His Own Man

by Edgard Telles Ribeiro

  Max kept smoking, but his eyes avoided mine. It didn’t matter much to me, that starry night, what direction his thoughts might have taken. Today I could speculate about a few likely possibilities. A stop at the Sorocabana Café in Montevideo, to make initial contact with a British agent named Raymond Thurston? Or a round of poker with the military attachés, from whom he extracted information for his own use (and at times neglected to pass on to his superiors)? An additional visit to the feared National Stadium of Santiago, where he had witnessed scenes that still haunted him? Or could he be thinking about the informers he had planted at the request of the SNI among the community of Brazilian exiles in Uruguay?

  “That’s what gave Brasilia its surreal quality,” I went on in the same tone. “The fact that decisions were handed down from the silence of the highlands. And that their outcomes, in the form of rumors, whispered hearsay, or guarded conversations, got back there, giving rise to further, identical operations. But the screams, the despair, and the horror never reached us, the first wave of young diplomats transferred to Brasilia. We had been living cloistered in one of the nation’s architectural masterpieces, amid reflecting pools and baroque Brazilian artwork, and felt utterly lost in a city that looked more like a stage set for a play featuring cold and sterile beauty along with tension, silence, and —”

  Fortunately, Max interrupted my rambling monologue. But in a casual tone, not at all unpleasant or aggressive. “You know I missed that first phase of the move to Brasilia. I was transferred to Montevideo months earlier. I didn’t live in Brasilia until 1981. They say the city had improved a lot compared to the initial period you’re referring to.”

  With that, he had concentrated on the objective part of what I’d said and remained on the outskirts of the real conversation. So what would be the point of pressing? I asked myself. Deep down, maybe he was even right. What were my motives in bringing up the twelve- and thirteen-year-old shadows of Brasilia on a peaceful Rio night in 1983? Me of all people, a bureaucrat who, as Max was aware, had never experienced real danger — nor taken a stance that would warrant retaliation by those in power?

  I knew full well that I’d been no hero. I hadn’t criticized my superiors out loud, I hadn’t resigned, following the example of two colleagues who quit as discreetly and anonymously as possible, I hadn’t taken up arms. On the contrary, I’d become part of an orchestra — in which Max was the soloist. But he would hardly have stood out if all of us weren’t, to some measure, playing around him. And if I had pounded a few bar tables in the way of protest, I’d done so in the company of friends whose indignation matched mine, in keeping with the number of beers consumed. Heroism had thus eluded me by a long shot. I just wasn’t convinced that I hadn’t cowered in certain circumstances. Not that this represented a serious character flaw. It was, rather, something bordering on unease, a kind of incorrectness. I could, for instance, have ceased to shake hands with people I knew to be involved in criminal activity. During my year and a half in Central America, I hadn’t hesitated to dutifully socialize with known tyrants of the region, to whom I was introduced at dinners and receptions. I had even played Ping-Pong with one of them at the dismal end of a party. (“If you beat me, I’ll kill you,” he had joked, revealing the gun tucked into his waistband while gnashing his teeth.) More than once — and this sometimes kept me awake at night — I could have disagreed with a superior on a matter of principle instead of keeping my mouth shut. Or even worse, agreeing — with a smile that would have me brushing my teeth back at home until my gums bled. But my irritation with myself was limited to the bloody stream of spittle, which quickly went down the drain.

  Since I said nothing just then, facing the unequal struggle I’d had for years with my own ghosts, Max correctly inferred that he could go in for the kill. He propped an elbow on the table and rested his cheek against his palm, shrinking the distance between us. Moving aside the centerpiece while holding my gaze, he prepared his attack.

  “Enough of this dull chitchat about Brasilia in the early days. It’s tiresome. Let’s talk about something more interesting — about this new Brazil that’s being heralded, willing to reexamine the injustices of the past. Take Itamaraty, for instance: what specific cases do you know of injustice committed in our realm? Aside from the people expelled from public service by the commission convened by the military?”

  “Of whom there were many,” I interjected. “Forty-four civil servants.”

  His voice, amiable until now, hardened. “Of whom only thirteen were diplomats. And I’ll tell you more: compared to the other public sectors, that wasn’t many. In most cases, the oustings and forced retirements were more than deserved.”

  “How can we know that? If the accused didn’t even have the right to defend themselves?”

  He relit his cigar, then tried to pursue the tenuous thread he thought he’d picked up on in our conversation. “Maybe so. But one thing is certain: for better or worse, we implemented a foreign policy that sparked general interest — and has inspired respect for its independence.”

  “A foreign policy that presented an interesting paradox,” I remarked in the same steady tone. “Considering the regime it came from.” I hesitated a moment, annoyed with myself more than with Max. I didn’t want him to be the one to praise the small group of visionaries who, at considerable personal risk, had safeguarded the ministry’s ideals and upheld our dignity abroad. But this remained a moot point because Max took it upon himself to redirect the conversation.

