Eucalyptus: Biblioasis International Translation Series
Autor Mauricio Segura Traducere de Donald Winkleren Limba Engleză Paperback – 21 oct 2013
An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013: Top 100/Editors' Pick
"Captivating . . . a story of blood, hatred, vengeance, and politics."—Radio-Canada
Alberto Ventura has travelled to Chile to attend the funeral of his father, Roberto. A man hated and loved both by his family and the local people, Roberto was known in the village as an enigma, a rake, a controversial boss, and a quick-tempered thug. It's said that he has destroyed the family land by mass-farming eucalyptus trees, and he's known to have killed a local boy in a fit of rage. Yet as Alberto delves into the rumours that obscure his father's death—was it natural causes, vengeance, murder, or self-sacrifice?—he finds the reputation at stake is his own.
In a breath-catching story of race and identity, rife with Chile's centuries-old tension between natives and local landowners, Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus investigates the flashpoint of one village community in an expanding world.
"Well-executed, with a cinematic quality and keen visual sense … Segura locates the political through the personal in a way that is uncommon."—Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books
"A solid novelist of infallible instincts."—L'Actualité
"Captivating . . . a story of blood, hatred, vengeance, and politics."—Radio-Canada
Alberto Ventura has travelled to Chile to attend the funeral of his father, Roberto. A man hated and loved both by his family and the local people, Roberto was known in the village as an enigma, a rake, a controversial boss, and a quick-tempered thug. It's said that he has destroyed the family land by mass-farming eucalyptus trees, and he's known to have killed a local boy in a fit of rage. Yet as Alberto delves into the rumours that obscure his father's death—was it natural causes, vengeance, murder, or self-sacrifice?—he finds the reputation at stake is his own.
In a breath-catching story of race and identity, rife with Chile's centuries-old tension between natives and local landowners, Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus investigates the flashpoint of one village community in an expanding world.
"Well-executed, with a cinematic quality and keen visual sense … Segura locates the political through the personal in a way that is uncommon."—Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books
"A solid novelist of infallible instincts."—L'Actualité
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781927428375
ISBN-10: 1927428378
Pagini: 150
Dimensiuni: 127 x 188 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Ediția:New.
Editura: BIBLIOASIS
Seriile Biblioasis International Translation Series, Biblioasis International Translation
Locul publicării:Canada
ISBN-10: 1927428378
Pagini: 150
Dimensiuni: 127 x 188 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Ediția:New.
Editura: BIBLIOASIS
Seriile Biblioasis International Translation Series, Biblioasis International Translation
Locul publicării:Canada
Recenzii
”Segura writes with a poetic economy of language, using very few words to create meaningful images … Winkler's masterful translation is so seamless, readers will think that the novel was written in English … Segura's novel and his original voice are important additions to the Canadian canon.”—Publishers Weekly
"An adventurous, hypnotic read.”—Ben Woodard, Numéro Cinq
"The book, originally written in French, is about a Chilean-Canadian man who has returned to his native country to bury his father. Perhaps this international hopscotch begins to describe the magic I felt when opening Eucalyptus ... a beautiful book."—A Geography of Reading
"Briskly paced ... The short novel reflects on the vital relation of exile (from one’s country, as well as one’s past) to such redemptive modes as love, atonement, and belonging. The fulfillment of Alberto’s quest to understand his father squares with Segura’s strong affirmation of charity and compassion, virtues capable of healing troubled pasts."—The Montreal Review of Books
"Ably translated, well-paced, teeming with interesting characters that often speak for whole chapters, and written in a prose that is both lucid and hallucinatory, Eucalyptus is a remarkable, thought-provoking novel with the accessibility of a page-turner.”—The Rover
"An adventurous, hypnotic read.”—Ben Woodard, Numéro Cinq
"The book, originally written in French, is about a Chilean-Canadian man who has returned to his native country to bury his father. Perhaps this international hopscotch begins to describe the magic I felt when opening Eucalyptus ... a beautiful book."—A Geography of Reading
"Briskly paced ... The short novel reflects on the vital relation of exile (from one’s country, as well as one’s past) to such redemptive modes as love, atonement, and belonging. The fulfillment of Alberto’s quest to understand his father squares with Segura’s strong affirmation of charity and compassion, virtues capable of healing troubled pasts."—The Montreal Review of Books
"Ably translated, well-paced, teeming with interesting characters that often speak for whole chapters, and written in a prose that is both lucid and hallucinatory, Eucalyptus is a remarkable, thought-provoking novel with the accessibility of a page-turner.”—The Rover
Notă biografică
Born in Chile in 1969, Mauricio Segura grew up in Montreal and studied at Université de Montréal and McGill University. A well-known journalist and documentary filmmaker, he is the author of three novels and a study of French perceptions of Latin America. His novel Black Alley, published by Biblioasis in 2010, was widely praised as “a gritty look at multiculturalism in practice” (Noah Richler, CBC Radio) that exerts “an urgent complicity rarely seen in other works about racial tensions, multiculturalism and the immigrant experience” (Words Without Borders).
