My German Brother

by Chico Buarque

  16

  Mr Hollander is a dickhead! No matter how deplorable my readers were, I published their considerations ipsis litteris and never shrank from a democratic exchange: I suggest you read some Machado de Assis, my esteemed and illiterate Mr J.B. I suggest you stick Machado de Assis up you’re [sic] arse, Mr Hollander!!! In the beginning I wrote a few pieces to nobody but myself, modelling them on my brother’s jottings in his school notebooks. Then I began to receive essays from readers in even more atrocious Portuguese, which almost led me to abandon my selfless work. I corrected them with some degree of impatience, often eliciting ill-mannered replies, followed by caustic remarks from third parties, but ultimately it was always the same members of a small community. Until a veteran journalist from A Gazeta published a note in a popular weekly saying that the name of my sorely missed father was being tarnished in the blog of an opportunistic and pedantic grammarian. From then on, as predicted by Natércia, my followers multiplied, there was an upswing in the number of insults being exchanged, I attracted more and more advertisers, and actually built up a bit of a nest egg. I had gone to Professor Natércia after Mother’s death, when Father’s pension expired and I found myself in a tight spot. Having books as my sole occupation was becoming unsustainable. Theoretically, relieving myself of my inheritance would allow me to enjoy it. At worst it would be like trying to save a floating library by bailing into the sea the very books that gave my voyage its meaning. To stall for time, I toyed with the idea of selling to a second-hand bookshop a few kilos of novels that I knew back to front, but leafing through them I realized I only remembered fragments of their narratives, characters’ names, characters from other books, random phrases, flashes, the cinders of a dream. And hovering over my shoulders there was still the shadow of Mother, who would have been horrified to see the library carved up, not least because she admired it more from the outside than from the inside. Determined to preserve it in its entirety, she had even chased off one of Father’s rival bibliophiles, who, on the very morning of his wake, had settled his hungry gaze upon the eleven sixteenth-century volumes in the bookcase in the sitting room. The snoop started sending her chocolates, dropping in at the most inappropriate hours, and didn’t even wait for her mourning to ease before making her a proposal in US dollars for the whole lot. I understand that Mother was offended, but after so many years with Father, she should have known that a man with a lust for books is always prone to losing his composure. And I have to admit that some-times Mother was a little too naive, because leaving precious works like those, their leather covers gleaming with beeswax, in the full view of a collector, was like polishing up cherubs for a pervert. But I think that, for her, caring for the books was a matter of taking pride in appearances, as innocent as doing her hair, for deep down she always knew that Father, although a doting husband, couldn’t distinguish very well between her and the library. And she wasn’t about to let it go to seed just because he was no longer there in the flesh; on the contrary, she had even more time to devote to tidying the house after she gave up the fruit pies and traded home-made pasta for the mass-produced variety. Although she could barely see a thing any more, she would climb the five-rung stepladder with cloth and brush to dust off the most recondite volumes, wipe down their covers and spines, sniff them for fungi and silverfish and then return them to their posts. I followed her around with outstretched arms as a precaution, and one day when she was going through the bookcase in the hallway, I noticed she was preoccuped with some Brits at the back of the shelf, among which was The Golden Bough. Mother didn’t usually disturb the insides of the books, where even the most banal traces of Father were sacred. But this time she opened, sniffed, sniffed again and shook The Golden Bough until Anne Ernst’s letter came loose and fell to the ground. And her ears, which were growing sharper by the day, in contrast to her diminishing sight, detected the sound of the envelope landing: What was that noise? It’s a letter in German to Father. Want me to read it? Berlin, 21 December 1931. Dear Sergio, From your Silence I gather you are as always in your Books immersed. Desolate … When I saw that Mother was barely able to keep her balance at the top of the stepladder, looking at me with her clouded eyes, I went on: Desolate that I can no longer get lost with you in the streets of Kreuzberg, wishing you a happy 1932. With friendship and admiration, Walter Benjamin. In the past I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to read Anne’s letter to my mother from start to finish so as to bring up Sergio Ernst in conversation once and for all. I could even have shown her the photograph of Father in Berlin with Anne in the family way, in exchange for some relevant secrets that she might be able to disclose. But by now it was hardly appropriate to go questioning Mother about a long-lost brother in Germany, when she was suffering more and more for lack of news of her own son. It was a rare night that she didn’t go down to open the door for him, awoken by a car horn or a possum scuttling outside. She often came into his old room in the dead of the night, too, creeping over slowly to touch my unkempt hair and convince herself that it wasn’t him sleeping there. I couldn’t even greet her when I came home, because when she heard my cheerful voice downstairs she would lean over the banister: Mimmo? Then she’d accuse me of playing tricks on her, as if it