At the dining table, I recite to Caramel: I want the flower you are, not the one you give. / Why do you deny me what I do not ask? / How brief even the longest of lives, / And our youth in it! Like it? I’m not sure I get it. Read it yourself, then. When she sees the sheet with the psychedelic clown at the foot of the poem, Caramel’s eyes bulge and her pupils dilate in anticipation. Even Mother thinks the clown is cute, when she comes in with two plates of reheated cannelloni. But the sight of the tomato sauce makes me feel queasy, and I snatch the book from Caramel’s hands as I get to my feet: Not now, later. I leave her with the cannelloni and go upstairs for a shower; I need to be presentable to visit the Beauregards. With my wet hair momentarily straight, I comb it into the shape of a turban. Then I take a nylon stocking cap from a shelf under the sink, behind the African novelists, and work it over my head in circular movements. Wrapped in a towel, with my jeans in one hand and Fernando Pessoa in the other, I arrive in my bedroom, where I find Caramel stark naked on my bed. She is lying on her side, with a somewhat affected sensuality that unravels as soon as I appear. She points at the stocking on my head and almost dies of laughter, a clear sign that a roach made it through the frisking earlier. I wouldn’t mind if she laughed at me until nightfall, because I’m not really in the mood for sex. But I can’t refuse her now that she’s summoning me with puppy-dog eyes, and when I lie down I try to remember her climbing the stairs with my brother; I almost ask her to call me by his name. Caramel writhes beneath me, and it is with her legs over my shoulders that she comes, and comes for real, comes crying, comes scratching at me and comes very quickly. I have no illusions as to my sexual prowess; it is the expectation of other, higher sensations that have made her all wound up like this. I’m still lying lifelessly on top of her when she asks me to read that clown poem again. Later, I repeat, and she begins to doubt that she’ll see the colour of an acid stamp before submitting herself to all manner of wild sex. I’m going to give you the whole sheet, my love, but not now, later. I put on the dress shirt and brown suit that belonged to my brother, which Mother took up for my graduation. I take off the cap and shake out my now dry, straight hair, which makes me look a bit like Ringo Starr in glasses, don’t you think? Caramel says yes, but she barely notices my do, she just asks, with each minute that passes, if it’s later now. Later is only after your piano lesson, baby. Piano lesson? Today you have a lesson with Henri Beauregard. That old bore? That’s the one, honey. I’m not going. Yes, you are.
10
Carmela, so it was you? Anne kisses Caramel, wishes her a happy birthday, and the courtesy she shows as she greets me suggests that I am unrecognizable in a suit, tie and fringe. From his stool, sandwiched between the piano and the window, Beauregard welcomes Caramel with a strong French accent, for it appears there are truly no traces of German left in this household. In good French he says to his wife: This guy here, isn’t he the same one who was prowling around the house yesterday afternoon? To which she replies: Yes, Henri, but this young man, in my view, he is harmless. At first it isn’t easy to understand the layout of the living room, completely dominated by the two pianos that follow the concavities and curves of the walls. You get the impression that Beauregard and his pianos were there before the walls, which were built with precision, not by an engineer, but a tailor. There is only a little space left at the foot of the stairs for a mini sitting room with a TV cabinet, four chairs around a tiny table and a two-seater sofa where Anne has me sit. Then she slips between the pianos and the wall, brushing against some pictures of pastoral landscapes, and exits through a door at the back of the room. Meanwhile Caramel, who was already in a bad mood, scratches her backside when Beauregard tells her off for not bringing her notebook. She rummages through a pile of scores on the floor, picks hers, and instead of taking the same route as Anne, passes under the pianos on all fours straight to her stool. She seems put off by the teacher, as it takes her a while to get into the piece, which she plays like a child: using only two fingers on each hand. And observing Henri Beauregard, I wonder what goes through the mind of a man who before the age of thirty played with Kurt Weill, taught at the Cologne conservatoire and gave recitals at Heidelberg University, only to end his career in São Paulo, enduring an ill-mannered girl who plays the piano with four fingers. He is understandably cranky, and at the very moment that Caramel is beginning to show a certain confidence, he reins her in, tapping on the piano to keep time: Slower, Carmen! Andante, Carmen! Stop, Carmen! Stop! When the teacher starts playing the same piece with his eyes closed, I stand and sidle around the pianos, brushing them as I go, and open Anne’s door to ask for a glass of water. Her face drains of colour and she takes two steps back, holding a knife and an onion, and the cat sitting on a stool doubles in size, white fur bristling. In my best French, I tell Anne merci for considering me harmless, and she suddenly blushes bright red: Pardon me, Monsieur, we had no idea you spoke our language so well. Don’t worry, Madame Beauregard, I was touched by your consideration for Caramel and the generosity of your husband, who, to top it off, is treating me to this waltz by Schubert. Anne reacts to this almost with indignation, because the piece in question isn’t a waltz, nor is it Schubert; it is Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. I beg your pardon, Madame, as you can see music isn’t my forte, literature is. I show her my book from a safe distance, afraid she might want to browse through it, but she serves me a glass of water from the tap and doesn’t appear to be interested in Fernando Pessoa. She slices the onion in rings with dull