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I’ve known Eleonora Fortunato since I was a child, although she rarely came down from her studio in the attic. Sometimes, when I saw her going past, I thought she was Captain Marvel’s father, as no one else in the house wore trousers. Later the fashion caught on among other women, but to me, trousers made their legs look short, compared to Eleonora Fortunato’s. She also had a long neck, as spindly legged birds do, and her triangular face, even when made up to go out, had a somewhat masculine beauty about it. I can barely remember her voice, much less a smile, as she had no time for children, and even as an adult I don’t think she ever looked in my direction. Hence my surprise when I find her waiting for me early one morning, with dark circles under her bloodshot eyes and her long grey hair in disarray, as if a few locks were missing. When I enter the sitting room, Mother is pouring her a straight whisky and shaking her head emphatically, because Eleonora Fortunato has just asked in a deep voice if, by any chance, she looks like a cow. Unable to hold it in, she asks if it isn’t rich when the father of your child, busy with his herds in Mato Grosso, doesn’t deign to reply to a desperate telegram. And when she sees me she adds in the same tone: And you, can you believe that not even my lawyer will talk to me? They’re a bunch of wimps, she says, they’re a bunch of fucking wimps, and her voice grows louder and louder, perhaps with the intention of being heard upstairs in Father’s study. Getting to her feet, she declares that she won a silver medal in the Belas Artes Exhibition, was featured in the last São Paulo Biennial, used to give interviews about abstract art on a weekly basis, and now she can’t even get the newspapers to print a few lines. You’re a fucking wimp too, she spits at me, citing, however, what she spat at the Military Police commander, who doesn’t have the balls to confront the agents who made her son disappear. The lying prick showed her some files with terrifying pictures of burglars, drug dealers and murderers, when everyone knew Ariosto wasn’t a dangerous felon but a kid from a good family with shit for brains. After a week without any news, Eleonora Fortunato says the only thing left for her to do was to go to Reichel, an industrialist who, according to gossip in high circles, has friends in the military. She already knew him from vernissages and had sold him a painting years earlier, so she was furious when she was barred entry to his mansion. She cursed the guard, quarrelled with the dogs, and kicked up such a stink that Reichel’s wife came to see her in the garden, but as she walked out of the door she was already calling Eleonora a cow, and worse. Eleonora tried to appeal to Mrs Reichel’s maternal sentiment, given that she is a mother too, and received as a response: But no son of mine is a son of a bitch. And this is where I come in. Eleonora Fortunato wants me to talk to Udo. She believes Udo Reichel will talk to his father if he’s told that his best friend was dragged out of the house by plain-clothes police officers, never to be seen again. I promise to do as she asks. I can hardly tell a woman in such a state that I barely know Udo and don’t even know where he lives. I certainly can’t tell her that I doubt Udo would be willing to help the person who slashed his face with a shard of glass. And no sooner has she left than Father starts talking loudly and confusedly in the study. Troglodytes, I think I hear, they’re monoglot shites, and I more or less understand that he is talking about the Ariosto Fortunato case. Bunch of torturers, I hear loud and clear now, and although his indignation is more than justified, Father should really be more careful about what he says over the phone. It’s because you’re a wimp, he shouts, you won’t publish it because you’re a fucking wimp! And with these words, Father, who has just retired from public service, puts an end to his long collaboration with A Gazeta.
