I Didn't Talk

by Beatriz Bracher

  I, on the other hand, lived my whole life with Dona Joana. I could never reencounter her. And the truth is our mother could never reencounter José either. Since he’d left home at seventeen, her son had gone through so many transformations, all so far beyond her ken, that her affection for the mature man was more of the kind you might feel for the friend of your dead son — one who reminds you, with his presence, his age, and his stories, of the boy who passed away and no longer exists. “The teacups,” the note continued, “are part of the set we used to use when we were little, and which I took when we split up her things. I thought of all the reasons they’re so special to me and why I want to share with you, my older brother, reuniting something that time divided, but all my reasons, no matter how sincere would only annoy you. We’ve never spoken about keepsakes, but I can imagine your opinion — I’m aware of your aversion to junk and of your preference for coffee in a jar. I only ask that you accept them, with my sincere affection.”

  I agreed to have lunch with Teresa because I enjoy her company, a feeling I think is mutual and which allows us to share an understanding, stimulating even when it comes to discussing academic concerns. This time there were no concerns, just an end-of-the-year lunch for two. We agreed to meet in the department café and then go somewhere nearby so we could have a decent meal, with some peace and quiet. She was with a young woman who looked like one of my undergrads. I don’t remember much about her, only that she was charming — but then there are so many — and I can’t recall her name, Ercília or Marília, or something like that. It turned out she’s writing a novel set in the Sixties and Seventies, and she wanted to interview me. She’d already interviewed several people when Teresa had suggested me. Her protagonist was more or less my age, had been imprisoned, became an educator. She needed information about the period, about the education system — details of daily life in the schools and in prison. She said she’d already read my books. I think she was studying pedagogy or anthropology, I didn’t quite catch that. She hadn’t known that I’d been a prisoner, had participated in the movement. I didn’t participate, I said. But Teresa made a pouty face, as if I were being difficult or modest. I didn’t want to upset Teresa, but the situation really bothered me. Sensing this, the girl was intimidated. She’s interesting, this girl. I mean — well, I mean, no, that’s just it, she’s serious, pretty, and this wasn’t mere idle curiosity. Finally Teresa asked her to say more about her book. The girl said she’d just started working at a public school and was taken aback by the “aggressive emptiness” she felt between the teachers. In the novel she wanted to portray a time when education still seemed to have a more explosive meaning, a detonating force — and where this had eventually led. She’d already read books about the history of education, and about the repression of the resistance movements. She’d seen the films and heard the songs, but she said she needed to interview people because her book wasn’t about politics or education, but about something she wasn’t quite certain she fully understood yet. Now that I think about it, she’s pretty bold, this girl. I knew exactly what she was talking about, because I’d thought about all this plenty of times myself — but I don’t like being the raw material that somebody else sucks dry.

  At the time however I found it charming, this shameless inquiry into my life, so transparent, utilitarian. She said she needed to know the slang from that period, nuances and details that you can’t get from reading books. She admired my ideas, that I understood, but ideas weren’t what she wanted — none of that mattered. She wanted my age. To ferret out words from those years that still lingered in the speech of older men. A Trojan Horse, this gift from Teresa. Now I can’t get it out of my head, this girl and her interview. She even ended up with my phone number, though she hasn’t called yet. I hope she doesn’t call. It’s a bad time. I told her I hardly remembered anything and she said she wanted that too — the broken memories, the scrambled view of what remained — everything that was vanishing into the aggressive void.

  She said she’d like to read some of my more recent work before conducting her interview, and Teresa mentioned the reports and letters I’d sent not long ago to the Department of Education, offering my unsolicited opinions regarding the latest direction teaching had taken. I ended up telling the girl I’d send them to her, even though they weren’t public documents. What was her name? Josefina? Maria? There’s no way I’d call Teresa to ask. When the girl calls, she’ll say her name. It’s no good, this business of forgetting even recent things. I jotted down her email someplace, but I think it was only her initials. I’d written it down so I’d remember to send her the letters and reports, but I haven’t had the time.

