The Whole Twisted Thing Is True
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By Marshall Shord
An old woman named Isabel Kremz is dying in a hospital room in São Paulo. Family and friends come and go from her bedside. Among them is her grandson Benjamin.
Benjamin is an orphan. His mother, Elenir, died giving birth to him. His father, Isabel’s youngest son Teo, died when Benjamin was still young. Isabel raised Benjamin for a time, but he ran away and has kept his distance since.
Shortly before the opening of Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio, Benjamin’s aunt Leonor shares with him documents she has found in Isabel’s apartment. They reveal that, in the words of Teo’s childhood friend Raul, “The whole twisted thing is true . . . your mother, Elenir, was married to your grandfather and had a child by him, a child who then died—the first Benjamin.”
The second Benjamin is soon to be a father (the boy will be named Antonio), and this disturbing news brings to the surface the trauma of his own childhood. He confronts the three people who know some or all of the story of his parentage: Isabel, Raul, and his late grandfather Xavier’s college friend Haroldo.
In Bracher’s first novel to be published in English, I Didn’t Talk, she uses the force of a single damaged voice to describe the physical and mental toll of living under Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1964 until 1985. The violence inflicted upon the narrator’s body and the ghosts of the dead haunt his story. I Didn’t Talk’s ultimate effect is to make the reader feel as if she is witness to unusually eloquent testimony delivered before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
With Antonio, Bracher revisits the same time period, but focuses her attention on the sordid affairs of an upper-class family protected from the crimes of the regime. The results are more telenovela than sobering documentary. No true historical perspective issues from Antonio’s three narrators. Their tales concern only their privileged circle and are addressed to a single member of the family. The reader is but an interloper from the world outside their bubble. What she overhears are the apologies, interpretations, and justifications of three people attempting to make sense of a past in which the sins of the father are repeated by the son, but to a greater, more perplexing degree.
Raul goes on to tell Benjamin, “For your grandfather, Elenir was Lili, and to your father she was Leninha.” Xavier Kremz is in his last year of college in 1950 when he meets Elenir, a young (fifteen or sixteen) and brilliant medical student from the interior of the country. Elenir is a forty-five year old doctor in 1979 when Teo is admitted to her hospital. Xaiver and Elenir marry quickly and she is soon pregnant. Elenir treats Teo’s illness, which leads to romance. Xavier and Elenir’s son, whom they name Benjamin, dies a month after a difficult birth, because, in Haroldo’s judgment, “Elenir was too young, her body not fully formed.” She disappears shortly after the child is buried. Almost thirty years later, Elenir wants her second son to be named Ishmael. Teo names him Benjamin.
Xavier becomes crazed with grief at the loss of his son. For the rest of his life, he says that he has five children: the four he will go on to have with Isabel and—“forever and above all else”—his Benjamin.
Teo barely mourns Elenir’s death. He finds work and lodging at a large farm near Elenir’s house. But, in a few years, he falls ill again and is no longer able to care for himself or Benjamin. Isabel, now a widow and a university professor, brings them back to her apartment in São Paulo, where she cares for them both.
Although Elenir is the focal point of Antonio’s two great tragedies (the first Benjamin’s death and her own), she is ultimately treated by Bracher and the narrators as no more than a mechanism upon which the plot turns. As Isabel tells Benjamin early in the novel, there just isn’t enough space for her story. Attention is lavished, instead, upon Xavier and Teo. Their lives act as twin lighthouses for Benjamin, warning him from the rocky shores of their fates. About to introduce a new life into this world, Benjamin can never forget that he has inherited more than a name of some distinction. His family’s legacy is one of madness and violence.
Xavier is a parasite on his family, which Haroldo notes. After the death of his first son, Xavier spends time in a mental institution (where, at one point, he masturbates in front his mother), then kicks around Europe for a bit. Upon returning to Brazil, he reconnects with Isabel, a woman he knows from his social circle, and they start a family. While Isabel raises their four children and goes back to school, Xavier squanders what little money he earns as an art critic by publishing tawdry paperbacks and staging dramatic “happenings.” In Isabel’s words, Xavier “frittered away our inheritance on insane luxuries.” Yet those around him, even Isabel, excuse his erratic and impulsive behavior. He is a clown and a provocateur; a source of entertainment.
