Diary of the Fall Read online

  19.

  In the final years of his life, my grandfather spent the whole day in his study. Only after he died did we find out what he had been doing there, notebooks and more notebooks filled with tiny writing, and only when I read what he had written did I finally understand what he had been through. It was then that his experience stopped being merely historical, merely collective, merely attached to some abstract moral, in the sense that Auschwitz became a kind of landmark in which you believe with all the force of your education, your reading, all the debates you’ve heard on the subject, the positions you’ve solemnly defended, the vehemently condemnatory statements you’ve made without for a second feeling as if any of that experience were truly yours.

  20.

  If I had to speak about something that was truly mine, I would start with the story of that classmate who fell at the party. About how he reappeared at school months later. About how I found the courage to go over to him and speak and ask a question when the two of us were waiting in the corridor for the next class and make some comment regarding the following week’s test or the teacher’s dandruff-covered jacket, and about the way in which he responded to my comment, as if we were having a perfectly normal conversation and as if either of us could possibly forget that he was wearing an orthopedic corset, and that whenever he stood up it felt as if everyone were watching to see if he walked any differently, raising one foot higher than the other, a slightly irregular rhythm that would stay with him forever, as it would with the other boys who were there at that party.

  21.

  My classmate’s name was João, and as we grew closer I learned that: (a) his father sold cotton candy in the park because he didn’t earn enough as a bus conductor; (b) his father had brought him up alone because João’s mother had died before she was forty; (c) after his mother died, his father never married again or had more children or even a girlfriend.

  22.

  About João I learned that: (a) he never said anything to his father about getting buried in sand every day; (b) he told him that the reason he never phoned up a friend to go out to play was because he preferred to stay at home studying; (c) he never attributed any of his problems at school to the fact that he wasn’t Jewish.

  23.

  My school had a tradition of getting students into the best universities, the ones that produced industrialists, engineers and lawyers. João’s father thought it was worth the sacrifice to enroll João in such a prestigious school, and through the scholarship program he managed to get an 80 percent discount on the monthly fees. However, he still had to work really hard to pay the remaining 20 percent, plus the uniform, books and transport.

  24.

  João’s father decided to celebrate his son’s thirteenth birthday because the family had never given a proper party. Aside from birthdays when João was a child, they usually only invited relatives over for a beer, and João didn’t normally invite anyone apart from a cousin and a boy from the same building who was four years younger than him. But because João was attending a Jewish school and all the boys there were bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen, and at every party the birthday boy was given thirteen bumps, a kind of initiation into the adult world, when, to use the Hebrew expression that gives the ceremony its name, the boy became “a son of commandment,” for all those reasons João’s father persuaded his son to invite his classmates to the reception room in the building where one of his brothers-in-law lived.

  25.

  I only found this out months later, when I was already a regular visitor to their apartment. They lived in an even more modest building than the brother-in-law, a place of peeling walls and bare wires, and when I arrived there one afternoon, quite late in the day, João was out. He had gone to pay a bill or post a letter or take something to the registry office, one of the various errands he ran in order to help out at home, and his father opened the door to me and offered me a glass of fruit juice. We sat down in front of the TV. The local news was on. We sat there for some time, not saying anything, as was perfectly normal, because up until then I had never exchanged more than a few words with him, and when the silence became ever more uncomfortable and the daily soap ever more tedious, and because it was nearly dark and João had still not come back, he started asking me questions — about school, about my father, about my grandfather.

  26.

  João’s father listened to me with the TV still on, and it was as if he wasn’t interested in anything I was saying, because he kept looking straight ahead, even occasionally changing channels. At one point, he commented on a game show in which the audience begged for money, the toothless, the blind, the deaf, people covered in sores and burns, and João’s father said how absurd to allow those people to appear on TV, how absurd to treat them like that, how absurd that the government did nothing about it. I’m sick of living in this shithole of a country. Don’t you agree that this is a shithole of a country? That everything we do turns to shit? That the people in it are nothing but shit? And then he got up, turned off the TV and started talking about himself and his son and about life, and then, with the same anger in his voice, fixing me with his eyes as if he had been waiting for this moment for a very long time, he asked if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at João’s birthday party.

  27.

  In a school like mine, the few non-Jewish students even enjoyed certain privileges. For example, they didn’t have to attend Hebrew classes. Or the classes about Hebrew culture. In the weeks preceding religious holidays, they were excused from learning the traditional songs, saying the prayers, doing the dances, taking part in the Shabbat, visiting the synagogue and the Old People’s Home, and decorating Moses’s cradle to the sound of the Israeli national anthem, not to mention the so-called Youth Movement camps.

