A Distant Father (6 page)

“The money for the girl last Saturday was a loan. You owe me, Jacques.”

“I’ll pay you as soon as I get the fee for my translations.”

“All right.”

Today I got up before my mother did. I put ground coffee in the cloth filter and dripped boiling water over it. The milk is heating on the stove as I cut two pieces of buttery
mantecoso
cheese, still fresh inside its waxed-paper wrapping. I turn an empty marmalade jar into a flower vase, fill it with water, and balance a single daisy in it as best I can.

Mama comes in to fix breakfast and is surprised to find everything ready. She’s washed her hair in the shower and wrapped it in a blue towel. A scent of lavender floats around her. She puts sugar in her coffee and milk, stirs it with a teaspoon, and looks at me distrustfully. I’ve got my elbows on the tablecloth and my chin in the palms of my hands.

“What is it we have to discuss?”

“Your life, Mama dear.”

“We’re going to talk about my life?”

“Yes. About how you feel, about what you need.”

“I feel fine, and I don’t need anything.”

“But you never go out. Your hands are all pale from washing so many sheets and tablecloths.”

“There’s not much to see in Contulmo.”

“But you could go somewhere out of the village. Angol, for instance.”

“And come back with a fever like you?”

“You have your fur coat.”

“It’s much too luxurious to wear in such backwaters.”

She delicately chews one of the miller’s little loaves with a slice of cheese and soundlessly sips her coffee and milk. I put my hand in my shirt pocket and hand her the envelope.

“What’s this?”

“A free ticket to the movie they’re showing tonight.”

“You’re crazy. Me, go to a movie?”

“You always used to go to the movies in Santiago. You’d tell me the stories of everything you saw. Now you’re always silent. It’s like something has eaten your tongue and your heart.”

“Two hours on the train to see a movie?”

Now I take my ticket for Angol out of my pants pocket.

“Jacques?”

“Mami?”

“The fever.”

“What about it?”

“I think it did you some damage.”

She looks at the movie ticket in one hand and the train ticket in the other. With a jerk she undoes the knot in the towel holding her hair, and the lavender scent permeates the kitchen magnificently. I drink my coffee and smile approvingly at her.

“You’re hiding something from me, Jacques.”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I’d rather not tell you.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’m not going to the movie theater.”

I chew my sandwich, not taking my eyes off her. It’s difficult to make deals with Mama. For example, if I tell her what I intend to tell her, that doesn’t mean she’ll automatically go to the theater.

“I need to be alone in the house tonight.”

“The miller says you want to commit suicide.”

“He’s a blabbermouth.”

“If you commit suicide, I’ll kill you,” she says with a smile.

She runs a finger over my lips as though sealing a promise.

“Actually, Mama, the truth is there’s this girl.”

“From the village?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Do I know her?”

“I don’t believe there’s anyone in this burg you don’t know.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Indeed.”

“Teresa Gutiérrez!”

“Yes, Teresa Gutiérrez, Mama.”

“She’s going to sleep with you?”

We sip our coffee for a while without saying anything. Inside the church, the priest rings the bell, the first of seven strokes.

“I don’t know, Mama. You can’t predict these things.”

“What’s the Saturday afternoon film? Some western?”

“No western this week. They’re showing a movie with Anna Magnani and Anthony Quinn.”

“What’s it about?”

“I read the summary in
Screen
. It’s set in some remote part of the United States. He’s a widower, and she’s come to replace his dead wife. But then he spends all his time comparing this new wife with the deceased one. And then she falls in love with a young man—”

“Where am I going to sleep in Angol?”

The sun is slowly spreading over the rustic tablecloth. When the rays reach the breadbasket, Mama lifts the cloth that’s covering the little loaves and exposes them to the sunlight.

I press my eyelids together hard, a way I have of controlling my nerves. I take a loaf of bread and break it apart to no purpose. I don’t want to eat anymore.

“God will provide,” I say slowly.

In truth, I’m
praying
slowly.

At ten in the morning, I’ve got an appointment with Augusto Gutiérrez on the school basketball court. He shows up with his galactic eyeglasses, wearing short jeans and sneakers.

I pass him the ball and watch as he makes a basket on his first shot.

I figure this is his lucky day.

We sit on a tree stump next to the little bleachers, and I accept the Richmond cigarette he offers me with a grown-up’s aplomb.

“Have you brought what I asked you to?”

He takes the banknotes out of his pocket, twenty thousand pesos held together by a yellow rubber band. I extract three bills and stuff them in my pants.

I’ve got the ball under my left foot and I’m moving it around. I say, “This is a loan, you understand me? When I get paid for
Zazie in the Metro
, I’ll pay you back.”

“That’s fine, Prof.”

“How do you feel?”

“Terrible. I turned fifteen and nothing happened.”

“Your problem is you think only about your virginity. You have to arrive at sex in a more subtle way.”

“Prof, if you called me here to give me a lesson, let me remind you that today is Saturday and there’s no school!”

