The True Actor by Jacinto Lucas Pires

Author:Jacinto Lucas Pires
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The True Actor
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6835-1
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

9. Ugly Swear Words

In a scene of rank melodrama, Americo is kicked out of the house, to the screams of his wife, stumbling down the staircase while twisting his neck to look back upwards, afraid that his beloved Joana might hurl his suitcase and his clothes and all his belongings right onto the head of her poor unfaithful husband. And, behind it all, a silent, monochromatic melancholy, completely unrelated to Joana’s screams, Joana’s hysterics, and the terribly ugly swear words issuing from Joana’s delicate lips. No, it’s much worse. After all those days and nights feeding him that beige-green slop, changing his smelly diapers, putting up with his pigheadedness, his whims, his tantrums, his unintelligible babbling, Americo hears it quite distinctly: Joachim says his very first word—the virgin word, the seminal word, the historic word, the word that no one will ever forget—and that word is: “Mama?”

How can life be so bloody cruel?

Americo runs fleeing to his mother’s house.

He looks downward to avoid catching eyes with anyone and concentrates on his breathing. He’s got to make it to her house. Fifteen minutes that seem like fifteen kilometers. As if he were running in place, as if the city were receding away from him. Everything—the facades, the streets—looks so sick. Everything looks so dead.

As he summons the courage to ring the doorbell his mother opens the door, a sermon etched onto her face. Americo asks her if she’s heard. “Unfortunately,” she says. Americo figures that she must have read the horrible story in the newspaper and tells her he doesn’t want to discuss it, that he just needs a place to spend the night. But his mother keeps talking, tells him to calm down, to think about “what you have done, Americo.” She takes Joana’s side and won’t let him explain.

“Mother, in that case I won’t even take off my jacket,” he says, frowning. It’s only a threat, but his mother doesn’t shut up and he realizes he has no choice but to leave.

“Maybe you can still work things out!” he hears her yelling from the doorway, loud enough for all of Lisbon to hear. “Think of little Joachim!”

A drunk, leaning against the ATM, sings the national anthem. A convertible packed with laughing girls drives past. A blank, listless, depressing sky hangs over everything.

Americo ends up on Murilo’s couch playing the part of the misunderstood schoolboy. He holds his face in his hands, assumes the role of the sufferer—angry with the world, with fate, with everything; detested by everyone. Murilo brings him a glass of wine and tells him that this time he needs to find himself a really good lawyer.

“What about you?”

“I mean a serious lawyer,” Murilo repeats, watching the line of runway models strutting on the television. Skinny women in complicated hats.

“Thanks, man. You’re the only one I can count on.”

“Oh, come now, no need to thank me; what’s all this? But look, right now, if you could, by chance, I wonder if…I could ask you to, if you

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