by Unknown
IX
That night, my dad and I went to a snack bar. We ate cheese and roast beef sandwiches and I drank a beer. My father started talking, recalling a day about five years earlier when I came home with a duck, given to me free at an agricultural fair. The friend who died was staying with us at the time. We gave the duck some water and some corn, and it strutted up and down in the garden, and my friend was fascinated, and because his mother was always giving me presents and I didn’t much care for the duck anyway I asked my friend if he’d like to keep it.
X
The duck’s name was Donald. The name of the friend who died was Marcelo. The name of another friend who died, this time in 1987, when he got caught in a fishing net while surfing, was Victor. On the day of the accident Victor, Marcelo and I were in the water, the beach was Capão da Canoa, it was about five degrees and we were near the sewage outlet. You can walk for miles along the beaches in Rio Grande do Sul and the landscape never changes – lifeguard huts, scrappy bits of grass, an old horse that keeps stopping to graze and getting beaten because it won’t pull the cart. Given the position of the rope tethering the net – we found the rope later on in the sand – and the direction of the current, which was pulling towards the south, it was clear that the net had passed underneath me and then underneath Marcelo before either getting entangled in Victor’s leash or caught on the tail of his board or around his leg, I never knew for sure. He was carried unconscious to a first-aid station. Salt water dribbled from one corner of his mouth. They tried artificial respiration, then applied electrodes to his chest, first shock, second shock, a guy in a white coat counted the seconds. Later, someone said he’d done it all wrong, that he hadn’t even placed him face down or expelled the water from his lungs or removed his wetsuit to allow his chest to expand more easily, but I think Victor was already dead when he was brought out of the sea.
XI
I was staying at Victor’s house. We had arrived the evening before, had eaten sausages for supper and played canasta until we went to bed. I went back to Porto Alegre at two o’clock the next afternoon, with my dad at the wheel, he and my mum having driven straight to Capão da Canoa when they heard about the accident. On the day Marcelo died I thought about that journey, Lagoa dos Patos, the toll station, the hour and a half drive to Porto Alegre, and I had that memory vividly in my mind when I left Marcelo’s house I told my dad this in the snack bar, but he told me not to think about it. These things happen. Sometimes they make no sense at all, he said, and now I realize that I never talked to my dad about his childhood, the school friends who had perhaps stayed behind in Germany, some or all of whom would have ended up in concentration camps, or about the memories he had of the streets and the town and the country that was laid waste in the years that followed.
XII
My father didn’t attend synagogue. He took no part in any charitable activities associated with the Jewish community. He showed no interest in religious topics, never quoted from the Bible, never prayed or said whether or not he believed in God. In almost forty years I never so much as heard him mention the word, and when the rabbi made a speech at his funeral praising him as ‘a man who lived his Judaism every day’ I couldn’t recall a single episode in his life that justified such a comment.
XIII
After my father died, my mother was left alone. His death came in the wake of a particularly grim period of her life, during which she had also lost her best friend. My sister had a Labrador puppy whose life was devoted to drooling, trashing the apartment, stealing food and barking at night, and my mother came to enjoy looking after him and taking him to a square frequented by other dogs and their owners or trainers. My mother likes to talk about my father but there’s nothing morbid about this, not at all, and I like it too because every now and then her memories include something I didn’t know or had forgotten: the time he won a prize from the Engineering Council, the time he decided to have a barbecue and to fan the hot coals with a hairdryer, the time he made me a little theatre out of modelling clay because I was having nightmares about giant otters.
XIV
In 1977, a sergeant saved a child in the zoo in Brasília. She had fallen into the enclosure containing giant otters, and the sergeant leaped in after her and was attacked and later died in hospital when the bites he had received became infected. The incident was featured on the TV news for days afterwards, and one night my dad called me into his room, where he had placed the ‘theatre’ on the bed with a towel as the curtain and behind it various dolls. He had made them all himself. The story always began with giant otters, about the babies they had and how they swam on their backs when eating fish. My dad told the story over several nights, explaining that giant otters are only aggressive when they feel threatened and that, besides, such creatures were unknown in Porto Alegre. I would watch this show before going to sleep and my mum says I never again woke up screaming.
XV
My father taught me to drive, to swim, to use a soldering iron, and together we rigged up a primitive lighting system by fixing four sockets to a piece of wood, each with a plug attached by a cable to four light bulbs positioned at various points in the garage which could be turned on and off to create our very own ghost train effect. He went with me to have my MMR jab. My first trip on a plane was with him. He opened a bank account for me and taught me my first words in English and bought me magazines full of stories about the Wild West, stories that encouraged me to read and, later on, to become a writer.
