In the Darkroom

  My father’s directorial debut was a documentary of a landmark construction project on the São Francisco River, Brazil’s first large power plant, the Paulo Afonso Hydroelectric Complex, fueled by a natural 260-foot waterfall. “I had this idea that I’d be Cecil B. DeMille,” my father said. He arranged for a construction crane to hoist him in an aerial lift to film a fancy tracking shot. “Somewhere, there’s a photograph of me in that bucket.” He also commissioned a two-seat open-cockpit biplane from the air force base in Bahia. “We flew through a canyon and sometimes we went underground, through these cave tunnels.” Aboveground, they dodged vultures. “If you hit one, the plane would crash—and there were plenty circling around.” Vultures were such a problem, “they even had a saying: ‘Urubu pousou na minha sorte!’ ” (A vulture has landed on my luck!)

  Off-hours, he and the other two young Hungarians played cards at the home of the institute’s secretary-general, Christovam Leite de Castro. “A nobleman,” my father said, “and very friendly to us. He was our patron.” When not socializing with aristocrats, the trio trolled for women on the beach and in the brothels. “I got gonorrhea once from one of these houses of ill repute.” My father sought relief in a pharmacy in Rio. “They took me in the back and gave me a huge penicillin shot.” For a while, the three young men were partial to a particular brothel in Copacabana called The Palace. “The name was a bit of an exaggeration,” my father said. The place was a pit. “The ‘madam’ was this transvestite named Jesus, and he also ran a bar on the ground floor.” My father, never a big drinker, liked to order rounds there, so “I could yell, ‘Jesus, get me a beer!’ ” Tibor got involved with an Indian woman he’d picked up on the beach; her name was Irene, but he called her Inca. She worked in their house as a maid. For a while, my father went out with a part-African, part-Indian woman he met at Carnaval, also a housekeeper, whom he favored because she was “smart and easygoing.”

  During the Carnaval festivities, my father dressed up, generally as a French sailor. “I had this very colorful striped polo. I was very convincing, because I was so skinny.” He augmented the sailor image with a pet he’d acquired soon after his arrival: an Amazon green parrot. The bird had a particular skill, learned from a nanny in the neighborhood who was always calling a child: “He could imitate a woman’s voice really well!” My father named the bird Loira, Portuguese for Blondie. “Blondie was green, but he had a yellow spot on his forehead.” The parrot lived on the porch of the house—in a cage, but my father left the door open. “Loira could say, ‘Loira wants a coffee.’ And I would dunk some cake in coffee, and he would eat it.”

  “Were you tempted to cross-dress?” I asked, thinking of Carnaval’s ample opportunities to assume any costume without judgment. “Brazil is one of the most sexually relaxed places on Earth.”

  My father shot me a skeptical look. “I don’t like to be too relaxed,” she said. “Anyway, I couldn’t. Tibor and I shared the house. And he wasn’t that way.”

  In 1950, Tibor applied for a visa to the United States and suggested my father apply, too. “I wasn’t too keen on it,” my father said. “I was happy where I was.” The United States had a tight quota on Hungarian immigrants at the time, but three years later, the visas came through. “By then, Tibor didn’t want to go—but I did.”

  A new regime had taken charge and my father’s “patron” at the institute, the nobleman, had been replaced. “The new boss was a military attaché,” my father said. “Military men are all horse’s asses.” There was another issue. “The new guy didn’t like ‘foreigners,’ ” my father said. In Hungary, “foreigners” was code for Jews. “I knew it could be bad for me.” He accepted the visa and made preparations to leave.

  His Hungarian compatriots remained in Brazil. Tamás would thrive. He went on to direct the news department of TV Rio and launch his own production company, making commercials for Coca-Cola, IBM, and major advertising agencies. Last my father had heard, some decades earlier, Tamás was on his second marriage, to a beautiful concert pianist. “I don’t even know if he’s alive.” Recently, my father said, she had dug up her old address books and tried all the phone numbers she had for Tamás. They were disconnected.

  Tibor’s fate she did know, and it was not a happy one. After my father left, Tibor moved in with “Inca.” He continued to work at the geographic institute, but with a listlessness that eventually turned to permanent despair. He drank heavily, mostly whiskey. In 1967, he died from cirrhosis of the liver. Just before he died, Tibor married Inca. He wanted her to inherit his government pension.

  “Tibor should never have left Hungary—he was not like me and Tamás,” my father said. That is, not a “so-easily-assimilated” Jew. “Tibor couldn’t function outside Hungary. People like him, when the root is cut, they wither and die. I didn’t have these problems.”

  Yet my father’s most treasured memory of Brazil involved a search for that root. On an expedition to the state of São Paulo, he’d heard rumors of a hidden community of a particular ethnicity, flourishing deep in the bush. He hired a jeep driver to haul him down barely passable dirt tracks and, after many teeth-rattling days and false leads, he found what he was looking for: Árpádfalva, Árpád Village, a tiny Hungarian colony near the Paraná River. It was named for the tribal chief who led the Magyar Conquest into the Carpathian Basin.

