I Didn't Talk

by Beatriz Bracher

  But the only thing that changes is the date on the stamp. In my research at the lab, even that didn’t change. For days and months it was always the same cell structures that, it’s true, are born, die, reproduce, and everything else: a productive life, varied and dynamic, but alway the same. It was an exasperating routine, doing the same thing for eight hours a day — I couldn’t take it. I compared it to the courses I taught in college prep and felt like I was wasting time. But I learned to describe what I observed with precision. Describing is sharing, inserting an observation into the chain of common knowledge, with its need for precision, for established nomenclature and recognizable methodology. The trouble is that every discipline has its own specific procedures, created according to its needs. And I’m not referring to the theoretical bias of a particular school, but to the slice of reality that each branch of knowledge sets out to capture. This slice obliges us to use a certain language, to establish its names and necessary procedures so that through it we can get closer. There’s already a story in motion, its false starts and deviations the result of ancient battles that today are meaningless, but language continues to carry the names we are in fact obliged to use if we wish to have our thoughts included in the common chain.

  I wasn’t trained for any special chain, I was never part of any of the organizations, and I had to guess at the correct discourse. There, more than in any other space of knowledge, speech is reality: it creates and modifies, kills and saves.

  It’s a pity

  What a pity

  the way a poor heart suffers

  its only relief is to tell everyone

  the thing that nobody says.

  Jose would say, Luiza said, Eliana suffered, Dona Esther died. I’m not acquainted with this relief, nor its necessity. It’s a paraphrase that’s worse than bad, it’s inadequate, José. I couldn’t just make something up because I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember what I said, and the incoherence of my story could get Armando killed. I always knew those were the stakes. But, I repeat, I had not been trained. For the suffering, the physical pain, we all are, or aren’t — anyway, it wasn’t going to be some gang of idiots who made me capable of withstanding mutilation, much less the idea of a mission I valued above life. Fucking life. This is something they never understood, especially you, José — by this point you were off smoking pot in Caixa Prego. The moral necessity, the feeling of loyalty and compassion, the colossal force that sweeps us up and compels us to resist adversity — it has nothing to do with adherence to missions or responsibility or a better future or being the protagonist of History or — what, my God? “I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities and all my love is toward individuals,” Swift said, and I’ve always felt the same.

  I found out later that the organization had rules about what to say and when to say it once someone is captured. If people “fell,” they needed to resist for a few days in silence, after which it wouldn’t be so serious if they gave up addresses and names, because the information would already be useless. There were other things that could be divulged during torture sessions, given that talking was necessary to avoid being killed: tell them whatever they want to hear, buy time for the machine to be disassembled and for your comrades to go into hiding. They started by saying what was already “in the open,” merely confirming what the soldiers already knew, making subsequent depositions seem credible, feeding their torturers a few valid facts, as though they were already giving in — and then, between useless facts, the names and addresses of idiots like me, people who knew nothing and who would certainly be released when it turned out they had a solid alibi. But I didn’t know any of this and, beneath the blows, I tried to keep guessing at the language, the codes and procedures.

  Armando was a good militant and, in spite of our close friendship — in truth, because of it — he never told me anything about his activities. The torturers already knew much more than me. Armando had participated in a kidnapping and a bank robbery, he’d laundered money, prepared safe houses for fugitives. The part about safe houses I knew. Later I found out the rest was just as true. In our apartment we took in a lowlife from Rio Grande do Sul whose nom de guerre was Joyce. He tried to seduce Eliana and all her friends. After I became a deaf widower, I learned that I could have said anything I knew — Armando would not have been affected by my words.

