Free The Day I Killed My Father by Mario Sabino

next day, my friend called me. From his insistence that I describe the most obscene details, I gathered he was a voyeur. I was right. He confessed his perversion, which was shared by his wife, and proposed that we secretly videotape me having sex with his wife’s friend. The equipment would be installed in a flat that he’d lend me for our dates. I agreed.
    â€˜My friend, however, never got his hands on the tapes. I used them to blackmail the limp senator and his nymphomaniac wife. I also got a nice sum from my rich friend, who didn’t want to be publicly known as a voyeur. When I got death threats from them, I told them that copies of the tapes, along with a letter in which I accused them of my murder, were in the hands of a friend who lived abroad. To be honest, the friend lives here. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I came out of it all with more than enough money to set up my own restaurant.’
    â€˜A temple in honour of anti-intellectualism, and built on sin.’
    â€˜My anti-intellectualism, Antonym, if it can be called that, is the fruit of one who used to entertain intellectual ambitions and then realised how much they can hold you back from life. Don’t mistake it, please, for an apology for human idiocy. As for sin, well … That, too, is God’s work.’
    â€˜How curious … Do you know Farfarello?’
    â€˜The priest? Of course I do.’
    â€˜ “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject. Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar?’ ’’
    â€˜I have to admit that it was actually Farfarello’s idea to put that biblical quote over the entrance. But I haven’t seen him for a while.’

VIII
    Antonym hoped a good night’s sleep would be enough to erase the feeling of delirium brought on by the dinner at Hemistich’s restaurant. But it only made it grow. It hadn’t been a dinner, but a ritual in which he’d unintentionally taken part. Why had Hemistich invited him? To persuade him to swell the ranks of his Christian hedonism? The expression ‘Christian hedonism’, an apparent paradox, had come into his mind because it had been the subject of an interview he’d done some two years earlier with a historian of religion who’d written a book about it. The only reason Antonym had been chosen to interview him was that he’d studied at a Catholic school. The result had been a mess but, luckily for Antonym, no one read the cultural section of the Sunday paper.
    From what he could remember, this so-called ‘Christian hedonism’ was based on simple logic: if it is God’s will that all men be happy, and it is natural that men want to satisfy Him, the most logical thing to do is to make the most of the sensorial experiences provided by the Creator. Could Hemistich, therefore, be defined as a Christian hedonist? Antonym decided he couldn’t. This was because both the tenets and the consequences of hedonism, whether Greek or Christian, were moral — and there certainly wasn’t any morality in Hemistich’s deeds, discourse, or sensorial orgies.
    In fact, the very idea that Hemistich had become religious struck him as absurd. He remembered that he only used to make reference to God, pretending to believe in Him, to impress those girls who made the sign of the Cross when they passed in front of a church. ‘It’s worth it; they’re the hottest ones,’ the sleaze used to say. As Antonym had already witnessed, Hemistich spoke about religion in a way that sounded highly original to the girls. Between one glass of wine and another, he borrowed from Pascal’s Wager, using the sophism born of the seventeenth-century French philosopher’s fertile imagination. While the lass he wanted to bed looked on questioningly, Hemistich would explain that, in order to rationally prove the existence of God, Blaise Pascal had argued that,