Monday 27 June 2016

Plantation Boy - Menino De Engenho - Chapter 2


                  
Chapter 2
        
I can still remember my father. He was tall and handsome with large eyes and a black moustache. Whenever he was with me he would kiss me and tell me stories and try to make me happy. Whatever I did was fine by him. If I messed up his books or got his clothes dirty, he wouldn't get cross. But some days he would come home quiet and serious. Then he would sit down in a chair or walk up and down the corridor with his hands behind his back. Then there would be a big row with my mother. He would yell at her, saying all sorts of things, his face twisted with anger, making me afraid. My mother would flee to her room, sobbing. I had no idea what it was about, those arguments. I only knew that a short time later, there he would be with my mother, all kisses. And the rest of the evening until bedtime, he would give all his attention to her, and his eyes would be red from having cried so much.
I loved him because he would let me do whatever I wanted and because he would come and play with me on the floor like a child of my own age. Later on I would learn lots of things about him; his excitable nervous nature, his bitterness towards the world. It was the story of a man in thrall to his passions, a man with a sensitive heart who dwelt too much on his pain. My poor father! I can see him now led out of the house by the policemen on the day of his crime. As he bent down to give me a farewell embrace, his boyish face was sunk in despair. The love he had for his wife had been the love of a madman. His place wasn't in the prison where they sent him. Indeed, my father would die ten years later in a mental hospital struck down by a paralytic stroke.

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