My German Brother

by Chico Buarque

  3

  In the early evening, Thelonious honks his horn down in the street aboard a brand-new Karmann Ghia, perfect but for a broken window on the right side. I’m forced to sit on one cheek, because on the passenger seat there’s a constellation of splintered glass, along with a cobblestone, which I place on the floor. We’re late to meet Udo, a friend of Thelonious’s who is on holidays in the city after six months locked away in a Diocesan boarding school in the countryside. Thelonious has told me before about this German, the one whose parents caught him smoking marijuana, and who, to be precise, is from a country called Liechtenstein. He is waiting for us in a restaurant near the city centre, and Thelonious decides to leave the car in a quiet street nearby. He parks right in the middle of the street, which is a rather steep slope, and counts in English: One … two … one, two, three, four … We both jump out at the same time and he asks: Right or left? I bet left, wrongly, because it is to the right that the Karmann Ghia lurches, begins to roll and picks up speed, before slamming like a meteor into the boot of a parked taxi. On the next avenue over is the Zillertal, a large alehouse with a stage at the back where musicians and dancers are performing, the dancers in full skirts and the musicians in knee breeches with braces. Udo is at a table near the door and stands to greet us with a large mug of draught beer in hand. He hugs Thelonious, slopping froth about, offers me his left hand and says we’ve come at the right time, precisely as the band launches into the ‘Liechtensteiner Polka’. He’s about seventeen like us, but much taller, a really good-looking guy, very blond, who drags out his ‘r’s and at the end of each sentence puffs at the hair flopping onto his forehead. But no sooner are we seated than I feel like three’s a crowd. I’ve ended up next to Udo, who addresses only Thelonious, seated in front of him, recounting some boarding-school antics that mean nothing to me. Now if Thelonious would only scoot half a metre to his right, we’d form a more impartial, equilateral triangle. But Thelonious, I don’t know why he dragged me down here. He sits there quietly, nodding as his pal talks, chortling every time Udo stops to puff at his fringe. Thelonious of all people, who’s always been the silent type, seems ready to laugh at anything today. He’s amused by whatever old nonsense Udo comes out with: If there are no women, what can you do but have a priest. Facing an empty chair, all I can do is tap my feet in time to the music and observe the people around me: lots of fair hair and rosy cheeks, many undoubtedly of German origin. Which reminds me of the letter I happened across the other day, and without meaning to I begin to daydream about my father’s secret romance in Berlin, already playing at searching the room for a German brother. He’d be a man of about thirty, most likely wearing glasses, with blond hair, a prominent chin, a long face, and a cone-shaped head. So far the only person who partly fits the description is the trombonist, a fair-skinned redhead with full cheeks, as my father’s would have been before he got old. But with the exception of the conductor, a dark chap with hairy legs, a bit grotesque in his knee breeches, the performers must all be second-generation, perhaps the grandchildren of Pomeranian immigrants who set up a colony in Espírito Santo, and I find it hard to believe that my brother has become a musician with a folk band in Brazil. I do think, however, that it would be perfectly natural for him, at some point in his life, to grow restless, question his mother about the origin of his name, insist on his right to know who his father is. And sooner or later, after saving a little, with or without her blessing, he would arrive in Rio de Janeiro with his father’s home address in Jardim Botânico. It would not be hard for him to discover that Sergio de Hollander, having barely recovered from the losses, one after another, of Arnau de Hollander and Clementina Moreira de Hollander, had been hired as supervisor general of CAMBESP, the Administrative Council for Museums and Libraries of the state of São Paulo. In the white pages of the state capital he would find a Hollander Sergio de, but he would hesitate before dialling 518776, for the conversation was bound to be difficult. Our phone would eventually ring, and of that strange language Mother would only be able to make out the name repeated at the other end of the line: Sergio de Hollander! Sergio de Hollander! She would pass the handset to Father, who would lose his voice at first, then, his German rusty, would struggle for words, after which his eyes would grow moist, and in the meantime Mother would have understood everything and would weep along with him. And she would most certainly offer to have her stepson over for lasagne, receive him as her own son and, if necessary, put him up for a time in one of his half-brothers’ rooms. For the young man’s sake, Mother would even be willing to send to Berlin for Anne herself, who might have fallen on hard times in a country still affected by the war. And we would all live respectfully under the same roof, but an interval in the show and the audience’s applause interrupt my flow of thought. I see that Thelonious and Udo have servings of sausage and potato salad before them, while I don’t even have a knife and fork. At least the waiter doesn’t stop bringing me new mugs of beer and topping up my glass of Steinhäger, which I use to toast my father, Anne, my half-brother, the cabarets of Berlin. Meanwhile, Udo continues to entertain Thelonious with his wisecracks: Got a skirt? Yep. Arsehole? Yep. It’s all the same. Thelonious revels in it, he thumps the table, guffawing at the ceiling with his mouth full of food, and I’m embarrassed when an older woman at a nearby table looks at me with bulging blue eyes, obviously assuming I’m the crass one. She is accompanied by a bald gentleman, and together they make an elegant couple. She must have been a fine-looking woman in her youth, which takes me back to my father’s girlfriend in Berlin. It’s now clear to me that, after sending him letters and more letters, under the illusion that he would return to Europe, or at least give her and the child a