Granta 121: Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

by Unknown

  the stagnant water in the iron pipes rotting and longing for skin, drying and creaking with hatred for the cold concrete, the house, you see the house and you see joyful moments clasping hands with sad ones, moments that wander around empty without their owners, withdrawing into the shadows

  I left home and when I looked back all I saw was Mother’s look of disgust, upset because I hadn’t got married to Luisa like she’d wanted since we were young, condemning me for marrying for love just as she had once done when she fell for the son of a popcorn seller, fancy not having married Luisa, she used to say in church in front of me and Marta and hell, Mother, leave me be, I love her, I love her more than anything else in the world and she, angry, always looking at me accusingly when we still lived with her, relentlessly, treating me like an object, as if I’d somehow brought shame on the house, and asking me all the time if I knew where Marta was, if I was sure she was at work, and I’d say where else would she be, Mother, and she’d laugh and ask about the grandchildren that weren’t on the way, and when would I at long last find my own home and get that woman out of here, that woman who was like a stain on her reputation, the same thing hidden behind every question, why had I changed the way I was with her, when did I stop being the man she’d hoped I’d become, making my life hell until one day I interrupted what she was saying and she slapped me and told me shut up while I’m talking, and I realized that if I didn’t leave I’d lose the mother I cherished in my heart, that this woman was threatening the memory of the woman she used to be, that the bitter selfishness that caused her to mistreat us also buried, day by day, the happy image I had of my mother, the one who I talked to and chatted to about her past, I realized this while holding back the tears that poured forth into the night, wrapped around Marta’s hips, trying to understand what had happened, what my mistake had been, and we decided to leave and rent a room and I quit the garage to go and work as an electrician, and Mother always said that I never got qualified in anything because of Marta, that Marta had been the end of me when in fact she’d been the beginning, that the problem with me was Marta when in fact she was the solution, and whenever I did a big electrical installation there was a great hullabaloo, there’s nothing so wonderful as the first time you flick the switch on in a house that’s never had electric light before, it’s as if a whole family’s dreams light up, as if they’ve all been blessed, man’s ingenuity made the bomb but it also made the lamp, and when we finished the project at Armazém Matias in Madureira and we turned the lights on and that huge arcade lit up and my father came hobbling over with his walking stick and gave me a hug and said that he always knew I’d bring light into people’s lives, my being a policeman stopped you from becoming a crook, you’d have made a good crook, but you do right to make so much light, my son, and I felt like saying that it was electricity that made light but as far as my father was concerned it was me who made it, and when I asked he said the madwoman was still mad but that she loves you, she loves you, every year another screw comes loose, but she loves you

  the long double bed, the indentation of its owners’ bodies frozen with disuse, the springs that creaked now mute and glass-like, the dining room arranged ready for guests that never came, the unwound unworking clock finally laying to rest the changing of the seasons

  I spent my days remembering and writing in school exercise books, jotting down ideas and concocting a past like my grandfather used to do, living out my unexpected retirement, condemned to using a walking stick but grateful for being alive, we fall off ladders without knowing what will happen when we hit the ground, falling is a question, and falling was the best thing that could have happened to me because the dogs were in power, the police now had to go after young people, boys were criminals, girls in skirts who smoked and read books were terrorists, the military set the agenda and we had to do their dirty work, better to fall off a ladder than fall foul of your pride, to be left to catch people for stealing rather than catch them for thinking, to go after people because of something they’ve done in the past rather than what they might do in the future, the future they want versus the future we want, I spent my days writing in exercise books to escape the misery that was destroying my country, pretending not to notice stories in the newspapers, news that was there but not there, the dungeons that lay behind the triumphant headlines, a country that outlaws the dreams of its youth is a country going backwards, God put that ladder in my path, when the ladder broke and I fell I felt peace, better to have a walking stick in my hand than a whip, which I’d used on horses in Olaria but people aren’t animals, and I lived like this, accumulating newspaper cuttings and exercise books until one day I got a call, and the world went silent and the ladder became a curse, because that fall should have killed me so that I never had to hear what I heard, it wasn’t possible and the man said it was, that he was sorry, a son has the right to become as old as his father one day and the man said he was sorry, and the phone went dead and I felt like going over to my exercise books and erasing them all, crossing them out line by line and then maybe time would reverse, or if I wrote that the ladder had killed me then maybe it would have killed me, it wasn’t possible and when Vera got back from shopping and saw me I felt her world collapse, a devious ladder that led to rock bottom and destroyed us, and then later on, when I saw him laid out on a silver table, it was really him, I’d still had hope but it was really him, he seemed happy and serene, and the doctor said it was very sudden, and I said it wasn’t possible, doctor, only yesterday we went around on the noisy trams watching the streets slowly going by, the lamp posts and the houses and the people of the world passing by and us seeing them for the first and last time, it was only the day before yesterday that he broke the radio apart trying to find where the presenter was hiding, and the day before the day before yesterday I helped him climb the tree to put a thrush back in its nest, and now sir is trying to tell me that this man laid here is my son, sir ought to be ashamed of himself because it’s not possible, a son has the right to become as old as his father one day, the good doctor ought to be ashamed of himself and make my son wake up, but it was no longer possible, and when I heard Marta and Vera in tears in the corridor outside I wanted to defy my son’s wishes and put him in a bread sack right away and walk through the night to throw him in the river, because Son you understand play but I understand death, throw the bag in a deep river so that he might lose himself freely and go back to his childhood, go back to his dog, go back to his childhood and his fish, leave this world for a better one

