The Day I Killed My Father

by Mario Sabino

  Without company, Antonym ended up at the refuge of the solitary: a luncheonette. At a luncheonette, even one with tables instead of a counter, you could eat alone without attracting the pity of those who were accompanied — which wasn’t possible in a restaurant. Solitude in a luncheonette always seemed circumstantial, or even preferable for clients who came alone. Quick and bland, like the meals served in such places. This image of being in a state of desired solitude could also be emphasised by reading a magazine.

  From that night on, Antonym started spending a considerable amount of money on magazines that really didn’t interest him. However, it wouldn’t be long before he missed the time when he didn’t have friends — or when his enemies were distant.

  III

  ‘Is this right?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The name on your ID here.’

  ‘Believe it or not, it is. The registrar was a bit out of it and typed an extra “m”.’

  ‘Your dad could have fixed it. Or you.’

  ‘True, but I kept Antonym. I’ve thought about correcting it, but this is a country of even weirder names … Does it bother you?’

  ‘Why should it bother me?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Bernadette.’

  ‘That’s funny.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve always had the impression that there was an “r” missing in Bernadette. That the right spelling should be “Bernardette”. You know, when I was a child, I got it into my head that I should be a devotee of the saint. I saw a film about her that had a big effect on me.’

  ‘I really liked the Infant Jesus of Prague.’

  ‘The one with the fingers.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have something extra, and you seem to be missing something.’

  He was going round and round in lethargic circles, reliving his first conversation with his ex-wife, but this was shattered by the sound of a car alarm. Silence had abandoned the world once and for all. Startled by his racing heart, and the bitter taste of barbiturate-induced sleep, he got up. Antonym’s intention, in deciding to take this kind of medication regularly, hadn’t been to escape his crisis; rather, it had been to put off dealing with it. Abolish, eliminate, cancel all and any drama of existence; reduce life to a white square on a white background — that was his motto.

  When he opened the window, and the white of the bedclothes blinded him, he thought he’d achieved his objective, without realising that the daylight was merely blotting out his soul, hiding the ghosts that inhabited the folds of his messy sheets. With a stupid smile, he scratched his big toe, and headed for the bathroom.

  The illusion only lasted a minute. The maids’ symmetrical tidying caused him discomfort for the first time. Was Bernadette gone forever? With her knickers hanging in the shower, the cabinet drawers half-open, the uncapped eau de cologne. He’d been vegetating in solitude for months. Antonym gazed at himself between the specks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. He’d never asked himself: Who am I? Rather, he’d asked: Is that really me? It was as if the face he saw masked an unfathomable essence that couldn’t be recognised in his features, gestures, emotions, and thoughts. And the terror of this brief lucidity killed him a little.

  His own Pontius Pilate, he rinsed his hands and eyes. While he was on his way to the kitchen, the telephone rang.

  ‘Antonym?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Hemistich.’

  ‘It’s been donkey’s … ’

  ‘I know, I reckon it’s been, what … eight years since we last saw each other?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It’s hard to be your friend. You don’t call anyone; you always have to be called.’

  ‘I know, that’s just me.’

  ‘And here I am once again. Do you know why? Because you’re worth it.’

  ‘I hope to let you down.’

  ‘You’re worth it.’

  ‘My phone number, how’d you … ’

  ‘Bernadette. I ran into her at a dinner. A work thing, I think.’

  ‘You, at one of those dinners?’

  ‘It was at my restaurant.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m here … Your restaurant?’

  ‘There are those who call it a steakhouse. Let me give you the address.’

  Hemistich remembered in detail things that everyone else had forgotten. Figures of speech, for example. He didn’t need to look in a dictionary to know what ‘anastrophe’ meant. This made him self-assured. Poet, writer, translator, editor, Master of Philosophy — the biographical footnotes of his articles varied according to need. They contrasted with his fidelity to certain stylistic additives and lubricants in his musings on everything. But the great feat of his career had been the timely domestication of his caustic sense of humour. When he was still young he had almost lost everything after having called a well-known concrete poet ‘(in)significant’. He was funny and a good conversationalist, but too intense. Hard to live with. He managed to be eternally surrounded by friends, due to the fact that they were never the same ones.

  Antonym was shocked. Hemistich Borba the Second, the quintessential Brazilian intellectual, had ended up running a steakhouse.

  IV

  The transience of his desire had found a golden mean in the price of satisfying it. Besides, he wasn’t in a position to spend a lot. He left her ‘come again’ behind, and he took the lift down, buried alive. In those days so predictable in their misery, he had clung to routine, discipline, schedules. His regular weekly hour with prostitutes was part of this scheme.

