by Unknown
Fleischer, a clown and a ham actor, escaped death by the skin of his teeth on at least a couple of occasions thanks to his ability to slip between languages and roles. The first time was after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Not really aware of quite what was happening, the troupe was travelling in their cart along a road when they were stopped by a German convoy. One of the soldiers barked at the Count in garbled Polish, taking him to be a peasant or, who knows, even a Jew. Fleischer, wearing a suit that was so threadbare it wasn’t hard to see the frayed edges of each garment, immediately saw his opportunity. In the purest German he cunningly related how he was a travelling salesman who had been held up by bandits, probably gypsies (at that moment the actor spat dramatically on the ground), and that he was on his way home with his wife and father-in-law. Without remotely dreaming what the truth might be, the soldier handed him a few coppers and told him to take care on his journey.
That was a close thing. Gabi and Maltchik were all set to intone the Shema Yisrael.
The second time that Fleischer gave death a miss the troupe was no more, and in the cities where they would have performed, their audience had been swallowed up. Where had they all gone? The Count found out one summer morning, almost suffocating from the heat and starving to death, in a truck where whole families were travelling crammed in like cattle. It was twelve days since Gabi – who had always had fragile health – had died from dehydration. ‘How old was she?’ the actor wondered now. ‘At most twenty-three, the poor thing.’ He had bumped into her five years ago, practically in rags, with a broken arm, by the side of the railway line on the outskirts of Linz. She was running away from what was her first day of work in a brothel. After seeing to her wounded arm and feeding her, the Count taught her the rudiments of the art of acting. In any case, he wasn’t exactly a Molière. She was amusing – when she wasn’t having one of her turns – and was good at promoting their show.
As for old Maltchik, at least he would not experience any uncertainty: before they even started off, three soldiers kicked him to death, just for the fun of it.
When they got out of the truck in the Nazi camp, his heart frozen, Fleischer had to pass himself off as a worker who might be useful. It was a small lie, but at the time a little fib could mean everything for people like him. Obviously, nobody played with any advantages in that farce, but something about the Count – his foreign accent, his half-slanted eyes, his sleek, dark hair – sparked a quite inexplicable reaction in the fellow staring at him, who found him amusing and selected him for the workers’ hut. The actor had survived that day. And the many days that were to follow.
Europe was in chaos immediately after the war. There were often no roads; people were forced to make long detours to avoid endless craters, blown-up bridges, the debris. Railway lines were the same: slow progress, stopping hours, if not days, at some spot on the track to wait for a convoy to come from the other side or for one of the victorious armies to make the necessary repairs.
It was always an effort for Fleischer, penniless and dressed like a buffoonish beggar (clothes he had filched on a night-time foray into a huge warehouse guarded by Russians), to board trains in the stations that separated him from his city of birth. He had to play a different role on each train. He was a virtuoso of forgery. In his favour, he could even produce a clutch of letters of recommendation – written in Russian and English – in which would-be generals made a thousand and one references to the qualities of that actor who ‘would no doubt make a name for himself in the cinema’. Given the gravity of events at the time, when everybody was worried about surviving and having something to eat or a place to sleep when night fell, nobody could fathom why generals who had led armies and won a war would waste their time on an actor wandering across Europe. The fact is that Fleischer had almost no serious upsets on his journey.
What kind of star did the Count have? He hadn’t worried about Death for a long time or, at least, had tricked her like one of those unscrupulous gallants who wheedle up to rich old ladies and live on their excesses, and then mount a scene of jealousy once in a while – all to guarantee emotional control over their hapless dames. Nothing untoward ever happened to him. He had crossed several countries, gazed upon cities in ruins, processions of defeated men, skeletal orphans and women who cackled as if they were out of their mind, but Fleischer seemed to have been touched by some mysterious higher design. He was immune to that kind of unhappiness.
Had he ever paused to think about any of that? It seems very unlikely because the actor wasn’t exactly likely. His sort doesn’t usually think about what is happening around them. He seemed to have a kind of instinct or, even, second nature. Almost an attribute independent of his will. Life is there, with all its challenges, for him to do the necessary without embarking on big debates. That’s why it’s not really surprising that Fleischer did manage to cross a large chunk of the continent and return to the place where he had spent his childhood. There he hadn’t been ‘Fleischer, the actor’, or ‘Fleischer, the Count’. He was just Emil, or the seventh and last son – and yet the one who most felt out of place – of a tailor who disappeared from home a few months before the bar mitzvah of his youngest son. What his father did was pure madness, he was thinking, as he drew close to Czernowitz.
In the distance, the actor could now see the chimneys, the plumes of smoke reaching into the sky. He was anxious to reach the outskirts of the city. Who will have survived of his relatives and acquaintances to hear him intone a Kaddish in homage to those who departed?
That night in Czernowitz they were massacring anyone who spoke the German language.
