I Didn't Talk

by Beatriz Bracher

  The freedom of a story or a novel includes, by definition, the freedom of ambiguity and contradiction. The process of the human condition is what Cecília seeks in me and others. My ideas are worth no more than my feelings. She wants the sudden flash of character, fragments of a being in a world that she didn’t know in its entirely, but whose echoes, both dead and surviving, form part of the structure he has inhabited, and where he continues to live. Long ago, novels, poetry, music, films, and plays changed the world, and education and work still contained this possibility, Cecília believes.

  Here I must stop. The air reenters my lungs or, as Francisco Augusto says, exits. Shortness of breath is caused by a failure to expel air from the lungs: we hold on to used air — carbonic gas — leaving no room for oxygen to enter and run its course: the path to fossilization. When I think quickly, I walk quickly. Then something gets stuck, blocking the exchange. I observe this in students who are fast learners, the ones who easily apprehend new meanings, build connections, everything makes sense, connects to what was already there, generates new feelings, and then suddenly, they’re halted. Some kind of resistance seems necessary: an estrangement, almost some kind of affront, the realization of the loss present in every gain.

  But there’s no way to argue against an idea in a novel. The idea can be fit into any worldview, assigned an origin and destination, a function in the action and composition of history. It can indicate certain new paths, useful to a thinker in the same way the violet winter sunset or a fire might forge a new link between our thought and its surroundings, which they nourish and provoke. But paths to an idea cannot be contradicted, shared, or even questioned: how can you doubt the sunrise, or argue with a begcourgar’s rant, or with the stupor of a cuckolded friend? So many thoughts occur in these moments, pregnant with ideas. The line at the bank, the bakery counter, the birdsong, the priest beneath the stained glass.

  When Renato was fourteen, Luiza got together with a diplomat and moved to China. She was always polyandrous, just as Armando had been polygamous. A flower with many stamens, sterile after Renato. The richness of a living being resides in its ability to spread its genetic inheritance. Luiza’s was in accumulating, retaining. A uterus full of sperm, sucking at the tiny feet of the insects that landed there. Sometimes she went all the way to shacking up, buying a fridge, putting on the airs, clothing, and vocabulary of the wife of: lawyer, adman, economist, tycoon, financier, doctor, politician. Other times she only made room in her apartment for: students, writers, professors, artists, goldsmiths, fishermen. In state registries her civil status always remained “widow.” Renato didn’t want to go to China with his mother and stayed with Dona Joana. Lígia moved into her grandmother’s room and Renato took the small one that had been Jussara’s and was originally part of ours, José.

  The house at first had four big bedrooms. When Jussara was born, they put the crib in our room. Her early morning cries were followed by soft, slippered footfalls and the sound of her suckling at our mother’s breast. José will not remember this image: a sonorous and tactile sequence blended in with my dreams: the soft cry growing, the felt slippers on the wood floor, the weight of the two at the foot of the bed, suck-suck, I’d peer from half-opened eyes to see my mother and the baby, a single mass, the breast and the mouth, their gazes and giggles, the milk running from the corner of Jussara’s mouth whenever mother stroked her cheek and made the baby laugh, her eyes sparkling some undetermined color. I’d pretend to be rolling over in my sleep and bring my feet against my mother’s thighs, drawing warmth from the suck-suck, elongating the mass. I’d reawaken to the sound of my father knocking his toothbrush against the edge of the sink. I don’t know exactly when they put up a wall to divide the room in two. In José’s house, the one in his book, Jussara wasn’t born: we are four men, plus our mother. And José was always the baby, sucking.

  Anyway, Renato moved in with us for good. The agreement had already been reached when Dona Joana came to speak with me about it. Even after my father’s death, domestic decisions weren’t divided between us. And now that I think about it, our father was never one to make decisions, either. José sees the world through dominion and predominance, and maybe I understand things more like agreements, accommodations. A masculine laziness about the little things that make up life. More than indolence, really: it’s irritation with the tedious polemics of small decisions, with having to leave my mark on everything, a tomcat pissing on the sofa legs.

