Carol Bensimon
TRANS. BY Alex Ladd
everything that remains inside
Like all stories, this one is full of gaps. Twelve members of the Sevi Bensimon family board a ship in Alexandria, Egypt. The oldest was fifty-eight and the youngest, four. That was my mother. Of course, there were no photographs of that momentous event, the expulsion of a family of Sephardic Jews from the cosmopolitan Alexandria of 1957. It must have been a sunny morning, the Mediterranean stretched out like a turquoise bedsheet. On the dock, I imagine people waving goodbye, many of them still without their entry documents into other countries. Some might have hesitated to leave behind the Sunday afternoons at Stanley Beach and the foul sandwiches wrapped in old news. I imagine little Daniele looking out at Alexandria, as Aunt Evelyne lied to her, telling her this was only temporary, running her hand through her niece’s hair.
My grandfather Elie Bensimon, always practical and resigned, was already in the cabin. Hadn’t they always been forced to move from one country to the next, taking down the mezuzah from the door frame before they even knew where they were going? I imagine him staring at the bunk beds and not looking out the hatches. His mother had come from Morocco, his father from Palestine. Elie and his siblings were the first generation born in Egypt, but now they were ready to sail, their laissez-passers in their pockets in their blue leather covers, grim photographs, and the words "valid for one journey only with no return".
At least it wasn’t to a gas chamber.
With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, tensions were mounting between Jews and Arabs in Egypt. In 1952, King Faruk I was surrounded in Montaza Palace by a group of young dissident soldiers, and he was forced into exile. The disillusionment with his reign was high, mainly due to the successive defeats of the Egyptian army at the hands of the Israelis. In 1954, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power after ousting President Naguib—the first after the fall of the monarchy—and he ruled the country until his death in 1970. One of the greatest legacies of the Nasser government was the nationalization of the Suez Canal, in 1956. Nasser’s gesture generated conflict between Egyptians on the one side and the Israelis, British, and the French on the other. During the Suez crisis, which lasted exactly one week and two days, Nasser ordered the expulsion of all foreigners and Jews from the country.
This was how my family arrived in Brazil, moved around like pawns by the Zionist and pan-Arab sentiments of others. They brought with them aluminum pots, a wedding album, clothes, an ornamental ceramic house, a metal plate with a buck in the middle whose antlers branched out in surrealist twists until they filled the entire plate. Both the plate and the ceramic house would later hang on the walls of their unique modernist apartment on Duque de Caxias Street in downtown Porto Alegre, where Julia Sevi Bensimon and Elie Bensimon lived from 1968 until the end of their lives.
I inherited that apartment, and I don’t know what to do with it. This is an essay about a vacant house and everything that remains inside.
Summer of 2018. Sitting inside the empty apartment, I imagine a newspaper ad: “Mad Men meets Porto Alegre. A rare example of modernist architecture. 1968 design in the best spot in Historic Downtown. 200 sq. meters of private space. Marble and jacarandá floors, view of the Guaíba River. Custom furniture, very well preserved. A real time capsule. Make your appointment now!”
I walk slowly through the rooms. There are many closets to open, and as much as one tries to remove all remnants of the past, something is always left behind. Hangers, a salt jar, a drawing by my aunt’s college classmate where the cartoon character Mafalda calls a billy club an “eraser of ideologies.” I remember that drawing when it hung on the wall and how many years it took me to understand it. On the narrow balcony, the dry azalea stumps have not yet been uprooted from their flower beds. The dust covering the living room floor, I imagine, comes from the air pollution outside which seeps through the cracks and settles over everything like a protective film. It is a lot less dust than if there were people living here, slowly and imperceptibly shedding their skin. The apartment doors have been shut for five years.
The first novel that really made an impression on me had a high-rise on the cover and the curious title Martinelli’s Last Mammal. During the 1990s, Marcos Rey, the author, wrote a series of successful young readers’ books with titles such as A Cadaver Listens to the Radio and Five Star Mystery. His less popular Martinelli’s Last Mammal told the story of a man who, during the military dictatorship, hides in an abandoned São Paulo skyscraper. The man, however, is a mere observer, and through clues he finds in the rooms—holes in the wall, inscriptions, a chandelier—he imagines scenes in bygone offices, shady pool halls and luxury penthouses. That book was my first contact with modern-day archeology. I vaguely understood that places can tell us a lot about people and that they usually outlive them. After that, I never looked at a wall or even a chair without discerning something human in its concreteness.
