I Didn't Talk

by Beatriz Bracher

  A distracted perception of art. The prose of my students’ mothers, gossip from around the neighborhood, the bakery, the university. And politics, which I took to reading about in the newspaper as though it were a soap opera — it had acquired the same weight as a book or a film. All of it fleeting and light. My studies, my linguistic research saved me from this lethargy and alienation — only work mattered. Mobilizing people for action, forming part of a group, taking care of those around me, placing myself in the line of fire: after prison that was how I lived in public and at school. Then I immersed myself in my studies at the university. Now I want to reread this Brazilian novel and listen to that Brazilian song and see another Brazilian film, but the meanings have changed, and I can’t find what I’m looking for.

  I must be deafer, or perhaps older, than I realize, because every book I pick up, every song, every painting seems part of one vast adolescent phase, even the theses and essays and debates over politics and public education. I can’t help feeling like I lost the ability to see the world with foreign eyes. It’s true that Diego and Robinho, Renato, Maurinho and Alberto, Alex and André Luiz managed to do this at the end of 2002. Not that bastard Fábio Costa who went and lost the championship game of the Libertadores cup to a bunch of Argentine punks. The professor corrects me, recalling that Costa saved the day in the final against Corinthans. But soccer is another story, almost like sex.

  In today’s teacher training, we discussed the importance of valorizing oral production in school and distinguishing the difference between oral and written codes. Helena, a Portuguese teacher in public high school, told us about a class she’d taught on argumentative texts. She proposed a fictional situation in which there would be a referendum in Brazil, to approve or reject the death penalty. She explained to the students what a referendum was and told them that to imagine they were being paid to write a pamphlet on the subject. Each group had to write a a text to convince the other voters of their point of view, for or against.

  Helena explained that she began the class with a conversation about which arguments might be raised against one side or the other. As the students spoke, the teacher wrote their comments on the board. She explained the idea of a counterargument, an argument that serves as response to another view that it presupposes. She explained the appeal to authority and other types of argumentative strategies, which the students then discussed. The discussion became heated and everyone participated, sometimes aggressively. Helena showed them that argumentative strategies such as shouting, threatening, and physical aggression have no place in a written text where only words have power, and for this reason their thoughts needed to be carefully arranged to be convincing. Other strategies that might work well during an interpersonal exchange, like weeping or other manipulations, would need to be formulated in some other way in a third-person text, in which the author and the audience remain anonymous.

  When the arguments had all been discussed, explained, and written on the board, the groups began to write their texts. The class calmed and finally started talking about how to write. After a while, the student who had been the biggest cheerleader for the death penalty indignantly shouted, “It’s not fair! We got stuck being the bad guys, the ones who want to kill people! It’s a lot easier to be against it and be the nice guy.” Helena tells us that she only laughed and was pleased her student had realized the “importance and responsibility that words possess.”

  Myself — professional development course, 2001

  The tales of a time when novels and films could change the world strike me as curious. First the world existed to be praised in song: wars were waged so they could be narrated, but after centuries and millennia had passed the song became a weapon. A real weapon, with a trigger and an explosion. Reality is not transformed within the work of art, it’s transformed by the work. Each reader, spectator, or listener becomes an armed agent of the transformation. It was more or less at such a time that I was apprehended, released, and stopped paying attention.

  I worked and studied a lot in those ten years in which I didn’t watch any soccer. I was transferred from school to school, I did my master’s, my doctorate, I started lecturing at the university. I returned to my need for an exact description, of gathering what’s already been thought out and settled, and then advancing with small, sure steps. And fear, an enormous fear hovered in the air, a dense and colorless smoke separated us, controlling all speech, containing only simple pleasantries. A collective gushing. Cursed, ten thousand times cursed. I don’t know if anyone today has any idea of what the fear was like. The humiliation of fear. The only excess was rage. That’s why there’s nostalgia for time we had a common enemy. Those who don’t remember can’t discern the horror of the word common. We were in common with the enemy: it was a part of us, among us: we were one with it, because of it. The beatings, shocks, the night raids became medals of honor and merit. Precisely because we were beaten, we continue to be those who were never beaten.

  Helena’s cheer was excessive. She is serious, and she’s right. I’m an old crank who mixes apples and oranges, and the joy that Helena took in the “responsibility that words possess” seems almost frivolous to me. In bed I hear Eliana’s voice, and it calms me. Lígia is now older than Eliana ever was. Renato never reached his father’s age. Renato died drunk when he drove his car into a post. If Eliana had been alive she certainly would have known how to prevent my confrontation with Renato. Not in the way that Dona Joana had done, protecting the father from sons and sons from father. Actually she never did this, it’s a lie from José’s book that’s wormed its way in and frozen a certain story in place, one that isn’t mine. Joaquim Ferreira didn’t need protection from anybody and he never threatened us. I admired him, I wanted his silence in me, without any of our mother’s confusing chatter. Dona Joana was nosy and barged into every space. She had no patience for masculine hesitation. She was what we might call a “facilitator” today. Because teachers, today, they don’t teach anymore: they facilitate, stimulate, and organize the process. They lubricate, oil, grease, smooth, sand. Lubricious, slippery, lustrous, sheened, penetration without pain. Screwy words, screwy images. And Helena is serious, yes, I know. Poor Dona Joana, she wouldn’t like to see herself inserted in this rigamarole. And Grandma Ana, back then, the teacher of so many boys and girls who remained grateful to her their entire lives: they wrote to her on her birthday, they sent her postcards. But Dona Ana, she didn’t teach anything, she only facilitated the process. Of course, my grandmother would say: her straightforwardness was light-years ahead of my screwy senilities.

