A Distant Father Read Online Free PDF

adult to get him into the whorehouse in Angol, and I’m the only person in the world who can carry out that mission. Cleaning his spectacles on his shirttails, he says I’m his teacher and his friend. I’m the one who’s taught him everything in life, fromthe triumph of the Chilean troops at the Battle of Yungay, where our hero General Manuel Bulnes thwarted the Bolivian Marshal Santa Cruz’s efforts to unite Peru and Bolivia, to lessons in the best way to smoke a cigarette without coughing.
    “Friday night will be yours, Professor Jacques, and Saturday night will belong to your disciple and servant Augusto Gutiérrez.”
    He asks me to feel the wad he’s got in his pants pocket.
    “That’s the twenty thousand Uncle Mateo sent me—I carry it around so I won’t lose it. The train for Angol leaves at four.” Then, anticipating his moment of glory, he repeats himself. “Four o’clock Saturday,” he says.

NINETEEN
    On the day of the party, as if obeying a decree, almost all the men in the village put pomade in their hair. The weather’s hazy, the temperature suddenly warm. Indian summer, as they say.
    Gutiérrez is standing beside the phonograph, and after handing him his present I check out the labels on the 45s waiting to be loaded onto the cylinder: “Sincerely,” by Lucho Gatica; Johnny Ray’s “Walkin’ in the Rain”; Paul Anka’s “Diana”; Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”; “Blue Tango,” by Hugo Winterhalter and His Orchestra.
    He pats me conspiratorially on the shoulder, and while he’s opening the package I see Elena Gutiérrez, in her new embroidered blouse, refusing to let the hardware store owner light the cigarette she’s holding in her lips. When the man insists, she blows out his match and wets the burned tip of the cigarette with saliva, all the while looking at me very meaningfully.
    But then Teresa Gutiérrez comes up, she looks at me in her turn, and the two of them turn away laughing.
    Augusto makes no effort to hide his disappointment in my offering. “A notebook with a padlock,” he mumbles without enthusiasm.
    “You can write personal things in it.”
    “What things?”
    “The things that happen to you.”
    “Nothing happens to me, Prof.”
    “But something may start happening to you very soon, and it would be a shame not to record it.”
    “For example?”
    “The trip to Angol. I’d like to know everything you do, in detail.”
    He offers me the palm of his hand with his raised fingers spread so we can exchange a knowing high five. Elena Gutiérrez appears, carrying a glass. She plants it in my right hand and remains cheekily at my side. Frankie Laine is singing “Jezebel” on the record player.
    “Cuba libre,” she tells me. “With Jamaican rum.”
    “It’s better than Mitjans.”
    “Do you want to dance?”
    I glimpse her sister Teresa, whose eyes are fixed on me as she sips Coca-Cola through a straw.
    “Actually, I thought I’d dance the slow songs with Teresa.”
    “ ‘Jezebel’ isn’t all that slow. It’s half foxtrot and half tango. Let’s dance.”
    I leave the glass on the table next to the phonograph and put my hand on her waist, on her highly polished belt. She reacts to my fingers and my steps with impeccable docility. Holding her straw wedged between her upper incisors and drumming her fingers on the empty bottle, Teresa watches us dance.
    Gutiérrez turns off the ceiling light, leaving two dim bulbs burning in the corners of the living room. We’re about a dozen people in all, and except for Gutiérrez, everyone’s dancing.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I see him go over to the buffet and add one more candle to the fifteen his father has already stuck into the frosting of the birthday cake.
    Elena raises my hand, which she’s holding at shoulder level, and places it over her heart. “I’ve had my eye on you for some time, Jacques,” she says.
    “To laugh at me.”
    “I laughed to hide myself.”
    “What does that