Mauricio Segura lives with his family in Montreal.
Donald Winkler is a Montreal-based literary translator and documentary filmmaker. He has translated books by the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, the philosopher Georges Leroux and the novelists Daniel Poliquin and Nadine Bismuth. Winkler is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Award.
Mauricio Segura lives with his family in Montreal.
Donald Winkler is a Montreal-based literary translator and documentary filmmaker. He has translated books by the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, the philosopher Georges Leroux and the novelists Daniel Poliquin and Nadine Bismuth. Winkler is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Award.
Extras
from Chapter 1
When the pick-up entered the outlying neighbourhoods of Temuco, Alberto took no notice of the election posters glued to the telephone poles, with either the lunar face and tired eyes of Francisco Huenchumilla, the mayoral candidate for the Concertación, or the open gaze and parted hair of Miguel Becker, candidate for the Alliance party. All he saw, through the smog here and there perforated by the sun, were the first little wooden houses, greyish yellow, tilted to the side as if about to collapse. These dwellings reminded him of another arrival in Temuco in the company of his father. It was 1990, no more than a month after the return of democracy. For the first time since his exile to Canada in 1974, his father was setting foot in that city so dear to his heart. As for Alberto, he would be in Chile only briefly, as he had decided to remain in Montreal to pursue his studies while his parents and brother returned to the country of their birth. Under Alberto’s attentive gaze his father, bright eyed, at the wheel, noted every detail, while the mother and brother were slumped in the back seat. Yes, he thought, papa preferred this city to many of the people around him. But above all, he thought: Yes, it is now that the family is breaking up, decomposing like molecules being brought to the boil, and we are scattering to the four corners of the American continent.
Now, as he drove along the Avenida Alemania, past its expensive houses with wrought iron fences and vast gardens and the monochrome condominiums rising up behind, it occurred to him that the reunion of the four members of his family, a reunion he had so often longed for over the past years, and even more intensely during the last four months, was no longer possible. As he parked the truck in front of the slope-roofed house of his grandparents, he was overcome by a sense of emptiness. Yes, that is what he felt, because it would not be until a few hours later, when he would see the scar on his father’s remains, that he would be overwhelmed by grief. Standing on the sidewalk he scrutinized the house for a long time, with its warped roof, its peeling paint, and dust encrusted window panes, only a shadow of what it once had been. He helped Marco out of the vehicle.
Alberto rang, but no one came to the door. He turned the knob and cautiously entered the living room, where the silence was broken only by the clock that marked off, painfully, the passing of every second. He and Marco went from one room to another and soon discovered, upstairs, a form on a bed under a white embroidered eiderdown. In a corner, in front of the hazy light drifting in through window, a woman wrapped in a manta dozed, her profile noble, her skin shrivelled. It was Abuela. When he crept around the bed, Alberto saw the thin and livid face of his father, who seemed to have aged enormously. Someone had dressed him in a white shirt he would never have consented to wear when he was alive. What is more, he was in a position that did not suit him, lying on his back with his hands clasped over his stomach, giving him a meditative air. When, by his side, Marco froze, fearful, Alberto pulled him gently towards him. After a moment, in a touching gesture, his son bent his ear to the corpse’s chest, as if to confirm that the heart had well and truly stopped.
“Oh, Abuelo...” said Marco, raising his head.