XVI
When I was thirty-one, my father rang me one Friday to tell me that an old university friend of mine, recently appointed public prosecutor in Santa Rosa in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, had been shot six times by a drunken policeman. For many years, he had been one of my best friends. During the year I spent in London, I stayed in the same place he had stayed. Like me, he had done his military service, and like me, he had considered becoming a diplomat. We read the same books and throughout our time at university we both often talked about giving up law and trying another profession. We worked together in the same practice before I became a journalist and moved to São Paulo. The murder was reported in all the newspapers and was talked about for weeks afterwards. A street in Porto Alegre was named after him, another Marcelo. The funeral took place late on Friday afternoon, and I didn’t go because I had something important to do at work, or because I wouldn’t have had time to catch the plane, or for both those reasons or neither, but my father offered to go in my place.
XVII
A year after my father’s death, I was in Porto Alegre for the unveiling of the headstone. In attendance were cousins from Florianópolis and Vitória, from France and Israel. The ceremony took place on a cold Sunday morning. The black cloth was removed from the grave marker and a few small stones placed on it, and then we went to a churrascaria for lunch, and since several of my cousins already had children every single person at the table asked me if I had any plans to start a family. Whenever I attend these family gatherings, I always notice how people interact with their children, one cousin spoonfeeding her eight-month-old baby, another kicking a stone back and forth with his son. The closest I came to being a father was when I was married. But the marriage ended, and I didn’t give the matter of having children any more thought, and now I can only respond to the kind of questions I was asked at the restaurant with some banal, jokey comment.
XVIII
The first cat I had was run over. The second one I lost when my wife and I split up. On the day my wife left I went to a bar on Avenida Roosevelt, then to another bar on Augusta, then I crossed the road and went into a club where there was a show on, then to another club and another show, then to a bar that had a jukebox and where you can breakfast on chocolate milk and brandy, and that was my life every night for the next three years. It lost me a job. It was the reason why none of my subsequent relationships worked out. I never again spoke to my ex-wife, or to any of the other girlfriends I’d had, or to the majority of the f
riends I’d made over a period of forty years, at school, university or work, and about whom I now know nothing, where they live, what they’re doing, or if they’re even alive.
XIX
The photo on my father’s headstone was taken when he was about sixty, the smile is fairly typical of him, but when I’m alone and try to remember him no specific pose or expression comes to mind, neither does his voice, because people’s voices change with age and in the last twelve years of his life we spoke more often on the phone than face to face. In the novels I’ve written, I’ve portrayed my father in different ways: as a Jew marked by the memory of the war, as a secondary character in that story about the fishing net, as a man who gives his son the worst possible news just before a football match. All of these are true and false, as is always the case with fiction, and I’ve often wondered why I keep writing about him and if, when I’m older, I’ll get my real memory of him mixed up with the memory I’ve set down in those books: the facts I chose to include or exclude, the feelings I did or didn’t have, who my father really was and the kind of person I did or didn’t become because of that or despite that or entirely independently of that, this story which, for various reasons, begins at the ballet performance that took place after Champion’s death.
XX
My father was sitting next to me. The theatre was packed, then everything went dark and shortly afterwards a solitary spotlight lit up my sister alone on the stage, dancing the part of Little Red Riding Hood.
XXI
My sister found out about Champion when we got back home. The Dobermann had torn off half of Champion’s snout, and the maid described how his body, with his jawbone protruding from his cheek, seemed to hang limply from the other dog’s mouth. First aid for dogs is much the same as it is for people: you lay them on the ground, make sure the airways are unobstructed and apply pressure to the wound. When he was put in the car, Champion was very still, wrapped in a blood-soaked towel, and at the veterinary surgery, after the vet had checked his pulse and the temperature of his paws and the colour of his gums, he told my father there was nothing they could do for Champion and that it would be best to have him put down.
XXII
When he came back from the vet’s, my father went straight to the Korean’s house. None of us had ever been there. They had an enormous living room, with a swimming pool and a basketball court out back. By then, the Korean knew what had happened and he told my father it was our maid’s fault. After all, she was the one who had let Champion slip out of his collar. The dog should never have been allowed that close to the fence, we should have kept a more careful eye on him, the Korean said, and one day I heard my father on the phone and I stood behind the door listening to him telling the whole story in detail, before, during and after the Dobermann attacked Champion, and then he was saying: I mean, shit, what the hell was I to do? That was the first time I’d ever heard his voice tremble. It almost tailed off in a whisper. But he never said anything more about the incident, and all I have left of Champion are a few scraps of memories: the bowl he ate his food from, the plastic snake he was always chewing, his dark, wet fur after we had bathed him, the night of a football match when we sat up with him, my father and I, until the fireworks had stopped.
