To coincide with the launch this week of Granta’s latest issue, Betrayal, we asked contributors from the issue to define the word. Following this piece we asked our Best of Young Brazilian Novelists for their definitions.

Antônio Xerxenesky

Betrayal. For me, the word comes from Betrayal at Krondor. The first time I heard this word in its English form was when I had to install the many floppy disks that contained the RPG (role playing game) Betrayal at Krondor on my 386 PC. The year was 1994, and I was ten years old. I had to check an English/Portuguese dictionary: ‘Betrayal’ meant traição. So that was betrayal: in a magical realm, assassins and elves were involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the king. Or something like that. With my poor knowledge of English at the time, I had to forge a story in my mind. Betrayal had nothing to do with being cheated by your girlfriend or deceived by your best friend. It had nothing to do with finding yourself utterly alone for a moment. Nothing to do with living in a country where, not so long ago, the military took over and trampled over the freedom of citizens. No. Betrayal had to do with pixels. Pixels and kings. Oh, and goblins too. Yeah, definitely goblins.

Emilio Fraia

Foie Gras

I got the feeling, quack, that we’ve seized the castle, quack-quack, that the banging of pans is ours, that we’re in more than we’ve ever been, that this one at the kitchen, knife in his hand, quack, he’s gonna help us, yes, that these onions and tomatoes, quack-quack, all of that, is our plan working out.

Julián Fuks

Betrayal, you say, and I immediately conceive a precise ensemble of damned acts – the impeccable wife disappearing into the night, the stout pocket of the politician, the soldier deserting his country, the mother abandoning her child. It’s not my fault, I tell myself. That’s what the world taught me in its eloquent pedagogy, made of rules and rites, illustrated with news and fictions. Thereby I exempt myself for a while, I breathe quietly, and allow myself to forget the minor or grander betrayals the world doesn’t damn – the husband misplacing his caress, the honest guy minimizing his taxes, the country that condemns its citizens to exile, the stubborn and incessant cry of a baby.

Vinicius Jatoba

And there’s no other treason worse, said the old man, than not to meet at the other side of your own lengthy struggle the face your dream promised you that you would have, and you should have, as you recall, almost daily, the path chosen, and it keeps coming, the treason, the broken promise, each time your own face stares at you from the other side of the mirror. And you live your life as if from the other riverbed, said the old man, every step misleading, and reinforcing, until there’s an end and you’re old because the end is being old, and you can cherish conversations with young lads, who listen because thanks to the arrogance of being young, they assure themselves they will make it all right, so they listen to avoid ending their life as the old man, they proclaim while listening respectfully, as if they care. But you will fail too, said the old man, you will fail. Not because of me or any other person you know or you will ever meet, said the old man. You will fail as while being so sure you deserve better, you are your own snake, my dear boy, like everyone else. You will fail.

Vanessa Barbara

Betrayal is not when your husband spends a few nights with a girl you know, nor when he returns home and you ask happily if it was fun (‘yes’, he said, ‘very much’). Betrayal is when he talks about it to a bunch of his friends, including some of your closest, and everyone knows the details while you spend forty-two days trying so hard to find out what the hell is going on. Betrayal is when the one who is supposed to protect you decides to hurt you and there’s no one left to speak in your defence. It’s when men are brave enough to brag about their acts to one another, but no boldness is left to speak frankly to their wives. Even when we beg. Betrayal is when you left home to live on your own and within two weeks he’s sleeping with other women in the bed you bought together – your picture still hanging on the wall, smiling blankly at your substitute.

Laura Erber

A fly betrays nothing and nobody, neither a frog nor a hippopotamus. Its happiness and consolation are different. But we who are animals that talk and are full of confusion and false promises betray day after day as soon as we say ‘I’. This is such a daily betrayal that it isn’t even noticed. Who cares? But nothing is as inconstant and unreliable as pronouns. And if to err is human and if it’s wrong to betray, then betraying our own inconstancy is the most tortuous path towards our daily madness. That’s more or less what Wittgenstein meant when he said that the language of each day is in itself true madness.

