Diary of the Fall Read online

  6.

  My father spoke a great deal about the Germany of the 1930s, about how easily the Jews were deceived, and how easy it was to believe that a raid on a house was an isolated event, that the appearance one morning of a Star of David daubed on the door of an optician’s or a hardware store was the work of a group of vandals, because if you own a business and pay your taxes and create employment and feel comfortably at home in the country where three generations of your family have lived, you’re not going to want to believe in the possibility that you might lose everything, and from one day to the next have to board a ship, with only the clothes on your back, heading for some place about whose customs, politics or history you know nothing.

  7.

  In my grandfather’s notebooks, the Brazil of 1945 was a country that had never experienced slavery. Where no immigration officers placed restrictions on the arrival of immigrants fleeing the war. A land full of opportunities for a teacher of mathematics who spoke no Portuguese, and so as soon as he had recovered from typhoid, my grandfather began looking for work, which would not be hard given the huge demand in the schools, universities and institutes that made of Porto Alegre a place of scientific excellence, where there were regular symposia on art and philosophy, pleasant events followed by pleasant evenings spent in one of the innumerable cafés in the center frequented, naturally enough, by pretty single women, whose parents would be delighted to be introduced to a Jew.

  8.

  Imagine a wealthy house in Porto Alegre in 1945. Imagine a dinner party at such a house, the table at one end of the dining room, a family speaking various languages, even or especially German. The family is served by uniformed staff and they pass comment perhaps on the swearing-in of the new President Eurico Gaspar Dutra, who my grandfather has never heard of, or a speech by Carlos Lacerda, who my grandfather has never heard of either, just as he has never heard of any of the other familiar references of the period, the casinos, Rádio Nacional, the showgirls in the cabarets, and, as the evening wears on, people drink and offer toasts and at no point does the owner of the house address my grandfather except to remark that the world would be a worse place now that the Americans had won the war.

  9.

  There are many ways of knowing how things actually happened. In this case, the story was told to my father by my grandmother. It is, besides, a banal enough story, and for me its sole interest lies in being able to compare it with my grandfather’s entry in his notebook: the house he describes is quite different, the owner of the house played records of music by Bach and Schubert and even made a joke about Schubert having died of typhoid fever, which did not strike my grandfather as in the least offensive — on the contrary, it was just a way of breaking the ice when, accompanied by my grandmother, he arrived as that evening’s special guest to whom the owner of the house offered a glass of wine, before inviting him to take his place at the table, telling a few more jokes and praising the readiness of Dutra’s party to reaffirm Brazil’s natural vocation for democracy.

  10.

  According to my grandfather, it was normal in Porto Alegre in 1945 for a rich, Germanophile father with a pretty single daughter, when confronted by a poor Jewish immigrant recently recovered from typhoid fever and owing two months’ rent at a guesthouse called Sesefredo, to ask that young man what his intentions were toward his daughter. It was normal for the young man to answer that he would like to resume his career as a teacher, but that, given his difficulties with the Portuguese language, which he would soon overcome, as well as certain expectations on the part of the owners of the Sesefredo Guesthouse, always expressed in a sympathetic, cordial manner, he was thinking of taking a temporary job as a traveling salesman offered to him by an agent, and which would require him to travel to sixteen towns a week selling sewing machines. There are various types of machine, the young man explains, with different uses and prices, and then the rich father of the pretty, single daughter smiles broadly and offers him another glass of wine and a cigar too, and at the end of that pleasant supper, they both toast to the fact that the young man will take the daughter of that proud, rich man to live in a one-bedroom apartment near to the Sesefredo Guesthouse, in a street where there are kennels and a poultry slaughterhouse, commercial establishments of unimpeachable reputation, in a building that survived a fire, but which is nonetheless solid and with a pleasant aspect to the sun, a place in which to start a new life to be commemorated in a ceremony a few months later, with a priest and a rabbi present to celebrate the union of the daughter of that proud, rich man and his poor, Jewish son-in-law, who will soon give him his one grandchild.

  11.

  When my father was born, it had been two years since my grandmother had spoken to my great-grandfather. She left home telling him that not only did she intend to stay with my grandfather, but that she also intended converting to Judaism. Conversion is not a simple process, because Judaism makes little effort to attract converts, and you have to submit to a long process of reading, living a Jewish life and talking to a rabbi, and on the day of her conversion the woman receives a Hebrew name and is immersed in a ritual bath of rainwater collected for that purpose, and I don’t know if my grandmother did this because of my grandfather, so that she could be closer to him, or if it was a reaction to her own family’s opposition to the marriage.

  12.

  My great-grandfather never forgave my grandmother. My great-grandmother stopped talking to her too. My grandmother had an older sister, who married a farmer in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, and a younger brother who was studying to be a diplomat, and not one of them is alive today: my great-grandfather died from a heart attack, my great-grandmother in a car accident, my grandmother’s sister of tuberculosis, her brother from complications following appendicitis.

