I Didn't Talk

by Beatriz Bracher

  Protagonist, antagonist, agony and agora. Each comes from a single word in Greek, that game of men: speaking in public, jousting, leading, driving, attracting, building, making, passing the time, carrying, dragging, driving, pulling, evaluating, educating, litigation, prosecution, mortal anguish. I think in terms of dictionary entries and dictionary entries are a dead language; modern Greek is Greek to me. Another characteristic of my reasoning: I need a process, I dig to the root. But the root only tells what trace remains in current speech. Diachrony and synchrony don’t mix. Diachrony explains the process until now, the journey through the uses a word has served. Synchrony explains the push and pull of other words that now exist. A word is only worth its relation to other words in use at a given time. The process up to now, the word’s past struggles — none of that counts. I’d already picked up the vice of diachrony by the time I married Eliana, and with her it got even worse. Strange, I wasn’t an intellectual until I knew her, in the more-than-biblical sense, or in the precise biblical sense, but without the lewd connotation that the phrase has today. Just look! How can I go on without due consideration of each word? Times like these I envy Dona Joana’s chattering mouth. Even her written words. Look what a difference it makes: Dona Joana and D. Joana. To the ear it’s the same thing, it refers to the same person. But one form, Dona Joana, puts forward a common, friendly face, while D. Joana reminds us of social hierarchies and the vestiges of an ancient nobility. Madame, my lady, Elaine, that’s what I called her, more of a heteronym than a nickname.

  Eliana is solar, open to the world, four clearly demarcated syllables. It demands her place. Elena is close, intimate, three syllables, the first an folksy introduction, almost a greeting, my friend, the next one languid, hanging like bunting, and the third like the mumble of a girl, my girl, my mother. Elena wasn’t Armando’s sister, she was my wife. She almost wasn’t Lígia’s mother, my wife. Elena and Eliana both visit me. Eliana was the wordsmith, who insisted on etymologies and origins, the one I was thinking of just now. But Elena is the one I miss the most. Mine. Eliana thinks and writes here with me: she works and argues. She clears the way for me and reveals my tantrums as folly. Or she makes them serious by stripping away my shrill anger, and with those sparks and conflagrations she tends a fertile and everlasting flame. Eliana is conscientious and cannot tell a lie. She likes to think calmly, she knows how to fight like no one else because with her what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong — and she’s always in the right. Elena is sly and skittish, she lies like child who is hungry, afraid, or lazy. She desperately needs me, she feels cold at night, she needs to entwine her legs with mine, rest her head on my chest and speak softly about her fears. She loves when I bring home a treat and sulks when I forget. Marizpan is her favorite.

  I hear Eliana clearly. In bed at night, it doesn’t scare me when her voice calls to me. I don’t hear Elena: what visits me is the absence of her legs and the weight of her head on my chest. I couldn’t hold her tight over the telephone, and that was what she needed. There was an intense struggle in her voice, on that public telephone in Paris. Fearful Elena alternated with upright Eliana, and this was something I found strange, even frightening. My God, it’s so sad. I couldn’t embrace her, she couldn’t see my eyes, her hands had gone cold around the receiver. This impossibility will never leave me. Nor the frozen, stabbing pain that blooms in my chest and snaps my bones every time I remember her voice, her chill, and the distance that separated our bodies. What didn’t she know, Luiza? — tell me, goddammit, what was it she never knew? I didn’t kill Armando. Eliana, I didn’t talk, can you hear me, my little one, my darling girl, I didn’t talk. But at the time I didn’t know this hypothesis hovered over her. How could I?

  I didn’t talk, and it’s just as though I did. I know this, I know that you understood this right away. My Eliana, so sincere. If you were to lay your head on my chest, that chancre would always be there, you thought — growing, occupying the space reserved for our affection. It’s still here, my love, pulsing and aching, and I can no longer smell your hair, or feel the drool that ran from your mouth in allergy season.

