I Didn't Talk Read online

  I Didn’t Talk

  I Didn’t Talk

  If it’s possible to have a thought without a word or an image, without time and space — complete, created by me, a revelation of what remains hidden in me (and from me) but suddenly appears, if it could be born so clearly for all to see, without origin, without any effort of breath, of tone of voice, of rhythm or hesitation, without vision even, emerging like a normal thought, or more than a thought: a thing — if such a thing could exist, then I’d like to tell a story.

  It happens every day. It’s among strangers: that’s where things emerge. It’s how they become known. Stories are the shape we give things to pass the time on the bus, in line at the bank, at the bakery counter.

  I asked, what do you do for a living? And he told me, I’m retired. Twenty years ago, at a motel café table, I found the answer unhelpful. His wife, all in white, looking like a nurse — an impression aided by her husband’s physical disability — worked for the navy.

  I was a school principal. Jobs help us make assumptions about people, the same as wrinkles on a face, the color of someone’s skin, the clothes they wear, the way they butter their bread. “Retired” tells you nothing. A retired doctor, a retired garbage man, a retired president, a retired manicurist, yes, but not simply “retired.” But today, yes, now I understand: retired is right.

  Look, I was tortured, and they say I named a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets. I didn’t snitch — I almost died in the room where I could have snitched, but I didn’t talk. They said I talked and Armando died. I was released two days after his death and they let me stay on as the school principal.

  Eliana was in Paris. Our daughter, Lígia, was here, with my mother in this empty house, which back then was full. When I was imprisoned they arranged Eliana’s trip to Paris. They didn’t arrange for me to go anywhere. Eliana died. My father, sick and retired. My sister, Jussara, still a girl, was finishing school and doing a free prep course for her exams, studying all day. The family could never really count on José. Eliana died in Paris, she’s buried there. After they released me, I talked to her on the phone. It was summer here, but she was trembling with cold, and complaining a lot about it — she wanted to see her daughter, bury her brother, take care of her mother — her voice trembled on the broken public phone she’d use to make free calls. I imagined her with purple lips, not dressed warmly enough. She couldn’t come back — I knew she couldn’t take it: she always felt the cold more than I did, but she couldn’t come back, and that was all she had left.

  Armando, my school friend, was her only brother. Luiza said that Eliana died of pneumonia without ever finding out that I’d said what I never said. I don’t trust Luiza. How could someone die of pneumonia in Paris? She stopped eating. Yes, but weren’t there friends around to feed and clothe her? I was furious. Luiza told me to remain strong for the revolution — she hesitated, and her metallic voice took on the electricity of the military shocks, and to make things worse, I’d gone deaf in my right ear — no matter what happened to Armando you’re still one of us, not everyone can take it, not even the strongest, Eliana died without knowing, don’t worry. Dona Esther went crazy over the death of her son and daughter and wanted to hang on to her grandchild. I didn’t go crazy but I couldn’t touch Lígia. I found her baby talk intolerable.

  Francisco Augusto, who’d recently left med school, reset the bones in my fingers, taping them to splints I tore off a week later, confirmed permanent deafness in my right ear, and recommended a dentist friend I should see about my two lost teeth. But I didn’t go, and I didn’t tell him about my nightmares or the impossibility of sleeping for more than fifteen minutes straight. We all have nightmares, and I couldn’t go insane.

  Dona Esther killed herself, but not without paying us one last visit, embracing Lígia, whispering in her granddaughter’s ear a final goodbye mantra, and looking at me with disappointment: Armando trusted you even more than he trusted me.

  At the café table in that provincial motel, the girl from the navy told us they were newlyweds. Eliana had been dead for ten years and I said, I’m a school principal, and the husband said “retired.” I could have said biologist, or linguist, or educator. I had a full set of teeth again and was spending the holidays with Lígia and her friend Francisca, seeing the “historic cities” of Minas Gerais.

