The Day I Killed My Father (18 page)

I came out of the study late in the morning. My wife was at the breakfast table. Without responding to her ‘good morning', I told her that I knew about everything. ‘About what?' she asked. ‘That you and my father are having an affair,' I said, helping myself to some coffee, as if it was all very natural. I continued with my breakfast while, on her knees, she cried, begging for forgiveness. I could retell the scene in dramatic colours, but it was just pathetic.

After she stopped crying, I ordered — yes, ordered — her to give me the details. She said that she'd succumbed to my father's charms back in Paris, and that her trip back to Brazil had been to see him. ‘There was no inheritance?' I asked. ‘No,' she answered. I asked how she'd got the money to open her catering service, even though I already knew the answer. She confirmed that my father had given it to her, and told me the rest of the story. She said that he'd put pressure on her to return to Brazil, threatening to cut the money he sent us. She'd tried everything possible to end the affair, and the idea of us getting legally married had been an attempt to create an obstacle to his advances.

However, she went on, when he heard we were getting married, he started acting sadistically. He demanded that she spend the afternoon at a motel with him on the day before. ‘If you don't, I'll tell my son everything,' he threatened. After the wedding, my father had made several other attempts to rekindle things, but their encounters had been rare, until they'd stopped completely. ‘But you started seeing him again two months ago,' I said, when I realised that her long silence was a full stop. She rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath, and said that she'd made this mistake because she needed the money. She really did want to open a catering service, and didn't have any other way to raise the capital, except by placing herself at my father's mercy. ‘Even if you'd asked him for the money, he would have come to me for reimbursement in the form of sex. So I thought it was better to ask him myself. That way, I'd have real money to justify my fictitious inheritance,' she explained.

I asked, ‘Could this child you're carrying be his?'

She denied this possibility vehemently, saying that she'd always been careful when sleeping with him, but it was obvious she was lying … How do I know? Well, for what other reason would she have considered an abortion? She had listed her reasons when I'd posed the hypothesis. But none of them were convincing, you must agree.

A funny thought struck me at that moment: it was all the fault of free initiative. The former employees who wanted to open their own cake shop, my wife who wanted her own catering service — if it weren't for all this entrepreneurialism, none of it might have happened. I left my wife at the breakfast table, and went back into the study to think about what to do.

–28–

I had a few options. I could leave my wife and disappear off the face of the Earth. I could pardon her, and demand that she have an abortion and that she never see my father again, as long as she was married to me. I could hire an assassin to kill my father, as he had set out to do with his former employees, or … I could kill him myself. You may find it odd that a guy who'd been so placid until now could conceive of committing murder; but in the midst of everything that was going on, it really was the most appropriate choice.

I didn't kill him out of revenge, believe me. It was to eliminate an anomaly that, from a young age, had made my life a living hell. My father had tortured me as a child, he'd abandoned me after my mother's death, he'd seduced my wife and then forced her to keep having sex with him and, last but not least, he'd usurped my role as father, by getting her pregnant. Where was the meaning in all this? It took me a while to find the answer, but I did: here was a man who was unable to distinguish between his own desire and reality — hence the anomaly. He didn't think about the consequences of his actions. If something gave him pleasure, he did it, without moral or emotional reservations. This was the main explanation for the sadistic way in which he had treated me. He'd saved me when I was a child only because he'd seen in his own son a way to vent his base instincts. Do you know what else? I cannot say for sure that I was lying when I told the story of the monster who crept into my bed when I was a child …

There, in the study, I also thought about my mother. How could she have fallen in love with such a man? Was it possible he'd managed to hide his true essence from her? No, my mother had most likely glimpsed the monster in him, but had believed that her love could redeem him. ‘The love that moves the sun and the other stars.' Dante's line illuminated me. Yes, redemption was possible. But not redemption through Good — this possibility had been lost to me a long time before, with the death of my mother and her love that moved the sun and the other stars. The path to redemption was now one of moral homeopathy.
Similia similibus curantur
— like things are cured by like. Evil, that is. I was no longer interested in how Evil is born in people. For me, at this moment, knowing it was the best alternative was enough.

Yes, you're right. I need to explicitly admit that I believe in God, instead of using subterfuges. But the only God I'm able to believe in is forged in my own likeness and image: the creator not of Heaven or Earth, but of Hell, and Purgatory, to which I descended to redeem my father and myself.

Of course, this has nothing to do with being a man of spirit. You asked me a while back if I thought I was a man of spirit. No, I'm not — which doesn't mean I disagree with the notion that such men are the motors of history. It's just that I've learned that philosophical systems, which serve above all to explain our actions, are not mutually exclusive, as most philosophers believe. What I mean is that I'm not a man of spirit, but I believe that subjectivity is truth. That's from Kierkegaard. And a person's truth is proportional to how much they are willing to risk, based on their faith in God. It must be a lot in my case, judging from what I have at stake.

The remedy I'd use on my father was, in fact, a wish come true. The principle might be homeopathic, but not the dose. I'd wanted to kill him countless times, but now I'd really do it, and with my own hands. Making him a victim would be a way to free him of his own monstrosity, to absolve him — and, thus, to celebrate him as a father. Isn't satisfaction the end of desire? But his redemption couldn't mean my moral damnation, seeing that I didn't want to take my father's place, but surpass him. After hours of anguish, I made another decision: I would have to inflict some kind of pain upon myself that would be a scourge on me until the day I died. Purgatory in life.

Once the general resolutions had been established, I wrote my wife a letter. In it, I advised her to hire a good lawyer to look after her interests. Then she should return to France and have her child there. Full stop. No accusations or goodbyes. My advice was followed to a T. She now lives with the child (a boy) in Paris, together with that American guy she'd dated before she met me. Lucky guy.

I left the letter in my desk drawer, printed a copy of
Future
, put it in a cardboard folder, and erased the file from my computer. It was already night when I left my house for the last time, taking only my unfinished book. There were other things to be done before my father got back from his trip.

–29–

The day I killed my father was a bright day, although the light was hazy, without shadows or contours. Or perhaps it was grey, that shade of grey which even tinges souls that are not usually inclined to melancholy… That would make a good start for a book, wouldn't it? Except that books no longer exist for me.

It was with a blow to the back of his neck and another to the top of his head. But I wasn't alone when I called the police. Through the guy who'd blackmailed my father's driver, I'd spent a small fortune hiring three criminals to come into the house after I'd murdered him. I'd instructed them to immobilise me immediately after the phone-call, even if I changed my mind at the last minute — which I didn't.

‘Come and arrest me. I've killed my father,' I said, and hung up the phone. The criminals then did what had been arranged. Two of them held me by the arms and head. Immobilised on an armchair, I could still see my father's body lying on the sofa, before the third crook poured acid into my eyes.

And then the light went out.

 

This silence … Are you still there?

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Part One

–1–

–2–

–3–

–4–

–5–

–6–

–7–

–8–

–9–

–10–

–11–

Future (a novel)

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Part Two

–12–

–13–

–14–

–15–

–16–

–17–

–18–

–19–

–20–

–21–

–22–

–23–

–24–

–25–

–26–

–27–

–28–

–29–