Free A Distant Father by Antonio Skármeta

SIX
    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 there’s something I don’t like, I rub it out with the eraser on the pencil’s other end and suggest a better phrase.
    The Remington’s actually a loan from the mayor, who let me have it so that I could make fair copies of my translations.
    The children’s 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 Gutiérrez stands outside the norm. For example, he writes, “The sun’s crowing bursts the cock’s eardrums.”
    In math he’s a disaster. He’s repeating the previous year, and he’s 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 Gutiérrez has thick eyeglasses and thin lips. He’ll be fifteen next Friday. He walks through the square carrying a volume by Rubén Dario. He knows by heart “The sea is lovely, Margarita, and a subtle scent of orange blossoms rides upon the breeze,” but he’s not so much interested in the Nicaraguan poet’s verses as he is in carrying on a man-to-man conversation with me.
    He wants to know, he declares, if I’ve 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 don’t want to tell him about life, he’ll ask advice from the priest in the confessional.
    He adds that his birthday party next Friday will offer more than just cake and candles; there’s also going to be romantic North American music that people can dance and make out to. His sisters asked him to invite me. Teresa’s seventeen and Elena’s nineteen.I’m twenty-one. Everybody around here is very respectable, and I have no doubt that Teresa and Elena come from a good family, but every time they go to Santiago, they buy dresses with plunging necklines and tight jeans that cling to their hips and squeeze the air out of my lungs.

SEVEN
    Tonight I went to bed without eating and was rude to my mother. I’m irritated because I’ve never been to the whorehouse in Angol, just to the hospital there. It angers me that I had nothing to tell Gutiérrez. I too would like to know the girls’ prices.
    I’m listening to the radio, a special broadcast with Lucho Gatica y Los Peregrinos. A bolero called “Amor, amor, qué malo eres”—“Love, love, you’re so wicked”—is all the rage, and the band plays it three times. Fans calling in to Radio Sureña have voted it the tune of the week. I like the part that goes, “Proud towers that once stood so tall collapse in humiliation.” Those words speak to my heart. Someday, the little Gutiérrez sisters who make sarcastic faces at me will collapse in the mud, and I’ll watch them from on high.

EIGHT
    Even though it’s night already and I still have to prepare my Monday classes—in history, I’m supposed to cover a very big topic, namely the Spanish Civil War and the murder of Federico García Lorca—I get up from the rough sheets that Mama washes until they’re immaculate and that the climate dampens and chills until they make me shiver.
    I head for the mill.
    Cristián pretends not to be surprised to see me and asks if I’ve got any cigarettes. I offer him one and in return he uncorks a bottle of red wine. He fills two milk glasses that measure a quarter of a liter each and instructs me to drink mine down in one gulp. When the glasses are empty, I feel like a rocket exploring the darkness of