  Alexandre was here to take a look at my computer. It might’ve caught a virus. The internet is slow, it comes and goes, and I haven’t received a single email. Cecília didn’t confirm receipt of the material I sent, and it’s been two days since I’ve seen any ads for penis enlargement. Alexandre lives next door and brings his furry dog along with him. While he examines the various connections between the processor, printer, CD drive, and modem, he explains the correct pedagogy for training dogs. I go to the next room, start reading something that’s doomed by his interruptions to incompletion. There’s no escape: he needs to tell me about the dog, which is really quite nice, about the thousand dangers of not putting a password on everything, about the way the hackers can get in and screw up your whole life, enough horrors to make me want to give up on the computer and go back to my typewriter. I made the switch to a computer when Renato came to live with us. While he was still alive, he showed me the basics and fixed any sort of problem I ran into.The truth is that he managed to captivate me. I regret the foolish accident, and the argument we had before it.

  I like Alexandre. I like his misanthropic dedication to dogs. I distract myself these lonely days with something or another. São Paulo and São Carlos, teacher and retired. Lígia and her family took a trip to avoid the holiday bustle in the city. She prefers to take her summer vacation in December and work through January, when São Paulo resumes a semblance of civility for thirty days. She said she’s coming back in time for Christmas. She doesn’t need to, not on my account anyway, but she says she wants to spend one last Christmas at 7 Vaz Leme. Jussara and José are coming, too. I’m the one who would prefer to leave. I’m not in the family Christmas habit. But leaving would be an aggressive way to manage my feelings and besides, I miss Marta. She calls me Grumps, she’s already talking and everything, and she loves coming here to the house. We go berry-picking. She eats some, scowls with comical exaggeration when she gets a bitter one, and later smashes them into the dirt. She mixes them with water and leaves, and plays at making potions. We end up covered in mud and berry juice. I show her how to find pill bugs and pop the buds on hostas. I wanted Lígia to move to São Carlos. Alexandre’s dog shed all over the place and I sneezed through the night. I need to remember to sweep and wipe up with a damp cloth. Vanise can tell as soon as she steps foot in the house that Alexandre was here. She comes every Thursday, cleans, does the laundry, bakes some cornbread, and mostly keeps to herself. She hardly says anything. Alexandre and his dog are one of the few subjects we discuss.

  The guy is down, the guy is down.

  Down, down, down, he’s wasted, down and out.

  The guy’s uncle comes in, gets right up in his face and says:

  done, done, done, you’ve really done it now, no, no, no, no.

  The guy turns to his uncle, says: you’re dumb, dum-dum-dum,

  a dummy with no money, you just work, work, work,

  you work day and night, night and day, you’re never done,

  you drag ourself home and drink yourself dumb.

  Then the dumb guy’s daughter, who’s the down guy’s cousin,

  she comes running, running down, running dumb,

  so she doesn’t have to listen to the dumb drunks chatter.

  And then her grandma, who’s nothing to the cousin,

  from a good family, goody-goody, there she is,

  tec-tec-tec, tock-tock-tock, seam in the front, seam in the back,

  back to front, front to back,

  knead the dough and sew and fold

  and everything’s fine, fine-
fine-fine.

  There’s no problem, just solution,

  leave the boy, don’t tease your uncle, let’s go eat,

  hey, hey, I’m on top, hey, hey, hey.

  Tits on her, ass on him, but she doesn’t let her cuz’s hand slip down to the pet

  between her thighs, she never smelled or felt so good,

  in her pits, her neck, her puss.

  Oui, oui, oui, mon oncle, just like that

  I’m done, totally done, over there and down,

  I’m almost done.

  And the test is gonna come, and this guy’s gotta hit the books,

  and he’s no down-done-don, cuz he knows how to hustle.

  Mon oncle, monocle. One big eye, just one,

  that stares into faces, gazes out at the world,

  doesn’t glance at the tits on the miss or mommy’s tic-tic-tock,

  one big tired eye, grey, it wants to swallow me, single me out.

  Get outta this fool, no gutter punk ass, or your uncle’s clean.

  Spick-and-span, Johnson’s baby.

  Uncle hasn’t fucked in more than a year.

  Tired of the girls’ “teacher, teacher,” uncle’s bone’s gone dry.

  What’s that dum-dum, you gonna tell me that you get it up?