The last day that this apartment was inhabited was on August 12, 2013. On that day, my grandfather was taken away in an ambulance, suffering what a doctor would later classify as a series of small cerebral ischemia, which made him aggressive, frightened, and uncontrollable for several hours. He had suffered from Alzheimer’s, but until then he had been calm, stable, and almost catatonic. He had lived what one might call a good life. After that original trauma—the expulsion from Egypt—about which he barely ever spoke, he had firmly planted his two feet in his new country. He climbed the social ladder exporting Brazilian wood to other continents. He traveled frequently; he took pictures on cruise ships and in front of sprawling buildings in Houston, Texas, wearing what appeared to be tennis attire. In spite of all of these trips, he spent almost all of his life sitting down; so it did not come as a surprise to me that, contrary to so many of the elderly who develop Alzheimer’s, Elie Bensimon never tried to run away from home. That is how I most remember him—motionless, seated on a Landau long bench, sitting on his bed watching a Charles Bronson film, seated in his Eames armchair with a glass of whiskey in hand.
In 1977, Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, one of the main proponents of humanistic geography, proposed that the definition of the word “place” be used in contrast to the word “space”; whereas the former conveyed calm and established values, the latter conveyed the idea of liberty, the future, action. Consequently, space represented movement and place represented pause. “Human beings need space and place,” Yi-Fu Tuan wrote. “Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and adventure, dependence and freedom.”
If we were to explore the material version of these two concepts, the objects that best represent them, we would probably arrive at a car (space) and a home (place). I believe anthropologist Daniel Miller would agree. Miller, whose work analyzes the relationship between modern man and objects, lived part of his life in Trinidad. In studying the habits of the local population, he concluded that the home represented a set of values that typified Trinidadian society, but that the same population that desired to maintain these values “is also increasingly tempted by the allure of the car’s mobility and its promise of freedom from the home and family.”
That reminds me of a family legend regarding a car. It involves an uncle of my grandfather’s whose property was confiscated by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime and who was told he could only leave the country with a very limited amount of Egyptian pounds. He went to the port and pushed his car into the Mediterranean.
Might this grand gesture have marked the end of mobility for the Bensimons? In fact, the family members I have met never had a strong impulse for movement. Establishing roots became a stronger impulse than discovering the world. And the same immobility I associate with my grandfather (it’s curious how in Portuguese the word for ‘immobile’ (imóvel) can also mean ‘apartment,’ like this apartment where I am now and which I can’t seem to get rid of) is also evident in subsequent generations. There are many examples. From my aunt insisting on keeping a video rental store open into the second decade of the new millennium (even though that business model showed signs of crisis in Brazil in the late 90s with the advent of cable TV), to my mother never clearing out my bedroom in the apartment where she currently resides alone—everything from stuffed animals to a Playmobil house, a Hole poster, a music box with a ballerina, all surrounded by green wallpaper with flying birds. Perhaps I cannot claim to be innocent in all of this.
There were three deaths in the immediate family in seven years: my grandmother (a pulmonary embolism after Saturday lunch), my grandfather (the aforementioned series of ischemia), and lastly my aunt (a cancer that began in her uterus). Three of us remain: my mother, my cousin, and me.
We had to deal with an apartment full of things. The first months after the deaths saw three attempts to resolve the situation in a practical manner. First, my mother and my cousin, the direct heirs, hired a garage sales specialist. Like the Guarani hero of the Seven Peoples of the Missions, his name was Sepé Tiaraju. I grabbed a few chairs, a lamp, a backgammon board, and resigned myself to watching Sepé Tiaraju mark the price on everything that could be sold—it turns out everything really can be sold. Professional antique hounds crowded the entrance hall, waiting for the signal that would mark the beginning of the plunder. Then came the amateurs looking for knick-knacks, vintage clothing or worn Persian carpets. We did not stick around to watch. Sepé warned us it would be awkward to watch strangers handling objects that once were so dear to us as if they were merchandise. Still, when two days later, as I walked through Brique da Redenção, a traditional Sunday flea market in Porto Alegre, I came across a familiar red sugar bowl for sale. I was too shocked to buy it back.
Dealing with these objects is part of a delicate process of mourning. “There is a well-established anthropological theory about the role of stuff in relation to death,” writes Daniel Miller in his book Stuff. For Miller, one of the problems with death is that it so often occurs unexpectedly. The solution to this sudden disappearance is to see real, biological death as a signal for the beginning of the rituals that accompany it. And divestment—the act whereby we, the living, let go of the belongings left by the dead, something that can take years—would be part of these postmortem rituals.
My mother and my cousin tried to settle matters in a rush, perhaps because they were insensitive, or perhaps because they were too sensitive and could not cope with the Museum of Death aura that gathers around vacant places. Be that as it may, after the garage sale they both settled into a slow, lazy rhythm. In trying to sell the property, they contacted only one freelance broker whose name was Anaurelino. He taped a banner with a phone number to the living room windows, as if anyone walking down below would ever be interested enough to raise their head to look so high at a soot-covered strip of cloth on the tenth floor of the Corrêa SA Building. After a while, Anaurelino disappeared.