  As though only some cities were historic. São Paulo’s present history is so violent that it occupies space in possible pasts and futures: unable to look forward or backward or to the side, we stare down at our feet. When Lígia was ten, São Paulo still had the possibility of history and we’d go to the São Bento Monastery, the Pátio do Colégio, the Ipiranga Museum, the Consolação Cemetery. She could go by herself to buy bread at the bakery. She knew Dona Maria the grocer, Senhor Ademar the shoemaker, and she played with the neighborhood kids. I’ve been the victim of an urban bucolic that I don’t like one bit. But my disbelief in the impossible is yielding: I’d rather not believe, and argue with Lígia about it. The move to São Carlos is the next phase in my career — I’m not giving up, as she alleges. I’m going to dedicate myself to Lucilia’s project at the university, her study of language acquisition difficulties. Lígia thinks I should have taken the post at the Department of Education, or at least continued directing the program here in professional development and accepting requests for talks and seminars. But I’d like her to come with me. The university there is very good — her husband would have no trouble getting in and, more important, my little granddaughter Marta could go out by herself to buy our bread. Well, not yet, she’s only three, but she’d come with me, and she’d get to know the baker, and the neighbors, and she’d pay attention to the color of the sky, the winds that bring the rain. No, I try to argue to myself, there’s nothing bucolic here, in this empty house.

  We finally sold the house. I have a few months left before I have to move out. I’m deciding which pieces of furniture are coming with me. José, Jussara, and Lígia took whatever they wanted after my mother’s death. Jussara took only a few small things: some shirts, the oil painting of a little boy drawing, and the vanity mirror in its ugly mahogany frame, the kind so many houses had on Rua Teodoro Sampaio. It was Grandma Ana’s and beloved by my mother — it was where she stuck little notes to remind herself of what she had to do the next day. Jussara grew up to be a beautiful, tall young woman, very thin like our father, but even so she took some of her short, plump mother’s shirts, saying she’d wear them around the house, a house I’ve never visited: a respected psychiatrist, she raised her family in London and her children speak Portuguese with an accent. But she says she wears Dona Joana’s clothes whenever she’s home alone, especially a wool-gauze dressing gown that our mother often wore. I had to shrink Jussara a bit in my mind, imagine her littler, or else the gown was too short on her — too indecent to be something from Dona Joana’s collection.

  My mother was an excellent seamstress. She acquired important clientele, people from outside the neighborhood. “Important” was how she put it. And we knew who she meant, something that wouldn’t make sense today. Now I wouldn’t know how to place names or faces or occupations if someone said “important clientele.” Obviously they weren’t people from the neighborhood. When I went to elementary school, I had to take two buses and get off downtown, and I knew that being from outside the neighborhood wasn’t enough to make someone important. Yet my mother treated all her customers the same, their clothes were all done with the same care, the prices fixed. The importance of the customer was only apparent in the quality of the cloth and my mother’s patience. The important ones — my mother would say as she prepared dinner at the stove, as José and I did our homework, and Jussara, the baby, ten years
younger than José, slept in her crib — are the most distrustful. They’re afraid I don’t know the names of the cuts, so they explain every little detail. My mother found this lack of trust reasonable enough: shoddy workmanship is rampant everywhere — ignorance has no fixed address, no mark on its forehead. She’d listen attentively and humbly repeat the details. It’s just, she’d say, that some of the important customers use the terms incorrectly: they want a ruffled skirt but they say pleated, they want a three-quarter-length sleeve and they say half sleeve. You can’t correct them, mainly because it doesn’t get you anywhere, so mistaken but so assured, poor things, and so I have to show them with fabric how it will look, find a photo of a similar model. Only then can I know for sure what they want. You have to understand that these people have never had the opportunity to learn.

  The late Dona Joana was a very intelligent but unambitious person. She regarded both stupidity and ambition as birth defects or traits acquired through life’s mishaps, and felt it was necessary to be as patient with such people as with the blind and the deaf.