  To sign, that is the first meaning of teach: to leave a mark. More than a sign, a signal. But that’s where things get complicated, where the conventional, social character of the sign is exposed, and I’m going too quickly, I’m out of breath again. Let’s stick with sign, a sign that distinguishes a being, he has a sign, a sign given by the master, the one who instructs. Let’s return to the first mark, not to Cain’s — that would be the third, we’ll get there. The first two, as I understand it, are the ones God made on Adam and Eve. The man who can only eat by the sweat of his labor and the woman who will give birth in pain. What did it mean, this mark? It distinguished them from those who had remained, the lambs of God who hadn’t betrayed His trust. With Cain it was the same: he is marked for having betrayed. Jacob is marked by his father, and Joseph by his brothers. The sign of betrayal isn’t the only kind, and it’s not the one we have in mind when teaching our students. But it was the first — and it was the mark given to me, which is why I’d like to consider it.

  Betrayal and tradition share the notion of transmission, the act of handing over. The old play on words — traduttore, traditore — takes its meaning not merely from the phonetic similarity between the two words, or the deeper meaning it gives to the act of translation. The similarity is plain and it’s right there in the root of the words, both of which refer to the act of passing from one side to another. We know that this going-over is never innocent and that nothing that crosses over can ever come back unchanged. To distract is something else: close in origin, but different in meaning. At first it meant to pull apart different things; to break, to tear, to scratch, to destroy, to quarter, to sell in parcels, to distribute, to divide, to level, to compose, to be defamed. The mailman hands over the letter he transmits. But my father wasn’t really a mailman: he worked at a desk, minding the flow of things and looking after union affairs.

  I think about where Cecília’s questions might take me. Back to a time when the schools harbored a detonating desire: that’s more or less what she’s looking for. We continue to detonate. Contact with knowledge is always something violent and transformative, no matter how bad we are as teachers. The students learn a new language, not only the specialized vocabularies of knowledge, in mathematics and writing, but another Portuguese: standard Portuguese. But whose standard is it? We abandon what we are, we betray our parents: that’s what we learn. Grandma Ana’s Jesus Christ would say that’s what it means to grow up. And later maturation, aging, retirement, and a return to our parents. I adopted my father’s habit of always walking with an umbrella, and ended up creating such an intimacy with my umbrella that I never forget it anywhere. This one has lasted almost a year.

  I already miss my job, the schedule and routine. I’ve been concerning myself too much with this interview, which wouldn’t be preoccupying me if I were still teaching classes and preparing for next semester. José’s book hasn’t helped either, not even as a counterpoint. Armando’s always there, submerged in my thoughts, but he now returns in force. I think it might have been more tolerable — the weight of accusation, the mark of Cain — if it had been anybody else who’d gotten killed. I miss him: our conversations are now idiotic monologues, building fire with sticks, nursing a cold tomb. I lack a counterpoint, a brother in arms. The mark of damnation isn’t as heavy as his absence. But I’ve had to carry both at the same time, as a single burden and I shouldered it, it’s true, I remained silent. I refused to respond to the never stated, always whispered accusation. It wasn’t only disgust, a
lthough there was that, too, it’s true: a violent physical nausea every time my responsibility for the crime phantasmagorically appeared in a gaze, in a slanted comment, in the absences of my supposed friends. I knew that I couldn’t allow this chancre of rage to take over — I struggled against mistrust, against making enemies. But I was systematically defeated in those first years. Anybody might transform into an accuser: Traitor. I wouldn’t rebel against it so much if the dead man were anyone else. Perhaps I’d be able to see the necessity for traitors from an anthropological point of view. I’d be able to sit down and discuss the matter, not to defend myself, because that will always be distasteful, but to try to show my friend how things look through my eyes, to remind him of who I am, to make him see. To see and not, believing what he’s heard, just glare at me. To see — and ripping out the doubt with my bare hand, I’d say: listen, it’s me and I’m here, the same old me. But no, any effort to deny a betrayal implies that it could have happened, and this is unthinkable to me: the iron brand that burns the steer’s haunches. A physical pain, worse for being unexpected.