  What’s worse, unc, never having what they want or beating off all alone.

  Teacher, teacher, put it right there, oh! —

  rub my tits like this, lick my pussy like that.

  And teach just stands there in his boxers.

  The guy wears boxers. How’s he even do it?

  And that cousin of Basílio’s gives it up,

  Capitú gives it up, I only gotta study for the entrance exam.

  Done done, dom dom.

  Renato — notebook, circa 1987

  Renato’s two obsessions: sex and the computer. Conversation was impossible, not for lack of topics, but his hunger irritated me. He was an opinionated boy. He was ready with commentary on the direct elections, Tancredo Neves, Ulysses Guimarães, José Sarney, the constituent assembly, the cruzado. It was a tumultuous time and he wanted to talk. I don’t know why it was so difficult for me to listen. He was so vague, exhibitionist, emotional. His age: I was used to it from being in the schools, the university, but in him I couldn’t accept it. Always adjusting his crotch and ravenous for women. He was a good student, with his father’s intelligence and natural ability. How would Armando have dealt with a boy like this? Maybe Renato wouldn’t be this way if he’d had a father. The family curse of fatherless boys. With the computer between us, we understood one another: he was the teacher, and a good one at that. He enjoyed the subject. That’s really all it takes: enjoying the subject. You don’t even have to like the student, because sufficient passion for mathematics includes enjoying the challenge of infecting others with that passion. It never entered Renato’s mind that I might not be aroused for every single second of my classes: not to admit to an overflowing sexual desire for every one of the three hundred pretty girls passing through my classrooms every year would make me a complete hypocrite. Now that seems funny, but then it turned my stomach, beholding this transformation of woman into female, an object of the hunt. Renato argued that they did the same thing, that they felt the same desire. That it was just good fun for everybody. Animals — peacocks, wolves, hyenas. Didn’t I see?

  But with the computer everything went fine. He taught me how to use spreadsheets and the word processor. He enjoyed it and I needed to learn the basics. We sometimes ask ourselves how to create this feeling of need — the need for formal knowledge among our students. But shouldn’t we be asking how to create a passion for the material (and not for instruction) in the teacher? It’s not for nothing that researchers are, generally speaking, better teachers than the nonresearchers. Teaching should be that space where knowledge overflows from other activities. And the overflowing then would be joyous, committed, and demanding. The students become interlocutors and partners in a process linked to life, not one closed in on itself.

  I had a history teacher who was a real piece of work, a specialist in Euclides da Cunha. During our classes he was constantly writing articles for the Estadão, always about Euclides da Cunha. I remember something unusual: he wrote with a green pen, with green ink. His class went like this: he called on the first and second in the class — there was a boy called Aquiles who was the best one — “Number one” — but I don’t remember the name of the second-best one. “Number one,” he’d say, acting as though he didn’t know it was Aquiles, “read from page such and such of Joaquim da Silva,” the author of the textbook he used. And the kid would start reading and he would go on writing, and this was history class in the best public high school in São Paulo.

  Someone like me — recent conversation

  One-on-one teaching doesn’t always yield the best results. But my lessons with Renato were excellent and from him I learned the essentials for managing machines: the problem, uncle, is that the computer doesn’t do what you want it to do, only what you tell it to do. Teachers, in a school, never do what the principal tells them, only what they want. Any change in procedure has to take their desires into account, something I think I usually do pretty well.

  The word “uncle” was banished. A false and lazy intimacy, clouding each of our roles, teacher and student.

  Unlike José, I obviously hold on to all of my notes and documents. Even now, with digital backups, I only trust printed paper. And now I have to deal with this mountain of folders and carloads of books that will certainly never fit in the little house that’s waiting in São Carlos. After the hustle-bustle of goodbyes, honors, and finishing up my courses — and before the beginning of a new apprenticeship: a new job, new house, new neighborhood and city — I find myself wading through the echoing void I came to know when they let me out of prison. It lacks the despair of those times, but it’s sad just the same. Back then, like now, the world had lost its clarity and I fumbled along, trying to relocate my place in the world and feel out a future trajectory that could pull me from the void. I started to work like a madman. I still always get up early, I don’t know how not to. I go out for the newspaper and my bread, and lately, I prefer to drink my coffee right there in the bakery. Its difficult to face down a whole day without arguments, without decisions to make, pressures to manage, human contact.

