It was different before. On the Saturdays that Néstor had a fight on, they would talk of nothing else and in the evening the three of them — Irma, Rubén and Anadelia — would sit down to listen to the radio together; Irma used to bite on her handkerchief and cuff them if they made a noise. Occasionally she cried. Any neighbours who were still awake in the small hours would sometimes hear shouting. If nothing else, Anadelia used to say, having a father as a boxer was a great way to scare your friends. You’d better, or my dad will get you.
That wasn’t an opinion shared by her brother, Rubén. One Sunday morning he had stopped asking what happened the night before, and it was just as well, Irma told herself, because she’d rather get the silent treatment than have to keep trotting out the same explanations: Dad wasn’t feeling well last night — he shouldn’t even have been there or Best fight of his life, but they fixed it for the other guy or He was up against a new kid, you know Rubén, sometimes it’s not so important to win, while Néstor would be yelling why give the boy so many explanations? He must have been listening, for Christ’s sake. But the boy’s silence wasn’t healthy. On the days after a match he never wanted to go out, even to run an errand.
‘Looks like they stuck it to your old man again.’
And it was true: he had lost. Perhaps people thought that in boxing only winning counts, or that being someone’s dad means you have no right to lose, ever. At any rate, Rubén didn’t want to go out any more: he spent all day Sunday at home, kicking anything in his path, and swearing at people.
Néstor also stayed indoors on Sundays. Apart from one time when he went out slamming the door behind him and didn’t come home for two days. Before leaving he had punched right through the window and hurt Anadelia, who was standing watching: he came back on Tuesday, drunk and shaking. That was the only time he ever went out. He spent Sundays at home, sleeping all over the place, naked to the waist and glistening with green oil. It was strange how they had finally got used to that pungent smell of mint and alcohol. There was a time when Irma would laugh about it. Let this be the last time — she laughed as she rubbed it in — that you come to me all beaten and bruised; otherwise some other Negra can go looking for it down in Riachuelo, he thinks his perfume works wonders on me. That was all long ago, though. These days Sundays still smelled the same — they didn’t even notice it unless they were coming back in from outside — but Irma wasn’t laughing any more.
The worst thing about Sundays isn’t the smell, Irma thought: it’s the football. And not because of the shouting that sometimes reached them through the window but because of the boy shouting indoors. Excessively. Deliberately. Avenging himself, with every goal he cheered, of a year-old grievance: his father’s great hand tearing the picture of his football team off the wall. It’s so that you learn, he had said, and to start with Rubén had watched him, fearfully. A son of mine should be prepared to tear his own heart out to get to where he wants, like I did at your age. I got by just with these (and he looked at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else) because you have to know how to stand up to everyone, you alone against them, to show what you’re made of. Put everything on the line. And you come to me with eleven poofs — film actors by the look of them — as interchangeable as football cards and who fall about crying if anyone so much as puts a finger on them.
It was like growing up in an instant: the scales fell from Rubén’s eyes. He stood facing Néstor, who had ripped down his poster with one swipe and was now calling him queer, and saw everything differently. Who was this man to lay down the law, to him, someone who had to hide indoors the day after a fight? Because you can say yes he lost, so what, once. But not over and over. One day someone or other’s going to ask, and not without reason: ‘what exactly makes your old man a boxer?’ And the insults will come next. That’s why Rubén thinks who am I afraid of? and holds his gaze steady. And keeps watching him, even when Irma slaps him across the face, to teach you to grin when your father’s talking to you. And Néstor Parini has to withstand his son’s gaze.
‘That boy’s gone wrong,’ he said that night.
Irma said he hadn’t: he was a bit rebellious, but incapable of malice. And it occurred to Anadelia that her mother was lying. Rubén hated his father, she could have sworn as much, she who knew her father better than anyone because one Sunday morning, when she had moved closer to watch him sleeping, he had woken up. That gave her a shock because Mom said he mustn’t be disturbed when he’s asleep, but her father had squeezed her against his chest, which was big and hard, and asked her who he was, What in God’s name am I? was the question, and Anadelia had answered that he was the best in the world because he was a boxer. Dad had cried and so had she. Nobody else knew what he was like, least of all Rubén.
Finally Irma had to acknowledge this, too. It was a Tuesday night, four days before the last fight. She had just told Rubén to go down to the store to get the meat. The boy slowly — scornfully? — turned his head and looked at the window. Cold had misted up the glass panes; rain beat against them.
‘Well you have to go anyway,’ said Irma. ‘He’s got training tomorrow.’
And she saw in her son’s eyes, which were now fixed on her, that there was something fraudulent about these words. They didn’t sound like the ones that, nine years earlier, on another night — one that had such a new smell of spring as gave her a wild desire to be with Néstor until dawn — had made Irma understand that wouldn’t be possible. He’s got training tomorrow. She’ll have to go back home early and on her own, and without protestations. Because there’s one thing his Negra has to understand if she really loves him as she says she does: he’s going to be a champion, whatever it takes; life’s not worth living otherwise.
Rubén shrugged his shoulders and Irma intuited two things: that perhaps it was true that her son didn’t love his father, and that there was something grotesque about all this. Grotesque that Néstor Parini had to eat a juicy steak at six o’clock in the morning and that she had to get up at five o’clock to have everything ready and that her son had to go out in a storm to get meat for the next morning. Why go to such lengths?
‘Because he’s got training, idiot,’ she yelled.
And for a few seconds she was frightened that Rubén would say something back. She had a chaotic presentiment of words that were going to be cruel, wounding and irrefutable. Words that, once out of Rubén’s mouth, would bring the world down around them. Or at least her part of the strange, vertiginous world that Irma Parini didn’t comprehend but which she had lived in since the age of eighteen, when she had entered it as one enters a dream, love-struck, falling into the madness of others, of men who burn while they wait, bound by an obsession that will either lift them to the highest reaches or eat them alive.