  28.

  At camp we were divided into groups, each with an older boy as a monitor, and part of the day was taken up with the usual activities one would expect at such a gathering: lunch, football, group hugs, treasure hunts and messy games involving talcum powder and eggs. We took a tent, insect repellent, a cooking pot and a canteen, and I remember carefully hiding anything that might be stolen in my absence, stowing a bar of chocolate at the bottom of my dirty laundry bag, a battery charger in the middle of a clump of nettles.

  29.

  At night we were divided into two groups, in an exercise known as “camp attack,” with one group hidden in the vegetation and the other in charge of defending the camp. Then, in a clearing in the early hours, we would form into platoons that basically did what patrols are supposed to do, armed with compasses and in columns, crawling through undergrowth and scaling hills, an imitation of what we had heard about in talks the monitors gave about the Six-Day War, the War of Independence, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanese War.

  30.

  There were other non-Jews at the school, but none like João. Once, one of them got hold of a Jewish classmate, dragged him along for about forty meters, pinned his victim’s right arm to the wall next to an iron door and repeatedly slammed the door on the boy’s fingers, and when the boy was screaming and writhing in pain, he grabbed the boy’s left arm and did the same again. João was different: if a classmate ordered him to stand, he would stand. If a classmate flung João’s sandwich across the playground, João would go and fetch it. If the same classmate then grabbed João and made him eat the sandwich, bite by bite, João’s face would remain utterly impassive — no pain, no pleading, no expression at all.

  31.

  When João’s father asked me if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at the party, I could have described that scene to him. I could have told him more than he was expecting to hear, rather than about how I had apologized to João when he returned to school. Instead of telling him how relieved I felt when I found out that João would make a full recovery, walking normally and leading a normal life, and how knowing this had made our conversation easier, as if my apology had instantly erased everything he had been throug
h after the fall, João lying on the floor in front of his relatives, the breath knocked out of him, João in the ambulance and in the emergency room and in hospital, where not a single one of his classmates visited him, and then another two months spent at home, where, again, none of us went to see him, and then back at school where, again, none of us spoke to him until I plucked up enough courage to do so — instead of that I could have told him what it was like to see João eating that sandwich watched by his attacker. And how, when he had finished the last mouthful, his attacker had hit him again, hidden behind a tree in one corner of the playground, surrounded by a small group of boys who chanted the same refrain every day.

  32.

  The refrain went like this: eat sand, eat sand. It was a sort of ritual, intended to drive them on while João turned his head to try and avoid the blows, until he could resist no longer and opened his mouth, the hot, rough taste, the sole of someone’s sneaker in his face, and only then did his attacker grow weary and the shouting diminish and then João would be left to get up on his own, red-faced and straightening his rumpled clothes, picking up his backpack and going up the stairs like a public admission of how dirty and weak and despicable he was.

  33.

  None of this prevented him from coming to school with the invitations to his party. For bar mitzvah ceremonies, the invitations were always professionally printed on a folded piece of card, with a ribbon and gilt lettering, the name of the boy’s parents, a telephone number to confirm that you would be coming and an address where presents could be sent. João’s invitations were homemade on a sheet of foolscap paper placed in a cardboard envelope and written in felt-tip pen. Two weeks beforehand, he silently gave them out, going from desk to desk, inviting the whole year group.

  34.

  That Saturday I woke up early. I got dressed, went to the fridge and spent the morning in my room. I liked watching TV like that, with the blinds down, the bed still unmade and breadcrumbs among the sheets, until someone knocked on the door to tell me it was a quarter to one, and the rest of the day was: lunch at my grandmother’s house, a visit to the shopping mall with my mother, her asking me if the classmate whose birthday it was would prefer a pair of shorts or a backpack, a wallet or a T-shirt, or if he liked music and would be happy with a record voucher, and me answering and waiting for her to pay and for the assistant to wrap the present up and then still having time to visit the arcade where I played at circuit racing and electronic snooker.

  35.

  I wished João a happy birthday when I arrived at the party. I gave him his present. I may have said hello to his father too, or to some relative of his standing nearby, and I may even have enjoyed the party along with all the other guests, I may even have had a good time without for a moment appearing nervous, along with the four other classmates chosen to form the safety net, and who I had also greeted when I arrived, and with whom I chatted normally, all of us dressed and ready and united as we waited for the moment for the birthday cake to be cut and for everyone to sing “Happy Birthday.”

  36.