home in Brazil, Anne would have felt abandoned. And when she discovered that Sergio had married someone else, an Italian at that, she’d have erased him from her life once and for all, torn up photographs and notes and under no circumstances would she have revealed his name to her son. But it is possible that, with conflicted feelings of pride and displeasure, she watched the boy grow up with an instinctive passion for books. He spent his days at the National Library, unaware that in its corridors he was imitating his father’s strides. He avidly leafed through the same pages of poetry and prose that his father had never tired of leafing through. And when he arrived at contemporary literature, I want to believe that the young man, for no apparent reason, felt a certain unease. Unsure of his literary choices, he abandoned books without knowing why and, coincidentally or not, it was only then that his father’s absence began to truly and deeply disturb him. No matter how he persisted with his reading, he felt fatherless in existentialism, among the New Novels, in nihilist poetry; he searched in vain for traces of him in books of more recent history. Only in dreams did he see his father, before the war, a faceless man among the pyre of books at the Staatsbibliothek, his hair in flames. In another dream he saw the same absent-minded man on the top floor of the library, reading Faust without eyes as the roof disintegrated over his head during the last bombardment. He never had been able to picture his father in military uniform, however, marching in the snow, rifle in hand, just as he also saw no reason for his mother to be ashamed of a husband killed on the battlefield. Then he swapped the library for synagogues, having gotten it into his head that he had Jewish blood. He rifled through every archive in his divided country, went by train to Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, returned home with G–d knows how many copies of files, thousands of names and even blurry photographs of Holocaust victims: Is it him? Is it him? Is it him? At which point Anne felt compelled to assure him: Your father set sail in 1930, safe and sound, for his native Südamerika. Then my brother hurried across town just days before they built the Wall and, on a scholarship from the Goethe Institute, flew to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and he might even be sitting in the Zillertal right now, on the lookout for a Brazilian father who every now and then reminisces about his beloved over a beer in a German restaurant. Or else, finally resig
ned to the fact that his investigations have been a failure, my brother might now be piecing together material for an autobiographical novel in which he will invent a Brazilian father, not so different from his vision of the father he has never met. The fictional father will be a man of about sixty, probably short-sighted, his dark hair now greying, curly, as is common among Brazilians, but with a large head and cheeks, like himself. Perhaps he’s even a mulatto, like the hairy-legged conductor with his arrogant jaw and cheeks that have sagged with age, exhausted from years and years of blowing into the trombone, the instrument inherited by his albino son, who, although he spits more than he plays, is the star of the band. Lost in such idle conjecture, I am surprised by Udo, whose face I have already forgotten. After I don’t know how many beers and an entire bottle of Steinhäger, he finally deigns to speak to me: What about you, aren’t you going to say anything? For lack of any other topic of conversation and inspired by my musings, I find myself saying that I have a German brother, that’s right, a German brother. Udo is incredulous: Is this a joke? Now I have no choice but to elaborate: My German brother belonged to the Hitler Youth, he was taken prisoner at the end of the war at the age of fifteen or sixteen. And, what’s more, I still have his mother’s letters and a photograph of him performing the Nazi salute, with a swastika armband and everything. I don’t know where I’m getting all this from; I think I’m mixing up details from several period novels I’ve been reading. But now Udo looks interested, he wants to know where my brother is now. In East Germany, I say, his mother’s with the Stasi, the secret police. Envious of our common ground, Thelonious shakes his head: It’s a lie, like hell he’s got a German brother. I don’t know what’s with Thelonious; he and I have been best friends since we were children and now he’s a stranger who only gives me sideways glances. A terrible silence falls over the table, until Udo leaps up, I believe with a urinary urgency, followed by Thelonious. Now that takes the cake, Thelonious keeping his tow-headed friend company in the john. Minutes pass, I drum on the table and try puffing at my hair, which is stiff and doesn’t move. Only then do I understand that neither of them has gone to the bathroom; the door on the right is the exit. The Zillertal gradually empties and the waiter prowls around my table, asks if I’d like the bill. After consulting the menu, I order a platter of eisbein with sauerkraut, another double draught and one more bottle of Steinhäger. As soon as he’s turned his back, I too slip out to the right, passing a doorman in decorative dress, and race away. I sprint across the avenue and only stop to catch my breath on a parallel street, which as it happens is where we left our Karmann Ghia, which is now being towed away, boot-first, with the front all smashed in. I grab a taxi at the stand, and the Asian cabbie drives like a maniac. He weaves the wrong way up several one-way streets to the city centre, floors it to Rua da Consolação, zooms up the side of the cemetery honking wildly, and on the corner of Avenida Paulista, I ask him to wait a minute while I buy some cigarettes in the Riviera. I don’t know how no one’s realized yet that this bar has a back exit, which leads to a building raised on concrete pillars, where there is a nightclub called the Sans Souci. I’ve always wanted to see what the Sans Souci’s like on the inside, have a few martinis, catch some jazz, but the bouncer asks for my ID. It’s only a short walk home from here and I whistle the ‘Liechtensteiner Polka’ as I go, because it’s hard to get annoying music out of your head.

