A Distant Father Read online

  Praise for A Distant Father

  “It is amazing how, in so few words, Skármeta is brilliantly able to paint the soul’s complexities and turn the world into a less uncertain place. With exquisite prose, as faint as a sigh, Skármeta weaves a fun and ironic story of the tortuous road toward maturity.”

  —FÉLIX J. PALMA, author of the New York Times best seller The Map of Time

  “In this spare, but emotionally rich and big-hearted new novella A Distant Father, the prize-winning Chilean author Antonio Skármeta accomplishes his usual magic of rendering with profound dignity the dilemmas of the human heart. Jacques, a young schoolteacher in the small village of Contulmo is on the cusp of a defining moment, a crisis of identity and manhood that unfolds in a masterfully told story. Desire confronts Jacques with life choices that present a clash of values: to stay with his beloved mother in their rustic idyll; to reunite with his abandoning Parisian father and pursue a more cosmopolitan life; or to explore a passionate relationship with the lovely Teresa. A poetic soul who finds beauty in the ordinary—winter apples, spiders building webs in a corner—Jacques’s haunting journey is archetypal and one we all share: becoming a Self. Written with exquisite calligraphic precision, A Distant Father is a book that plunges the reader into longing and loss, possibility and hope, and never strays from the heart’s truths.”

  —DALE M. KUSHNER, author of The Conditions of Love

  “Each fragrant line of A Distant Father is in just the right place. Without excess, every word is positioned with the precision of an artist who works with his eyes closed, fluidly. Without artifice, without sterile rhetoric, and without pyrotechnics.”

  —La Vanguardia

  “This charming little book possesses an amazing storyline, many love stories, and it has, at the end, an extraordinary surprise.”

  —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

  ALSO BY ANTONIO SKÁRMETA

  The Days of the Rainbow

  The Dancer and the Thief

  The Postman (Il Postino)

  Copyright © Antonio Skármeta, 2010

  First published as Un padre de película

  by Editorial Planeta, Barcelona, Spain, in 2010.

  Translation copyright © 2013 by John Cullen

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text Editor: Julie Fry

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Skármeta, Antonio.

  [Padre de película. English]

  A distant father / by Antonio Skármeta; translated from the Spanish by John Cullen.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59051-625-6 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-59051-626-3 (e-book)

  1. Fathers and sons — Fiction. 2. Latin America—Fiction. 3. Chile — Fiction. I. Cullen, John, 1942– II. Title.

  PQ8098.29.K3P3313 2014

  863′.64—dc23

  2013044646

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  About the Authors

  Publisher’s Note

  ONE

  I’m the village schoolmaster. I live near the mill. Sometimes the wind covers my face with flour.

  I’ve got long legs, and nights of insomnia have stamped dark rings under my eyes.

  My life is made up of rustic elements, rural things: the dying wail of the local train, winter apples, the moisture on lemons touched by early morning frost, the patient spider in a shadowy corner of my room, the breeze that moves my curtains.

  During the day, my mother washes enormous sheets, and in the evening we drink lemon balm tea and listen to radio plays until the signal gets lost among the dozens of Argentine stations that crowd the dial at night.

  TWO

  My village, Contulmo, is smaller than the neighboring town of Traiguén. Before going to the capital to get my teaching degree, I finished high school in Angol, a town much larger than Traiguén. While I was there, I was diagnosed with acute anemia, which the doctors treated by prescribing Scott’s Emulsion and injecting bracing shots of cod liver oil into my arms.

  A nurse in the hospital initiated me into the vice of smoking cheap cigarettes, and in order to support this habit—which wound up giving me bronchitis—I’ve had to find a second job.

  The work is very modest and very infrequent. Once a week, a truck comes to pick up the sheets my mother washes for the hotel in Angol, and I consign to the driver some translations of French poems that the editor of the Angol newspaper publishes in the Sunday supplement.

  My dad is French. He went back to Paris a year ago, when I returned to Contulmo after completing my studies at the teachers’ college.

  I got off the train and he climbed on.

  He kissed my cheeks desperately. My mother was on the platform too, dressed in mourning. My return home has never compensated for my father’s absence. He used to sing French songs—“J’attendrais,” “Les feuilles mortes,” and “C’est si bon.”

  And besides, he knew how to bake loaves of crispy bread, baguettes, that were different from the local buns and soft breads. He also used to bring lemons and oranges to the market. Every day he’d pass by the mill to get some flour, and that was how he and the owner became friends. When Dad left, I wasn’t able to reproduce his skill in baking baguettes, but I’ve carried on his friendship with the miller.

  He knows more about Dad than I do myself.

  He knows more about Dad than my own mother does.