I am late for work, find my classroom empty, and in the front office I am told that the director wants to talk to me in private. Natércia and I go way back. We took this very same prep course together, and in the university entrance exam, which I coasted through, she placed first. Just out of university, where she was top of the class, she took over as director of the prep course and invited me to teach Portuguese. Every so often she’d call me into her office, and it pleased me to see that the country girl, who’d been so bashful when I met her, a real hick, was now a talkative, assertive version of herself, always in stilettos or leather boots. Our conversations about surrealist poets would stretch on into the afternoon, and from work we’d head out for a drink, or to catch a play, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to end up in my bed. But after she got married Natércia started to avoid me, and when she summons me to her office this morning it is for me to sign two copies of my letter of resignation. For strictly personal reasons, says the letter, closing a chapter in my life, seeking new challenges, professional growth, etc. There has been a complaint that she really should investigate, and if it were any other employee she wouldn’t hesitate to open an inquiry. But out of consideration for our old ties, she is giving me the opportunity to leave the job discreetly and of my own volition. I look into her yellow eyes, trying to guess what cards she has up her sleeve, and am inclined to call her bluff, but she glares back at me and doesn’t look like she is kidding. I decide it isn’t worth grovelling for a pitiful salary, sign the papers in which I give up any claims to compensation of any description and leave the room without saying goodbye to that nymphomaniac. I stop by the front office to get my belongings and note that everyone there already knows of my disgrace; even in the cleaning lady’s cross-eyed gaze I see that I am a persona non grata. And wandering through the city, I speculate about the real reason for my dismissal, beginning with the understandable jealousy of Natércia’s husband, an elderly man, dean of the Law department. On the other hand, it could be that this ambitious woman, who obtained her PhD in Language and Literature not so long ago, who was testing my patience in bed with questions of semiotics just the other day, sees me as competition now that the chair of Comparative Literature is up for grabs, seeing as how its occupant has gone into exile in Chile. I can’t dismiss the possibility, either, that she encouraged students to file complaints about me, whether for perpetual tardiness, too many no-shows, alcohol on my breath, or even possession of LSD. But the most serious thing, in the current climate, is that quitting in dubious circumstances creates the suspicion that I am something of a lefty, while Natércia, like all swots, has never gone anywhere near the student movement. And if the current chancellor’s office decides to look into my background, my proximity to opponents of the regime, or even urban guerrillas, will necessarily come to light. My name will quickly find its way onto a blacklist and state schools will close their doors to me; I won’t even be welcome in Catholic schools. Then I remember Christian. I doubt the agents of repression would dare go snooping around the Alliance Française. With a job at the Alliance, no matter how inconsequential, I’ll be able to apply myself to my research far from the intrigues of academic circles, while waiting for the wind to change in the country. Besides which, working alongside Christian on a day-to-day basis, I won’t want for opportunities to exchange a few words with Heinz Borgart, in spite of his wife. So I head to the school in the city centre, confident in my university-level French, which in practice is even more fluent than my friend’s. When I get there, though, I flaunt my skills in vain, because the receptionist, with her broken French, thinks that I’ve come to enrol and recommends the excellent night classes for adults. I ask to speak to her superior, but she says Madame Nicole has just nipped out to a doctor’s appointment. She had to pay her gynaecologist an urgent visit after a little spotting. As for Christian Beauregard, he is her favourite teacher, perhaps because he’s a Sagittarian like her, but he’s giving a class at the moment and nothing in the world could convince her to call him out of class for a minute. At any rate, if I decide to wait, there’s a waiting room with a sofa and a pile of magazines on a coffee table. She also shows me the toilet, a drinking fountain, mentions that she heard on the radio that it was 38°C in the shade and nibbles at a bar of chocolate: Want some? I leaf through three or four issues of Paris Match then try the receptionist for something else to occ
upy myself with, but all she has to offer me is her photo novel. There must be some books in the director’s office, but she isn’t authorized to remove them from there. After much reluctance, however, she ends up bringing me, for a quick look, what she finds in Madame Nicole’s drawer. It is a pocket edition of Justine, Les Malheurs de la Vertu, by the Marquis de Sade: Yes, Constance, it is to you that I am dedicating this work … Some time ago I held in my hands a limited edition of this novel, which Father keeps on the revolving bookcase beside his lounge chair, safe from Mother. I read it in fits and starts, always on high alert, on the rare occasions that Father left the house, just as I am made aware each minute of Madame Nicole’s imminent arrival. At this period crucial to the virtue of the two maidens, they were in one day made bereft of everything … Voraciously, more with my memory than my eyes, I reread the vicissitudes of poor, God-fearing Justine and her older sister Juliette, abandoned to the pleasures of debauchery. And just at the moment when the younger of the two, aged twelve, repels her pastor’s lustful moves, I hide the book from the children and adolescents who fill the waiting room until they merrily trade places with the classes that are leaving. When I reopen it, I imagine that it is illustrated with pictures of the very same girls in bloom who have just gone past, possible future students of mine: ‘Oh! Monsieur,’ I said in tears, throwing myself at the feet of this barbarous man, ‘give way a little, I beg you!’ I imagine Madame Nicole is also interrupted in her reading frequently, as indicated by the folded corners of successive pages. Or it could be that the folds mark the passages she finds most interesting, such as this one, in which Justine, still a virgin, is subjugated by the terrible Ironheart, as soon as I was in the state he wished me to be in, on all fours, which made me look like an animal … And this is when the receptionist takes a phone call and tells me that Madame Nicole won’t be returning to work this afternoon, and it’s good that she’s taking a week off to rest because she never slows down and has already had two miscarriages. And Ironheart once again threatens to take Justine by force, without harm to her virginity: If you are afraid of getting pregnant, that could not happen in such a way, so your pretty figure will never be ruined. The maidenhead that is so dear to you will be preserved … Absorbed in my reading, I only realize it is night when I see that my packet of cigarettes is empty. Standing in front of me, Christian holds out his: Want a cancer stick?
