The Last Patriarch by Najat El Hachmi

Author:Najat El Hachmi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2008-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

4

A dictionary of the Catalan language

If you want to escape from the poltergeist and don’t have a loudmouthed little mistress like Tangina Barrons, you should laugh a lot till you feel your ribs are about to explode, or cry a lot till you feel drained, or you should have an orgasm, that, at the end of the day, is also a way to get drained. I still didn’t know how to get an orgasm, father didn’t like anyone crying and mother didn’t like anyone laughing. So I started to read that dictionary of the Catalan language word by word. Everybody said what an intelligent girl, what a studious girl, but it was only so I could find one of those three things.

A period of truce was established. We’ll act as if my parents had never existed, or him, or anything at all. Not even yours. Nobody. I don’t want to hear their names pronounced. Anyone mentioning them should watch out. That was our truce. No talking about our grandparents, aunts or uncle. Especially mother, she wasn’t even allowed to say your father, your mother. Shush, he’d say, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets. Shush, I don’t have parents, and you mustn’t talk about them. All because they hadn’t damned his brother for the big sin he’d committed. Nothing should exist before our journey. Nothing. Perhaps we should see in this a sign that father was capable of love, but it was the gradual closing down of her intestines that really forced him to sign the peace treaty. You eat and I’ll forget all that. I don’t remember mother looking bad enough to give him such a fright, but I’d probably reached B. Baador was an adjective and baare another, while baba was a child’s name for grandmother, and not what trickles from the corner of your lips when you’re asleep or slaver that drips down. I didn’t understand all this, but I’d read it aloud all the same, to see how it sounded.

I was his favourite, the apple of his eye, he loved me more than anyone in the whole wide world, even more than mother, even more than my elder brothers, even more than the women he’d had before we’d arrived. It wasn’t an easy love, but it allowed me to go everywhere with him. A margin of freedom women don’t usually have and which I enjoyed, quite unprecedented in the line of patriarchs.

I’d do crosswords in the bar on our street. The omelettes were like sponge and the waiter bald and paunchy, with marks on his forehead that was no longer a forehead. There were caged birds everywhere and the smell of cigars or cheroots, which I couldn’t tell apart. Father preferred Ducados and smoked one packet after another while he drank his expresso with a drop of milk, bearing his whole weight on one leg and leaning his elbow on the marble counter. He gulped it down in one while the little spoon was still whirring round and said change this for me, Ramon.

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