  The village’s three hundred residents had immigrated in the 1920s, built a church (named, of course, St. Stephen’s) and a school where, for many years, all instruction was in Hungarian. My father was especially entranced by one extended family of Hungarian farmers, so many kinfolk that after he assembled them in front of one of their houses—“a very traditional Hungarian cottage with a thatched roof”—he needed an extra-wide lens to get everyone in the frame. Something about my father’s description reminded me of the one picture she kept in her computer folder marked “Family,” the 1943 photograph of the Friedman clan, gathered for Sámuel and Frida’s Golden Jubilee.

  “I loved that Hungarian family,” my father said, pensive. “I wish I had those photos.”

  A few weeks after I returned home, I did a Google search for Tamás Somló’s stepdaughter. My father had said she might be in the United States. As it turned out, she was on Facebook. Within a few days, I had Tamás’s phone number. He was alive and well and retired in Brasília.

  “Your father helped me a lot to leave Hungary,” Tamás told me when we talked. “And to come to Brazil. And to get a job.” My father got him that job, Tamás recalled, by claiming that he was a “seasoned” photographer. (In fact, Tamás had no experience in professional photography and had to do a frantic stealth study after he arrived.) Tamás still had the letter my father wrote to land him a visa. “I owe him a lot.” He suggested I contact a senior researcher at the current-day geographic institute in Rio, who had written a scholarly treatise on the Hungarian trio and the formative role they had played in shaping Brazilian photography. “They brought a new kind of vision to photographing people and landscapes,” Vera Lucia Cortes Abrantes, the researcher, told me when we spoke. “They left a precious legacy.” As it happened, that legacy was now on electronic display. The institute had begun digitizing the photos from that era and posting them on a website.

  A half hour later, I was sitting at my computer, dumbfounded by what was before me: the visual record of a body of work that I’d presumed was lost forever, summoned with a few keystrokes. Late into the evening, I typed “Faludi” over and over again into the box marked “Fotógrafo” and downloaded scores of brooding vistas, sun-bleached ports, flea-bitten villages, leathery farmers and cowboys and fishermen, barefoot children with ragged clothes and bloated bellies. They suggested a documentarian’s sensibility, WPA, not Condé Nast. The gaze behind the camera was observant, unsparing. The cache included three photos of the extended Hungarian family in Árpádfalva, lined up several rows deep before a thatch-roofed cottage, dressed in faded European frocks, button-down shirts, and fedoras.

  I
downloaded the pictures and sent them to my father. A few days later, she sent me back an e-mail, with two of the photos attached. One was of Árpádfalva. She had enlarged it several times, my father explained in her annotation, so I could see the details that proved the house to be a “true Hungarian Village Hut.” The other shot, which she captioned “Picture from My Past,” was a photo of the São Francisco River threading through a deep canyon, the river over which my father as a young man had flown all those years ago when filming the construction of the Paulo Afonso dam. In the picture, a canary-yellow two-seater fighter jet zoomed over the canyon. Perched on the far cliff were two vultures, hungrily eyeing the plane. It took me a moment to realize I was the recipient of a gag. My father couldn’t let pass an opportunity to Photoshop.

  ————

  Brazil’s freedom was oxygen that not every European expatriate could breathe, even its most celebrated Jewish refugee. Stefan Zweig finished another book a year after his ecstatic Brazil, Land of the Future, and The World of Yesterday may have expressed more truthfully his state of mind: it was an elegy for an epoch lost forever. In its pages, he set down a succinct diagnosis of his terminal condition: “I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger.” On February 22, 1942, less than a week after attending Carnaval, Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, killed themselves with massive overdoses of sleeping pills.

  And what had been the relationship between my young father and the Land of the Future, the land of “hot (35 degree) love,” where no matter what went wrong, nothing would go wrong, because “we will figure it out here”? “In Brazil, I had a great life,” my father told me. “The climate was wonderful, I had a solid job with a lot of freedom, I was making movies. They even gave me a VIP card that got me in everywhere. State receptions! Executive banquets! And there was no discrimination. No one ever asked me in Brazil if I was a Jew.” If there was a fairy-tale chapter to my father’s otherwise constricted and disappointed life, it would seem to be here in the lush abundance of one of the most ecologically diverse countries on earth. In the movie version of my father’s story, this is where the film goes from black and white to living color.

  Back in Yorktown Heights when The Wizard of Oz enjoyed its annual television broadcast, my father never missed a showing. He seemed as rapt as his children. The movie belonged to the storybook side of my childhood, of a piece with my father’s confectionary constructions—the marionette theater, the train set with its elaborate Odense toy town of cottages and churches, the lavishly illustrated Hans Christian Andersen anthologies that lined the shelves. My own favorite scene in Oz was the one where Dorothy and her companions shake off the fatal slumber of the Deadly Poppy Field and, linking arms, skip toward the glittering gates of the Emerald City. I thrilled to the song that accompanied their liberation, no doubt because liberation was what I craved.

  You’re out of the woods,

  You’re out of the dark,

  You’re out of the night.

  Step into the sun,

  Step into the light. …

  Hold onto your breath

  Hold onto your heart,

  Hold onto your hope.

