Читать книгу Resistance - Julián Fuks - Страница 12

6.

What did we do on those countless nights when we shared a bedroom? Who fell asleep first, consigning the other to silence and uninhabitable darkness, to the fear of the shadows, to the shock of each creak? What erratic reveries would seize the one left behind, what childish ghosts would haunt him, while his brother snored calmly, indifferent and pitiless? Who asked the other if he was asleep yet, just so the concreteness of his shaky voice might fill the inscrutable space that separated them?

These questions are fallacious, too lyrical to contain any truth. By choosing to tell this story through its night-time terrors, I’m placing myself at the centre of the anguish, I’m making myself the protagonist, I’m assigning contempt unfairly to my brother. I was the one who resisted sleeping with the light off, I was the one who got up scared in the middle of the night, went down the gloomy corridor and sought refuge in my parents’ bed. Sometimes, in the small hours of the morning, my sister would also be taken into that spacious double bed, and there we slept on, together, squashed up, four-fifths of the family confined to a few square metres. My brother remained apart, between his own sheets, and the solitude that embraced him must have been deeper, even if the tranquillity he didn’t fear was not.

This story might be very different if I could actually remember it. For eight years I lived in the same bedroom as my brother, in the same series of bedrooms, and I can’t remember how we talked, if we had fun, if we played some common game or got into some argument or other that did away with any age difference, if he taught me his childish mischiefs without my having to suffer from them myself. Maybe not, maybe we kept our distance, maybe we intimidated each other and bored each other with the same emptiness that consumes us, sometimes, today.

I remember the geography of the rooms, the position of the bed, the other bed, the wardrobe, the desk by the window that loosed us into the vastness of the city, be that São Paulo or Buenos Aires. I remember the bright posters he used to stick on the walls, perhaps hoping I might share his enthusiasms. I remember a few toys of mine, inane pieces of plastic that fascinated me, dolls I used to involve in complex narratives all morning long, all afternoon long, tirelessly, until he came back. The imagination in those days was a fertile thing, a fruitful fiction that has abandoned me now. I can’t remember what it was like spending a minute, ten minutes, an hour by his side, and I can’t make it up either. How eight years can have gone by like that is a question I can’t answer, yet another conception of reality being avoided here.

I know he protected me, and not because my mother insists on boasting about it, emphasising how much he loved me, her covert way of begging me to go and knock on his door one more time. I know he protected me because one customary gesture of his sticks in my memory: his hand resting on the back of my neck, his index finger and thumb pressing onto the skin on either side, each in turn, not too hard, just indicating the direction of the next step. That was how he led me when we walked side by side, in the middle of any crowd that happened to surround us.