My German Brother Read online

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  1

  Insect wings, a ten mil-réis banknote, calling cards, newspaper clippings, scribbled-on scraps of paper, pharmacy receipts, patient instructions for sleeping pills, for sedatives, for painkillers, for flu tablets, for artichoke-leaf extract; pretty much everything is in there. And ashes; shaking one of my father’s books is like blowing into an ashtray. This time I was reading a 1922 English edition of The Golden Bough, and when I turned page thirty-five I came across an envelope addressed to Sergio de Hollander, Rua Maria Angélica, 39, Rio de Janeiro, Südamerika. The sender was a certain Anne Ernst, Fasanenstrasse 22, Berlin. Inside the envelope, a letter typed on a tattered sheet of yellowing foolscap:

  Berlin, den 21. Dezember 1931

  Lieber Sergio

  Deinem Schweigen entnehme ich

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  __________

  Viele Grüße,

  Anne

  Written in German and teeming with capital letters, the only part I understand is the beginning and the name Anne in rightward-sloping handwriting. I know that as a single man my father lived in Berlin between 1929 and 1930, and it isn’t hard to imagine him having an affair with a local Fräulein. In fact, I seem to remember talk of something more serious. I think a while back someone said something about a child he’d fathered in Germany. It wasn’t an argument between parents, which a child never forgets; rather, it was like a whisper behind a wall, a quick exchange of words that by rights I couldn’t have heard, or couldn’t have heard right. And I forgot about it, as I shall forget about this letter in the book, which I need to put away in the back row of the double bookcase in the hallway. I need to put it in its exact place, as Father doesn’t like me handling his books; much less this one. But I see Mother squatting at the foot of the bookcase, looking for a title Father has sent her to fetch. She won’t take long, as it is she who organizes his library according to an indecipherable system, knowing full well that he’ll be lost if she dies. And no sooner has she scurried to the study with her quick little footsteps, four thick volumes stacked under her chin, than I hurry over to put mine away. I know it was on that shelf above my line of sight, behind the Portuguese poets, a palm’s width to the right of La Comédie Humaine, but it won’t be easy to find its place again. By now the books have already spread out to press against one another at the back of the shelf; they seem to grow plump when confined. On tiptoes I push aside a Bocage in the front row, then grope the spines of the two Brits that were on either side of mine. There’s something erotic about parting two tightly shelved books with my ring and index finger to force The Golden Bough into its rightful slot.

