Читать книгу The Amputated Memory - Marjolijn de Jager - Страница 25

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Popular wisdom says that everything comes to those who wait. For some unknown reason, my father begins to show renewed interest in me, and although it takes a different form it’s better than nothing. He takes a growing pleasure in introducing me to his old highly placed or affluent friends, as a way to reinforce their relationship. I especially remember the first and last on the long list of these introductions, no doubt because each marked a critical turning point in my life. Because of the first one I began to judge my father, see him as a sick man; and the last one convinced me that it was my stepmother who was at the root of my father’s internal sickness. And so the first one signified a noteworthy evolution in my usual feelings of affection, tolerance, and incredible admiration, which I now attribute to my undue naiveté, my feelings, and my view of the world as inculcated by my grandmother’s teachings. The last one unleashed my first impulses toward rebellion and the desire to fight with all my might against what I thereafter saw as an obstacle, even if that meant forgetting my grandmother’s teachings, as long as I could change our life. The first to the last was merely a progressive, almost normal, and rather predictable development.

First introduction: An old, very red-faced, freckled Swiss man. He was a planter with acres and acres of coffee and cocoa beans not far from the city, houses with several stories at the center of his plantations, electricity, and running water—the ultimate in luxury at the time.

One night, invited by the old Swiss man to his very beautiful colonial house in town, my father takes me to dinner there. A red brick house with huge stones and a tile roof on a frame of rafters as massive as the trunks of young iroko trees. Here and there on the walls of the enormous living room are terrifying masks, hunting rifles, animal skins and heads, family photographs, and portraits of a young man in military uniform, probably the owner in his youth. There are also maps of Africa and Switzerland framed beneath glass, and beautifully dyed fabrics in heavy gilded frames, which in their own way tell the story of a man who has spent time in many places and knocked about a bit. All the furniture (armchairs, low tables, enormous armoires) are made of massive, slightly buffed and undecorated wood, giving the impression of power and weight and, at the same time, revealing that they have been handmade by people who like to do everything themselves.