  Father’s light is no longer on as I approach the house. I see two ghostly figures against the wall, Thelonious and Udo, who head for the gate and block my entry. We want to see the letters, says Udo. What letters? The letters from Germany. I push my way between the two, who can barely stand, but Udo immobilizes me with an armlock: Aren’t you going to show us the letters? Thelonious says: I told you it was bullshit, German brother my arse. I try to worm my way out of it: The letters are very personal. I glimpse a set of brass knuckles in Udo’s right hand, but it’s only a silver keyring between his fingers. I put money on you, faggot, he says, and I’m not in the mood to lose a hundred smackers. I feel the ferocity of his words in his Steinhäger-and-potato breath. And I ask them to be quiet as we enter the house, because Father is given to bouts of insomnia, but Udo starts kicking chairs with his boots and Thelonious follows suit, imitating Udo’s fake laughter. Then it’s me who makes a racket in the hallway when I knock four Camões off the shelf. My fingers believe they’ve found the spine of The Golden Bough, but I can’t seem to pull it out; it feels as though it’s been nailed to the wall. When it finally does come, it brings two British anthropologists with it. I shake the book, a few ashes fall out; I don’t think the letter is here any more, or maybe it never was, maybe it was a hallucination, but here it is, flattened between pages thirty-six and thirty-seven. I open the envelope and hand the letter to Udo, after locking the bedroom door behind us. Udo rocks back and forth like a clown-shaped punchbag, closes his left eye, his right eye, opens them both wide. He seems to struggle to understand what he’s reading; as I suspected, he’s probably forgotten all his German. He looks at the letter, looks at me, looks at the letter, looks at me somewhat aggressively, and now I wonder if I am the one who’s been bluffing without realizing it. I understand that this Anne could be any German woman who knew Father vaguely, a librarian, a chatty neighbour; she could be, for example, his landlady in Berlin asking him to settle his rent in arrears. Udo plonks down on the edge of my bed, stares at the letter again, then sniggers. He asks for paper and a pencil, and says he’s sorry he doesn’t have a German dictionary so he can look up a few things. No problem, I say, right here on the bookcase in my room I have the Duden in twelve volumes. And, when all is said and done, considering his state of inebriation and his intellectual limits, Udo turns out a remarkably good translation:

