A Distant Father by Antonio Skármeta Read Free Book Online Page A

before me, desperately available. I’ve made up this farce of her traveling to Angol so that I can remove her clothes as I like, in my own bed. Here in Contulmo.
    Now I examine my student. The gray pants are perfect, the blue jacket well ironed, the red tie with the white spots very cheerful, the hair, subdued by some implacable gel, very adult.
    And in the midst of all, triumphant as a blue apple, the globe that helped him get the school’s highest grade in geography.
    “You’re to give that to Señorita Luna.”
    “The world and the five thousand pesos?”
    “First the world, and then, if the occasion should arise, the five thousand pesos.”
    Getting him to take her the globe as a gift was my idea.
    The train pulls into the station, needlessly whistling. Today only dogs are crossing the tracks.
    Sometimes I think the engineer blows that whistle just to keep himself from falling asleep. As calm and steady and experienced as this train is, it could get to Angol even without a driver.
    I go over to Mama and help her up the steps and into the car. She stoops to kiss me on the forehead. “Have a good time, Jacques.”
    “You too, Mami.”
    “Tell me about it tomorrow.”
    “We’ll tell each other tomorrow.”
    “What’s the name of the movie with Anna Magnani?”
    “
Wild Is the Wind
.”
    The stationmaster blows his little whistle and checks his wristwatch for the tenth time to be sure it’sfour p.m. and reflects upon the fact that the platform clock has been stopped at ten minutes after three for five years.

TWENTY-FIVE
    Back home, I barely have time to take the pitcher of lemonade out of the refrigerator and pour Teresa a glass before she starts to cry. I’d like to ask her what’s wrong and console her. Smell her skin and stroke her earlobes. Lick her eyelids and swallow her youthful mascara as it dissolves on my tongue.
    But my heart’s elsewhere.
    Its grave throbbing accompanies the heavy wheels of the train bound for the movie theater in Angol.
    Emilio needs a mother to take care of him.

ANTONIO SKÁRMETA is a Chilean author who wrote the novel that inspired the 1994 Academy Award-winning movie
Il Postino: The Postman
. His fiction has received dozens of awards and has been translated into nearly thirty languages. In 2011 his novel
The Days of the Rainbow
won the prestigious Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa. His play
El Plebiscito
, based on the same true event, was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film
No
.
    JOHN CULLEN is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Yasmina Khadra’s Middle East Trilogy (
The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack
, and
The Sirens of Baghdad
), Eduardo Sacheri’s
The Secret in Their Eyes
, Carlos Zanón’s
The Barcelona Brothers
, and Rithy Panh’s
The Elimination
. He lives in upstate New York.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.