Austral by Carlos Fonseca

Author:Carlos Fonseca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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My kisses served little. In August, my father announced that he planned to travel to America for some months. Two weeks later, we went to see him off at Heathrow, and we watched him board the plane that would take him first to New York and later to Brazil, where he would board the ship to Paraguay. There is a photograph that shows him getting on the plane, smiling for us. My mother took it with the Kodak Instamatic. He looks happy and hopeful. He is waving with his left hand, while farther off, in a quadrant of the image that seems to be hiding, his right hand grasps the dark suitcase holding the tape recorder he had bought that summer. An Ampex 960, identical to the one he’d seen in Zermatt. Just ten days earlier, my brother and I had seen him come home with the case, and we’d intuited that it held some kind of toy. We weren’t wrong. In the following days we watched him play with the recorder, and we suspected that this machine was turning my father back into the young man we’d once known. A man who laughed again as he listened to his own distorted voice. A certain optimism marked the weeks leading up to the trip, a certain hopefulness that by picking up the deceased anthropologist’s project, he would be capable of reversing a story that already seemed doomed to play out in a tragic key.

And so we watched him leave, hoping that the man who returned to us would be a new one, full of life and energy. I remember how during those months, in the absence of the diary where I could read his secrets, I imagined him crossing over southern lands. From time to time my mother would receive a telegram, but it was always minimal, lacking the details I needed to inspire my imagination. One telegram might say only, “Finally in Asunción, everything in order. Love to Aliza and Daniel,” but I would make sure to fill in the blank spaces: I’d imagine my father in that city he knew so little about, tape recorder in hand, traveling across those swamps I’d read all about, convinced that his steps would redeem von Mühlfeld’s madness. I saw him finally in Nueva Germania, walking amid the ruins of a town that had once housed Mengele himself but that now welcomed a man named Yitzhak Abravanel: a Jew who was unwittingly retaking his place in a past that my grandparents had struggled to leave behind. Repeating the past is a way of setting things right, my grandfather would say in those days, and I, not yet understanding what the words implied, imagined my father as a secret hero. We had only to wait: one day he would return from those distant austral lands and I could secretly read the record of his feats and exploits in that town where the legacy of Nazism was finally disappearing among peals of laughter from the last of the Nataibo.

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