GRANTA
* * *
THE DINNER
Julián Fuks
TRANSLATED BY JOHNNY LORENZ
* * *
JULIÁN FUKS
1981
Julián Fuks was born in São Paulo and is the son of Argentinian parents. He has worked as a reporter for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and as a reviewer for the magazine Cult. Fuks is the author of Fragmentos de Alberto, Ulisses, Carolina e eu (2004) and Histórias de literatura e cegueira (2007), which was a finalist for the Telecom Award as well as the Jabuti Award. His latest novel, Procura do romance (2011), was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature and longlisted for the Telecom Award. ‘The Dinner’ (‘O jantar’) is a new story.
Ensconced in the entrance hall that grows more and more claustrophobic, Sebastián is an adult, fully grown, a respectable and solemn man. Well-defined muscles, rigid features, a bottle of wine held tightly in his fist. A deceptive outward appearance, for beneath the almost immaculate surface, this respectable man is a wreck, a body in shambles, an adolescent reincarnated with all his insecurities, all his fears renewed. He can imagine a drop of sweat running down his cheek, shattering his aura of tranquillity, undermining the composure of the face that appears in the spyhole.
He doesn’t wait for very long, but the person coming to the door isn’t announced by the sound of footfall, and the silence deprives time of any measurement. In an instant the darkness is undone by light, and in his eyes, now shut, pale circles of luminosity begin bursting. ‘Hola, Sebastián,’ a monotonous voice greets him without affection or enthusiasm, and the hand that grabs him by the shoulder is firm and pulls him close, and the lips that smack a kiss on his cheek are crinkled. His eyes now open, his skin bristling, his body leaning a second too long against this woman who is no longer embracing him, the assault on his senses is too diverse to assimilate. He takes a step back to get a good look at her, returns to an erect posture and examines her face in uncertain recognition. He knows this face or will come to know it. The features are those of his mother but with more pronounced lines, the features his mother’s face will gain one day, in the near future, except for those unruly eyebrows and the wrinkles radiating from her lips, signs of her famous sternness of character.
‘Hi, Auntie, how’s it going?’ he responds after a long delay, and the awkward timing of the phrase as well as t
he incongruous tone of joy that betrays a certain childishness are sufficient cause for regret. The bottle of wine passes from his hand to hers without much fanfare, a simple gracias, then it’s immediately lost among the other bottles on the shelf. She makes a quick gesture with her arm to indicate the sofa where he should sit down, the sofa that was forbidden to him throughout his childhood, because it was a place where only adults could sit, although on occasion, he recalls, alone in that apartment belonging to his ancestors, he had dared to lean back and stretch his legs on those cushions, establishing beneath absent eyes some sort of intimacy with the space.
‘Should I sit here?’ he asks with diffidence as if her gesture hadn’t been clear enough, an excessive diffidence that nullifies even that false intimacy, returning him to the condition of guest, conceding all authority to her. Now isn’t the time to be timid, he says to himself before she’s responded to his question, and clenching his jaw, he lets himself slump down on the indicated spot with a thump that is heavier than required.
‘And your children, your grandchildren, aren’t they joining us?’ Sebastián asks, avoiding the nasalized vowels of Portuguese, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth when pronouncing an ‘n’, attempting the music of proper Spanish, hoping to erase his own Brazilianness and impress her with his accent.
‘No,’ she responds, as though surprised, squinting her eyes at him and adding, in her own majestic Spanish, a phrase that sounds hostile: ‘I didn’t think to call them.’
‘And the family, what are they up to?’ Sebastián insists, with real interest, wanting to hear news of his cousins for whom he still nurtures some affinity in spite of distance and inherited frictions.
But she effectively eludes him with a modest play on words: ‘They’re up and about, those who can stand up at all,’ alluding perhaps to her youngest grandchildren and becoming entangled in an inopportune literalness.
‘Please tell them I send my best.’ And so Sebastián finds himself wrapping up that conversation at the wrong moment, saving himself from making any more indirect hints destined to fail.
There is in this woman a total refusal to abide by traditional conventions, that’s how Sebastián formulates his first diagnosis. Polite conversation about mutual acquaintances cannot distract her from her seriousness or alter her unruffled countenance or cause her muscles to stretch into a warm smile. To speak of close relatives – one might notice the spasmodic oscillation of the elevated foot of her crossed leg – provokes an impatience that is poorly concealed, a disinterest proportional to the interest the other person demonstrates, almost a disdain for such frivolity. The living room doesn’t seem to be a space she really enjoys, at least not as a space for domestic pleasures or as an intimate setting, a place to indulge in trivial formalities.
‘So what do you think of Buenos Aires?’ she asks – a question that counters his somewhat unsubstantiated theory, and it behoves him to throw away his previous judgements in order to devote himself more fully to the conversation.
‘Ah, but what could I think of it? Buenos Aires is eternal like water and air,’ he quotes offhandedly, and instantly regrets having done so. ‘Here things seem to have perpetuity, reproducing themselves with every decade and at every corner, always the same, always preserving the same peculiar quality.’
