I Didn't Talk

by Beatriz Bracher

  You had a convincing story to tell, you weren’t a militant, you don’t have any idea about what’s going on, you don’t know anything about any of it. You could say whatever you wanted about Armando, he couldn’t have been compromised by what you said. There was nothing you could give away.

  Francisco Augusto — remembrance, 1970

  The problem was I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what a convincing or intelligent story was, I didn’t know what it meant to open, to shut, to give way, period. I knew precisely nothing, not even the name of the illness to be sniffed and felt out. Anything could have been a disease, you know? He didn’t understand, he thought that I was a borderline masochist for letting myself get so banged up when I had an intelligent story to tell.

  There’s something that’s not exactly human, and a little bit diabolic, that allowed you to resist. There’s a diabolical side to resistance. Superhuman. It’s not human to resist. It’s almost a pleasure. This heroic side. You entered into a dimension of madness and hallucination, of the heroism of resisting torture.

  Francisco Augusto — remembrance, 1970

  I didn’t continue the conversation. I closed my eyes and felt Francisco Augusto resetting my bones, his movements precise, his hot hand securing mine with the necessary pressure, and I didn’t feel any pain, only heat and confidence, and my entire muscular system relaxed, slept to the crack-crack sound.

  The truth was that I stopped thinking about it from any angle; now he returns to obsess me. The very ideal of betrayal that I’d read in the eyes of others, I hadn’t read it all the way through. The grumbling of doubt and censure locked into those gazes was merely confirmation of what I carried inside. There is no punishment without blame and I had been punished. And not by gods or by inscrutable destiny, but by my countrymen, my compatriots, my contemporaries.

  Aside from blame, I read the pity that, with time, transformed into respect and admiration. I’d made history, I didn’t wait for it to happen. Maybe that’s why the subject returns now with such force and disturbs me to the point where I can’t escape the damned prison where I didn’t talk. Sealed into my creed of not believing, only seeing, of keeping my eyes up and spirit alert, the admiration of these young ones disconcerted me. The soldiers weren’t Germans, Cecília, and I’m not a Jew, and even if I were, look what monstrosity was born of it, of all that can’t be forgotten. Forgiveness doesn’t exist, I know, but there has to be a way of living with the terror of what was, without it becoming its inverted semen, historical opposite, Egyptian misfortunes created by a sky god because of the need to have our souls yoked to his. What I didn’t say can’t be worth more than what I did say later. Having been destroyed made me less: only what I constructed should count. But the youth, the good and the pure, they think that the intensity of rebirth cancels the horror of having died. And that’s not true. The cynical and the vain and the vitalists used that new-life eraser to redeem their errors. I understand why João Cabral used to say that his least favorite work was Morte e vida. Anyone who reads it forgets the suffering and is left with just the life.

  The world as oppression doesn’t sit well with me. Praising the strong and praising the weak results in the same violent game. When I got back in the classroom I was confused.

  It was an immense feeling of fear. To give you an idea, when I went home I would get off the bus three or four stops early, I’d try to take different routes home, every night, afraid of being followed, hauled off to jail.

  The school was visited daily by the secret police because they wanted students, people they thought were our students. So there began to be a series of demands for photographs of everyone at the school, and in other buildings, apartment complexes — it was madness.

