by Unknown
Sebastián can do nothing but seek refuge in his dinner plate, wishing to express through silence his profound disagreement. Is she trying to provoke him? How can she openly defend those torturers, how can she allow herself to be so insensitive when her family, her own sister, was victimized by them? And how does she dare speak such nonsense to his face when those defenceless and forsaken old men were the same ones responsible for the erratic course of his destiny, by-product of his parents’ destiny, the same ones who were to some degree his persecutors, as well?
His plate does not provide refuge, so he turns his face away to avoid looking at her directly and in doing so catches a glimpse of someone in his peripheral vision: there, on the sofa of the living room, leaning back and reading a newspaper with a few columns cut out, is one of those men in uniform. He’s not young, indeed a number of the hairs in his moustache are grey, but neither is he a feeble old man, there’s no crutch or wheelchair by his side. The man bites on the end of the pen he’s holding, and his way of biting causes Sebastián to remember a gentleman he saw just once at a dinner long ago, at the wedding banquet of his oldest cousin. He recalls laughter abounding among the guests, but his father refused to smile, and his mother seemed troubled as she tried to calm him. Uneasy, not knowing if he should join in the fun, he decided to find out what the problem was. He discovered that, at a distant table, holding his fork tightly in his right hand, the man with the slightly grey moustache who was clamping down on a big hunk of meat, that man was a general by the name of Jorge Videla.
He resented his father that night and condemned his intolerance. Of what importance was the appearance of some general if that general wasn’t even a relative of the bride or groom, if the entire family had gathered together for this event for the first time in a long while, everyone at that moment so lively and at ease? And even if indeed it was he, as they had explained, if that general, whoever he was, happened to be the person responsible for the years they had spent separated from everyone, expelled from their own home, exiled to São Paulo, why couldn’t they enjoy themselves now that the punishment had been retracted? Now that his aunt is calmly cutting a slice of tomato and continuing to talk about the mistakes of the current government, exalting the economic vitality of previous decades, now that a man in uniform is sitting on the sofa tranquilly turning the pages of his yellowed newspaper, both man and newspaper obfuscated by Sebastián’s dim peripheral vision, at last he understands what his father had been thinking at that party long ago, he feels the affliction his father must have felt, the anguish that must have weighed on him, and he wishes, too late, to escape from that night just as he wishes to escape from this dismal encounter.
He can’t stand up, he can’t remove his plate or leave the table and let her go on by herself, analysing the failings of a government without any muscle, a government averse to discipline. He’s not capable of perpetuating the great insult of making an overly dramatic exit – he can still hear the voice of his mother asking him to be more accepting of the family even when he’s all too aware of the antagonisms, even when he sometimes feels uncomfortable, oppressed, subjugated. He can’t walk away, he can’t allow the man in uniform to take his place at the grand table that belongs to everyone – he can’t run off, he can’t remain silent. He must clarify that he doesn’t agree with anything she’s said, he must express in some way his own discomfort, he must make his feelings known immediately: ‘They murdered thirty thousand people. Not to mention the tortured, the persecuted, all those kidnapped children, all the forced migrations for which they were responsible. As frail as those officers might appear today, there is a symbolic importance in punishing them. So that they and their followers might understand, as much as possible, the terrible evil they perpetrated.’
His abrasive words, his heated tone and the sudden gravity of his voice take over the surrounding space and in some way protect him, calming him at least for a moment. And for a moment she seems affected by the force of his phrases, shaking her head from side to side, compelled this time to respond to him.
Her response, however, is a summary refusal to give any ground or offer concessions, returning him to the distress he had felt moments before and restoring her inexorable dominion over the room: ‘These numbers are always inflated. Only the most rebellious, the most inconsequential, the insubordinate people died. It’s the same in Argentina as it was in Pinochet’s Chile, or Franco’s Spain: a systematic effort to exaggerate the negative aspects. The only reason why the same thing doesn’t happen in Brazil is because your military has always been too soft, so there wasn’t anything to blame them for. Did some people die here, and in Chile, and even in Brazil? Yes. But the context justified those deaths. When order is being threatened, when there’s a country to save . . .’
