‘You have a brother?’
‘And a sister. There are three of us. I’m the youngest. Julia is the middle one. She’s in Brasilia. She works as a dentist. And Paulo—’
‘Paulo?’
‘Paulo Roberto.’
‘Paulo Roberto? Eduardo called one of his sons Paulo Roberto?’
‘My elder brother. He’s a doctor. He lives in the United States. In Cleveland. He’s a cardiologist. He wasn’t here when our father had a heart attack.’
‘Does he look like Eduardo?’
‘I resemble him more. Paulo is more like his mother. He’s darker-skinned. He looks almost like an Indian. His mother is from Rio Grande do Sul.’
‘You and your sister …’
‘We’re from his second marriage. Paulo used to spend his holidays with us. He only came to live with us when he was about fourteen. That was in Uruguaiana, down near the frontier with Uruguay. Our father was working on some hydro-electrical project or other on the border. I can’t remember which exactly.’
‘What was he like? Your father, I mean. What was Eduardo like as an adult?’
‘Thin. Lanky. Always well dressed.’
‘What was he like as a person? You can understand why I’m curious, can’t you? We got to know each other as kids, and …’
‘He was very quiet. He didn’t laugh much. He went to bed early. He used to go out to buy bread, milk, the newspaper. He read a lot. Newspapers, books, magazines. He wrote. He listened to music at night, when he thought we were asleep. He liked opera.’
‘Tosca? Did he listen to Tosca a lot?’
‘I don’t know. All opera sounds the same to a young boy, doesn’t it? He tried to get us interested in opera and classical music. But I never got hooked. Nor did Julia. Paulo did though. He also likes to read. Comics, newspapers, books, he always read everything that fell into his lap. Just like our father. He must still do the same, in the States.’
‘Don’t you see each other?’
‘I’ve never been there. My daughter is still small, and you know how complicated it is to travel with children. And now since 9/11 everything is even more difficult, what with the American paranoia over terrorism, the restriction on visas and all the rest. Besides, it seems Cleveland is a very cold city. I can’t bear the cold. The winter here in São Paulo is bad enough. And Paulo and I were never very close. Are you an engineer as well?’
‘A sociologist.’
‘Great. And what do you do, as a sociologist?’
‘My most recent work has been in East Timor. We’re building schools there. I work for an agency linked to the UN. Some Brazilian contractors have put in bids for the construction work. That’s why I came to São Paulo.’
‘If you work for the UN, you must live in New York.’
‘No, the headquarters of the agency I work for is in Lausanne. I have an apartment there, a base. But I don’t live in Switzerland. I don’t live anywhere, really. I live where I work. At the moment that’s East Timor. Before, I’ve been in Mozambique, Algeria, Bosnia. Sri Lanka … Some months here, some months there …’
‘Do you have children?’
‘Two. One lives with his mother in Sweden. Joseph. The younger one. He doesn’t know whether to study architecture or biology. He’s only seventeen. The other boy is in India. He’s a web designer. Neither of them looks like me. Thankfully for them. Their mother is very pretty. She’s Swedish.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘His name?’
‘Your eldest son.’
A pause.
‘Edward,’ he said eventually.
‘Eduardo? Like my father?’
‘Yes. Like your father.’
A silence fell at both ends of the line. Neither of the two strangers knew how to continue with a conversation that was distant and yet intimate. Still sitting on the bed, Paulo looked at his watch. The taxi must already be waiting for him downstairs. Outside the double-glazed window that let in no noise, from the twenty-eighth floor of the Alameda Santos Hotel he could make out the milky summer sky of São Paulo, above and beyond the mass of tall buildings that made up the city centre. Then the landscape became blurred, and he realized he was seeing it through a mist of tears.
‘It’s been so long …’ he murmured.
‘What’s that? What did you say?’ Eduardo’s son asked.
‘Forty-one years,’ he said softly, wiping away the tears.
‘I didn’t hear what you said.’
‘I would have liked to have met your father again. I really would. It’s a shame I only found out where he lived when it was too late.’
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Tell your brother … and your sister … Tell Paulo and …’
‘Julia.’
‘Tell Paulo and Julia that a friend of your father’s called, and sends them a big hug.’
‘I’ll tell them.’
‘He was the best friend I ever had. I learned a lot from him. Above all, about solidarity. Eduardo even corrected the mistakes I made in Portuguese. Whenever I wanted to know the meaning of a word, he would look it up in his dictionary and write it on a bit of paper for me. Eduardo was the only boy I knew who had a dictionary. I hid the bits of paper in my wardrobe so my father and brother wouldn’t find them and destroy them. I took them all with me when we left there.’
‘I understand.’
‘He was my best friend at a time when I didn’t have anyone. He lent me my first Tarzan book. He also lent me the first Charles Dickens book I ever read. David Copperfield.’
‘I remember my father reading and re-reading that book many times. It was an old edition. I think it had a blue cover.’
‘No, it was yellow. Yellow with black letters, and the title in red.’
‘That’s right. That’s how it was.’
‘Do you still have it?’
