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.

This week on the Granta Podcast, Best of Young Brazilian Novelist Vinicius Jatobá and his translator Jethro Soutar talk to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the challenges of rendering a story described by Melanie Rae Thon as ‘mesmerizing, incantatory . . . an eighteen-page lyric poem, a single sentence spanning generations, a broken-open elegy vast enough to be a novel.’ They also discuss the role of China in the story and the peculiar and intimate bond between author and translator.

Jethro Soutar and Vinicius Jatobá in the Granta basement.

Vinicius Jatobá was born in Rio de Janeiro. He has written criticism for Estado de S. Paulo, O Globo and Carta Capital. He has also contributed to the anthology Prosas Cariocas and to the film guide 1968 Cinema Utopia Revolução!. Jatobá has written and directed several short films, including Alta Solidão (2010) and Vida entre os mamíferos (2011). Currently, he is at work on his first novel, Pés descalços, and completing Apenas o vento, a collection of short stories, from which ‘Still Life’ (‘Natureza-morta’) is taken. 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 – Vinicius Jatobá is introduced by previous Best of Young American Novelist, Melanie Rae Thon.

You see the house collapsing in disrepair, dust suspended against a fine thread of sunlight, proud furniture cracking and losing its exuberance and shine, the quilt on the bed becoming a filthy cloak, and you think that looking at this house for too long will destroy you, and so you turn, you listen, you imagine, and a woman is speaking, remembering her dream of the house before it was built, believing in dreams, a place where she and her beloved Paulo might be eternally happy, where they might have children and live countless days of joy, but the house insists, you see it sinking, even the FOR SALE sign now cracked and rusted, and Paulo begins to speak his dream of leaving Vera, his madwoman, his pregnant wife, knowing he never will, fearing her swollen stomach might burst and flood the house . . .

Mesmerizing, incantatory, Vinicius Jatobá’s ‘Still Life’ is an eighteen-page lyric poem, a single sentence spanning generations, a broken-open elegy vast enough to be a novel. One of the wonders of this gorgeously evocative story is the elegant movement between sensibilities, the voices of Vera and Paulo and Pedro erupting as if from a single capacious consciousness, that mysterious second person – you who are looking at the house in its inevitable dilapidation, you who might be reader and storyteller, or the dead returned who see how memory dissipates as objects decay. You might be the grandson who steals Paulo’s journals one at a time and secretly returns them, learning the history of his people in fragments; yes, you are endlessly mutable, a stranger, perhaps, anyone who passes a house long abandoned and begins to wonder, to imagine lives lost, dreams destroyed, you who begins to grieve her own inevitable diminishments, but who also remembers the light, each small gift, each miracle, each blessing, who hears Pedro whisper: man’s ingenuity made the bomb but it also made the lamp.

Yes, everything dies: the toads in the mud, the dog, your child, the madwoman, your wife, and yes, even you will die, and the house too will go back to the dust from whence it came, but the mind, the expansive, loving consciousness that moves around and beyond us, the spirit that does not, as Martin Buber says, circulate like blood in a single body, but passes instead like breath between us, this unbounded, exuberant, curiously permeable consciousness continues through our capacity to gaze at a ruined house and hear whisperings, songs of the dead, their revelations and their praise, their impossible hopes, their devastating beauty. – Melanie Rae Thon, Best of Young American Novelist, 1996.

Still Life

You see the house and its time, the house and the house alone, though your secrets, your fears and silences still exist there, locked away behind the denseness of the closed doors and shuttered windows, your fears and silences desperate for an opening to escape a winter that seems eternal, to leave behind the low rumble of trapped accumulation to which they are held captive and ownerless, and you see, you see the house, you don’t flee from it or ignore it, you see that the only thing that seems to move in its atmosphere is dust suspended against a fine thread of sunlight, that time itself sleeps lazily on the stupefied clocks, you see the proud furniture relinquishing its strength to despondency, cracking and losing its exuberance and shine, the quilt on the silent bed becoming a filthy cloak where any trace of the smell of its owners is lost amid the dusty fury, the grime, the tears on the ceiling and the weeping in every corner

at first he didn’t want to buy the plot and thought the whole thing absurd but I argued that nowhere in the world was so perfect for us to live as here, only here could we be eternally happy, as I’d dreamed of since childhood, and who doesn’t want happiness, we’d build the house of our dreams here and live out the countless days that lay ahead of us, and Paulo just looked at me, silent, aloof, proud, his eyes condemning me as if it were inappropriate to want to be happy here, thinking me mad and crazy and fragile, and I loved him for it, even for that, for making me feel simple in his arms, paralysed under the stare of his dark eyes, all those cold nights together, squeezed against each other, submerged under the covers, yes, your madwoman, I’m your madwoman, I said in silence, and he there, staring at me as if buying a plot of land in a place as boggy and humid as Irajá was something really quite stupid, Paulo always so intelligent and learned and me so ignorant, as he would say shamefaced to his friends, forgive her for not speaking properly and not knowing anything about politics, yes, a little airhead, and I know I’ve only ever really understood my sewing machine, which was all I had in life besides God, my dear God, that machine has brought me pleasure, bricks and mortar, the two of us alone night after night, doing battle, dreaming, accomplices, keeping secrets that we still share, I knew it wasn’t stupid to buy that plot and I said come on, man, are you made of sugar, for Paulo was always so clean and perfumed and he hated mud and dirt and always wiped his feet on the mat, even though the mat was so filthy it was like not wiping them, he wiped them more for the gesture, he furnished himself with gestures, and he went mad whenever his son, all smiles, took the dog into the living room, years later, when the sludge had gone and the house existed and the neighbours had multiplied, and then I went further, I said come on, man, this is where I want to have children, I said, and he ended up giving in, though not without first thinking it was all madness, a godforsaken shithole with no tarmac or anything out there in the back of beyond, but it was a simple matter of me having headaches for weeks and weeks until he changed his mind, feeling nauseous whenever he came close to me in bed in our little rented room in Cascadura and there I’d be, hearing the deep breathing of my heart, and there I’d be, feeling the smooth fabric of my nightdress touched along the line of my buttocks, and even then I had terrible headaches that only stopped when he finally gave in, I who was always excessively pretty and who always got the men worked up on the tram or the tramps in the streets where I walked, restless, as if I were inappropriately clothed, feeling myself naked in front of everyone but keeping a calm face for I was Paulo’s woman, the man I love and the father of my child

You can also see Vinicius Jatobá at the following events:

Translating Culture: From Copacabana to Clerkenwell
14 November, 7 p.m., Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA. £7/£5 concessions, tickets include a copy of Granta 121. Purchase tickets here or at the door on the night of the event.

Granta magazine introduces the next generation of Brazilian writers to the Free Word Centre for an evening of short readings with Best Young Brazilian Novelists Vinicius Jatobá, Michel Laub and Tatiana Salem Levy. Then, award-winning translator Margaret Jull Costa and Michel Laub will explore bringing Laub’s short story ‘Animals’ into English with Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey.

The Bath Launch
15 November, 7 p.m., BRLSI (Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution) 16–18 Queen Square Bath, Avon BA1 2HN. RSVP to events@granta.com. Free.

Granta’s online editor Ted Hodgkinson introduces Vinicius Jatobá and translator Jethro Soutar with readings and conversation about being chosen as a Best of Young Brazilian Novelist. In association with Bath Spa University’s Creative Writing Department.