But she says she read what I wrote. I haven’t left behind only rumors. Hardly. I take responsibility for what I’ve written and done, for the fights I fought: I am also this history, and I rather like the old man who’s emerging from it, I feel like I could touch him. Even when I hear one of my lines being butchered or distorted in the mouth of a student, another professor, or an ill-intentioned adversary, I still recognize myself, esteem my words. What I’ve left is strong and hard. In the professional development courses I helped organized and teach, I went back to having daily contact with the schools. For fifteen years I’d remained distant, just an evaluation here and there. And they were always office conversations with coordinators, secretaries, ministers, advisers — never this direct contact with the teachers. I honestly don’t know if the teachers got anything out of the courses, but it was certainly productive for the university faculty who taught them. An opportunity for discovering new ideas, some of them brilliantly simple, devised by teachers who were brimming over with talent: an interface between those who teach how to teach and those who teach how to learn. I don’t know how many times these interfaces ever led to a transformation in the way things are done, I don’t know how many of us discerned the richness of opportunity raised by the teachers’ boredom and bad attitudes — their repressed rage against the State, the students, and the parents; against us, academia, and the country — against life.
In the final analysis, a school is a representation of the world that excludes us, the teachers: school is preparation for a life that teachers don’t have. School was my refuge for many years. There I knew things, and the world could be drawn with lines that gave it a unity and precise contours. My sanity and survival require, more than air, to draw these boundaries around that which is dispersed: to teach the limits, the categories, the phyla, the families, the species; to contain the unbearable confusion of life in elements that were comprehensible in my state of abandonment. Teaching science to fifth graders saved me from the chaos. They were still well nourished students, those kids in the Seventies. They resembled the boy I’d been. The teacher’s power, in the public schools, remained untouched. It came from us, the teachers, that questioning of hierarchies, the provocations designed to unsettle the students, transform them into inquiring beings, in possession of doubts and desires. The oppression that quieted us during teachers’ meetings and in the occasional contact we had with the various organs of the Department of Education, or when dealing with agents of public order who would go to high schools, apartment complexes, and clubs in search of subversives (to public order), and even at the tables of the bars I no longer visited: that oppression vanished in the classroom. In my science classes. To the state I was a principal and to the city I was a teacher. At night I taught adult education, and in the morning I graded papers, I finished all the paperwork for my district. In my work I hid the sad and troublesome monster who had developed in me. Battered, traitor, killer, widower, father, and orphan.
Armando was given up for my sake, but not by my lips, as though that made any difference. My imprisonment must have forced him to expose himself: he had to arrange for Eliana’s flight, mobilize people to come visit me, and make my imprisonment known. He had to take to the battlefield.
I was lucky that my family immediately learned I’d been taken prisoner. I was supposed to meet my father and didn’t turn up. So my father figured out what had happened. Even people who weren’t caught up in the resistance had rendezvous points. There were places. Anything could happen. We stayed connected. It was lucky because when the family figures out where the missing person is, the cops are leery of snuffing him out, you know? Because if he’s found dead after being arrested, then it’s obvious who did it. So they always tried to avoid that kind of thing. It’s like I was telling you. . . . I was found almost immediately. Even the torture I went through: I get the impression that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, given what I learned later. About houses rented by the police for the purpose of summary executions. They’d take their most wanted prisoners there and no one would ever know what happened. They had a whole security system set up and everything, and they’d kill them after the interrogations. They killed them when they were finished them: that’s how they made people disappear. But at the time I didn’t know these houses existed.
Someone like me — recent conversation
I was probably taken prisoner because of him. In cases like these we all forgot the visible, incontestable cause: the men who had come to my house and took me, the men who went to his hideout and killed him. Soldiers, the secret police, Operation Bandeirantes, the prisons of constituted power. They weren’t the cause of betrayals and deaths, of humiliations and sufferings, of suicides and madness, because they were enemies: that was their role. Even I, who had never positioned myself as anyone’s enemy, thought of them that way. I searched for causes in the guts, in mine and those of my friend, in the meanderings of a movement whose logic I didn’t understand.
— Josélia lashed out a lot, she was a real a violent kid. And I hit back, for real. The neighbors used to say she was going to end up crazy. Some of this remained in her, maybe that’s why she’s so responsible now. She was always up to something. She wanted to walk along the top of every wall. She never wore pants or shorts, only a dress, and she got up on the walls.
— I got a note from the principal saying Dinarte put his hand on some girl’s butt. She didn’t ask me to come to her office, only sent me the note. When Dinarte came home I asked him, are you perverted or something? And he says, but mom, but mom. And I said, no, just tell me, are you some kind of pervert who puts his hand on people’s butts? And he looks at me and says, but I’m a man. Oh, Jesus, why? I slapped him right across the mouth. So you get to touch people just because you’re a man? His father grounded him from playing ball for two weeks, which is what he likes more than anything else. So that’s how we’re dealing with it.