weren’t enough that I’d already led her on with fanciful tales from Argentina: Deceiving a blind woman is a sin, Ciccio! And Dr Zuzarte’s insistence that her cataracts could be cured with a simple operation was in vain. Why should I want my sight back, she would ask, to give myself a fright in the mirror? She used a white cane to go to church, felt her way around the house with a broom and, unerring with the salt, cooked while listening attentively to the news on the radio. She who had never paid attention to politics now knew congressmen, ministers and high-ranking army, navy and air force brass by name. She thought President Médici was more sinister than Mussolini, but turned up the volume whenever the advert from the government came on, because Mimmo’s voice-over was still being used: He who does not live to serve Brazil does not deserve to live in Brazil. In the morning she would ask me to read her the newspapers and open letters, which consisted mostly of books that publishers continued to send to Father. And then, one day, among junk mail and electricity and gas bills, I found in my hands a blue-and-white-edged envelope addressed to Assunta de Hollander: Caspita, Mamma, here’s a letter from Argentina! To which she replied: Macché Argentina, Ciccio, don’t pull my leg. But it was indeed a letter from Eleonora Fortunato in Argentina, inviting her to a private viewing at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires, where she was exhibiting her latest collages explicitly inspired by her son’s suffering. A valiant woman like Anita Garibaldi, Mother said. If I weren’t so decrepit, I’d get out there with Eleonora in defence of my son, I’d let tutto il mondo know, just like her. Through hints like that, Mother was trying to chastise me for spending my days in the lounge chair, instead of engaging in goodness knows what action. One night at dinner, she let slip that she’d be satisfied if I devoted myself half as much to Mimmo as I did to the other one. What other one? I asked with a start. What other one, Mamma? She said nothing and started plucking at breadcrumbs on the tablecloth. But, like Eleonora Fortunato, I really believed that after giving a statement, having the fright put in him once or twice and serving a little time, my brother would be released without having come to any great harm, given how obviously ignorant he was of political matters. He would also be able to count on the testimony of Beatriz Alessandri, who would be ready to exculpate the gentleman who had offered to carry her backpack. Tricita would repudiate any suggestion of intimate relations with Domingos de Hollander, and wouldn’t need too much coercion, undressing and violation to give up the name of her fiancé, who had already fallen from grace and wouldn’t receive any supplementary punishment for being engaged to a mere Argentinian carrier pigeon. As a routine procedure, in one last interview they would ask my brother if he happened to be acquainted with a certain Ariosto Fortunato, which he would naturally deny. Unless, out of excessive zeal, or imagining his testicles
being strangled in a tourniquet, he confessed that he did know said individual by sight. Ariosto Fortunato was friends with his brother, Francisco de Hollander, otherwise known as Ciccio. Then he would be released, perhaps even catch a lift with one Inspector Borges and when he knocked at the door he would announce himself in a loud voice: Morning, Mamma! You’re going to drive me crazy, Ciccio, Mother would say, but when he lifted her up and twirled her around the sitting room, she would exclaim: Mimmo! She would run her fingers through his hair and shriek: Madonna, it’s Mimmo himself! And she would call me to embrace him: Subito, Ciccio, è il tuo fratello! But I’d no longer be there; Inspector Borges would have hauled me off for a chat at the army headquarters. Tied to a metal seat, a bunch of wires attached to my naked body, it’s natural that I’d have a lot to say about my best friend, a man with balls, in the words of his torturers, who took, without spilling his guts, what no one can take, and who ended his days like a zombie from so many blows to the head and so much pentothal in his veins. I, on the other hand, subjected to intermittent electrical charges, unsure whether the pain itself or the expectation of it was more unbearable, had no intention of becoming a hero of the resistance. But there would be no way for me to cooperate with the interrogation if I knew nothing of my friend’s transgressions, his comrades in arms, their meeting places, his group’s organigram, their contacts abroad, their noms de guerre. The only thing that would come to mind would be secrets from my childhood spent with Bugs Bunny, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man et al., and when he heard my stammering the furious major would wind the handcrank faster to intensify the electric current, which would bring on vomiting, convulsions and, suddenly, a heart attack. Now look what you’ve done, you fuckwit, the colonel would say, and the fuckwit major would try to resuscitate me with a new round of shocks, before sending for the doctor, by which time there would be nothing to be done. When he saw me there with a crooked head and glassy eyes, Dr Zuzarte would say, But didn’t I warn you the lad had a weak heart? What now? And now they would dump my body in a police van with fake plates, which would carry me along four hundred kilometres of motorway to a beach at dawn. And only like this would I arrive at the Copacabana that Maria Helena had told me so much about, with the salty air that she described as the breath of the waves, although fouled by the odours of my body and others laid out on the sand. The vultures would be beaten off with an oar by a ferryman, who, after wrenching from our mouths the