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He must be with the girl in a hotel somewhere, I say to pacify Mother, who was up all night because she had a bad feeling. Still in her nightgown with her hair in disarray, she is heating up milk for my breakfast when someone rings the doorbell insistently. It’s him, it can only be Mimmo, who has lost his keys again, but when she opens the door my petite mother is trampled by four intruders who, without introduction, ask if this is the residence of Domingos de Hollander. Mio figlio! Dov’è mio figlio? Whenever she is on the verge of tears Mother regresses to her native tongue. They ask if I speak Portuguese, announce a search for our Argentinian guest’s belongings, and I have no choice but to show them to the valise containing Tricita’s things on the sofa in the sitting room. La valigia di mia mamma! protests Mother as she watches them slash the lining of the valise with pocketknives, after tossing Tricita’s knickers, blouses, skirts and polka-dot dress onto the rug. It isn’t enough; they’re looking for letters, notes, agendas, diaries, Marxist publications, and by now the pandemonium must have reached the study, where Father, always vaguely tuned in, is probably thinking it’s more of those youths eager for literature, to whom he never refuses to lend his books. And when someone mentions the name Beatriz Alessandri, he suggests that Mother look on the Spanish American bookcase, as he vaguely remembers such a character in a short story by Borges. A thickset fellow wants to know which Borges the old boy upstairs is on about, because he is Borges, as he shows me in his wallet: Jorge Borges – Police Inspector. I try to joke about the coincidence, point to the top of the bookcase, which is out of my reach, and promise him a copy of his namesake if there is a duplicate. But the inspector isn’t in a joking mood; he signals for the three gorillas to evacuate the shelf of Argentinian fiction writers and a first edition of El Aleph, its spine reinforced with plasters, winds up in his hands. With a stubby, dirty-nailed thumb, he flicks through the book back to front as if it were a stack of playing cards, and between the cover and the title page he finds a note, which I insist on translating for him. It’s a few lines from the editor Gonzalo Losada, vigorously recommending Borges’s short stories to Father. I point out to him that it dates from 1949, but he isn’t interested in stories and orders his henchmen to confiscate the book, which they throw in a canvas bag, oblivious to Mother’s indignation. They also discover a piece of paper inside a Cortázar with the following note: Los pocos lectores que en el mundo había [illegible] se pondrán también de escribas. Borges snorts when he sees Father’s scrawl, which to him looks more like a coded message, and impounds the Cortázar also, just in case. I take him aside and explain that this Beatriz Alessandri, whom we know as Tricita, accidentally spent the night at our place, but no one told her to make herself at home with the library. And, in an effort to impose some limits, I suggest they take a look at the room where she slept, as the pigs are now attacking the shelves of Chileans and Cubans. Disturbed from his reading, Father watches from the door of the study as the four men with oily hair and dandruff-speckled blazers climb the stairs behind me. Who are these quadrupeds? he asks, but fortunately only I understand him, because when Father is upset his diction is worse than his handwriting. His face is inflamed, his cheeks quivering, and Mother ushers him back to the lounge chair, where she takes his blood pressure and gives him a tranquillizer to dissolve under his tongue. In my brother’s room, the agents run their eyes over the walls of books and look startled by the task in front of them. They put their hands on top of the books and, with great effort, pull them out in blocks to peer behind them, where they find new walls of books, even more compact, between which cockroaches slip as if through veins in a slab of marble. They soon give up on the bookcases and start rummaging through my brother’s desk, on top of which are nothing but porno magazines. The first drawer is full of condoms and Vaseline, but the second is locked, forcing one of the grunts to use a lock pick. And I am shocked to see Borges pull out a sepia photograph of my father with Anne Ernst, which he forgets among the harlots on the magazine covers. At the bottom of this drawer there is also a cardboard file that contains German manuscripts belonging to Father and a document with what looks like the City of Berlin stamp at the top. It’s just a bunch of old papers from Germany, I say, offering to translate them, but the inspector, keen to score points with his superiors, or merely wishing to punish my eagerness, decides to confiscate them too. He flings the file into the bag, looks at the bookcases with an air of disgust and wraps up the operation. And after accompanying them to the door, I race back upstairs, afraid I’ll find Mother snooping around my brother’s room. I now examine at close range the photograph of my lanky father in a bowler hat and bowtie, embracing an Anne Ernst who is already visibly pregnant in her fitted dress, in front of a two-storey house with an alfresco dining area. I imagine it is a literary cafe, because on the back it says in rightward-sloping handwriting: Sergio und Anne, Literaturhaus, 11-7-30. Anne’s physiognomy isn’t anything new to Mother, seeing as how she must be tired of seeing her pictured with the baby in her arms, trying to understand what Father saw in her. But she’d surely be shaken if she saw her looking so radiant, very much her own woman, and Father’s too, his son like a king in her belly. I hide the photograph, which Father entrusted to my brother as if in a will, under the raided drawer. And I finally understand who they must have been talking about so much, late into the night, when they sat side by side in the study. Because Father, like me, is incapable of keeping a secret, but, for obvious reasons, he can’t very well open up to his friends in artistic circles if he wants to maintain a modicum of discretion about his affair in Berlin. With Mother he avoids stirring up any jealousy of the past; better to let her think he never heard from Anne Ernst again after the wicked woman left the child in the care of the State. But the explanation he may have demanded from Anne, the answers he did or didn’t get, the letters he sent to the German authorities, the truth about what happened to Sergio Ernst, which I’ve been investigating so doggedly, all this he appears to have offered up on a plate to my brother, who probably had little idea where Germany was and would never learn to pronounce Ernst. And Father would have urged him to lock this collection of papers in a drawer, which in all likelihood my brother never opened again because he’d lost the key. And now they are in the possession of the police, to be pored over by a detective who barely understands German, and finally dispatched for filing in an inactive archive.