‘Paulo took it. It was one of the few possessions of my father’s that he took to the States. That and some photos, some old records and, if I’m not mistaken, my grandfather’s social security card. He worked on the Brazilian Central Railway.’
‘I know. His name was Rodolfo.’
‘That’s right. You remembered.’
‘And your grandmother was called Rosangela.’
‘She still is. She lives in Rio with a sister-in-law who’s also a widow. They live in Tijuca. They’re getting on in years now. She was hit very hard by my father’s death. We all were. Paulo most of all. Perhaps it was because he didn’t live with him much, and spent less time with him. The two of them used to talk a lot. They could spend the whole night talking. Paulo was the only person my father wasn’t reserved with.’
A fresh silence fell between them.
There was a knock on the hotel door, a voice saying that the taxi had arrived, and asking if there was any luggage to take down.
‘Just a minute!’ he shouted. Then he said to Fábio: ‘I’ll be right back.’
He opened the door, pointed to the biggest case, gave the bellboy a tip and thanked him. The youngster left, dragging the case behind him.
Paulo sat down again on the bed. He hesitated. He didn’t want to say goodbye. He knew this meant the end of the link with the warmest memories he had of his past. But he picked up the phone, raised it to his ear and said, his eyes again moist with tears:
‘I have to go. A big hug for you, and for your brother and sister. If you talk to your grandmother, tell her I called, looking for Eduardo. Perhaps she’ll remember me.’
‘Who shall I say called?’
‘I’m sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Paulo.’
‘Paulo and what else?’
‘Paulo Roberto. The same as your brother.’
‘Paulo Roberto what?’
‘Antunes.’
‘Paulo Roberto Antunes?’
‘Yes. Thanks, and goodbye.’
‘Wait!’ he heard Eduardo’s son gasp, just as he was putting the phone down.
‘Your name i
s Paulo Roberto Antunes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wait a moment, will you please?’
‘My taxi’s waiting. I have to go.’
‘Just a second! Don’t put the phone down!’
The sound of the telephone being laid rapidly on a hard surface. Muffled noises in the distance. Car horns, even further off. The wail of an ambulance siren. One minute. A minute and a half. Two minutes. Two minutes ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty seconds. Two and a half minutes. He couldn’t wait any longer. Two minutes forty-five seconds. Two minutes fifty. Two minutes and …
‘Sorry!’ he heard Fábio say on the other end of the line. ‘I went to look for this envelope. I wanted to be sure.’
‘Sure of what?’
‘Your name is …’
‘Paulo Antunes.’
‘Paulo Roberto Antunes?’
‘Yes, Paulo Roberto Antunes.’
‘Then I need your address.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘To send you this envelope.’
‘What envelope?’
‘The one we found among my father’s things.’
‘And why do you want to send it to me?’
‘Because on the envelope it’s written, at the top, For Paulo Roberto Antunes, and underneath, From Eduardo José Massaranni. It’s a brown A4-size envelope.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘A lot of typed sheets. The envelope was sealed when my mother found it. You’ll have to forgive us for opening it, but we had never heard anything about you, and we had to do the inventory of Papa’s possessions. There might have been an important document inside. There’s also a letter, attached by a paper clip.’
‘Have you read it?’
‘I’ll post everything to you.’
‘Send it by express mail. Please, write down my address.’
‘I’ve got paper and a pencil ready. Go ahead.’
14
Lausanne
THE LETTER WAS not dated. It was handwritten in blue ink, on a sheet of lined paper. It was in the same neat, careful handwriting that Paulo knew so well. The paper clip holding the letter to the typed pages had gone rusty and left its mark. It looked like the outline of a labyrinth.
Dear Paulo
My son was twelve yesterday. My eldest son. From my first marriage. He doesn’t look anything like me. He’s dark like his mother. Almost as dark-skinned as you. I named him after you.
The two of us were twelve when we last saw each other. Perhaps that’s why I remembered you. Even more than I always do. Because I remember a lot. Not always for good reason. It’s often when she astounds me. She still does so today. It was twenty-four years ago that we found her by the lake, and she still astounds me. It’s twenty-four years since I last saw you. Since we saw each other.
I sometimes dream of her. I wake up exhausted. Does that happen to you too? Do you remember her? Does she astound you the way she does me? Do you remember those days in April?
I read somewhere that you were a political prisoner during the military dictatorship. That you fled to Chile, or possibly to Mexico. Or that you had gone to Sweden. I lost the newspaper clipping in one of my many moves. I don’t like moving, but my job makes it necessary. I’m a civil engineer. I work for a state company. I wonder where you work? What profession did you choose? I never learned anything more about you. I would have liked you to be Paulo Roberto’s godfather, but I couldn’t discover your whereabouts. Letters were censored. People in our embassies were linked to the dictatorship’s security services.
Following the amnesty, I thought you would return to Brazil. Many other exiles came back. But it appears you stayed where you are. Wherever that may be.
I would have liked to talk to you about her. About the nightmares I have. I thought I could free myself from them by writing about her. About what happened to her. What happened to us because of her. To me, you, Ubiratan.