  Someone like me — recently

  There were placards up all over the city, showing photos of terrorists. The newspapers issued warnings to subversive cells, the TV showed which guerrillas had been apprehended. There was a kind of mass schizophrenia in the air, we were all being watched, friends were disappearing, militants and nonmilitants built networks of information to know who was still alive, nothing written or spoken still carried its conventional meaning and the new meanings required deciphering codes that were unstable and for that reason inefficient, the value of face-to-face relations was also placed in suspense: friend, guerrilla, stool pigeon, colleague, infiltrator, plant — all of them wore jeans, spoke in allegories, used metaphors and code names that swarmed across every available surface — and that idiotic little joy of secret codes, of knowing looks, and the feeling of brotherhood at the dawn of a new day, and also the stubborn, fetid joy of those small men who had the power to denounce, threaten, shout. And besides all that there was the street, the bus, the bakery, the line at the bank, soap operas, lovers, the life of good morning, how’s it going, four rolls, please, a double shot, people going to work and coming home, the bus jammed, grinding against each other, people laughing and people sleeping, long conversations, stench of armpits, the driver smoking, an old lady saying excuse me in her tiny voice, a big black man yelling you sons of bitches, can’t you see the lady wants to get by, bunch of punks, the day completely normal, words meaning what they mean, every gesture in place, I tighten my grip, wave, and wonder of wonders, our team in 1970.

  In meetings with teachers and coordinators, in the communications with the district office, in the classroom with my students, I tried to be as clear as possible. I was horrified by the metaphors and by the whispers, I felt then lost the fear that wormed its way into us, and had slowly frozen me in the period before I went to prison. I’d gone mute in the interrogations. I used to talk all the time, and then I only required punctual attendance, objectivity and synthesis, all my lesson plans and reports filled out just like they want, staff meetings and minutes, I knew about all the students and every teacher. I met with parents afflicted by the changes taking place in their children and in the times we lived in, and told them to stick by their kids. I managed to open the school at night and created an adult education program, a lot of the parents came, the teachers were all volunteers. I’d made inquiries with the comptroller and the cops who came after our staff wanting to know about the classes in civic and moral education, social organization, and Brazilian politics. What do you want to know, sir? Here are the syllabi, the summary of material we taught in each class, attendance, absences, tests, evaluations. The tone of the classes? The students’ comments? Well, sir, in the event that our reports aren’t sufficiently clear, I invite you to sit in on some of our classes. Sometimes they were confused by the materials I gave them, for example on Greek democracy. I summoned the social studies teacher and asked him if he would please be so kind as to offer a private session of his class for these gentlemen. The cops got annoyed and left in a huff. In my classes and in meetings, whenever anyone raised an issue that flirted with danger, began speaking in code, or made any wisecrack about the soldiers I interrupted, furious: “Hey, I’m a spy, didn’t you know? I could be, so watch it.” I called any student or teacher who missed class, or I sent someone to check on them at home. Not everybody had phones. If someone disappeared, we had to be quick.

  So then we talked to the lawyers and they said, “look, you have to make them see that people know about this prison, that the public is aware, and maybe then they’ll relax” — something like that. We scheduled a meeting. “Whoever is single” — me and two others — “should go talk to them.” So we went, marched right up to the door of the secret police: “We want to speak to the director here.” “Why?” “He has to sign some checks, and tomorrow we have to run payroll” — something like that. I remember that it was a hot day, very hot, and the guard was fat and sweating, sweating, sweating and we just went right up and started talking to him. His team was Santos, we got him talking about Pelé, who knows what else, and he ended up working it out. Of course that wasn’t why he was released, but . . . I sometimes get to thinking about how crazy it all was, hea
ding straight for the gates of . . . My God, my God.

  Someone like me — recent conversation

  In the adult education classes the suffocation was even greater. It attracted insanity from both sides. Educating adults was necessarily subversive: this was pretty much the consensus of anyone in power — those who thought that teaching people to read and write was suspect — as well as the radical teachers whose sole objective, the one that gave legitimacy to any action, including making love, was to topple the repressive powers and herald the inevitable triumph of socialism. Some of our high-school students were tutors at night school. Along with Lucilia, I organized the program, and taught science and Portuguese. She was already a university professor and couldn’t help out every night, so she would write up the lessons plans for Portuguese and I’d teach a double. The other teachers were younger, right out of college or still finishing up. The most circumspect were the ones most deeply involved in the heavier stuff. I feared for their safety, but their ears and eyes were closed with the wax seal of revolution. Some were wonderful people: serious, generous, and good teachers. Many of them died. They were just a little younger, but I felt like a grandfather to them, in various senses. Including, something I’d never thought about, in terms of sex.