gold teeth that would repay him for his labour, would carry us over his shoulder, pile us up on his barge and, on the high seas, serve us to his brothers the fish. And when she awoke from a bad dream like this, Mother would take it as a divine warning, and fly into a panic, and cry to the heavens, and between sobs communicate to my brother that his brother was dead. A little calmer now, after a visit from Vicar Bonnet, she would bid Mimmo farewell and beg him to understand, because without Ciccio she had lost her will to live. And my brother would be left to roam alone that outlandish house, to him as big as it was suffocating, surrounded by books as impenetrable as wallpaper. He would avoid the kitchen and the study, and he’d more or less come to terms with the loss of his parents, but he’d be surprised to find himself deeply missing someone about whom he’d thought he’d never given a cazzo. He would burst into my room, rummage through my drawers, search in vain for a picture of me, any old passport pic. Having forgotten my face, he would look at himself in the mirror, face on, in profile, he’d part his hair on one side, then the other, and he wouldn’t find himself as good-looking as before, when he had me around for comparison. Over the phone he would entice into his lair one, two, three hundred women who perhaps wouldn’t give him the same pleasure as before, now that I no longer came to masturbate outside his door. He would want to eliminate me from his thoughts, liquidate the house and move into a serviced apartment, but the real-estate agent would tell him that without my signature it would be impossible to sell. He would eventually discover that the library was not part of the estate, and would have no qualms about flogging it, perhaps to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, flabbergasted to find that the collection was worth more than the house itself. And, once hollow, perhaps the house would collapse. Without that mass of literature, its skeleton of bookcases might bend and snap, but these absurdities can only be the product of my sick dreams, if not a posthumous nightmare of Mother’s. What really happened was that after Mother died from missing Mimmo, I was strapped for cash and remembered Professor Natércia, who had close ties with the chancellor’s office at the University of São Paulo. I phoned her to ask if the university might be interested in renting the residence of Sergio de Hollander to establish a cultural centre where I’d be allowed to live and read my books without being disturbed. She came to see the house of her salacious memories once again, and, pushing fifty, Natércia was in good shape. She went to bed with me once, twice, got hooked, visited me every afternoon; meanwhile negotiations with the university became bogged down in bureaucracy. And I was already considering going back to teaching a preparatory course, when she showed up with an outdated computer that had belonged to her husband, who was by now quite long in the tooth. She got rid of Father’s Remington, had an Internet connection installed in the study, created the webpage Hollander’s Guide to Better Writing and was a gifted lover until she was widowed, married another old man and disappeared from my life. Natércia was an educated woman, a polyglot, and Mother would have enjoyed talking to her. She’d have found her Italian cute, with that farm-girl drawl Natércia had never lost. I honestly believe that in life Mother never got used to the absence of women’s voices coming from Mimmo’s room, because every so often she’d ask me about this one or that one who’d frequented it. I’d go looking for his exes in the bars of old, but I couldn’t even find the bars because they’re always changing locations in the São Paulo night, except for the occasional establishment which allows itself to sink into decline, taking its captive audience of half a dozen regulars with it. In my wanderings I even ended up on the Beauregards’ drab street, where their house had given way to a Shell petrol station. The alleyway had been widened and was now an avenue with nightclubs and music halls packed with dancing girls who looked right through me and had no idea who my brother was. I only found women of my league in the most obscure corners of the city centre, and I asked them to be discreet because Mother would have frowned at the language they used. Mother pretended to ignore my bringing whores into the house and merely commented now and then that a woman who wore very sweet perfume was not good marriage material. She also played dumb when, as I read out her bank statements to her, I omitted my withdrawals for personal expenses, or when I spared her the most depressing articles from the newspaper. But I couldn’t prevent her from listening to the radio and hearing about the death of Eleonora Fortunato, who was hit by a car in front of Cemitério da Consolação. She also heard an interview with a witness to the accident, a night guard according to whom the bedraggled artist had been staggering along after midnight, before throwing herself under the wheels of a Kombi that didn’t stop to offer help. It’s a pity, said the reporter, but from what I know the prize-winning painter had a problem with alcohol and had suffered from psychological disorders ever since her son was arrested for car theft. Incensed, Mother turned off the radio, never listened to the news again and around the same time began to receive messages from the other side. It was Fortunato, it was Father, it was her mother, Donatella, it was even her wretched father, Pandolfo; they all came to gesticulate at her bedside wearing looks of consternation, as if trying to find the words to relay the unspeakable. Basta! Via! Fuori! Fuori! She would send them away and her cries would go right through me as I lay in my room.

