My Father's House E-Book

Karmele Jaio

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 238

Beschreibung

Ismael, a successful novelist, has been suffering from writer's block for two years, trying to get inside his female narrator's head and failing. However, he tells no one about this problem and continues to spend each day in his study, supposedly writing. When his mother is taken into hospital, he is forced to spend time with his father who has the beginnings of dementia. This experience carries him back to a moment in his childhood that has remained hidden away in his memory until then. Jasone, Ismael's wife, has always been his first reader and editor. As a student, she used to write, but has devoted the last decade of her life to her daughters and to her husband's career. Now that the girls have left home, Jasone finds herself drawn to ideas and causes she believed were the domain of her best friend Libe, as well as to an old flame, who is also her husband's publisher. The rape of a young woman in a nearby town triggers something in Jasone, and she begins spending her nights at her computer writing a novel she never expected to write. When the couple's respective secrets are revealed, everything will change. With intelligence and wisdom, Karmele Jaio brilliantly dissects the complexities of relationships of all kinds, never coming down on one side, but allowing her characters space to evolve and take up roles of their own making.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Europe

General Editor: Timothy Lane

MY FATHER’S HOUSE

Support for the translation of this book was provided by Acción Cultural Española, AC/E.

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited

24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

[email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 08 3

ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 09 0

Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors

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Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd

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[email protected]        www.peribo.com.au

First published in Spain in 2020

First published by Dedalus in 2023

La casa del padre copyright Karmele Jaio 2020

Published by special arrangement with the Ella Sher Literary Agency

Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa & Sophie Hughes 2023

The right of Karmele Jaio to be identified as the author and Margaret Jull Costa & Sophie Hughes as the translators of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

THE AUTHOR

Karmele Jaio writes in Basque and translates her own novels into Spanish. She has written three books of short stories, one of poetry and three novels. This is the second of her novels to be translated into English. Her first novel Her Mother’s Hands brought her several prizes and was adapted for the cinema. My Father’s House was awarded the Premio Euskadi de Literatura and was voted the Best Book written in Basque in 2019. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, including Best European Fiction and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories.

THE TRANSLATORS

MARGARET JULL COSTA

Margaret Jull Costa has worked as a translator for over thirty years, translating the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz, and poets: Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Ana Luísa Amaral. Her work has brought her many prizes, among them the 2008 Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz. In 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

SOPHIE HUGHES

Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty books from Spanish, by Spanish and Latin American writers including Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, José Revueltas, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor.

For Iñigo MuguruzaFor all new men

“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.”

John Cheever

Thank you for being by my side while I was writing this book.

Contents

ISMAEL

1      From up on the top of the hill

2      Trapped in another time

3      Old nightmares

4      I’ll leave you to write in peace

JASONE

5      The sound of a sliding door opening

6      I’m here, had you forgotten about me?

ISMAEL

7      This is a war

8      The good old songs

9      You could take Dad home with you

10    The best lies are also the briefest

JASONE

11    I can feel your touch

LIBE

12    The age-old battle

ISMAEL

13    It wasn’t me

14    The coins

15    A perspex door

16    He’s just not a hunter

17    A stranger

JASONE

18    Fear is a difficult balancing act

LIBE

19    You’re here

ISMAEL

20    Dad frightens me

21    Arconada, I’m supporting him

22    It’s not just his lip that’s crooked

23    Come on, if you’ve got the balls

JASONE

24    You’re going to have to help me…

25    Back to the sliding door

ISMAEL

26    Like scraps of scorched paper floating to the ground

27    The pearl necklace

28    The great mystery

29    The crossword

30    It’s no longer your voice

LIBE

31    Take a step back and start again

JASONE

32    It isn’t that I fancied Jauregi, I wanted to

be

Jauregi

ISMAEL

33    Another sleight of hand

34    And the rest of the flock will follow behind you

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ISMAEL

1

From up on the top of the hill

Gunshots in the hills. You hear them again from where you are, up high. You know, though, that the shots aren’t coming from the surrounding trees, but from inside you. Your body is just another part of the greenery. How many empty cartridges must get lost in the undergrowth, like little hearts that slowly corrode over time and yet beat on, and on, and on…