  I’d lost lust, like the eunuch minister at court, I only had the desire to make, organize, teach, work, direct, make sure everything was going okay and that nobody was getting hurt, challenge, and provoke. I had a gentle nostalgia, not for sex, but for desire. I didn’t even feel the urge and I didn’t even think about it, if a double didn’t even makes any sense: I appreciated catching the long looks the young teachers would give a colleague when she turned to walk away, or blush as she got closer, or the stammering of a young teacher when one of her comrades slipped into her class. There was also the flouncing of bodies, the laughter that ended with a head on a friend’s shoulder, a tête-à-tête in which the boy clasps the girl’s arm to hold her attention, to place more emphasis on his words, to feel the smoothness of her skin, to which she responds by lowering her eyes, raising them up again with unconvincing coyness. Little things like that moved me in the same way as Lígia’s first attempts at words took hold of me. I saw an extraordinary power in these beginnings, like when my students discover the meaning of one of João Cabral’s poems, which minutes before had been an unintelligible foreign language. The throat tightens. I had, in those days, a claustrophobic feeling of love and compassion for the world, in which I included myself. We were small and weak and there was no way out, and at the same time we were together, united not in the struggle or for the cause or anything like that, but in life. It was that simple. Hence the apparent schizophrenia and lucid paranoia, on the one hand, and the bus, the bakery, the national soccer team on the other — none of it stayed my hand, they didn’t appear under the sign of antagonism, there was still some life in common.

  And life, for me, at that time, translated only as work and Lígia. I’m talking about ’71, maybe ’72, a year after Eliana and Armando died, a year after my father’s illness. Not the national team of 1970, but months later. I think I left prison in March and the World Cup was in June. My father had had his first stroke in May, something like that, just before the Cup. When I got out of prison he was there to receive me. Prickly and firm, quiet as always, but with something else I didn’t recognize. A sadness lurked in his daily routine. He took me by the arm, touched my face with hands I don’t remember having felt before, confirming something but not seeming to see me. It wasn’t me he was looking for, that was the feeling I got. Jussara says that I looked awful when I got home: skinny, bearded, bruised, and scowling like an angry animal. She and my mother both looked at me differently: swift glances from the corner of their eyes to make certain it was still me inside that disjointed man. But this period of estrangement finally passed. Women have that way of bathing, feeding, making the bed, fluffing the pillow; they bleed, become pregnant, have many bodies and many ways of doing their hair, painting their nails — what I mean is that their bodies are always a field of change and manipulation. They cry more often, too — more things enter and leave them. After we passed through the phase of feeling things out they welcomed me with care, and things slowly returned to normal between us. But not with my father. Something in him had broken.

  We were all sad about Armando’s death. We didn’t talk much about it. When Eliana died next it was an earthquake. Mother, Jussara, and I steadied ourselves in the doorframes to keep from collapsing, to prevent the earth from swallowing us whole. Not my father: perhaps by then he’d died. Or maybe he’d already said his goodbyes to Eliana. I don’t know when. When I got out of prison, he touched me, he really held me by the arm, firmly, but there was no tenderness in his face. He ran his fingers across my mouth and eyes, like a blind man might do. He looked deep into my eyes and then abruptly turned to leave. We got to talk a bit before his second stroke, when he became completely mute.

  When I got involved in the student movement in ’59 or ’60, writing for the student newspaper and making handouts for my test prep classes, my father helped me with my writing. In a still more distant past, when he still played with Armando, in those moments when he taught Armando his music, I was embarrassed. He must have been about forty-something and we were twelve or thirteen. At the time, my father seemed to me a complete and finished being. Even when he practiced and took on that dreamlike air, or when he laughed with his friends and played his silly games at the table while he had his cigarette, coffee and bread — making little creatures from a hunk of bread and then devouring them cannibalistically, tearing limb from limb — none of this broke the fourth wall. He was a great man despite his weak body and his spells of self-absorption, his intrinsic pessimism, and his failure to become a musician. The joy he took when he played with Armando didn’t derive from friendly showboating — his concentration wasn’t the same as when he practiced alone. Only after his death, when the various contours of the role of teacher became familiar to me, could I understand the core of what it was that caused this shame.