  He hesitated briefly at the door of the building. Noticing a vagrant on his left, he turned right. The cathedral loomed before him — an insect with gothic antennae and a rotten apple on its back in the guise of a dome. The stench of urine and fried food rose up from the Portuguese mosaic pavement. Before climbing the stairs, he freed himself from the gypsy woman intent on reading his palm, dodged the man selling limes, and pushed away the street kid tugging at his pants. The inside of the church wasn’t much different from the reality around it. While beauty hinders asceticism, so does ugliness. Antonym thus experienced no elevation, inner peace, or reconciliation with the human race in the time he sat there. It was just cooler.

  A priest came out of a door next to the high altar, and approached him. Antonym stood up. Was it possible?

  ‘Father Farfarello … ’

  Domenico Farfarello had been his grammar teacher at school. Short and bald, with cerulean-blue eyes and an aquiline nose, he used to spend a considerable amount of time in front of the mirror, rehearsing expressions that would inspire fear in lazy students, like a Caligula of the education system. At least, this was the rumour at the school run by Italian monks that Antonym had attended.

  ‘So it is you, Antonym! What a nice surprise! It was God who guided my eyes to the pew you were sitting on. I haven’t seen you since …’

  ‘… Since Monsignor Salviati’s funeral.’

  ‘Salviati, a good servant of God … “Remember you will die”.’

  ‘Remember you will die.’

  The old ecclesiastical expression that Salviati had loved made them laugh.

  ‘How are you, Antonym?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Father.’

  ‘That’s the right answer, son. I have a feeling I was placed in your path to help you.’

  ‘To help me …?’

  ‘To help you.’

  ‘I don’t think it would hurt to talk to you.’

  ‘Why don’t we go into the sacristy?’

  ‘No. Wouldn’t you rather have lunch with me?’

  ‘Is that an invitation?’

  ‘Of course.’


  They chose a small restaurant, already half-empty at that hour.

  ‘My marriage is over and I was fired. That’s it in a nutshell. All very banal, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I guai vengono bensì spesso, perchè si é dato cagione.’

  ‘Ma la condotta più cauta e più innocente non basta a tenerli lontani.’

  ‘Però quando vengono, o per colpa o senza colpa, la fiducia in Dio li raddolcisce, e li rende utili per una vita migliore.’*

  [* Father Farfello and Antonym are exchanging lines here from the famous Italian historical novel The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1827): ‘Troubles certainly often arise from occasion afforded by ourselves; but the most cautious and innocent conduct is not enough to keep us from them; when they come, whether by our own fault or not, confidence in God alleviates them, and makes them useful for a better life.’]

  ‘Manzoni would be a checkmate, Father Farfarello, if I weren’t an atheist.’

  ‘Not even the Devil is an atheist, son. If you were really an atheist, you wouldn’t be discussing your concerns with a priest.’

  ‘Your order, if I’m not mistaken, practises exorcism. That must be fun. It’s even become a spectacle for television.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate the Devil. He is part of God and was born of His boredom, which survives inside each and every one of us. How many err just to escape their own routines? Most, to be honest. For this reason, too, God is able to forgive. He himself sinned when He gave in to boredom and created Evil, thus becoming the Creator of sin.’

  ‘That’s heresy.’

  ‘No, far from it. God sinned and, in this manner, created sin, because it was part of His plan. And the boredom that moved Him was another of His creations: something we mortals are able to understand, bearing in mind that not everything that stems from the divine will is within our grasp.’

  ‘These theological somersaults should be an Olympic sport, don’t you think? But no one can break the record of Saint Augustine, who invented Original Sin. It was him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Do you know the basis for original sin, son?’

  ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘Augustine saw sexual motivation in Adam’s fall. It was carnal concupiscence that led him to sin. And this sin is repeated every time a man and a woman make a child. Because, in order for there to be birth, there must first be the same carnal concupiscence that was Adam’s undoing. The concupiscence that means selfish desire. The Bishop of Hippo didn’t invent original sin; he merely revealed it by the grace of God.’

  ‘As I was saying, Saint Augustine is unbeatable. Actually, the fact that he was so extraordinary … Africa in the fifth century must have been pretty boring. Maybe he started developing theological systems to escape the dreariness around him.’

  ‘Don’t confuse things, Antonym. Boredom never moves great men. What propels them is the Idea — which is the same as the Absolute, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. And what are these concepts if not a philosophical expression of God in all His plenitude?’

  ‘That’s the Hegelian right-wing point of view. For the left, that’s not the way it works. And the Hegelian left won, father. At least in that, the left won.’

  ‘One must choose a side, son. And I am always on the side of those who have faith in God, even if they’ve been defeated. Have you read Hegel, son?’

  ‘Very little. I edited the cultural pages of the newspaper I worked on. Hegel in a newspaper, imagine …’

  ‘Anyway, it is God who leads great men to achieve their feats. But never through boredom; rather, through the desire to know God.’

  ‘Isn’t it ambition that moves them?’