Sebastián can’t go on listening, he is immersed in the torment from which he can no longer escape. To listen to those words is to let himself be trapped again between the walls of terror, to return to the structure of oppression, to its fulcrum, to the site of greater evil, it’s to walk once more through the rooms of the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, which he visited like a distracted tourist a few days ago, without realizing the effect it would have on him. His guide, a young and very serious woman, explained: the prisoners, hooded, their hands tied behind their backs, would enter through this door. There’s another stairway over there that goes down to the torture chamber, but it was sealed up and hidden when this prison was about to be inspected, so let’s go through here. Right where we’re standing, the prisoners were undressed and subjected to a slow and meticulous ordeal – ‘making them sing’, that’s what they called it. Nothing was off limits, the contorting of arms and legs, blows to the spine, everything was allowed, lacerations, breaking bones, applying electrical shocks, it was all valid, and they used the most diverse instruments. After a day or two, or however much time was necessary, they were all taken here, to the attic, which was extremely cold in the winter and oppressively hot in the summer, and they were locked in large wooden trunks, very similar to coffins. They would spend on average a week here while the information they had provided was confirmed and compared to other depositions, but there was really no limit to the amount of time they could be subjected to this horror. They were fed the minimum, water and scraps of bread, and, to distract them, the radio would be left playing all day long at extremely high volume, hindering their ability to think or to communicate with one another. They would wear the same hood for the whole week, then immediately it would be put on another head – the smell of this hood, the pestilence in the fibres, the nausea it produced, are palpable in the testimony of those few who survived, the prisoners who somehow gained the trust of those in command. If there happened to be a pregnant woman among the prisoners, they’d give her the same food the guards ate, they’d avoid any punishment that might hurt the foetus, they’d beat her only on her arms and legs, they’d pull out her hair, her nails. When she was about to give birth, they’d isolate the mother here, in this room reserved for delivering babies, and on the very same day the child would be taken to another family, handed over to the open arms of a couple not able to have children, a couple on friendly terms with the regime. Afterwards the mother joined a group of prisoners who were taken to the ground floor where they received an injection to make them docile for transfer. Unconscious, they were brought to the vans parked just outside, and then they were taken to a plane about to depart from the Aeroparque two kilometres up the avenue. When the plane was far enough away from the coast, when all that could be seen was blue sky and the wide mouth of the Río de la Plata, the bodies were thrown from the plane, still weakened by the anaesthesia, unable even to feel the vertigo, and one by one they plummeted through the void. Each of those death flights ended with the muffled sound of a body striking the cold surface of water.
She rouses him with the metallic sound of cutlery striking the china, her arms resting on the table now, nothing left on her plate. Her mouth at last seems e
xhausted of speech, she’s satisfied, but there’s a quivering in the corner of her lips that disturbs him. She’s smiling, that’s what he notices, nothing more than a mere reflex, very subtle. She smiles with her chin raised high, but she’s discreet, sardonic, and he knows that smile isn’t directed at him, it could only be directed at someone behind him, someone he can’t see but whose presence makes a shadow, and the shadow grows larger, until it is undeniable. He doesn’t need to turn his head, he’s certain that there’s no one sitting on the sofa now, that the living room is empty, and suddenly he feels two hands settling on his shoulders, two hands grabbing hold of him, softly, but they do not intend to let go of him, two hands that confine him to his chair, and without covering his mouth they silence him, two hands that evoke everything and make everything disappear from his memory, two hands that are gentle but nevertheless they place on his shoulders a tremendous weight.
GRANTA
* * *
A TEMPORARY STAY
Emilio Fraia
TRANSLATED BY KATRINA DODSON
* * *
EMILIO FRAIA
1982
Emilio Fraia was born in São Paulo. He is an editor at the publishing house Cosac Naify and has also worked as a journalist for the magazines piauí and Trip. He co-wrote the novel O verão do Chibo (2008) with Vanessa Barbara, which was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature, and is currently working on the graphic novel Campo em branco with the illustrator D.W. Ribatski. ‘A Temporary Stay’ (‘Temporada’) is a new story.
1
The leg with the bum knee drags as he walks. The caretaker runs ahead to shut off the water valves, start up the pump. His only remaining staff are the ageing caretaker and a fat housekeeper who doesn’t let a day go by without airing out the rooms, to let some life pass through, as she says.
It’s a place of tarnished cutlery, outdated gym equipment, a marble fireplace, filthy cloth napkins. Towards the back of the patio, the unused bar shares the space with a purple hot tub in which people have left behind oars, bags of fertilizer, a tennis net, a pair of Le Coq Sportifs missing their laces. In a low voice, he runs down an inventory: sheets, stacks of plates, chipped teacups, the wooden owls in the entrance hall.
They stand side by side at the edge of the swimming pool, Nilo and the caretaker. They watch the water draining away. Nilo rests his hands on his waist, thumbs hooked in his waistband – the water has left a line of scum on the tiles two feet from the top. We’ll know soon enough whether or not he’s in there, Nilo says.
Years ago, when he’d first had the pool built, he’d imagined one of those sweeping stretches of water: bright, blue, crystalline. But the water that gets pumped in from the river is murky. At this time of year, it only gets worse, turning muddy from the rains. The caretaker shakes his head and says it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. If he were really in there, sir, the body would have floated to the surface. The caretaker asks something else. The drainage system is chugging at full force and Nilo doesn’t hear the question. Nor does the caretaker repeat it. But the judge could easily have gone on a binge. He could have had way too much to drink and fallen in. The caretaker sighs. They go back to just focusing on the water.
The two men stand there, unable to make out anything that looks remotely like the bottom. Under his breath, Nilo runs down the inventory: towels, boots, riding helmets, seed packets. He asks when they’re going to plant the pumpkins. The caretaker says they’ve already been planted, two weeks ago. The racket from the pump disorientates him even further.