  It has the same pathetic nature as the teachers who cry at graduation speeches: as vexing as any situation in which the witness is an exogenous element with regard to the chemical process that unfolds. We see and feel the heat of combustion, but are not a part of it. To my adolescent eyes it recalled the afflicted identification an audience feels with a bad actor in a full house. When the actor’s good, we identify him with his character, and when he’s bad, with his own person. A mechanism fails him, and we’re invaded by a feeling of error, almost guilt, like we shouldn’t be watching something as intimate as public failure.

  It’s a distant scene, my father with Armando, because it’s so long ago in time, and because it’s malleable, from that distance, in my memory. Now it’s flying at me like a magnet and adheres to the memory of my father helping me with my articles and classes. With Armando he was the teacher who taught by example, delighted with his student, and playfully pompous with his disciple. It reminded him of the musician he’d been when he was young: together they rediscovered the stages of secret knowledge he’d already accumulated, leaving what remained of the secret for a hobby, social gatherings, alleviation. Armando had talent, intelligence, aesthetic hunger. He was swift, he composed a personal paideuma: he knew how to insert his own voice into the classics, he played with the rhythm, but he didn’t try to hold his own like it was his art form. It was just another fling, and the fire went out within a few months. The scene now establishes itself as true, it takes on its due proportions, and my father returns to solid shape. The teacher who persists, trying to retain the young spirit that slips away, fleeting and diffuse: that’s life, that’s youth, and the teacher remains behind a little while longer, savoring the last taste of that rare pleasure of the first time.

  Let me go, I need to leave

  I’m going there to search

  To laugh as not to cry

  I want to watch the sun
rise

  See the river waters running

  Hear the birds singing

  I want to be born, I want to live

  Candeia — “Preciso me encontrar,” 1976

  The Armando who returns to this scene is one who would never die, who leaped from peak to peak, no valleys, no peace: he was the perpetual sunrise. Not Joaquim Ferreria — he knew the deep valleys, that’s true. But he knew the science of rebirth and wasn’t afraid of the dark. I think he even had a taste for things foretold. He wouldn’t make a good teacher, with that strange taste restored. He, too, needed room to be let go. Not with me. He was a lot of work as a father. Text isn’t art, it’s something that man does for his fellow man. Words lie and become a part of life, which is why we can’t allow ourselves to be swept along by what they steal from music: surrender, in a text, is danger — always doubt when it turns beautiful. Of course, we want to convince and explain, and beauty helps, but it’s pernicious because it creates room for confusion.

  The thing about turning beautiful is yours. I mean, it’s something of yours that you’re putting in, and it’s all wrong. How can I explain? I don’t like ugly things, but that’s not my point. We have to seek out information, it needs to be liberated, clean. It’s about truth and error. Style, fluency, levity: they’re foolish ideas from your dearly departed Grandma Ana. We’re talking about text and not art: it’s much more serious and also more foolish. It’s serious because it’s not yours, it’s nobody’s, it’s of the world and to the world it will return, shaped with words. But it exists before that. The cell, for example, the mitochondria: they’re there. It’s the same when you’re calling a strike: the demonstration of everything wrong with the country, in politics — it’s already all there before you do it. Yes, you say, but it’s an opinion, or a group resolution, it’s not information, but a summons. Look, what do you think will convince people to respond to your plea? Reasoning, exposition. Present to them the things they cannot see but which are already there, not in you, but things in common. Be simple and repeat yourself. Vehemence is situational, not textual.