  the animals in pictures on the wall too scared to run away, their stories abruptly interrupted, dry waterfalls and dead fish, Napoleonic wars suspended for lack of will for victory, an immense and doleful moon denying romance to a couple watching a river that no longer runs, sitting on a bench in a sad square

  and they ran down the corridor, the girl with the Indian face and the tanned little fat boy and that was that, Paulo in his corner wrote and read his newspaper and got cross because his grandson stole his walking stick to play with the dog, and Marta came and went, taking the grandchildren away and bringing them back again, and they grew and grew, the girl staring at the hardly used sewing machine until one day she asked if we could get it going and I taught her to thread the needle, she needed help stepping on the pedal because her legs couldn’t reach and she laughed as she ran the sewing line over the fabric, playing with the giant scissors and the buttons that she stuck onto pieces of cloth like little faces and landscapes while the boy spent more time with his grandad, watching grandad bash his typewriter and going through the drawers of cuttings he kept gathered in the old storeroom, and one day I saw him sneak one of the exercise books into his rucksack and I didn’t say anything, he took the exercise books and sneaked them away and brought them back again, and they grew bigger and bigger, and Marta had grey hair by then and a new husband, and they came and they had lunch with us at the weekends, until they left to go and live in Petrópolis and ended up visiting less, increasingly it was j
ust Paulo and me, we watched telly and played cards, neighbours came by to talk badly of other neighbours, friends from church talked about the youth of today, the clothes the girls wore, on Thursday nights the living room became a policemen’s club, Paulo told stories about outlandish crooks, everyone boasting, until one day Paulo told no more stories, the typewriter went silent, the drawers of paper remained closed, a good man deserves a good send-off, his was peaceful and serene, and I was left alone in the house, waiting for the day to come, awaiting the unknown hour, the second chosen on a whim by time for me to depart, sitting in the armchair and winding up my watch and listening to the radio and thinking about when my time would come, that life is made up of expectations but old age has only one, it gets disguised as several others but it’s always there, waiting, it’s our breath, it’s our false step, and it’s time to hand things down, to tidy up the sewing things because somebody will use them one day for some special occasion, the daughter’s first social outing, the shirt button that comes off just before an important meeting, patching up little mishaps gives life its spice, the boy by now a man comes here and takes the exercise books one by one and asks me to talk about old times and asks me what his father was like and I tell him that he was a good man and that the lights on the Armazém Matias are the most beautiful in the world and that many couples have fallen in love in cars fixed by him, your father was a good man who fixed things that were broken, that was your father, a man who kept on believing, gave the fridge another chance, the radio, the cooker, he was a machine’s best friend, today people throw things out at the first sign of any problem but he brought things back to life, that’s what’s been passed down to you from your father, that there’s a trick to doing everything, that no problem’s too big for a monkey wrench, and the lad laughed and went on his way and left me on my own, and so I patiently await my end, because I’ve a hernia, swollen shoulder and sore leg, because eyes that could once see through the eye of a needle can now hardly make out faces, I go outside the house and take care of the pepper trees and the lemon verbena, I sit in my armchair and listen to the sound of the presenters on the radio, biding my time until He says enough is enough, Amen

  the house, you see the house, the last days of the house before it falls to the ground and goes back to being the dust from whence it came and where a building will be raised upon its last remains, the house and its furniture and its pictures and its papers and its fabrics, orphaned, silenced and still.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  APNOEA

  Daniel Galera

  TRANSLATED BY STEFAN TOBLER

  * * *

  DANIEL GALERA

  1979

  Daniel Galera was born in São Paulo but has spent most of his life in Porto Alegre. He co-founded the publishing house Livros do Mal, which then published his collection of stories Dentes guardados (2001) and his novel Até o dia em que o cão morreu (2003). His second novel, Mãos de cavalo (2006), has been published in Argentina, Italy, France and Portugal and is forthcoming in the UK. Cordilheira (2008) won the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Prize. In 2010, he wrote the graphic novel Cachalote with illustrator Rafael Coutinho. ‘Apnoea’ (‘Apneia’) is part of a novel in progress.