Gunshots in the hills. You’ve heard them again, from up high. And you can see the cartridges as clearly as if you were holding them in your hand. Trust cartridges, made in Eibar. Your father’s watchful gaze as he checks to see if you’ve loaded them into the shotgun correctly. Red or green, with a gold base, and packed with pellets. The pellets swiftly expand when they pierce the flesh, like some sort of evil spermatozoa. Those stupid cartridges go flying into the bushes and there’s no way to retrieve them. Not that anyone really tries. When all’s said and done, they’re just empty casings. Nobody thinks about how they continue beating and firing — bang, bang, bang — however rusty, however old.

You’ve reached the top, panting hard, having raced out of your study, leaving the computer on, and possibly also the hall light. You left without really knowing where you were going, as urgently as a diver furiously swimming up to the surface for air. Propelled more by angst than by the strong southerly wind. A familiar feeling that came back to you at your computer when you remembered yesterday’s nightmarish news about the girl found in the woods.

The news about the girl who was raped and abandoned up in the hills. Some hunters found her, too late. It turned your stomach, you can’t get it out of your head, it’s like what happened in Pamplona all over again, and you really didn’t need that. The last straw. What a hackneyed phrase, another tired cliché. No, seriously, you really can’t write any more. Your head is one big mess. One day they’ll finally find something there, a malignant tumour that prevents you from thinking. That prevents you from writing.

The news about the girl who was raped and abandoned in the woods. You’re not sure if it’s affected you more because you fear for your daughters — especially now you know that Eider was in Pamplona the night of the tragedy — or because of where it took place. Out in the wild, in the hills, a landscape that still tears at your skin like brambles, a landscape that has haunted your dreams since you were a boy.

And now here, at the top of Olarizu, a brisk forty-minute walk from your house, you ask yourself why your feet have carried you out into the woods. You wonder why the angst you feel has driven you to this precise spot, to the very epicentre of your fears.

You gaze down at the city from above, your thinning hair fluttering about your forehead. Up here, you’ve finally been able to take a deep breath and calm down a little. There’s always something so calming about being up above it all.

You haven’t been here since you were a kid. Your father brought you once or twice, soon after you moved to Vitoria, just as he used to take you to Kalamua or Ixua when you lived in Eibar, only without the shotgun. And yet the setting now fills your head with the sound of gunshots. Bang, bang, bang. Gunshots in the hills. Gunshots and dogs barking. For you, there is no more terrifying combination of sounds.

You look at the city that welcomed you when you were fifteen. A city that has grown with you, that has expanded like an ink blot on a piece of paper, losing intensity as the stain widens and spreads. It took you a moment to pinpoint the roof of your parents’ apartment building. The Church of San Pedro helped you to place it. They’ve been living in that apartment since the move from Eibar. Like their fellow residents, who also came from elsewhere: Zamora, Cáceres… In many cases, those neighbours would spend their summers back in their home towns. You remember months of empty apartments, lowered blinds, deserted stairwells. The coolness of the hallway compared to the desert heat of the street. Cold landings and scorching patios. Those intense August contrasts.

At this hour, your mother will be mopping the kitchen floor, as she has done for the last fifty years, from left to right, right to left, zigzagging back and forth as if trying to remove the evidence of a murder. Your mother, always removing evidence, silencing voices, putting out fires. She’ll have left the balcony door open so that the floor dries more quickly and to get rid of the smell of cooking. Fried fillet steak and bleach, that post-lunch blend of smells also travelled with you from Eibar to Vitoria. Homes aren’t physical places, they’re atmospheres that follow us from one house to the next. Nancy has been helping them out ever since your father started losing his memory, but there’s no way your mother would let her mop the floor. Nobody mops like her. Mopping is her domain.