  March up to the gate

  And bid it o-pen. …

  Now I think that anthem more rightly belonged to my father, the sound track to her South American years. Whenever I’d mention to an expatriated Hungarian Jew that my father had returned to their homeland, I’d always get the same horrified response: “How could he go back to Hungary?” I had another question: how could he have left Brazil? He’d escaped from the abattoir of identity-turned-death-sentence and skipped into one of the freest places on the face of the earth. He’d gone from a world of enforced and fatal racial classifications to a land of none. If identity is what you choose to be, not the thing you can’t escape, then my father’s arrival in Rio ushered in a period when every choice was open to him, occupationally, religiously, racially, sexually. He was free, more than free. He could take flight. The fantasy he’d had for himself, the desire he’d engraved on Jablonszky & Faludi letterhead—with a soaring plane and an unspooling reel of film—had come true. Why did he forsake it?

  Partly it seemed for love, his infatuation with the one woman he knew in the United States, a childhood sweetheart, a Hungarian Jew who had survived a death march and found her way to New York after the war. “I often feel like crying that I cannot be with you,” he wrote from Rio. “Believe me, You are the only being with whom I have a serious emotional bond.” In one letter he enclosed a photograph of himself: the dashing film director in a bow tie and jacket, framing a shot with his tripod. “Time, however, somehow passes, because I always have a lot of work, and while one is young all kinds of entertainment are possible, which however do not sustain the spirit. You know I’m entering the age when one starts to be seriously preoccupied with thoughts about marriage and family,” a state he philosophized about. “Man, being a social animal, needs family and a sexual partner,” he wrote. “I don’t really believe in the possibility of a perfectly happy married life with a foreign woman brought up in a different milieu, though there are exceptions and one can, as a last resort, modify oneself as well.”

  So there was that—his longing for a future with a woman of his “milieu” held within it a longing for a vanished prewar past, as miraculously preserved as an Árpádfalva in a Brazilian forest. “Do you still remember the harvest fair, the Disznófő and the Normafa, summer vacations and winter skiing?” he wrote. “Those were beautiful times, full of variation. I remember you had a Skoda and we had a Renault and once I was on a vacation near the Balaton and I invited you to come play ‘Swallows and Amazons’ with me on a real sailboat, but the contemporary spirit did not allow for such naughty acts.”

  On the very last day of 1953, my father boarded a Braniff International flight for the United States. He descended from the DC-6 Cloudmaster at Idlewild Airport many hours later, carrying a formal tie and dinner jacket in his suitcase. It was New Year’s Eve and he had anticipated ringing in 1954 with his old flame. She, however, had plans for the evening—with her fiancé, an American GI. “I guess she couldn’t resist the American man in uniform,” my father told me wanly one night in Buda. In a matter of hours, Braniff’s Cloudmaster had transported him from expectancy to disappointment, from the freewheeling polymorphism of mid-century Brazil to the gender demarcations of postwar America.

  Blondie, the parrot with the golden topknot, accompanied my father to the United States. “They made me leave him in quarantine for a while,” my father said, “but finally I got him back.” By then, my father had moved into a dreary studio on the west side of Manhattan. “I was at work every day. The poor thing was so lonesome. He was used to living on a sunny veranda. Now he was locked into a dark room all day with no sound.” The bird languished, stopped channeling the woman’s voice, then stopped eating. My father came home one day to find Blondie dead in his cage.

  19

  The Transformation of the Patient Is Without a Doubt

  “What’s this?” I said.

  It was another day in the attic, and we were at our routine, me in the folding chair, my notebook open, my father presiding from behind her desk, going through a manila folder marked “Changes.” It contained the paperwork of her operation, including the letter I’d just asked her about, two pages of single-spaced Hungarian text with an official-looking medical logo at the top, above the heading:

  Pszichológiai vélemény

  Név: Faludi István Károly

  Szül.: 1927. 11. 01.

  A “psychological opinion,” my father’s name and birth date.

  She made a scoffing sound. “Just life history. Things I told her.” She turned to the second page, perused it quickly. “But it’s no good.” She swept the letter aside. “That psychologist didn’t know what she was talking about.”

  “So, this is … what?”

  “An idiotic thing. Not relevant.”

  “One of the letters you submitted to the s
urgeon?” I meant, one of the all-important two letters stipulated under the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care, the protocols first devised by “the father of transsexualism” in the 1960s for treating transsexuals, which have since become the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care. Those standards call for written evaluations from two independent mental-health professionals, verifying the patient’s eligibility for surgery.

  “I told you, it’s not relevant.”

  I pulled the letter toward me and studied the incomprehensible type.

  “Originally, I had the idea I’d have the operation on November first,” my father said as she continued to rummage through the file. “On my birthday. It would be a rebirth.” But a year of hormone treatment is customary before surgery, and my father had barely begun the regimen. “So now my birthday is May seventh.”

  “Aha!” My father had found what she was looking for. This was a document she was eager for me to inspect—once she got it out of its protective wrappings. The extraction took a while: she kept it in a plastic sheath inside a hardback folder bound in elastic straps. It seemed to be some sort of diploma.