Lightning, they say, doesn’t strike twice — what, then, to make of the fulgurant love affairs and psychic breaks that cleave two generations of the same family? In Antonio, the Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher’s third novel, that tangled history gives rise to dueling accounts of the mad bonds that tie families together, the intellectual passions that induce madness, and the wretched decisions families must make when they institutionalize one of their own. The novel is, like the intertextual and fragmentary I Didn’t Talk before it, a trial of multivocal writing, playing as it does three narrators off of each other. The trio of voices amplifies the silence from the novel’s protagonist, Benjamim, whose inquiries are echoed by his interlocutors but who himself utters not a single word. This speechless presence, taken together with the telegraphic style of Bracher’s three speakers, betokens the wounds that words may soothe but never heal. The mess, though, is a kind of mooring. Addressing a generation of readers dispossessed of family lore, to say nothing of history, Bracher does not stammer: “You’re from this family, so you are this family.”  In the following excerpt from Antonio, published for the first time in English at Caesura, we glimpse Bracher’s defense of gnarly rootedness. The novel’s translator, Adam Morris, offers in English the original’s cognitive melody of dilatory, spare-no-details narrative and a sparse, take-no-prisoners prose style that propels us through the morass of family history, the dazzling light of sanitoria. 

—Adam Mahler

Excerpt from Isabel

Men, as you know, Benjamim—men like to use their imaginations and tell tall tales. Around the time that Xavier fell in love in Elenir, I didn’t know him very well. We hung around a lot of the same places and our families knew each other, but that was it. The world was smaller then, and he called attention to himself. Maybe I did too, like Haroldo told you, but I don’t think so. Maybe they noticed me because, although I was a girl from a good family, I was attending the university. Usually only girls who had to work went to college, something that was never expected of us.

These days in the hospital. This green room. It’s confusing for things to be brought to a halt like this. It’s never happened to me before, not even after I retired. I continued advising students, I kept writing and participating in panels and discussions. I always kept myself busy. I’m not the type to get sick. Even after giving birth I was on my feet two days later, running up and down the stairs. Now there are days I barely speak, my memories come from far off, from long before I had children. Be patient, Benjamim, there’s something I want to tell you.

I remember that in my day it wasn’t so “good”—in the most irritating sense of the word—to be a serious girl, to focus on one’s studies. It wasn’t good for boys, either. Young women barely ever considered going to college, and many of the boys did it as an afterthought. Today when I see the concentration you put into your studies, your struggle to obtain a fellowship to get a Master’s in the United States, all the specialization, the effort put into being a good professional—this is all new. It simply didn’t exist in my generation, because we were all the children of people who owned farms or banks or factories. Very few of my classmates went to Sedes, which had a very good program at the time. It was where my mother studied, first in her class, and at that time it was just for girls. Most girls went to Lareira. There was only one course of study and the girls fooled around, waiting for a husband. They learned housekeeping and had a few murky sex-ed classes—that kind of thing. The most chic families, and there were only a few, sent their girls to finishing school in England or Switzerland. Those girls learned how to be polished.

My great exception was having gone to USP—that was a complete novelty. Daddy, your grandfather, he was an ophthalmologist, a professor on the medical faculty. He knew Dr. Emanuel Kremz from there. We weren’t a rich family, but we were a “good” family, and that was what mattered. The other day I rewatched The Great Gatsby on TV and got to thinking about the difference between the two. The American upper class between the two wars had something savage to it, in many respects. The thirst for amusement, the vanity and the ostentation. The girl says something like, “rich girls don’t marry poor boys,” as though it were common sense. We’d never have said that here. We didn’t talk about money: we saw it, we knew about it, but it wasn’t what made the difference. The difference came from somewhere else. 

Now, at home Daddy didn’t have the slightest doubt I’d go to college. But this was an oddity in our milieu. Even if I hadn’t been the only child, I know that he’d have thought the same thing. It didn’t just have to do with educating his daughter, but with his different vision for the world. He’d say, “I’m not going to leave you any money, but I’m going to provide you with a good education.” 