  When I get to Thelonious’s house he is waiting for me at the gate with a torch and a piece of wire bent at one end. We roam the tree-lined streets of the neighbourhood until nightfall, when we chance upon a Skoda conveniently parked on the corner of a poorly lit slope. I place my hands on the window like a pair of suction cups, forcing it down, and the glass gives about ten centimetres. Enough for Thelonious to stick the wire in, hook it around the lock and pull it up, which he’s a pro at. I ask to drive, release the handbrake, let the Skoda roll down the hill and before I’ve even hit the kerb Thelonious is practically lying at my feet with the torch in his teeth and his head under the dashboard. He removes some parts that I can’t see, connects some wires, and after a few pops and sparks the engine starts up. I accelerate, change gears, redline in second, make a tight curve, careen around the edge of the cemetery with squealing tyres, and as we head downhill towards the city centre Thelonious praises my manoeuvres with a grunt and a thumbs up, more concerned with rummaging through the glove box, the torch in his mouth. I think the best part of climbing into an unknown car, besides smelling its interior, familiarizing yourself with its quirks, sinking your backside into the seat, running your hands over the steering wheel and testing its responsiveness, is rooting through the glove box and finding, among other things, a document with the name, date of birth and photograph of the owner. I prefer it to be a man. I get more pleasure out of driving another man’s car and I like to stare at the goofy faces they generally have on their documents. And I’d pay to see the expressions on their faces the moment they realize their car is missing, their mugs as they examine the mugs of thieves down at the police station. I feel a little sorry for the women, though, perhaps because I imagine them traipsing back and forth through the city unsure of where they left their cars, like frazzled mothers searching for sons who haven’t come home. On Rua Aurora, Thelonious makes me pull over beside two old whores and asks if they’d like to get in, just to go for a spin in the car, no strings attached. He gives up on the working girls, jumps out, makes me scoot over and takes the wheel. He zigzags through cobbled streets to lose a police car that he swears he saw tailing us. But on an avenue in the East Zone that I’ve never seen before, he teaches me to listen to the car’s engine, to feel its torque, to pinpoint the lapse during which it’s possible to change gears without having to step on the clutch. It’s a matter of downbeat and upbeat, he says, like jazz. He demonstrates the transition a few times, but what I hear is almost invariably the irritated squeal of metal on metal. We cross a railway line and, after a lurch, Thelonious discovers that the car is now forever stuck in third. He runs red lights, weaves around Sunday drivers, trying to maintain his speed until he is forced to brake behind a tram, which causes the engine to splutter and die. We abandon the Skoda right there on the tramline, which is no big deal as far as Thelonious is concerned, since it was already running on empty. We haven’t any money for the fare and it takes us a good few hours to get back on foot because along the way there isn’t a single decent car begging to be taken. We cross gloomy parts of town with factories, warehouses, tenements, closed garages and shops. We walk down crooked alleyways that lead us to a viaduct that ends in the centre of São Paulo, with its deserted streets, its skyscrapers in darkness. We then come to a traditional upper-class district, with English cars in the garages of houses that I’ve always thought too big for the land they sit on, which must seem even bigger on the inside than they do on the outside. And which, having such austere facades, must be fancier on the inside, more vibrant on the side where the people live. Climbing through the window of a house like that must be what it feels like for my father to open an old book for the first time.

  It’s after midnight when Thelonious and I part ways on the street corner between our houses, from where I can see the light on in Father’s study. I climb the stairs holding my shoes so I won’t have to give Mother any explanations, or wake her if she is asleep. In the hallway I catch a glimpse of the bookcase out of the corner of my eye and on the way to my room I pass the always-open door of the smoky study, where I think I see my brother and father sitting side by side. I get into bed fully dressed, then realize I’ve left the light on. But it’s OK, I think, I can cover my face with the blanket, and underneath it’s neither hot nor cold. It’s a good place to think about my friendship with Thelonious, which reminds me of my father with my brother, who comes and goes from the study as he ple
ases but only reads comics, which reminds me that one day I might reveal to Father that I sort of managed to read half of War and Peace in French, and that now, with the help of an English dictionary, I was labouring through The Golden Bough before I came across the German letter, which, incidentally, reminds me that Thelonious, back when he was still called Montgomery, had another friend, Swiss or Austrian, whose parents sent him to boarding school, and without warning I am suddenly in an Oldsmobile with Thelonious, who is driving me to a boarding school called Instituto Benjamenta, where the Austrian or Swiss friend, a ginger-haired lad who has so many pimples his face is red and swollen, and this Deutsche-speaking friend reads the letter and laughs evilly with his monstrous mouth, with pimples invading his lips, with pimples on his tongue and gums even, and he really is an extremely sensitive, helpful young man, who translates Anne’s letter for me very slowly, explaining the meaning of each word, its origin, its etymology, in a voice so soft I can’t hear a thing, which sends me off to sleep.

