Resistance

Julián Fuks, Daniel Hahn

• Publisher: Charco Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781999859374
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

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... A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being 'disappeared'. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The family grows as the couple have two more children: a son and a daughter. Resistance unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It's an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, to your own past.Already winner of the Jabuti Award for Book of the Year 2016 (Brazil), the José Saramago Literary Prize 2017 (Portugal) and the Anna Seghers Prize 2018 (Germany), Resistance demonstrates remarkable courage and skill by one of Brazil's rising literary stars.

Resistance

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 though that might make it disappear. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that it was my brother who imposed on all of us the silence he found most comfortable, and we simply accepted it, so kind, and so cowardly.

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 str...

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• Resistance