It was two weeks ago that all this trouble with the judge first began. Or three. Nilo had been lying in one of the deckchairs, trying to read – a book on the importance of sleep for leading a happy life – when their car pulled up, the retired appeals-court judge and his wife. She was driving. She was frail and nervous-looking. He thought she was awful, not exactly for being ugly, though she was ugly too, but because she seemed high-strung and disapproving. They got out of the car. The wife asked if there was a room available. As they stood on the patio, the shadows of Nilo and the couple lengthened alongside one another, the sun drawing them over the cracked slate of the entryway. They’d come on a friend’s recommendation – but it had been a long time ago, and they’d remembered it as they’d been passing through Redenção, which didn’t happen very often, the wife added, since they almost never travelled through the rural areas of São Paulo state. They’d gone to a cousin’s wedding the night before. Its theme had been ‘A Thousand and One Nights!’ The judge’s shadow flowed out from a pair of white tennis shoes, while the wife’s head intersected the angle of a planter, giving her shadow an extravagantly sculpted coiffure.
Thinking back on it now, Nilo regrets his decision. He doesn’t know what he’d been thinking. The hotel’s been shut down for at least a year. They weren’t supposed to be taking guests any more. The caretaker lowers his head as the water drains away, disappears. Nilo returns to the topic of pumpkins. He asks how long it’ll be before they can harvest the pumpkins. The caretaker sighs and answers that if the weather cooperates, it’ll take forty days, fifty at most. Under his breath, Nilo goes over the list of where things are kept: keys, check-in forms, skin cream, fish food. The caretaker sighs again, decides to take action. He grabs hold of the pool ladder. At the third step, he hops down and sloshes across the tiles. The water comes up to the top of his boots. He swishes his soles around trying to come across something – an arm, a leg, a torso. They look at each other, Nilo standing at the edge, the caretaker down in the pool: it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. No sign of the judge. Nilo blinks a few times. At this point, even he doesn’t understand why he had the caretaker drain the pool.
The next several hours elapse as though part of a long drawn-out match punctuated by hard-won points. Nilo goes back to searching the rooms, the orchard, the storage shed. Afterwards, he gives up. He falls asleep in the deckchair with his mouth half open and the book on his chest.
In the late afternoon, a sound wakes him up. At first it’s far away, indistinct, then comes echoing through the mountains, getting closer and closer. It’s a car honking. From where he’s lying, without getting up, Nilo watches the caretaker walk out to the front gate. There’s the horn, the pop-pop of the motor, the smell of exhaust. A red VW Beetle sputters across the expanse of lawn overrun by vegetation. It parks. The judge gets out. He looks excited. He explains how he went into town the night before. He made the acquaintance of two absolutely remarkable individuals. He bought the Beetle from one of them. And a house from the other. Paid for the Beetle in cash. Wrote two cheques for the house. He announces all of this enthusiastically, banging on the rusty hood with joy.
2
It was supposed to have been just a temporary stay, but the days go by, and the judge doesn’t check out. Every two weeks, he settles the bill for his room, drinks, meals. Always in cash. His wife visits on the weekends.
She’s trying to convince him that this whole thing is ridiculous. The judge invokes the fresh air. The river water. His wife says that if it were only a matter of these things, then all he had to do was go to the country club. During the week, they communicate by cellphone. She’s the one who calls. It’s hard to hear, the reception’s so bad, the judge tells Nilo. His son never calls. His daughter and her husband promise to visit. But they never show up.
One afternoon, the judge says he saw a hog lying in the middle of the road. It looked like a bull. It was pink. Absolutely remarkable. They stared at each other for a while, until the hog got up on its hooves and with a heavy shuffle disappeared into the undergrowth.
When he tells of this encounter, contrary to all those stories involving men and animals, stories of tenderness, mutual understanding, tales of awe, of wild beasts lying in wait, primal encounters, the judge announces that he’d like to eat that hog. Living at the hotel are: a half-dozen hens, a skinny horse, ducks, two cows, a rooster, a stuffed parrot. Not a single pig. Nilo offers to have some excellent por
k sent over from Redenção. The judge says that he’s not talking about any old hog, he’s talking about that hog.
This conversation occurs on the concrete risers that sometimes serve as spectator stands alongside the tennis court. It’s a hot day. Nilo sends the caretaker off to enquire at the neighbouring farms. He knows that one of them raises livestock but can’t remember which. Or is he imagining things? He’s feeling worn out, in a fog. A faded white line divides the court in half. Sitting next to him, the judge wipes the sweat from his brow. He says they need to fix the air conditioning in his room. Ever since the judge arrived at the hotel, they’ve spent the afternoons together in conversation. Nilo and the judge compare various ailments: rheumatism, sciatica, lower-back pain. His knee aches. When he tries to remember things, his mind spins in place. He concentrates harder. Certain episodes fail to cohere. There doesn’t seem to be any cause and effect. Nilo makes an inventory of what the judge is wearing: a New York Knicks cap, tennis shoes, white socks, a gold watch. Indiscernibly, without the slightest sound, or without any sound that he can make out, an airplane crosses the sky. Nilo raises his hand to his forehead, like a visor.
When the plane vanishes, he tells the judge that it reminds him, the story about the pig, that is, of the fox that used to prowl around the building where he stayed in London for a time, during the period in his life that, now that he thinks of it – Nilo blinks – seems to explain everything that came after.