— Why should a kid respect his teacher if he doesn’t even respect his own mother and father? The parents are to blame. You’re right about that. I don’t lay a hand on my son, and I guess what you’re telling me is that’s the problem, he doesn’t get smacked enough.
— Okay, what you say about the boys beating up on the younger ones, that’s definitely true. The principal said that at recess the big boys are beating up the smaller kids, they gang up on them. I told her, let me give you a suggestion: call up all the able-bodied mothers and fathers who are out of work and get them to help keep an eye on things at recess. It was just a suggestion, it’s what they did in another school my son went to. It was just a suggestion I had. So I told her. But she said, no, we can’t have things mixed up like that. But I see it at home, the boys beating each other up. From my house I can see the whole block, and you know what, they like doing it — beating each other up. They do it for no reason at all. You can see it on their faces: they love it.
Group of mothers — recently
In the Seventies it was never an issue. Not in the Thirties, either. Graciliano Ramos was jailed by the Estado Novo and never said anything about getting beat up. He was thrown in prison, taken out of circulation. When he got out, his comrades in the Communist Party asked him to write a book denouncing the oppressive regime. He ended up writing the Prison Memoirs many years later. But right after he got out everybody insisted that he had to make a denunciation right away. What he wrote instead was Childhood. The characters were a scrawny boy, his father, his uncles, the teacher, the principal, the priest, the deputy, and his grandfather, all living in the Brazilian scrub. This was the oppressive regime the book was about. He’s beaten, but it wasn’t the point of the book. Being beaten isn’t the subject of any book. But the fear of being beaten, that’s huge — the fear of making a mistake, fear of not realizing it, fear of making another mistake, the fear of being afraid. Fear isn’t the subject, it’s too big. He can’t speak. But maybe, to return to the beating, he might get used to it. He does the ma
th to see if any kind of infraction is worth the price he’ll pay in brusies, then he goes ahead with it. The greater terror, perhaps, is of the arbitrary, the unexpected.
For me the greatest terror was not knowing when it would stop. Maybe if I’d been beaten as a child . . . But I wasn’t accustomed to it. It’s true that you learn quick, and I wasn’t old yet, so I learned. But it’s only ever partial. What I mean is that there’s no way to stop hoping it will end, or that they’ll at least have a shred of solidarity and respect. This is a mechanism that undermines resistance and it has to be fought, but you can never do away with it altogether. Hope is a false word; it has a sound and a spelling whose referent is void, like a counterfeit bill, a phantom pregnancy, it transforms from a feeling into an action, from noun into verb. There should be a rule to prevent making transitive verbs into nouns. The nouns are sufficient, and so are the intransitive verbs. Fighting, dying, changing, fleeing are fine as fight, death, change, flight. The student says: but food isn’t the same as the act of eating. That’s right, food is the object of the verb. And is love the act of loving? No, perhaps love is the verb’s subject.
With respect to the case of the word hope, I think the complication stems from the definition of hope as a passive desire, of impotent origins and, in instances where the noun is used, unconfessed. Its meaning in the sentence “I hope to give you a two hour lunch break” is the same as “I hope that she still loves me.” In the first phrase we can’t change the verb to a noun: you can’t say, “I have hope that I’ll give you a two hour lunch break,” but in the second phrase, semantically, it would still be correct to say, “I hold on to the hope that she still loves me,” even though I’d never say that. What I mean is that having hope, in this case, is recognizing impotence, the fact that she probably doesn’t love me and that keeping hope alive is only a vain foolishness of the spirit. Weakness.
The classic mechanism is not hoping, bracing for impact, and steeling the nerves: it’s been twenty-nine years and I still must be ready to withstand. Readiness. It’s become a dependence — repeating the meanings of words like a stutterer, harmonizing their spheres of action — or is it sharpening?
It takes all the strength of my spirit to transform my executioners into animals, not to leave the slightest opening, to discuss nothing, not even Pelé. Which is impossible, I never met anyone who couldn’t. And that is how along with fear, shame takes its hold. Because it’s ugly. The pleasure in the beatings — the men’s faces, the blood, the blows, the laughter, a theater, vomit, that swaying light, the fatigue of the men doing the beating, their sweat, the white belly that appears under the rumpled blue shirt, the nose studded with blackheads, my groans, their crooked teeth, my acting, not withstanding, the fear of dying, crying, and trying not to register what I saw, not understand what I was looking at, forget. We were all men, and it’s impossible to erase the information from my neurons. We were men.
The first Russian patrol came in view of the camp around midday on January 27, 1945. . . . They didn’t greet us, didn’t smile; they appeared oppressed, not only by pity but by a confused restraint, which sealed their mouths, and riveted their eyes to the mournful scene. It was a shame well-known to us, the shame that inundated us after the selections and every time we had to witness or submit to an outrage: the shame that the Germans didn’t know, and which the just man feels before a sin committed by another. It troubles him that it exists, that it has been irrevocably introduced into the world of things that exist, and that his goodwill availed nothing, or little, and was powerless to defend against it.
