Montecore Read Online Free PDF

outfitting was … how shall I write it … bravissimo in its excellence. All the other farmer boys at the cookie factory bore a solidarity in short-cropped hairstyles and bath slippers. Your father, home from Tunis, was different. He was the first man in Jendouba who presented a style of such long hair. His black locks curled effeminately, and (never inform him of this) when I saw him again a suspicion germinated in me that he had become infected with homosex. (Isn’t it interesting how his taste for long hair has been inheritaged by you? And that the photos he exposed of you in your pimply teenage years filled me with exactly the same suspicion?)
    Your father’s cheeks had two smiling hollows, which he only demonstrated for women who sold
casse-croûtes
on breaks. His legs bore blue jeans of supermodern European bell-bottomed style and his favorises bore an increasing size that referred to early John Travolta or late Marvin Gaye. His tongue exposed a sudden knowledge of numerous European authors, artists, and poets. Many were impressed by your father’s newfound person. (Even me.)
    •   •   •
    Write:
    “Let us present my father’s youthful exterior. Home from Tunis, his eyelashes were arches of blackness, his eyelids curtains over brown velvet wells, his corporeality that of a growing Greek god. His mentality was a cosmopolitan artist’s and his face referred at the least to a young Antonio Banderas.”
    (Your father’s modesty would of course redden his cheeks and not at all agree with me about this description.)
    Our shared words, however, were few in number until the autumnal day when the photographer Papanastasopoulou Chrysovalanti afflicted Jendouba. Do you know this photographer’s work? One thing is my secure certainty—his name MUST be simplified in the book.
    The rumor about Papanastasopoulou’s arrival was whispered on streets and squares; his form wandered about the souk and the cultivation fields with his camera like a friendly weapon. The rumor whispered that at night one could see his photographic lightning flash the sky (like lightning) in an attempt to capture Kroumirie Mountain’s moonlit silhouette. The street boys followed his path and played charades in the hope that the clicking sound would immortalize their forms into the exhibition that he had been commissioned by the Institute of Greek Culture to implement. Certain tradition-loving tongues mumbled
“Haram”
and described how the Greek had tried to photograph hajjis outside the mosque, even though they had tried to hide their faces.
    The next scene is a regular workday; the metal trays are turned and they tumble down packable cookies; the sweat runs our faces and the clock ticks slowly; Emir swears in the office and your father is wearing his self-boasting, ever more worn-out gigolo jeans. After lunch he turns to me:
    “Do you know whose body has been invited to the Greek photographer’s studio in order to be immortalized for the future?”
    I denied and your father beamed:
    “Mine!”
    I praised my congratulations to your father’s fortunate happiness and inquired about the possibility of escorting your father as company to the Greek’s photo session. Your father conferenced his thoughts before he submitted his positive response.
    After the termination of work we companied to the terracelike apartment that the photographer had rented for two weeks from a local clothes tailor for an astronomical price. The door was opened by an oiled Greek man with the age of a forty-year-old, a tight shirt with a flower motif, and sharp cornery teeth which glittered his large smile (and then disappeared quickly when he understood that we were two boys who had arrived for a visit).
    My memory smiles when I think of the curious eyes that your father and I exposed in contact with our first photo session. All those things that your father would get to know in detail later were there, but right now they seemed most like spaceshiply