  And now I’m going to talk with that girl Cecília, who never met you. She sent me a message commenting on my reports. She’s intelligent and inquisitive, she liked my writing, she wants to make an appointment to interview me next week, here at the house. A lot of people never met you, Eliana. My wife, with her serious gestures and delayed laugh. Codename Joyce, vulgar in every sense, he says he fucked you, my love. I’m talking nonsense and I can’t even manage to get angry anymore when I remember the meetings you organized around him with your psychologist friends. Today, Codename Joyce is a middlebrow writer, respected by new young women he’ll claim to have fucked. But my anger has passed. Secret meetings, sex was undergoing a revolution, too, mine and yours, Eliana. Who was the bastard who gave you that glow? No one, I swear, there was no one. No one, I assure myself, it was no one. Thin, tall, bony, and ugly. He has a Southern accent, he knows things about history, books, and people. A storyteller. He loved telling stories about what would happen next: a new world, new men and women. His thinness, his accent, his undercover ways, it all went together, corroborating his girlish, prophetic speech. A filter for the New Age, the honest old scheme erased from the eternal macho desire of sheltering and consuming. The strained juices of the new truths had tasted bitter. For Armando I kept quiet, I fed and sheltered him, for how long, Eliana? Three weeks? Two months?

  My wife worked in the university clinic. She’d just obtained a position in a research hospital and was preparing for the admission exams to get her master’s degree. After defending my thesis in pedagogy, I’d decided once and for all to go into education and had recently managed to be made the principal of a group of schools far from home. We worked a lot, both of us beneath the wing of a state that became more claustrophobic every day. We were mobilized, taking people in, hiding guns, debating what kind of revolution it would be. On the other hand, we lived among lunatics and children, something I now realize afforded us a view of the world where dictatorship and revolution weren’t as deterministic as they were in our friends’ hearts.

  In Portuguese, the verb denotes both time and person. In what other language can you respond only with a conjugated verb? Are you going to Maria’s house? Vou. Wanna eat? Quero. Do you like eggplant? Odeio. We barely ever say yes. I happen to use it quite often, the crisp yes or no. It was a choice that became a habit, and after I say it, I frighten myself. Are you going to Maria’s house? Yes. Do you like Codename J.? No. I realize that it’s considered rude, appears rude, because it is. It doesn’t continue the sequence of movement begun by the question: it interrupts it and has nothing to add. It borders on confrontation. I don’t really know why I do it. I remember that at the beginning, as a young adult, I liked the cutting effect, the unaccustomed word that surprises: it was for fun, for the experience of a new word rolling in my mouth. Yes. No. Maybe it had something to do with the objectivity of scientific language, which then I understood, and a certain rude revolutionary tone that I was picking up. Revolution and science both vanished but the yes and the no remained, became habitual. (A cop responds, affirmative, the soccer player, definitely.) “To gather up this cry of his” and “the cry of a cock before” — the absence of the verb obscures the person and the tense, it leaves us in suspense. But, strangely, it maintains the idea of movement, perhaps reinforces it. The speech of children, of parents with children, and of the insane: all contain this reinforcement of absence. The notes that old Joaquim jotted down knew something of this force, but José’s memoirs do not. Science, its language, understands it, and for this reason avoids it. I learned to write the book of nature, the absences contained by the exuberant real must be filled out in a way that distills it to words intelligible to everyone along the chain of knowledge.

  This is what I thought about as they beat me. What language would be safer: the babble of the homo demens or the precisio
n of homo sapiens — which would hide more? And safer for whom? Was protecting Armando the same as protecting Lígia and Marta? Eliana and Lígia? I had to tell a viable story even though I’d lost control of my speech. They didn’t let us sleep, and I knew that stress and fatigue were going to undermine my intelligence. For this reason the story had to be linked to something profoundly true. A piece of me that could stand on its own, coherent when all other strength had deserted me, when my body was no longer mine. They were experts in thrashing, the bastards; my colleagues in confession by installment. I had nothing, was stupid tired, blind as an illiterate. Codename Joyce was out of the country, safe and sound, so I could concentrate on talking about him. I never knew how the other five or six who had passed through the house ended up, so I had to keep quiet about them. And Armando, where was he? And Eliana? I didn’t know anything. Was one of her friends part of the organization? And of my friends: who was, and who wasn’t? I didn’t know anything, so I couldn’t say much. Everyone was very professional, they went to the movies, had beers together, even discussed politics, and any one of them could have spearheaded a kidnapping, or driven a getaway car for a bank robbery. Even Eliana: how far had she gone? I wasn’t even sure about my own father: which side was he on? In this story, I was the only fool.