  “Countries thrive on such paradoxes. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing happens in the United States. Consider recent examples: Nixon, a Republican, established relations with China, the same way Reagan is the one who negotiates best with the Soviets today. The Democratic Party, with whom we share affinities of another sort, only holds us back. They’re essentially protectionists.”

  “Besides their inconvenient obsession with the issue of human rights — so aggravating!”

  “You can kid all you want.” He laughed. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about your more personal grievances. From that difficult time. At the ministry.”

  “My grievances, Max?”

  “The ones you didn’t share with me. All you did was grumble. At most. I always asked myself why. Considering our longstanding friendship …”

  The sweet-sounding cicadas that had greeted us earlier were in for a treat.

  16

  “What did you feel was unfair? Or absurd?”

  “Everything was absurd, Max. Starting with the stifling conditions we were living under. And still are.”

  “Okay. Tell me about the dictatorship, then.”

  “Max, what interests me, what ought to interest you, is something else altogether. It includes the ministry but goes beyond. Well beyond …”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Okay. Compared to the acts of violence that took place throughout the country, the cases that occurred among us obviously don’t seem so grave. There was no physical aggression, no bloodshed, torture, or rape to speak of, no cases of young children seeing their parents in chains, or parents watching their children being tortured. There was nothing comparable to the electric shocks applied to nuns’ vaginas or adolescents’ rectums.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly?!”

  “I’m reacting to your words, my friend. I’m trying to figure out what you’re getting at, not evaluating the intensity of a shock to someone’s anus. I’m the first to regret that things like that happened. If they happened.”

  “What I’m getting at is this: the bloodshed and violence aren’t enough to evaluate what happened in our midst. At the ministry, to begin with, there were individuals who remained indifferent or cynical. Some threw their career out the window, reducing a worthy profession to a mere job. That kind of atmosphere, transposed to poorer or more radical social contexts, could have led hundreds of people all over the country to despair, possibly even to suicide.”
r />   “Or worse, to armed conflict.”

  “How is that worse?”

  “From the point of view of the military, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And …?”

  “Max, how many people were baited, pressured, corrupted by the regime? People who under normal circumstances would never have gone off track, abandoned their values, whether ethical, moral, or religious? And who, later on, when confronted by relatives and friends regarding the consequences of their actions, were driven to depression or despair, if not more extreme measures, without ever being tallied among the horrors? Without even becoming so much as a footnote in the annals of the dictatorship?”

  “You know what I think about all this?” he asked wearily.

  “No, Max. What do you think about this? I’d love to know.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “When the history of this period is written, impartially, without being manipulated by one side or the other, it will become clear that these weren’t acts planned by the military or political leaders, much less by bankers or businessmen, as rumor would have it. They were works orchestrated in absolute secrecy. As if the CIA had commissioned Merce Cunningham, who was at the peak of his career in the sixties and seventies, to choreograph the series of coups to happen in rapid succession, so that the entire region would fall like a house of cards.”

  I couldn’t resist the temptation to add my two cents, albeit with a heavy heart: “In unison with the ballet dancers who collapsed onstage as soon as the lights faded, the curtains closed, and the middle class applauded.”

  Without acknowledging the irony, Max digested my remark and went on. “Maybe so,” he said. “The difference is that there was no audience. Because the theater remained empty. Outside, the people were being roughed up as usual. Until, twenty years later, long after the spells cast by the Cuban threat and Allende’s rise to power, the theater would gradually fill up again. In a matter of months, the curtains would open to full halls. And the house of cards would go up again before everyone’s eyes, to the applause that would then celebrate the restoration of democracy.”

  The student had clearly surpassed his master, as the ambassador in Montevideo faded into the shadows of the past. I listened in silence to Max’s conclusion: “Except that the people would remain abandoned in the streets. They were no longer beaten or tortured. But their conquests would amount to little more than that. Should you ever quote me on this, however, I’ll not only deny everything but say that I always sensed there was something off-kilter about you.”

  I clapped my hands together six or seven times, in the slow, cadenced kind of applause that produces silences as expressive as the sounds. Applause that echoed mournfully in the middle of the night. It was moments like this that enabled me to see just how well Max understood his own tragedy — and the hell he had gotten himself into. Or so I thought.

  “You know what’s even worse?” he asked, aware that he’d caught my attention. “That in twenty or thirty years, no one in Brazil will talk about this anymore. By the early twenty-first century, not even historians will be interested. No one will broach the issue except in passing. Bookstores will shelve works on the subject in the history section. In alphabetical order. Depending on the author’s name, an account of torture in Brazil in the 1970s might be located between a volume about gold mining in the colonial period and one on African influences in Brazilian folklore. If it’s there at all.”

  “Could be,” I conceded. “Because we’ll be busy paying the price of impunity. Which will always be a part of the country’s realities from here on.”

  Besides feeling powerless and indignant, I was furious with myself. And with fate, for having directed me to sit at Max’s table. I stood up. “Anything else? Or am I free to go, wishing you luck on the banks of the Seine?”

  “There is indeed something else. Sit down, my friend. And see if you can handle it. Because it’s not very pleasant.”