  ‘Even the personal ambition of great men obeys His plan. Come with me to the sacristy after lunch. I’m going to give you a text by Hegel that I think is very enlightening — although, as a priest, I cannot agree with the Hegelian conclusion that the destiny of all religion is atheism.’

  ‘Well, well. So Hegel really was left wing …’

  ‘Such sarcasm, Antonym. Don’t you know philosophers can speak truths without arriving at the Truth? Many get lost along the way.’

  ‘And what about lies? Could they serve as the basis for the Truth?’

  Farfarello smiled.

  ‘Antonym, you have yet to grasp the full extent of what you just said merely to be ironic. Let’s go, I must be quick.’

  A full day, this one, thought Antonym. I fucked a whore, chatted with a priest, and am about to go home with a piece of German philosophy tucked under my arm.

  V

  Every so often, Antonym tried to digest some late-afternoon melancholy with a packet of cornstarch biscuits. He used these moments to make more or less free associations. Any old fact could spark a run. One of the sequences he’d been most chuffed with was inspired by a stumble:

  I tripped and almost fell. If I’d fallen, I would have hurt myself. If I’d hurt myself, I’d be resting in bed. A doctor would come to examine me and give me medicine. Many ancient medicines were made with Eastern drugs. According to Aristotle, the winds are born in the East. Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great was lord of the world. The Greeks believed the world was held up by Atlas. Atlas was strong. Strength is symbolised by columns. Columns hold up buildings. Buildings are made by labourers. Labourers are directed by engineers. Engineers work from architects’ sketches. Sketching is part of painting. Painting is an art. There are seven liberal arts. Seven is the number of sages who studied eloquence. The goddess of eloquence is Minerva.

  A week after his meeting with Farfarello, Antonym was munching on cornstarch biscuits while making a series of associations that, having started with scouring powder, had already reached superconductors. But he didn’t get to what might have been the end of this chain of thoughts.

  ‘I’m so useless. Bernadette was right to leave me.’

  Antonym left the packet of biscuits in the kitchen and went to the bedroom. The text Farfarello had given him had been lying on the nightstand for a week — and he hadn’t read it.

  ‘Would Hegel have made associations as banal as mine?’

  Antonym decided to take the priest’s advice to read Hegel’s text. It was a compilation of phrases by Hegel that summed up the notion that all great men in history were propelled by the World Spirit, despite the fact that their actions appeared to stem, even in their own eyes, from personal ambitions alone. Such great men — who could be called heroes — were capable of perceiving what needed to be done in their era and, consequently, of revealing the Truth that inhabited all human beings, but to which the majority did not aspire. They had often been warned to proceed with caution along the way, but had pushed on regardless. And, thus, these great men had ended up being followed by those who saw them as the incarnation of their own desires and their own souls.

  Of all the quotes, one stuck in Antonym’s head: ‘The courage of truth, faith in the power of Spirit, are the first conditions of philosophy. Man, because he is Spirit, can and must consider himself worthy of everything that is most sublime. He can never overestimate the greatness and power of his Spirit. And if he has this faith, nothing will be so hard and unyielding as not to reveal itself to him.’

  It was already after 9.00 p.m. when Antonym went to meet Hemistich.

  VI

  A sculpture of a white steer with golden horns loomed over the entrance of the The Bullseye. Beneath it was a marble plaque with the following inscription:

  I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

  and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject.

  Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar?

  ‘How many will be dining with you, sir?’

  ‘Hemistich is waiting for me.’

  ‘May I have your name?’

  ‘I’d rather keep it, if yo
u don’t mind.’

  ‘?’

  ‘Antonym.’

  ‘One moment, sir.’

  He’d expected a steakhouse that looked like a refectory — with colonial décor or something of the sort — and had found instead a very peculiar restaurant. The first room was a bar clad in dark wood with panels of bullfighting scenes on the walls. The barmen and waiters moved around silently, and the usual sound of glasses and bottles was almost non-existent.

  ‘A dry martini, please.’

  As Antonym sipped his martini, he took a closer look at the drawings. Men and bulls clashed with joyous expressions on their faces. In one scene, a bullfighter, about to be gored, had the transfigured look of one on the verge of orgasm.

  Funny, he thought. It reminds me of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Hemistich.

  ‘It’s strange in this context, like the inscription over the steakhouse door.’

  ‘Actually, this is more than a steakhouse.’

  ‘Right, it’s a new concept in steakhouses, as a publicist would say.’

  ‘Go ahead, joke. I don’t care.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Hemistich. I shouldn’t be talking like this to the guy who’s going to provide me with a free meal. I’m impressed by your steakhouse, or whatever you want to call it. Seriously. Where’d you come up with the money?’

  ‘Let’s just say by using some relatively emotional blackmail. Come to the dining room.’

  A three-by-fifteen-metre corridor led from the bar to the dining room. Three wall lamps on each side shed yellow light on the people walking through it. Over the dining room door, an enormous Minotaur grinned down at passers-by.