The Day I Killed My Father

by Mario Sabino

  When he entered the dining room, Antonym gulped. On every wall there were scenes of satyrs and nymphs indulging in orgies of food and sex. On the floor were mosaics depicting food leftovers: olive pips, fruit peels, chicken bones, fish skeletons, hunks of meat.

  ‘Surprising? Weird? I know it’s hard to choose the right adjective. But I’d say, “Appropriate.” This place was designed to celebrate the triumph of the senses over reason. See how relaxed everyone is? Let’s sit in that corner. Another dry martini? Risério, two more.’

  ‘So she came here.’

  ‘Bernadette? She really liked it. But the décor was different then.’

  ‘You mentioned relatively emotional blackmail.’

  ‘That’s how I got the money.’

  ‘Your intellectual work, of course, wouldn’t have paid for all this.’

  ‘I burned everything I ever wrote. I also torched my library.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘One thing at a time. First, the blackmail. The wife of a political candidate. Quite pretty. Anyway, I had an affair with her, and I documented it.’

  ‘I’m speechless.’

  ‘I had to truly live. I had to live the truth.’

  ‘Hang on. What, pray tell, is the truth?’

  Hemistich smiled.

  ‘Remember Augusto?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He asked the same thing.’

  ‘And what was your answer?’

  ‘I didn’t have an answer at the time. But Augusto ended up discovering his own truth — which, from a certain perspective, is everyone’s truth.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He killed himself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘After slashing his wife’s throat.’

  ‘He lost it …’

  ‘He left me a letter. A kind of poem, actually. I know it off by heart:

  From tongue to blade, unrestrained. With a swift slash, I gash my beloved’s throat. And, among such vocal cords, I seek the words that once filled my ears with tenderness, don’t find them, and wonder where they are.

  ‘It was premeditated?’

  ‘He wrote it after he killed her. The paper had bloodstains on it.’

  ‘Is that the answer? Desperation?’

  ‘To act on impulse, the purest expression of the senses.’

  ‘Death.’

  ‘Death is a contingency.’

  ‘Not your own, you callous prick. I’m hungry.’

  ‘There it is!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The key to my truth. Let’s to the feast, monsieur.’

  ‘Let’s.’

  And that’s what they did. And that’s how it was to be. Blessed were those called to the supper of Hemistich.

  In Antonym’s memory, the orgy of rump steaks, porterhouses, t-bones, tenderloins and sirloins, accompanied by an array of perfectly cooked vegetables, seemed like an hallucination. To accompany the banquet was a wine that, from the very first glass, heightened his senses, drove away his anxiety, and made time pause. Meat, wine, meat, wine: a steady flow of waiters presented oblations with reverence, as if they were serving the lords of the world. All notion of time slipped away. Had it been three, four hours? Impossible to tell. Hemistich was transformed.

  ‘Such is the mystery of faith! Which has been revealed by me, only me! Music incarnate! Where is it?’

  At the next table, a group of inebriated Germans stood and began to sing the national anthem — ‘Deutschland über Alles’.

  Hemistich cackled with laughter.

  ‘Not that, no!’

  The dining room was stormed by twenty musicians in colourful clothes and shiny adornments, carrying strange percussion and wind instruments. They played an oriental-sounding melody and sang in an indecipherable language. Then twelve dancers appeared — four brunettes, four blondes, and four redheads. Wearing transparent clothes that provided glimpses of perfect contours, they swayed and gyrated between the tables, occasionally making the high-pitched sound that Muslim women make on festive occasions and when they’re mourning.

  ‘Touch the women, Antonym. Go ahead. Come here, my lovely. I want my friend to run his hands over you. Look how smooth she is, Antonym, so soft … Not silk, not satin. There’s nothing nicer to the touch than skin like this. Parlez, mes mains, pour moi.’

  The room was now spinning around Antonym. A light perfume wafted not only into his nostrils, but into his pores. It was as if there was no longer a barrier between outside and inside, between him and his companions in revelry.

  ‘One body, one soul!’

  Hemistich was dancing on the table.

