The Day I Killed My Father (17 page)

When I arrived, I found her sitting on the armchair in our room with the lights out. I switched on a lamp but, before I could speak, she said she'd thought a lot during the night and had come to the conclusion that she should get an abortion. In her opinion, a child would only bring unnecessary problems into our marriage. And she enumerated the ones we already had: we still hadn't fully settled into a stable routine; she was about to open a business that would take up a lot of her time in the beginning; and I had no idea when I was going to finish my book.

My reaction to these rational arguments was to appeal to her emotional side. I said that no one in the history of humanity had ever felt, or would feel, ready to have a child, and that that was what made life so much more fascinating. I also said that a child would be, for me, a reason to push on in the ‘desert that had to be cultivated in reverse', to quote João Cabral de Melo Neto. I'd always wanted to adapt the poet's line to a concrete situation, and now the opportunity had presented itself. Then I gave my wife her present, crowning the scene with a line that I'm ashamed to repeat: ‘For the most beautiful mother in the world.' When she saw the necklace glittering in the lamplight, she smiled through her tears. She hugged me, saying she'd never disappoint me again.

–26–

My story is drawing to an end and, much as I would like to go on, there isn't much more to say. It's a shame. Spending time with you has done me good … You've already said that you'll come back whenever you can, I know. But I don't think it's very likely. Do you know how that makes me feel? Like a guide at a nature reserve in Africa. Years ago, I saw a story in a TV documentary that struck a particularly deep chord in me; I can see it has taken on a greater-than-normal importance in my memory. A guide is introduced to a tourist he's going to take on a safari. He shows him the wildlife all around them; the intensive contact makes them grow close; and, at the end, when it's time to say goodbye, the tourist tells the guide that one day they'll meet up again in that very place. The guide, who lives alone, knows from past experience that this won't happen — they all say the same thing. Not that it's a lie, because, at the time, the tourist really does believe he'll come back to the reserve. But the minute that the tourist returns to civilisation, the guide becomes nothing more than a travel memory. I think this story made a mark on me because it reproduces, in the arena of personal relationships, the myth of Sisyphus. The guide is Sisyphus; his stone, the friendships that never come to fruition.

I didn't have time to tell my father face-to-face that I was going to have a child. He'd left the country the day after he fired the driver and housekeeper, and the news of my wife's pregnancy only caught up with him in New York, by phone. It was my wife who rang him. ‘I'm calling to tell you I'm pregnant,' she said, and she went completely quiet as she listened to what he said. Then she said, ‘Thank you', and passed me the phone. ‘You don't deserve a grandson, but that's life — it rewards those who don't deserve it,' I said. My provocation got no response. ‘Congratulations,' he answered. And hung up. My wife, who was generally a peacemaker, didn't say a thing about my unpleasant behaviour. She changed her clothes, and went out. ‘I need to get some air,' she said.

When I'd farewelled my friend the driver, I'd told him to contact me if he ever needed anything. But I hadn't expected him to do so quite so soon. Later that same afternoon, I received a note, written in his wife's flowing hand and signed by him. ‘I need to talk to you. It's urgent. I am staying at a hotel in the centre of town. Below is the address. Please come today.' At first, I thought he wanted more money. But, after giving it a little thought, I came to the conclusion that it didn't make any sense for him to ask me to come to his hotel to ask me for money. I was intrigued, and decided that I would go after dinner.

My wife and I had what was to be our last supper. We were monosyllabic. She didn't speculate as to why the driver had sent the note, and I didn't dwell on it either. After dinner, she went to bed. I even thought about putting off going to the hotel; but, since I had nothing better to do, I went to meet the driver.

One would have assumed that his hotel was modest, bordering on sordid. But it wasn't. It was a four-star hotel, with a lobby flash enough to make me think that the driver and his wife were frittering away their money. I announced my arrival, and was told to wait a little while before going up. I waited thirty minutes, in which time every bit of the class prejudice I'd tried my whole life to stifle flowered in me. Angry, I thought how absurd it was for underlings like themselves to subject me to a humiliating wait, and in the setting of a dodgy little downtown hotel to boot (my anger had already made me notice fluff balls on the lobby carpet, as well as dirty ashtrays and peeling furniture). To show that I'd taken offence, I could have left but, truth be told, I was too curious to find out why the driver needed to talk to me so urgently.

I was finally given permission to go up. It was the driver's wife who opened the door. We greeted one another coldly before she invited me to take a seat. I glanced around the room. My father's former housekeeper was still a stickler for order: there wasn't a wrinkle on the bedspread, their suitcases were closed and stowed out of the way in a corner, and the glasses on the table were washed and standing bottom-up, even though there were two empty soft-drink cans in the rubbish. The driver was in the bathroom for a few minutes before he finally emerged with a startled expression, and sweating a lot. ‘It's hot in here, isn't it? I'm going to turn up the air-conditioning,' he said, holding out a limp hand in a way that wasn't natural for him.

Sitting in front of me, with his wife standing beside him, he was still sweating profusely, even with the thermostat set to the minimum temperature. ‘Are you feeling unwell?' I asked. ‘No, he's afraid,' answered his wife. Then the driver started to cry. You can imagine how awkward I felt. It was the first time I'd ever seen him lose his cool. I told them I didn't understand a thing, and asked them to hurry up and tell me what was going on, so I could see if there was something I could do to help. ‘Your father … He wants us dead,' mumbled the driver.

I hated my father's guts, and knew he was capable of doing the most miserly and dishonest things, but this was too much. I raised my voice to say that a man like my father wouldn't put his social standing in jeopardy to kill some former employees, or to have them killed. Especially because, given the circumstances of their dismissal, if he were to perpetrate a crime like that, all the evidence would point to him. It would be stupid, I concluded, and my father was anything but stupid.