  José, in his book, describes a boy with various small joys, the morning of manhood, joys as a youth, youthful joys. Powerful things — the intensity of desire and its fulfillment; shamelessness, with its low manners with filthy words; delight. There was a time when everything was morning and he captured it.

  Our mother left the room. I was old enough to go to school with my brothers, and Amado called to me from his bed. “What is it?” I asked — I didn’t want to be late for breakfast. The smell of coconut soap and G.’s neatly made bed, the powerful, indolent mess of Amado: I was between the two, wanting my mother.

  — Come look at this.

  And he threw his covers off, between the beds, and showed me the little tent he was able to make with his erection.

  — Look, can you do this?

  José — unpublished manuscript

  And Amado helps José do as he did. The description and the details are cheerful and childish, their slang naturalizing the sex — at first.

  The Velhas River baths, deep in the country, in shadows, light skins under clothing, the dark skin of the jabuticaba. Deep in the country, so much foliage, the smell of the forest, dicks out. Vianinha’s was absurd, he was already fully grown, he had pubic hair and was spurting a drip of sperm. Nobody wanted anything to do with him, for fear of losing the milky way. With the younger ones he didn’t do any harm, it was just a matter of pressing into the gully and never going in. Just for laughs. He was the big guy and got pissed whenever he found himself rejected. He went around the rowdy and ready semicircle playfully tugging on all their pricks. Everything made us laugh in that dawn of our lives, in that beloved childhood that the times don’t allow anymore. Everything made us laugh at that age when sex is funny and hadn’t yet become the pungent drama that it became in the afterlives of a boy: life as an adult, masculine strength, maturity, old age — not even the louche, nauseating, hedonistic leering of dirty old men.

  Pedro Nava — O círio perfeito, 1983

  In our neighborhood there were also thick groves of jabuticaba, light and dark flesh, and José proceeds now to an urbane and exhibitionist language that makes me want to jump out of my skin. What sort of amalgam of people is this Amado? I’m outraged by that scene in our room, and afraid of what will come.

  In prison my rage derived from my own stupidity. I wasn’t mad because I was stupid, but because I’d been stupid, I hadn’t foreseen, I hadn’t prepared myself. I didn’t perceive the soldiers as adversaries, but as enemies, and that made all the difference. We inhabited different universes, without communication or common origins. There were no points of contact, only points of friction. It sounds crazy, incoherent, illogical, inexcusable for a scientist — but this was how I saw things and it was why I wasn’t prepared. Armando adopted the same logic as the soldiers: he accepted the idea that we were at war. How did he fall? Some unsuspected person had betrayed him. Nobody needed to betray me or Eliana, we were just collateral damage.

  Unsuspected because think about it: he believed he was at war, he plotted things out carefully and took precautions, he only gave up names of those he believed couldn’t hurt the cause (me and her). I knew nothing about Armando’s life as a militant, and for that reason was a harmless choice. When I found out, later, I understood it — I was going to say his guerilla street smarts, his power as a strategist — anyway, I admire those who are capable of engagement to the limit, who can go all the way to death for the cause, and who do it with intelligence and clarity. In fact, I envy anyone capable of this level of enchantment, and above all I admire their intelligence. Even during the busiest months of his involvement in the movement, he still visited us often. We ate together, went to the movies. Then he’d disappear for a few days or weeks. He came back happy. We doubted he was involved in anything dangerous, that he was part of a militant cell, but we endeavored not to know much. In any case, Armando denied it — he said they were meetings for political debates, that yes, he could be imprisoned because in those days almost anyone could be thrown in jail. He said he helped organize the resistance, aided his comrades, but he rejected the armed struggle because it risked the entire democratic organization that was forming, that with guns we’d lose the solidarity of the bourgeoisie. The guns we hid for him always belonged to some idiot who got himself in a bind — and Armando couldn’t let them walk around armed, so he gave them to us for a few days’ safekeeping. If a friend of ours disappeared, he never knew more than the same rumors we heard. All this is to say that we intuited, but never knew for certain, that he was one higher ups in the armed struggle. Our ignorance protected him, and the banal social life with his sister and his brother-in-law was a useful ruse.

