Antonio E-Book

Beatriz Bracher

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Benjamim, a young man on the cusp of fatherhood, discovers a disturbing family secret: before his father was born, his paternal grandfather had a child with Benjamim's mother. With both men dead, Benjamim turns to three of their confidantes to piece together his family history: Haroldo, his grandfather's best friend; Isabel, his grandmother; and Raul, a friend from his father's youth.Through their conflicting testimonies, full of blind spots and contradictions, Benjamim will gradually learn of the secrets and conflicts that shattered his wealthy family; of his father's search for meaning in the poverty of the backlands, and of his slide into madness. In prose of great subtlety and penetrating insight, Beatriz Bracher builds an indelible portrait of a family and a society in decay.

Leseprobe

Antonio

BEATRIZ BRACHER

Translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris

PUSHKIN PRESS

Contents

Title PageRaulIsabelHaroldoRaulIsabelHaroldoRaulIsabelRaulHaroldoIsabelRaulHaroldoPreparation of the BodyAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin PressCopyright

5

Antonio

Raul

Whenever anyone asked how many siblings he had, Teo would say, “There are five of us, but one died.” If this confused whoever asked, Teo would only shake his head and say: “I never met him. He was the eldest and died when he was a baby.” Teo and I were classmates since elementary school. I became a friend of the family and spent a lot of time over at their place. When we were young, it was a cheerful house—much different than the one you got to know. Aside from earning whatever she could teaching classes at the high school and then the university, your grandma Bel took care of everything. She made sure the chaos never totally overwhelmed them. Xavier was an editor, writer, journalist, and dramaturge, so I figure their day-to-day expenses were paid by Bel’s work and, from what I could gather, the remains of an inheritance. They lived in Butantã, in a house that belonged to Xavier’s father—your great-grandfather, the doctor. When I was a kid, there weren’t many houses on that street. Theirs must have been one of the first. You went there when you were very little—I don’t know if you’d remember. There was a yard with trees, and sunny rooms with high ceilings. The broken furniture never got fixed; it eventually just disappeared. The emptiness expanded, so the interior of the house seemed to grow as the years went by. We’d build cities and ranches on the parquet floors, and they’d stay there for months without bothering anyone. When the wooden wedges in the floor started to come loose, they became walls and bridges, and the tar and sawdust underneath transformed into patches of rocky terrain. Then came the days of balsa planes and plastic monsters, the constant smell of glue and ink. The button soccer board must have stayed there until the house was demolished. Later on there were all those cushions where we’d spend hours lounging and talking, playing guitar, watching TV without the sound, and eating crackers and cream cheese. Nadia Comaneci in the ’76 Olympics and Sonia Braga in Dancing Days. The walls covered in newspaper clippings, the shelves stuffed with books and binders, and photos Scotch-taped to the paint. It was sort of like a bunker, or maybe the reverse: we had sunlight, air, books, TV, the guitar, and Graça’s white cake. In the event a nuclear war broke out, we could’ve survived there for years.

I never saw a single picture of this dead brother, and the baby boy’s death didn’t seem to weigh on the family. Bel liked to tell stories about her kids when they were little, but she never talked about him. So I started to think that maybe it was just a gothic invention of your father’s. One day, sometime near the end of that era of cushions and weed, I asked him about that brother. Your father stopped strumming the guitar, became very serious, and said:

“Up until last week even I didn’t really know anything about it either. I’d heard my dad tell people the same thing: I have five children, but one of them died. And so I started saying it, too: there’s five of us, but one died. I knew that this other son of his was born before he married my mom—the result of a fling in his youth. I thought the phrase had a heroic ring to it for those of us who survived. And something supernatural, too, because he always said I have and not I had, suggesting that all five of us remained with him in the present. Then a week ago I was on the phone with Helinho and I laughed and said, there are five of us, but one’s dead. I think it had something to do with Rafa, who swore he wouldn’t come play button soccer with the rest of us until he passed his college entrance exam. My father was nearby and overheard me. He asked me why I was making light of such a serious subject. You know my father—you know how he is when he gets serious.”

