In my memory, my brother’s eyes were filled with tears, but I suspect this is an invented detail, added later, on one of the first times I recalled the episode, already clouded by a certain remorse. He was sitting in the front seat. If he was crying, he certainly held back any sobs and hid his tears with his hands, or he turned his face to the window, let his eyes drift over presumed pedestrians. The point is, he wouldn’t look at me, he wouldn’t turn around. Maybe they were mine, those tear-filled eyes.
4.
How strong is silence when it stretches well beyond the immediate discomfort, well beyond the hurt. For years I’ve noticed, impressed, how my brother can quickly dismiss any thoughts that displease him, interrupt conversations without seeming abrupt, change the subject without even noticing, slip between one idea and another in a way that’s almost instantaneous, seamless. I see his face crumple for just a moment at some vague misfortune, some unhappy words that nobody ended up saying, a minuscule hint of or approach towards what’s bothering him, only to return to his normal expression, his indifference, his anaesthetised neutrality. There is no shortage of clues to suggest he has managed to forget, though forget isn’t quite the right word – repress is what my parents would say here, I can tell. There’s no shortage of evidence that he spends long periods without admitting it even to himself, without accepting or recognising it – days, months, maybe years, locked away in his room without any of this overwhelming him, without his mind being revisited by everything that I don’t want to say and cannot say, everything that I need to say. And has he no need to say it to himself?
How strong is silence when it stretches well beyond, I ask myself, well beyond the immediate discomfort, and the hurt, but also well beyond blame, and finally I come to my answer. I too, for a long time, have been able to forget. We are in the car again, now it’s a long journey and the tiredness is affecting us almost as much as the boredom, the heat, the frustration, and here once again I seem to be trying to justify my callousness, my foolishness. For some reason I’m annoyed at my sister, I don’t want to be sitting next to her any more, sharing the space and the journey with her, but I’m forced to and this makes me desperate: I’m not your brother. I announce that I am not her brother and she gets indignant, you can’t do that, you are my brother, that’s just how it is, you’re my brother and you’re going to be my brother forever. I insist, I don’t want to, you’re not my sister and that’s that, it’s decided, I’ve decided. She appeals to my father, who acknowledges quite reasonably that she’s in the right, stifling a laugh, and my mother agrees and she laughs too, amused at the absurdity of it all, at the extent of my stubbornness. No verdict means anything to me at that moment: I don’t care, to hell with you all, I’m not her brother and that’s that.
The anecdote has become a family classic, repeated over dinner even when all those present have heard it before, as a general example of childish folly or as proof of my excessive obstinacy. It’s always recounted in the cheerful tone that the two of them in front, my parents, assign to it. Two of us who were sitting in the back also take on this same tone, we also remember the episode as something funny, even seeing it as contributing to the complicity that we managed to establish between us.
But there were five of us in the car. My brother didn’t comment, and he still doesn’t today, preferring to stay silent at his corner of the table, simply swallowing what’s left of his meal, withdrawing earlier and earlier. I was sitting in the middle, between my sister and him, and I must have turned my back on him as I argued, doing my best to defend my impossible position. I don’t know how this effort of mine must have sounded to his ears, if he was pleased to hear how little I valued blood ties, or if it was painful to hear how precariously I treated fraternal bonds. I didn’t question whether he was my brother, our relationship was not something I wanted to disrupt. But I wonder whether he didn’t, all the same, just for a moment, frown, lower his eyes, his little boy’s face crumpling.
5.
I walk the streets of Buenos Aires, and look at people’s faces. I wrote a whole book based on my experience of walking the streets of Buenos Aires and looking at people’s faces. I wanted them to act as my mirror, to replicate me on every corner, I wanted to discover I was Argentinian by my simple aptitude for camouflage, so that I might finally walk among equals. I never thought what it would be like for my brother to walk the streets of Buenos Aires. The uncertain anxiety that would run up his spine at every recognisable feature, every common gesture, every lingering stare, every familiar-looking face. The immense fear – or expectation – that someday a face would show itself to be his mirror, that somebody just the same really might appear in front of him, and that this same person might be replicated into so many more.
I suddenly understand, or want to understand, why my brother stopped spending time in this city that we never managed to quit. Buenos Aires is where my parents were forced to leave when he was not yet six months old, Buenos Aires is what we all felt jettisoned from as long as they weren’t allowed back – even if some of us, my sister and I, had never even set our tiny feet on its pavements. Can exile be inherited? Might we, the little ones, be as expatriate as our parents? Should we consider ourselves Argentinians deprived of our country, of our fatherland? And is political persecution subject to the norms of heredity? These questions did not arise for my brother: he didn’t depend on our parents to be Argentinian, to be exiled, to have been deprived of the land of his birth. Perhaps that was something we envied, the autonomy of his identity, the way he didn’t need to struggle so hard for his Argentinianness. He had been born there, he was more Argentinian than us, he always would be more Argentinian than us, however little that might mean. Which is why we were surprised, years later, when he stopped accompanying us on our insistent visits to the city, for the long periods in which we tried to recover the something that had, indirectly, perhaps, been stolen from us.
I walk the streets of Buenos Aires and I stop at the Plaza del Congreso, outside the headquarters of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. I hesitate a moment at the door, I can’t make up my mind to go in. I’ve been there on other occasions just as a tourist or out of curiosity, I’ve run my eyes over every shelf in the bookstore, I’ve had a coffee in the gallery, I’ve let myself be imbued with its testimonials, its stories, its slogans. Now I realise I don’t want to go in, that I’m standing at the door and I don’t want to be standing at the door. That I’m standing at the door because I wish my brother were here in my place.
6.
What did we do on those countless nights when we shared a bedroom? Who fell asleep first, consigning the other to silence and uninhabitable darkness, to the fear of the shadows, to the shock of each creak? What erratic reveries would seize the one left behind, what childish ghosts would haunt him, while his brother snored calmly, indifferent and pitiless? Who asked the other if he was asleep yet, just so the concreteness of his shaky voice might fill the inscrutable space that separated them?
These questions are fallacious, too lyrical to contain any truth. By choosing to tell this story through its night-time terrors, I’m placing myself at the centre of the anguish, I’m making myself the protagonist, I’m assigning contempt unfairly to my brother. I was the one who resisted sleeping with the light off, I was the one who got up scared in the middle of the night, went down the gloomy corridor and sought refuge in my parents’ bed. Sometimes, in the small hours of the morning, my sister would also be taken into that spacious double bed, and there we slept on, together, squashed up, four-fifths of the family confined to a few square metres. My brother remained apart, between his own sheets, and the solitude that embraced him must have been deeper, even if the tranquillity he didn’t fear was not.
This story might be very different if I could actually remember it. For eight years I lived in the same bedroom as my brother, in the same series of bedrooms, and I can’t remember how we talked, if we had fun, if we played some common game or got into some argument or other that did away with any age difference, if he taught me his childish mischiefs without my having to suffer from them myself. Maybe not, maybe we kept our distance, maybe we intimidated each other and bored each other with the same emptiness that consumes us, sometimes, today.
I remember the geography of the rooms, the position of the bed,