XXIII
There are many ways for a dog to die. It can catch rabies, distemper or canine parvovirus. Or hepatitis or cancer. It can get shot or eat some poisonous plant. Or else, one humid day in the garage, when no one else in the house is stirring, you take a glass bottle, wrap it in newspaper, and stamp on it several times until the fragments of glass are so small as to be almost invisible. Then you pick those pieces up one by one and stick them into a chunk of raw meat until it’s really heavy and has the texture of sand. Then you go up the steps, through the living room, open the door, cross the garden to the neighbouring fence, as close as the shrubs will allow, and you lob it – that favourite dish of any dog anywhere any time – onto the other side.
XXIV
My sister cried all night for Champion. My father went into her room several times, and his steps sounded heavy, as if he were dragging his feet, and I remembered our conversation earlier that evening, his asking me to be strong, saying that we had to protect my sister, that I was a big boy now, the older brother, and that’s what older brothers had to do. There’s no point being angry, he said. You should never hang on to anger. An angry person will never be the master of his own life, said my father, but at the theatre the wolf appeared onstage and my sister mimed her questions about the size of his ears, his big eyes, his huge mouth, and throughout the rest of the show all I could think about was the Korean. The Korean’s house. The few occasions I’d seen the Korean leaving the house and setting off to work in a suit, and what I would do the next time I saw him. And what he would do when he saw me. And if I would make a point of looking him in the eye, knowing I knew that he knew. And never again, not when Victor or Marcelo or the other Marcelo died, not even when my father died or at the unveiling of the headstone, perhaps because I didn’t cry on any of those occasions, not a single tear, a whole life without shedding a tear, no, never again did I feel as I did on that night at the ballet performance: sitting in the fourth row, my dad in the half-light, and me looking at him and fixing his profile in my mind, his nose, his jaw, his eyes and his expression, the clearest image I have of my father, with me so close to making a decision and him waiting for the wolf’s answer.
GRANTA
* * *
VIOLETA
Miguel Del Castillo
TRANSLATED BY AMANDA HOPKINSON
* * *
MIGUEL DEL CASTILLO
1987
Miguel Del Castillo was born in Rio de Janeiro. His father is Uruguayan and his mother is from Rio. While studying architecture at PUC-Rio, Del Castillo worked as editor of the culture and architecture magazine Noz. In 2010, he moved to São Paulo, where he is now an editor at Cosac Naify publishing house. He received the Paulo Britto Award for Poetry and Prose for his story ‘Carta para Ana’ and is currently at work on his first collection of short stories, from which ‘Violeta’ is taken.
I
Miguel Angel was one of my father’s cousins, a Tupamaro who disappeared during the military dictatorship in Uruguay. I was named after him. For many years I was unaware of my family history, of the twenty-two years my father spent in Montevideo before moving to Rio, Miguel Angel and the rest of it. I learned Spanish on my own, as nobody bothered to teach it to me.
I like to think that Miguel Angel feared nothing: looked at himself in the mirror every morning, took his guns, and made two or three coded phone calls
– Now the bird flies off alone
sipped his maté, bade farewell to his daughter Ximena, entrusting her to my father, and set off to find his comrades in arms. Violeta, Miguel Angel’s mother, was taken prisoner more than once because of her son’s subversive activities, her head inside water barrels, the soldiers provoking while undressing her
– She doesn’t look all that old after all
gripping her tightly, telling her that her son had been captured, that they were torturing him nearly to death but still he wouldn’t reveal anything, so she’d better spill the beans. Until one day one of Miguel Angel’s female comrades was brought into the prison and she and Violeta decided that, should the girl succeed in getting out before her, she would find her family and ask them to write to Violeta in an agreed code, to inform her regarding her son. Two days after her release, this woman bumped into my father
– I can’t believe I found you, I’ve got something to tell you
and she explained how, since Violeta spent her time in prison sewing, they had agreed that sending her some needles would indicate Miguel Angel was well and that a skein of wool meant he was going to leave the country. My father wrote to his aunt to announce the birth of her grandson, Pablito, and that baby clothes would be useful, which was why he was sending the wool and needles
– Now the bird flies off
and Violeta jumped with joy, the guards could not understand, even after reading the letter once twice three times, why Violeta was dancing naked around the prison
– She doesn’t look that old
my father, a student at the military school, enquiring at every military headquarters about a lady called Violeta, Miguel Angel had left the country, the skein of wool, Chile still free of dictatorship