  I’m disorganized and forgetful, which is why I created a rather rigid methodology, external to me, from which I wouldn’t be able to escape. I became what appears to be a punctual, organized, and responsible person. Appears is the right word, but without its insinuation of falsehood, which is connected and consecutive to superficial, incomplete knowledge. He appears to be generous, but once you really get to know him — you can’t even imagine. This would actually be a good way to teach Portuguese. Take an expression at random, one that arises in a trivial classroom conversation, when we’re not — when we appear not to be — teaching. In those innumerable instants when the teacher speaks about a spouse or against the government, or when a student — but trivial conversation rarely comes from the students. In those moments we can interrupt ourselves to call attention to the word being used. That’s the birdsong. Or the appearance of a priest in a church when we’re only there to see the stained-glass windows. That moment in which we perceive another dimension of what we’re doing, the object we’re examining, the instruments we’re using. The value of error: this is precisely the value of error. Yes, because the birdsong in the middle of muddling through Kant is certainly an error, as much as when the flesh-and-blood priest appears right beside you as you’re going on about the Baroque. Error skewers our thought, distracting us. And such is the magic of errors: we return from them changed. Like an errant trajectory, suddenly on the wrong street — only then do we stop to think about the general design of streets and their layout and choose the most interesting path, which may or may not be the shortest. And so the teacher uses the word apparently in an unusual way, stops and says, how curious, we sometimes use “appear” to say that something is false, that it seems to be something that in reality it isn’t. But when you think about it, we also use it to say that something appears to us in such a way, in such a form, and that’s the only way we know it — the way in which something appears. Because we aren’t sure if it will remain, over time, the same way we see it now. Or perhaps we suspect it will be able to change, so we say that it now appears as such. But when we say that something appears, do we really mean that it’s false? Or do we only use it to express our hesitation, which may not be motivated in any way by the thing in itself? And then we can open the dictionary together with the students to find out if apparent has any relation to parent.

  I always favored the presence, in every classroom, of a Portuguese dictionary, an etymological dictionary, a Latin dictionary, a Greek dictionary, a common grammar, and a dictionary of verb and prepositional correspondences. And not in some corner of the room, but on my desk, to be handled at all times, without formality.

  I say I appear organized because that is how I’ve become in relation to the world, without having changed my nature. Thus: apparently. I am organized to everyone who comes into contact with me and only to myself apparently organized. But I didn’t send those report letters to that girl of Teresa’s. Not because I lack discipline, or because she doesn’t deserve my help. I left it to the end of the week to decide what I’d send her, and ever since, I’ve been hesitating. The dinner with José came in between.

  Eliana died at twenty-five. Tomorrow she’d be fifty-nine. I don’t think there was a suicidal vein in the family — Dona Esther’s melancholy was more Lusitanian than depressive. Sh
e was widowed young, with small children, and sold her father-in-law’s bakery (which her bohemian husband had inherited and never knew what to do with). She bought two houses to rent out for income and went to work for a Catholic association for women. As Dona Joana would say, she had the opportunity to learn, and learn she did. When I was young, I was envious of Armando, of his mother who worked away from home, of his father’s absence; he had the family apartment to himself and all the responsibilities of the man of the house. In comparison to our little clan huddled under Dona Joana’s wings and my father’s black umbrella, it all seemed modern and adult. When I first met him, Armando would get his sister from her school every evening at five. I never heard him complain the way I did on the few occasions my mother asked me to watch Jussara. He didn’t regard what he did for his mother as a favor; it was one of his household duties, like going to the bank to pay the bills. The house was an apartment and it was his: he had a set of keys, his mother consulted him on the best way to manage their domestic budget. In my house Dona Joana left no space for any of us to assume such a role.

  Compared with José, I appeared to be a very independent young man, an appearance that my contact with Armando cracked open to reveal a mama’s boy — that was a bitch, but nothing could be done about it. When I looked after Jussara so my mother could go out, or when I brought her some kind of fastening from the notions store downtown, on my way home from school, she’d tousle my hair, the smile on her face expressing pride in her little boy, all grown up. It was so different from the way Dona Esther treated Armando when he gave her the receipts from the bills he’d paid at the bank, along with her change. She didn’t thank him. She sighed, remarked on how costly life was, she praised God that she had a job and, unlike the women she served in the institution where she worked, she didn’t depend on others for help. The scholarship that Eliana had received to study in the Catholic school hurt her pride, and she and Armando decided that the way to set things right would be for Eliana to attend the same public high school that we did, and by then she’d be old enough to catch the bus by herself and make her own lunch.

  Eliana, who would be fifty-nine years old tomorrow, was passionately devoted to her brother. Armando — a loudmouth, a truant who always got away with things, a ringleader, a prankster, a mediocre soccer center striker, a mediator of various factions, a spokesman for all our student demands, a merrymaker, a glutton, a foul mouth, and a miser — felt part of any group that life set before him, claiming the role of brother or father no matter where you put him. Eliana on the other hand belonged to only one group, her family triad: a chosen people, bearers of the mark. It was necessary to deserve it, the mark, which she daily mastered through her dedication to her studies and how seriously she measured her thoughts and actions. Francisco Augusto says that love triangles hold more love than duets. He says that the desire to defeat and dominate is what preserves love. Eliana was possessed by the obligation to serve and to live up to a certain standard. She couldn’t fail. Up to the standard of her mother, first of all, and then, forever and always, her brother. She wasn’t timid, submissive, or defensive — she was delicate. She had that joy of the very serious. She died without knowing, Luiza said, don’t worry.

