Juntas and Housewives: Three Books from Brazil

To appreciate Beatriz Bracher’s fictional portrait of how families survived their losses after the 1964 military coup in I Didn’t Talk (2004) it’s well to remember Brazil’s recent history. Only in 1985 after 21 years of media censorship and torture of political dissidents—including former President Dilma Roussef—did Brazilians elect a civilian government and return to democracy.

Now with the Worker Party’s Roussef impeached and her predecessor Lula da Silva in prison, the country has swung sharply to the right under its new President Jair Bolsonaro. Many are afraid Brazil’s fragile democracy is again under assault.

A former army captain and 27-year veteran of Congress, Bolsonaro has vowed to purge the country of leftwing “outlaws.” He condones sexual violence and openly admires the former military dictators.  In their analysis for Boston Review after the October 2018 election, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Marcello Silva wrote that Bolsonaro’s bombast is closer to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte than our paper tiger, Donald Trump.

Brazil’s “ghosts” refuse to stay buried, and they haunt the narrator of Bracher’s novel.

Gustavo is a recently retired professor. He’s preparing to leave São Paulo for the countryside when his plans are interrupted by a young woman’s request to interview him. Cecília, a stand-in for the author, needs information for her novel about the 1960s and ‘70s, a time when education seemed to be a “detonating force” that led to repression by Brazil’s dictators. Because of their links to leftwing groups, Gustavo and his brother-in-law Armando are captured in 1970 by police and tortured.  Gustavo loses two teeth and the hearing in his right ear; Armando loses his life.

After his release, Gustavo finds out their family and friends suspect him of ratting on his brother-in-law: “Look, I was tortured, and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets. I didn’t snitch — I almost died in the room where I could have snitched, but I didn’t talk. They said I talked and Armando died.”

It’s never clear who “they” are, but Gustavo’s anguish is far worse than the torture he survived. It explains the tone of uncertainty as he begins his story: “If it’s possible to have a thought without a word or an image, without time and space, then I’d like to tell a story.” The same tone resurfaces as he ends the story: “That’s what I’d tell you, Cecília, if it were possible.” Guilt and self-doubt rarely leave his thoughts.

Armando’s murder triggers a series of family tragedies. Eliana, Gustavo’s wife and Armando’s sister, dies while in exile in Paris. Armando’s mother kills herself. Then Gustavo’s father dies, leaving Gustavo and his mother to raise his daughter Lígia. Gustavo, the reluctant revolutionary, gratefully reassumes his position as school principal after his release. But he’s haunted by his dead friend, “a loudmouth, a truant who always got away with things, a ringleader, a prankster” and by a dead wife who may or may not have believed he was a traitor.

Though he’s tentative about his own memories, Gustavo can’t resist criticizing his brother Jose’s memoir of their childhood—“we didn’t have an armchair, just a chinzy sofa that ended up who knows where” or “where is this going, Jose?” The book is too literary for Gustavo, perhaps because his brother was spared the regime’s repressive tactics. But it adds other voices to his monologue. So do the excerpts from letters, books, and documents the professor uncovers in his packing. He discovers a notebook of his nephew Renato, who dies drunk, and remembers trying to parent this difficult boy. The novel’s flow resembles his notes and memorabilia: “Fragments of life in no particular order, awaiting imagination, or a necessity, or whatever might sew them together.”

Something as mundane as a haircut by his barber of 30 years, Mr. Osvaldo, prompts memories of a family ritual. Suddenly Gustavo is a boy living at home again. “I look in the mirror at him, behind me, where new strands now fall, to be swept up by his broom, and I recall Ritinha, at the end of the day, sweeping trimmings from the sewing room’s wine-colored linoleum.” How curious he was of this maid as she ended her workday, showered, and dressed to start her other life—as a night-school student!

This is a novel about storytelling, about the ordinary magic that happens “on the bus, in line at the bank, at the bakery counter” or in a walk through a cemetery, where Gustavo and his daughter Lígia make up histories for the dead based on their gravestones. “The cemetery was her first library: each tomb a tome. The stories always ended with someone flying through the sky.”  Bracher conjures the same magic, yet always returns to the central fact of Gustavo’s life: his guilt.

The novel builds to a final, powerful scene, the importance of which Gustavo admits he never grasped. It’s 1970 and his father urges him to put any thoughts about Armando to rest. “You have a family to take care of, he says, mother, sister, and daughter. I close my eyes, run my hands across my face. The conversation is annoying me, I don’t want to listen anymore…. Gustavo, he says in a soft voice, it’s over now. It ended. Armando went too far, he lost control. He thought he could do it, that he’d find a way, but things got out of control. And now it’s over.”

Military regimes governed many Latin American countries during the 1970s and ‘80s, and countries like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay established truth commissions in the aftermath of that repression. These reconciliation commissions allowed governments to prosecute at least some human rights abusers, as well as to set a new national narrative.

Brazil made a different choice, which helps explain how an apologist for torture and military rule like Bolsonaro ascended to the presidency. Brazil only established its commission in 2012, never charged anyone with a crime, and hasn’t seriously encourage a national dialogue about the country’s authoritarian past. “Rather than develop a politics of memory, as other Latin American countries have done,” writes historian Kenneth Serbin in Foreign Affairs, “Brazil has chosen to pursue a politics of forgetting.”