  But now, in this intermission in life, Eliana has been visiting me more often. Just now, Lígia was teaching Marta that after death our bodies are eaten by bugs. She laughs and tells her friends, by way of explanation, about the strange education she’d received, our sunny strolls between the tombs and the grave we made for her mother — just now Eliana’s spirit visits me and calms me. She was always sweet and soft, but has become more cheerful in old age. She’s no longer frightened by my outbursts: she even finds them funny. Sometimes she treats me like a child. And with her I’m able to laugh at my rages and accept time as a passive assistant: passively I watch and wait, and time goes on without my help. It’s not hypocrisy or indifference, or irresponsibility, she says: it’s stepping aside, making space, having patience, knowing when you can’t do everything, being ready, staying close. Little, feminine things like that, perhaps a bit timid, but maybe they’d have helped me avoid a conflict that proved insufferable. Who knows.

  I’d never seen this notebook of Renato’s before. I found it when I was clearing things out for the move. I need to give it to Luiza. I was going to say give it back to her, but it was never hers, nor mine. Returning is an act of giving back something lent or forgotten. Who owns Renato? The dead never forget these things. Anyway, I place return in the same classification as reply, respond, refuse. I don’t even know where Luiza is anymore, she vanished. A
nd this time I refuse nothing. I don’t even know what I’m talking about. I never refused. It’s just that sometimes I had the impression that Luiza saddled me with Renato as a punishment, a debt that fell to me to honor. In school I always had more patience with adolescents. Maybe that’s not the right word. They require certain things and my hearing had been altered. In the professional development courses, I get a glimpse into how things have changed over the past fifteen years. The responsibilities of teachers and principals are different, and what families and society expect from the schools has changed. In the shift from teacher to educator, the operational elements are inverted: school as extension of family became family as extension of school — today’s schools require educating the parents.

  Eliana graduated early and then we got married. At one point I’ll have to stop and put all these old things in order. To think: Eliana as an old thing. These papers I find tucked away in closets and drawers. Our father died, then mother, Renato. Lígia moved, Jussara married, each one leaving behind bills, letters, checkbooks, minutes of meetings, notebooks, everything worn at the edges. If the house weren’t going to be demolished it would all stay right here until the next resident threw them out. The painter, the cabinetmaker, the foreman, or maybe Tobias: they’d come prepare a new home in the house, they’d replace the old pipes, the wires, maybe change the tiles, so worn down that they’re no longer level. A new coat of paint on the walls, varnish on the closet doors, and all these papers would go down to the dumpster.

  I have my systems, I always have: in school, at the university, at home. They’re idiosyncratic — all of ours are — but perfectly intelligible to anyone who needs to consult them. My advisees, for instance: after a few months they’d already be able to find any book, thesis, or journal in my office. The lazy ones could never find them, they’d accuse me of being messy or of purposefully creating codes revealed only to my disciples.Vile infamies (redundancy of emphasis) of indolent minds. Each person is a new theory of knowledge. Understanding his systems of organization for anything — books, clothing, relationships — means getting to know him. It’s something I’ve always been curious about. But now, during this tail-end to the year, and retired, I wonder if I should bother trying to know, or continue knowing, those who are dead and gone. Papers and more papers. Dona Joana’s patterns, Grandma Ana’s school notes, old man Joaquim’s drafts of minutes and manifestoes, Jussara’s letters, Lígia’s stories, notes, and outlines; and José’s book. Cecília would be interested in all this. Fragments of life in no particular order, awaiting imagination, or a necessity, or whatever might sew them together.

  My father had his first stroke while I was in prison and died a few months later. My mother told me he was furious with Armando. I rarely saw my father furious. He grumbled, there was a lot he didn’t like, especially a lack of objectivity or anything whimsical. Politics isn’t for putting your feet up and feeling fine, it’s not a way of gaining friends. It’s only a way of obtaining things: simple, shared things — improvements to salary, working conditions, family benefits — or so my father, Joaquim Ferreria, would say. He wasn’t in love with Jango and he didn’t despair the coup. I don’t know if his love was limited to individuals, but he distrusted the powerful and all their institutions. They were his adversaries and so he had to understand their mechanisms. It seems he wasn’t a good negotiator, or at least that’s what Francisco Augusto told me — he was close to the postal workers during the social movements. My father was not on the front line, swept along by the current of national politics: that was something of which he disapproved.