Fast forward five years. Nothing’s changed. Since the garage sale, none of us has set foot in the apartment. Until now, that is. It is the summer of 2018. I am in the apartment alone, sad but also empowered. I have come to settle things once and for all.
The problem is that the dead have not left an easy place to dispossess. Most of the objects have been carted away by strangers to become part of other homes, but there are stacks and stacks of old papers and documents, including old address books (from when phone numbers still had six digits), newspapers announcing Queen's first album or Glória Pires as “Brazil’s newest sex kitten,” Christmas cards sent by sawmills from the state of Paraná in the 60s and 70s, collages made by my aunt when she was in grade school, cassette tapes with the titles written in my grandmother’s tiny handwriting, and a receipt for a jacket purchased in Mexico City in 1976.
I believe we all accumulate seemingly useless objects which, over time, acquire the function of evoking memories. At the bottom of our drawers, there is always an old movie ticket or a never-used napkin with a restaurant logo. The older these things are, the more sentimental meaning they acquire. A note written last week is banal. A handwritten note from thirty years ago—even if it only says “There’s food in the fridge”—unintentionally becomes a relic.
My grandparents’ accumulation of objects was not normal. Okay, they did not pick objects off the streets and bring them into the house, like the hoarders on the Discovery Channel, but they seem to have had great difficulty in sorting through their possessions, or at least in realizing that there was no reason to keep a birthday card from the bank. Was this a consequence of that one-way trip in 1957? Did they believe a home would be more solid if they simply packed the closets full of stuff? Were they even aware of what they were doing? Were they consciously leaving a trail of their lives in financial spreadsheets, magazine clippings and old French language exams? Is it because, in the few letters and postcards I found, they could not give word to the vaguest of feelings, limiting themselves instead to banal subjects of all kinds? Why did they leave behind property tax payment coupon books instead of a simple line expressing their feelings? For a moment, I feel angry. How am I ever going to throw my aunt's childhood drawings in the trash? Why could they simply not accept the passage of time?
One of Orhan Pamuk's most celebrated novels, The Museum of Innocence, chronicles the obsessive love of a privileged resident of Istanbul, Kemal Basmaci, for his cousin, Füsun. After tragedy strikes, Kemal dedicates the rest of his life to the construction of a museum in honor of his beloved. This museum includes such things as 4,213 cigarette butts organized by date, dozens of keys, small porcelain dogs, pieces of bread that have been nibbled on, and toothbrushes. James Lasdun, in a review in the Guardian, wrote: "The compulsive pilfering, along with the museum itself, are certainly an inspired variation on the Proustian idea of recoverable time."
These objects, in their deceiving banality, seemed to touch Pamuk’s heart so much that in April 2012, the author opened a real version of his Museum of Innocence to the public on a quiet street in the Çukurcuma neighborhood in Istanbul. At the time, Pamuk told reporters that the cost of the museum equaled what he received for his 2006 Nobel Prize—about a million and a half dollars. The Museum of Innocence is now another tourist attraction in the city, especially for those familiar with Pamuk’s work, who can hear narrated excerpts from the novel as they browse exhibits bathed in yellow light.
The museum’s main attraction, installed right at the entrance, is undoubtedly the immense panel of twisted cigarette butts that in the novel were discarded by Füsun and discreetly collected by the narrator. “Each one of these had touched her rosy lips and entered her mouth, some even touching her tongue and becoming moist, as I would discover when I put my finger on the filter soon after she had stubbed the cigarette out; the stubs, reddened by her lovely lipstick, bore the unique impress of her lips at some moment whose memory was laden with anguish or bliss, making these stubs artifacts of singular intimacy.”
Orhan Pamuk has interesting ideas about museums and the future of these institutions. In an article published in the Guardian on the occasion of the opening of the Museum of Innocence, the novelist argues that new museums should be less concerned with the history of nations and more with quotidian matters and with the trajectories of individual lives. Pamuk suggests that we are tired of this kind of social, communitarian, national narrative we see in large museums, and that personal histories are far more revealing of our humanity—a literary analogy, he argues, would be the difference between the epic (monumental museums) and the novel (museums centered on individuals). "The future of museums is in our homes," says Pamuk at the end of the article.
Before purchasing this apartment, my grandparents, great-grandparents, great-aunts, and mother all lived in a small hotel on Andrade Neves Street with other Jewish families who had just arrived from Egypt, all receiving financial assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Elie, Julia, and Daniele later rented a small apartment in the Cidade Baixa neighborhood, which my mother hardly remembers. As they learned the language of their new country, my grandmother began teaching French and life improved until they moved to the Edificio Duquesa. I have no mental image of these places inhabited by the Sevi Bensimons before I was born because old family pictures rarely show living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. I do not know what kind of dinner table they had or what was on the walls, other than very probably that plate and that porcelain house brought from Alexandria. What I can imagine very clearly is that one morning in 1965 or 1966, Elie Bensimon leaned out of a window in the back of the building from which he could see the metal dome of the Metropolitan Cathedral. An intense noise had brought him there. They were demolishing some old houses on Duque de Caxias Street.