  A bitter gag and tang shuts my throat, my esophagus burns. Armando exposed us to danger. And I let him, I knew the times we were living in, and the consequences of what he was doing. But how could I refuse to help him? Exactly that: how could I refuse to help in those times we were living in? We were compromised. There were rumors. There were. Listen. The banks of the Ipiranga were listening. Who listens to rumors beyond the banks of the Ipiranga? Rumors and humors: there must be some relation. One is sonorous and the other is liquid. What they have in common is the way they spread. Rumors are intelligible and apprehensive words in any language and culture, which even the mute can murmur and the deaf can hear, betrayal is betrayal wherever you go, like fucking the woman whose husband is saving your ass. The rumor of a train, river, stampede, surrender. It rumbles through the air, enters the body through various channels of audition, the way the beat of a drum first enters through the abdomen, the genitals. The rumblings aren’t understood — they’re incorporated. They take shape without cognition. We know that someone has betrayed. Or fucked. Or surrendered. It’s known. It’s said. It’s reported. The subject isn’t just indefinite, it’s inexistent. The same as the subject of “it rained yesterday.” What rained? There is no subject. Who talked? Who said? Inexistent, and therefore unassailable, the victim defenseless.

  If it were possible. My story perceived as a rumbling, without words, without voice, but incorporated whole, solid. In fact, that’s how things are. Our image of the world is the sum of various rumors, reverberations of the steps we do and do not take passing through us. There is no alibi, no way to repair the story that we end up with. José, with his book, expands my childhood laterally, into things I never knew. Because my house and my family are me, in a sense. I was the the eldest brother — I thought I managed it. When Agnello slapped José in the face, I felt it on my skin. When Armando was condescending to my father, the matter rested with me. It was the same at school: when a teacher called a student a monkey, I was the humiliated black boy and th
e racist teacher. What amalgamations are these? We need to be thoroughly adapted to a given habitat, but if we’re becoming part of that habitat at the same time, what results? Who’s creating the placenta, the uterus, the fetus? It seems as if each of us goes about constructing our own environment with the available elements, whatever’s at arm’s length, outside the self. And the environments intersect and coincide and occupy the same space: my house and José’s house. I am an element in José’s environment and vice versa. The same goes for Armando. And suddenly a rupture: José with his book for example, ruptures the history of my room, and ruptures my story, the story of my family, just think: something about back then has now changed. Everything else will have to adapt and be reshaped.

  This interview, Cecília, the letter reports, the interrogations, my nonconfessions: what are they? Why do I mix these diverse people and moments? Having nothing to do is making me crazy. The responsibility that words possess, says Helena the teacher. My torturers took pleasure in beating, but they didn’t beat anybody up just for pleasure. They did it to collect information. There was no didactic motive, nothing punitive or vengeful, it was only part of their investigative work, collecting information to fill in the bigger picture of the organized resistance. In the end they knew more about the organizations than the organizations knew about themselves. This girl is aiming for the same thing. After these interviews she’ll know more about the period than the people who lived through it. But, as under torture, they each will tell her only what doesn’t threaten, what doesn’t weigh on their present. And so, perhaps it’s not possible to have a collective return to what happened, only an individual one. The interviews will give her just the external elements within arm’s length, the shared elements from which each individual constructs his shell, his placenta. And from within herself, the girl who never lived through it will have to draw out another witness, old enough to be convincing, an artifice that enchants.