To the right of your parents’ home is the bell tower of the Church of San Miguel. You lived near there for years, in the old part of town, with Jasone and the girls. But in among that compact jumble of houses, you haven’t been able to pinpoint the one that used to be yours. Just as you can’t see your daughters either. They’ve already left the scene, flown the nest. They no longer need your protection. They move in and out of sight like those flocks of birds you often watch in the afternoon from your study window, making shapes and patterns in the sky only to immediately unmake them again.

Your current house, the one where you and Jasone now live just the two of you, albeit with two spare bedrooms for your daughters’ comings and goings, is easy to spot. It’s in one of the residential areas in the south of the city, where the buildings are more spread out. You can even see the terrace your study looks out on. The window from which you’ve observed the world in recent years. On the other side of that window is your computer, your dried-up cup of coffee on the desk, your fears, your post-it notes, your paper clips, your slippers beside the chair, your nightmares, your books, your notepads, your world. There is your novel, the one you’ve been trying to write for the last two years. There is your secret. A novel that isn’t progressing, a creative drought, a classic case of writer’s block. Never a truer word spoken. Yet another cliché.

Just like every sentence you write. Over the last two years, your words have created nothing but cardboard scenery for a stage set. But how to create a really believable set for a world you’ve always kept well away from in real life. You’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve regretted your decision to try and describe the corrosive political atmosphere of the Basque Country in the 1980s. Putting the political conflict at the centre of your work was a disastrous idea. If it hadn’t been for Vidarte’s review of your last book, you might never have got yourself into this mess. And if it hadn’t been for the offer you received to have your next work published in Spanish translation, you might not have embarked on a history of that time of “Si vis pacem, para bellum” — “If you want peace, prepare for war” — which was your sister’s mantra. You thought the publisher would like that authentic touch, an insider’s view of the Basque conflict, but you’ve regretted it ever since. Over the last two years, you’ve questioned every single line you’ve written; not a word of it rings true, because you didn’t live through those years the way your sister did, ending up getting arrested, or like Jauregi or countless others. You always ran away from political commitment, from activism; you ran away from the first sign of pain or risk and kept the conflict at arm’s length. So how are you supposed to write about it now, if you can’t find even fragments of truth in either your hands or your memory.

You can see your study window and it seems so small… Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s the reason all your ideas have dried up in recent years. You’re looking at reality from too far away. You can’t see anything from there, detached from the world. Vidarte was right all along. In his review, he wrote that your characters felt like extra-terrestrial beings, that your novel didn’t make a single reference to the world in which they live, to the social or political context… He said you never let your characters out in the street, that you kept them locked indoors, between four walls, debating among themselves. But he also said that you’d failed to do even that properly, because you watched them from afar, as if you were afraid to enter their thoughts, their nightmares. In your novel there was no engagement with either the setting or your characters’ inner lives. And without any real engagement with the truth, there can be no art. That’s what the critic Vidarte wrote about your last novel, along with a few other equally charming comments. And over these last two years you haven’t been able to shake off the image of him hovering over your study day and night, calling you an extra-terrestrial. You’re an extra-terrestrial, Alberdi.

Perhaps that’s the problem. In this new novel, you’ve tried to get close to the real world, but it isn’t easy; whenever you get too close, you take fright — as you did when you heard about that poor girl — and you scurry back to the refuge of your study. It’s not easy engaging fully with what’s happening in the world, or with the people in it, if you never leave your study from whose window you see only your own nightmares and the geraniums on the balcony that Jasone has been neglecting lately.

You see drought. You see darkness.

Perhaps it’s the darkness that has finally driven you up this hill. Yes here. Perhaps it’s the darkness that has finally propelled you into the light.

