Avril and Mario (pp. 765–766)
My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile […] My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.
Context
Avril, explaining fragile selfhood to Mario, reaches into her own paternal line — and what comes out is a father-son horror that rhymes with the Incandenzas'. Her grandfather: financially ruined (the Delaware Punch bet against Coca-Cola, the blighted harvests), then "frozen," able to feel "only when he was drunk," getting drunk four times a year to weep, throw his son through the window, and vanish enraged into the countryside. A wrecked, withholding father who can only reach his boy through drink and violence — the exact pattern the male Incandenzas run (scene 049's garage, the quarterly rhythm, the disappearing). The teller is Avril (the framing tips toward family-hamlet), but the content is a father-son transmission story, catalogued here as a cross-family echo of the theme's spine.