Kruger's Alp Read Free Page A

blind to move.
    His father had been a bricklayer. Big head and a jutting lower lip. He drove a powder blue Pontiac with a pink plastic butterfly on the bonnet. Mrs Ferreira was white-faced, plain as a gate-post, cracked and peeling, whom Mr Ferreira carried everywhere with him like a club and used with terrible effect on his son when his own arm tired. Looking at them in their pew, the Ferreiras senior, he with pale hair on his sun-tanned arms and she solid, straight, wooden, with a blankness in their eyes as the Mass progressed, like two strangers who have darted out of the rain into church only to find they havestrayed into some foreign funeral service and must now patiently wait it out, masking their incomprehension in a slumberous passivity intended to suggest the appropriate demeanour. Hard to imagine them flinging themselves fist and boot on their only son. But Tony bore the marks.
    Hemmed in on both sides his only escape was upward. Tony grew tall and elegant as if to repudiate his father’s squat energy and outstrip it. With his father’s thick pale hair and his mother’s immobile features he was delicate, sensitive, smart. A war of attrition began as Tony set out deliberately to bait his father into extending himself by making plain his open contempt for his bricklaying business. Mr Ferreira responded, fighting back by opening branches, getting draughtsmen into his office; soon he denied he was a bricklayer and described himself as a quantity surveyor. He went on to employ other quantity surveyors and his picture even appeared in the papers as a man on the move in ‘our thrusting, dynamic economy’. Father Lynch remarked on Ferreira’s father’s success, at which Tony nodded pleasantly: ‘Yes, he’s fully extended on all fronts now. His order books are bursting and he has substantial credit lines. The banks are falling over each other to lend him money.’ When the big crash came Tony explained the reasons for it with gentle composure. ‘It happens every day. He’d stretched himself to breaking point. Simply couldn’t service his debts. Nailed by his own ambition. Crucified by his own success.’ And then the final twist of the knife, elegant and terrible, Tony attended his father’s bankruptcy hearing wearing a rich red tie and a glossy, heavily scented rose in his buttonhole and listened with rapt attention as the quantity surveyor’s empire was dismantled brick by brick and thrown to his creditors.
    Even Lynch heard of the crash.
    â€˜It seems your dad has been under fire, Tony.’
    â€˜Yes, Father. I’d say he’s taken a good knock.’
    â€˜Snapped his head back, did it?’
    â€˜Decapitating.’
    But why had Lynch described Ferreira as a visionary? The priest explained: ‘They will tell you, the people who run this country, that they built the New Jerusalem in this brown, dry, prickly land. To see the lie behind the boast requires the eyes of the seer.’
    Again: ‘They will proffer the moral principles on which their empire is built, the keepers of the uneasy peace. Refuse their invitation. Ask instead to see the books.’
    And: ‘We are dealing here with questions of faith,’ a favouriteopening, ‘which in the neo-Calvinism followed by the Regime is in fact a matter of money. There’s been no question of faith since Kruger left and his heirs forsook morality for power. We know this to be true. The difficulty will be in proving it.’

    Father Lynch always had a line, a view. Mad he was, but reliable. I saw how desperately Blanchaille needed to consult the old priest long forsaken by his altar boys who not unnaturally believed they had outgrown him. The man I saw in my dream was cracking up. He wept and raved. Things were closing in. He sat in the empty house. Waiting, or hoping? His bags had never been unpacked since he arrived to take up his incumbency as parish priest in the new suburb of