The Day I Killed My Father (7 page)

‘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.

‘But when we met outside the bank he showed an enthusiasm that I can only describe as inexplicable. For my part, I pretended to be happy to see him after so many years, asking questions whose answers I wasn't even remotely interested in. My act was so convincing that he invited me to dinner that Saturday, in a restaurant that had recently opened. Since I was single, he wanted to introduce me to a friend of his wife's. The four of us could go out together; what did I think? At best, I didn't think anything. At worst, it was a fucking stupid idea. I fought the instinct to choose the path dictated by the second response. I accepted the invitation. Pleased I'd agreed, he gave me a hug (a rich man's hug, emanating a slight trace of musk), and added that it was about time we rekindled our friendship. I not only agreed, but I also lied and said I'd thought about trying to track him down recently. He said that we'd have plenty of opportunities to make up for lost time. I got his card; he jotted down my number. Our arrangements included a whisky at his place before dinner at the restaurant. When he got into his flashy car, surrounded by security guards, I sighed with regret. But there was no turning back. I had a date for the next day.

‘At the agreed time, I arrived at my former classmate's home. The couple's friend was very attractive. She was about thirty-four, with a little body, tight from working out, and accentuated by a low-cut dress with slits up the sides.'

‘Thirty-four …'

‘What about it?'

‘I love women about that age. They're still spring-like, but starting to show signs of the autumn to come.'

‘Your images have been better.'

‘I know. It's no accident I'm up shit creek.'

‘Anyway, there was this gorgeous woman. She was friendly, and said she enjoyed reading my reviews and had bought the little book I'd written on twentieth-century Italian poetry (in which, incidentally, I used many of your observations, Antonym). Then she told me that she was married to a powerful senator, who was abroad at the time. Before we left for dinner, she and my friend's wife went to the bathroom to touch up their makeup — at least, that was their excuse. My friend took advantage of their absence to ask me straight up if I was interested in the senator's wife. I said I was. He told me that I should feel free to make a move. The senator wasn't too partial to sex, and his constant travels allowed his wife to have sexual escapades. He himself had already “served the nation”, he revealed with a wink.