  He sees a bulbous nose with shiny pores, like the skin of a tangerine. A strangely adolescent mouth between the chin and cheeks that are covered in fine wrinkles, skin sagging a little. A trim beard. Large ears with even larger ear lobes, as if their own weight were stretching them out. Irises the colour of watered-down coffee in the middle of lascivious, laconic eyes. Three deep, horizontal furrows on his forehead. Yellowing teeth. An abundance of blonde hair breaking as a single wave on his head and flowing to the base of his neck. His eyes run over all four quadrants of the face in the interval between breaths and he can swear that he has never seen this person before in his life, but he knows that it is his dad because no one else lives in this house on this farm in Viamão and because lying on the right side of the man sitting in the armchair is the bluish dog who has been with his dad for years.

  Why that face?

  His dad gives the faintest hint of a smile. It’s an old joke and has a set response.

  The same one as always.

  Now he notices his dad’s clothes, the tailored dark grey trousers and the blue shirt soaked in sweat at the armpits and around his bulging stomach, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, the sandals that he seems to wear against his will, as if only the heat stopped him from wearing leather shoes, and also the bottle of French cognac and the revolver on the little table beside his reclining chair.

  Sit down, says his dad, nodding towards the white two-piece imitation-leather sofa.

  It is early February and whatever the mercury says, it feels like the temperature here near Porto Alegre is over forty degrees Celsius. Arriving, he saw that the two ipê trees that stand watch at the front of the house were laden with leaves. They groaned gently in the still air. The last time he was here, back in the spring, the purple and yellow blossoms of their crowns were rustling in a cold wind. Still in his car, he passed the vines growing to the left of the house and saw many clusters of tiny grapes. He could imagine them sweating sugar after months of drought and heat. The farm had not changed at all in these few months, it never changed, a flat rectangle of grass beside the dirt road and a small, neglected football pitch, and in the road the annoying bark of Catfish, the other dog, the front door standing open.

  Where’s the pickup?

  Sold it.

  Why’s there a revolver on the table?

  It’s a pistol.

  Why’s there a pistol on the table?

  The sound of a scooter passing on the road is accompanied by Catfish’s barking, hoarse as the hollering of an inveterate smoker. His dad frowns, he cannot stand the surly, noisy mongrel and only keeps it out of a sense of responsibility. You can abandon a son, a brother, a father, definitely a wife, there’re reasons that justify all that, but you’ve no right to abandon a dog once you’ve looked after it for a certain amount of time, his dad had said to him once, when he was still a boy and the whole family lived in a house in Ipanema that had also been home at one time or other to half a dozen dogs. Dogs give up forever some of their instincts when they live with people, and can never get them back completely. A loyal dog is a crippled animal. It’s a pact that we can’t undo. The dog can undo it, although it rarely will. But man doesn’t have that right, said his dad. And so Catfish’s dry cough has to be endured. It’s what the two of them do now – his dad and Beta, the old Blue Heeler bitch lying at his side, a dog that is truly admirable. Intelligent and circumspect, as strong and well built as a boar.

  How’s life, son?

  And that revolver? Pistol.

  You look tired.

  I am, a bit. I’m coaching this guy for the Ironman. A doctor. The guy’s good. Great swimmer, and he’s not bad at the rest. His bike weighs seven kilos, tyres and all. One of those 415,000 bikes. He wants to do the qualifier next year and get into the world championships in three years’ time, maximum. He’ll manage. But he’s so fucking boring. Just have to put up with it. I haven’t had much sleep, but it’s worth it, he pays well. And I’m still giving lessons at the pool. I finally managed to get the bodywork fixed on my car. As good as new. It cost two grand. And last month I went to the beach, spent a week in Farol with Antônia. The redhead, you know. Oh, right, you didn’t meet her. Too late, we had a fight in Farol. And that’s about it, Dad. The rest is the same old, same old. Why’s there a pistol on the table?