  I was never a revolutionary, never took part in that enthusiasm. I never burned with the certainty of having a declared enemy. I was excited. We, mankind: we were going to change a lot more than the world. Each one of us had our own path, and we were all in it together — even if my path never took me down in the trenches the way so many others went involved in the various movements. Movements: we didn’t always call it that. Those in the armed struggle said “organization,” and then shut up. Today in the slums and the fields groups call themselves a movement. A curious expression, movement. Everything that moves is divine — I think Newton had a problem with that: explaining the movement of the stars while maintaining their divine logic. I believe there’s this idea that movement, more than any other manifestation, confirms the presence of the divine. Anyway the problem was this eccentricity with words: stopping before each one, taking it in my hands, massaging it, observing it from several angles, and only then, after it was deformed, allowing it to enter. As an eccentric, I felt ill suited to movements and organizations. Armando understood this, he accepted my way of participating where the movement unfolded in the community: by teaching, studying, raising a family. This isn’t the whole truth. My classes were inflammatory, I participated in student politics, I was active at the student center, I traveled to student conferences. We had study groups, alliances with other student organizations, arguments in bars. And I wrote violent articles. I was the editor of the natural sciences student guild’s newspaper. Brazil was coming into its own, and we were one of the first departments to move to the new campus: beautiful, big, and wild (when was this? ’62? ’63? Somewhere in there). We were in touch with the entire country.

  Those were our feelings, and they certainly moved us: today we are in closer contact with the whole world. But my feeling is of no longer knowing my neighbor. I spoke of burning with the fire of having a declared enemy. They existed, our enemies, before 1964: the bourgeoisie, poverty, capitalism, ignorance, oppression. But I sincerely understood them, that was the only possible way for me: understanding that these antagonists dwelled within us and that the struggle to build a new life for the new world would be waged inside each one of us. My new man was beardless and nude. There was so much to learn, on every trip, in group meetings, in the bars, and even in the classrooms. There was biology, and the way each professor approached it, girls, and adulthood — but not my parents’ adulthood. I taught college prep for the sciences and started working in a research lab. Before starting at the university, I worked in the bank and studied at night. Armando had a job, too, in a construction firm office. He organized the flow of materials, and I the flow of funds.

  I worked in the bank and in the bank I was possessed. Banks are a trap, banks are a trap: I was certain, absolutely certain, convinced, that the money in the bank was mine. Why? Because they give you a certain authority which then gives you the feeling of power. My section was called “Accounts Payable.” What did I do? I received instructions from agencies about which checks should be paid and about the limits on each account. I was seventeen, and to me this was thrilling: the power to say yes or no — it never occurred to me that what I was doing was just another dumb job. Fortunately I had a banker friend there, Mr. Gabriel. He was a cashier, and he’d say to me: Hey, watch out, in a banker’s life the only thing that ever changes is the date on the stamp. My god, was it damning. Power wasn’t in saying yes or no to a check, but to the person who presented it. Will I cash the check or won’t I? It was a simulacrum of having money at my disposal, as though the money were mine. You go nuts like that.

  Someone like me — recent conversation

  At 7 Vaz Leme Street, in that house that still held three children, mother and father, plus Grandma Ana, who came to live with us, widowed and sick, and the Saturday choro sessions and the union guys and the nightly meetings, with my father shuffling papers, writing out minutes and declarations, my mother sewing, my grandmother helping José with his homework or putting Jussara to bed and telling her stories. And Ritinha, who helped my mother with the sewing and with chores around the house, folding laundry and sweeping up the day’s loose ends, rushing off to her night-school course in typing. Number 7 Vaz Leme Street, full of such modest folk. A lineage without a single aristocrat or king. Cells, millions of them in a tiny dome under the microscope — working incessantly, dying, being born, transforming — always rounded shapes that absorb, expel, and return to their mobile, terrestrial lines, the crust of the entire planet consumed with such round, uninterrupted work. I left the bank and went into natural sciences: paying and not paying adapted to the prosaic work of cells, but the memory of power remained embedded, germinating a depression in the sheath of a memory until, little by little, that memory was assimilated and charged with the electric current of the movements.