  2

  I don’t know what house it was, or if it was a hospital; all I remember is an unfathomable emptiness. And I see myself, still unsteady on my feet, frozen in the centre of a white-walled room. I had never seen anything like it and cried out when I saw my mother go over to the wall. I thought she was going to fall into an even emptier emptiness. I didn’t see anything else after that. I buried my face in her bosom when she picked me up and didn’t open my eyes again until we were home. Until then, for me, walls were made of books, without the support of which, houses like mine would collapse; even the bathroom and kitchen had floor-to-ceiling bookcases. And it was on books that I leaned, from the tenderest age, in moments of danger real or imagined, just as how today, in high places, I still press my back to the wall when my head begins to spin. And when no one was around, I’d spend hours sidling along the bookcases; my back brushing from book to book gave me a certain pleasure. I also liked rubbing my cheeks against the leather-bound spines of a collection that later, when they were at chest height, I identified as Padre António Vieira’s Sermons. And, on a shelf above the Sermons, I read, at age four, my first word: GOGOL. I maintained this sensual relationship with books throughout my childhood, until the age of nine, ten, eleven, until the fourth or fifth shelf. I was even protective of my schoolbooks; it was a shame they came to me all grimy and doodled on by my brother. I’d head straight home from school with my manuals and compendiums, stopping only occasionally to visit Captain Marvel, who in addition to being my neighbour was also my best friend. I didn’t feel as uneasy in his house as I did in others, with its walls covered in paintings and a veranda where we used to have the odd kick-about. But after a while I would grow anxious to see my library again; I even thought of the cockroaches with nostalgia. They’d appear from behind books, race across the spines from one end of the shelf to the other, and who knows if they felt on their bellies the same pleasure I felt on my back. I was always amazed to see the biggest cockroaches, hard-shelled and varnished, dart between two books where not even a fingernail would fit. Whenever I managed to catch one by the antenna, I’d go and show it to Mother, who would only tell me not to put the thing in my mouth. Mother was well acquainted with the cockroaches; when she married she knew full well what was in store for her. A less courageous woman would have done an about-turn the first time she set foot in Father’s house. At that time, at the age of thirty-something, I estimate that Father had already amassed almost half of the books that he would acquire over the course of his lifetime. And prior to Mother, I imagine that this abundance of books, as well as piling up in the study, also cluttered up his future sons’ vacant rooms like Aztec pyramids in ruins. Mother quickly had bookcases made to line the walls of the two-storey house, and when she fell pregnant she decorated the baby’s room with books on linguistics and archaeology, in addition to the map collection, the Spaniards and the Chinese. For my room, two years later, she saved the Scandinavians, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran and metres and metres of dictionaries and encyclopaedias. When I was older, I saw the advent of three more double bookcases for miscellaneous or unclassifiable books, which Mother had installed in the garage since we never had a car, never any luxuries. Mother did the housework herself, and books were the sole indulgence that Father allowed himself. When he sold the printer’s that my grandfather Arnau de Hollander had owned in Rio de Janeiro, he spent half his inheritance on rare books alone. The crown jewels of his library were eleven volumes ensconced in a niche in the sitting room, like an altar hollowed out of the middle of the bookcase, with a thick jacaranda frame segregating them from what one might call the plebeian titles. There used to be twelve of these rarities, but I managed to render worthless a sixteenth-century Hans Staden first edition. It was on the day my brother told me that when I was born Father had taken me for a mongoloid. I didn’t even know what a mongoloid was; it was my brother’s guffawing that got to me. I dragged over a chair, reached up to the niche and grabbed the book that looked the most sacred, because of the gold lettering on its hard cover. I tore it to shreds, page by page, and then peed on it. I was unable to tear the cover, and was about to set fire to it when Mother came and gave me a slap across the face, which didn’t even hurt. But when Father came down the stairs holding a slipper, I shat my pants and pissed myself even though my bladder was now dry.