  A lysergic effect rippled out in all directions, and the satyrs and nymphs peeled off the walls, and joined the dancers and musicians. In sassy voices, the satyrs sang a song with just one verse:

  Queasy, I vomit

  a leftover shred,

  love, eternal dreaming

  multiplied.

  One of them (or was it Hemistich?) brought his ugly face close to Antonym’s.

  ‘Nature, if you are neither mother nor stepmother,’ he said, ‘if human adventures and misadventures matter not to you (as you have affirmed more than once), all we can do, then, is writhe in your cornucopia, in the hope of a metaphysical echo, or ignore such indifference, and enjoy the mysterious pleasures of existence …’

  ‘Echoes of Leopardi … I once read Leopardi … How I love Bernadette! Maybe if I wore clothes in happy colours, like these musicians … She got tired of asking. A yellow shirt, a cloud in trousers … No, I’m not sad. The nostalgia of my shipwrecked love offers so many possibilities. Everyone’s fucking. I want to, too, but I don’t know if I can … What did you put in this food, Hemistich? What did you put in this wine, Hemistich? Hemistich, where are you? Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Bernadette!’

  Antonym cried out, and everything went black.

  VII

  ‘Hi, remember me?’

  Antonym examined the discreet crow’s-feet that belied her youthful appearance.

  ‘I have to admit I don’t.’

  ‘It’s Kiki. We went to school together.’

  ‘Oh, right, Kiki. But where are we, Kiki?’

  ‘In Hemistich’s office. You passed out last night, and we brought you here.’

  ‘We? Were you in the restaurant?’

  ‘I arrived at the end of the party. I haven’t seen anyone from our class for ages … We should get everyone together every now and then, shouldn’t we? I always read your articles. I don’t understand much, but I generally like them. You were always good at writing …’

  ‘I don’t write any more.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘Let him be, Kiki.’

  ‘Ah, come on, Hemistich. You’re always giving me a hard time. I’m going to give you my card, Antonym. Give me a call, OK? You’re looking hot. Ciao.’ As he watched Kiki’s arse moving away, Antonym thought how embarrassing it was to be part of certain people’s pasts.

  ‘Do you know Kiki?’

  ‘Yeah. We went to school together.’

  ‘Top-notch pussy.’

  ‘A bit past her prime.’

  ‘But she’s still a babe. And the best thing is she loves to fuck.’

  ‘This is starting to sound like something out of a porn flick. That was wild, last night. Is it always like that at your steakhouse?’

  ‘Let’s just say it was a special night, in your honour.’

  ‘Was it like that for Bernadette?’

  ‘Of course not. She had an absolutely normal dinner.’

  ‘I’m curious. Why did you get into this business?’

  ‘It’s a long story. I’m not sure you’re
up to hearing it now.’

  ‘I’m fine. Go ahead.’

  ‘You probably aren’t aware of it, but I fell into a deep depression two years ago. My intellectual career wasn’t going anywhere — except to debates on Byzantine topics and to the beds of post-grad lit students — and even that had lost some of its thrill. I felt lethargic; it was hard to get out of bed in the morning, and I was plagued by thoughts of death. Anyway, the symptoms of depression are well known. I went to a psychiatrist, who gave me one of those new drugs. I got better enough to realise that my existence had been a series of mistakes up to that point. If I’d kept going like that, the most I could aspire to was a fifteen-second obituary on educational TV to the sound of a classical guitar … Have you ever noticed that behind every TV news story about culture, there’s always a guitar being strummed? But it wasn’t the need for recognition that bothered me the most. I’d stopped seeing any sense in my writing — and in the writing of others. I needed a life.’

  ‘That’s not much different from how I feel at the moment.’

  ‘I kind of figured you weren’t OK. That’s why I called.’

  ‘So, like Paul on the road to Damascus, you had a vision and discovered that you needed to have your own steakhouse.’

  ‘Why the sarcasm?’

  ‘It’s a professional vice, as well as a self-defence strategy.’