Then, dizzyingly, his memory disgorged multiple images of his father. He remembered when he was always neatly dressed, the hem of his white tunic thrown up by his rapid strides. He remembered him in a plaid shirt, construction boots always unlaced, when, exhausted, he pushed open the door of their cramped apartment in the neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges. He saw him bearded, his hair long, just as in the photos taken when he was going to university and living only for meetings and demonstrations. Finally, he remembered him from the last time he had paid him a visit, wearing a rippling leather hat with a lasso hanging from his waist, sharp-eyed, taciturn like the peasants around him on the farm he ran with an iron fist. He thought again of all these roles his father had played, and could not connect them.
How he would have liked to collect his thoughts, to lay down at the foot of this body the confused tangle of emotions at work within him!
When Abuela began to moan, doubtless in the throes of a nightmare, Alberto took Marco by the hand and left the room.
Once in the courtyard, Alberto didn’t see him right away, because he was off to the side, out of the sun, under a corrugated iron roof. Enrique, his father’s youngest brother, an adopted son whose family name, Araya, had stuck to him like a birthmark, had been skin and bones just a few years ago; now he lifted his arms slowly, breathed through his mouth, and would have had trouble tying his own shoelaces. An axe over his head, the other hand holding a log, he looked more and more like his boss, thought Alberto, remembering the fleshy butcher with white hair and a sharp tongue. It seemed to him, from where he stood, that the axe grazed Araya’s fingers when it fell. The high grass, colour of straw, had overgrown everything in the courtyard: bald tires, the old body of a Coccinelle with shattered windows, tools, iron bars. What would Abuelo have thought of this neglected yard, he who had succeeded in restoring the house? Too old to go on working the land, his children having left it, he had acquired it to bring the family together again, something he had achieved in part, since four of his daughters came to live here with their husbands and children. That was what made it possible for him to live out the last of his days in something of a domestic circle, as he had hoped.
“You’ve seen the weather?” asked Araya, raising his eyes.
When Alberto looked at the sky, he had to squint.
“You ever remember heat like this in October?” Araya went on. “I’m telling you, the planet is all topsy-turvy.”
With disturbing ease, like a knife cutting through quesillo, the axe split the log in two. Araya stood the axe head on the concrete, looked Marco up and down, and balanced another log on the stump.
“No point looking for anybody.”
He leaned over and spat to the side.
“Noemie’s left for the campo,” he added, referring to his father’s land. “And to Cunco too I guess, for the legal papers... I figure you must be happy to be back. That makes what, four years that you haven’t been to see us?”
“Four years. Exactly.”
“So tell me. You still freezing your balls off in the land of hockey?”
Alberto smiled, and as Araya launched into a playful description of a fight during a game he’d seen on TV, he thought to himself that the last time he was here his uncle did not have this ragged beard now growing like a weed.
“And the little one’s mother?”
As Alberto did not reply right away, Araya said:
“You know, I’m separated too.”
When he smiled mockingly, his double chin was more noticeable. So he’d heard about his recent marital problems. But who had talked to him, since even his father had known nothing about it. His mother?
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that, you know...”
“Did I say I was ashamed?”
“You really look like one, don’t you?”
“What?”
“A writer. You know, I can’t stand novels. But when I come across a writer on TV, I stay on the channel. Those guys fascinate me, they have something, I don’t know what exactly... Seems you have to teach too?”
Alberto nodded yes, thinking: “He’s up on everything. He knows I don’t like teaching. That it takes up all my time, making me work late at night on my hypothetical novels, once Marco is asleep.” To change the subject, he asked him when the burial would be.
“If you ask me, there won’t be many people at the cemetery,” Alaya replied.
“Why do you say that?”
“He didn’t know how to make himself loved, your old man. He didn’t have the knack. And what are you going to do with his land? You know it goes back to you, right, to you and your brother?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”
“But you know what he had, right? They said ‘internal haemorrhage.’ You believe that?”
Alberto was suddenly all ears, but he kept quiet.
“In my opinion,” Araya went on, “he hurt himself and didn’t deal with it. And what happened happened. He went down. And so fast, my friend...”
He laughed openly, in a way that clearly gave him satisfaction.
“You know me, I’m not like the others here, all religious fanatics. Still, the way he died makes you think. God’s punishment? You can’t rule that out.”