I don’t know if you remember your grandfather, but he adored you. Xavier was a special person. He could turn anything into a gag or a joke, including his own failures. He was always devising some new way of making money from theater or literature. One time he came up with the idea of printing cheap books and selling them at newspaper stands and distributing them to street vendors. Books with plenty of action and sex, sexy women on the covers and “metaphysical messages between the lines.” They even sold pretty well: they were funny and not at all metaphysical. But Xavier always figured out a way to blow his investments and end up owing even more than he did before he started. He also went through a period of trying to do this improvisational musical-dance-theater-circus thing. He’d place announcements in the newspaper for a theater class that was open to anyone but professional actors. He didn’t believe in acting workshops; he preferred magic and pirouettes, makeup, rags, feathers—and always music. Trumpeting fanfare, cello solos, Spanish guitar, samba sung a cappella, the dry wooden taps of indigenous music. He’d gather a bunch of people in the garage and put on a traveling show—an andante performance in several movements connected by an invisible plot. In the seventies he managed to put on a few of these shows. They’d start in the street at six in the evening, marching by the crowded bus stops and the bustling doorways of factories during the evening shift change. The spectators were part of the show, but they only realized after it had gone by. I saw one of those shows, in which Teo was one of the musicians. It was pretty amazing: sort of like a breeze, or a dream. Even though they were all done up with costumes and props for vaudeville and the circus, the performance was soft and sweet, almost like a landscape. It was the complete opposite of the Theater of the Oppressed: it was a theater of the irrepressible. It eased some of the tension in the streets and lightened the hearts of people who got to see it. Nobody made any money off it, and your grandfather invariably lost much of his own. That was why he kept working as a journalist and art critic for several newspapers and magazines. He worked like a dog and lived for leisure—always ready with a bon mot and making the kind of scenes that embarrassed his children, especially as we all got older.

That’s why when he became serious—really serious, not fanatic or megalomaniacal, but serious—it was something that scared us. He changed colors, as though his blood had started running the other way through his veins. His eyes got dark and his saliva thickened. We listened quietly and all felt the urge to get up and go when he, always so articulate, started stuttering.

“So then,” Teo continued, “he told me that he, my father, would always be—before all else—the father of this dead boy, his son Benjamim dos Santos Kremz.” That’s right: the same name as yours. Now hold on, listen: I remember everything I ever knew about it, but I never knew that much. I have an unbearably good memory—that’s why I’m so good at my job, with all those announcements, jingles, slogans. I’m a professional plagiarist, which is also how I knew your name was going to be the same as that dead brother’s, the full name on the death certificate I just showed you. At the time it didn’t occur to me that your mother could be the same one—Santos is such a common name. The amazing thing is that what disturbed you just now when you saw the certificates, those papers that Leonor found and wanted you to see—the whole twisted thing is true, it seems. That is, your mother, Elenir, was married to your grandfather and had a child by him, a child who then died—the first Benjamim. An insanity that I only just now learned about—Leonor told me before she left. A truly crazy thing. For your grandfather, Elenir was Lili, and to your father she was Leninha.

Starting again from the beginning will help you understand at least part of this tangled knot. All that business about “There are five of us” happened just before he went to Minas. Your father spoke in hushed tones, he was so excited. “He said he’d never told me about Benjamim because it wasn’t just a story, like one of his theater projects, or the make-believe of children—it wasn’t just the tribulations of new parents. No, it was the story of his rebirth, the birth of Xavier the adult, the real Xavier, a delivery in which Xavier the boy had to die.” I didn’t understand, and said so. I saw that Teo was still struggling with it himself. “I didn’t really understand either, and my father seemed to regret that he’d started telling me. I asked how old my brother was when he died. He got emotional when he heard me call his son my brother—his eyes welled up and I felt ashamed. He said that he was less than a month old, that his mother was very young, that it was a difficult birth, and that they’d used forceps and messed up and crushed the baby’s head. He ended up with birth defects and died in the first month. The whole thing was still very difficult for him.” We sat there in silence. Teo wasn’t one to get emotional. On the contrary, he looked down on sentimentality. I was the sensitive one, and I often suffered the brunt of his sarcasm. He demanded so much from himself, and he was always on guard against going soft. But he needed to unload on someone about that conversation with Xavier. He was searching for the right words.

