–27–

It was all too vulgar — the fact that my father was having an affair with my wife and, blackmailed by his employees, had hired a hit man to take them out. My own fiction was much better than this slapstick reality. This was the only thing of which I was certain.

I didn’t want to head home, because I didn’t have the stomach to face my wife. But going to a hotel would be worse. So I decided to lock myself in the study, where there was a sofa bed. I didn’t get a wink of sleep, of course. I was disoriented. I needed someone to talk to, but I had no friends. There was just my aunt, who lived in Milan. I called her. I woke her up and, without any preamble, relayed what had happened. There was a long silence on the other end of the line, then she said in a teary voice that she already knew everything. She would have told me at our last dinner in Paris if her husband hadn’t stopped her. This was the reason for the argument in the restaurant that had contaminated our evening. I asked her how she’d found out. She said that she’d seen them kissing on a street corner in the Marais district, late one afternoon. They hadn’t seen her. Her shock, of course, had been great, and she’d ended up at the doctor’s with a bout of hypertension. She repeated that she would have told me, but her husband hadn’t let her, for fear that I might do something silly. He’d even threatened to leave her. ‘Forgive me, son. Perhaps it would have been better for you to hear it from me,’ she said, now bawling. I hung up.

I came out of the study late in the morning. My wife was at the breakfast table. Without responding to her ‘good morning’, I told her that I knew about everything. ‘About what?’ she asked. ‘That you and my father are having an affair,’ I said, helping myself to some coffee, as if it was all very natural. I continued with my breakfast while, on her knees, she cried, begging for forgiveness. I could retell the scene in dramatic colours, but it was just pathetic.

After she stopped crying, I ordered — yes, ordered — her to give me the details. She said that she’d succumbed to my father’s charms back in Paris, and that her trip back to Brazil had been to see him. ‘There was no inheritance?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she answered. I asked how she’d got the money to open her catering service, even though I already knew the answer. She confirmed that my father had given it to her, and told me the rest of the story. She said that he’d put pressure on her to return to Brazil, threatening to cut the money he sent us. She’d tried everything possible to end the affair, and the idea of us getting legally married had been an attempt to create an obstacle to his advances.

However, she went on, when he heard we were getting married, he started acting sadistically. He demanded that she spend the afternoon at a motel with him on the day before. ‘If you don’t, I’ll tell my son everything,’ he threatened. After the wedding, my father had made several other attempts to rekindle things, but their encounters had been rare, until they’d stopped completely. ‘But you started seeing him again two months ago,’ I said, when I realised that her long silence was a full stop. She rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath, and said that she’d made this mistake because she needed the money. She really did want to open a catering service, and didn’t have any other way to raise the capital, except by placing herself at my father’s mercy. ‘Even if you’d asked him for the money, he would have come to me for reimbursement in the form of sex. So I thought it was better to ask him myself. That way, I’d have real money to justify my fictitious inheritance,’ she explained.

I asked, ‘Could this child you’re carrying be his?’

She denied this possibility vehemently, saying that she’d always been careful when sleeping with him, but it was obvious she was lying … How do I know? Well, for what other reason would she have considered an abortion? She had listed her reasons when I’d posed the hypothesis. But none of them were convincing, you must agree.

A funny thought struck me at that moment: it was all the fault of free initiative. The former employees who wanted to open their own cake shop, my wife who wanted her own catering service — if it weren’t for all this entrepreneurialism, none of it might have happened. I left my wife at the breakfast table, and went back into the study to think about what to do.