Family Album by Gabriela Alemán

Author:Gabriela Alemán
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

MARRIAGE

IT MUST HAVE been ten in the morning when I opened the drawer. A month had passed since the funeral, and though I felt like a chunk of raw meat on a butcher block, I had come to understand that the world never stopped. That while I looked at the ceiling in the bedroom, without knowing how to get out of bed, day went on turning into night and night into day. It wasn’t that I had forgotten the steps to follow, no, just that I didn’t remember the reasons for doing so. The ceiling didn’t help either, it was stucco over cement and, over that, paint. And thirty days was more than enough time to figure that out. I knew I had things to do, with or without a corpse in the closet, there are always things to do. Like putting papers in order, changing the name on the bank account, paying the bills, answering the telephone, dusting, opening drawers. After opening the drawers, it was five in the afternoon. Stupid me, in those seven hours I came to understand more about the world than I had in the previous fifty-eight years of my life.

The papers were always there, if I had wanted to find them. I just needed a little curiosity. But I always thought that Jorge didn’t have locks on the desk because he was an honest guy, with nothing to hide. No, wait, let me reword that, because it’s a lie, the truth is that I never thought. During my entire life at his side I never did that, I did not think, is what I’m trying to say. Nor did I react, that would have meant that I was involved. What I did was assume. I assumed from one year to the next, and adding up the years, I made an ass of myself. Hee-haw. The only thing I didn’t find in those drawers were bundles of thousand-dollar bills. There were deposits in off-shore banks, trust funds, I found out — reading one of the documents — that he was a front for a construction company with contracts to the tune of three hundred forty-two million dollars to pave half of the province of Los Ríos. Other documents revealed the existence of a number of children with his last name. Things like that. And I, who for my whole life had thought he was a loser. It was one of the reasons I stayed with him. From the beginning I had been duped ― when I was still thinking, I didn’t do it very well. After all, to be a loser at least you have to have tried to do something. And I thought he never tried to do anything in his life. We lived thanks to the small jobs his friends gave him. I never asked what he did for them. Some mornings he went to an office and then, at the end of the month, he paid the bills. We never went on vacations abroad, sometimes we went to the beach.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.