I enjoyed my studies. I wanted to major in philosophy, and Daddy said I could do that at Sedes, never at USP, or else I’d lose my faith. But I wanted to study at USP, so I decided to major in classics. It was an excellent choice. I was reading all the time. I adored college: it was a completely new world for me, because I’d been in the same school from seven to seventeen, the age I was when I started at USP. I was also terrified, because Daddy would say, “If you’re going to study at USP, you’d better work hard, because you’re coming from a private school and will have to compete against people from the state high schools, which are much stronger.” So you see there’s been an absolute revolution. Now, of course, what he told me wasn’t completely true, because I’d had the opportunity to study English and French. I got in on the first try and did very well at college. The truth is that the curriculum the nuns developed at Des Oiseaux had actually been quite good.

College was a crucial transition for me. Everything was stimulating. The new building—my class was one of the first at the Maria Antonia campus—the foreign professors, classmates from other cities, with different customs. The war had just ended two years earlier, the fascists had been banished from the face of the earth, we lived in a free and prosperous world, in need of hands and minds to build and teach. It was a lot different from the college experience my children had, and much more that what you did. I think the important thing—besides the changes to the role of the faculty, the spatial reorganization, and the ghettoization of departments—besides all that, there was, for us, at the end of the 1940s, that experiential gap between high school and college. It was brutal. I came from a Catholic school. I’d never sat in a coed classroom, and the way of addressing the students was totally different. It was like I’d been living in a cloister until then and was suddenly set free. 

I tried to recapture that feeling when I went back to school in the mid-Sixties. But everything was so chaotic then, and getting worse every day. The pleasure I took in my studies derived less from a collective experience, and became more solitary. In ’77 or ’78, when Teodoro decided to take that trip, many professors were still exiled. The environment was one of fracture and frustration, sometimes resentment. I knew he wouldn’t really be missing much. Maybe that’s why I considered Teodoro’s path to be more courageous than the ones his siblings took. 

My youngest were still children at the time of the coup, when the dictatorship started. I imagine that the fear disseminated throughout the country had some kind of psychological effect on them. I know this because I lived through the war as a girl. There was always the danger of German submarines, the blackout drills, my father listening to news about troop movements on the radio. Even though we were so far away, we still felt the imminence of violence, and that left some kind of impression on us all. In our day we were convinced that good had achieved an unequivocal triumph over evil. You couldn’t say the same about the feelings of fear and dread that your father’s generation absorbed. My generation never had any doubt about our role in the world: it had been destroyed and needed us to rebuild it. Your aunts and uncles and father found themselves on a very different plane of action. Flora fell into all that hippie stuff, which might have been more violent than politics. That dark and omnipotent-suicidal side that every adolescent feels emerged in her use of her body, drugs, sex. 

What I feared was that near-perversion of her body. In my mind, I paced back and forth, trying to find the pathways I could use to accompany her, and somehow, protect her. The way she chose had never been my path, and I never liked drugs. The truth is I was always afraid—I have such an addictive personality. I smoked my whole life, and it’s only now, after winding up in this hospital, that I finally quit. I still crave a smoke—but I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore. In my book, if a girl smoked pot and had sex, she was a woman and could take care of herself. But that’s not true. Somehow she survived. She got to experiment with things she thought were important and then get on with her life. 

Henrique, always the most sensible one, decided to join the workers’ movement, and then the Workers’ Party. Our house was full of stars and red flags. Your grandfather got irritated with all the rah-rah about the metalworkers, and then with the intellectuals who’d joined the Party project, and with the Party’s links to the Catholic Church. He’d always distrusted missionaries. He argued with Henrique. Xavier’s field was art. He said he didn’t want to be oppressed by avalanches of orderly pronouncements. He wanted disorderly words— always. Half-baked and incoherent speech. The truth is that he always had a physical aversion to feeling imprisoned. He was very clever about deconstructing the things we said and revealing our lies. Smooth, implacable, and irresponsible. He saw his duty as this negation of things, even if there was never anything to put in their place. That’s why Daddy never really got along with Xavier. And it’s why I admired him. I was fascinated by his freedom to criticize without any obligation to be constructive, a position that was always inaccessible to me, a warrior weighted down by my obligations. Xavier liked to be around younger people but didn’t want to have anything to do with disciples.