2

Trapped in another time

You ate your breakfast staring at the filter coffee machine. For years you’ve eaten breakfast sitting opposite the same bloody thing. Jasone has told you countless times that you need to change it, that it doesn’t go with the new kitchen, which, with its minimalist furniture and metallic finishes, looks more like a spaceship than a kitchen. The old coffee maker is out of place. At the very least you should buy yourselves one that uses capsules. But you’re adamant that no other machine makes coffee as good as this. Even so, for some reason, ever since you changed house and kitchen, you’ve found that coffee machine somehow discomfiting, as if it were a reflection of you, as if you, too, were out of place, outmoded, out of keeping.

When Jasone goes off to work at the library and you’re left on your own in the house, you feel the machine’s presence even more strongly. The slow rhythm of the coffee as it drips into the glass jug couldn’t be more different from the speed of the news headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen of the TV you always have on in the background over breakfast each morning: Donald Trump, Aleppo, Lesbos, the Dow Jones, oceans of plastic… No, those news stories are from another planet. Out there, everything moves very fast. Inside, it’s just you and the electric coffee machine, trapped in another time. Drip drip dripping, gradually being drained of substance.

For a long time now you’ve watched only foreign channels: CNN, CBS… It calms you down. The bombs explode somewhere far away. Almost as far away as the bombs in the story you’re failing to write. News of rapes that have taken place locally never seem to filter through to those channels. They’re never going to tell you about how, in the early hours of that morning, a girl was raped in the very town where your youngest daughter spent the night. Jasone phoned you the second she heard the news.

‘I’ve been calling her, but there’s no answer,’ she said in an anguished voice. ‘I think she’s got her phone switched off.’

You instantly regretted having given Eider permission to go to Pamplona.

‘All of my friends are going, Dad.’

You can’t think how it even occurred to you to let her go. She’s only seventeen.

When, after one very long hour, your daughter finally called her mother — ‘What’s the big deal, my phone died, chill out’ — you felt as if you were deflating, as if all the air you’d been holding in were escaping through your mouth. A very long hour. An hour-long rape. Your daughter’s rape. You experienced it as if it had really happened, and since then you’ve felt as if an alarm were going off inside you, as if the mere mention of a man abusing a woman, raping her, murdering her, inflicted a deep wound on you. Now, as when you first heard the news of that girl who was raped and abandoned in the hills (the way someone might toss away their empty cartridges), you feel afraid, terribly afraid for what could happen to your daughters. But your fear is all mixed up with a feeling of guilt, although you can’t quite put your finger on where it’s coming from. Or perhaps you can, perhaps all Jasone’s remarks since she set up her feminist book club — all her ‘this is a war’, and ‘they’re killing us’ — have left their mark on you. That way of talking about men as if they were all the same. Ever since that awful morning after the San Fermín festivities, you’ve been paralysed by this mixture of fear and guilt. You’ve regressed to being the little boy who used to have nightmares about the woods, about the dogs’ barking during the frantic, agonising search for your cousin Aitor. In those dreams, too, the fear was always tinged with guilt.

Your old obsessions and your old paralysis have returned. Something in your head isn’t working. Something in there has caused your imagination to stagnate and blocked the flow of ideas as you sit at your computer. And not only there. Last week, you completely blanked at the cash machine, unable to remember your pin. You walked away without withdrawing any money. You picture a small black ball inside your skull, a slowly growing tumour, and you’re certain that this is what’s clouding your mind and preventing you from writing like you used to, gliding from one paragraph to the next, always sure of where you were going, of where you wanted to go.

That black ball is also the cause of your nightmares and the worry that builds and builds inside until you can’t stand it any more and have to leave the house and race up to the nearest hilltop. And the worst part is, the doctors can’t find anything wrong. But what would today’s doctors know? They’re barely older than your daughters. What would they know about illness, about failing bodies and atrophying minds? You hate them even more than you hate young writers, the stupid wave of promising new writers. The doctors tell you there’s nothing to worry about. They’ll never admit that they’re simply incapable of finding anything. They made you a follow-up appointment in six months. Six months. You could die in that time. In that time the little black marble in your head could grow to the size of a ping-pong ball. Or one of those terrifying rubber bullets used by the police.

