Читать книгу Resistance - Julián Fuks - Страница 15

9.

I sit at the dining-room table, even though I’m alone. Sitting at the table, not hungry, without any dinner, I feel as if there are many silences accompanying me, I feel as though every absence is demanding its place. It’s nine p.m. in Buenos Aires, nine p.m. in São Paulo: in that other room my parents must be sitting at the table, some leftovers on the plates that they’ve carefully pushed aside, no new subjects to discuss, no new yearnings to confess, each of them drawing circles in their teacup. My hands rest on the desolate surface: I notice that I too am drawing shapes with the tip of a finger, following a furrow in the wood, but the furrow doesn’t make a complete circle and my movement is pendular. By now, my brother must already have gone back to his room, that’s as much as I can imagine. He swallowed some of what they served him as best he could, bestowed his usual monosyllables upon them, and then got up and left without a sound, failing to reply to what they failed to ask.

I don’t know where he would have been sitting, I don’t know where they sit when I’m not there. My father is always at the head, my mother to his right, but opposite her, to his left, in the spot where ancient custom would place the firstborn, none of us ever managed to establish ourselves. For years, my brother seemed to accept this as his natural place, fitting into an unsuspected hierarchy that nobody needed to articulate. My sister and I would choose from the other chairs according to some private logic – following the gender distinction already in place, as far as I can guess, her aligned with my mother, me with my brother. It was only later that he started hanging around in his room for longer, ignoring the insistent calls that we took it in turn to yell, ever more vehement calls that only ended up spoiling his mood. We couldn’t even hear his voice when he finally surrendered to dinner, his eyes then were a sad curtain of eyelids, but so comprehensive was his withdrawal, so resonant his silence, that he seemed to occupy the whole space and compel us to fall silent, too. I think it was just to avoid this small daily battle that we started to occupy his chair, my sister or I, whoever was first troubled by the emptiness that opened up between us, whoever first dared to break with tradition. In the years that followed, the firstborn was no longer whoever had arrived first into the world, but whoever arrived first at the table and dared to establish themselves there.

He would leave before dessert, I think he always left before dessert, and I’m not referring here to the usual meagre fruit that we never tired of, whatever Argentinian fruit could be found in São Paulo, or to the measured-out portions of chocolate that would grow progressively as our bodies grew. I’m referring to dessert as it’s conceived of in the Spanish-speaking world, the time spent at the table after all hunger has been sated, a time for retrieving in words a past that refuses to recede into the distance, a chance to scrutinise life in its many banal details. Why was there such attachment to the past, why did we keep trotting out the old days in all those aimless stories, it was a question that none of us asked, one of the many inquiries we failed to make. Tonight I think I understand why my parents never found an answer. If I sit at the table at nine o’clock, without any dinner, not hungry, if tonight my solitude takes the shape of those four vacant chairs, it’s because I wish I could, just one more time, hear those stories.