Haroldo says that at college everything was the other way around—he was a leader involved in politics at every level. After his crisis and the trip to Europe, he changed completely. When people started to be persecuted and arrested after the coup, he suffered very much. We took in friends and strangers; he was disgusted by the brutalities. I was more worried about holding the house together, keeping us in the black. We were so different—perhaps that’s why our marriage lasted as long as it did. I don’t know, maybe because he trained as a lawyer and worked at a newspaper, he took a more skeptical view of the motives and methods of the opposition movements. He argued with Henrique, told him he was unlearning how to think for himself. 

Flora mutilated her body and Henrique his intelligence. But those are the rites of passage. Something I know nothing about—I couldn’t, and even if I could, I don’t know if I’d have done anything different. It’s just that some don’t survive. I say I wouldn’t have done anything differently because they took the necessary steps for forging their character as individuals. What right would I have to impede, restrain, or stifle them? At first, it’s necessary to behave like spokesmen of ever-more exclusive tribes. Only after that can one’s own voice emerge, and return to the rest of humanity. To one’s family and generation, and then to the great ideas germinating a voice that will need to run its own course if it’s ever to be considered original. Only the originals matter, only they can light the way, only those truly unparalleled voices can begin to find new peers. I never wanted any of my sons to be a butcher. I wouldn’t know how to guide them. Because that’s part of it: parents learn alongside their children. They can’t do everything. No, Benjamim, there’s nothing cerebral to it, in the unromantic sense of the word. Quite the opposite: what could be more generous than discovering your own unique strengths and placing them at the service of others? That’s what I’m talking about. This is the moral obligation that I tried to pass on to my children and to you, my grandson. 

I married young, in 1954. Getúlio Vargas had just killed himself—it was terrifying to see the multitude in the streets, crying for their sweet daddy, their father figure. It wrecked my ideas. I’d gone into the streets demanding his resignation. To see people feeling so orphaned was a shock. I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken, that the truth is always where the people are. Then came Juscelino, and my children. I didn’t know a thing about education. I only felt that I needed to stay by my children’s side at all times. The education that I’d had wouldn’t suffice as a model. We had to start from scratch. And the truth is that no matter how diligent and responsible I was, I never knew anything about life. Nobody knows anything about life until they have children. Xavier always had an opinion about what was best for the children. He was an enthusiastic father, but his sort of dedication was never much help. We had four kids in five years. Flora was born in ’55, and Teodoro in 1960. We lived in a little house off Dr. Arnaldo Avenue. After your great-grandfather died, Dona Silvia decided to move back to Higienópolis—she never liked living in the sticks, as she called it. So we took the house in Butantã, which was near the university and the kids’ school. With the house and the inheritance everything got a little easier. When your father was two years old, I went back to school, and later, to teach. Back in the same building at the Maria Antonia campus. It was a tumultuous period: first the coup and then the resistance movements. Even in that difficult climate, among the new teachers they brought in, I was able to find my peers. I was happy. Throughout those years when I’d stayed home to take care of the kids, my life was something animal, ancestral. Giving birth, breastfeeding, washing and cleaning, warding off danger. When I went back to school I returned to myself. In a family we’re always a me or an I who’s scattered and complex. It’s only at work, especially work that has to do with ideas, that it’s possible to feel ourselves out and let the contours assume a shape. Xavier’s occupational vagrancy made me afraid. I miss him: his joy, the fun we had together. But I was afraid.

Xavier frittered away our inheritance on insane luxuries and that business project of printing cheap books. We were one of the first families with a TV. We also had one of those reel tape recorders, the kind people used before cassettes. Xavier used it to record the children singing rounds, as well as the stories that Vanda, the nanny, would tell them. I began to realize that besides going back to school, I’d also have to go back to work if I wanted to keep the kids in good schools. While I was doing my Master’s, I got a job as a teacher at the kids’ school, which meant they could all go for free. They were always good students. 