Alberto tolerated Araya’s gaze for a long moment, then he beckoned Marco to come near. Side by side, they walked towards the house.
“Hey, wait... Wait, I said!”
Alberto stopped in the doorway and slowly turned around.
“Come here,” Araya continued, “Sit down... Sit down, I tell you!”
Alberto dropped his son’s hand and, reluctantly, lowered himself onto the sofa leaning against the house’s brick wall.
“I understand you, you know,” said Araya. “Me too, when I was younger I idolized your father.”
“I don’t idolize my father.”
“Are you sure? Anyway, there’s one thing you can’t deny. Roberto ran away from Chile. You understand? He – ran – away. That’s what’s behind everything.”
“He left because his life was in danger.”
“He left because he was just waiting to leave. Your father was ambitious, very ambitious. He dreamed of the North.”
“I see you didn’t know my father.”
Araya smiled with a falsely conciliatory air.
“Listen, let me tell you something. Okay?”
At first Alberto wondered if he should just leave, but astonishingly, as the other talked, he found himself more and more rooted to the spot out of curiosity and lassitude. He listened as Araya talked about the political circumstances surrounding his parents’ return to Chile at the beginning of the 1990s, when Patricio Aylwin’s coming to power inspired a wave of hope. He was going to rebuild the country, to restore dignity to the people who had been held in contempt by the military regime, we were going to open ourselves to the world, and to welcome hundreds and thousands of exiles with open arms. In point of fact, after seventeen years of dictatorship, just telling the population that it was now free was enough to raise its spirits. And then bit by bit the celebrations dissolved into day-to-day life. And with the simple power of words, Araya conjured up Roberto getting down from a train that had arrived from the capital. While a morning mist wrapped the streetlights in an aura of mystery, his father advanced along the sidewalks of Temuco, trailing a small black suitcase on wheels, oblivious to the taxi drivers and their honking.
He passed in front of the Pinto feria where the empty stalls, under the gallery’s deep arcades, stood next to piles of wooden crates, and where the wind swept cardboard boxes along the ground and sent a newspaper flying into the air. He passed through the centre of town, past the university he had attended forty years earlier and that no longer had the same name, and turned onto Calle San Martin leading west.
“He walked like that,” said Araya, “from the centre of town to here. As if there were nothing to it, a good hike. In front of the house he must have noticed all the cars double-parked. Then he went up the path. He rang the bell, but there were so many people that nobody heard. He pushed open the door, and that’s when I saw him. It was not the first time I’d seen him since he’d been back in the country, and right away I was astonished to see how much the news seemed to have affected him. His eyes were frozen, shining, like those of a madman. People went up to him and embraced him. They pretended to be surprised that Carmen had not come with him, but they knew their marriage was going from bad to worse. I remember, he took a good look at the weeping women. It’s true they were laying it on a bit thick, swaying from side to side, and crying as if they were really sad that the old man was gone,” Araya said, smiling. “It must have reminded him of his childhood. In a corner, the old man’s friends, those mad for Yahweh, dressed in black and all wearing skullcaps, were talking softly. Then he went up to the coffin. I was watching him, and I saw right away that he had something in mind. And just like that, there, in front of everybody, the man opened the coffin’s lid. The women stopped weeping, discussions shut down, and they all threw themselves at him. Don’t you know, you don’t do that, it’s forbidden! But he’d had time to open the coffin, and we all saw the old man’s bony face and silver hair. That gave me a jolt, because he had a gentle air about him, something you never saw during his lifetime. Then, as Noemi, I think, was taking him by the hand, Roberto fell to the ground, all at once, just like that, knocking his head against the coffin. Four of us picked him up and carried him to the sofa.”
Alberto had no trouble imagining his father opening his eyes, laid out on the sofa. He imagined him blinking on seeing the maid bent over him, fanning him, while behind him the weeping women had resumed their plaints. His father got up, unsteady, and went into the kitchen, where sitting beside the wood stove he found Abuela, her eyes motionless, muttering away as usual. He knelt down before her and listened: “Why is the house full of strangers,” she complained. “Mamá, soy yo,” he said to her, but she kept on moving her lips, gazing into space as if she had just lost her sight. He rose and placed a kiss on his mother’s brow, before Noemi burst in to announce that it was time to leave for the synagogue.