  ‘Well, anyway, one afternoon, which stretched out before me like all of my afternoons as an idle intellectual, I was taking a shower with my body on automatic pilot — hands, arms, and legs, performing the sequence of obligatory movements that makes one shower exactly the same as all others. We’re never further from ourselves than when taking a simple shower, haven’t you noticed? But this one was different. As I was soaping up the soles of my feet, I felt, as if for the first time, how soft they were. This fact, which had never been so clear to me, startled me. Startled? No, it frightened me. My feet were like those of a newborn. It wasn’t possible that they belonged to a thirty-six-year-old man. They were out of keeping with my receding hairline, my sarcasm.

  ‘Anyhow, that same day, I went to have lunch with a brother I hadn’t seen for a while. I led the conversation towards our similarities and dissimilarities (to be honest, I don’t think one talks about anything else with siblings), and I started saying how ugly our family’s feet were, with crooked toes and everything. I went on so much about it that he took off his shoes to examine his own feet. That was what I’d wanted. My heart started racing when I saw them: my brother’s feet had hard, rough, calloused soles. I expressed my perplexity at this difference. He smiled, and said, “What do you expect, Hemistich? You were always cooped up, reading. You didn’t play barefoot like I did.”

  ‘That banal observation, one that I’d heard all my life, suddenly struck a deep chord. I went home less depressed than ashamed. Yes, I was really embarrassed, filled with the shame of one who finds himself naked in a crowd. Proud Hemistich, arrogant Hemistich, was a coward. My intellectual life meant the opposite of what I’d thought. Ever since I was a child, books hadn’t helped me know the world; rather, they’d kept me from it. Through them, I realised, I’d kept reality at bay, or adapted it to my own narrow parameters, which, in the end, is the same thing. I preferred reading the description of a landscape to actually seeing it. I preferred reading about love to feeling it. I preferred reading about pain to feeling it. And, to hide my weakness, I used knowledge like a whip on anyone who dared get close to me. My learning — which, at the end of the day, wasn’t so great and for which the word “learning” seemed like over-sized clothes — only served to inspire fear. Nothing more than fear. It had never made me happy, or led anyone to see new aspects of the world.’

  Antonym was unable to suppress a laugh.

  ‘ ‘‘See new aspects of the world.” That’s a good one, Hemistich. Do you know what that is? Educator? Baloney. I’ve interviewed a few, and they always say the same thing: “To educate is to help people see new aspects of reality with a critical perspective.” ’

  ‘Did I say anything about a “critical perspective?” ’

  ‘No, but it would complement it well.’

  Hemistich got up and went over to the window, which looked on to what seemed to be an inner courtyard. Antonym took the opportunity to examine his friend’s office. The walls were completely naked and light blue, like a police station. Next to the window was a heavy desk in dark timber decorated with marquetry, like the high-backed chair behind it. Two lower chairs for visitors completed the arrangement. On the table, a small, carefully stacked pile of papers and a chrome pencil holder only highlighted the lack of clutter. The sofa on which Antonym had woken up stood against the wall opposite the desk. It was covered in black leather, and was brand-spanking new. In front of the sofa, a centre table on a white rug held some magazines and newspapers, also stacked with the same fastidiousness. The publications were dated from the previous week, which reinforced the impression that the room wasn’t used very much. Maybe it’s just where Hemistich brings his pussy for the kill, thought Antonym.

  After remaining quiet for a few minutes, Hemistich came away from the window.

  ‘Could it be that we’re wrong about you, Antonym?’

  ‘We’re wrong?’

  ‘That I’m wrong, I mean.’

  ‘Most probably, yes. My mission on Earth is to disappoint.’

  Hemistich walked over to Antonym and looked straight into his eyes, as if searching his retinas.

  ‘No, I’m not wrong. There’s something in you that begs to be set free.’

  ‘You’re freaking me out, Hemistich. Someone stared at me like that last night, before I passed out. Was it you?’

  ‘No. Do you want me to go on with my story?’

  ‘Please do. It begs to be told.’