I don’t know why the hell I had to go and invite Christian to dine at this particular restaurant, now that I am unemployed. La Casserole is one of the most expensive restaurants in São Paulo, and Christian, whose air hostess girlfriend must bring him wines from first class, isn’t content with a good Brazilian red. Yet the titles he is carrying in a book strap are, at a glance, less sophisticated than I thought: a Petit Robert dictionary, a Portuguese–French–Portuguese Larousse, three grammars, an Asterix collection and four The Adventures of Tintin comic books, in addition to two volumes with hand-made covers. The first of these he shows me under the table as soon as the maître d’ has left with our orders. I thought it was another Marquis de Sade, but it is a Russian book, the title of which Christian underlines with his finger: МИсTерИя-Буфф, that is, Mystery-Bouff, from which, obviously, I deduce that МаяKвский is Mayakovsky. And when I see the name of the author of the second book, Гголь, I can’t help myself: GOGOL? With a hand on my arm Christian warns me that most of the city’s waiters, doormen and taxi drivers are police informants, to whom merely knowing how to speak Russian may appear compromising. And when in whispers he compares our police state to that of Nazi Germany, I think he’s exaggerating a little. But I take the opportunity to bring up Heinz Borgart, who, in Brazil at least, needn’t fear a campaign of racial hygiene. Christian wrinkles his brow as if he doesn’t understand and, switching from Portuguese to French, says his father was persecuted by the Gestapo due to his connections to anarchist organizations. Of course, I say, and it was in an anarchist cell in Charlottenburg that he met Anne Ernst. Never heard of her? Here she is, the angle of the photograph doesn’t do her justice, her body only just recovered from the pregnancy. The baby? The baby is my brother Sergio, at six months of age. But he could have been your adoptive brother, just take a look at this letter. Today you and I would be brothers by marriage, isn’t that incredible? Keep the letter, take the photo too, it’d be interesting to show them to your father. What, you aren’t on speaking terms? The waiter brings Christian’s starter, a fifty-cruzeiro foie gras that he savours in silence. Then he tells me he wants to rent his own apartment if he can get the Alliance to adjust his salary for inflation. He sends back his chateaubriand, he likes his rarer, and asks for a taste of my omelette. He says he wouldn’t mind a bedsit in a council building; at least noisy neighbours would be more fun than waking up every day to his father’s piano. Even when still a babe in arms, he couldn’t understand why his father sat there banging on that huge black box for so many hours. But it wasn’t long before he found himself enthroned on the cushioned stool of the brown piano, where he learned to read music before his ABCs; it was a piece of cake. From an early age he resigned himself to six hours of practice every morning, and, like a child prodigy, learned to play any score he set eyes on. Nevertheless, his efforts fell short of his father’s expectations; Heinz criticized him for always playing very different pieces in the same mechanical way. As a result, before bed, he was subjected to forty minutes of his father showing off with Chopin so Christian would know what it meant to play with feeling. But no matter how impressed he was with Heinz Borgart’s face while playing preludes, little Christian was unable to perceive any feeling at all in the sound of a piano that, frankly, to him was little different from a rattle. He kept at his exercises only to please his father, to whom he didn’t dare confess that he had never been able to distinguish between the tones of those notes that his eyes read and his fingers played so faithfully. The essence of music was a mystery to Christian, who, when his mother would sing ‘La Vie en Rose’ to him in the kitchen, only thought it odd that she likes speaking so slowly to him. Michelle became suspicious and took him to see a specialist, who diagnosed him as having severe congenital amusia, otherwise known as complete tone-deafness. These words were like music, so to speak, to the ears of a boy who imagined that from then on he’d have his mornings free to play football with his school friends. But no, Henri refused to believe such quackery. He thought his son was doing