Outside, the mist deepened his melancholy, as he held up one corner of the coffin and onlookers joined the procession. At intersections, traffic stopped to let them pass. He recognized the synagogue immediately, the two-storey stone building with its balcony and modest dome on which one could make out a Star of David. In a city so eager to tear everything down, this dignified building is a kind of miracle, thought Roberto.
As the ceremony began, he was surprised to find that his Hebrew came back to him quickly, but he soon tired of the rabbi’s psalms. He cast his eyes around and studied the faces that once peopled his childhood, today ravaged by time and the South’s harsh climate. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins, friends of the old man, his colleagues and his suppliers, in short Temuco’s entire Jewish community had turned out. Who would have thought that the old man was so much appreciated? And Araya reported what he had learned from his sister Noemi: that towards the end of the ceremony the rabbi, by a coincidence that left Roberto speechless, had proclaimed aloud what he himself had been trying to express for days: “To turn your back on his past is as vain as wanting to fell a tree with your bare hands.”
When Araya paused, Alberto interrupted him:
“Fine. But what are you getting at with all this?”
“Just be patient. The next day, all the brothers and sisters were seated here, in the dining room. At one end, her eyes half open, Mama smiled, she barely understood what was going on. At the other end, Noemi held an envelope in her hands. Everyone understood immediately, you could have heard a fly on the wing. Noemi coughed, she tore open the envelope, and brought out a sheet of squared paper, on which I recognized the old man’s elongated, flowing script. She began reading. The letter went something like this, in the old man’s inimitable style. (Here he assumed a stentorian voice): ‘So as to honour the will of Yahweh, so as to give thanks to my beloved family and to ensure our perpetuity in this lost corner of the world, I leave...’ Noemi stopped reading, not believing her eyes, then she pulled herself together and went on in a halting voice: ‘...I leave all of my assets in the hands of Roberto, my son, who is free to dispose of my inheritance as he deems best...’ Can you imagine? I, who in his last years, had spent whole days with the old man, talking to him, going with him to fetch his wine at the botelleria, sometimes even reading to him from his Zionist journals, I was struck dumb, I have to admit. What had I done to him to deserve this slap in the face? What had Roberto done to so enter into his good graces? I decided to find out. And you know what? Nothing. Roberto had not lifted his little finger for the old man.”
For a few moments, his shoulders hunched, wholly absorbed in his story, he looked at Alberto without seeing him, his gaze passing through him as if he were a ghost.
“The truth,” he continued in an absent voice, “is that on the instant Roberto was as stupefied as we were. He hadn’t seen it coming, either.”
Roberto got to his feet, walked shakily into the middle of the living room, leaned on the back of an armchair. He felt, thought Alberto, everyone’s eyes burning into his back.
When the pick-up entered the outlying neighbourhoods of Temuco, Alberto took no notice of the election posters glued to the telephone poles, with either the lunar face and tired eyes of Francisco Huenchumilla, the mayoral candidate for the Concertación, or the open gaze and parted hair of Miguel Becker, candidate for the Alliance party. All he saw, through the smog here and there perforated by the sun, were the first little wooden houses, greyish yellow, tilted to the side as if about to collapse. These dwellings reminded him of another arrival in Temuco in the company of his father. It was 1990, no more than a month after the return of democracy. For the first time since his exile to Canada in 1974, his father was setting foot in that city so dear to his heart. As for Alberto, he would be in Chile only briefly, as he had decided to remain in Montreal to pursue his studies while his parents and brother returned to the country of their birth. Under Alberto’s attentive gaze his father, bright eyed, at the wheel, noted every detail, while the mother and brother were slumped in the back seat. Yes, he thought, papa preferred this city to many of the people around him. But above all, he thought: Yes, it is now that the family is breaking up, decomposing like molecules being brought to the boil, and we are scattering to the four corners of the American continent.
Now, as he drove along the Avenida Alemania, past its expensive houses with wrought iron fences and vast gardens and the monochrome condominiums rising up behind, it occurred to him that the reunion of the four members of his family, a reunion he had so often longed for over the past years, and even more intensely during the last four months, was no longer possible. As he parked the truck in front of the slope-roofed house of his grandparents, he was overcome by a sense of emptiness. Yes, that is what he felt, because it would not be until a few hours later, when he would see the scar on his father’s remains, that he would be overwhelmed by grief. Standing on the sidewalk he scrutinized the house for a long time, with its warped roof, its peeling paint, and dust encrusted window panes, only a shadow of what it once had been. He helped Marco out of the vehicle.
