A confession, refusal, a recital, a parody, an unfolding, a reckoning, an interrogation, a self-explanation. A convocation of selected syllables, sometimes suggesting poetry, but only suggesting, not committing, a few furtive thoughts, a suggestion, an implication, a more that shall forth-come, which it happily will, movingly it will, but only slowly, with a watercolor drib and a drab (never oil) across its canvas.

Its being author (and editor of the prestigious Editora 34 publishing house in Brazil) Beatriz Bracher’s 2004 novel Não Falei (I Didn’t Talk), out this year from New Directions in a new translation by Adam Morris, its canvas spread across two time periods: first, the present day, when our narrator Gustavo, an aging professor of Education in Sao Paolo, readies himself to move to a more leisurely job in the country, and finds himself going through his papers on behalf of Cecília, a colleague’s student who is interviewing him and writing a novel about education and the resistance movement against the military dictatorship which controlled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

This serves as a frame for Gustavo to delve into his files and memories of that period, beginning in the 1950s, when Gustavo grew up, got married, became a teacher, then a school principal, and lived happily until his arrest by the dictatorship in 1972, when he was tortured and told to give up information about Armando, his radical friend and his wife Eliana’s brother.

I didn’t talk, Gustavo says prominently, in the first pages of the novel.

Look, I was tortured, and they say I named 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.

But that doesn’t stop people from believing the opposite:

They said I talked and Armando died. I was released two days after his death and they let me stay on as the school principal.

Shortly thereafter, Eliana dies in Paris. Her mother, back in Brazil, kills herself. The story of Gustavo’s culpability is powerful because it explains these events, imbues them with a story, however false.

Luiza (evidently a friend or family member) later tells Gustavo “that Eliana died of pneumonia without ever finding out that I’d said what I never said.” Gustavo doesn’t believe her, seeing in this another convenient story, an elegiac presentation in lieu of the actual truth. And later Bracher dons an elegiac style to have Gustavo describe Eliana, only to abruptly halt his momentum right at the end:

Eliana on the other hand belonged to only one group, her family triad: a chosen people, bearers of the mark. It was necessary to deserve it, the mark, which she daily mastered through her dedication to her studies and how seriously she measured her thoughts and actions. … She couldn’t fail. Up to the standard of her mother, first of all, and then, forever and always, her brother. She wasn’t timid, submissive, or defensive—she was delicate. She had that joy of the very serious. She died without knowing, Luiza said, don’t worry.

Gustavo builds up a picture of Eliana as “serious,” “measured,” and “delicate,” a person who strives to deserve, but then comes Luiza’s statement, which Gustavo strongly suspects is false, to cheapen what comes before. Gustavo didn’t talk, but even if he did, he didn’t cause Eliana to die (which, without Luiza quite saying so, validates the idea that he talked.) This web of confusion, Bracher shows, is the ill harvest of our beautiful lies, of our nice and convenient stories; and probably the chief concern of the novel, which Bracher raises in the book’s remarkable opening paragraph, is how to tell stories that are true:

If it’s possible to have a thought without a word or an image, without time and space—complete, created by me, a revelation of what remains hidden in me (and from me) but suddenly appears, if it could be born so clearly for all to see, without origin, without any effort of breath, of tone of voice, of rhythm or hesitation, without vision even, emerging like a normal thought, or more than a thought: a thing—if such a thing could exist, then I’d like to tell a story.

Notice the structure: If—Then. To tell a true story requires a whole defile of negatory periods: without a word or an image, without time and space, without vision. A true story must subtract what stories are naturally embellished with, down to breath, down to tone, hesitations, and rhythm, the isocolonic seduction of structure and sound. Of course Bracher doesn’t literally subtract these—no Carveresque exercise in minimalism, this. The last words of I Didn’t Talk—“That’s what I’d tell you Cecília, if it were possible.”—frame the story as one long illustration of how to enact the if statement that the book starts out with, how to practice a form of storytelling that is more true.

Bracher’s solution is to take a phenomenological approach: here’s what Gustavo comes across—scraps of his pedagogical writings, a report about a student, his sister Jussara’s notebook, excerpts of his brother José’s “Machadian” memoirs. Bracher’s method is less to strip back these stories as to provide a collage of texts, to introduce the multifold voices Gustavo encounters in his old house and memories and allow the confusion of genuine experience, non-streamlined, to inform readers.