Sometime later Flora bought a Super 8 camera. I don’t know what she ended up doing with her little films. She’d invent scenarios and get Leonor and your father to act them out. I think they all enjoyed it, but who knows. There was always so much going on in that house. Henrique and Flora talked incessantly. Leonor was always calmer. She made up stories about her dolls and stuffed animals, practiced piano for hours on end. Teodoro was independent; even as a child he never liked sitting on anyone’s lap. He was a quiet boy, very attached to Leonor. The two of them would play by themselves all afternoon. During our vacations to the beach, they’d build sandcastles. When Xavier could join us, he’d make-believe drawbridges, underground lakes, and traps for enemy crabs. I spent my time reading. On vacations I let my mind unwind by reading novels—something I didn’t have time for when classes were in session. Back then I could still sleep in, what a pleasure. Vanda would leave early with the kids, who came back with their arms full of seashells. Teodoro was so cute when he was three, four years old. When he was nine he built a special box for his seashell collection, noting the date he found each one and separating them by size and color. Always so meticulous, traipsing around with his boy scouts’ manual. It’s true: he always had that passion for collecting and cataloging. In our house here in São Paulo he was always catching animals, playing with armadillos, investigating anthills. We pretended that he was going to be the family scientist. 

When I brought you both back here and had him committed, I didn’t recall any of that. But his hoarding of trash from the streets was similar to what he’d done with the shells. The same goes for that mania for cataloging. I don’t know how much you remember of that period in your father’s madness. He, who was always so beautiful, became skeletal, his face sunken in. I missed Xavier, but don’t know if he could have handled it. It wasn’t easy, Benjamim, it wasn’t an easy decision to have him locked up. Henrique helped me with everything. And Haroldo, too, against Raul’s wishes. I know that he was angry with Haroldo and felt guilty that he couldn’t stick things out with Teo. But he shouldn’t have felt anger or guilt—at the time, there was nothing else to be done. Helping someone who doesn’t want to be helped is the most difficult thing in the world. It means forgetting about forgiveness, which is just something made of words, with no muscle or meat to it. Now that you’re an adult, about to have your first son, you seem ready to listen. In those days, and afterward, with everything that happened, you lived with me in my apartment like it was just a room in some boardinghouse. Yes, I know. In the end it was good for you to move out, into a real boardinghouse. You always wanted to be from Minas, you never gave that up. I know Benjamim, I know that you are from Minas. You know what I mean. 

I’m talking about the responsibility to be who you are. You’re from this family, so you are this family. Your father wanted to be rid of all that, and got rid of himself along with it. The history that he crafted for himself in Minas was a non-history. He went too deep. By the time I brought him back, there was nothing left to hold on to, no handle I could use to hoist him back out: only destroyed pieces. You survived just fine. You grew up drinking milk fresh from the cow, catching birds— you enjoyed the simple, humiliating lifestyle that befalls a field hand’s son. You were raised by the kindness of those women, in the hidden spaces of that big plantation house, on that dark cot belonging to your father, a servant in the brickyard of that yes-sir world. You rejected the new atmosphere I offered you. You wanted to “yes, ma’am” me and I wouldn’t have it. No, Benjamim, you were never rude to me. On the contrary: you had perfect manners. We were locked in a battle between different rubrics of politeness. Nobody won, nobody lost, and there was no truce. That’s where we left it. 

Now that you’re back, handsome as always, soon to be a father, you need to understand something that was always here between us and will also be with your son. I’ll probably never meet my great-grandson, little Antonio, but you will doubtless recognize me in him—your father, too. That’s why you came— that’s why you need to understand. This search has nothing to do with your mother. She was never from here. I have nothing to say about her. But I can tell you about your father, and we can each talk about ourselves. About how you were before you’d reached adolescence: about that clever and lively little boy with shining eyes. About me, how I dragged from the abyss a man who would never again be my “prodigal son.” 

During that time your father was still with us, with all the comings and goings from the clinic, and with me still finishing my tenure file, you became a little ghost, tiptoeing throughout the house and hiding in the corners. Maybe you don’t believe it, but I worried about you. I worried a lot.

Antonio by Beatriz Bracher, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris,
is published by New Directions and available March 2, 2021.

Adam Mahler is an essayist and translator of Portuguese poetry. The recipient of a Fulbright Research grant, he is currently pursuing a doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese. His first book of translations, Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra and Other Poems, is forthcoming, with Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts, in the spring of 2021.

Adam Morris is a writer and translator based in California. He has translated novels by Hilda Hilst, João Gilberto Noll, and Beatriz Bracher. His book American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation was published by Liveright / W.W. Norton in March 2019.