Picture on the Expatriate's Wall, pt 2

I have also been witness to the expatriate’s return. I have played the visited, rather than the visitor. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties my Irish mother’s brother lived as a missionary in Peru. Every seven years he would make a pilgrimage home to Ireland, stopping off for a brief visit with us in Boston.

I could not come to know him from such short, infrequent stays. I knew him only from old pictures, infrequent letters, and from what my mother told me. Yet, how could she know him? How could she know him, for who he was in the now? Uncle Pat entered the seminary at age seventeen, and left for Rome at twenty-two. Although he didn’t then immediately plunge into missionary work after Rome—he taught in Ireland for years—he had been nearly two decades in South America.

I felt the sad discrepancy between who he was, and who she thought him to be, during his visits. Felt the tension, not between them, but between the past and the present. The myriad of details that made up his present life was unknown, the incidentals, the mundane, the things too common to report, but ubiquitous, that make up a life: How did he get around the mountain roads of the Andes? He had a truck, what kind? Did something hang from the rearview? Did it smell like tobacco? Was it filled with laundry, or soda bottles? What brand of soda did he get in Peru? (I learned that later, during a trip there: Fanta.) Who were his friends? What type of jokes did he tell? How, exactly, did he spend a day with the poor in Cusco and beyond? What is it like to breath, day in and day out, at 11,000 feet and above? His habit of dress: casual, sloppy, dignified? The biaural world of Quechuan and Spanish in his ears, and the knowledge of English, Irish, and Italian in his memory. When did he first begin to dream in Spanish?

All unwitnessed and unexperienced by her, known only by report, through letter or in person, or not reported at all. This life-defining unknown paled before the vibrancy of my mother’s memory, memory like a demand, an insistence for connection, memory harkening back to their shared youth and truncated at the moment of his departure.

Now I understand the discomfort he must have felt surrounded by emblems of his own past, displayed in our house. The enshrinement of much that was probably for him forgotten, or at least outdated, though sentimental. And the frustration? Human nature is perverse: we aspire to be misunderstood. That is, we want to be understood in our own terms, for empathy’s sake, but we don’t wish to be known. That is, defined. To have our measure taken. It is only a step removed from being told:

You know what you are like? I’ll tell you . . . .

We are all spirits of growth, and need to be allowed such growth, have it recognized and accepted. Perhaps one used to smoke, or drink, but does so no longer.

Every revelation, every indication of change adds a degree of separation and confusion for the reunited, and underscores our mortality and essential isolation. No doubt, the expatriate resents the attempts to pull him back into the mold of the expected and familiar.

It is a sensation common to reunions of any stripe, school and college gatherings, and even family holidays, when we may feel the shackles of assumptions formed long ago and doggedly kept.

I think for the expatriate it is much worse. Here is the irony: He has gone off a-roaming, perhaps exactly to get away from the known, and he becomes something different. Only to return and find the assumptions about who he is ever more firmly entrenched by his very absence.

My mother of course, would have grown into a new understanding of this brother, given time. Those who love must adapt. But with such short visits, he continued to live with her still in memory: who he was as much as who he had become. An important expansion of understanding, the new realization, occurred, although it came not about Uncle Pat and his true, evolved self, but rather came in the reluctant, indeed hushed, realization of time, change, and separation.