He kicks the ball out from under my foot and tears off down the court, dribbling the ball around imaginary opponents like a soccer player. He stops under the basket at the other end, kicks the ball straight up, catches it in his hands, and scores again.

He comes back to me in an excellent mood.

“The money you loaned me,” I say. “It was for this.”

I take out a train ticket and lay it across his bare knees.

“Are we going to Angol?”

“You’re going to Angol.”

“By myself?”

“You’ve been crowing about being fifteen years old.”

“They won’t let me in, Prof.”

“How do you know?”

“I tried two years ago.”

“Ah, you were a baby then.”

He scratches the area between his nose and his lips and then asks me to feel it.

“Can’t you tell? I’m starting a mustache.”

The plan I made at dawn is being carried out precisely. I hand him an envelope with a card inside containing instructions for the next steps he’s to take.

“Open it at home, and be at the train station at four o’clock.”

“Will do, Prof.”

“Make sure you bring every item on the list I just gave you.”

“Of course.”

“You won’t need more than five thousand pesos. There’s no reason for you to go there with that whole roll of bills in your pocket.”

“Five thousand. Got it.”

“And put on long pants and a tie. You’re going to see a lady.”

Gutiérrez touches his throat as if the red tie were already knotted around his neck.

“Five thousand pesos,
Diary of My Life
, long pants,” he enumerates.

“The rest of the money stays home.”

“You’re a great teacher, Prof.”

“You can mention that to the judge in the local police court when the time comes. I could wind up in jail for this.”

Augusto Gutiérrez looks anxiously at his watch and snaps his fingers, encouraging the hands to advance without pause to four in the afternoon.

At three fifty-five in the afternoon, the normally empty platform in the Contulmo train station looks like the scene of a political gathering.

There are three clearly distinct groups.

My mother is wrapped in her fur coat, sporting a felt hat like something out of a forties movie, black kid gloves, and an umbrella, which she dangles pensively.

Teresa Gutiérrez is wearing a skirt and a man’s jacket, with a gray scarf covering her shoulders and her neck and, at her feet, a leather suitcase the color of pale coffee.

The stationmaster is trying to tie the various ends together, maybe even inventing a story for all these characters.

And now there’s me.

Bleeding as though from a bullet wound, but obsessed with my plot.

Before approaching my protagonists, I head for the stationmaster. I want to instruct him as to what he
must say when Augusto Gutiérrez’s dad crosses the tracks in his pajamas later tonight, waving a flashlight and looking for his children Augusto and Teresa. The stationmaster must lie and tell Teresa’s father that he saw the two of them leave for Angol together.

“A lot of movement today,” I say.

“A wide range. Including your
señora madre
, right?”

“Yes. She’s going to Angol to pick up a package my father sent her from Paris.”

“And the Gutiérrez kids.”

“Teresa’s accompanying Augusto to the store to exchange a birthday present that’s too small for him. A Windbreaker like James Dean’s.”

“And you?” he asks me.

“I’m here to tell Mama good-bye.”

Next I go over to the Gutiérrez group.

Teresa is pale and vacant. The remnant of childhood that once protected her seems to have melted away. She stands before me, desperately available. I’ve made up this farce of her traveling to Angol so that I can remove her clothes as I like, in my own bed. Here in Contulmo.

Now I examine my student. The gray pants are perfect, the blue jacket well ironed, the red tie with the white spots very cheerful, the hair, subdued by some implacable gel, very adult.

And in the midst of all, triumphant as a blue apple, the globe that helped him get the school’s highest grade in geography.

“You’re to give that to Señorita Luna.”

“The world and the five thousand pesos?”

“First the world, and then, if the occasion should arise, the five thousand pesos.”

Getting him to take her the globe as a gift was my idea.

The train pulls into the station, needlessly whistling. Today only dogs are crossing the tracks.

Sometimes I think the engineer blows that whistle just to keep himself from falling asleep. As calm and steady and experienced as this train is, it could get to Angol even without a driver.

I go over to Mama and help her up the steps and into the car. She stoops to kiss me on the forehead. “Have a good time, Jacques.”

“You too, Mami.”

“Tell me about it tomorrow.”

“We’ll tell each other tomorrow.”

“What’s the name of the movie with Anna Magnani?”

“
Wild Is the Wind
.”

The stationmaster blows his little whistle and checks his wristwatch for the tenth time to be sure it’s
four p.m. and reflects upon the fact that the platform clock has been stopped at ten minutes after three for five years.

Back home, I barely have time to take the pitcher of lemonade out of the refrigerator and pour Teresa a glass before she starts to cry. I’d like to ask her what’s wrong and console her. Smell her skin and stroke her earlobes. Lick her eyelids and swallow her youthful mascara as it dissolves on my tongue.

But my heart’s elsewhere.

Its grave throbbing accompanies the heavy wheels of the train bound for the movie theater in Angol.

Emilio needs a mother to take care of him.