I know he protected me, and not because my mother insists on boasting about it, emphasising how much he loved me, her covert way of begging me to go and knock on his door one more time. I know he protected me because one customary gesture of his sticks in my memory: his hand resting on the back of my neck, his index finger and thumb pressing onto the skin on either side, each in turn, not too hard, just indicating the direction of the next step. That was how he led me when we walked side by side, in the middle of any crowd that happened to surround us.
7.
This is not just a story, not just his story. This is history.
This is history, and yet, almost everything I have at my disposal is memory, fleeting notions of days long gone, impressions that precede consciousness and language, destitute relics I insist on embezzling into words. This isn’t a matter of some abstract preoccupation, though I do make use of abstractions: I’ve looked for my brother in what little I’ve written up to now and he is nowhere to be found. Maybe some idea would have done him justice, the description might by chance have evoked him, the handful of apparently truthful facts I’ve spread into my winding paragraphs, but nothing. From this unnecessary observation, you are not to assume naïveté on my part, at least not for now: I’m well aware that no book could encapsulate any human being, no book could ever reconstruct in paper and ink an existence of blood and flesh. What I’m saying here is something more serious, not just a kind of literary formalism: I’m talking about the fear of losing my brother, and I feel with every sentence that I’m losing him more.
For a moment I’m confused, I forget that things can also precede words, that trying to tap into them will always involve new fallacies, and I go around this apartment just as I went around the text, in search of traces of my brother, something that might restore his reality to me. I’m not in his house, my parents’ house, where I can imagine him shut up in the bedroom, I can’t knock on his door. There are thousands of kilometres separating us, a whole country separating us, but one thing that works to my advantage is our mother’s strange habit of scattering the family homes with objects that keep us in contact. This Buenos Aires apartment has nobody living in it. Ever since my grandparents’ death it’s just been a place for passing through, a crossroads for distant relatives, distracted and hurried, who have forgotten one another’s existence. I happen upon a photo album lying flat on the bookcase, left at just the perfect angle to look casual. I have to turn a few pages before I’m finally assailed by my brother’s face, before I’m finally surprised by what I was already expecting.
The photo doesn’t say what I want it to say, the photo doesn’t say anything. The photo is merely his soft face in the middle of a shady veranda, his eyes looking at me through the photographer’s lens, those eyes that are so light, that hair smoother than I could have imagined – his childish beauty that perhaps I envied. His head is tilted to one side as though he were asking something, but I know it’s not for me to make up what it is. His half-open lips are quiet, too, but that’s where my gaze is drawn merely to be quite sure of the injustice I am doing him, the injustice I’m doing my brother in this very indelicate attempt. I can’t make this boy, the boy and the man he is today, a fragile character. I can’t assign some unreasonable pain or other to him, reducing him to an excessive sensitivity that might evoke pity, subjecting him to easy distress. And above all, I cannot make my brother mute, deprived of any means of defending himself, of confessing himself – or of keeping quiet when the situation calls for it. Why can I not let him speak, attribute even the smallest phrase to him in this fiction? With this book will I be trying to steal his life, to steal his image, and also to steal, in minor thefts, his silence and his voice?
I can’t decide if this is a story.
8.
When you’re one of three children, being one of three children is enough and you’re already creating a multiple universe of complicities, exclusions and alliances. A game I might be retrieving intact from some secret corner of memory or I might just be inventing now, assigning roles like the person in charge, redeeming my own inaction with words. I can see, or invent, my brother summoning us silently, holding a finger to his lips: he wants us to gather all the cushions, pillows, mattresses we can carry without being seen, and pile everything up in the corridor, dividing the apartment into two halves. He wants us to build a great barricade together, not yet knowing, not even suspecting, that the great barricade will divide us, too.
Those were good moments, when we threw ourselves against that soft barrier, trying to clear the top in acrobatic leaps, committed only to impulsiveness, the inconsequence of bodies. We were siblings, and being siblings made it easier to appreciate the irresponsibility, to fantasise about an unlikely accusation by the adults, their censuring of the risks we were supposedly taking. In my brother’s jumps those risks became spectacular, and it wasn’t unusual for me and my sister to step aside just to watch, full of wonder at his skill, amazement at his courage. Some would say this was his way of dispelling his aggression, that by throwing himself into the void he was mastering his anguish and helplessness – the anguish that was reflected in our eyes and that we too dissipated merely by watching him. But none of that seemed to cloud the joy of those acts, none of that made the smile fade from his face, a smile that was so uncommon in him.
It wouldn’t be long before the smile would fade, as the game threatened to come to an end. We were siblings, and among siblings any coalition is temporary, any peace is fleeting, any sign of affection heralds the next inevitable attack, which might be brought on by the mildest word. At the first command I would find myself beside my brother, on one side of the barricade, cushions quickly piled up, and then battle would commence. My sister was now the enemy to be subdued, my sister who would soon give up on any counterpunches, bending beneath the dense hailstorm, lying face-down and shielding the back of her neck with her forearms. My sister’s curled-up body like a silhouette drawn on the ground – can I see that image or am I making it up? Do I add my puny blows to my brother’s or do I in that moment manage to defy him, to break our pact, to become my brother’s brother and denounce the cowardly acts being perpetrated there?
That night we waited in silence for our sister’s return, we waited at the kitchen table, by the door, wanting to be there when she arrived. When she arrived she was still inconsolable, she was still sobbing, and my father’s expression was stern. The front tooth that had been cracked would never be perfectly repaired, that was what the dentist herself had said: now it was half resin, and the colour of the tooth and the colour of the resin would never be the same. I don’t know how we reacted, my brother and I, if there was any anguish our eyes could express, any kind of sympathy, any polite pity. I think I wanted to sleep in her room, just for that night, but I was too ashamed to say so.
9.
I sit at the dining-room table, even though I’m alone. Sitting at the table, not hungry, without any dinner, I feel as if there are many silences accompanying me, I feel as though every absence is demanding its place. It’s nine p.m. in Buenos Aires, nine p.m. in São Paulo: in that other room my parents must be sitting at the table, some leftovers on the plates that they’ve carefully pushed aside, no new subjects to discuss, no new yearnings to confess, each of them drawing circles in their teacup. My hands rest on the desolate surface: I notice that I too am drawing shapes with the tip of a finger, following a furrow in the wood, but the furrow doesn’t make a complete circle and my movement is pendular. By now, my brother must already have gone back to his room, that’s as much as I can imagine. He swallowed some of what they served him as best he could, bestowed his usual monosyllables upon them, and then got up and left without a sound, failing to reply to what they failed to ask.
I don’t know where he would have been sitting,