“You know, it was like my father was telling me a secret I already knew. He was lifting the veil from something I didn’t recognize, but always knew existed. He spoke about his love for other people, about his ability to get close, really close, to other people. Only this time he wasn’t talking about his theater or one of his classes, but real life. He was talking about his feelings and the sense of direction that Benjamim’s birth and death had given him. He told me the mother of this brother of mine was a special woman, and after everything that happened he couldn’t stay at his desk at the firm, he needed to start over. He tried to go on, stuttering more through each sentence—but I had to get out of there, I had to get away from him. The way he was talking made me feel like I had something to do with the death of his son—it was something half-crazy. Something saccharine and cloying. In the heat of the moment I got angry—I’m not sure why. If this was so important, why hadn’t he told me about it before? And obviously it was important, a brother who’d died, it was something I’d never seriously considered. Later I got sad, as though this Benjamim had just died a few days beforehand. I don’t know—it was like we’d taken his place, without anybody ever saying his name in our home. But in my father’s heart he loomed larger than us all. It’s very strange. He’ll always be the eldest and the baby—dead, but alive whenever my father looks at any of us, or at anyone else.”

And Benjamim, let me tell you, it really was strange, especially in that house, the way a story like that wasn’t already known to everyone, endlessly commented and dissected, sucked down to the bone. Everyone and everything in that family required commentary, nobody was exempt. I think it was part of the times we were living in—the belief that we had the obligation to eliminate taboos, that the spoken word possessed that sort of power. In the Kremz household, everyone had to have an opinion. Sometimes a disagreement would end in a shouting match; other times it was resolved by consulting the encyclopedia, dictionaries, books—or quite often, by Xavier’s dissatisfying conclusion that nobody was getting anywhere, that they were all too tired to go on. Your aunts Flora and Leonor were the two most modern girls I knew. I think it was the first house where boyfriends and girlfriends were allowed to spend the night together, and we could smoke whatever we wanted without a fuss. There was a real violence of ideas, an obligation to be alert to what was happening in the world, to submit everything to rubrics of analysis, curiosity, and taste. With that burden of culture and liberalism, I preferred to remain just an add-on to the family, and later return to my private and well-furnished house.

Teo was the youngest. Flora was already working by then; Henrique and Leonor were in college. And by the time he sat for entrance exams that year, Teo still had no idea what we wanted to do. Passing the exam wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t as hard back then as it is now, and everyone in that family was practically a genius. The real difficulty was choosing a career. He was the sharpest of our set: he wrote, drew, played, composed. He was a math whiz ever since grade school, always a few levels ahead of everyone else. Everything came so easily to him. Maybe that was why he hesitated—and actually, in his senior year Teo began to force himself to be a bad student. After that conversation with his father, it seemed like he put some things together in his head—something clicked with one of his preconceived notions, and he decided he didn’t want to go to college. He was sick of São Paulo and wanted to take a break, he wanted to travel, to see the sertão—things that don’t make any sense today, but which, back then, were still in the realm of possibilities.

Isabel

No, Benjamim, I don’t think your father went to the sertão to find your mother. That was a coincidence. I never met Elenir, but I imagine she was beautiful and had the sort of charm that drew her to the Kremz family. And no, I don’t think Teodoro intended to pay for his father’s suffering, as though it were a sin that demanded his atonement—not least because there was no sin in the first place. Whenever Xavier spoke about the year he spent with Elenir, it was with the tone of someone describing a lost love affair. In fact, I’m not really sure why they went their separate ways. Knowing Xavier, I’m sure he didn’t abandon her. He never told this part of the story, at least not to me. I said that he never abandoned her because he fought with his parents, left home, and refused anyone’s help—all so he could be with her. Elenir was a simple girl living in São Paulo, away from her parents. I think she would’ve been about fifteen at the time. A lot of his friends started keeping their distance. I know this because Haroldo told me their affair became the talk of São Paulo. Haroldo was his classmate at São Francisco, the law school, and was one of the few who stuck by him. I believe he knew your mother well. Just think: these days, a rich kid who gets a poor girl pregnant would be totally ostracized if he didn’t take responsibility for the child and help pay for child support. Back then it was the exact opposite. The boy’s family and even some of his friends would tell him the girl should “figure something out,” as they used to say. Or they’d send her back to wherever she came from with a little bit of money. And just like that, nobody ever mentions it again. Xavier was in love with your mother—it wasn’t a simple matter of taking responsibility. That was the story he told.