So for us even the hour of freedom struck solemn and oppressive, and filled our hearts with both joy and a painful sense of shame, because of which we would have liked to wash from our consciences and our memories the monstrosity that lay there; and with anguish, because we felt that this could not happen, that nothing could ever happen that was good and pure enough to wipe out our past, and that the marks of the offense would remain in us forever, and in the memories of those who were present, and in the places where it happened, and in the stories that we would make of it.
Primo Levi — The Truce, 1963
We let it happen, we occasioned this horror. And we continue to occasion, it happens, we are still men.
My mother brought cornbread and guava jam to the jailers, and to us, the prisoners. My father only came a few times, wanting to know what the men had asked me. He said, hold out just a little longer, we’ll get you out, you’ll be out soon.
There, like now, I was the odd one. I was thirty years old and the other guys were only eighteen, twenty, sixteen. There was a lot going on, a lot had happened and it formed a part of those kids’ flesh. They told me about festivals, sang songs, had long hair. I’d seen the festivals and I knew the songs, my hair wasn’t cut short. How can I explain? I’d heard Joyce Moreno, her cultural proselytizing, but I hadn’t realized there could be any truth in it. Music, hair, clothes, sex as a form of ideology and not of culture. That was strange, captivating, powerful, exclusive. I didn’t understand. Because ideological proselytizing was something I understood and either combatted or adhered to. What I mean is it was familiar to me. I argued with Armando, who was cynical enough to be sensible about those kinds of things. But through his jesting I discerned not only a rigidity of ideas, but a discipline of action I warded off in myself: I feared the absence of fear and the feeling of the infinite.
I was a militant communist. I joined the Party when I saw Moscow holding off the German tanks. I got the impression that it justified, after the fact, everything I thought it was impossible to admit about Stalinist Communism, a kind of hardness necessary for resistance, for winning the war. [ . . . ]
I lived in a feeling of the infinite, like anyone who was a communist.
Edgar Morin — No One Knows What Day It Will Be Born, 1992
I’m inverting everything. What used to drive me away from my friends is now something I need. A totalizing vision throwing open the doors of the world, the whole world, its entire history, the primates, us, everywhere, yes, because this explanation is powerful and was something that could open access to every last corner, even to our souls and the hereafter. I understood that everything was coated in authoritarian ignorance, willingly, everyone was amputating their sensibility to reality, exempting ourselves from the efforts of the struggle. We mutilated our sensory capabilities and subjective intelligence when we enslaved ourselves to the notion of analysis. Right out of the gate, the war was lost.
But now, retired and cynical, I perceive — in Cecília, in Helena the teacher, in my conversations with Lígia, in the interviews I did with teachers, principals, and students; in the schools and the university and the world — the disservice that turning a blind eye does us. I used to be profoundly irritated by the truisms of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, with his lazy, proud, and egotistical Lusitanians, his indolent and predatory Indians, and his disgust for what it all said about us. But today I see these as characters that allowed him to construct powerful instruments of observation and analysis.
His idea was confident, but deceptive, I thought then, and illusive. But it gave him the power and the will to build a world, to wade into the past, to seize the future and take from it those visions that moved us.
It’s necessary to have a point of view and a question. And my friends had them, which irritated me. I don’t know if it was the fault of biology in general, and its strict sense of scientific investigation, or of genetics specifically — the paternal side. Instruments of observation that transform the thing observed. Microscope, slide, the muscle of a living, opened frog, research on cadavers, formaldehyde, the mere mention of an illness allows me to smell it and hear it.
My strained senses for surprising Malady in the act were constantly improving. My powers of gazing, seeing. Of listening, hearing. Of touching, guessing. To be skilled with OBSERVATION, even the nose must achieve a refined discernment between smells. I was
able to distinguish a countless number of maladies just by smell. I’m not talking about the stench of living putrefaction that rises from miasma and gangrene and nomas. But the notes that emerge from within the general reek of the infirmary: the odor of violets and vinegar that signal a diabetic coma; the fecal curdling of those infected with typhoid; garlic-scented multijoint rheumatism. So many times a diagnosis only required an exam for formal conformation and to play by the rules of the game. The rules of the game…were not to lose it and not to be deceived by any Malady that hid and remained defiant.
Pedro Nava — Seashore, 1978
The rules of the game in prison — from which I can’t seem to escape, despite there being nothing there that might be useful to me — and this appointment I made, she called to confirm, will be here next week, she and her interview will make me return and I’m imprisoned, there’s a weight that makes my thoughts hang back there, thirty-four years ago, like a big cloth sack, full of odds and ends, hiding a misplaced anvil, creating an imbalance that makes it impossible for me to shoulder the sack and keep going without feeling the presence of that anvil the entire time, aware of its exact position and feeling its shape through the sack. The rules of the game in prison were to not die and not give in. The moral structure inverted the order of operations, but instinct screams “don’t die, don’t die.” Francisco Augusto didn’t understand how I’d managed to play dumb and take such a beating.
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