But there are lots of things I don’t remember properly. And others I never knew about at first hand. There are situations I imagined in one way or another. Perhaps I imagined them as they really were, perhaps not. I’m not sure of anything. I wrote down what I thought had happened and what I could remember, as more and more came back to me. I tried to make a whole out of the fragments. But there are a lot of gaps in my memory. Perhaps you can recall things more clearly. Perhaps you can complete what’s missing. Fill in the gaps. I’d like you to do that.
I’ll keep these sheets until I find out where you are and can send them to you. Possibly we’ll meet, and I can give them to you? Then we can write it together.
Feel free to correct, eliminate or add whatever you like. My address and phone number are given below.
A fraternal hug from your friend
Eduardo
Paulo kept the letter in his hands for a long time. He re-read it. He did the calculation: Eduardo must have written it in 1985. The year when Tancredo Neves was elected the first civilian president of Brazil after twenty-one years of military dictatorship. The year of the death of Tancredo Neves, only three months later, which destroyed all hopes of radical change in the country. The same year that Mikhail Gorbachev was elected secretary-general of the Communist party in the Soviet Union. The beginning of the break-up of the Soviet Union and of the utopias it had represented. History lessons. Ubiratan would have been pleased he had learned them.
He put the letter on his cluttered desk, on top of the scanner next to his computer. The envelope from Brazil that he had torn open lay between the printer and a pile of documents that never seemed to grow any smaller.
He took out the typed sheets. They were numbered 1 to 76.
They were carbon copies on thin paper, typed in a small font. The type had faded, and several parts had been written over with thick black pen. There were lots of notes in the margin, written in pencil or ball-point pen, some of them erased.
On the last page, on a sheet of plain white paper, was just one sentence, typed in a different font. Underneath was a handwritten note in brackets:
‘The dead don’t stay where we bury them.’
(Find out where I read that)
Paulo went over to the armchair beside the window, sat down, and began to read.
15
20 April 1961 and the Following Months
PAULO WAS STILL angry, and stayed angry through all his classes. He had been angry when they were set free by the bouncer, a long time after Ubiratan had left, and he had been uselessly kicking at the door of the tiny storeroom. He came out cursing. The prostitutes laughed. The Polish madam laughed. The bouncer laughed. Eduardo flushed. Paulo cursed even more. Still swearing, he walked back in the teeming rain to his house, not bothered about what time it was, or how his father would react when he saw him arriving so late and soaked to the skin.
But there was no reaction. His father was sitting at the dining-room table talking to Antonio. They looked up at him, then resumed their conversation.
Paulo was annoyed when he fell asleep, annoyed when he woke up. His brother’s bed had not been slept in, and his father had not made any coffee: they had spent the night at the Hotel Wizorek. They must have found out he had been there with Eduardo and the old man. Let them find out. What did it matter? If they asked what he and the others had been doing in the brothel, he wouldn’t say a thing. Let them ask.
The old man: that was how he thought of Ubiratan now. The old man. Shameless. A traitor.
When he reached school, he hardly exchanged a word with Eduardo, who was as gloomy and silent as he was. Paulo didn’t want to talk to anyone. He felt betrayed and humiliated. And that made him angrier still. If any teacher dared ask him a question, he wouldn’t reply, even if he knew the answer. If the teacher scolded him, he would swear at him. In front of the entire class. Then if he was sent to the headmaster, he would tell him to expel him there and then.
At the end of classes, he stormed out of school, but did not head for home. He had no idea where he was going. He simply wanted to
get away from there, from everywhere.
Eduardo ran to catch him up.
‘Where are you going in such a hurry?’
‘To shit!’
‘Calm down, Paulo!’
‘I’m going to shit because I am shit. Everybody laughs at me! Everybody mocks me! Nobody respects me! My father doesn’t respect me, none of the teachers respect me, none of my classmates respect me, nobody at school does. Nobody. Anywhere. Not even the old man respects me!’
‘Calm down, Paulo, calm down!’
‘The old man left us locked up in that brothel! He went off who knows where and left us behind! Locked up with the whores. Did you see how they laughed at us? I bet they don’t laugh at Antonio like that. Or at my father. I’m nothing but shit. And I don’t like it! I don’t want to be a shit in life.’
‘You’re not. And I respect you. I’m your friend.’
‘What does that get me?’
‘Lots of things.’
‘What things?’
‘Things a friend can give you.’
‘What things? What, eh? What things, Eduardo?’
‘Things. Like now.’
‘Now what?’
‘Now I can tell you you’re not shit.’
‘What?’
‘You’re not shit.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re my friend.’
‘So what?’
‘If I had a brother, I’d want him to be you.’
Paulo said nothing. He dropped his head, and felt ashamed. He wanted to apologize and to hug Eduardo, but didn’t do either.
‘I’d also want …’ he said, but couldn’t finish the sentence.
They both lapsed into an awkward silence.
‘Are you hungry?’ Eduardo asked finally. ‘I’ve got two cruzeiros, I can buy two pasties.’
‘No,’ lied Paulo. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Well then …’
‘What?’
‘Well then …’ Eduardo searched for a neutral topic they could talk about freely. ‘My bike.’
‘Your bike. The old man didn’t give it back.’
If I Close My Eyes Now Page 23