  Armando liked Dona Joana. We were classmates in elementary school and again in high school. In the weeks leading up to our exams, he’d come have lunch with me and we’d study together until late afternoon. Francisco Augusto was Armando’s classmate in med school. He’s a good doctor, just as Armando no doubt would have been. I studied biology, then education, and then linguistics. Now I’m going to São Carlos. Armando used to talk to my mother. About recipes, seasonings, or little things about the city and its characters. Some dishes were renamed “Armando’s.” We’d had them all before: pasta with meatballs, sautéed squash, baked rice without olives but with fresh corn, toast with creamed spinach and minced hard-boiled egg. Only now they were Armando’s meatballs, Armando’s rice, the same old thing, but under new management. José, Jussara, our father, and I — we didn’t have dishes named after us, although we ate them with pleasure. I think that Armando’s sort of praise wasn’t part of our language — maybe that’s what it was. Sometimes I got caught up with something downtown and stayed there, annoying Armando. He didn’t want to miss out on Dona Joana’s food so he learned how to get there by himself and would go on his own. He’d say he could only study properly while listening to the tac-tac of the sewing machine.

  I’m healthy, the illnesses I get come and go without medication, I cost very little. My mother and father are dead. Jussara has taken care of herself for decades now, Lígia and her husband have found their footing, Renato is no more, and so with my pension I have more than I need. I don’t have a car with registration or taxes, no microwave or any other useless machine, only a computer that crashes every so often, requiring me to call the ever-stranger Alexandre, the grandson of my ancient neighbor, Dona Eulália, who comes over and futzes with it and forgets to charge me. The house, which is old, needs constant work: a burst pipe, burned-out wiring, a door that squeaks but won’t shut anymore. It’s all going to hell, so I have an agreement with Tobias, a thrifty handyman. He tells me gently the house needs a complete overhaul, the pipes have to be replaced, the wiring requires this and that and who knows what else. But I’ve bravely resisted for these past thirty years, ever since I got out of prison, ever since Eliana died and I moved back here. I always had my father’s firm support, but after he died I had to keep up the fight alone. Lígia, Jussara, and my mother all took Tobias’s side and wanted the renovation, the overhaul, changing everything, but my side prevailed and the house was allowed to age in peace. Now a developer will tear it down, like all the other old homes around us, and many families will live off this sale, including Lígia’s: I put my share toward an apartment for her and there was still enough left over for a small house with a yard in São Carlos.

  José was here a few days ago, he slept three nights in our old bedroom. I sleep in our parents’ old room. He came to speak with his editor and with people from the newspaper and the magazines he writes for. He saved the last night for us to eat dinner together. That was how he put it: I left Friday free for us to have dinner, you have any plans? Aside from sleeping, no sir, I replied, like I was reporting to one of the important clients. He found this funny — he knows I’m too lazy to go out at night and the farmers’ hours I keep. We barely saw each other on Wednesday and Thursday. He has his own key and knows where to find sheets and towels, and despite his criticisms he makes do with my jam-jar glasses, my mismatched plates and bent silverware. It’s the last month of the professional development courses for teachers, and I still needed to show up for meetings to prep for next semester and to attend the commencement ceremonies. Goodbyes were said, and homage paid, as if I were leaving for another planet where wizened São Paulistanos, having forsaken its flux, are put out to pasture. The past tense triumphed in each tribute, and I left more irritated than when I arrived. Being buried alive annoyed me. It was such an efficient, elegant way to stop listening to what I have to say, or reading with glazed eyes what I write. How can we be giving courses in professional development when we’re the ones who need to be brought up to speed? I no longer believe in any of this. But Professor — that awful little voice of respect that I can’t stand — it’s what’s possible. I think I got tired of possibility, it doesn’t interest me anymore. Anyway I’m finishing something off with this move: it’s certainly an ending. I am killing something, I don’t know exactly what, maybe ambition, since even Dona Joana couldn’t keep the mishaps of life from infecting me with that too.