I think it was Elenir who jumped ship, because she couldn’t tolerate Xavier’s grief. Your grandfather was always a bit manic—even his joys were hard to contain. It’s not easy to tolerate feelings like that. She was so young, a simple girl, an orphan. You see, Benjamim, you were also born motherless, but you had your father and then you had me. You were born into a family. Your father, in spite of it all … It wouldn’t be fair to say that he abandoned you. He abandoned himself—I think by now you’re able to tell the difference. Maybe for a son it’s still something unforgivable. But when you get to be my age, trapped in a hospital room and knocking on purgatory’s door, maybe you’ll be able to understand what happened. With Elenir, I can only guess. It’s likely that at fifteen she thought she’d found a husband and a family. And I’m almost certain Xavier wanted the same thing. I realize this is completely banal, but in Elenir he sought the family he’d never really had. Your grandfather’s mother was a proper lady, everything absolutely comme il faut. Intelligent, generous, elegant, self-sufficient. Your great-grandfather was a renowned scientist, a celebrated public health advocate, a great benefactor of hospitals. He had all of humanity to look after. Yes, I think Xavier might just have experienced a rebirth after that affair with Elenir, after the death of that poor child. It’s a realistic outcome of his line of thinking, and I’m not surprised you got the idea from Raul’s rather fantastic imagination. That poor child. The bad luck of having to be a father to his own parents, forcing them to be reborn—it was too much for a such a small being to bear.

We never knew you were Elenir’s son. When you were born and your mother died, Teodoro never told us anything. He only said your mother was called Leninha and that she worked in the ward where he was hospitalized after coming down with malaria—or whatever was giving him those fevers and deliriums. I never knew he was sick—in fact, I didn’t even know where he was. He’d write or call from time to time, telling us he was retracing Guimarães Rosa’s path through the backlands, perfecting his guitar skills. That was just in the beginning. After a while he didn’t call anymore, and only wrote a few letters, always from different places. In the first letters he seemed excited about his new life. He’d say he was always reminded of Vanda, their nanny, that wherever he was living people told the same stories he’d known ever since he was little. They sang the same lullabies. In the summer of that first year, Raul went out to see him. He said Teodoro was doing well, he was happy, had short hair, and spoke with a Minas accent about making plans to settle down. I never imagined that he referred to having a family. He was only eighteen. Raul didn’t tell us anything about the accident on the boat, or about Teodoro’s disappearance.

When Teo left São Paulo he was already pretty lost. I thought it would do him good to travel, to find his way forward. Teodoro was always the one most different from his father. Ever since he was little he was neat and orderly. He reminded me when to take him to school, when to give him his medicine and cut his nails. I think that, because he was the baby of the family, it was his way of surviving. At fifteen or sixteen he started giving private tutoring lessons and making his own money. We could have helped him out, but he never asked. He’d say he was doing just fine, picking up work in the towns where he stayed, that he still had his savings. It’s possible that he wasn’t eating well, but that wasn’t something I could discern from his letters or calls. I was never too concerned about nutrition or health when it came to my kids. We had those kind of ideas about how to raise them, and even after everything that’s happened, I still believe that freedom is the most fundamental aspect of an individual’s self-formation, including the freedom to die. Without that risk we’re not masters, only slaves. I raised my children this way, you know that, Benjamim. I’d like to think your mother was also a free person, and maybe you can hold on to that thought, instead of clinging to fear and rage.

Anyway, back to the story: Teodoro got excited by music, and by the people he met. In that way he resembled Xavier. He didn’t have the same missionary fervor—no, he was always the one transformed. You’re now older than your father was when you were born. Today everything is different. It’s hard to explain. I still don’t really know whether we were fools, or if all of you, today, are lazy and boring and weak. We thought the world would be transformed and that we would be the catalysts for that transformation. And today it makes us seem like fools. Whatever you make of all this, it’s important for you to remember the idiosyncratic ideals of those days. Otherwise you’ll never understand what I’m trying to tell you.

Teodoro, although he was the youngest, was the most mature of my children. I trusted him, I never feared for his future. If he thought he was capable of wandering through the sertão, then that was what he had to do. And if your mother had survived, I don’t know why she wouldn’t have been the right woman for him. You’re young, you travel, you find the love of your life, you shack up, have a kid, and that’s the end of it. That’s what life is, the best parts of it anyway. You’re living through it now, so maybe you know what I mean. Your wife is pregnant, you’re still in love, you’re thinking about what to name your child, already imagining his face. You’re going to call him Antonio? Yes, I do like it. It’s serious but unassuming. You say that your mother was much older, over forty, but so what? They loved each other, didn’t they? Teodoro’s madness came later. It wasn’t madness that drove him to your mother—that I won’t believe. Xavier was a bit abnormal, too, but with me he managed to live a productive life, raise four children, bring joy to many people.