The empty lot would make way in the coming years for the Edifício Corrêa Sá, a colossus with one eye toward the city center and another toward the placid waters of the Guaíba River. At that time, with his constant visits to the lumbermills of Paraná and to the Itajai Port shipping araucarias that would become broomsticks in Alabama, my grandfather could already dream of a definitive and ideal home.
Even now, empty, after fifty years from the first day it was inhabited, this place still conveys a bold, proud conviction. It was designed by architect Sérgio Montserrat and his wife Maria Alice at a time when interior design was a field almost unknown in Porto Alegre. I do not know how my grandfather met the Montserrats, but he eagerly embarked on this modernist dream, made tangible in the smallest of details: the pivot doors with slats of white lacquered wood; the semi-circle of reinforced concrete surrounding the dinner table, probably inspired by a work by Mies van der Rohe; the central sound system, with little speakers concealed even in the bathroom’s ceiling; cloth panels; the cooktop imported from the United States; the six Herman Miller chairs in the dining room.
One day, in my eagerness to act—to sell the apartment, to have access to part of the money, to briefly live the life of an artist without worries and with no bills to pay—I contacted Marta Peixoto, architect and professor of the College of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. She had been described to me as an authority in modernist interiors. Braced with photographs and an attractive narrative, I managed to convince Peixoto to visit the apartment.
It is late morning and stuffy. We walk from room to room. Marta points out details, making comparisons between a particular design feature and the architecture of today. We've been talking about footboards for ten minutes when we finally sit down in the only place to sit, a little cream sofa in the foyer, which only survived because it is attached to the wall. In front of us, there are mountains of paper and folders of all sizes. That's when I finally understand that this is not action on my part. To act would be to call a high-powered realtor from a large real estate agency. To act would be to be overjoyed at the prospect that this realtor had found a buyer, a young couple for example, regardless of the aesthetic tastes of this buyer. It would mean I would remain overjoyed even if the young couple wanted to demolish everything inside. Even if they wanted to demolish everything which makes this apartment uniquely this apartment. The triple mourning, in other words, would be over.
But what I do with Marta instead is to mull over my sentimental doubts. Like a mother, a wise woman, she tells me to let go. In the end these are only things, although she once had experienced a similar or even more extreme situation, trying to raise money to prevent a city landmark, Casa Fatia, from being turned into a drab beauty salon. We fall silent. I cannot even offer her a glass of water. Then, Martha suddenly says, “No one has ever understood this place. Not now, not even in the sixties.”
No one has ever understood this place. My grandparents must have felt this, that their friends' apartments were different, with their china cabinets, their porcelain sets, their lacy towels. According to philosopher Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness: “In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants.”
For reasons I can only guess, my grandparents were not interested in the kind of furniture or objects that usually comfort us because they are associated with the past and with a kind of simple, warm, and cozy life. In an irony of fate, my aunt, who lived in this apartment until her first marriage, became an antique hunter. In choosing a modernist house, my grandparents were choosing the kind of people they wanted to be: a family who looked favorably upon the changing times, who believed in science, in technology, who brightly looked forward to the future.
We were never as good as this house. We were all imperfect. Elie and Julia became hoarders of their own history, leaving behind traces of everything they had done in the most objective sense—buy things, pay bills, travel, run a company, prepare French lessons. The daughters, Daniele and Vivian, each rejected the modernist ideal in her own way: my mother, who tried to justify all her problems from one past fact, the expulsion from Alexandria–the sun setting on the deck of the ship, the girl who ripped the trinkets from her bracelet when she was looking away; my aunt, who searched among the antique shops of Fernando Machado Street on Saturday mornings, in an attempt perhaps to recover a past that had never been transmitted to her by her parents.
As for me, I am also guilty of preserving this museum. Guilty of writing. The house faces me and radiates an ideal that none of us could reach.
Carol Bensimon is a Brazilian writer. In 2012 she was selected by Granta as one of the Best of Young Brazilian Novelists. Her novel We All Loved Cowboys was published in the US by Transit Books. Her latest work, O Clube dos Jardineiros de Fumaça, received the Jabuti Award in 2018. She lives in Mendocino, California.
Alex Ladd is a literary translator and theater producer residing in New York. Recent translations include The Mystery of Rio by Alberto Musa (Europa Editions); Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto (Europa Editions); Life As It Is by Nelson Rodrigues (Host Publications); The Asphalt Kiss by Nelson Rodrigues (Nova Fronteira, 2007) and Nestor Capoeira’s The Little Capoeira Book (North Atlantic Books).