The Eternal Son by Cristovao Tezza

Author:Cristovao Tezza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth

Work dulled their wits. After the hospital in Frankfurt, they’d wound up in a small laborers’ guesthouse in a satellite town — he could no longer remember the name or how to get there. He remembered a Venezuelan immigrant who, according to legend, had won a fortune in the German lottery and donated everything to the church, carrying on his purifying work of cleaning stairs and corridors with mops, rags, generous detergents, and an interminable, edifying monologue about the advantages of Jesus Christ — a paranoid litany, but with method, and bearable even, if you thought about other things as you worked and also kept a certain physical distance to avoid the habitual soft touch of his hand on your shoulder with each sentence. Because of his good contacts, the man always had an odd job up his sleeve, and in exchange the two Brazilians, the communist and the atheist, exercised religious tolerance to the point of attending a service at his so-called miraculous church. It was better to accept the invitation, they decided, thinking about the comfort of the pension they were in and the jobs coming in practically every day.

He was impressed by the discreet but real wealth in the details of the temple. On a mezzanine at the back, for example, there wasn’t an organ or a children’s choir, but a glass-enclosed area for mothers with crying babies. Apart from that, it had a Protestant dryness, false Gothic windows, and a smell of fresh paint — and sermons in German with an intonation that reminded him of the priests in Santa Catarina when he was a child. But it really was a German church, from the faces, all Alpha Pluses; they were the only savages there, he thought. This was one of the few moments in his life in which he really beat himself up over the thought that he was selling his soul (how did I get dragged into this shit?) in exchange for work. But he was selling his soul to God, not the Devil; and it was a reasonable price, putting up with the lectures (always somewhat on his guard, his eyes skeptical, eyebrow raised, a resistance that further stimulated the hard work of evangelizing the world), and in exchange spending his days doing odd cleaning jobs, paid at the end of the day in nicely counted marks and shiny pfennigs. The comfort of the hospital was gone; now each day was a struggle for them, illegal workers trying to scrape together some money.

On the very first day, they had to be on the pavement outside the pension at 6:30 a.m. — a car would take them to a clinic in another town. When they tried to open the door, they discovered it was locked. They did everything they could to get it open (a glass-and-aluminum door in the kitchen at the back of the building) but it was useless, and the clock was ticking. They wriggled clumsily through the narrow window over the sink, jumped and ran out front, worried about missing their ride.

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.