The Revolutionaries Try Again. Mauro Javier Cardenas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ He seems to be giving Leopoldo the chance to take León away. Does that moronic cameraman think Leopoldo doesn’t see the other cameras? Some of the reporters, as if they know Leopoldo’s about to obstruct them, are urging their cameramen down the stairs. By one of the garbage cans Leopoldo takes his time disposing of Alvarito’s letter. Ándate a la verga viejo hijueputa. Let El Loco’s people see León’s in no condition to block El Loco from returning. León turns and faces the cameras without looking at the cameras, as if lost in someone’s kitchen. Leopoldo checks his watch. Antonio’s waiting. It’s time.

       IV / ANTONIO EDITS HIS BABY CHRIST MEMOIR

      For first, there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

      — DAVID HUME, AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, SECTION X

      After a twenty one year absence my father returned to the church. The pious boy I was back then had convinced him to attend Christmas Mass, and, according to my grandmother, his return that night led to the baby christ’s tears. Most in my family readily adopted my grandmother’s version, as I was to do in the years that followed, sharing it with my American acquaintances as another example of the quaint superstitions of my Third World country, which would often prompt in them comparisons to eyewitness news reports of Virgin Mary sightings on trunks of trees or mortadella sandwiches. Of course I suspected my grandmother’s version was far too simple, and yet nothing ever compelled me to elaborate on it by implicating others or by including events that began long before that night or that decade.

      —

      Everyone was implicated, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, meaning everyone he’d once known in Guayaquil (Cristian Cordero’s grandfather, Espinel’s father, Julio Esteros’s mother, his own father) plus everyone else in the world (and here Antonio wishes he wasn’t inside a plane so he could search online for an essay by Leszek Kołakowski, a philosopher Antonio had been drawn to because he was from Poland like John Paul II, the first pope to visit Ecuador — we can never forget the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition, Kołakowski wrote —), and so to write about implicating others before that Christmas night and that decade seems redundant to him since it was implied everyone was implicated, although he could argue against himself and state that most of us need reminders that we’re implicated with the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition, okay, so let’s say that you encounter these reminders in the leisurely world of memoir or fiction: wouldn’t you ignore them, Antonio, or at most be smote by yet another round of deep urges to change Ecuador that might impede your reasoning and compel you to board a plane back to Guayaquil without much of a plan or money?

      —

      Before my father agreed to attend Christmas Mass we were at my grandmother’s house. My father had announced I was old enough to sit with the adults, and since my grandmother’s dining table could seat only eight, and since neither my aunts nor my grandfather wanted to sour our Christmas by starting another pyrrhic battle, ten of us struggled to pass the potatoes and slice the pig without elbowing each other. And we did so in silence. My father was in an awful mood, and we knew that whoever spoke during dinner risked being savaged by his sarcasm.

      —

      But perhaps he has been equating Leszek Kołakowski with Father Villalba, Antonio thinks, perhaps he has been drawn to certain novelists and philosophers not because they’re from Poland like John Paul II but because their work reminds him of Father Villalba’s sermons, even though he doesn’t remember Father Villalba’s sermons anymore (once Antonio searched online for texts by Clodovis Boff and unbeknownst to him he later ascribed them to Father Villalba — never purchase a painting of your favorite landscape because that painting will come to replace your favorite landscape, one of W. G. Sebald’s narrators says, but what choice did Antonio have if his favorite landscapes have, for the most part, vanished? — bless me Father, Clodovis Boff recounts, Father we are dying —), or perhaps he hasn’t been drawn to certain novelists and philosophers because of Father Villalba but because he likes to believe intricate association mechanisms subtend his mind like in the novels of W. G. Sebald, drawn to Father Villalba like Jacques Austerlitz is drawn to fortresses that contain the seeds of their own destruction, for instance, and whether on that Christmas night at his grandmother’s house they stuffed themselves with potatoes and pig he doesn’t remember anymore either, so he should just delete the porcine and potato details or acknowledge he doesn’t remember them anymore.

      —

      My father had assumed that his appointment in the administration of León Martín Cordero had entitled him to arrogance, and perhaps because of his airs of infallibility we did not consider something could be troubling him.

      —

      He had also assumed that his father’s appointment in the administration of León Martín Cordero had entitled him to arrogance at San Javier, Antonio thinks, but who could blame such a skinny teenager with acne on his face for assuming airs of infallibility for just a tiny bit? (And here Antonio recalls some notes he’d written about Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías — one never experiences genuine self disgust, Javier Marías wrote, and it’s that inability that makes us capable of doing almost anything — or, in Antonio’s case, of doing almost nothing — I’m on a plane on my way back, isn’t that enough? — no.)

      —

      My grandmother, restless amid our silence, seemed to be counting rice grains with her fork, though most likely she was deliberating whether to talk. She loved a seated audience, and Christmas was the time of the year when everyone was more receptive to her stories. She must have reminded herself that she was, after all, the most inured to my father’s jabs because she began recounting for us the storied origins of her dining table. The story was not a new one (none of them were) yet we were relieved someone other than us was talking. After her father sold a small fraction of his plantations, she said, he had decided on a whim to throw out all their furniture and start anew, contracting for the job all the carpenters available in Portoviejo at the time. For a week, on their cobblestone patio, the sound of hammers and hacksaws merged with the sound of poor families carrying off the old furniture her father was giving away. The dining table my grandmother had inherited from those days had knotted flowers carved on its thick width, which matched the dense Guayacan patterns of the four adjacent cabinets, immense cabinets stuffed with more plates and teacups and sugar bowls than anyone could ever use in a lifetime, all of them burnished at least monthly, most of them handpainted with landscapes no one wanted to see.

      —

      Before Antonio’s grandmother squandered what remained of her father’s plantations in Portoviejo, Antonio would stay with her during the summer, and what he remembers of those summers in Portoviejo are the black bats that would appear outside the immense windows in his bedroom like apparitions from Monstruo Cinema, the weekly horror TV hour he wasn’t allowed to watch, the black bats that he knows he hasn’t invented in retrospect because he’d asked the laborers in his grandmother’s plantation and they had confirmed that yes, niño Antonio, vampires love bananas, and clouds of them do swarm us at night, and although the black bats had terrified him they hadn’t traumatized him irreversibly, or at least his nightmares about the black bats by those immense windows did vanish eventually, and what Antonio also remembers of those summers in Portoviejo is the chained monkey at an outdoor grill by the side of the highway, Antonio hurling rocks at the squalid monkey chained to what looked like a giant nail sledgehammered into the mud, the monkey charging toward him and choking himself before he could reach him until the one afternoon the monkey managed to grab his hair and wouldn’t let go, someone help that little boy, for god’s sake, the monkey СКАЧАТЬ