  THREE

  When Dad went away, my mother was suddenly extinguished, like a candle blown out by a gust of frosty wind.

  Like her, I loved my father to the point of madness. And I too wanted him to love me back. But he was gone a lot. When he was home, he’d write letters at night on my old Remington portable typewriter and pile them up on the desk for me to hand on when the truck came to pick up the sheets. They were letters to his friends, he said. “Mes vieux copains.”

  Occasionally, when we’ve been drinking brandy, the miller drops some nugget of information, and so I always listen to him with great attention. But his trails lead nowhere. He keeps things quiet by talking about them. Or rather, he talks about things while keeping them quiet. It’s as though he had a secret pact with my father. Un jurement de sang.

  When Pierre decided to leave, I was just about to graduate from the teachers’ college in Santiago. The week before I was to arrive in Contulmo, elementary school teaching certific
ate in hand, he told my mother that the cold climate of southern Chile cracked his bones, and that a ship was waiting for him in the harbor at Valparaíso.

  I got off the train and he got on, boarding the very same car.

  In southern Chile, the trains still belch smoke.

  My father shouldn’t have left the same night I arrived. I didn’t even get a chance to open my suitcase and show him my diploma. My mother and I wept, both of us.

  FOUR

  The texts I translate are simple. Things the people around here can understand. Poems by René Guy Cadou. Village verses, not cathedrals of words. By contrast, the Santiago press publishes monumental poems, verses chiseled in marble, rich with allusions to ancient Greece and Rome and meditations upon the eternity of beauty. In Santiago, El Mercurio prints such poems and accompanies them with illustrations of Paris and Rome. Below the text, in parentheses, the translator’s name appears.

  Here in the provinces, beauty is never eternal.

  Sometimes I include an original poem of my own in the envelope with my translations and ask the editor to consider publishing it. His response, though negative, is courteous, given that he never rejects my poems and never prints them either.

  FIVE

  The first month of Dad’s absence nearly killed my mother. She’s never gotten over it completely. She’s merely convalescing. When I got a teaching post at Gabriela Mistral Elementary School, she livened up a little. There was even a trace of joy in her approval, because my new job meant I wouldn’t abandon the village like the Mapuche kids who left and wound up kneading dough in Santiago bakeries.

  We got no letters from Dad. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t sent any. The thing is, mailmen don’t come to these villages, and asking the truck driver to inquire in the Angol post office whether there was any mail for her would have wounded my mother’s pride.

  It really rains a lot here; I constantly have a cold. On a normal day, I teach children literature and history, and after school I harvest potatoes, lemons, and oranges, depending on the season.

  Now and again, I fill a few baskets with apples and bring back flour from the mill. Cristián is an assiduous drinker of red wine, and his apron is eternally spattered with purplish stains. He always offers me a glass, which however I always decline. Drinking alcohol makes me sad.

  Although I’m almost always sad, wine makes me sad in a different way. It’s as if a very deep solitude were entering my veins.

  Ever since Dad went away, I want to die.

  SIX

  I devote most of my time to smoking and sharpening my Faber No. 2 pencils. I use them to correct my pupils’ compositions, and if there’s something I don’t like, I rub it out with the eraser on the pencil’s other end and suggest a better phrase.

  The Remington’s actually a loan from the mayor, who let me have it so that I could make fair copies of my translations.

  The children’s compositions are quite optimistic. Most of them begin by saying something like, “The day opens with the sun, which spreads its kind fingers over the field,” or “When the cock crows, dawn breaks and the shadows put on yellow robes.”

  Only Augusto Gutiérrez stands outside the norm. For example, he writes, “The sun’s crowing bursts the cock’s eardrums.”

  In math he’s a disaster. He’s repeating the previous year, and he’s the only boy in the class with a hint of mustache on his upper lip.

  He has two sisters. On Sundays I go to the village square, buy some candied peanuts and a Bilz soda, and sit on a stone bench. When the sisters pass close to the bench, they burst into mocking laughter and I turn red.

  Augusto Gutiérrez has thick eyeglasses and thin lips. He’ll be fifteen next Friday. He walks through the square carrying a volume by Rubén Dario. He knows by heart “The sea is lovely, Margarita, and a subtle scent of orange blossoms rides upon the breeze,” but he’s not so much interested in the Nicaraguan poet’s verses as he is in carrying on a man-to-man conversation with me.

  He wants to know, he declares, if I’ve been to the whorehouse in Angol and how much it costs to spend a night there with one of the girls.

  I brush crushed peanuts off my blue trousers and say that such a conversation between a pupil and a teacher is improper. He says that if I don’t want to tell him about life, he’ll ask advice from the priest in the confessional.