  13.

  Everyone on my grandfather’s side died in Auschwitz, and there isn’t a single line about them in the notebooks. There isn’t a line about the camp itself, how long my grandfather spent there, how he managed to survive or what he felt when he was freed, and I can imagine my father’s reaction when he read those notebooks six months or a year after my grandfather’s death and noticed these omissions.

  14.

  My grandfather wrote nothing about Judaism. He made no comment about my grandmother’s conversion. Nor any account of her attempts to understand the religion after she had converted, the books she read, her visits to the synagogue unaccompanied by him, the questions she asked and to which he gave only the briefest of answers. It’s possible that my father never heard him say anything on the subject when he was a child or indeed before the age of fourteen, some explanation of or potential clue to an identity that marked him out from the world around him, from his neighbors, his classmates, his teachers, from the radio announcers, characters in films, the people my father used to see from the window of the bus walking back and forth and who never gave the matter a second’s thought.

  15.

  My father began to take an interest in all this because of the death of my grandfather, which is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, because religion isn’t something you think about when you’re fourteen, even if that religion has the historical and cultural weight of Judaism, and even if my father had known that my grandfather’s refusal to deal with the subject was not a mere whim, a personal choice made by a grown man, but the symptom of something that was doubtless apparent in the way he lived his life and the way he treated his wife and son and everyone.

  16.

  Wife — person who takes charge of all the domestic tasks, ensuring that the most rigorous standards of hygiene are employed in the house and that during the day her husband remains undisturbed whenever he wishes to be alone.

  17.

  I don’t know when my grandfather began writing the notebooks, but it’s likely that it was decades after the events he describes, at a time when it became his main aim in life to remain shut up in his study drafting these encyclopedic entries. Because the text doesn’
t change greatly as it progresses, as if it had been written in one go, and the pattern is set pretty much right from the start, with my grandfather talking about my grandmother and the sewing machine business that was so successful he was able to open a small shop in Porto Alegre shortly after my father was born.

  18.

  My father started working when he was fourteen, immediately after the death of my grandfather. Initially, my grandmother took over the running of the business, and I don’t know if she helped him get his bearings then or not, because at fourteen there isn’t much a boy can do in a shop apart from stocktaking or helping at the till or receiving orders or pretending that he’s older than he is so as to be able to write out receipts, but I think the hustle and bustle and the customers’ chatter and the visits to a tea shop two blocks away to eat cheesecake helped him get through those first few years and thus escape the grim prospect of having to come home from school and spend the evenings among furniture and objects that served only to remind him of my grandfather.

  19.

  In time, all this ceased to be pure therapy. My father came to enjoy the day-to-day life in the shop, and when he was eighteen or nineteen my grandmother left him in sole charge, and a few years later he opened another branch, then a second, then a third, and in each one he changed the merchandise. From sewing machines he moved on to fabrics, then to clothes, then to furniture and car parts, which meant that, by the time I was born, I was the heir to what had become a miniature empire.

  20.

  My father met my mother when he was nineteen, at a dance at the Jewish club. In those days, men still wore ties and women waited to be invited to take the floor, and it’s always tempting to think about what might have been if something had gone wrong on that night, if something had interrupted the sequence of chance events that led to my birth. It’s always tempting to imagine what my father felt when I was born, how he communicated those feelings to my mother and whether or not this determined the way in which he related to me over the years. What child hasn’t felt the same curiosity? And then I imagine the impact my grandfather’s notebooks must have had on my father: it’s possible there to retrace a similar path, with my grandfather describing my grandmother’s pregnancy, what he referred to as the pregnant wife, the entry in which he writes that the wife should tell her husband about the pregnancy so that the husband can immediately take the necessary decision.

  21.

  It’s tempting to say that my father’s reaction to the notebooks influenced the way in which he dealt not only with Judaism but with everything else: his memory of my grandfather, his marriage to my mother, his way of relating to me at home, and since I never got to know another side to him, because he never showed me another side, it’s clear that I, too, became caught up in that story.

  22.

  For me, everything begins when I was thirteen, at João’s birthday party, when I let him fall. The head teacher summoned the parents of the boys who had been involved. The incident had occurred outside of school, but the staff–student coordinator nevertheless felt that it was within her jurisdiction. When my father asked me about it, he already knew that the other boys involved had told the coordinator it had been an accident, that we often played such pranks on each other and, up until then, no one had been hurt. My father was unconvinced by this explanation, he certainly didn’t treat the matter as a mere childish prank, nor did he speak to me in a jokey, confiding way or tell me about something similar that had happened to him in the past, and he made me promise never to allow such a thing to happen again, but after that he said no more about it. In the months that followed, he showed no more interest than usual in school, my behavior, my friends or João.

  23.

