A Distant Father (4 page)

The girl gets off me and walks over to the washstand. She uses a damp cloth to clean her belly and her thighs.

“I didn’t understand a thing,” she says. “I don’t understand anything when I go to the movies, either. The problem is I never manage to read the subtitles. They go by very fast.”

“It’s a poem dedicated to the poet’s father.”

“Did you write it?”

“No, but I translated it. You can find it in the
Diario de Angol’
s weekend supplement.”

“What does it say?”

“ ‘Ah, my poor father, have you ever guessed how much love you planted in me and how I love, through you, all the things of the earth?’ It was written by René Guy Cadou.”

“Do you wish you wrote it?”

“I couldn’t write a poem like that. I’m a simple country schoolteacher.”

“It’s five thousand pesos for the hour.”

I pull on my trousers and place the damp banknotes the miller loaned me on the night table. She takes some water, wets the bangs on her forehead, and pats them smooth.

“I’m going back to Contulmo tonight. The train leaves in an hour.”

“If you’re in these parts again, I’ll be here for you. My name’s Rayén, but they call me Luna.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m moony, because I always look at the moon, because I have a moon-shaped face. I don’t know why. Everybody calls me Luna. What do they call you?”

“Prof.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Prof.”

“Do you give good grades?”

“I’ve never flunked anybody.”

“What grade would you give me in geography?”

She smiles and her teeth look as though they’re about to jump out of her wide mouth.

“Russia?” I ask her.

“Moscow,” she says, smiling even more broadly. “What grade?”

“An A.”

“Are you serious? You’d give me an A in geography?”

“Absolutely. The highest grade.”

“I can’t wait to tell the other girls.”

“All right.”

She gives me her hand, quite formally. I grasp it, shake it, and slowly leave the whorehouse.

Outside the door they’ve still got a hitching post so cowboys can tie up their horses. The miller’s standing there, yawning.

“So how was it?”

“Great.”

“Good-looking chick?”

“Yes, Cristián, she was hot.”

“What did you two talk about?”

“Foolishness. Ourselves. How about you?”

“We couldn’t find a common theme. I mean, she wasn’t a very communicative girl.”

We take the dirt road to the train station. A slice of moon rises up amid black clouds. No rain, however. It’s cold.

“So you and her didn’t talk at all.”

“Two or three words. Believe it or not, she asked me for a bread recipe.”

“An interesting subject, Cristián. What’s the recipe for baking a baguette?”

“The one your father used.”

“What recipe did my father use?”

“You’re putting me on. You want me to give you the recipe right now?”

“At this moment, there’s nothing in the world I desire more than to know how to bake a baguette.”

“Two kilos of flour, a cup and a half of warm water, one hundred grams of yeast, two and a half tablespoons of butter, three cups of water, a tablespoon of salt. All right?”

For a while I follow the moon’s comings and goings in the ragged sky, and then I trip on a rock. I drop the little satchel I’m carrying, pick it up, and slap it against my thigh to knock off the dirt.

“If a person climbed up to the sails of the mill and jumped off, do you think he’d kill himself?”

“If anybody was crazy enough to do that, he’d probably break his neck.”

The engineer’s in his locomotive, resisting the cold with the aid of the brazier at his feet. An Araucan poncho covers his body. He holds out his thermos bottle to us and we drink coffee from the cap. He tells us we have a long wait, departure isn’t until five o’clock. We’ll arrive in Contulmo at seven.

He’s got his day all planned. Breakfast at eight, Mass at nine, soccer at ten (Peleco versus Contulmo on Viera Gallo Field), lunch at one, the weekend soap opera on the radio at two, siesta at three, and then at four he has to drive the locomotive back to Angol.

He’s afraid that Chilean State Railroads will close down this branch line because it has so few riders. And he’s only three years from retirement. Except for the time when a heifer tried to cross the tracks, there’s no major accident on his service record. On that occasion, he informed the owner of the ill-fated animal, who willingly turned it over to him for a big barbecue that was held the following day in Purén.

