Father and Son Read online

  Now that I think about it, though, that early stage wasn’t so linear, nor was his presence so constant. I know, for example, that in the six years and three apartments spanned by the memories I’ve just recounted, he lived for a long time in Paris and then in Essaouira, Morocco, where my mother and I visited him twice. The problems in the marriage had already appeared, and though it’s likely that both my parents thought it could be saved, my father’s dissatisfaction, his instinct to liberate himself from the burden that my mother and I represented in a milieu—that of his painter friends—where family responsibilities were the exception, took inexorable hold of him in the end. Nevertheless, the fact that I have these memories, and no recollection of discontent or unhappiness, leads me to think that it wasn’t yet the problem it later became for me. Either my mother managed to cover up his absences by giving them a convincing patina of normality, or I unconsciously compensated for them by granting him an unassailable place in my life.

  In fact, not even for the next four years (1975, 1976, 1977, 1978) does the landscape change much. My father is gone more and more often, disappearing completely from my daily life for long stretches, but he keeps his studio, and though later I learn that his relationship with my mother was almost nonexistent, there are no serious repercussions for me. My mother keeps things normal even when they’re not; my mother ensures that my father is still my father, leaving no room for doubts, complaints, or dangerous fissures.

  Where do they lead, these few memories I’m able to dredge up? Where are they taking me? They lead to an afternoon when I hear loud voices in my mother’s bedroom, and when I open the door, frightened, I see my mother on her knees, in tears, and my father brandishing the empty frame of a painting he’s just smashed on the floor, the very one on which he’d asked me to write the names of my friends. I remember that I closed the door and that, after a period of time I can’t specify, when we passed each other in the hall and I asked him where he was going, he said to the movies and left, slamming the door. Though my mother still insists that he came back to say goodbye, the only thing I remember is a postcard, of two Angora cats, that I received a few weeks later from Paris; and later another one of an old cycling poster; and a few more that arrived every so often until, a few months later, he came back and took away his easel, boxes of paints, pencils, aerosols, stretchers, rolls of canvas, drawing paper, notebooks, scraps for making collages; and what had been his studio became my huge bedroom, the bedroom of a privileged only child. My father was gone from our daily life, and not even then did it come as a shock. My mother was there to soften the blow, and he came back occasionally, sometimes even sleeping in the room that had been mine before I took possession of his studio.

  My father comes and buys me clogs like his; my father comes and—reluctantly—buys me a doll that I’ve requested; my father comes and buys me an Elvis Presley album. We spend the summers together too. Strange summers on Formentera. My mother and I in one house with assorted guests, and my father and his guests in another house, sometimes next door.

  And that’s not all. I get used to other men coming to the house. Actually, it’s just one man. I still don’t know whether he was my mother’s boyfriend, though I suppose that’s the word that best describes him. He brings me things, pets; I’m fond of him, and we make a life with him. More than with my father.

  And that’s not all. Since 1970, my mother and father have worked together. My mother is the codirector of an art gallery in Madrid and my father is one of her painters. These are fertile years for both of them. They’re at the heart of Madrid’s cultural scene. My mother wears a miniskirt, is admired and desired by almost everyone, and my father is a prominent member of a generation of young painters. At a show of his in 1974, everything sells. And the buyers are other painters.

  And that’s not all. Tired, she claims, of the clashes between the other director and the owner, my mother leaves the gallery in 1975, and three years later my father leaves too, after a falling-out with the remaining director for having favored a rival painter. My mother goes to work for a collector, but the job doesn’t last long and it takes her a while to find something else. Meanwhile, my father is heading for a crisis. Without the gallery where he’s shown for the last eight years, he lacks the confidence to face up to his career. Financial problems overwhelm him, and his visits aren’t as relaxed or as frequent as before. I remember one afternoon when he comes with us to sell a gold coin that someone has given me. He’s tense. I imagine that he’d like to be able to help and is ashamed that he can’t. This fixation and his air of bitterness will become familiar over the course of our lives.

  This is 1978.

  But my mother recovers. She reinvents herself. She works briefly in television and then more steadily in radio, and immediately we sense my father’s relief. His bitterness lifts and he begins to visit us regularly again. He’s still painting and showing his work, though not with the old fanfare. His former gallery is the most important in Madrid and he’s lost the chance to show there. Intrigues are mounted against him, too, by young critics who champion his rival. He doubts himself, watches others triumph, and gets discouraged. Sometimes he’s strong and keeps working, and sometimes he gets distracted and loses himself in female labyrinths. I come across scraps of this: a picture of him naked with two women; an afternoon when he’s admitted to the hospital with kidney trouble, and when my mother and I arrive, we’re told at the reception desk that his wife has just left; the apologies of the guard at the apartment complex where a married female friend lives for having mistaken him for a thief when he climbed out the window the night before … None of it hurts; I simply remember it. Just as it doesn’t hurt that it’s my mother I see when I get up, my mother who helps me with my homework and goes to school to talk to my teachers. At the same time—probably due at least in part to my mother’s prodding—he’s always there at critical moments. I come down with rheumatic fever and he increases his visits. The nights of my mother’s radio show he usually stays with me into the early-morning hours. I’m with him the day I have an attack of peritonitis, and he pays the surgeon with one of his paintings. It doesn’t even have to be anything serious. In the summer he comes to swim at our community pool, sometimes he stays for dinner when my mother’s father is there, and many Sundays he brings his father for lunch. If I want something, he does his best to get it for me. Then he jokingly makes a big deal about it and says that all I have to do is ask him for the smallest thing and there he is on bended knee, but the truth is that he does come through (the smallest thing, on bended knee, the times I must have heard him say that…).

