The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer

Author:Victor Heringer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions

41

The egg room had a weird smell now. Since Mama had moved in there, she only left to go to the bathroom or have a shower. She’d polish her fake gold ornaments and look and polish and look and drink red wine and sleep and polish and look hard. Nothing was ever polished enough.

It was the beginning of her black phase, stained with sickly gold. There were no windows in the room. Paulina, already swollen with the baby, brought food, tried to tidy the piles of clothes, beat the sheets, give the corpus cavernosum an airing. From time to time I’d come to give her a hello or a kiss and I’d notice the smell. It wasn’t a stink, because my mother didn’t stink—she never went without rose-milk deodorant or French-Brazilian perfume, contraband from the street hawkers in Cidade Nova. It was the smell of a bathroom that’s been disinfected, but locked shut for hours. The smell of teeth almost rotten, but recently brushed.

(She and Dad traded words, yes, I remember. They traded them, but didn’t trade them back. One of them was stuck with the other’s words and that was that. Conversation didn’t exist, only monologue existed. They didn’t kiss. I never saw the two of them hold hands again.)

Dad worked shifts and drank in his free time. Drunk, he was a slick-as-Vaseline best pal. He talked and talked and said he loved us with those slippery lips. One day, he insisted he was going to build a tree house for us, chose an almond tree on the street and gave it a few slaps on the trunk to see if it would hold. It would! The next day, he got planks, ropes and nails. On the third day, he sobered up. The planks were stolen before the dew could rot them.

Sometimes Dad would sink into a silence and everybody saw on his face that he was in pain, everybody thought it was because he’d seen so many people die.

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