  Berlin, 21 December 1931

  Dear Sergio

  From your Silence I gather you are as always in your Books shipwrecked (immersed?). Desolate to steal from your Reading half a Minute, I write to inform you that our Son Sergio one Year of Age in excellent Health turns today. A Photograph I promise to send at the first Opportunity, and certain I am that yourself in the Boy’s Mangokopf (mango head?) you will see.

  If you don’t mind, to the Subject of my last Letter as yet unanswered I return. Since that Day, Mr Heinz Borgart, the Pianist to whom I then referred, has demonstrated something more than Friendship towards me. For you until now I have waited, but you know that to give my Son a true Home I have always desired. Thus, if I do not receive a Reply from you within a reasonable Time, free I shall believe myself to consider the Hypothesis of tying myself to Heinz, who furthermore may even his Family Name give the Boy, who, in case you have forgotten, has on his Birth Certificate only his Mother’s Name — Anne Ernst, it never hurts to remember.

  Best wishes,

  Anne

  4

  brothers-german: brothers who share the same mother and father; full brothers

  If my brother and I were to have a coin minted, showing our heads on either side, and if we were to spin this coin with a vigorous flick, we might glimpse Father’s head and Mother’s head almost simultaneously. When the coin came to a halt, however, we would once again be two heads so unalike that no one would ever guess we were brothers. Only frequent visitors to our home, or perhaps someone studying one of the rare photographs that show the whole family together, would see that we aren’t so much opposite as complementary. But Father’s and Mother’s features were not distributed equitably between us; my brother has a clear advantage. He has the facial features of our father, who is far from handsome, but the overall result is, mysteriously, a male version of our beautiful mother. The details I inherited from Mother are, on the other hand, lacking in harmony; for example a pointy nose without the high cheekbones to justify it, her full lips that are unfitting on my small mouth. Her Italian hair, which my brother now wears in long curls, is, on my head, steel wool. And perhaps by some firstborn right he got Mother’s colouring, her green eyes and pink complexion, leaving m
e with Father’s rough skin, underbite, grey eyes and glasses. To return to our point of departure: if the combination of my parents’ faces was to be decided by rolling a die, we could have come into the world with myriad other faces, my brother and I, depending on the whim of the croupier, who, when it comes down to it, always decides in favour of my brother. Which is to say nothing of what was never up for grabs: his height of six feet, a good ten inches on me. However, with the toss of invisible dice, I think Chance compensated me with the gift of wit.

