Shhh by Raymond Federman Read Free Book Online Page A

leap-frog technique.
    Besides, as I’ve often said, the real world, it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there permanently.

RAMONA
    My father’s favorite song was “Ramona.” It goes like this, Ramona je t’aimerai toute la vie, Ramona je t’aimerai toute la vie … I only know the words in French. But I think that song also exists in English.
    My father, the dreamer, the starving romantic, the Trotskyist, the gambler, the womanizer, the Brudny yd as he was often called, my tubercular father, who never achieved his vocation, while listening to Ramona on the scratched disk playing on our old dusty phonograph with the big speaker and the little crank, my father, Papa, Tate, was dreaming. I could tell he was dreaming.
    Sometimes towards the end of the song, when the phonograph was unwinding and needed to be cranked again, the voice of the singer would whine into distortions, and the song would become so slow, so sad.
    I never knew who was singing the recording of “Ramona” that my father loved so much. It was a woman, a young woman, I think, with a beautiful deep sad raspy voice. She died young. She died of tuberculosis. That’s what my father told me one day. That’s all I know about her. I don’t even know her name, or perhaps I knew it once but have forgotten it. But when I listened to “Ramona” with Papa, I would feel tenderness towards her. Yes, tenderness. Not passion. I was too young then to know what passion was.
    Papa, I’m sure, knew what passion was. He was a passionate man. He loved women. Il était coureur de femmes. That’s what all my aunts and uncles always said about him, un coureur de femmes, but also un fainéant, un rien-du-tout. Papa.
    So what. Maybe that’s what he left me when he changed tense. His passion. His passion for women. For love. For sex? Look, it’s not because I am writing about my father that I have to become prudish.
    Yes, even me, while listening to the sad voice of the singer singing Ramona je t’aimerai toute la vie … I would feel tenderness for her, and I would imagine her being petite et fragile, with very long black hair and very long eyelashes. That’s all I could imagine about her then. Today I could imagine her much better if I could listen to her sing Ramona. Today I know how to imagine a beautiful woman.
    When papa listened to “Ramona” there was dreaming in his eyes, I could see that, and I know he was dreaming about his failed vocation. And probably also about his failed loves. When papa listened to Ramona, sitting in his old broken down armchair, facing the phonograph, I could tell he was making up stories about how he could have been great if ...
    Ah! yes, if ...
    I could see it in his eyes, but I could also feel it in his fingers, in his fingernails gently scratching my back. As I sat on the floor next to his armchair, I would say to him, Papa gratte-moi le dos, s’il te plaît, ça me gratte là, près de l’omoplate gauche, and my father would scratch my back. We had studied human anatomy in school, that’s why I could tell my father to scratch my left clavicle because it itched.
    I could feel he was dreaming in the way his fingers moved slowly on my back. He was dreaming of the great works of art he would have liked to have created, but never did.
    Not because he was lazy, as my aunts and uncles said he was, and not because he was sick all the time. But because he was not ready yet. The tense changed too soon for him. I am sure he would have created something immortal, if he had been given the time. I could feel it in his fingers. Papa had beautiful hands, with long fingers.
    Deep inside he knew he had failed, failed to achieve what was inscribed in him, by his father, or some remote ancestor.

All the others before him, his father, grand-father, great-grand-father, and all those who preceded them probably failed each in their