  Topics under discussion at the bakery might change with the times, but soccer is a constant. I root for Santos, but I never really followed the game that closely. Armando and Eliana rooted for São Paulo, but nobody at home really cared much either way. Only after I was older, over twenty, did I begin to go with Armando to see games at a stadium. Although his team was São Paulo, he never missed a Santos game. It was impossible not to admire that team in the Sixties. Sometimes we’d go to Vila Belmiro stadium. Eliana liked going, too. I transformed myself, not exactly into a fanatic, but certainly into an enthusiast. Eliana found the game beautiful. She enjoyed watching the fans react and cheer, but never got to the point of understanding the championship brackets, or keeping up with the scuttlebutt. Armando used to read the sports section before anything else, and his mood varied tremendously according to the scores. He waxed philosophical about the matches, read interviews with players, and kept up with their lives. He had an excellent memory, and was the kind of guy who could tell rattle off the entire São Paulo roster for the past however-many years. I didn’t go to such lengths. I still read the news first, but I knew how the season was going for Santos, the names of the players, things like that. Then it happened. Life and Santos changed. Two years ago our beachfront team started to shine again and I perceived, in the bakery, for instance, that saying Santos was my team is no longer seen as some kind of shame or irony. I started reading the sports section again.

  This morning the professor said that in ’73 we were Paulista champions, still with Pelé. It’s strange ho
w in my mind, part of reality, some of its flux, was interrupted after 1970. The professor has his blanks, too: immense clouds that carry him off to a peaceful place, I think, because he appears calm during these absences. The other regulars at the bakery consider him just another neighborhood character. He was a literature professor, he activated the electric connections necessary for the enjoyment of writing in hundreds or thousands of nervous systems still young enough to be connected. Recently something in his mind was disconnected — an aneurism or something like that. He retired and sometimes wanders around the neighborhood, talking to strangers, reciting lines from the Lusíadas in a voice that’s still strong. I don’t know how, but the bakery cashiers know his story, they treat him well, but the other customers are perturbed by his praises of their eyes or bodies, made without any moderation to his affect. The professor sits at a little booth near the counter, turns to a girl and says, your eyes are so pretty, and then he forgets himself, his mind lost in admiration of the girl. Along with his short-term memory, he lost the awareness and self-control required for social life. But he’s kind in these moments, and his admiration for the girls is so sincere that I don’t think he runs a risk beyond the occasional tart reply.

  In my case, perceptions about which flows had been interrupted were delayed. I refer not to memory loss, although that has happened, as well, if on a lesser scale. First came a loss of perception, the perception of reality — or of interest in reality, which ends up being the same thing. Music and soccer, for example. The Seventies are one big blank. Not that I know much about what came later, but I have vague memories of specific games, the names of some players, and certain melodies. Literature, poetry, cinema, art, theater: nothing happened for ten years. After 1980 the fog begins to dissipate and some shapes become perceptible, but it’s a distant realm that I couldn’t reach, even if I had the interest. What’s missing? I read the classics, some for the first time. A few years ago I began to curate a small collection of my favorite records, this time on CD, even though I still haven’t managed to get rid of my LPs and my father’s ancient victrola. Lígia gave me a CD player as a gift, and some nights I listen to music. Sometimes I go out with my friends to bars that play old samba. On my Sunday strolls I end up, eventually, at a museum, or see gallery shows. I read the reviews of new books. I go to the cinema, sometimes I like a new film. Yes, the funk of interest is re-forming, but something changed. Maybe it’s my age, or the world, or a combination of the two.