Bracher does imbue Gustavo with a profound suspicion of many stories. He’s suspicious of how certain small towns in Brazil are described as “historic,” pointing out that Sao Paulo isn’t described that way; its recent history is too politically fraught, too bloody. In the second paragraph of the novel he meets a man who says he’s “retired” and a wife who says, “I’m in the navy,” and then uses this chance meeting to explain that our understanding of people is often thrown off by our tendency to categorize, to treat phenomena as needing to be boxed and pigeonholed, so that even when we find out that the lady in white is in the navy and the girl at the bakery has cancer, we recompose our mental boxes around it.

The danger, when confronted by these surprises, is to say to ourselves, oh yes, now I understand, and to halt the process of imagination, deactivating it. To accept navy and cancer, archiving them in pigeonholes called soldier and death, is to discard, as error, care and maternity.

Gustavo starts this discussion of appearance versus reality by averring that “I’m hesitating not because I’m afraid to expose my incoherence.” The risk is that readers conclude that Gustavo’s departures from conventional narrative constitute just that—incoherence. But Gustavo is authorizing himself to analyze, authorizing himself to digress about retired, betrayal, hope, power and other words and ideas that can’t be passed over lightly if the story he wants to tell is to remain true. Bracher also allows Gustavo, by questioning his own narratives, to see a more complex truth about the people close to him such as his brother José, his father, his mother, he and Eliana’s daughter Ligia, and Armando.

When we first meet Ligia, grown-up and in the present day, she is trying to convince her father not to sell his house, and in one of the novel’s more mysterious groupings of phrases, he tells the reader, “I’ve been the victim of an urban bucolic that I don’t like one bit. But my disbelief in the impossible is yielding.” The “impossible,” apparently, is the idea of selling the house and moving out of Sao Paulo. The urban bucolic is Ligia’s romantic attachment to the house and Sao Paulo. But after all that had happened, Gustavo sees nothing in the place that’s romantic anymore. Gustavo’s relationship with Ligia when she was a child, like so much in the novel, is heavily threaded with the theme of storytelling, and when Gustavo describes his visits to the cemetery with Ligia and the therapeutic effects (and subsequent disillusionment) for Ligia of the stories he tells her about the dead, we see both the positive and negative sides of story-telling.

A by-turns humorous, by-turns tragic example of Gustavo’s skepticism of traditional storytelling is his attitude towards the books of his brother José, lengthy passages of whose breathless, transcendental autofiction—written, says Gustavo, in a “Machadian tone … that borders on plagiarism yet somehow remains, paradoxically, his own”—are offered repeatedly in the book, first as comic relief, with Gustavo pointedly interrupting the poetry to comment on

the double bed, a present from Dona Esther,

(that got sold)

and Dona Joana’s curtains in the kitchen window

(no, no, we only had an ugly, narrow ventilation window in our tiny, hot kitchen)

… and then later as sadness, as Gustavo notices how all the pseudonyms, such as “Amado” for Armando or “mother and father” for their mother and father, are fulsome, except for his own; he is reduced in his brother’s writing to G, and described in poetically harsh phrases:

Only G. smelled of coconut soap [Gustavo notices], something that strips away all other scents, a smell of a thing and not the smell of a person. G. doesn’t have a scent, a sound, or a body. He nearly lacks a name. Only an initial. Is that what I was?

But as he reads more of José’s writing, Gustavo begins to see beyond the dishonest prose into José’s isolated upbringing as younger brother, forgotten and picked on due to his weight.

Cecília, the student whose project in the novel’s frame story fills Gustavo with trepidation and prompts the search through old memories and files, is also viewed skeptically by Gustavo. Cecília is a character I recognize (in myself), with strong opinions, a voracious will, and seemingly limitless faith in the power of research:

The girl said she’d just started working at a public school and was taken aback by the “aggressive emptiness” she felt between the teachers. In the novel she wanted to portray a time when education still seemed to have a more explosive meaning, a detonating force—and where this had eventually led. She’d already read books about the history of education, and about the repression of the resistance movements. She’d seen the films and heard the songs, but she said she needed to interview people because her book wasn’t about politics or education, but about something she wasn’t quite certain she fully understood yet.