But Xavier’s lack of substantive engagement with the world is an act of violence against his family. Isabel has to shoulder the weight of the responsibility he rejects, denying herself fulfillment for decades. His four surviving children are left floundering in his sea of “contradictory expectations,” never sure how he will react to their ambitions. When Xavier passes away from emphysema in his fifties, Teo skips the funeral. Isabel confesses to Benjamin, “I was relieved when he died.”
Teo’s fate is the more obvious tragedy. Much of Antonio is taken up with the fall of this golden boy. He begins life as a bright, independent, and exceptionally talented child. At seventeen, shortly after he learns from Xavier of the existence of the first Benjamin, he forgoes college to move to the backlands of the neighboring state of Minas Gerais. There he will live and work among the rural poor. Raul visits his friend a year later and describes Teo as being “in detox, ridding himself of the vocabulary and the notion that he was special.”
Whatever it is that Teo purges from himself, he replaces it with something much uglier. Raul describes his best friend at this stage in his life as a “poseur,” and finds in him “an unwavering self-absorption.” On a boat trip with a group of school friends, Teo gives a woman a black eye, abets a sexual assault, and kills a man. He then disappears into the outback for several years, in which time he gains and loses love, has a child, and toils as a field hand before resurfacing.
Back in São Paulo, after being retrieved from the farm by Isabel and recovering from his illness, Teo is ultimately consumed by madness. He becomes absent and alienated from his friends and family, even his son. He goes missing from the apartment for long stretches, spits on himself, rants incoherently, and fills his room with trash. No one knows what to do with him. That is, until he throws a violent fit in Isabel’s apartment and Haroldo has him committed. (It was Haroldo, also, who had Xavier committed). Eventually, Teo escapes the institution and winds up living in a favela. There, he teaches poor children to read, only to die from ingesting contaminated water while trying to rescue his neighbors in a flood. Lest anyone mistake such a development for redemption, Isabel sets the record straight: “He doesn’t want to be a good teacher. He isn’t concerned about how well they could read or write. I think he’s resolved to become some kind of saint.” Teo is, in the end, a parasite, just like his father: “And they’re so hungry, all of them . . . Teodoro is hungry for their hunger.”
It is fairly clear that Teo was trying desperately to avoid following in Xavier’s footsteps. He had no interest in being either a man of intellectual refinement with little to show for it or a demanding and unpredictable father. It is also likely, as Raul suggests, that learning of his dead half-brother opened some new channel of possibility in his young mind. But in leaving behind everything that anchored him to reality, Teo hastens his own demise. Haroldo tells Benjamin, “Your father went too far and too fast.” Moreover—wittingly or unwittingly; Bracher leaves it tantalizingly unclear—the farther he gets from Xavier, the closer Teo comes to replicating the family his father might have had if the first Benjamin had lived. But it slips through his fingers just as quickly as it did Xavier’s.
Antonio’s remarkable final section acts as a palate cleanser after two hundred pages stuffed with the failures and misdeeds of privileged men. Deploying the third person, Bracher describes in grim detail the surprisingly intimate act of caring for the body of the recently deceased. At the same time, she suggests the existence of a parallel universe by foregrounding Isabel’s mostly ignored other children and their offspring. Their interactions suggest a depth of familial tenderness for each other largely absent from the rest of the novel.
But this glimpse is very brief. Because the narrators cannot turn their attention from Xavier and Teo, neither can the reader. So these two men’s intertwined fates blot out the many forces at play in the Kremz family history.
Of course, tragedy is the font from which springs literature’s greatest stories. Antonio would be a far less compelling novel if the narrators had chosen to air the dirty laundry of any of the other characters. Yet Bracher leaves the reader in the presence of the boring ones—the ones who remained offstage to build stable and loving families. In the end, they get to walk away, to continue on with their quiet, happy little lives while the wreckage of their intoxicating relatives is swept from the stage.
Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.
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