  In the vicinity of an advertising school of dubious quality, in whose classrooms he was never seen, my brother earned a reputation as something of a pioneer. Countless female pupils went into his room as maidens, and left adjusting their underwear through their outerwear. I logged them all in a mental notebook, then, in the afternoons, I would track them down in the bars of Bela Vista, ask permission to sit at their table and introduce myself as my brother’s brother. It was enough to make them put down their sandwiches or textbooks and give me their full attention, and over the course of our first conversation, I would gain their trust. I played the part of confidant and even stooped to pocketing love letters, which obviously never reached their destination. I also listened to their bitter complaints, because my brother was a prick who promised love and so on and so forth and then skipped out without a word. And I was amused to learn that few among them would have given him a second chance, had he sought them out, because he was too hasty, poorly disposed to foreplay, much less playing for extra time. As night fell we would exchange phone numbers, and, the next time we met, my brother would be of little consequence, because it was all Shakespearean sonnets from then on, and loftier. I know they listened to me, charmed less by the poetry than by the timbre of my voice, the one paternal characteristic in which my brother and I are twins. And it would be my trump card in the darkness of the cinema, where I had two hours to move, entertain and impress them with words my brother doesn’t know, whether we were watching a nouvelle vague film or a romantic comedy produced by MGM. At the end of the show the lights would come up slowly and I hoped that, bit by bit, they would grow accustomed to my skin, my grimaces, that they would leave the cinema with my deep voice still in their ears and not be put off by my sweaty hand on theirs. It was from the Cine Majestic that I took home the first of my brother’s exes, which gave me the satisfaction of cuckolding him, in a way. She was also the first woman in my bed, because until then I’d only done it in massage parlours. She was also the first woman I made come, come copiously, excessively, and scandalously, which made me suspect that she intended to reach my brother with her howls, wherever he was. When she left my room she dragged her feet in the hallway, glancing at the spines of books, contemplating my father in his study, and in the kitchen struck up an interminable conversation about cooking with my mother, who was making a strawberry pie. My mother was no fool, she knew very well what the farfallina was there for; there were always floozies hanging around, biding their time, hoping to bump into Mimmo. Wary of her husband’s own youthful indiscretion, Mother would make the fig sign to ward off an untimely grandchild. But deep down she was proud of the revolving door in Mimmo’s room. She resisted the urge to hang his bloodied sheets out on the clothesline, each time pretending to believe that the girls came to study the Mappa Mundi with Mimmo. Every now and then she’d complain about him locking the door, seeing as how she might need emergency access, should Father require a Cervantes, a Quevedo, a Calderón de la Barca. And because she was fair to her children, I believe she would, if she could, have divided Mimmo’s women equally between him and his disadvantaged brother. As such, I don’t know how she’d have felt if she’d known that my brother, having restricted himself to his own turf for a time, had been seen recently sniffing around Rua Maria Antônia, where I was taking a preparatory course for the Language and Literature entrance exam. It was fertile terrain for him, not because he was remotely attracted to Language or Literature, but because in this area of the humanities the female-to-male ratio was ten to one. I understood it the moment he set eyes on Maria Helena, and she struggled to believe me when I told her that that guy over there was my brother. And she couldn’t understand why I refused to introduce them; she thought it absurd that two brothers weren’t on speaking terms, she who, being an only child, had grown up resigned to talking to herself. But I never thought my brother would take a liking to her; in my class alone there were more than twenty supposed virgins, and virginity was a prerequisite he insisted on, quite the opposite to me. I took it for granted that Maria Helena wasn’t a virgin. I had yet to find out for myself, but she lived alone with her mother, didn’t have a curfew, drank beer, and was tall and slender, with a tight arse, a certain je ne sais quoi, a free and easy way of walking, of speaking with open vowels, on top of which Maria Helena is from Rio and cariocas are notoriously more laid-back. She wasn’t, therefore, my brother’s type; her affinities lay with me. It was I who introduced her to Céline and Camus, and in exchange she lent me a Henry Miller full of smut. With her I could watch Godard, Antonioni and Bergman without having to explain the silences; I told her the story of my German brother, in confidence. I even invited her over to see Anne’s letter, but she mistook it for a lame come-on and told me to take a hike. Maria Helena would get upset with me over nothing, the next minute she’d be planning marriage and children, then she’d go from peals of laughter to fits of rage; in other words, she was crazy enough to fall in love with me. Besides which, she was up for anything; she even went with me to Pacaembu Stadium to see Pelé play. And it was against the trees of Pacaembu that