You’ve been afraid of dying ever since you were little. Back when you still lived in Eibar, you would pull the sheets up over your head at night — you still associate fear with the musty smell of the sheets in the house in Eibar — and you’d lie there, perfectly still, sweating, afraid that at any moment Death itself would appear in your bedroom. Those fears and nightmares only intensified after your cousin Aitor went missing up in the hills, and half the town spent two whole days and nights looking for him. You and your father included. Even though, by that point, you were already living in Vitoria, you both returned to Eibar to join in the search.

As a boy, whenever you had nightmares, you would jump out of bed and run along the chilly corridor to your sister’s room. Tucked up in Libe’s bed, you would calm down — her smell calmed you down. Libe has always been braver than you. The big sister. The one who, once you were both older, wasn’t afraid of rubber bullets or being arrested. The one who wasn’t afraid of getting into the most dangerous political situations, or, trickier still, getting out of them. And get out she did. She ran off on her own to Berlin, where she still lives. That didn’t scare her either. Now she’s still saving the world in her own way working for an NGO helping refugees.

You, on the other hand, are a coward. And knowing this weighs on you.

When Jasone leaves for work each morning, when you hear the front door slam, the dreaded silence begins. Lately, your mind only produces words that dissolve into mush like wet cardboard. Page after page of notes, sentences that stare back at you the moment you finish writing them, as if to say: ‘Is that it?’

The novel you’re working on is really a caricature of life during the conflict, a first draft that was dead before it was even born, a story even you don’t believe. One big lie. Even more dated and out of place than the filter coffee machine you stare at as you eat your breakfast each morning.

3

Old nightmares

When Jasone gets in from work each day, when you hear the jangle of her keys, you bolt out of your study towards the front door, like a dog who’s spent all day cooped up and waiting for its owner to come home. But it’s not only Jasone you want. You also crave the freshness of the street that she carries on her clothes and face. The same crisp, clean air visitors bring with them when you’re ill. And those cheeks as cold as keys.

Like the cold your father used to bring home with him after a day’s hunting. The cold that would enter the house with your father, making your mother’s body and face freeze. That way he had of handing her the shotgun for her to put away and his dirty boots to be cleaned. The cold of the water your mother would use to clean them in the bathroom sink. Your mother’s red knuckles under the cold water. Her nails torn from scraping out the tiny pebbles embedded in the grips on the soles.

Today, as usual, on hearing the jangle of keys, you leave your study and follow your wife down the corridor while she takes off her coat, as if you are waiting for her to tell you something, as if she were supposed to report back on the outside world: ‘Did you see anyone we know? (Did anyone ask after me?) What have you got there?’ Like a child, you rummage through the shopping bags she puts down on the kitchen table, looking for something, quite what even you didn’t know. A message in a bottle.

‘Has your mother been over again?’ she asks on seeing the Tupperware containers in the fridge. Jasone eats lunch with her colleagues from the library every day except Friday, while you eat lunch alone from Monday to Thursday, and so are more than happy to accept the croquettes, the tuna or bean stew that your mother brings.

‘I’ve told her to stop, but, I mean… At least it gives her a reason to leave the house.’

‘You shouldn’t let her.’

‘But she loves doing it.’

‘You shouldn’t let bringing you food be her sole reason for leaving the house. You should talk to your father.’

‘To my father? He’s hardly in a state to be lectured to.’

Some part of your father’s brain has disconnected, and you’ve convinced yourself that whatever you have must be hereditary, that some families are weaker, more vulnerable to disease than others. You’ve convinced yourself that something is about to explode inside you at any moment, probably that black ball.