  But, Francisco Augusto tells me, his legacy remained alive and they consulted him when they needed to mobilize the old guard. My father knew more about movements and organizations than I did. After the coup, he became even more closed-off and left his post at the union. He stopped bringing home all those papers. I didn’t witness this phase: I’d already left home. One day, after his death, I asked Francisco Augusto what my father’s position had been with regard to the movements. He was evasive. He said that old man Joaquim only spoke about internal problems at the Post Office. But I know that he and Armando had had a serious disagreement. I thought maybe Armando had stuck his nose into union politics. But maybe that confuses things, because around the time I started college and José left home, my father no longer cared for Armando, and the meatballs had returned to being meatballs. They were no longer “Armando’s.”

  The fact is that the old man, in his more active days, would keep quiet in the assemblies and the meetings with the bosses. If asked, he would advise the leadership in short sentences, uttered in a low voice. This agrees with what I remember of the nighttime meetings at our house. He would laugh at jokes, he liked hearing the cases members brought to be discussed, and he told his own, too. But he he didn’t get swept up in any excitement. He waited for the silence and then summarized all the shouting in two or three sentences: the positions advanced during the past two hours are this-and-that and such-and-such. I was reminded of him when I watched the Great Dictator, during the scene in which Chaplin’s Hitler barks out pseudo-German, and then the English translation of his words. After a long speech full of howls and grunts, the translator explains in half a second: the führer has expressed his feelings in relation to the Jewish people. Now I look through his papers and the printed materials from the union. In his careful handwriting I find a list of items on a half page of cheap paper. The same items appear on a printed page in the form of a page-long manifesto, front and back, written by a colleague, inflated with patriotic vehemence. The rhetoric of words invoking order not only offended my father’s sensibilities: more importantly, they insulted his ideology, which he claimed not to have. He disagreed with any use of patriotism, nationalism, or internationalism. He had trouble with the idea of uniting students, blue collar laborers, peasants, and the proletariat. His universe was that of the manual laborers, farmhands, sharecroppers, squatters, factory workers, public servants. There was no united front, only interior, outback, farm, plantation.

  Two large puddles formed on the the edges of the roof where it sagged from the weight, a tenement for trolls and pigmies: behind and to the left of the drooping avocado tree was my mother’s sewing shed. On the right, a fragrant pitanga tree that hid the clothesline and the washtub. The veranda was an addition made of corrugated metal with an earthen floor. Two plastic wires, black and red, made languid love to three naked bulbs. Inside, mother and grandma put up lampshades, but in the veranda it was a matter of hanging them and waiting for our father to unscrew them and toss them aside. Then Joana would replace them, saying, this time leave it, because without it I can’t see straight. At a loss, my father unscrews it, removes it, walks away, tosses it aside.

  José — unpublished manuscript

  At a loss of what, José? Each one us is so full of things. For my father to solicit the words then and clean them up, holding his tongue was essential. This wasn’t a loss or some kind of negligence — only my brother’s blindness. Every utterance was a ready-made thing. He never learned to soliloquize, he either argued or ridiculed — a light joke, a heavy one, he knew how to rise to the occasion, so long as no one expected anything long and drawn out. That was an apprenticeship we undertook with our mother and Grandma Ana. Both ways of talking are complete: the word that’s made and the word that’s in the making. Our mother was a bit of a gossip, a habit among those who work with their hands. Grandma Ana on the other hand was more cautious. She liked to listen and work with words, but not in the weighty way our father did. Like anything placed in the world for all to see, she took care that her words would turn out nice.

  — You there, Dona Joana? And Dona Ana?

  Our singsong Bahian neighbor came calling at the end of each year to ask my mother’s permission to take some branches from the pitanga tree. They lived in back of a house three doors down and didn’t have space for any plants. Her daughter was a neighborhood friend of mine: a pret
ty girl with a strong temper and braids, scraggly thin. Hey, son, where’s Dona Ana? Their place was on the second floor of a shack, just a single room with a stove in one corner, a bed in another, and a table in the middle with four little benches underneath. A patterned curtain, red with yellow flowers, hid the toilet and shower. Where do you and Nico sleep, I asked Zininha. When she bent down to show me a mattress under her parents bed, I could see her underwear, smeared with mud. I thought about Zininha and Nico sleeping in that tiny little space under the boobs, butt, and arms of Dona Iracy and her husband. Dona Ana, who was in from São Carlos for the holidays, was reading the newspaper, ironing clothes, straightening her grandchildren’s beds, picking beans, reading a novel, listening to the radio, hoeing the garden, clearing undergrowth, hanging things to dry, making pitanga jelly and arrowroot cookies, darning socks — anything that made her feel like less of a burden in our house, and also to pass the time — nothing she couldn’t interrupt just like that to chew the fat, her face cheerful and full of apologies for being so useless.