Carlos Villacorta Gonzáles
TRANS. BY Gillian Esquivia-Cohen
thirteen fathers
I have thirteen fathers. As you know, being a son is hard with only one father; with thirteen, you avoid a lot of problems. My first father was born far away and taught me to round my vowels when I pronounced them: Mon Dieu!, parfait, croissant; these were his favorite words. Sometimes, he blurted strange phrases like J’ai deteste ici or Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’àme. Years later, I learned I had half-brothers and sisters on his side but I never knew if I was his favorite.
The second was a little older and always looked to the left. “This inequitable country,” he would say, “must be made into a machine for justice.” Maybe this is why all his mistresses loved and spoiled me with presents and kisses: before any endearment or hug, I would sit down and devour fiery red books. On winter nights in New England, he would read Poe’s stories to me, repeating Nevermore!, while on Christmas he refused to give me any presents. “As long as there is hunger, we cannot accept gifts.” I loved him a lot until the day he died under the snow.
The third was the youngest. I always traveled with him to different cities but, like my second father, he never gave me any presents. “You have to earn them, with work.” He sent me to sell lemonade in the summertime. In fall, to rake leaves. In winter, to shovel snow. In spring, he made me go with him to work so the secretaries would pinch my cheeks or hug me. “The poor man is poor because he wants to be,” he would say before I went to sleep. I always looked at him with suspicion, like you do a poor dog trying to bite its own tail. He was the first to run off.
The fourth always spoke to me in Castilian, which around here they call Spanish. Sometimes he pronounced the th as an s and sometimes it sounded like he was sucking on a lime. That was what my mother said that peculiar sound he made with his lips and teeth was. When he wasn’t working, he rested so much it seemed like he would never work again. And when he was working, he didn’t come home for days. For instance, he would arrive on Fridays and take a huge sum of money take out of his pocket and give it to my mother to pay for food and other expenses. He would kiss her forehead and tell her how much he loved her before disappearing until Sunday night. He wasn’t such a bad father. When we played, we would stay out with the ball until late, kicking it again and again at the goal we marked with stones, pretending we were in some stadium. He ran off many times, as many times as he came back.
The fifth doesn’t deserve much mention. He was a soldier and only spoke in orders: the house is the house and the table is the table, he used to shout. I think Mom couldn’t stand him for long because she also issued orders: this is my house and this is my table. From the two of them I learned my clothes weren’t my clothes and neither were my toys. Before, they belonged to my cousins or my older siblings, then they were passed down to me and now could be passed on to the younger kids. The fifth died in the war against the foxes, or the wolves, or the coyotes, or the jackals. I can’t remember which. And Mom refuses to give me details.
The sixth seemed to have stepped out of a Hollywood movie, one of the ones where the leading man or the hero confronts the villains and gets captured but ultimately is victorious and ends up with the beautiful woman with black hair. Once, he told my mother that all his children look like him except for me, who had my mother’s eyes and thick black hair. He almost never spoke to me and when he did, it was only to tell me to move. He left one day without warning, leaving behind only his freshly laundered clothes, as if, at any moment, he might come back.
The eighth would run his old minibus all over the beaches that connected our house with the city. He would pick up kids and women, drunk men, dogs and cats, and sometimes chickens and hens and—why not?—calves. Passengers loved him, the neighborhood loved him, my mother loved him, and his kids did too, the ones that lived in our house and the ones that lived scattered throughout the city. One time, I met one of my half-brothers, a boy who looked so much like me I didn’t know what to say to him. But he did. He said, “I have thirteen fathers, too. Want to know what they’re like?” But I only ran away like my fathers had, and I never saw him again.
There’s not much to say about the ninth one either. He was the one who stayed the longest. He took me to school on my first day and on my last. He always carried my sister and when she was grown, led her by the hand through the city streets. It didn’t matter if bombs had gone off that day or if we had lost electricity. You can’t miss a day of school, he used to tell us with a kind smile. Mom criticized him all the time: for the way he dressed, his job, or the way he pronounced his vowels. He often confused the e with the i or the o with the u, and used to say that God was in the clouds, the river, the mountains, the animals. Nobody knows for sure why he killed himself.
The tenth left so long ago that I didn’t recognize him when he knocked on the door and asked for Mom. But he recognized me and said how much I had grown, how I was a man now. I looked at him and little by little the memory of his face came back to me, only now it was shaved, and had long red hair, and finer features, and thinner arms. He wore a very modern skirt like the ones Mom liked. He stayed for only a few days since he had only come to see my sister and tell her how much he loved her. Mom got furious with him because his money wasn’t enough for anything, though she wished him the best. Far away from us, of course. The last thing he told me before she left was “never stop believing in who you are.”
The eleventh told me one day that he had eleven children, each one more beautiful than the last, although they all had some almost imperceptible defect: one eye smaller than the other, slightly convex ears, one leg longer than the other, two left feet, one was a leftie, another a righty, two were identical twins that didn’t look like each other, and the others were fraternal twins with different colored eyes. The last was born prematurely and was the most beautiful of all.
The twelfth only told me over and over again that I could be from any part of the world. Like someone examining an object unearthed from the sands of the Sahara, he searched my face and my features for some indication of my origins, of my ancestors reflected in my cheekbones or the color of my eyes, or the size of my forehead. When he tired of that, he combed my body for some mark: scars, moles, strange protuberances, any sign of the word of God. “All a man has is his legacy,” he told me. One day we had to bury him clutching his Bible.
The last one told me he would never leave. Tired of traveling the world, he came home with anecdotes and stories like the time he met his father somewhere far away from the city, but he couldn’t remember if that was in Europe or in some remote part of the Andes. Another day he told me about his travels through this country—from Chicago to New Orleans, from Boston to San Francisco—in a beat-up old Chevrolet, drinking from old bottles of whiskey that some bums gave him and that he filled with whatever alcohol he could find. I looked at him closely and though he had grown on me, I always knew he wasn’t my real father, if any of them were.
These are my thirteen fathers.
Carlos Villacorta Gonzáles is a Peruvian writer and Associate Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Maine. His publications include four books of poetry and the novel Alicia, esto es el capitalism (2014). He was recently recognized as one of the voices of the New Latino Boom.
Gillian Esquivia-Cohen, a dual citizen of the United States and Colombia, is a writer and translator. Her own writing in English has recently appeared in Guernica and in Spanish in Polis Poesía. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she is working on a novel.