it out of spite and, when he saw Christian desperately thumping the keyboard, sentenced him to six hours of daily seclusion in his bedroom. Michelle tried to defend the child, arguing that even a genius like Charles Darwin suffered from the same disorder, and compared her husband to a vain painter who curses his son for having been born blind. But in the end all she could do was keep the boy company. She learned to play button football on the floor in his room, and one day brought him the only book in the house, an old paperback of La Fontaine’s fables from when she was a girl. The moral of the story? Paternal punishment yields the most unexpected fruits. Christian developed a fondness for literature, from the classics that his mother used to buy for him at the French bookshop to the latest international releases that his girlfriend brings him from Paris. And after ordering profiteroles for dessert, he apologizes for venting, but his differences with his father have only become more accentuated as an adult. And if he’d known what my intention was when I sought him out, he’d have discouraged me right there in the waiting room of the Alliance Française. Now it is I who apologize for having spoiled his dinner with such a trivial matter, because what I really want is to land a gig at the Alliance, which has a tradition of taking in political dissidents the world over. I was hoping that Christian would promptly offer to help, that he’d promise, for example, to put in a good word for me with Madame Nicole, but he glances at his watch, is surprised to see that it’s already after midnight and orders a Napoléon brandy as a nightcap. In the taxi, he talks quietly in French about his hopes for the weekend, when the air hostess is going to bring hi
m some of Nabokov’s earlier books in Russian, which she saw in a second-hand bookshop on Saint-Germain. But I don’t register the titles he cites, nor do I follow the directions his monologue takes until the end of our journey, when he passionately holds forth about some of Tolstoy’s wife’s intimate problems. In front of his darkened house, I decline his invitation to come in and I’m not sure if he is offended. Without saying goodbye, he gets out of the taxi with an ungainly jerk of the body, perhaps due to the alcohol, perhaps the weight of the books.
My house is pitch-black too, but as I pass my brother’s door I think I hear a woman sobbing. Some time ago, naively, I actually delighted in the signs of his decline. I’d noticed that this consummate hunter of immaculate maidens had begun to allow second-hand females into his room, some even over the age of twenty. And, not infrequently, no sooner had they entered than they would become angry and leave, slamming the door behind them. But there were also those who gradually calmed down, or even appeared to enjoy whatever went on in there, though not without first whimpering and begging for mercy like poor Justine: Oh! Monsieur, I have no experience of such things … I began to suspect that my brother, with urges like those of the abominable Ironheart, was intent on initiating these women in deviant practices of which Mother would never have approved. I do not presume, however, to judge his sexual conduct, not least because lately, with my door open a crack, I have eyed these young women up and down so I can approach them if I ever see them in the bars he frequents over near Rádio Tupi. But tonight, after keeping an eye out until late, I go to bed unsuccessful in my surveillance. And I find it odd, because my brother is a celibate at heart; he has never liked sleeping in the company of anyone else. Once satisfied, he sprawls across the bed, talks about other women, tells scatological jokes, points out cockroaches on the bookcases; in short, he always finds a way to rid himself of his guests. And it’s only when I am already under the blanket that I realize I’ve left the door ajar, but it’s better this way, as it’s easier to keep tabs on what’s going on in the house. Pretending to be asleep, I will leap out of bed at the slightest soundto size up the mysterious female visitor, who might be a complete dog, a hag, an all-time low that my brother hides because it could tarnish his reputation. Or, on the contrary, she might be the one who doesn’t wish to be seen with him, an elegant woman, way out of his league, a woman from another walk of life, a married woman.
My German Brother Page 9