  I don’t know if I took part because of those other classmates, and it would be easy at this stage to blame them for everything, or if at some point I played an active role in the story: if during the previous days I had an idea, made a suggestion, and was in some way indispensable if everything was to work out as planned, with us singing the last line together, happy birthday to you, before we gathered round him, one at each leg, one at each arm, with me supporting his neck because that’s the most vulnerable part of the body.

  37.

  I don’t know if I did it simply because I was mirroring my classmates’ behavior, João being thrown into the air once, twice, with me supporting him right up until the thirteenth time and then, as he was going up, withdrawing my arms and taking a step back and seeing João hover in the air and then begin the fall, or was it the other way round: what if, deep down, because of that plot hatched in the previous days, because of something I might have said or an attitude I might have taken, even if only once and in the presence of only one other person, quite independently of the circumstances and any possible excuses, what if, deep down, they were also mirroring my behavior?

  38.

  Because of course I used the same words, the words that led up to the moment when the back of his neck struck the floor, and it didn’t take long for me to notice my classmates beating a hasty retreat, just ten steps to the corridor and the porter’s lodge and the street and suddenly you’re tearing round the corner without a backward glance and not even thinking that if you had only reached out an arm to break the fall João would have got up, and I would never have had to see in him the consequence of everything I had done up until then, school, break-time, the stairs and the playground and the wall where João used to sit, the sandwich flung across the playground and João buried in sand and me allowing myself to be carried along with the others, repeating the same words, the same rhythm, all of us together at the same time, the song you sing because that’s all you can do when you’re thirteen: eat sand, eat sand, son-of-a-bitch goy.

  A FEW THINGS I KNOW

  ABOUT MY FATHER

  1.

  The first entry in my grandfather’s notebooks is about the day he disembarked in Brazil. I’ve read dozens of accounts written by immigrants, and new arrivals tend to remark upon the heat, the humidity, the uniforms worn by the immigration staff, the army of petty con men who gather at the port, the skin color of someone sleeping on a pile of sawdust, but my grandfather’s first sentence is about a glass of milk.

  2.

  It seems that my grandfather wanted to write a kind of encyclopedia, an accumulation of apparently unrelated words, each followed by a short or long text, and each with its own peculiar characteristic. The entry for milk, for example, speaks of a liquid food with a creamy texture, which as well as containing calcium and other substances essential to the organism has the advantage of not being highly susceptible to the development of bacteria.

  3.

  My grandfather then moves on to port, luggage and Sesefredo, and it isn’t hard to see that the words occur in the order in which he came across each of those places, objects, people and situations. You can follow the sequence as if it were a story, but because the entries are so obviously contrived and written in such a crassly optimistic tone, the effect is quite the opposite: my grandfather writes that there is no record of any illnesses being caused by drinking milk, that the port is the meeting place for street vendors whose work is subject to strict fiscal and hygienic controls, and it isn’t hard to imagine him there on the quay, having eaten the last slices of the dry bread that was his only food on the voyage, and drinking his first glass of milk in years, the milk of the new world and the new life, poured from a jug kept who knows where or how or for how long, and because of which he would almost die.

  4.

  The Jewish immigrants who arrived in the south of Brazil — initially in the port of Santos, then traveling from there to Rio Grande and finally in a small steamship to Porto Alegre — usually stayed in the homes of relatives or distant acquaintances or in small guesthouses in the center. The name of the guesthouse where my grandfather stayed was Sesefredo. In the notebooks, he defines it as a clean spacious establishment, quiet in the mornings and cozy and welcoming when night falls. A place where someone with typhoid fever, probably contracted from drinking a contaminated glass of milk, is cared for by the generous owners who speak German and explain in German the nature of the illness, its symptoms and the 25 percent mortality rate, and this in an age when the necessary antibiotics had not yet been invented or had not yet reached Brazil or not at least that particular guesthouse. In the Sesefredo Guesthouse it was possible to withstand those four weeks of vomiting, headache, malaise and a forty-degree fever thanks to the kindness of its owners, the couple who never threaten their new guest or spend those four weeks saying that they will kick him out into the street as soon as his last centavo has gone.

&
nbsp; 5.

  Unlike my grandmother, my father spoke little about the banal details of my grandfather’s life. Perhaps because he died when my father was fourteen, and so what would be the point of wondering if my grandfather used to arrive promptly at work, if he was nice to the customers, if he treated his employees well, if he enjoyed what he did for ten or twelve hours a day until he retired and spent what remained of his life at home, shut up in his study, and if during all that time he made any comment about the house where they lived, the city or the country, about something he had seen or experienced, something that would remove from him the label that was always present in any conversation I had with my father on the subject: the man who survived Nazism, the war, Auschwitz.