Winner
Jabuti Award for Book of the Year
(2016)
Winner
Oceanos Prize for Literature in Portuguese
(2016)
Winner
José Saramago Literary Prize
(2017)
Winner
Anna Seghers Prize
(2018)
Resistance
Julián Fuks
RESISTANCE
Translated by
Daniel Hahn
For Emi, much more than a possible brother
I think it’s important to resist: that’s been my motto.
But today, how often have I asked myself
how best to embody that word.
Ernesto Sábato
1.
My brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted. If I say this, if I speak these words that I have long taken care to silence, I reduce my brother to a single categorical condition, a single essential attribute: my brother is something, and this something is what so many people try to see in him, this something is the set of marks we insist on looking for, despite ourselves, in his features, in his gestures, in his acts. My brother is adopted, but I don’t want to reinforce the stigma that the word evokes, the stigma that is the word itself made character. I don’t want to deepen his scar, and if I don’t want to do this, I must not say scar.
I could use the verb in the past tense and say my brother was adopted, thereby freeing him from that eternal present, from perpetuity, but I can’t get over the strangeness of this formulation. My brother wasn’t some different thing until he was adopted; my brother became my brother the moment he was adopted, or rather, the moment I was born, some years later. If I say my brother was adopted, it’s as though I were reporting quite calmly that I’d lost him, that he was kidnapped, that I had a brother until somebody came and took him far away.
The remaining option is the most sayable; of all the possibilities, it’s the one that causes the least disquiet, or that best disguises it. My brother is an adoptive son. There’s something technical about the term, adoptive son, which contributes to its social acceptability. There’s a novelty to it that absolves him, just for an instant, of the blemishes of the past, that seems to cleanse him of any undesirable meanings. I say my brother is an adoptive son and people nod solemnly, masking any sorrow, lowering their eyes as though they weren’t eager to ask anything more. Perhaps they share my uneasiness, or perhaps they really do forget the whole business with the next sip or the next forkful. If the uneasiness continues to reverberate within me, it’s because I also hear this phrase partially – my brother is a son – and it’s hard to accept that it won’t end up leading to the usual tautological truth: my brother is the son of my parents. I chant over and over that my brother is a son and the question always springs to my lips: whose son?
2.
I don’t want to imagine an icy, gloomy, cavernous space, a silence made even more severe by the muteness of a skinny baby boy. I don’t want to imagine the strong hand that grabs him by the calves, the harsh slaps that don’t stop until you hear him crying in distress. I don’t want to imagine the shrillness of that crying, the desperation of the little boy drawing his first breath, longing for the arms of someone ready to receive him – arms he will not be granted. I don’t want to imagine a mother in agony, reaching out, one more sob muffled by the rumble of boots against the floor, boots that leave and take him with them: the child vanishes and what remains is the size of the room, what remains is the emptiness. I don’t want to imagine a son as a woman fallen. I prefer to let these images dissipate into the unheard-of world of nightmares, nightmares that inhabit me or that once inhabited a bed beside my own.
I wouldn’t know how to describe a happy childbirth. A white room, white sheets, and white for the gloves that receive the child, too, white and plastic, impersonal, scientific. No happiness, certainly, in the total asepsis. An obstetrician who takes him into his neutral hands and examines him: the child is intact, the child is breathing, his skin rosy, the flexing of his limbs is good, heart rate regular. Best for his mother not to see him, or rather, for the woman who gave birth to him not to see him. No point in the potential confusion of feelings, especially at such a susceptible moment, the pain of the labour fading, a weight being lifted, perhaps a slight sense of emptiness. Nothing to be gained from uncertainty like that. Being held in provisional arms will be of no benefit to him; better for him to meet his real parents as soon as possible, when they are open-armed and ready to receive him, eager and certain, for a full welcome.
Let me be honest with myself: I would rather not become too absorbed in the images of this birth. To tell of a child being born is to tell of a sudden existence, of somebody coming into being, and that moment doesn’t matter to anyone as much as it does to the child who is bursting into life. To bestow upon this birth the appropriate tone of joy, the tone I’d like it to deserve, that I’d like my brother to deserve just as all life deserves it, I would have to appeal to the smiles of those who would very soon find themselves before him, those who would at last be ready to call him son. They must have been wide, those smiles, a suitable fading of the nerves that comes with any longed-for relief. But a child is not born to bring relief, he is born and as soon as he is born he demands relief himself. A child doesn’t cry in order to enable a smile in others; he cries so that they pick him up, and protect him, and with their caresses soothe the implacable feeling of helplessness that has already begun to torment him. I don’t want to imagine a boy as the downfall of a woman, nor can I imagine him as the salvation of another family, of the family that would later be mine, an unreasonable salvation they should never have asked of him.
3.
He’s adopted, that’s what I once said to a cousin when she insisted on pointing out how different we were, he and I, his hair darker and curlier than mine, his eyes so much lighter. I don’t think there was any malice or spite in my statement, I must have been about five years old – though if I now feel compelled to defend myself, perhaps I really was seized by some innocent cruelty which to this day I am still seeking to conceal. We were in a car being driven by my father, and my mother couldn’t have been with us because my brother was in the front seat, perhaps following our conversation, or perhaps lost in his own unfathomable thoughts. In an instant, there was silence. I might have been elbowed discreetly by my sister, who I imagine sitting beside me, or maybe the jab was merely the discomfort I felt upon realising I’d done something wrong, a discomfort I so often felt without anyone needing to elbow me. So bruising was the silence that I remember it to this day, among so many other silences that I can barely remember.
I’m not trying to absolve myself for my mistake when I say that in those days the guidance we received was ambiguous and vague. My brother had always known he was adopted, that was what my parents said, and it had always intrigued me, or intrigues me now: how to say something on that scale to a child who can barely manage the simplest words, how coldly or distantly to pronounce mummy, daddy, baby, adoption. How to convey the importance of that fact, with the seriousness the subject demands, without assigning it unnecessary weight, without transforming it into a burden the boy will never be able to carry? It was Winnicott who was dictating the steps we took – we followed a lot of what was suggested by Winnicottian theory, that’s what I would hear many years later, not quite understanding the term but aware of the plaintive tone, the distress in the voice. The fact of his knowing, of our knowing, of everyone who lived in the house knowing, was itself basic knowledge. And yet, somehow, this process was then put into reverse, a time coming when what had once been a word became unsayable, the truth silenced as