  He adds that his birthday party next Friday will offer more than just cake and candles; there’s also going to be romantic North American music that people can dance and make out to. His sisters asked him to invite me. Teresa’s seventeen and Elena’s nineteen. I’m twenty-one. Everybody around here is very respectable, and I have no doubt that Teresa and Elena come from a good family, but every time they go to Santiago, they buy dresses with plunging necklines and tight jeans that cling to their hips and squeeze the air out of my lungs.

  SEVEN

  Tonight I went to bed without eating and was rude to my mother. I’m irritated because I’ve never been to the whorehouse in Angol, just to the hospital there. It angers me that I had nothing to tell Gutiérrez. I too would like to know the girls’ prices.

  I’m listening to the radio, a special broadcast with Lucho Gatica y Los Peregrinos. A bolero called “Amor, amor, qué malo eres”—“Love, love, you’re so wicked”—is all the rage, and the band plays it three times. Fans calling in to Radio Sureña have voted it the tune of the week. I like the part that goes, “Proud towers that once stood so tall collapse in humiliation.” Those words speak to my heart. Someday, the little Gutiérrez sisters who make sarcastic faces at me will collapse in the mud, and I’ll watch them from on high.

  EIGHT

  Even though it’s night already and I still have to prepare my Monday classes—in history, I’m supposed to cover a very big topic, namely the Spanish Civil War and the murder of Federico García Lorca—I get up from the rough sheets that Mama washes until they’re immaculate and that the climate dampens and chills until they make me shiver.

  I head for the mill.

  Cristián pretends not to be surprised to see me and asks if I’ve got any cigarettes. I offer him one and in return he uncorks a bottle of red wine. He fills two milk glasses that measure a quarter of a liter each and instructs me to drink mine down in one gulp. When the glasses are empty, I feel like a rocket exploring the darkness of space.

  According to the miller, we’re heroes, he and I. The simple fact that we haven’t left the village is epic.

  “I give the children bread, you give them education,” he tells me, spitting a few tobacco grains onto his apron. “The world’s not made for small villages. But our presence makes them big. One of these days, some high government official will give us a decoration. There’ll be a pavilion in the square with your name on it. Your father was a cosmopolitan man, a Parisian—he must have really loved you if he was willing to bury himself in this place for five years. We spent many hours playing cards together.”

  “Have you ever been to the whorehouse in Angol, Cristián?” I fire the question at him impetuously, drunkenly, stupidly.

  He fills his glass with wine. I cover mine like a coffin so he won’t pour me any more.

  With a gesture that’s supposed to be majestic, I get to my feet and look up at the starry sky. My mind’s spinning faster and higher than the cosmos.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday, Jacques. You’re not teaching any classes, I’m not baking any bread. The train to Angol leaves at noon. But the action doesn’t start until after dark.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say from under a hail of meteorites. “If we go during the day, I’ll have time to buy a birthday present for Gutiérrez.”

  “The sisters’ little brother?”

  “He’s having a birthday party next Friday. His sisters look at me and laugh when we’re in the square.”

  “The younger one has the hots for you.”

  “For me? How can that be, Cristián?”

  “They both have a thing for Frenchmen.”

  �
��But I’m a Chilean, and a poor one at that.”

  “But you’re young. You have a profession, you haven’t settled for milking cows. Someday the education ministry will send you to Angol. Or even to Santiago.”

  “It worries me to hear you say that.”

  “Why?”

  “If we go with whores today and then I get a teaching position in some other school and someone declares he’s seen me in the whorehouse, what happens to my academic career?”

  “The principal of the high school visits the girls, too.”

  “Don’t give me that!”

  “Whatever you do, there’ll always be someone trying to impose limits on you. Don’t go looking for them on your own. What are you going to give Gutiérrez?”

  “A pair of boxing gloves. I saw him shadow-boxing on the basketball court.”

  “He’s fifteen years old and he’s already getting a mustache.”

  “He takes after his father. Have you heard anything from my dad?”

  “Not a thing, kid.”

  “You said that funny. Is he dead?”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “Well, you say you haven’t heard from him, so how do you know he’s not dead?”

  Cristián pours himself another glass of wine, emptying the bottle.

  I lie down on the floor.

  “What’s wrong with you, buddy?”

  “I’m drunk.”

  “That’s all right. But there’s no need to get all dramatic. What’s bothering you?”

  “Gutiérrez’s sister.”

  “The younger one or the older one?”

  “The younger one, Cristián. Those tits she’s got, they make me want to squeeze them until they pop like grapes. Her teeth gleam in the night. I imagine myself biting her lips, and then she touches me …”

  “How?”

  I don’t want to answer. I’m standing in the universe, vertical and alone. I’m a dog beaten by moonlight. Why did my father leave us?