The Things We've Seen by Agustin Fernandez Mallo

Author:Agustin Fernandez Mallo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

This was what happened that March after the telegram at MIT. Well, more or less. The story I’ve just told is what I can remember of a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides called ‘Timeshare’. And though it’s from memory, I have tried to render the original as faithfully as I could. I’ve read it hundreds of times, but at the same time it’s also true that my memory isn’t fit for any grand expeditions nowadays. In any case, I came across ‘Timeshare’ in a magazine that did the rounds in the Home in 1997, and from the off could hardly believe what I was reading: nothing short of a blow-by-blow, word-for-word account of the time I spent in Florida that March, except one or two small circumstantial details, plus one or two other things that I will call, simply, ‘slight deviations from reality’.

The circumstantial details: 1) My father never worked in a bank; 2) I’m an only child; 3) the man who delivered the summonses, generated by my father’s ruinous business ventures, did not bring them to an apartment but to my room at MIT; 4) my mother couldn’t have cleaned the windows of the apartment on the rooftop terrace with rubber gloves identical to the ones she used to clean the windows at our residential neighbourhood home, because we never lived in a residential neighbourhood.

As for the ‘slight deviations from reality’, these are: in my father’s case, next to his timeshare property complex he built a decent-sized golf course. In reality, this was his prime motivation and not the apartments, which to his mind were less likely to turn a profit than a golf course. On the night I saw my father punching himself in the gut, I did indeed go out onto the terrace, and my mother was sitting having a rest beneath the seashell-and-coral painting, which was askew on the wall. As I’ve said, I asked her what she’d dreamed about the previous night, but when she said I was better off not knowing, I didn’t in fact leave it there, and, working on her in the way only a child can a mother, in the end got her to say: ‘I dreamed something strange and terrible,’ she said, ‘something I can’t fathom at all.’ That was as much as I could wheedle out of her. After that, as I looked out across the dark expanse of the ocean, I remember feeling a golf ball in my pocket. My father had given it me the previous day when the two of us were out walking, not far from what he referred to as ‘future Hole 5’, then still nothing but a big muddy tract – a fairways in waiting. My father had pointed out that the sprinklers weren’t working, and that Buddy, no longer in his employ then, was the only one who knew how to fix them. I remember him stopping by the future Hole 5 – my feet on soil remarkably firm, him with shoes a few inches deep – and handing me the golf ball.

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