Julián Fuks, author of Resistance (2015), would seem to agree with Serbin. “The journey Jair Bolsonaro is planning has as its destination a past that we have never overcome,” he told the Guardian, “dark decades that have never left us.” For the first time in 36 years Fuks wonders: will I have to leave Brazil? But Fuks, like Bracher, has put those fears into his latest novel, much of which is autobiographical.

Fuks’ family was twice exiled, first from Romania because of anti-semitism, then from Argentina to Brazil because, as political dissidents, his parents feared for their safety. Between 1976 to 1983, the government killed at least 15,000 people. They simply vanished. Sebastián, the narrator of Resistance, obsesses about his adopted brother’s origins as a way of returning to the notion of estrangement, from a country, from a history, from oneself.

His parents escaped Argentina following the brutal arrest of their friend Martha Brea, who becomes one of the disappeared. Martha’s elitist family refuses to investigate, blaming their daughter for getting “involved in things she shouldn’t have.” “She messed with people she shouldn’t,” says Martha’s sister, “now let her suffer the punishment she deserves. I’m only sorry how sad my father is, the disappointment in such a well brought up daughter,…” Thirty-four years after she disappeared, a letter arrives confirming that Martha was a victim of state terrorism, and Sebastián’s mother is able to honor her friend in a speech.

Then, as today, mothers and grandmothers remember their missing kin with a vigil every Thursday in Buenos Aires’ Playo de Mayo.

When the novel begins, Sebastián has found the Buenos Aires apartment where his parents once lived. In a lyrical passage, he imagines their courtship, their unlikely alliance—a Catholic girl from a conservative family and her Jewish Marxist beau—their medical training.

He decides the young couple “were not opposites at all, but two people alike, united in their criticism of the brutal and archaic psychiatric treatment perpetuated in hospitals across the world, and in their militating for a therapy that was more humane, more understanding, more comprehensive, less damaging.” His father hides guns under his bed until Martha is arrested and they fear they’re next. “Dictatorships can come back,” Sebastián’s father warns him.

Fuks chose the words of Ernesto Sábato as an epigraph, and they illuminate his philosophy as a writer: “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.” Resistance is not just how we fight but how we live. And both Fuks and Bracher choose to fight repression—past and future—with their books.

One thing Bolsonaro’s bid for political power has done is mobilize Brazil’s feminists against him. That effort would have been unheard of in 1940s Rio de Janeiro, the locus for Martha Batalha’s debut novel, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao (2016).

Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? Artist Sinem Erkas’ graphic of a woman sipping coffee with huge rollers in her hair sets the tone for this tale of housewives who make themselves beautiful for their husbands and necessary for their children. Though Batalha gives detailed histories of all her female characters, she favors the Gusmao sisters, Euridice and Guida.

The thing is, Euridice was brilliant. Give her the proper equations and she would design bridges. Give her a laboratory and she would invent vaccines. Give her blank pages and she would write classics. But instead, she was given dirty underwear, which she washed quickly and left spotless, before sitting on the couch, looking at her nails, and thinking about what she ought to be thinking about.

Euridice’s creativity is channelled first into cooking, then sewing, and finally—in a move so scandalous to her neighbors she’s forced to relocate her family—to writing her life’s work, The History of Invisibility, a manuscript that remains invisible to all but its author.

Euridice’s liberation comes after years of domestic forbearance whereas her elder sister Guida elopes while still in school with Marcos, a medical student whose parents are rich. The newlyweds marry in a private ceremony, rent an apartment, and Marcos begins the practice that will fulfil their dreams. Unfortunately, the doctor has paid a “half-black, half-poor classmate” to take his exams, so he’s more of a threat to his patients than a caregiver. (“He thought he could do with his studies what his ancestors had done with Brazil.”)

Not long after they desert him, he deserts Guida, who finds herself poor and pregnant.

Thus, begins what, for me, is the most absorbing aspect of this novel: the solidarity of the poor, who create a safety net they find nowhere else. Guida and her newborn son, Chico, are taken in by the ex-prostitute Filomena, the most popular babysitter in Estacío.

Guida is tested many times. She always rises to the challenge. When she needs money for Chico’s heart medicine, she opens a beauty salon in her home. When Filomena needs morphine to ease her dying, Guida finds a way to get it. No matter their talent, energy, and spirit, in this patriarchal climate Euridice and Guida are always a hairsbreadth from disgrace. “Slut,” Euridice’s husband Antonio screams at her because she sheds no blood on their wedding night. And this tirade continues as the Nights of Whiskey and Weeping.

Batalha deftly describes the tricks the sisters use to gain some privacy and self-respect when their roles as wives and mothers are robotic. Her satire verges on the burlesque and sometimes the exaggerated comedy falls flat. But beneath the comedy is compassion. Batalha knows these women, who want “salmon-colored pillows” because they’ve heard it on the radio and whip up duck à l’Orange when it’s only to please themselves.