  I went to the university early on Friday to clear out my office, submit grades for all the stragglers, sign off on all the necessary bureaucratic things to formally free myself, and have lunch with Teresa. Early that morning, as I was putting the bread and newspaper on the kitchen table with an automatic gesture whose predicate is to turn toward the stove, take a pot, fill it with water, set it to boil, et cetera, I gave a start — the bread and the newspaper nearly broke two teacups, two saucers, and two small plates from the old china set José took after our mother died, which were now set out neatly with white napkins. There was also a vase with flowers and a gift, wrapped in gold paper, with a note from my brother. My first reaction was to look around to make certain I wasn’t in the wrong house. Then, irritation with this invasion of my breakfast ritual — my coffee in a glass, sweetened coffee in the pot, my baguette with butter and crumbs on the old table. In the rage and confusion of these last days, as everyone around me was calling them, I pushed it all aside, took out my cup, pulled apart my bread, and read my newspaper — starting with the sports section, an old habit of Armando’s that had grown on me the past few years, as though I’d always done it. I threw my brother’s gift on my bed and took his note with me to read on the bus to the university.

  Mine, mine, mine. Like a little child learning the tribe’s tongue, I find myself in the acquisitive phase of a new language. At the same time the old phrases, the ones I knew and used, seem to have become sterile — transformed beyond recognition. Now it was my cup, my bread, my rage, my sixty-four years of age — as if I needed once more to name and claim what I was taking with me. Return to the first person and to the possessive, modernity’s twin juvenile plagues, against which I’d always struggled so sincerely. José’s note spoke of the same necessity — but in a diametrically opposite way. He wrote of reminiscing and I think of creating; he wrote of discovering and I need to be establishing. Yet his note brought me peace, banishing the childish indignation that in recent days had left me too restless to think — frivolous, vibrating, orphaned and prone to pure reaction. His Machadian tone — which José cultivates in a way that borders on plagiarism yet somehow remains, paradoxically, his own — revived my happiness in the same way that, when absorbed in something specific and complex, we’re surprised by birdsong. Maybe the bird had been singing for a while, maybe its song had been softly penetrating the machinations of logic. But we perceive it suddenly, as if it had been born alongside our unexpected joy at hearing it. The song pulls us out of ourselves, o
bliterates the train of thought we’d been following, leaves us only the pleasure of listening to the bird. Often, when we realize we’re happy — and have lost our train of thought — we sigh, resigned to the idea of starting over again, when the solution appears as clearly and as unexpectedly as the birdsong. As José wrote, “This is what happens to me, as I go about remembering and shaping the construction or reconstruction of myself ” (Machado, as written by José).

  As I go about remembering, what a beautiful thing. I need to reread Machado, and retrieve the unexpected things I no longer remember. Unlike José — who, as he searches, tries like Dom Casmurro to construct a past that will be kind to him in the present — I seek my errors, I kick stones and send the cockroaches scurrying, I walk my face through spiderwebs and ask of every smug milestone I’ve passed, what purpose did you serve in my life? Did you manage to hold firm, or emit light, or make noise, or at least serve as a pillar, to sustain whoever reached you? Or — already so eaten away by applause — could the flick of a finger tumble you over a cliff and into the calm and muddy river of the satisfied?

  Inside the gold package on my bed was José’s new book, the first volume, I’d read in the note, of an autobiographical cycle. It was an advance copy and he wanted my opinion. Although artfully written, the request was sincere; it moved me, even if I couldn’t help but find it amusing. José had already exposed himself and our family in his very first book, his most experimental and the one I like best. None of them is straightforwardly bad — they all have charm and depth. But for all the genres he’s tried — detective stories, historical fiction, critical essays — there’s something predictable that I find off-putting. I know where he wants to end up (he provides, in fact, long explanations, in which his sexuality plays an increasingly important role). But his note moved me: it’s my brother’s first direct request in many years. Even in his most dire straits, he never asked us for anything, never let down his guard for us so we could help him. He moved away a long time ago. He was a hippie in Arembepe, saw a flying saucer somewhere over the Planalto Central, went backpacking in Machu Picchu, got stoned in California until — with the sudden conversion of a hold-out — José became an academic, a man of letters. He got a fellowship in Germany, then one in Spain, and finally returned to live in Curitiba. After our father’s death he came to visit more frequently. When our mother got sick, five years ago, he moved back home and, for the two months before she died, he cared for her. You couldn’t call it a reconciliation, because there’d never been a fight. Reencounter is the right word, from José’s point of view.