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.

Julián Fuks was born in São Paulo and is the son of Argentinian parents. He has worked as a reporter for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and as a reviewer for the magazine Cult. Fuks is the author of Fragmentos de Alberto, Ulisses, Carolina e eu (2004) and Histórias de literatura e cegueira (2007), which was a finalist for the Telecom Award as well as the Jabuti Award. His latest novel, Procura do romance (2011), was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature and longlisted for the Telecom Award. ‘The Dinner’ (‘O jantar’) is a new story. 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 – Julían Fuks is introduced by previous Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelist Pola Oloixarac.

Sebastián, a former child who grew up in Brazilian exile, returns to what lingers of his Buenos Aires home. He finds himself on difficult ground: coldly received by his porteña aunt, no cousins to talk to, even his notion of Buenos Aires comes in as essentially literary (when referring to the city, he quotes a poem by Jorge Luis Borges). Time and memory are the playing fields where Julián Fuks essays an interesting, newfangled take on the gothic past of South America.

When we met for coffee in Buenos Aires, Julian told me that his parents, two doctors, fled the dictatorship in 1978 after the kidnap and torture of the chief of the psychiatric hospital where they worked (rumours had escalated that the hospital had become ‘too progressive’); the couple knew they were next. Years later, when Julián was a little boy, they tried to settle back, but Argentina was at the brink of a new catastrophe (the economic crisis of ’89), and the family went back to Sao Paulo. Julian’s favourite writer is the Argentine, Paris-based, prolific and late Juan José Saer. It is a rare pleasure to read Saer’s influence through the Brazilian music of Julián Fuks’ language, with his keen and almost obsessive eye for detail. A gauzy finesse that shines thru his debut novel, Procura do romance, where Sebastián’s story, in his Brazilian-Spanish idiom, expands to a larger philosophical voyage.

In ‘The Dinner’, Sebastián endures the words of his Argentine aunt, a dry woman who hates Argentina’s president Cristina Kirchner and defends the dictatorship leaders. In a stance that would enamour Cristina’s hardcore supporters, Sebastián vindicates the Argentine politics of memory, and though one can disagree with the way the 1970s tragedy has been politically abused, Fuks’ fresco of prime right-wing-Argentine-speak, its sheer refusal of empathy despite democracy, is quite exact. The crescendo of the political argument becomes surreal when The Worst Argentine Nightmare appears in the room. Evil remains unscathed; even after exile, he never really left. – Pola Oloixarac, Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, 2010

The Dinner

Ensconced in the entrance hall that grows more and more claustrophobic, Sebastián is an adult, fully grown, a respectable and solemn man. Well-defined muscles, rigid features, a bottle of wine held tightly in his fist. A deceptive outward appearance, for beneath the almost immaculate surface, this respectable man is a wreck, a body in shambles, an adolescent reincarnated with all his insecurities, all his fears renewed. He can imagine a drop of sweat running down his cheek, shattering his aura of tranquillity, undermining the composure of the face that appears in the spyhole.

He doesn’t wait for very long, but the person coming to the door isn’t announced by the sound of footfall, and the silence deprives time of any measurement. In an instant the darkness is undone by light, and in his eyes, now shut, pale circles of luminosity begin bursting. ‘Hola, Sebastián,’ a monotonous voice greets him without affection or enthusiasm, and the hand that grabs him by the shoulder is firm and pulls him close, and the lips that smack a kiss on his cheek are crinkled. His eyes now open, his skin bristling, his body leaning a second too long against this woman who is no longer embracing him, the assault on his senses is too diverse to assimilate. He takes a step back to get a good look at her, returns to an erect posture and examines her face in uncertain recognition. He knows this face or will come to know it. The features are those of his mother but with more pronounced lines, the features his mother’s face will gain one day, in the near future, except for those unruly eyebrows and the wrinkles radiating from her lips, signs of her famous sternness of character.