Alberto rang, but no one came to the door. He turned the knob and cautiously entered the living room, where the silence was broken only by the clock that marked off, painfully, the passing of every second. He and Marco went from one room to another and soon discovered, upstairs, a form on a bed under a white embroidered eiderdown. In a corner, in front of the hazy light drifting in through window, a woman wrapped in a manta dozed, her profile noble, her skin shrivelled. It was Abuela. When he crept around the bed, Alberto saw the thin and livid face of his father, who seemed to have aged enormously. Someone had dressed him in a white shirt he would never have consented to wear when he was alive. What is more, he was in a position that did not suit him, lying on his back with his hands clasped over his stomach, giving him a meditative air. When, by his side, Marco froze, fearful, Alberto pulled him gently towards him. After a moment, in a touching gesture, his son bent his ear to the corpse’s chest, as if to confirm that the heart had well and truly stopped.
“Oh, Abuelo...” said Marco, raising his head.
Then, dizzyingly, his memory disgorged multiple images of his father. He remembered when he was always neatly dressed, the hem of his white tunic thrown up by his rapid strides. He remembered him in a plaid shirt, construction boots always unlaced, when, exhausted, he pushed open the door of their cramped apartment in the neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges. He saw him bearded, his hair long, just as in the photos taken when he was going to university and living only for meetings and demonstrations. Finally, he remembered him from the last time he had paid him a visit, wearing a rippling leather hat with a lasso hanging from his waist, sharp-eyed, taciturn like the peasants around him on the farm he ran with an iron fist. He thought again of all these roles his father had played, and could not connect them.
How he would have liked to collect his thoughts, to lay down at the foot of this body the confused tangle of emotions at work within him!
When Abuela began to moan, doubtless in the throes of a nightmare, Alberto took Marco by the hand and left the room.
Once in the courtyard, Alberto didn’t see him right away, because he was off to the side, out of the sun, under a corrugated iron roof. Enrique, his father’s youngest brother, an adopted son whose family name, Araya, had stuck to him like a birthmark, had been skin and bones just a few years ago; now he lifted his arms slowly, breathed through his mouth, and would have had trouble tying his own shoelaces. An axe over his head, the other hand holding a log, he looked more and more like his boss, thought Alberto, remembering the fleshy butcher with white hair and a sharp tongue. It seemed to him, from where he stood, that the axe grazed Araya’s fingers when it fell. The high grass, colour of straw, had overgrown everything in the courtyard: bald tires, the old body of a Coccinelle with shattered windows, tools, iron bars. What would Abuelo have thought of this neglected yard, he who had succeeded in restoring the house? Too old to go on working the land, his children having left it, he had acquired it to bring the family together again, something he had achieved in part, since four of his daughters came to live here with their husbands and children. That was what made it possible for him to live out the last of his days in something of a domestic circle, as he had hoped.
“You’ve seen the weather?” asked Araya, raising his eyes.
When Alberto looked at the sky, he had to squint.
“You ever remember heat like this in October?” Araya went on. “I’m telling you, the planet is all topsy-turvy.”
With disturbing ease, like a knife cutting through quesillo, the axe split the log in two. Araya stood the axe head on the concrete, looked Marco up and down, and balanced another log on the stump.
“No point looking for anybody.”
He leaned over and spat to the side.
“Noemie’s left for the campo,” he added, referring to his father’s land. “And to Cunco too I guess, for the legal papers... I figure you must be happy to be back. That makes what, four years that you haven’t been to see us?”
“Four years. Exactly.”
“So tell me. You still freezing your balls off in the land of hockey?”
Alberto smiled, and as Araya launched into a playful description of a fight during a game he’d seen on TV, he thought to himself that the last time he was here his uncle did not have this ragged beard now growing like a weed.
“And the little one’s mother?”
As Alberto did not reply right away, Araya said:
“You know, I’m separated too.”
