Antonio Skarmeta: A Distant Father

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.

“Friday night will be yours, Professor Jacques, and Saturday night will belong to your disciple and servant Augusto Gutiérrez.”

He asks me to feel the wad he’s got in his pants pocket.

“That’s the twenty thousand Uncle Mateo sent me — I carry it around so I won’t lose it. The train for Angol leaves at four.” Then, anticipating his moment of glory, he repeats himself. “Four o’clock Saturday,” he says.

On the day of the party, as if obeying a decree, almost all the men in the village put pomade in their hair. The weather’s hazy, the temperature suddenly warm. Indian summer, as they say.

Gutiérrez is standing beside the phonograph, and after handing him his present I check out the labels on the 45s waiting to be loaded onto the cylinder: “Sincerely,” by Lucho Gatica; Johnny Ray’s “Walkin’ in the Rain”; Paul Anka’s “Diana”; Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”; “Blue Tango,” by Hugo Winterhalter and His Orchestra.

He pats me conspiratorially on the shoulder, and while he’s opening the package I see Elena Gutiérrez, in her new embroidered blouse, refusing to let the hardware store owner light the cigarette she’s holding in her lips. When the man insists, she blows out his match and wets the burned tip of the cigarette with saliva, all the while looking at me very meaningfully.

But then Teresa Gutiérrez comes up, she looks at me in her turn, and the two of them turn away laughing.

Augusto makes no effort to hide his disappointment in my offering. “A notebook with a padlock,” he mumbles without enthusiasm.

“You can write personal things in it.”

“What things?”

“The things that happen to you.”

“Nothing happens to me, Prof.”

“But something may start happening to you very soon, and it would be a shame not to record it.”

“For example?”

“The trip to Angol. I’d like to know everything you do, in detail.”

He offers me the palm of his hand with his raised fingers spread so we can exchange a knowing high five. Elena Gutiérrez appears, carrying a glass. She plants it in my right hand and remains cheekily at my side. Frankie Laine is singing “Jezebel” on the record player.

“Cuba libre,” she tells me. “With Jamaican rum.”

“It’s better than Mitjans.”

“Do you want to dance?”

I glimpse her sister Teresa, whose eyes are fixed on me as she sips Coca-Cola through a straw.

“Actually, I thought I’d dance the slow songs with Teresa.”

“ ‘Jezebel’ isn’t all that slow. It’s half foxtrot and half tango. Let’s dance.”

I leave the glass on the table next to the phonograph and put my hand on her waist, on her highly polished belt. She reacts to my fingers and my steps with impeccable docility. Holding her straw wedged between her upper incisors and drumming her fingers on the empty bottle, Teresa watches us dance.

Gutiérrez turns off the ceiling light, leaving two dim bulbs burning in the corners of the living room. We’re about a dozen people in all, and except for Gutiérrez, everyone’s dancing.