Gustavo admires Cecília’s boldness, but his admiration pales in comparison to his wariness and resentment at “being the raw material that somebody else sucks dry.” He describes the methods of Cecília—this idealistic young student—as “this shameless inquiry into my life, so transparent, utilitarian.” Most of all he objects to how Cecília’s methods aim at the creation of pseudorealism, a Frankenstein’s monster of fiction with more verisimilitude than veracity:

She said she needed to know the slang from that period, nuances and details that you can’t get from reading books. She admired my ideas, that I understood, but ideas weren’t what she wanted—none of that mattered. She wanted my age. To ferret out words from those years that still lingered in the speech of older men. … I told her I hardly remembered anything and she said she wanted that too—the broken memories, the scrambled view of what remained—everything that was vanishing into the aggressive void.

Cecília’s project is to digest reality into a blender and recompose it in a more polished form; but memory doesn’t work like that. A writer can recreate the details, the words, the nuances, and even the broken memories “vanishing into the aggressive void”—but this digestion of Gustavo’s experience will never actually be Gustavo’s experience, only a slick storified version of it. Gustavo goes so far as to compare Cecília to the men who tortured him:

In the end they knew more about the organizations than the organizations knew about themselves.  This girl is aiming for the same thing. After these interviews she’ll know more about the period than the people who lived through it.

What Bracher dares to argue with both the form and content of I Didn’t Talk is that however much traditional storytelling ideologies may tell us that the ideas of the writer don’t matter, or need to be subsumed to the story—all these little details that are shown—there is something invariably distorted when the reflective mode of Gustavo gets artificially changed into the representational rhetoric of Cecília or José.

Had Cecília or José written Gustavo’s book, it seems likely that they would have focused it on its most sensational part: Gustavo’s arrest and torture. (In fact, the book’s marketing copy—and any number of book reviewers, I might add—would have you believe the torture is the point!) Yet Gustavo refers readers to the example of Graciliano Ramos, who “was jailed by the Estado Novo and never said anything about getting beaten up.” He notes the irony that, after getting out, instead of writing about the oppression of the regime, Ramos instead writes about the oppressions of his family!

This was the oppresive regime the book was about. He’s beaten, but it wasn’t the point of the book. Being beaten isn’t the subject of any book. But the fear of being beaten, that’s huge–the fear of making a mistake, fear of not realizing it, fear of making another mistake, the fear of being afraid.

One senses Bracher’s background as an editor coming out here; what is interesting is the sensational part of the story, but rather how it effects the way that character thinks, including (here’s the kicker) his attitude toward stories, and in fact there is a passage of the book that links Gustavo’s experience of torture with his skepticism of stories.

This is what I thought about as they beat me. What language would be safer: the babble of the homo demens or the precision of homo sapiens–which would hide more? And safer for whom? Was protecting Armando the same as protecting Ligia and Marta? Eliana and Ligia? I had to tell a viable story even through I’d lost control of my speech.

Here as elsewhere in the novel, Bracher shows that stories have consequences, that considerable moral choices are made by the stories we choose to tell. This, I think, is ultimately the realization that allows Gustavo to reconcile himself with the past. Gustavo recognizes that he’s wrong to blame Armando for what happened to him:

I was probably taken prisoner because of him. In cases like these, we all forgot the visible, incontestable cause: the men who had come to my house and took me, the men who went to his hideout and killed him.

However, he also understands that his friend Armando was playing a dangerous game–they all were–and he recognizes the peril of dehumanizing the dehumanizers:

It takes all the strength of my spirit to transform my executioners into animals, not to leave the slightest opening, to discuss nothing, not even Pele. Which is impossible, I never met anyone who couldn’t. And that is how along with fear, shame takes its hold.

He evokes the physicality of the torturers, their very humanness, and quotes Primo Levi discussing the sense of shame that accompanies the commission of injustice, and concludes:

We let it happen, we occasioned this horror. And we continue to occasion, it happens, we are still men.

Definitely a sobering thought to ponder.