When he smiled mockingly, his double chin was more noticeable. So he’d heard about his recent marital problems. But who had talked to him, since even his father had known nothing about it. His mother?
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that, you know...”
“Did I say I was ashamed?”
“You really look like one, don’t you?”
“What?”
“A writer. You know, I can’t stand novels. But when I come across a writer on TV, I stay on the channel. Those guys fascinate me, they have something, I don’t know what exactly... Seems you have to teach too?”
Alberto nodded yes, thinking: “He’s up on everything. He knows I don’t like teaching. That it takes up all my time, making me work late at night on my hypothetical novels, once Marco is asleep.” To change the subject, he asked him when the burial would be.
“If you ask me, there won’t be many people at the cemetery,” Alaya replied.
“Why do you say that?”
“He didn’t know how to make himself loved, your old man. He didn’t have the knack. And what are you going to do with his land? You know it goes back to you, right, to you and your brother?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”
“But you know what he had, right? They said ‘internal haemorrhage.’ You believe that?”
Alberto was suddenly all ears, but he kept quiet.
“In my opinion,” Araya went on, “he hurt himself and didn’t deal with it. And what happened happened. He went down. And so fast, my friend...”
He laughed openly, in a way that clearly gave him satisfaction.
“You know me, I’m not like the others here, all religious fanatics. Still, the way he died makes you think. God’s punishment? You can’t rule that out.”
Alberto tolerated Araya’s gaze for a long moment, then he beckoned Marco to come near. Side by side, they walked towards the house.
“Hey, wait... Wait, I said!”
Alberto stopped in the doorway and slowly turned around.
“Come here,” Araya continued, “Sit down... Sit down, I tell you!”
Alberto dropped his son’s hand and, reluctantly, lowered himself onto the sofa leaning against the house’s brick wall.
“I understand you, you know,” said Araya. “Me too, when I was younger I idolized your father.”
“I don’t idolize my father.”
“Are you sure? Anyway, there’s one thing you can’t deny. Roberto ran away from Chile. You understand? He – ran – away. That’s what’s behind everything.”
“He left because his life was in danger.”
“He left because he was just waiting to leave. Your father was ambitious, very ambitious. He dreamed of the North.”
“I see you didn’t know my father.”
Araya smiled with a falsely conciliatory air.
“Listen, let me tell you something. Okay?”
At first Alberto wondered if he should just leave, but astonishingly, as the other talked, he found himself more and more rooted to the spot out of curiosity and lassitude. He listened as Araya talked about the political circumstances surrounding his parents’ return to Chile at the beginning of the 1990s, when Patricio Aylwin’s coming to power inspired a wave of hope. He was going to rebuild the country, to restore dignity to the people who had been held in contempt by the military regime, we were going to open ourselves to the world, and to welcome hundreds and thousands of exiles with open arms. In point of fact, after seventeen years of dictatorship, just telling the population that it was now free was enough to raise its spirits. And then bit by bit the celebrations dissolved into day-to-day life. And with the simple power of words, Araya conjured up Roberto getting down from a train that had arrived from the capital. While a morning mist wrapped the streetlights in an aura of mystery, his father advanced along the sidewalks of Temuco, trailing a small black suitcase on wheels, oblivious to the taxi drivers and their honking.
He passed in front of the Pinto feria where the empty stalls, under the gallery’s deep arcades, stood next to piles of wooden crates, and where the wind swept cardboard boxes along the ground and sent a newspaper flying into the air. He passed through the centre of town, past the university he had attended forty years earlier and that no longer had the same name, and turned onto Calle San Martin leading west.
