A Distant Father Read Online Free Page A

it?”
    “Great.”
    “Good-looking chick?”
    “Yes, Cristián, she was hot.”
    “What did you two talk about?”
    “Foolishness. Ourselves. How about you?”
    “We couldn’t find a common theme. I mean, she wasn’t a very communicative girl.”
    We take the dirt road to the train station. A slice of moon rises up amid black clouds. No rain, however. It’s cold.
    “So you and her didn’t talk at all.”
    “Two or three words. Believe it or not, she asked me for a bread recipe.”
    “An interesting subject, Cristián. What’s the recipe for baking a baguette?”
    “The one your father used.”
    “What recipe did my father use?”
    “You’re putting me on. You want me to give you the recipe right now?”
    “At this moment, there’s nothing in the world I desire more than to know how to bake a baguette.”
    “Two kilos of flour, a cup and a half of warm water, one hundred grams of yeast, two and a half tablespoons of butter, three cups of water, a tablespoon of salt. All right?”
    For a while I follow the moon’s comings and goings in the ragged sky, and then I trip on a rock. I drop the little satchel I’m carrying, pick it up, and slap it against my thigh to knock off the dirt.
    “If a person climbed up to the sails of the mill and jumped off, do you think he’d kill himself?”
    “If anybody was crazy enough to do that, he’d probably break his neck.”

FOURTEEN
    The engineer’s in his locomotive, resisting the cold with the aid of the brazier at his feet. An Araucan poncho covers his body. He holds out his thermos bottle to us and we drink coffee from the cap. He tells us we have a long wait, departure isn’t until five o’clock. We’ll arrive in Contulmo at seven.
    He’s got his day all planned. Breakfast at eight, Mass at nine, soccer at ten (Peleco versus Contulmo on Viera Gallo Field), lunch at one, the weekend soap opera on the radio at two, siesta at three, and then at four he has to drive the locomotive back to Angol.
    He’s afraid that Chilean State Railroads will close down this branch line because it has so few riders. And he’s only three years from retirement. Except for the time when a heifer tried to cross the tracks, there’s no major accident on his service record. On that occasion, he informed the owner of the ill-fated animal, who willingly turned it over to him for a big barbecue that was held the following day in Purén.
    When the train finally leaves the station, there are eight passengers in our car. I’m shivering from my hair to my soles. The moon’s gliding freely and swiftly through the sky. At least that’s the illusion you have when you’re traveling fast.
    My teeth are all bashing one another.
Zazie dans le métro
falls off my lap. Cristián puts a hand on my forehead, and I can barely hear him when he says, “You’re burning up with fever.”

FIFTEEN
    On Sunday I drink liters of warm lemonade and swallow aspirins every four hours, and Mama changes my sweaty sheets three times. Some boys from school stand under my window and call up to me that Contulmo won, one to nothing. We’re leading the Malleco League. I want to read a bit of my novel, because I have the suspicion I’m going to need money very soon, and the only way for me to get some is to finish my translation. There are words I don’t know, but when I look them up in my
Larousse
, my vision blurs.
    My fever reveals something I may forget later. I write it down on a leaf of penmanship paper I find with the
Diary of My Life
I’m going to give Augusto Gutiérrez: “It’s not the case that words circle uncertainly around subjects. It’s the world itself that’s uncertain; words are precise.”
    What will Gutiérrez’s first journal entry be? I open the little window in my room and look out at the quietsails of the mill. Cristián’s asleep. The bread recipe. French baguette.

SIXTEEN
    Monday goes past. According to my mother, I groaned like a woman giving birth and suddenly sat up