I'd barely finished speaking, when the driver's wife let out a hysterical cackle. ‘You rich folks think you're better than us, don't you? So much so that you're prepared to question something we actually heard and witnessed,' she said. Irritated by her insolence, I told her that I thought it very odd they hadn't gone to the police to file a complaint against my father. ‘The police work for the rich, not the poor,' she retorted. I said that maybe they hadn't gone down to the police station for a much more concrete reason — the twenty-five thousand dollars stolen from my father. She went bright red and didn't answer, then turned to her husband and shouted that he should just go ahead and tell me everything.

Part of what you're going to hear now isn't in my criminal trial records. I wanted to spare the survivors.

When he heard his wife's order, the driver, who no longer bore any resemblance to the steely, dignified man I had learned to admire, got up, came over to me and, with his face almost touching mine, said, ‘Your father and your wife …'

He didn't finish the sentence, nor did he need to. My head started to spin, like when I was a child. I asked to lie down on the bed, and there I stayed for I don't know how long. I have to say, I didn't feel at all angry — just disappointed. And, curiously, I was more disappointed with my father than my wife. Which meant I must still have had some kind of positive expectation of him, in spite of our history.

When I felt a bit better, I asked the driver's wife to leave the room so I could talk to her husband in private. Then he told me everything he knew.

Their affair had started back in Europe. He was the reason she'd returned to Brazil for a month, leaving me on my own in France. The driver had been assigned to her for her entire stay, taking her shopping and to meet my father. She'd stayed at a hotel, where my father had spent all of his nights. After we returned to Brazil, they continued seeing one another, but with less frequency. The day before our wedding, she'd spent the whole afternoon with him in a motel room. They'd been more distant for a time, but had taken up again about two months ago.

At this point, my heart froze: this meant my wife might be pregnant to my father, and not to me.

My dizziness got worse again, and the whole room spun.

I was in a pitiful state but, even so, I managed to keep listening to the driver's story. He told me that, at first, he'd been amazed that my father hadn't tried to hide something so immoral from him. But his wife had a good explanation for this. ‘For the rich, we poor folks aren't people. We don't hear anything, see anything, notice anything. We're just beasts of burden,' she'd said.

It was impossible to disagree, seeing that history was replete with powerful individuals who'd got into serious trouble for having underestimated their subordinates. I asked, then, why my father wanted them dead. It all began, the driver said, when his wife decided to blackmail my father. They wanted to move back to her hometown in the country and open a cake shop, but hadn't managed to save up enough money to buy a house there. Having their own business was their dream. After many arguments, she'd convinced him to put the screws on my father by threatening to tell me he was having an affair with my wife. Blackmailed, my father remained impassive. He just went to the safe, took out twenty-five thousand dollars, and handed the money to the driver. ‘Now, get lost and never show your face around here again,' he said. The sight of so many dollars, however, had whetted his wife's greed as well as his own. They imagined that, since I hated my father, I'd easily be led to believe he'd been unfair — and so wouldn't hesitate to give them money.

Everything had gone according to plan … except for one detail. They'd already moved into the hotel when they received a phone call. On the other end of the line, an acquaintance warned them that my father, furious at having been blackmailed, had hired a hit man to kill them. This acquaintance was well connected in the underworld, and had decided to warn them because he was also a bit hard up, et cetera. If there was something in it for him, he added, he could find a way to make sure that the service wasn't carried out. It soon became apparent that this scoundrel was in cahoots with the hit man, whom he probably managed. When asked, in a second call, how much this protection would cost, the guy said my father had offered five thousand dollars, plus the twenty-five thousand in the possession of his former employees. ‘But if you pay us twenty-five thousand dollars, you're in the clear,' said the acquaintance, letting out a little chuckle. The crooks' rationale was based on a simple premise: it was better to get less not to kill than to get just a little bit more to kill. The couple had no choice but to pay up — which is what they did.

Since they had nothing else to lose, the driver went on, his wife had said I should be informed of my father's affair with my wife. It was both revenge and a guarantee: my father wouldn't dare hire another assassin after the family scandal blew up. It would be too obvious. The driver had been convinced by his wife's arguments, and there he was, telling me everything. ‘We're leaving town tomorrow, and are never coming back. I'm so sorry to let you down, but I had no choice,' he concluded, in tears.

When I left the hotel, it was already well after midnight. I had the phone number of the guy who managed the hit man in my pocket.

My dizziness was gone.

–27–

It was all too vulgar — the fact that my father was having an affair with my wife and, blackmailed by his employees, had hired a hit man to take them out. My own fiction was much better than this slapstick reality. This was the only thing of which I was certain.

I didn't want to head home, because I didn't have the stomach to face my wife. But going to a hotel would be worse. So I decided to lock myself in the study, where there was a sofa bed. I didn't get a wink of sleep, of course. I was disoriented. I needed someone to talk to, but I had no friends. There was just my aunt, who lived in Milan. I called her. I woke her up and, without any preamble, relayed what had happened. There was a long silence on the other end of the line, then she said in a teary voice that she already knew everything. She would have told me at our last dinner in Paris if her husband hadn't stopped her. This was the reason for the argument in the restaurant that had contaminated our evening. I asked her how she'd found out. She said that she'd seen them kissing on a street corner in the Marais district, late one afternoon. They hadn't seen her. Her shock, of course, had been great, and she'd ended up at the doctor's with a bout of hypertension. She repeated that she would have told me, but her husband hadn't let her, for fear that I might do something silly. He'd even threatened to leave her. ‘Forgive me, son. Perhaps it would have been better for you to hear it from me,' she said, now bawling. I hung up.