  For thirty years I’ve been getting my hair cut by Mr. Osvaldo, three blocks from number 7, Vaz Leme. Valfrido, the nephew of some relative of Osvaldo’s wife, came on later. The two of them already old men, though Valfrido must be a few years younger me he already has the face of an old barber. Their relationship is old: Valfrido has always remained the young apprentice with a promising future if only he could settle down and learn to do things right. Maybe for this reason, now that he’s in his fifties, I hunch over and with the characteristic grimace of life’s commentators (taxi drivers, shoe shiners, bakery cashiers, newsstand men), those for whom life passes by in pieces each day (the elevator operators, too) — I make a face that, when you think about it, isn’t really a grimace, and yet it’s more than just a way of talking, it has something to do with the position of the head and a curling of the lips at the end of the phrase, something I call a grimace because it’s a public face made for an audience, like the faces on the prows of boats, parting rivers and oceans with their unique scowls — with that face, I turn to Valfrido, who’s sweeping the clippings of his last clients and punctuating Osvaldo’s monologue with discordant grunts. I look in the mirror at him, behind me, where new strands now fall, to be swept up by his broom, and I recall Ritinha, at the end of the day, sweeping the trimmings from the sewing room’s wine-colored linoleum.

  I’d get home from the bank at nearly six and had an hour to eat and study before leaving for night school. The house was in chaos — kids taking baths, mother preparing dinner, father arriving in silence and settling among his papers, setting the mood for the rest of the house. I would go to the sewing room to do my homework. Ritinha unplugged the radio when she heard me coming. She swept with a soft-bristled broom, softly humming the rest of the interrupted song. Twice a week she went to her typing course and the other three nights she took classes in design. The broom and her hips both moved to the rhythm of the music, her flesh firm, swaying with the sweeping. She wore striped dresses, long and modest. The skirts swished across the back of her thighs as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, the scraps and clippin
gs fluttering with the breeze before they were swept into a tangle of black threads. She was a cheerful girl, and always wore a thick coiled braid in the daytime, hours which for her passed easily, vespers to the night — when her life really began. She liked everyone and was a quick study: she hemmed, sewed, embroidered, took measurements, cut patterns, helped around the house, swept up, smiled and played along. We were too little to be of any use. Despite the distraction, I still managed to study, not with any absorption, but in a way that lent itself to humming, hips, the swish of the broom, the verb connecting to its indirect object, the wars and revolts and phagocytosis, the process by which a cell or a group of cells will incorporate solid particles, engulfing them, a process that does not require the penetration of a cellular membrane and which acts as a means of nutrition and defense against foreign elements within an organism. The difficult part was the sequence of bending, showering, see-you-in-the-morning. The bending part is obvious: when the girl is young, and the boy watching is young too, she doesn’t kneel down, but keeps her legs straight and bends her body down, swaying as she brushes the scraps into the dustpan. Then came her shower in the tiny bathroom behind the sewing room, where everything was thrown together on top of everything else: cold shower, sink, and toilet. No steam — just the smell of soap and a song that had regained its lyrics, under the false protection of a sheet of plywood that barely functioned as a door. It only blocked the view, which made matters worse. I plugged my ears but the melody was already inside, hammering away, thumping my stomach and regions south. And the variation of the rhythm corresponded to the changes in the sound of the water, which sometimes nearly stopped: rinsing here, then over there, a little more here, water spilling across, my God, wherever her hand was lathering. When she finished, she turned off the tap — the lyrics faded once more and all that remained was a melody that drifted away as she concentrated on drying the enormous surfaces and curves and the spaces between her fingers, between everything, the brush in her hair and now her clothes, and then the plywood door opens. Sweating and drained, I laugh awkwardly as Rita the typist and designer emerges, hair hanging in lose waves, her dress low-necked and tight-waisted, the skirt to her knee, lipstick on her lips, see you tomorrow buddy, I’m going to class.