Xavier was always like a child, his whole life. Remember when you’d come to spend vacations here, when you were three or four years old? He already had advanced emphysema and was nearing his painful end. We had to sell the house. We tried all kinds of expensive treatments, but nothing worked. I think that was why your dad decided to bring you: he wanted his father to know his grandson. He knew it would make him happy. You were a joy to Xavier, a shining sun—a sunset. When he saw you, when he heard your voice, the color would rise back into his ashen face. By this point, Henrique’s Fábio had already been born. But to your grandfather, you were always different from the other grandchildren. The last time you came for the holidays you must’ve been about four. It was an especially dry July and Xavier no longer had the energy for long walks. One day you went to the zoo with your father and your cousin, and Xavier insisted on going along. The truth is that he felt better when you were near. It was an illusion, a desire to have enough life left in him to share it with you. He came back exhausted from all the walking, but happy as a clam. I could tell something wasn’t right. I asked Teo to leave and take you away with him—your grandfather wasn’t going to last much longer. A week later he died, and Teodoro didn’t come to the funeral.

Maybe Xavier figured out who you were. And then died in peace. I don’t think so. No. This isn’t a beautifully intricate novel in which your mother is the hero and I’m the character who picks up the pieces of her broken love. No. Benjamim, the story of our lives still isn’t finished, and it never will be. Creating this space for your mother, this narrative for your father and your grandfather, as though nothing had transpired between one Benjamim and the next, or as though it had only been an echo, a gap, a void between a lost love and its reencounter—that’s rather poor. Look, Benjamim, it makes sense, but only a little. We’re not literature, my dear. We’re love and sperm, blood, laughter, hatred, death and illness, phlegm and farts, baths, medicine, doctors, schools, tests, guitar, English, swimming, ballet, maids, nannies, fingernail clippings, toothbrushes, cuts, Mercurochrome, lice, chicken pox, potassium permanganate, tears, birthday candles, holidays, beaches, horses, tumbles, joys, work, salaries, inheritance, time, and so much more that comes between one encounter and the next. This is what you’re made of, too, and it’s much more complicated than a love story.

Haroldo

It was in ’49, no, ’50—my last year at college. Your grandfather was the top student in our class at São Francisco, president of the law school senate. He was a charismatic politician, and the class poet. He had philosophical ambitions. He was already making overtures to your grandmother. Isabel Belmiro was a must: a modern girl who’d read everything and held advanced views, who went to bars with boys but came from a good family. It isn’t true that she never met Elenir. She met her once, but gave her the Irish goodbye. Maybe she didn’t want to get to know her—that would be in keeping with my dear friend’s refinement. The thing is that Xavier was passionate, his whole life through. He managed to be passionate about certain street corners, the side of a building, the way an elderly person’s earlobe sagged. He was strange like that—he always was. Isabel was exuberant. She dominated her surroundings with her foxy mannerisms and that air of being a French intellectual. She was the most popular girl in the neighborhood. Not in the way you’re thinking, but naturally that was part of her charm, too. She wasn’t a flirt, but generous and aloof. She’s still the same, nothing’s changed. She’s more somber now, of course—75 years aren’t nothing—but she still maintains the independent spirit she cherished in those days.

So you want to know about Elenir. Isabel called and told me everything—I had no idea. How about it, my boy? Seems like you’re the son of Elenir and Xavier’s crazy son. The same Elenir who brought my friend to his knees back in 1950. What year were you born? In ’79 … yes, she would have been about fifteen going on sixteen when she met Xavier. I met Teodoro, your father, when he was still a kid, and again later, after he’d gone insane. He was eaten away by his illness and slowly killing my dear friend Isabel.

To be honest, I didn’t spend much time with Isabel and Xavier after they got married. Life took us in different directions. After the thing with Elenir, Xavier completely changed course. A chasm opened between us. We’d been very close friends, so we still got together pretty often. But our families never really connected. I continued studying law, became a lawyer, and then a professor in the law school. I have my practice, I married Fernanda, and we raised a far more conventional family than Xavier and Isabel did. Even so, we remained friends until he died. I remember one time when I visited the old house, he’d had some kind of episode and was recovering in bed. I think this was before you were born. He missed his son. He’d insist that he didn’t, saying that everyone had to accept his own lot. But it was obvious he missed him. After all, he was a stay-at-home dad, very much a family man. I don’t think he took it well when the house started emptying out. During that visit he showed me a portrait of Teodoro. He had the same face as his father’s when we were in college together. The same shoulders, the same gaze and skin tone—everything the same. It must have given your mother quite a fright.