  This is 1978, the year of the constitutional referendum. Behind us are the assassination of Carrero Blanco, Franco’s death, and the elections of ’77. The effects of these events are still being felt in our house. The Christmas of the Carrero Blanco assasination, my cousins and I are playing guessing games, and when it’s my turn, I mime an explosion; the night of November 21, 1975, while my father is in Paris, the phone rings off the hook, and later friends come over. The next day, my mother gets me dressed and sends me to school, but before I can get out the front door of the building, the doorman stops me, long-faced. Around this time, we attend two Communist Party of Spain gatherings, one clandestine and the second by then legal, and we watch the king’s proclamation on television. Stories fly about the guerrillas of Fuerza Nueva and Bandera Roja. I have an album of Civil War songs, and I learn “The Internationale.” In ’77 I’m taught in school to make a basic gelatin print and I print flyers asking people to vote for José Bergamín, who is running for senator on the Republican Left ticket. All of this I essentially live through with my mother, but my mother is a monarchist, my father a republican, and I—like my father—am a republican. I decide this at a traffic light in Plaza de Castilla one afternoon when the two of us are out in his blue Dyane 6. My father has a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard (Lola, they’re called), and what he says is more venal than rational, but I get it. I want to get
it, to share this with him.

  Then there’s God. My mother has taught me to pray, and that same afternoon, with the pack of Lola on the dashboard, I listen to my father argue against the existence of God and life after death. Here, however, I stand my ground. Where are the grandmothers I never met? I agree with him, I try to convince myself that after death there is nothing, but I’m not being entirely honest. In fact, though I hide it from him, for years I still keep trying to believe. When we visit a cathedral or a church, I cross myself, and he can’t help smiling. He’s moved by it. I’m sure it irritates him that we aren’t alike in this regard, that he hasn’t convinced me, but he’s moved by it.

  * * *

  Before going on, I should pause here. When coolly catalogued, the facts of the past lose their distinctiveness and come to seem interchangeable. A catalogue like the one I’ve been making does a better job than any digression would of reflecting the transitory nature of life, the nothing that everything becomes when death makes its appearance; still, emphasizing the latter point—important as it is—is not my only goal.

  A life, though fragile and ephemeral, is so singular that it comes as a surprise that it should be the result of an act of intercourse. The contrast between the trivial randomness with which two bodies unite and the meaning that the life to which that union may give rise assumes for the person who possesses it obsessed me for a while. On alcohol-fueled nights, surrounded by friends, the calculation of the approximate dates of our origination filled me with hilarity and vertigo. More than our births, it amused and dismayed me to conjure up the moment nine months earlier when we were conceived. Why did our parents’ bodies come together on that particular day at that particular time? Maybe it was dinner out and a few drinks; maybe they had been on a trip to the country and it was the coda to a summer outing; maybe they had fought and this was how they made up. But what would have happened if they hadn’t taken a trip, hadn’t gone out to dinner, hadn’t fought, hadn’t slept together that night? More than any other paradox, the tremendous futility of these questions encapsulated for me the tragedy of the human condition, the arbitrariness of our fate.

  When does life begin to be subjected to a multitude of factors capable of altering it, of channeling it in a certain direction?

  I’m the result of an act of intercourse that took place at the end of May 1967. I don’t know the circumstances, and I don’t care to know them. Nor do I know what caused the bodies of my father’s parents to unite in November 1939, though here I can take some license: they had spent the war apart, she in Biarritz and he in Madrid, and after their reunion, I imagine that whatever their inclinations, their carnal relations must have been frequent.

  I’ll have to go back in time if I want to sketch a comprehensible portrait of my father.

  His birthplace itself is revealing: in Madrid, across from the Cortes, in a grand block of apartments built at the turn of the twentieth century to be inhabited by families of the Madrid haute bourgeoisie, among which his was certainly not the least prominent. I’m told that I visited the place, but the truth is that I have no memory of it. Or no memory of the inside, since the building still stands. From the photographs I’ve seen, I know that it possessed all the attributes of the opulent homes of the day. Spacious rooms, gold-framed mirrors, rugs from the Royal Tapestry Factory … In theory it belonged to his maternal grandparents, but just as his parents took refuge there after the war, other family members came to spend some time or settled there more or less permanently. It must have been a happy place, because his mother’s family was happy. Happy and not at all conventional, despite their standing.