Assunta! Assunta! Assunta, where’s the Orlando? Mother would turn down the stove, leave the pasta in the water, ask the young ladies to excuse her, fetch the Orlando, or the Ulysses, or the Lady Chatterley, or Sophocles’ tragedies, take them up to the study and return to the kitchen panting, and the scene would repeat itself night after night. And every evening the cast of women in the sitting room grew, offering a kind of retrospective of my brother’s love life. They brought jugs of wine to go with the spaghetti and there was always a guitar to lead songs by Violeta Parra and Joan Baez. Sitting on the floor, they whispered, snivelled and laughed quietly, but as soon as I came home they would lower their eyes, as my presence made my brother’s absence more painful, if not intolerable. I was like a negative of him, even to Eleonora Fortunato, who ignored me as she handed out T-shirts with the face of her missing son on them. Mother wasn’t keen on the T-shirts; she thought they were bad luck and was afraid the exes would ask the painter to make them ones with Mimmo’s face on them. But to Eleonora Fortunato my brother was small fry; after being slapped around a bit down at the police station, he would come swaggering back, handsome as ever. She compared him to Assunta’s valise: a good seamstress would have it looking brand new in no time, unlike the paintings and etchings that the police had hacked to shreds with pocketknives the last time they raided her house. She added that my brother had an illustrious, well-connected father, rather than a screwball mother like her. This was true and Father did in fact appeal to the São Paulo secretary of justice, who called him back promptly to say he hadn’t managed to locate the boy in any of the sta
te’s facilities. Even the editor of A Gazeta, with whom Father had broken off ties, was helpful and confirmed that the newspaper hadn’t registered any traffic accident, bar brawl or police incident involving Domingos de Hollander in the last few days. Then Mother got it into her head that her son had skipped off to Buenos Aires with Tricita. As a matter of fact, she had predicted something of the sort the first time they met, when the air had filled with an electricity that took her back to the night she met my father at a carnival parade. And when she saw Father looking more and more miserable, she tried to persuade him that soon someone would come bearing letters and photographs of the couple, along with packets of alfajores. Mother told my brother’s ex-girlfriends how delightful her Argentinian daughter-in-law was, how hard she had prayed for her son to marry a decent girl. She also thought it proper to thank Eleonora Fortunato for having sent her the girl, who, God willing, would give her a grandchild the following year. And because no one dared contradict Mother, the vigil cooled and the visits ended in a week. I was the only one left to feed Mother’s fantasies, to conjure up the betrothed in Buenos Aires, now drinking hot chocolate in the Café Tortoni, now strolling through Plaza San Martín, now greeting a blind poet on Calle Maipú. I was almost beginning to believe the things I made up, and even found myself nurturing a certain esteem for my fictitious brother and his unfaithful muchacha. At the same time it angered me to imagine poor, dishonoured Ariosto’s face should we ever meet again, which Christian thought was out of the question. In his opinion, with all due respect to my childhood friend, all armed struggle in South America was just suicidal bravado. Without wanting to sound pessimistic, Christian said he wouldn’t like to be in my brother’s shoes either, if indeed he had been intercepted with that guerrillera and her backpack full of clandestine messages. And I, who had never been crazy about that Brazilian brother, I, who would have exchanged him for a German brother without a second thought, began to feel nervous about being left with no brother at all.