When the train finally leaves the station, there are eight passengers in our car. I’m shivering from my hair to my soles. The moon’s gliding freely and swiftly through the sky. At least that’s the illusion you have when you’re traveling fast.

My teeth are all bashing one another.
Zazie dans le métro
falls off my lap. Cristián puts a hand on my forehead, and I can barely hear him when he says, “You’re burning up with fever.”

On Sunday I drink liters of warm lemonade and swallow aspirins every four hours, and Mama changes my sweaty sheets three times. Some boys from school stand under my window and call up to me that Contulmo won, one to nothing. We’re leading the Malleco League. I want to read a bit of my novel, because I have the suspicion I’m going to need money very soon, and the only way for me to get some is to finish my translation. There are words I don’t know, but when I look them up in my
Larousse
, my vision blurs.

My fever reveals something I may forget later. I write it down on a leaf of penmanship paper I find with the
Diary of My Life
I’m going to give Augusto Gutiérrez: “It’s not the case that words circle uncertainly around subjects. It’s the world itself that’s uncertain; words are precise.”

What will Gutiérrez’s first journal entry be? I open the little window in my room and look out at the quiet
sails of the mill. Cristián’s asleep. The bread recipe. French baguette.

Monday goes past. According to my mother, I groaned like a woman giving birth and suddenly sat up wild-eyed on the bed. She gave me aspirin and lemonade, and at night a little chicken soup.

There are two pieces of correspondence for me. One, from Cristián, arrives in a yellowish envelope. Inside there’s a note and a postcard.

The note reads,

The postcard shows a painting of ballerinas doing bar exercises. On the back, the painter’s name: Degas. Otherwise, emptiness and silence.

The second note comes from Gutiérrez:

By six o’clock Tuesday morning, my fever has disappeared. I’m clearheaded, and I can distinguish every one of the birds and chickens that are warbling or clucking in the garden. I occupy my day off with
Zazie dans le métro
. I touch my growing bristles and decide not to peer into the mirror or shave. I’ll show up at school tomorrow looking like a bandit. The kids will feel anxious, and they won’t throw pieces of chalk at the blackboard when I turn my back on them.

For dinner, Mama brings me another dose of chicken broth, this time accompanied by two rolls.

“Cristián’s gotten over his hangover,” she remarks.

When she turns to go away, I take hold of her wrist and force her to sit on the edge of the bed. She looks at me with fright and curiosity but immediately starts feeling my sheets to make sure they’ve been properly dried and starched. She adheres in her own house to the norms of the hotel business.

“What do you know about Dad that I don’t know, Mama?”

“He’s in France.”

“Why did he go away?”

“All men have a little sailor in them. Curiosity about other places. Besides, it’s his native country, no?”

“What about me? What about you?”

She strokes her chin, and for an instant she looks like a ballerina. She’s a shallow, distracted woman whose beauty is marked by melancholy. She says, “We’re here, no?”

I spoon the soup with one hand and hold her wrist tight with the other so she won’t go away. Then I start voraciously gobbling up the miller’s bread. I’m as hungry as a wolf. The stubble on my chin lends me an unexpected audacity.

“Where’s Pierre, Mama?”

“In Paris.”

“And why?”

“He’s from there. It’s only natural.”

“And when he left … didn’t he love you anymore?”

“Why wouldn’t he love me anymore? Of course he loved me. He loved you, too. But Paris …”

“Do you like movies, Mama?”

“I used to go to the theaters in Santiago a lot. In a few years, supposedly, television is going to come to Chile. Maybe by then we’ll have enough money to buy a set.”

I look at her as I’ve never done before. Without touching her, I strip the years from her, the effects of the daily grind. I see how lovely she is, how vulnerable. Youthful in the way older women are youthful.

Devastatingly attractive.