  At the time, he and João rarely met. In the afternoons, I would be left alone apart from the maid. João would arrive after lunch, it was exam month, and he was behind with his studies because of all the time he had spent recuperating. I helped him with Portuguese, maths and science, and although this required work and effort on my part, I continued to copy out my notes for him, to talk about the books we had to read at home, to repeat what we had been taught in class, because otherwise it would be impossible for him to do the exercises.

  24.

  At around four or five, the maid would bring us our afternoon snack. I usually had a toasted banana sandwich and a milkshake, and we would stop for a rest. Unlike my other classmates, João didn’t play video games. He had never used a videocassette player. He had never been in a house like mine, where, as soon as summer began, we could turn on the air conditioning, my room like an island where day by day, subject by subject, we worked our way through the study schedule, until the light changed and the temperature cooled and we could finally free ourselves from our textbooks and end the afternoon by the swimming pool.

  25.

  João did not belong to the same club as me, and had never jumped from a diving board like the one we had at my house, a wall that we would scale, putting our feet in the gaps between the bricks, and from which you had to jump, clearing the lawn and the plants and the stones and the tiles around the edge of the swimming pool, a jump I found relatively easy, but which it took João a while to screw up the necessary courage to make: the almost two-meter-high wall, the sun going down on the other side, the wind and the mosquitoes and the smell of cut grass after a long hot day, and me saying come on, it’s not that tricky, and him crouched, concentrated, eyes wide, calf muscles tensed, a leap into space as if there were no gravity and a fall into the void, taking care not to breathe out.

  26.

  Some people open their eyes underwater, others prefer not to, and I don’t know that it makes much difference when you’re plunging down to the bottom and you have to wait patiently until the impetus slows and you stop in the middle of all the bubbles and allow buoyancy to carry you back to the surface. You propel your body upward using long movements of the arms, and you’re very conscious of your legs and your stomach, and when you emerge into the light you look at the edge of the pool, and the colors have never seemed so bright, you’re intensely aware of the reflections on the water that shines and laps against the tiles and the slap of the waves and the taste of chlorine in your nose, and then the fear you’d been feeling all afternoon and all the previous afternoons ever since the day of the fall at the birthday party vanishes as if you had been born again.

  27.

  It would be hard to say why I became João’s friend. These things don’t happen because you feel sorry for someone, or because you’ve spent months tormented by the idea that you almost destroyed that person, although it might help to begin with, at least as an impulse when you first decide to approach him. If it wasn’t for that initial awkwardness, I wouldn’t have offered to help him with his studies. If it weren’t for those afternoons at my house, we wouldn’t have spent so much time together. And if we hadn’t done that, which happened in parallel with the whole recovery process, with his physiotherapy sessions, the exercises he did to strengthen his muscles, the press-ups and sit-ups and weight lifting, which he started doing almost obsessively, I wouldn’t have come to see what had previously seemed idiotic in João’s personality as a quality.

  28.

  At the time, I spoke very little to my father. He would arrive home from work at night, exhausted, and by then I would have had my supper and would usually already be in bed asleep. If I were to calculate the amount of time we spent together each week, it would only be a few hours, and since included in those hours were his speeches about the Jews who died in the 1972 Olympics, the Jews who died in PLO attacks, the Jews who would continue to die because of the neo-Nazis in Europe and the Soviet alliance with the Arabs and the ineffectual stance taken by the UN and the media’s negative attitude toward Israel, it’s possible that more than half the conversations he had with me turned on that one topic.

  29.

  As a child, I used to dream about those stories, the swastikas and the Cossack torches outside the window, a
s if someone in the street were about to put me in a pair of pajamas with a star on them and shove me onto a train headed for the chimneys, but this changed over the years. I realized that the stories kept being repeated, my father told them all in the same way, with the same intonation, and even today I can quote examples that would often cause his voice to break, the young girl who was imprisoned, the two brothers who were separated, the doctor and the teacher and the postman and the pregnant woman who crossed the whole of Poland only to be caught in an ambush in the forest. Something happens when you see your father repeating the same thing once, twice, five hundred times, and suddenly you can no longer sympathize or feel affected by something which, gradually, when you get to be thirteen, in Porto Alegre, living in a house with a swimming pool and having shown yourself capable of allowing a classmate to fall to the floor on his back at his birthday party — gradually, you realize that those stories bear very little relation to your own life.

  30.

  After I became friends with João, I started looking at my other friends, unable to understand why they had done that, and how they had managed to co-opt me as well, and I began to feel ashamed that I had ever shouted son-of-a-bitch goy, and this became mixed up with my growing feelings of discomfort around my father, a rejection of the performance he gave whenever he spoke of anti-Semitism, because I had nothing in common with the people he talked about apart from having been born Jewish, and I knew nothing about those people apart from the fact that they were Jews, and even though so many had died in the concentration camps it made no sense to be reminded of this every day.