  He seemed intent on taking our conversation to its conclusion. “If some of the dead and the disappeared you and the press are always referring to,” he said after I sat back down, “not all, but some, could one day return from heaven or hell, or wherever they are, they would kneel before their friends and relatives, they would kneel at their feet, and beg forgiveness for the grief they caused. That they caused.”

  “Max …”

  “For the childishness of their actions,” he continued deafly, “for the stupidity of their decisions, for their immaturity in embracing lost causes. And for the way they let themselves be manipulated by the cunning old foxes of the left. They would be on their knees, begging forgiveness for the suffering they caused. Not of their victims, generally young soldiers (because these were the poor souls who died, not their superiors) or simple bystanders, like the unlucky managers of banks that were held up, or foreigners that the amateur guerrillas mistook for CIA agents. No. They wouldn’t have to ask forgiveness of these individuals, because they were just accidental victims, as we love to say in our line of work. But they would beg forgiveness of the friends and relatives they had loved. And left devastated — if not wounded or mutilated. Because many were imprisoned and tortured simply for the sad privilege of knowing them.”

  “Max,” I tried to interject, “what about the military, responsible for everything that happened beforehand? Beginning with the coup? And their accomplices and business backers, the team that covered for the torturers? And trained them? Or provided financial support?”

  “They’re better off, relatively speaking.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Because they would only have to ask forgiveness of their victims. ‘Forgive me, my dear man, but we were at war, you were on one side, I was on the other. And I killed you. Because it was you or me …’ Much easier than asking their loved ones, right?”

  Given my silence, he proceeded. “Think about facing your sister, who was raped and tortured for days just because she happened to be your sister, with absolutely no connection to the insurgents. And try to open your mouth. Let’s say you’re able to do so. Open your mouth. What words would come out? ‘Lenin and Guevara were right, the party was wrong’? It’s tricky, don’t you think?”

  “Max!” I exclaimed, both awed and astonished. “A world without victims or culprits … What about Nuremberg? How would that fit?”

  “No, my friend. It’s just the opposite: a cruel world in which all are to blame. By action or default. A world in which the borders between good and evil aren’t vague or inexact; they simply don’t exist. Or when they do exist, they shift easily, depending on what part of the globe you’re in.”

  “History as written by the victors and so forth?”

  “A lesser vision, that saying. Superficial, like everything that deals with subjects of this magnitude. But if you want to put it in those reductive terms, yes.”

  “And where do notions of aggressor and defender, of victim and perpetrator, fit into these scenarios of yours, devoid of values?”

  “Where they always were: in the minds of men.”

  He looked straight at me for the first time. “Upon arriving in Paris and assuming my duties, I decided to reread the preamble of UNESCO’s charter. Do you remember the wording? Did you ever read it?”

  “I must have. I don’t remember.”

  “No, my friend. You didn’t read it. Because if you had, you wouldn’t have forgotten. It alone accounts for the existence of the United Nations. Poetically, I should add. And its simplicity is stirring, more so than the reams of reports that the UN has been churning out over the course of nearly four decades.”

  True to form, he would keep me in suspense. Then, eyes on the stars, he quoted: “ ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.’ ” He took another puff of his cigar. “ ‘In the minds of men,’ ” he repeated. “According to which side they’re on, of course. What happened in Brazil and continues to happen in South America
is a microcosm of what occurs in the world at large. Wherever there are conflicts. And, from the look of it, the universal trend will only get worse. Particularly because we’re talking about a cultural melting pot that thickens with hunger, poverty, and ignorance. And these three ingredients, as we know, are only going to increase.”

  I decided to cut to the chase. “If that’s the case, why did you feel compelled to take a stand in 1964? To switch sides without even batting an eye? What happened in the mind of Marcílio Andrade Xavier?”

  Unflappable as always, Max looked me head-on and asked, “Who told you I switched sides?”

  17

  I glanced around. Apart from a waiter, we were the only ones left in the garden. The other guests had disappeared into the house, from which muted voices, interspersed with laughter and the strains of a piano, drifted. Then I heard Max saying, “Convictions are a luxury, my friend. Reserved for those who don’t play the game. I played the game.”

  Still silent, I slid over the clean ashtray the waiter had just set on the table and snuffed out my cigar. I took my time with this activity, as though pondering some final plan that would lead me to victory in a battle whose hidden meaning almost eluded me.

  Max slowly stood and crossed his arms, as he bestowed his professorial treatment on me. “The truth,” he declared, “is that we’ll never know what would have happened to the country if the military hadn’t staged the coup. Quite likely we would have done the same had we been in their shoes.”

  Voices and laughter continued to drift from the house. The piano chords, however, had given way to a Chopin étude, which seemed to be missing several crucial notes. I was beginning to feel somewhat helpless.

  Calmer, almost relieved, Max concluded in a casual tone, as though now dealing with secondary details, “As for the rest of the population, other than the group who took up arms (and then regretted it, as they themselves will admit someday), or those who chose exile, everyone adapted to the new realities. And tried to get on with their lives as best they could.”