“Before you were born, your father would compare me with French and Italian actresses. There was one year when he called me Mylène Demongeot, another when I was Pier Angeli. Then I got old and he stopped giving me nicknames.”

“You were prettier than those actresses.”

“Are you going to hold classes tomorrow?”

“Of course, Mama. My fever’s gone.”

“You almost left with it, Jacques. I’ll never let you go to Angol with Cristián again.”

“I got sick because I didn’t bring an overcoat.”

“Acting like the young male lead in some movie.”

“Yes, Mama. Never again.”

I keep hold of her wrist. The exact words are there, but unfortunately they don’t do their duty.

“What will you teach your young pupils tomorrow?”

“A little history. A bit of geography.”

“What?”

“I’ll talk to them about the tunnel on the road to Lonquimay.”

“ ‘Las Raíces?’ ”

“They’ve surely been through it several times, but they don’t know it’s 4,537 meters long. They don’t know its construction required the removal of 184,000 cubic meters of rock with the help of 175,000 kilos of dynamite; they don’t know that 240,000 bags of cement went into building the concrete tunnel lining.”

Her eyes wide and unblinking, Mama hums a little tune to dissimulate the pride produced in her by the depth of my professional knowledge. I recognize Yves Montand’s song “Je ferai le tour du monde.”

“What time shall I serve you your breakfast?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“In bed or at the table?”

“At the table.”

Throughout the rest of the week, my pupils behave like storybook children. They bring me apples, and before I eat them I rub them on the lapel of my jacket until they’re shiny. To prevent Gutiérrez from asking me about Angol on my very first day back, I decide to give long dictations, which keep the pupils at their desks. I set them difficult words. For example, “disciplinary,” “accession,” “wallop.”

At noon on Wednesday, glancing through the window of the seamstress’s workshop, I see Elena Gutiérrez, the older of Augusto Gutiérrez’s sisters, trying on a blouse that needs to be taken in. Luckily, she’s got her figure back, she says. In the South, she says, you eat so much cheese, and there’s so much fat in the milk. Now she has only skinless chicken and vegetables for dinner and drinks a lot of parsley water.

She gets close to the mirror and says that her cheeks look “frightfully healthy.” She’d like her cheekbones to be more prominent, she’d like to be as pale as Greta Garbo in
The Kiss
. She wants the blouse good and snug at the waist, she declares, and when a certain man puts his hand on her belt to lead her out to dance, she wants the embroidered hem of the blouse to feel good to him. She’d love it if the blouse could ride up a little when he pressed it and he could touch her skin.

I withdraw to the plaza before she can notice me and let one of my pupils, who works as a shoeshine
boy, pass a cloth over Dad’s former footwear. According to an announcement in the
Diario de Angol
, next month it will begin to publish Raymond Queneau’s great novel
Zazie in the Metro
. The installments will run throughout the winter.

Two facts go unrevealed: I haven’t turned in the book yet, and I haven’t yet been paid the advance I was promised. Nor is the translator’s name, my name, even mentioned.

I’d like to see my name in print sometime. A bit of fame would lend me prestige in Teresa’s eyes. According to Gutiérrez, I have to ask her to dance, attach myself to her like a limpet, and breathe into her ear. I don’t need to say anything to her. The girl’s like the Electrola in the Danubio Azul, he informs me. She knows all the songs on the radio.

“You squeeze her and she’ll sing. And then, Professor, I dim the lights, all at once, and you have to give her a French kiss.”

I ask him why he’s helping me so much in the conquest of his sister, and he says that one favor pays for another. He needs an adult to get him into the whorehouse in Angol, and I’m the only person in the world who can carry out that mission. Cleaning his spectacles on his shirttails, he says I’m his teacher and his friend. I’m the one who’s taught him everything in life, from
the triumph of the Chilean troops at the Battle of Yungay, where our hero General Manuel Bulnes thwarted the Bolivian Marshal Santa Cruz’s efforts to unite Peru and Bolivia, to lessons in the best way to smoke a cigarette without coughing.