  I’m hesitating not because I’m afraid to expose my incoherence. Retired, said the man who moved with the help of a walker and his new wife. I’m in the navy, said the wife in white, and we’re newlyweds. Apparently we don’t know anything about the people we see and when they tell us what they are — retired, in the navy — we’re surprised because without realizing it, we already knew the entirety of their lives: something inside us has woven their stories. Mainly about the things they don’t tell us. In the bakery, that pretty girl with the bags under her eyes, I think: she’s married, she’s nursing and doesn’t sleep much at night. She proudly displays her weariness and the leaked-milk stain on her low-cut dress. She has the voice of a queen and her gaze is distracted; she loves and is loved and the love flows into the bread, the butter, the milk, the baker, and transforms even the famished gaze of the little urchin upon her breast into an homage to maternity — and this is how we make people known and familiar, enclosed in a story that doesn’t threaten us. When the girl in white at the motel said, I’m in the navy, she guided my thoughts, charting a fixed course — that of the nurse who’d used her husband’s infirmity to make herself indispensable and loved, yet with a love always threatened by the possibility that her companion might be cured. I don’t know whether this information about her was enriching or limiting.

  Life is full of surprises. I’m in the navy, said the girl in white. This cancer, it’s already taken my breasts and given me these silicone tits, said the girl from the bakery, it’s eating me from the inside and I want life, bread, the baker, and the hunger of this little boy. The danger, when confronted by these surprises, is to say to ourselves, oh yes, now I understand, and to halt the process of imagination, deactivating it. To accept navy and cancer, archiving them in pigeonholes called soldier and death, is to discard, as error, care and maternity.

  Oh, how thought betrays. Next to error, betrayal is my engine. I was going to talk about two beautiful women who attracted me, as if I meant nothing by it, only to illustrate a prosaic analogy, and I’ve returned to soldiers and death. Soldiers and death. Where along the way did I lose the shining, dark skin of my domineering navy nurse and the pulsing tenderness of my new mother? Soldiers and death. Left-right, left-right, march little solider, in your soft beret. The trick is to accept these betrayals of reality and thought — incite them, remain open to receive them — but never submit to them.

  The letters and reports I wrote to the Department of Education, criticizing where trends are heading and the evaluations designed by the current government — they’d be interesting for that girl of Teresa’s, so objective, so emphatic, up to date, and above all, rather specific. The center of that void that perturbs her. I’m not considering publishing them, but it might be productive to show them to her. A reading of the letters would bring out contradictions of certain things I’ve written in my books, which is interesting. It might deconstruct the image she’s made of me, of my thoughts. Or it might reinforce what I always say about the necessity of self-subversion. Something more than just an old man, I still feel the strength and desire to err and to betray and to strike my target. Not strength for defending what I’ve already said, that’s foolish, but strength for thinking anew — but will I? Right about now I’m tired and confused, almost disinterested. I think about the girl and her curiosity, but her topic doesn’t excite me. Still, the letters are a moment of vigor and struggle. Why do I hesitate?

  By Friday’s dinner, I hadn’t yet started to read the manuscript of José’s new book. He was emotional, saying goodbye to the house, taking Polaroids of every corner, and regretting having ever agreed to the sale.

  — What do you mean, agree? You and Jussara had to convince me to sell it.

  — No, no, I don’t want to argue, I’m not criticizing you. Jussara needed the money, and I thought you did, too, now that you’re retiring.

  — José, please. I’m moving to São Carlos because we’re selling the house, not the other way around, so spare me your good intentions.

  — Calm down, professor, no need to shout.

  — I’m not shouting, I’m emphasizing.

  — It’s all fine, it was an attractive offer and ever since she died I’ve never wanted to come back, it brings me down. But I didn’t realize your attachment was so strong and besides, my life has been a never-ending process of leaving things behind, going away, burning bridges, and starting over with a few more scars. You know I burn all my originals and proofs? I keep no kind of diary, no record, no notes. I’ve always been that way. But now that I’ve begun to write about our childhood, I feel the lack.

  — Our childhood, José, ours?

  — Yes, that’s what brothers tend to have in common, their childhoods. You can�
�t change that, can’t destroy it.

  — What do you mean, destroy?

  José cooked dinner: the spaghetti Bolognese of our childhood, with sauce, diced onion and tomato, and lightly browned ground beef. Eating calmed us down. I complimented the dish and he told me about life in Curitiba. His project — our childhood, myself though his eyes — was a latent theme.

  — So, when will you move to São Carlos?

  — The demolition crew starts work at the beginning of March but I want to be in São Carlos by the first week in February. Lucilia wants me to move now, right after Christmas. But I don’t want to stay at her place and the painters will only be finished at the end of January. I’ll move as soon as it’s ready.

  — If we hadn’t sold the house, would you have stayed here?

  — I don’t know. Now that it’s said and done, I think it’s for the best, and that I should have left São Paulo a long time ago. But there was always the house.

  — Really, I didn’t know it was so important to you, it didn’t even occur to me.

  — It’s nothing like that, José, it was laziness, the path of least resistance. But as soon I was forced to move on, to make a new home, my old idea of working with Lucilia came back to me — I’m not leaving São Paulo so much as getting out of the university environment — working only on linguistics, returning to my research without the burden of administering this or negotiating that.