When he finishes speaking – expressing poorly an idea that came to him earlier that afternoon while sitting in a century-old cafe on the Avenida de Mayo, leaning over a menu identical to that of previous occasions, under the impatient stare of the very same waiter from similar afternoons – he knows he’s taken a risk with his irresponsible analysis. Buenos Aires is her city, terrain favourable to her own analyses, and it’s evident that his thoughtless remark will provide her with the opportunity for a dissenting speech.
‘I wouldn’t be so optimistic,’ she responds, already distorting what he meant to say. ‘If only we knew how to preserve the values we hold most dear, but unfortunately not a single one of those values can be found in our leaders today. That woman. You know who I’m talking about,’ and Sebastián can feel the fury in her voice. ‘That woman took over the Casa Rosada, only to ruin everything in an act of petty, foolish vengeance. Sure, now she’s rich, she got very rich, she and her husband who didn’t die soon enough, but at what price did they build their fortune in the dirt-poor valleys of Patagonia, working as lawyers with who knows what authority? Now they take vengeance on those who once spurned them, persecuting our former leaders, insulting their political enemies merely for their own pleasure, and in the meantime restricting our freedoms and the freedom of the press.’
That severe face of hers changes very quickly from indifference to the most conspicuous anger. Her eyes are fierce, the pupils dilating, and her mouth forms a different mask with every syllable she utters. Her right hand, raised halfway, starts to tremble, and her extended forefinger punctuates every declaration she makes. Sebastián, half repelled and half amazed, notices how easily she stamps her authority on the conversation, how agile her transition to a topic she holds dear and now she’s reciting the names of ministers and other leaders, the ones who in her estimation don’t even deserve the salary of a subordinate or the position of chauffeur or cleaning lady in the presidential palace. Sebastián’s eyes sweep across her face, examining the mutable creases of her skin, the smallest details, and as her voice reaches his ear, it competes with the noises emanating from the dining room, the placement of the china on the tablecloth, the clinking of the silverware and glasses laid out by invisible hands in the next room. Sebastián is barely paying attention to her words, but even so he has no difficulty understanding her anger, seeing that it reflects not so much a critique of the current situation or the nation’s politics but rather the spite his aunt feels for not being able to occupy that position herself, the position currently occupied by the woman who is the central target of her attacks.
To be cordial, to be prudent, he refrains from speaking when silence re-establishes itself in the house. Without inviting him to follow, his aunt simply gets up and walks towards the dining room, opening the large doors to reveal a setting already evacuated by the people who have prepared it. He follows her, clicking against the parquet floor with cautious steps, hesitating as to which chair he should occupy, sitting down only when she has taken her place at the head of the table. The display of food, modest and frugal, contrasts with the surrounding opulence: nothing but a lettuce salad with a few tomatoes and aubergine filled with something he can’t quite make out, accompanied by a small quantity of water already poured into each crystal glass.
Forgoing any ceremony, she begins to serve herself with the same aplomb with which she resumes her previous litany, speaking now about the shady schemes of the country’s new leaders who are blinded by power and supported, naturally, by the ignorant masses. Shady schemes involving the very same names she was listing moments before – opportunistic, dishonest and indecent people – in addition to, shockingly, ‘some of the most unseemly members of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo’, she goes out of her way to emphasize. Sebastián is silent, and begins to reprimand himself. He’s allowing her voice to impose itself on all other voices, on his own ideas or the ideas he might borrow, and his passivity while interacting with the woman sitting in front of him would disturb anyone witnessing this banal conversation.
And so, to upset her or to shatter his own cowardice and redeem his presence at the dining table, Sebastián forces himself to respond to her in a tone that is not feverish, but composed: ‘I’m surprised by these rumours you boast of. We’ve heard nothing of this in Brazil. On the contrary, the people you insist on disparaging still enjoy enormous prestige there, as they do here.’
She takes advantage of the interruption to focus on the small bit of food she had set aside for herself. After a sip of water, she resumes her speech, as if there hadn’t been any disruption, completely indifferent to his opinions but not even showing him any disdain, as though he were n
ot worthy of her disdain. Her words initially sound neutral and cold, but little by little they become animated as she grows more and more emotional discussing the misery of elderly men deprived of their last years of life and liberty, helpless gentlemen locked away in their homes and practically denied the right to receive visitors, and all of them destined to a tragic end, forsaken, but for the sense of honour they’ve maintained, the fortitude that has always defined their character, the pride with which they still wear their uniforms, which are now too long for their arms and legs. Except for a few who are still in good health, they’re all terribly feeble, she informs him, and now they’re obliged to appear in court in their wheelchairs, and for what? she asks. Do they have anything to answer for at this point, those elderly officers? Sure, they made some mistakes here and there – it was a war, after all – and sometimes they went too far and committed a few sins just like the others, but don’t you think enough time has passed to forgive and forget?