  I know, for example, that my great-grandfather had a brother who was a morphine addict and another who never left the house or even his bed, where he spent his days reading travel books surrounded by maps, and that my great-grandfather looked after both of them, administering their fortunes. On my great-grandmother’s side, an emblematic case is that of a rather quiet and retiring brother—so quiet that strangers imagined he was mute—who, after a life as a model bachelor, appeared at his mother’s house one day with a former maid and three boys already in long pants, whom he introduced as his children. When my great-great-grandmother, beyond scandalized, asked why he’d had relations with the maid, his answer was “Because she brought up my meals every day…”

  Socially, both branches of the maternal side of my father’s family constituted two unique but related versions of the haute bourgeoisie of the Madrid of the era. They weren’t industrialists or government officials or professionals. My great-grandfather’s family came from the north of Castilla and boasted noble origins, though my great-grandfather’s fortune, when my father was born, was founded on speculation in securities and real estate; my great-grandmother’s family on the maternal side was from Madrid and on the paternal side from a mountain village that my great-great-grandfather had left at the end of the nineteenth century to come and open a perfumery, which in its day was the best in the capital, one of those businesses petulantly displaying a sign reading OFFICIAL PURVEYORS OF THE ROYAL FAMILY. The differences between my great-grandfather’s family of landowners and my great-grandmother’s family of tradespeople were amplified by various shades of behavior that aren’t worth elaborating upon here. What matters is that both represented a way of life that was soon to disappear, a way of life for which neither family—whether out of ineptitude or because of copious wartime losses—was able to find a substitute. The truth is that my father never knew this life in all its glory, but rather at the beginning of its decline. And yet, that world—unequivocally bourgeois, but with sufficient outlets for the cultivation of taste and judgment—was the lost paradise to which he always dreamed of returning. A paradise that was equal parts bourgeois stability and the happiness mentioned above.

  I stress happiness to underscore one of my father’s defining characteristics: his yearning to be happy, to recover the lightness that the passage of time tends to make more difficult, less permanent, as well as to distinguish the atmosphere of faded but cheerful prosperity that reigned in the home of his mother’s parents from that of the home into which he moved with his parents shortly after his birth. If my great-grandparents’ house reflected the taste of the haute bourgeoisie of the 1890s, my grandparents’ exemplified the preferences of the bourgeoisie that established itself in the postwar period. A new brick building with square windows ranged symmetrically on each facade, it was chosen with the needs of my grandmother—who had heart trouble—in mind. The apartment had to be on the second floor, and the building had to have an elevator. Before the war they’d had another apartment, but perhaps because its contents were lost when Madrid was under siege, almost all the furniture was bought new. What wasn’t new was my grandparents’ marriage. They already had two daughters and very little in common. My grandfather was born in Barcelona, and when he turned twenty, he settled in Madrid with one of his brothers to run a glass factory belonging to his father, which he would later leave to start a ceramics factory. He was a solitary man, obsessed with upholding the legacy of his ancestors, as well as the youngest (and probably the least business-minded) son of a family of Catalan industrialists, and the shock for my grandmother—in whose family almost no one had ever worked—must have been brutal. She never understood that for her husband, there was no life beyond the walls of his factory, nor did she grow accustomed to his stern ways. As a result, she threw herself into caring for her children, and most of all my father, the youngest and the only boy. So devoted was she to him that she had a window cut in the wall that separated their bedrooms in order to watch over him at night during the long spells of illness that kept her bedridden.

  The closeness of their relationship was the key to my father’s insecurity, especially from the moment he found himself prematurely deprived of her. He was twelve when his mother died, and his father proved unable to change his ways to give him the support he needed. With the years, the distance between them only grew, and just as emphatically as
my grandfather expected him to follow in his footsteps, my father began to make it clear that he wouldn’t. He finished high school with mediocre grades, and he didn’t go to college to study engineering—which is what his father would have liked—or even art, a compromise that wasn’t considered, despite the fact that since he was fourteen, it had been clear that painting was his calling. My father was not the son my grandfather had hoped for, and busy as he was establishing his ceramics factory, he had neither the time nor the sensitivity to engage with him. Someone more open, less single-minded, might have found other ways to involve him, but my grandfather couldn’t even rise to the occasion when at one point my father offered to help design some dishes. When my father told me about this, rushing through the story in his eagerness to be done with it, and probably still bitter, he couldn’t help adding that the proposal he had vainly presented, inspired by Scandinavian design, would have had a better chance of succeeding than the generic pieces my grandfather produced.