In those days of uncertainty Mother and I would both give a start every time the doorbell rang. While I feared news of a death, she longed for a letter, a postcard, a telegram from Argentina. But, naturally, after a time without any news, I grew indifferent to the doorbell, as one who lives behind a cathedral must become deaf to the bells. Every morning the postman would bring books and more books in packages that Mother didn’t even open any more, letting them pile up on the sitting-room floor. There was no point in taking them to Father, who now spent all of his time reclining on his lounge chair, his eyes blank, a closed Proust on his lap and the butt of a Gauloises between his fingers. He refused to go to bed, barely touched the food Mother brought him and only got up to go to the toilet, leaning on Mother. Dr Zuzarte had already examined him and wanted to have him admitted so he could have some X-rays done, but Father dreaded hospitals. So Mother dragged my brother’s bedroll into the study, where she would lie at her husband’s feet each night, without sleeping a wink. And so that I could respond in an emergency, I began to sleep in my brother’s bedroom next door with the door open. Because I’d only ever snuck into his room to fetch an Unamuno or return a Lorca, I’d never even sat on his bed before. And now I was developing a taste for the softness of his mattress, for his sheets, which no matter how many times they’d been washed, never lost their smell of women. When I woke up, I helped myself to his wardrobe, rolling up the legs of his Lee jeans and the sleeves of his linen shirts, which hung down to my thighs like tunics. It is possible that Father mistook me for my brother when he saw me in those clothes, because he’d become agitated, look like he was about to say something, wheeze, wheeze, then cough. And one day when Mother went out to Mass, it occurred to me to show Father the photograph of him with Anne at the literary cafe, to stir up some fond memories. I sat on the chair beside him for the first time, leaned over the lounge chair and even dared sing the waltz from The Blue Angel the way he did, while I made the photograph dance here and there, in circles, in a zigzag, thinking his eyes would follow it. But he kept them trained on me, frightened eyes that suddenly reminded me of the expression of little Sergio Ernst in his mother’s arms.
It was no novelty for Mother to pray a novena to San Gennaro for Father, hoping he still might recover his faith. And in the last few days she’s been trying to convince me that, with his laborious death rattles, he is showing repentance for the sins he committed during his life, of which there are many. From what I know of Father, neither his knowledge of the Holy Scriptures nor his meticulous reading of the Summa Theologiæ have made him any less of an atheist. I can understand, however, that finding himself at the door of hell, which in his nightmares is, perhaps, an eternity without books, or an infinite bookshop with its titles in embers, he might have crumbled. It could also be that he has only agreed to the sacrament tonight to make Mother happy one last time. At any rate, whether he wants to or not, he no longer has the strength to boot out old Vicar Bonnet, who arrives with his holy oils for the last rites. And when he sees the priest’s white whiskers at close range, Father’s voice crackles: St Jerome … He is delirious, of course, but the fact that he has spoken in these circumstances, after so many days of silence, feels like a miracle. My son, says the priest, I am Vicar Bonnet and I have come from the Igreja do Calvário to administer the anointing of the sick. But Father insists: St Jerome … St Jerome, where’s Assunta? And Mother, taking his hand, says: I’m here, Sergio, shall I fetch St Jerome from the bookcase? Father squeezes her hand, falls silent, and the priest begins: Through this Holy Unction and through the great goodness of His mercy, the Lord pardons you … The doorbell rings and I answer it apprehensively, because the postman doesn’t come at this hour. It’s a private chauffeur who hands me a package of books and a note from the Secretary of Justice apologizing for the misunderstanding. I discard the Borges, the Cortázar, the Nerudas and the two volumes of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry to get to the cardboard file at the bottom of the package. But it is missing the City of Berlin letterheaded paper which I remember seeing in the inspector’s hands. I can, however, work out its likely content from the three incomplete drafts of letters, in my father’s handwriting, which I translate as follows:
Rio, 15 December 1936
Municipal Welfare Officer
Berlin City Council
Dear Sir!
Since I received your letter of 15 May 1936, I have gone to great lengths to gather all of the documents required for Sergio Ernst’s adoption in Germany. As I explained previously, Brazilian birth certificates make no mention of religion and hence won’t satisfy the German court’s requirements.
I mentioned to you the possibility of obtaining my forebears’ baptism certificates. Because Catholicism was the religion of Brazil until 1889, baptism certificates were, in fact, the only birth certificates that existed back then. It is very hard, however, almost impossible, to obtain such documents, as one would have to know for certain where they are (city and church) in advance. In my case, this investigation is even more difficult because my grandparents came from several
Rio, November 1937
To the Deputy Mayor
of the Regional Administration of Tiergarten, Berlin Secretariat for Childhood and Youth, Child Welfare
Since my reply to your letter of 26 May 1937, I did my best to obtain all of the required certificates, mine and my relatives’, in order to prove the Aryan origin of the child Sergio Ernst, who is in State care. Unfortunately, conditions here in Brazil don’t make such investigations easy. There weren’t even birth certificates prior to 1889, because Catholicism was our state religion until then, and the only certificates were
My German Brother Page 11