Antonio Skarmeta - A Distant Father

Im the village schoolmaster. I live near the mill. Sometimes the wind covers my face with flour.

Ive got long legs, and nights of insomnia have stamped dark rings under my eyes.

My life is made up of rustic elements, rural things: the dying wail of the local train, winter apples, the moisture on lemons touched by early morning frost, the patient spider in a shadowy corner of my room, the breeze that moves my curtains.

During the day, my mother washes enormous sheets, and in the evening we drink lemon balm tea and listen to radio plays until the signal gets lost among the dozens of Argentine stations that crowd the dial at night.

My village, Contulmo, is smaller than the neighboring town of Traigun. Before going to the capital to get my teaching degree, I finished high school in Angol, a town much larger than Traigun. While I was there, I was diagnosed with acute anemia, which the doctors treated by prescribing Scotts Emulsion and injecting bracing shots of cod liver oil into my arms.

A nurse in the hospital initiated me into the vice of smoking cheap cigarettes, and in order to support this habit which wound up giving me bronchitis Ive had to find a second job.

The work is very modest and very infrequent. Once a week, a truck comes to pick up the sheets my mother washes for the hotel in Angol, and I consign to the driver some translations of French poems that the editor of the Angol newspaper publishes in the Sunday supplement.

My dad is French. He went back to Paris a year ago, when I returned to Contulmo after completing my studies at the teachers college.

I got off the train and he climbed on.

He kissed my cheeks desperately. My mother was on the platform too, dressed in mourning. My return home has never compensated for my fathers absence. He used to sing French songsJattendrais, Les feuilles mortes, and Cest si bon.

And besides, he knew how to bake loaves of crispy bread, baguettes, that were different from the local buns and soft breads. He also used to bring lemons and oranges to the market. Every day hed pass by the mill to get some flour, and that was how he and the owner became friends. When Dad left, I wasnt able to reproduce his skill in baking baguettes, but Ive carried on his friendship with the miller.

He knows more about Dad than I do myself.

He knows more about Dad than my own mother does.

When Dad went away, my mother was suddenly extinguished, like a candle blown out by a gust of frosty wind.

Like her, I loved my father to the point of madness. And I too wanted him to love me back. But he was gone a lot. When he was home, hed write letters at night on my old Remington portable typewriter and pile them up on the desk for me to hand on when the truck came to pick up the sheets. They were letters to his friends, he said. Mes vieux copains.

Occasionally, when weve been drinking brandy, the miller drops some nugget of information, and so I always listen to him with great attention. But his trails lead nowhere. He keeps things quiet by talking about them. Or rather, he talks about things while keeping them quiet. Its as though he had a secret pact with my father. Un jurement de sang.

When Pierre decided to leave, I was just about to graduate from the teachers college in Santiago. The week before I was to arrive in Contulmo, elementary school teaching certificate in hand, he told my mother that the cold climate of southern Chile cracked his bones, and that a ship was waiting for him in the harbor at Valparaso.

I got off the train and he got on, boarding the very same car.

In southern Chile, the trains still belch smoke.

My father shouldnt have left the same night I arrived. I didnt even get a chance to open my suitcase and show him my diploma. My mother and I wept, both of us.

The texts I translate are simple. Things the people around here can understand. Poems by Ren Guy Cadou. Village verses, not cathedrals of words. By contrast, the Santiago press publishes monumental poems, verses chiseled in marble, rich with allusions to ancient Greece and Rome and meditations upon the eternity of beauty. In Santiago, El Mercurio prints such poems and accompanies them with illustrations of Paris and Rome. Below the text, in parentheses, the translators name appears.

Here in the provinces, beauty is never eternal.

Sometimes I include an original poem of my own in the envelope with my translations and ask the editor to consider publishing it. His response, though negative, is courteous, given that he never rejects my poems and never prints them either.

The first month of Dads absence nearly killed my mother. Shes never gotten over it completely. Shes merely convalescing. When I got a teaching post at Gabriela Mistral Elementary School, she livened up a little. There was even a trace of joy in her approval, because my new job meant I wouldnt abandon the village like the Mapuche kids who left and wound up kneading dough in Santiago bakeries.

We got no letters from Dad. Which didnt mean he hadnt sent any. The thing is, mailmen dont come to these villages, and asking the truck driver to inquire in the Angol post office whether there was any mail for her would have wounded my mothers pride.

It really rains a lot here; I constantly have a cold. On a normal day, I teach children literature and history, and after school I harvest potatoes, lemons, and oranges, depending on the season.

Now and again, I fill a few baskets with apples and bring back flour from the mill. Cristin is an assiduous drinker of red wine, and his apron is eternally spattered with purplish stains. He always offers me a glass, which however I always decline. Drinking alcohol makes me sad.

Although Im almost always sad, wine makes me sad in a different way. Its as if a very deep solitude were entering my veins.

Ever since Dad went away, I want to die.

I devote most of my time to smoking and sharpening my Faber No. 2 pencils. I use them to correct my pupils compositions, and if theres something I dont like, I rub it out with the eraser on the pencils other end and suggest a better phrase.

The Remingtons actually a loan from the mayor, who let me have it so that I could make fair copies of my translations.

The childrens compositions are quite optimistic. Most of them begin by saying something like, The day opens with the sun, which spreads its kind fingers over the field, or When the cock crows, dawn breaks and the shadows put on yellow robes.

Only Augusto Gutirrez stands outside the norm. For example, he writes, The suns crowing bursts the cocks eardrums.

In math hes a disaster. Hes repeating the previous year, and hes the only boy in the class with a hint of mustache on his upper lip.

He has two sisters. On Sundays I go to the village square, buy some candied peanuts and a Bilz soda, and sit on a stone bench. When the sisters pass close to the bench, they burst into mocking laughter and I turn red.

Augusto Gutirrez has thick eyeglasses and thin lips. Hell be fifteen next Friday. He walks through the square carrying a volume by Rubn Dario. He knows by heart The sea is lovely, Margarita, and a subtle scent of orange blossoms rides upon the breeze, but hes not so much interested in the Nicaraguan poets verses as he is in carrying on a man-to-man conversation with me.

He wants to know, he declares, if Ive been to the whorehouse in Angol and how much it costs to spend a night there with one of the girls.

I brush crushed peanuts off my blue trousers and say that such a conversation between a pupil and a teacher is improper. He says that if I dont want to tell him about life, hell ask advice from the priest in the confessional.