The Day I Killed My Father by Mario Sabino Page B

writing of others. I needed a life.’
    â€˜That’s not much different from how I feel at the moment.’
    â€˜I kind of figured you weren’t OK. That’s why I called.’
    â€˜So, like Paul on the road to Damascus, you had a vision and discovered that you needed to have your own steakhouse.’
    â€˜Why the sarcasm?’
    â€˜It’s a professional vice, as well as a self-defence strategy.’
    â€˜Well, anyway, one afternoon, which stretched out before me like all of my afternoons as an idle intellectual, I was taking a shower with my body on automatic pilot — hands, arms, and legs, performing the sequence of obligatory movements that makes one shower exactly the same as all others. We’re never further from ourselves than when taking a simple shower, haven’t you noticed? But this one was different. As I was soaping up the soles of my feet, I felt, as if for the first time, how soft they were. This fact, which had never been so clear to me, startled me. Startled? No, it frightened me. My feet were like those of a newborn. It wasn’t possible that they belonged to a thirty-six-year-old man. They were out of keeping with my receding hairline, my sarcasm.
    â€˜Anyhow, that same day, I went to have lunch with a brother I hadn’t seen for a while. I led the conversation towards our similarities and dissimilarities (to be honest, I don’t think one talks about anything else with siblings), and I started saying how ugly our family’s feet were, with crooked toes and everything. I went on so much about it that he took off his shoes to examine his own feet. That was what I’d wanted. My heart started racing when I saw them: my brother’s feet had hard, rough, calloused soles. I expressed my perplexity at this difference. He smiled, and said, “What do you expect, Hemistich? You were always cooped up, reading. You didn’t play barefoot like I did.”
    â€˜That banal observation, one that I’d heard all my life, suddenly struck a deep chord. I went home less depressed than ashamed. Yes, I was really embarrassed, filled with the shame of one who finds himself naked in a crowd. Proud Hemistich, arrogant Hemistich, was a coward. My intellectual life meant the opposite of what I’d thought. Ever since I was a child, books hadn’t helped me know the world; rather, they’d kept me from it. Through them, I realised, I’d kept reality at bay, or adapted it to my own narrow parameters, which, in the end, is the same thing. I preferred reading the description of a landscape to actually seeing it. I preferred reading about love to feeling it. I preferred reading about pain to feeling it. And, to hide my weakness, I used knowledge like a whip on anyone who dared get close to me. My learning — which, at the end of the day, wasn’t so great and for which the word “learning” seemed like over-sized clothes — only served to inspire fear. Nothing more than fear. It had never made me happy, or led anyone to see new aspects of the world.’
    Antonym was unable to suppress a laugh.
    â€˜ ‘‘See new aspects of the world.” That’s a good one, Hemistich. Do you know what that is? Educator? Baloney. I’ve interviewed a few, and they always say the same thing: “To educate is to help people see new aspects of reality with a critical perspective.” ’
    â€˜Did I say anything about a “critical perspective?” ’
    â€˜No, but it would complement it well.’
    Hemistich got up and went over to the window, which looked on to what seemed to be an inner courtyard. Antonym took the opportunity to examine his friend’s office. The walls were completely naked and light blue, like a police station. Next to the window was a heavy desk in dark timber decorated with marquetry, like the high-backed chair behind it. Two lower chairs for visitors completed the arrangement. On the