“He walked like that,” said Araya, “from the centre of town to here. As if there were nothing to it, a good hike. In front of the house he must have noticed all the cars double-parked. Then he went up the path. He rang the bell, but there were so many people that nobody heard. He pushed open the door, and that’s when I saw him. It was not the first time I’d seen him since he’d been back in the country, and right away I was astonished to see how much the news seemed to have affected him. His eyes were frozen, shining, like those of a madman. People went up to him and embraced him. They pretended to be surprised that Carmen had not come with him, but they knew their marriage was going from bad to worse. I remember, he took a good look at the weeping women. It’s true they were laying it on a bit thick, swaying from side to side, and crying as if they were really sad that the old man was gone,” Araya said, smiling. “It must have reminded him of his childhood. In a corner, the old man’s friends, those mad for Yahweh, dressed in black and all wearing skullcaps, were talking softly. Then he went up to the coffin. I was watching him, and I saw right away that he had something in mind. And just like that, there, in front of everybody, the man opened the coffin’s lid. The women stopped weeping, discussions shut down, and they all threw themselves at him. Don’t you know, you don’t do that, it’s forbidden! But he’d had time to open the coffin, and we all saw the old man’s bony face and silver hair. That gave me a jolt, because he had a gentle air about him, something you never saw during his lifetime. Then, as Noemi, I think, was taking him by the hand, Roberto fell to the ground, all at once, just like that, knocking his head against the coffin. Four of us picked him up and carried him to the sofa.”
Alberto had no trouble imagining his father opening his eyes, laid out on the sofa. He imagined him blinking on seeing the maid bent over him, fanning him, while behind him the weeping women had resumed their plaints. His father got up, unsteady, and went into the kitchen, where sitting beside the wood stove he found Abuela, her eyes motionless, muttering away as usual. He knelt down before her and listened: “Why is the house full of strangers,” she complained. “Mamá, soy yo,” he said to her, but she kept on moving her lips, gazing into space as if she had just lost her sight. He rose and placed a kiss on his mother’s brow, before Noemi burst in to announce that it was time to leave for the synagogue.
Outside, the mist deepened his melancholy, as he held up one corner of the coffin and onlookers joined the procession. At intersections, traffic stopped to let them pass. He recognized the synagogue immediately, the two-storey stone building with its balcony and modest dome on which one could make out a Star of David. In a city so eager to tear everything down, this dignified building is a kind of miracle, thought Roberto.
As the ceremony began, he was surprised to find that his Hebrew came back to him quickly, but he soon tired of the rabbi’s psalms. He cast his eyes around and studied the faces that once peopled his childhood, today ravaged by time and the South’s harsh climate. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins, friends of the old man, his colleagues and his suppliers, in short Temuco’s entire Jewish community had turned out. Who would have thought that the old man was so much appreciated? And Araya reported what he had learned from his sister Noemi: that towards the end of the ceremony the rabbi, by a coincidence that left Roberto speechless, had proclaimed aloud what he himself had been trying to express for days: “To turn your back on his past is as vain as wanting to fell a tree with your bare hands.”
When Araya paused, Alberto interrupted him:
“Fine. But what are you getting at with all this?”
“Just be patient. The next day, all the brothers and sisters were seated here, in the dining room. At one end, her eyes half open, Mama smiled, she barely understood what was going on. At the other end, Noemi held an envelope in her hands. Everyone understood immediately, you could have heard a fly on the wing. Noemi coughed, she tore open the envelope, and brought out a sheet of squared paper, on which I recognized the old man’s elongated, flowing script. She began reading. The letter went something like this, in the old man’s inimitable style. (Here he assumed a stentorian voice): ‘So as to honour the will of Yahweh, so as to give thanks to my beloved family and to ensure our perpetuity in this lost corner of the world, I leave...’ Noemi stopped reading, not believing her eyes, then she pulled herself together and went on in a halting voice: ‘...I leave all of my assets in the hands of Roberto, my son, who is free to dispose of my inheritance as he deems best...’ Can you imagine? I, who in his last years, had spent whole days with the old man, talking to him, going with him to fetch his wine at the botelleria, sometimes even reading to him from his Zionist journals, I was struck dumb, I have to admit. What had I done to him to deserve this slap in the face? What had Roberto done to so enter into his good graces? I decided to find out. And you know what? Nothing. Roberto had not lifted his little finger for the old man.”
For a few moments, his shoulders hunched, wholly absorbed in his story, he looked at Alberto without seeing him, his gaze passing through him as if he were a ghost.
“The truth,” he continued in an absent voice, “is that on the instant Roberto was as stupefied as we were. He hadn’t seen it coming, either.”
Roberto got to his feet, walked shakily into the middle of the living room, leaned on the back of an armchair. He felt, thought Alberto, everyone’s eyes burning into his back.
Descriere
Murder, intrigue, suspicious cash, public munificence, scandal—and tree farming? A family saga of Sephardic Jews living in Chile.