  Just you wait, Ciccio, said Mother when, already grown, I asked why Father didn’t write a book of his own, seeing as how he liked them so much. He’s going to write the best book in tutto il mondo, she said opening her eyes wide, but first he has to read all the others. At the time, my father’s collection consisted of about fifteen thousand books. In the end he had over twenty thousand. It was the largest private library in São Paulo after that of a rival bibliophile who, according to Father, hadn’t read a third of what he owned. Supposing he’d been accumulating books since the age of eighteen, I estimate that my father read no less than one a day. And that’s not taking into account the newspapers, magazines and his copious correspondence, including complimentary copies of the latest releases sent to him by publishing houses. Most of these he discarded after glancing at the cover or leafing through them quickly. He’d toss them onto the floor and Mother would gather them up every morning to put in the crate of church donations. And when something did take his fancy, he’d always come across some detail that would send himback to his earlier reading. Then he’d boom: Assunta! Assunta! and off my mother would go to fetch a Homer, a Virgil, a Dante, which she’d bring him, at speed, before he lost his train of thought. And the new book would be pushed aside while he reread the old one from cover to cover. It’s no wonder my father so often fell asleep with a book open on his lap and a cigarette between his fingers right there on the lounge chair, where he’d dream of parchments, illuminated manuscripts, the Library of Alexandria, and wake up distressed about all the books he’d never read because they’d been burned, or had gone missing, or were written in languages inaccessible to him. He had so much reading to catch up on that I thought it unlikely he’d ever get around to writing the best book in tutto il mondo. In any case, whenever I left my room and heard the clack-clack of the typewriter, I’d take off my shoes and hold my breath as I passed the study, giving it as wide a berth as possible. And I’d cringe if by some misfortune he happened to tear a page out at that very instant; I was sure that the rage with which he crumpled the paper, screwed it up in a ball and hurled it away was in part directed at me. On other occasions the typewriter would stop for Father to call for help: Assunta! Assunta! It would be some quote that he urgently needed to copy from a particular book. Thus it took him months to write, revise, cross out, hurl balls of paper, start over, correct, retype and, no doubt under duress, submit for publication what would be drafts of the bones of his magnum opus. These articles on aesthetics, literature, philosophy, or the history of civilization would occupy a newspaper column or a text box at the foot of a page. When Father died, we were approached by an editor who wanted to publish a collec
tion of articles he had written over his lifetime. I was against it and went so far as to show Mother the profusion of illegible corrections and edits he had made to his texts or scribbled in the margins of clippings of his own articles. But Mother was convinced the book would be received with acclaim in academic circles, perhaps even published in Germany, thanks to the texts he had penned in that country in his youth. She even insinuated that I’d been trying to sabotage my father’s work ever since I was a child, in view of one particular essay which would be missing from his complete works because of me. This was only half true, because it was my brother whom my father would occasionally entrust with an envelope to be delivered to the editor of A Gazeta, on the other side of town. For this, in addition to the tram fare, he would remunerate him with enough money for a week of milkshakes. But every now and then my brother would give me the tram fare and envelope, which I’d take to the newsroom on foot. I wasn’t motivated by the money, which was barely enough for two sweets, but I was pleased by the responsibility of it all. The newspaper employees took a liking to me, and I didn’t mind being mistaken for my father’s sweaty courier, in whose hands they’d deposit a few more coins. But on one occasion, on my way to the newspaper, I stopped to play a bit of street football, which was common back then. Cars were few and far between, and when we saw them in the distance we’d shout: Here comes death! We’d scramble to fetch the lunchboxes, folders and jumpers that represented the goalposts and wait on the footpath for the car to pass before resuming our game. On this day it wasn’t the traffic, but a sudden downpour that forced us to grab our things quickly and seek shelter under a shop awning. There was even hail, which we picked up, sucked on and hurled at one another; it was a riot. But suddenly I remembered Father’s envelope, which I’d left under a jumper and which was now sitting there in the middle of all that water. I ran to save it and narrowly missed being run over, for that very second a Chevrolet went past, snatching up the envelope with its tyre and only releasing it two blocks later. I went to retrieve the remains, but there was nothing to be done: Father’s article was a strange grey mass, a wad of wet paper. Mortified, I lost all desire to go home. I whistled at Bill Haley’s gate and he came out onto the veranda with a packet of his mother’s menthol cigarettes. And for the first time he insisted on showing me the collection of ornaments he’d swiped from car bonnets, including a star from a Mercedes-Benz and a Jaguar’s jaguar. It was cold on the veranda, my clothes were drenched, and I hoped he’d invite me in for a hot chocolate or something. I’d have stayed all night in that house full of paintings, but he wasn’t too keen to let me in. I think he was ashamed of his mother, a painter and a divorcée who people thought was crazy. She sang arias at the top of her voice well into the night, and the neighbours said she painted in the nude.