Diary of the Fall Read Free Page A

80 percent discount on the monthly fees. However, he still had to work really hard to pay the remaining 20 percent, plus the uniform, books and transport.
24.
    João’s father decided to celebrate his son’s thirteenth birthday because the family had never given a properparty. Aside from birthdays when João was a child, they usually only invited relatives over for a beer, and João didn’t normally invite anyone apart from a cousin and a boy from the same building who was four years younger than him. But because João was attending a Jewish school and all the boys there were bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen, and at every party the birthday boy was given thirteen bumps, a kind of initiation into the adult world, when, to use the Hebrew expression that gives the ceremony its name, the boy became “a son of commandment,” for all those reasons João’s father persuaded his son to invite his classmates to the reception room in the building where one of his brothers-in-law lived.
25.
    I only found this out months later, when I was already a regular visitor to their apartment. They lived in an even more modest building than the brother-in-law, a place of peeling walls and bare wires, and when I arrived there one afternoon, quite late in the day, João was out. He had gone to pay a bill or post a letter or take something to the registry office, one of the various errands he ran in order to help out at home, and his father opened the door to me and offered me aglass of fruit juice. We sat down in front of the TV. The local news was on. We sat there for some time, not saying anything, as was perfectly normal, because up until then I had never exchanged more than a few words with him, and when the silence became ever more uncomfortable and the daily soap ever more tedious, and because it was nearly dark and João had still not come back, he started asking me questions — about school, about my father, about my grandfather.
26.
    João’s father listened to me with the TV still on, and it was as if he wasn’t interested in anything I was saying, because he kept looking straight ahead, even occasionally changing channels. At one point, he commented on a game show in which the audience begged for money, the toothless, the blind, the deaf, people covered in sores and burns, and João’s father said how absurd to allow those people to appear on TV, how absurd to treat them like that, how absurd that the government did nothing about it. I’m sick of living in this shithole of a country. Don’t you agree that this is a shithole of a country? That everything we do turns to shit? That the people in it are nothing but shit? And then he got up, turned off the TV and started talkingabout himself and his son and about life, and then, with the same anger in his voice, fixing me with his eyes as if he had been waiting for this moment for a very long time, he asked if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at João’s birthday party.
27.
    In a school like mine, the few non-Jewish students even enjoyed certain privileges. For example, they didn’t have to attend Hebrew classes. Or the classes about Hebrew culture. In the weeks preceding religious holidays, they were excused from learning the traditional songs, saying the prayers, doing the dances, taking part in the Shabbat, visiting the synagogue and the Old People’s Home, and decorating Moses’s cradle to the sound of the Israeli national anthem, not to mention the so-called Youth Movement camps.
28.
    At camp we were divided into groups, each with an older boy as a monitor, and part of the day was taken up with the usual activities one would expect at such a gathering: lunch, football, group hugs, treasure hunts and messy games involving talcum powder and eggs. We took a tent, insect repellent, a cooking pot and acanteen, and I remember carefully hiding anything that might be stolen in my absence, stowing a bar of chocolate at the bottom of my dirty laundry bag, a battery