Beatrice Bracher, Antonio (New Directions Press, 2020). Translated by Adam Morris.

Beatrice Bracher's Antonio is a novel that revolves around secrets.

Here’s how New Directions describes it:

Benjamin, on the verge of becoming a father, discovers a tragic family secret involving patrimony and determines to get to the root of. Those most immediately involved are all dead, but their three closest confidantes are still alive—Isabel, his grandmother; Haroldo, his grandfather’s friend; and Raul, his father’s friend—and each will tell him a different version of the facts.

By collecting these shards of memories, which offer personal glimpses into issues of class and politics in Brazil, Benjamin will piece together the painful puzzle of his family history. Like a Faulkner novel, Beatriz Bracher’s brilliant Antonio shows the expansiveness of past events and the complexity of untangling long-buried secrets.

The protagonist wants to learn more about his father's past and early death; the novel is structured by the protagonist's presentation of recorded testimony of family members and friends describing their memories.

First to speak is the protagonist's paternal grandmother, who tries to convey the mystery of her son's love for the protagonist's mother, who was not of their social or economic class. "It was like my father was telling me a secret I already knew," the grandmother says, "He was lifting the veil from something I didn't recognize, but always knew existed."

Something I didn't recognize but always knew existed evokes the weight of a family secret and its surrounding silences. The recognized thing, once articulated, brings new silences; the dimensions of silence expand to include remembered clues, hints, allusions.

Your uncle tells you a secret you suspected . . . Maybe you are at a cabin, and all the adults are drunk. You are the oldest child; the one who knows they are drunk, the one deprived of the security experienced by younger children who still imagine adults as god-like. The secret changes how you understand time, place, the parents in it. When you remember the secret, you remember the scent of whiskey, the aunt crying in a red armchair, the men outside on the porch, laughing, another relative screaming at her mother, who is carrying dirty dishes from one room to another, seventies rock playing in the background. You know what you know about family, and it silence keeps family alive.

As a writer, I’m interested in how we use various forms of punctuation to evoke silence. Bracher, for example, uses parentheses to set silence apart from connection, to reveal how silence can withhold acknowledgement or intimacy. When the grandmother goes to visit Xavier, the protagonist's father, in a sanatorium, where she helped have him committed for madness, Bracher lets the grandmother address Xavier as he sits on the bed:

But lately you've been a bit forgetful. (Silence.) It's probably nothing. (Silence.) Water under the bridge. (Silence.) I recommend the Psalms. In our moments of affliction, direct conversation with God is always soothing. (Silence.) Sometimes, even without our understanding it, just repeating the words, the sound of them is calling, Illuminating, bringing consolation. (Silence.) I also recommend Saint Paul's letters to the apostles.

The mother has come to bring her son home, to make amends which, she believes, can reestablish normalcy, but Xavier's silence resists this entreaty: the parentheses marks the space where a response should exist, and expectation is turned upside down. Silence, here, is not a form of speaking or communication - it is an enclosure, a fence, a closing off.

Bracher's novel never gives us much interior access to Ben, the son to whom all these explanations are addressed-- the protagonist never narrates or responds to his relatives' statements. He merely transcribes. He is acted upon by the past, a tabula rasa. It's not really about how this information effects or changes him.

We’re never really given a full picture of the family life at the center of Antonio; we have an idea, and we’re given details from which we can extrapolate: the size of their home, the sort of projects they each had when they lived there, how Isabel’s life changed when she had to leave the house, and so on. It’s through these details that Bracher renders the fall of an entire class, or an entire way of life. There is still an upper class in Brazil—it just doesn’t look like that anymore. This is the sort of cultural memory that the author is trying to reconstruct and memorialize, because that class was so instrumental in all the political drama that characterized the national experience of the 1960s and 70s.

Adam Morris, in an interview on his translation of Antonio

[Aside: I felt as if the female characters were there to help men get out of their "badness"--or to help them get into it.]

The question of authenticity in this book appears on multiple levels, and Bracher searches for it among Brazil's intellectual classes. The novel excels by refusing to answer its own questions: the ghosts remain, and some are more legible than others.

Read an excerpt from Antonio, courtesy of Caesura.

On the topic of secrets in families, I thought of a scene in Barbara Comyn's novel, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (NYRB Classics) where the narrator, Sofia, wakes up in a hospital with scarlet fever. She discovers her baby girl is missing. When Sofia asks to see the baby, nurses say the baby also has scarlet fever, but Sofia will see her soon—as soon as she gets a little stronger.

Sofia's estranged husband comes to visit her in the hospital, and she asks him to go to see the baby, or to help her convince the nurses to let her see the baby. The husband tells her, bluntly, that the baby died three days after she was admitted to the hospital.

"Somehow I've known she was dead all the time," the narrator intrudes, " I'd hardly dared to ask after her in case they told me the truth, and now I knew it and there was no escape."

The problem with the secret is that it can be protective: there are truths which make it impossible for us to continue living the same life. This sort of secret troubles Jenny Erpenbeck's harrowing novel, The Book of Words (New Directions). For the adopted daughter to know the crimes of her father would require her to become orphaned again, alienated from the home she has known. The end of the secret makes it impossible to continue as the self who did not know.

Secrets have this power to reconfigure us in our minds: in Antonio, for example, what Benjamin learns about the history of mental illness in his family becomes a form of lineage. The sins of the fathers may be genetic pre-conditions; the crimes of the mothers may begin as warm blankets, protective forms of silence.

The secret changes the world in which one can exist, and it changes the self as known by the world.

Better not to know, the babas say of certain things that happen in families. Ignorance is easier.

In our minds, the self who did not know maintains a relationship with innocence. And innocence, like ignorance, has the patina of freedom.