Miguel Del Castillo

There is an acceptable kind of betrayal, one that people crave (mostly in the subconscious): architectural betrayal. In a faithful marriage, partners often have confidence to show each other even the undesirable parts of themselves (which theoretically the other is willing to deal with). In good architecture, though, there is betrayal. You don’t want to know what buildings really are like underneath. You don’t want to participate in their conspiracies. Some architects are still worried about the so-called ‘structural truth’ (buildings should show how they stand: pillars, beams etc.). But nobody wants to live inside a Pompidou. It is nice to go there once in a while and see how it all works, but it may be tough to go to Pompidou-like bathrooms every day. Picture yourself seeing your flush going down through transparent tubes, or imagining if electricity is really making its way through the pipes above. No, what you need is to know that everything is clean, beautiful, working. This is not merely a domestic issue: to be ‘truthful’ in architecture proves most of the times to be uninventive and plain, creating lifeless constructions. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor says buildings are like violins: you don’t see their inside structures, you might not even have a clue on how they were made, but the sound they make touches you deep inside. In architecture, this sound, he says, is called atmosphere. Architecture’s greatest betrayal.

Photo by Markles55.

Antônio Xerxenesky was born in Porto Alegre. His first novel, Areia nos dentes, was published in 2008 and his collection of short stories, A página assombrada por fantasmas, in 2011. Xerxenesky has collaborated with several newspapers, magazines and websites, including Estado de S. Paulo, Suplemento de Pernambuco and Blog do IMS. In 2007, his short story ‘O desvio’ was adapted for television by the screenwriter Fernando Mantelli. English translations of his work can be found at wordswithoutborders.com and the online edition of Two Lines magazine. ‘Tomorrow, upon Awakening’ (‘Amanha, quando acordar’) is taken from his story collection. Here, as part of an ongoing series on the twenty authors from The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists issue – which was first published in Portuguese by Objectiva – Antônio Xerxenesky is introduced by previous Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelist Rodrigo Hasbún.

The signs of things to come, of everything the future has in store for us, are usually there already, in the air, but it frightens us to look at them. Perhaps because it’s comforting to think we’re in control – or maybe because not knowing helps us feel more alive – we ignore those signs in order to continue inhabiting the present. In the fragility of this present, in its vertigo and its uncertainty, ‘Tomorrow, upon Awakening’ takes place.

It is the last day of 2010, and the protagonist, a nineteen-year-old boy, has rented a house at the beach so he can be alone with his girlfriend. For him, those hours will be his entry not only into a new year, but also into the year when he’ll finally reach his twenties, adulthood. All possibilities are open, for them and for us, the readers: the night may be memorable or disastrous, mind-blowing or utterly forgettable. With remarkable subtlety, Xerxenesky leads us through that long awaited night, when even the most insignificant details become decisive, and everything is or could be a threat, a promise, a symbol (‘and he more than anybody else needs to define his symbols for the year to come, his year of change’). Gradually, lasting certainties emerge, along with the unintentional and painful confrontation with those signs of the future that are so difficult to face. An intense, luminous, moving ending also comes – one of the most beautiful I’ve read in years.

Seven pages are enough, at times, for life to become something else. Seven pages are also enough, the seven that make up this story, to discover Xerxenesky’s extraordinary talent. – Rodrigo Hasbún, Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists, 2010. Translated by Alfred Mac Adam.

Tomorrow, upon Awakening

There is a clear distinction to be made between Christmas celebrations and those of the new year. The former are family occasions, or, for those without family, sad get-togethers with friends (and even then only close friends, the ones regarded as family). But New Year celebrations, being held in a spirit of renewal, an atmosphere of ‘from now on everything will be different’, of ‘put it all behind you, here comes 2011’, are all about good riddance, and nobody really wants to celebrate that sort of thing with people as permanent as family. Seeing in the new year is a ritual to be undertaken with friends, lovers, casual acquaintances. The city of Porto Alegre empties out completely, leaving only beggars in the streets, while the lower-middle, middle-middle and upper-middle classes flock to the Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina beaches, where they celebrate the turn of the year as if it were a carnival compressed into a single day. Which explains all those crazy stories that do the rounds, like: ‘I screwed two chicks at New Year,’ or: ‘Then we all went skinny-dipping,’ or: ‘I took acid and lay on the sand and watched the fireworks.’

He, for his part, had had no such experiences. At nineteen years of age he felt he had missed out on every opportunity for a good time, breaking free, getting some kicks. He had never even travelled on his own (that is, without his family). So in the new year he would make sure things were different, and now was a good time to start. The way he spent this New Year’s Eve would be a symbol of what was in store, an introductory ritual to the adventures he would have in his twenties, making up for his boring teens and a childhood which, if not sad, had certainly been dreary.

Translated by Ina Rilke.