  ‘You must be asking yourself whether I’d never noticed my limits before then. Yes and no. I’d sensed my cowardice, but intellectual arrogance is peculiar: we are only able to be arrogant with others when we are arrogant enough with ourselves. The right amount of arrogance is that which leads us to believe that we make a difference. After the revelation that I was really just a big farce (because it really was a revelation), I started taking a closer look at the intellectuals around me. They were mirrors of my fragility. It became glaringly obvious to me that, even when armed with total arrogance, they always found a way to avoid straightforward statements and original reasoning. Their articles and essays were amphibological, so to speak; full of emergency exits, of which the most common were the expressions “to a certain extent” and “so to speak”. Have you ever noticed how intellectuals overuse them? Much more than stylistic crutches, they’re existential ramparts.

  ‘These discoveries were, obviously, followed by the question: What to do? Put a distance between myself and my peers and go to live in another city, where I could reconstruct myself? Vulgar avoidance: I’d just be sweeping my problem under the carpet. I fell into a state of aboulia. It wasn’t a depression, although it had things in common with the depressive state I was already familiar with. So I took leave from the university where I taught. I went to Europe. Perhaps contact with beauty, with history, would jog me out of my state of numbness. I went to museums, visited ruins, and admired architectural monuments. In Paris, I watched the best films by French, German, and Italian filmmakers.

  ‘But the trip only served to underline how out of touch with the world I was. Have you ever felt detached from your surroundings, Antonym? Because this was the feeling that had come over me. I came back from Europe with an urge to look for a solution in nature. Yes, I told myself, what I was missing was direct contact with reality in its rawest state. I needed something visceral. I spent two months visiting beautiful, remote places — beaches, forests, mountains, caves, waterfalls. But, no matter where I was, it was as if I wasn’t there. There was a barrier between my conscious mind and my
senses. I said “barrier”, but perhaps “discontinuity” is more accurate. The noise of the rapids and waterfalls was dull when it reached my eardrums. I’d touch a leaf, and it would have no texture. I’d smell a flower, and its perfume would be a memory. I’d look at a green valley, and my gaze would go somewhere beyond, somewhere that didn’t exist.

  ‘It had always been like that, I now realised. I’d never been able to integrate with the world, surrender to the world. We operated on different frequencies — hence the feeling of discontinuity. One night, back in the city and more anaesthetised than ever, I came to the conclusion that the only way out of this state was through pain. So I stapled the fingers of my left hand, one by one. I did it several times. But not even my own screams could wake me. I understood something that might sound obvious to some: all pain, even the most tenuous, tends towards totality. It belongs to a parallel universe — there is no intersection between pain and reality, even though we believe the latter to be composed of painful elements. Pain, when it is attributed to the reality around us, as if it were something that made it even more real, is either a romantic metaphor or an ideological representation. When true pain sets in, we find we are removed from the world. This is one of the reasons why it is so terrible. Even the hardest, most burdensome life is better than pain. With no alternative, all I could do was try to forget myself. In a way, it’s what everyone — OK, almost everyone — does.’

  ‘What about sex?’

  ‘My depression had left me impotent.’

  ‘There are medications, in case one of your waiters hasn’t already told you.’

  ‘Which only work if you feel desire, and desire had been deleted from my brain’s list of commands. Are you tired of listening to me?’

  ‘No. At least not to the point of stapling the fingers of my left hand.’

  ‘You should take me seriously. And you should take yourself seriously, Antonym. That’s what I expect of you.’

  ‘If it’s what you expect of me … So you decided to forget yourself, and …?’

  ‘I went back to my job at the university and wrote reviews for the literary supplement of a newspaper to top up my income. About three months went past, when this bleak routine took a detour. One Friday morning, I ran into an acquaintance as I was leaving the bank. My branch is in the shopping centre next door. He was coming out of an elegant jewellery store when we saw one another. We’d gone to school together and, though we’d come from different social echelons (he was very rich and I was very middle class), we’d become buddies. When we finished school, we’d followed the paths dictated by our vocations and bank accounts. I went on to study Language and Literature at the public university; he, Economics in London. And we’d never seen each other since.