thuds, and I’m still reeling off the poet’s heteronyms when she says that her son’s a bookworm, too, although neither she nor Henri are avid readers. C’est la vie, she says, shaking her head, and dumps the onion in the frying pan as she politely dismisses me from the kitchen: It was a pleasure to meet you, Monsieur … Monsieur … I pause, waiting for her to look at me: Hollander, Monsieur Francisco de Hollander. Anne stares at me, open-mouthed, examines my grey eyes, my cone-shaped head, my father’s arrogant jaw, then looks away, rinses some spinach, begins to chop it into tiny pieces and murmurs that many years ago she had a friend with the surname Hollander. Her revelation is interrupted by Caramel, who hammers the bass notes on the piano and slams the lid shut with a bang. Bloody old pain in the arse! she shouts as she marches into the kitchen. She is determined to take the book from me by force, but suspends the attack when she sees the cat: Piaf, my love, my favourite little friend! She squats so that she is eye to eye with Piaf, who lifts her tail and ears, while Beauregard provides an encore of the previous night’s melody on the piano. But you said something about a friend by the name of Hollander, ma’am? Maybe I know him. I have relatives who lived in Berlin between the wars. Anne opens the oven, closes the oven, fans her face, sautés the spinach and tries to remedy her slip-up with a muddle of digressions. She claims she has never lived in Berlin nor is she terribly fond of Germans, not least because her mother’s family is from Alsace, which was once annexed by Prussia, like Lorraine, which she got to know as a young woman when she studied at the Nancy theatre school, where she was a colleague of Hollander, Ismael Hollander, a promising young comedian who was later sent to a concentration camp. Now Anne almost burns her fingers as she repositions the tray of pork ribs in the oven, and she begs my pardon for all of tonight’s faux pas, such as alluding to Auschwitz in my presence. I have great respect for the saga of your people, says Anne, whom I reassure once again because I am not Jewish. Oh, well, then I’m doubly sorry, but in Europe Hollander is considered a Jewish name. Well, I don’t know, it’s never come up at home, we Brazilians are a very mixed people. At any rate my father, Sergio de Hollander, witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany and as far as I know was never given a hard time. He was even romantically involved with a young woman by the name of Anne Ernst, from an excellent German family. Although I can only see her from behind, I am sure that Anne smiles, flattered, and this is when the maestro wraps up his number as an obvious signal for his wife to hurry up: It’s been lovely chatting, Monsieur, I’m only so
rry I can’t invite you both to stay for dinner. You’re always welcome too, Carmela, even if only to continue your tête-à-tête with Piaf. I’ll show you out, she says, washing her hands in the sink, and as she dries them on a tea towel she gives a little gasp and a youthful skip: Une minute, Monsieur Hollander. She takes an apple-scented pastry out of the fridge and puts a slice on a dessert plate: You said your father lived in Germany? She hands me the plate covered with paper: It’s my Alsatian grandmother’s recipe, he’ll like it. I follow her, sliding along the living-room wall, while Caramel crawls under the piano with Piaf, and Henri Beauregard takes refuge in the toilet under the stairs. I want to pay for the lesson, but Anne refuses to charge for fifteen minutes. I insist, I am adamant, otherwise I won’t have the courage to ask the maestro to give Caramel another chance. I go so far as to take the money out of my pocket, but Anne acts offended. I try to drag out the goodbyes, step back to straighten some pictures on the wall, stroke Beauregard’s piano, and I am praising its art deco design when I hear the sound of a key in the door and see the handle turn by itself. Paralysed before the door through which my German brother is about to walk, in my mind I run through all the fantastical ways I have imagined him since I found out that he existed. I recall the many times I have dreamed about him, with a different face each time, faces that morph in the aquarium of dreams, figures that vanish with the morning light, throughout all the years I have longed for this encounter. And now I no longer want the door to open; as far as I’m concerned the handle can go on turning forever. I prefer to continue seeing my brother in my dreams, his face still unfinished. I think seeing him at point-blank, with excessive clarity, will be like seeing a character from a novel that I’ve been conjuring as I read, detail by detail, suddenly splashed across the big screen. It will be like a spotlight thrown onto a character from a novel that I’ve been reading by candlelight, because the more indistinct their features, the better. If I could, I’d ask my brother to wait for me outside, to be once again the silhouette that I glimpsed in passing at night. But the door creaks, the handle returns to its original position, and what I see before me can’t be my German brother. It’s a man of my age, with slightly flaky white skin, Henri’s hook nose and creeping premature baldness. He is truly banal-looking, the sort of person one struggles to commit to memory, who doesn’t frequent dreams. This is my son Christian, says Anne in French, and this gentleman here, he is Monsieur Hollander, our dear Carmela’s beau. Christian greets us with a nod, being weighed down with books, and bolts up the stairs two by two. Anne opens the front door, Caramel tugs on my coat sleeve, and outside I ask on an impulse: What about the other one, Madame? The other one? Your other son, Madame. I hear the sound of a flush, and even lit from behind I notice that Anne colours before responding: We don’t have another son, Monsieur Hollander. She closes the door, and I am at the gate when she opens it again: Psst. It is to call Piaf, who was following Caramel and now scampers back inside.
My German Brother Page 7