointments. She took a flask and lavishly started to spread its contents over her bared arms and legs. The smell of perfume was overpowering. Suddenly, to my chagrin, Elena lurched directly toward the corner in which I was hiding. Convinced that she had spotted me, I jumped up, roaring, shedding my protective cover of burlap sacks. But I had been mistaken. The shrieking young woman had obviously been totally unaware of my presence. She staggered back in fright, stumbled, and fell on the floor. Highly agitated, she protested that she would tell my father, in his study at the other end of the house, of his son's latest dereliction. I desperately tried to detain her. And, in a moment, as she was getting up, I had pinioned her arms. While I was pleading, babbling excuses, telling her that I had just tried to play a boyish game by pretending to be a wild monster, my eyes rested on my mother's black blouse. I could not let Elena go. I wanted her to stay in this space with me. I wanted to caress that silky blouse, to become totally enveloped in the perfume she was exuding. Yet I remained immobile, conscious only of my strength. A minute passed. And then erotics gave way to prudence. I relaxed my grip and allowed Elena to free herself. And, after she had been allowed to air her indignant accusations, I meekly abided by my father's judgment.

 
The two scenes I have just described are inseparable from the earlier episodes of the swimming pool and the green mask. Paralysis or immobility seems pervasive in all of these memories: the aggressive adolescent who may be strong enough to overpower Elena nonetheless remains as frozen and supine as the little boy who yearned for his mother's return while lying at the bottom of the pool; indeed, by inducing his mother's return, this passive tot might well be considered to have been the stronger of the two. Seen as a sequence, the four scenes thus dramatize a progressive weakening. Standing in his tub, the raging boy who vainly splashes water on the enemies who have surprised him in his nakedness is far more impotent than the masked boy who warded off Willie while fingering his toy gun. The mask which allowed that boy to feel so secure in his anonymity has been replaced by unreliable cloth coverings: the curtain left unguarded by his mother and the bath towel that can no longer screen him now cruelly mock his wish for an extension of the secure swaddlings of childhood.

There is, however, a special relationship between the first and third episodes, in which the maternal is associated with water, and between the second and fourth episodes, in which the maternal mask the boy wears in order to hide from Willie has turned into an article of clothing now worn by her substitute. In each case, the later experience subverts its childhood antecedent. Let me therefore briefly consider both pairings, before reiterating the questions about hindsight that I raised at the outset of my narrative.

The boy who lingered at the bottom of the pool, I want to believe, anticipated his mother's intervention. Would he have stood up as soon as his breathing became totally impaired? We shall never know. But his willingness to risk drowning stemmed, I like to think, less from a sense of loss than of security. I compared the horizontal boy, earlier, to Tennyson's protected Kraken, secure and invisible at the bottom of the ocean. That marine creature, however, expired when it was forced to rise from heated waters in order to be seen by beings who lacked its childlike unselfconsciousness. I cannot help associating the painful roaring of the boy who rose from the tub with that of Tennyson's sea-monster. Exposed to the gaze of strangers, the boy experiences the shattering of his desire to remain in an infantile state of symbiosis. But what smarts most is his mother's seeming complicity in bringing about his exposure. The rescuer of the little boy at the wading pool has ceased to be his protector. Her hurtful indifference must now be acknowledged.

A similar reversal is evident in the apposition of the second and fourth episodes. I called the green mask a maternal token, a guerdon, that allowed the boy in the crevice to fend off Willie's attractions. But no such easy displacement is possible when it is Elena who wears such a token—the mother's silky blouse—and, to boot, also exudes the mother's perfume. The aroused voyeur must confront a sexuality he can no longer mask through boyish games. He cannot reassure himself by impersonating the aloof Phantom. When he protests that he was merely playing a prank on Elena, he knows the futility of such pretending; he cannot disguise lust as a game. And his exposure is now complete. When Willie failed to fathom the boy's identity, his privacy remained intact; when Elena, however, hauls the culprit to be judged by a father who sees more than this pseudo-prankster, privacy gives way to public scrutiny.

Given such reversals, it is possible to question the accounts of my earlier two "spots of time." Might they not reveal an adult's search for childhood antidotes to the stumblings of his adolescence? Could it be that the little boy who failed to stand up in shallow water was, far from the successful orchestrator of his mother's return, little more than an over-dependent, rather unresourceful, child? I do not know. But whenever I dismantle or put together the various segments of my wooden stacking doll, I have to acknowledge that the outer shapes inevitably determine the deformities of those increasingly distorted inner figures.