we would lean late at night for a little kissing with tongues, which was only possible if I balanced on their roots. I thought Maria Helena would give it up in no time, but it was a while before she even let me suck her breasts, and only through her bra, although she did once hold my dick through my trousers. This was around the time my brother started to haunt Rua Maria Antônia. Things were heating up between me and Maria Helena, and when I insisted she come upstairs with me, she agreed with the proviso that she might not be ready to go all the way. Yes, she was a virgin, and the news came as a blow to me, while simultaneously reviving my worst fears, for my brother was still spending time lurking around the entrance to my school. He’d already laid five or six girls from my class, including the best pupil, who’d always struck me as very chaste. She was a fairly attractive country girl whom I’d started talking to, partly to annoy Maria Helena; I even invited her to the cinema once, right in front of Maria Helena. We went to see The Exterminating Angel, but she was too shy. She watched the film huddled in her seat and didn’t find my observations funny. After I said goodbye to her outside the cinema, she followed me home with-out a word, head down, I’d almost say with her tail between her legs. I heard her sandals shuffling behind me on Rua Augusta, from Avenida Paulista to the slopes of Pacaembu, and from the front door to my bedroom, where she slowly undressed. In bed, however, of all my brother’s former conquests, she proved the most insatiable. After that exhausting night she started dropping in unannounced, hunting me down in bars, and news of the affair ended up finding its way to Maria Helena’s ears. But I didn’t want to waste any more time with Maria Helena. I quickly hit on another classmate, then another, and another; if I could, I’d have drooled over every woman my brother had ever slept with. Until one weekend Maria Helena paid me a surprise visit in knee-high boots and a short skirt the likes of which I had only seen in French films. A shiver ran through me; for a second I thought she was dressed that way for my brother. But no, she made me stand on the first step, gave me a love bite on the neck and told me how anxious she was to see my room. She even wanted to see the famous letter from my Mexican brother. In a husky voice she said she’d made up her mind now, she wanted me to be her first. She said other things along those lines, but right then all I could focus on was a collection of Italian plays on the bookcase at the foot of the stairs. It began to bother me, like a crooked painting, a provocative gap on the second-to-top s
helf that was starting to get on my nerves. Look at that, I said to Maria Helena, who looked behind her and didn’t see anything wrong. And ultimately it really wasn’t anything serious, just one volume that had been recently removed from between two others, which were now touching at the top and not at the base, like two friends leaning in for a peck on the cheek without a hug. A fool might even have assumed the missing book was pointed, like a canine extracted from a crowded bite. As far as I could tell the absentee was a Pirandello, though only Mother could say for sure. I dragged Maria Helena into the kitchen to introduce her to Mother, who didn’t take her hand because she was busy pressing a pastry crust into a baking tray. This time she was determined to get it right for her husband, who, although he appreciated her pies, never failed to remark, after mangiaring them almost entirely, that they were a bit doughy. Mother was muttering this to herself, firstly because she too had been an only child, and secondly because she could see that Maria Helena wasn’t paying any attention to her and had drifted off. That was when my brother barged into the kitchen. He stopped in front of Maria Helena and, with the tip of his finger, raised her chin towards him, as if he were an actor in a Western. Without taking his eyes off her, he grabbed a beer from the fridge, popped the cap off using the drawer handle, poured himself a glass and handed her another, his arm brushing my nose. I was pissed off and announced to anyone who would listen that I was going to buy cigarettes at the Riviera, where I drank three shots of cheap whisky without ice, smoked three cigarillos and vomited on the counter. I walked slowly down the hill, paced back up it, descended again and was startled by Maria Helena, who didn’t quite collide with me as she was leaving the house. She was sobbing, and when she saw me she covered her face, slipped out of my arms and ran up the hill with her clothes all askew, the side zipper of her miniskirt in the middle of her backside. And, even all flustered as she was during that fleeting encounter, I desired her as never before, I pictured her as I showered, I couldn’t sleep for thinking about her all night long. In the morning I picked a Flaubert to give to her as a present, not Madame Bovary, but Sentimental Education. As it happened, though, Maria Helena never came to class again, and only a long time later did I hear she’d been accepted into Architecture. I called her at home, but each time the maid would tell me that Dona Maria Helena was in the bathroom. Around the twentieth time, her mother picked up and insisted that I stop harassing the girl. And one day Maria Helena sent a chauffeur to drop off a number of French poets I’d swiped from Father’s library to lend her, from Baudelaire to Francis Ponge. It was Mother who received them, put them back in order and made me swear to leave Father’s books alone once and for all.