The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo & Frank Wynne

Author:Jean-Baptiste Del Amo & Frank Wynne [Jean-Baptiste Del Amo & Frank Wynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2024-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Although the son hears the mother’s voice, although in his mind the mother’s voice conjures images of cars hurtling through the darkness, fearless silhouettes, he does not really understand what she is talking about – in truth, she is talking to herself rather than to the child, perhaps to see whether, once spoken, her words might have a particular flavour, might halt the march of time or summon up the ghosts of the past – and the child forgets those occasions when she confided in him, told him stories, details about their youth and their life together, which, had he remembered them, would have allowed him to picture the father, to reinforce the flimsy sketch of his memory, to lay another memory – perhaps another complete fabrication – over the two photographs hidden in the chest of drawers.

Or perhaps the mother’s words floated in the space of a room and, having hovered over them for an instant, reached him as he was busy playing play-town carpet or examining the tangled trinkets in the jewellery box. Perhaps they trickled into him, sank to the bottom and settled like sediment, so that while he cannot remember, he can recall them, but only from the depths of a primeval, ineffable memory.

He forgets, and all that remains is the fact that Uncle Tony knew the father, and indeed had a close relationship with him – though, if asked, the son would have been unable to describe the nature of that relationship.

From this former closeness, this mysterious complicity, the son develops a fascination, almost a veneration that wreathes Uncle Tony in glory, as though he had come home from exotic far-flung expeditions, had survived a war or accomplished some great feat.

The black hole in the child’s life generated by the father’s absence – by the secrets surrounding that absence – confers on Uncle Tony something of its hold, its power of attraction, its magnetic field such that it seems to the boy that some remanence of the father subsists in him.

Every time he encounters Uncle Tony, the son studies his bearing, his posture, the palpable nervousness in the way he stands in the kitchen or the living room. He never seems to feel quite at home, never knows what to do with his body, taps his foot constantly, stuffs his hands into his pockets and rummages about, twirls a cigarette between his index and middle fingers, and the child wonders which of these gestures he learned from the father.

During Uncle Tony’s visits, the mother, too, is alert; not to what she sees of the father in him, but to the way that he disturbs the well-regulated, hallowed, almost liturgical routine that she and the child share, to the minute changes effected by his mere presence – his body, his restive silence, his masculine smell – on the atmosphere of the house, pervaded by homely scents and maternal intentions. The father’s absence hangs between them, if not as a distant threat, then as a warning, tracing

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