  I agreed to sleep in her bed with her, where, fearful, she struggled to stay awake and wouldn’t let me sleep. She would press her ear to my chest, sniff my armpits, pat my face, hold my eyelids open and talk to me about Mimmo. Because Mimmo had the fatal air of those who died young, because Mimmo had been born with a murmur in his heart, because M
immo had the smouldering gaze of Rudolph Valentino, who had died when he was Mimmo’s age. You should have heard what a calamity the funerals held for Mimmo were, according to Mother: women threw themselves out of windows all over the world, and I was relieved when her speech grew slurred, her ideas became jumbled and finally she fell asleep. She still talked about Mimmo while dreaming and often ground her teeth, but after a time I grew accustomed to it all, except being shaken awake in the middle of the night for breakfast. We no longer kept normal hours: dinner was served before midday, we napped here and there and went to bed when it was still light out. What day is it today? she would ask. 25 January 1973. Still? It was already late August, but I held back the calendar to ease her anxiety: What about now, what day is it? It puzzled her that time seemed to be dragging its feet lately, which was true: at our house 1973 took several years to pass. Even when the situation in the country began to ease up, it was a good thing I kept her in the dark because my brother’s name wasn’t on any of the lists naming those who’d been granted amnesty. And news of those returning from exile and the release of prisoners of conscience, cheerfully received by friends and relatives, might have felt, to Mother, like she was being taunted. Democracy was soon restored in Brazil and in neighbouring countries, and even the Berlin Wall came down, but I asked Mother to be patient. Mimmo still has a few more weeks of his sentence to serve, I’d tell her, although judging from photographs of the packed prisons it looked more like the hard-line military government had opted to lock up blacks rather than subversives. I tried to distract her with the same old headlines, the election of the Polish pope, Italy winning the World Cup, but in the end she no longer listened; even chopping tomatoes in the kitchen she looked like she was asleep with her eyes open, a pair of white eyes that rolled around aimlessly. In bed she began to summon up her dead, whom she hadn’t seen for a while because, as often happens with those who go blind in later life, she was also losing her sight in her dreams. And she preferred her former visitors to the tormented voices she now heard, not knowing how to exorcize them in the pitch darkness. She would say the Creed in Latin, mutter insults in dialect, and one night woke me up in a state, for the voice from the other world that she’d just heard was Mimmo’s. It wasn’t Father, as she had first thought, if only it had been another of my pranks, but the one calling her this time was definitely Mimmo. I tried to reason with her: It was an incubus, Mother, it was just a bad dream. But there was no talking her out of it, she needed to be reunited with Mimmo, who, after a difficult time in purgatory, was waiting, like a child at the door to the cinema, for Mamma to sanction his entrance to the heavenly mansion. Vicar Bonnet, who was always caring towards Mother, came to celebrate Mass at the foot of her bed. And before receiving the holy wafer, Mother asked if it was a sin to yearn and pray for one’s own death. Why no, said the priest, if even the Virgin begged her crucified son not to leave her for long in this vale of tears. When Vicar Bonnet left, Mother made me sit beside her, crossed my forehead and told me it was time I got my act together, for it was up to me to carry on the Hollander name. She placed the back of her hand on my neck and thought I was feverish, but it was only that her hand was cold. Then she crossed her hands on her chest, fixed a half-smile on her lips and her eyes finally went still. When Dr Zuzarte arrived there was little to be done. He took her pulse without conviction and struggled to close her eyelids.