Father and Son Read online

  In 1992 I’m living at my mother’s with the girl in red lipstick. Tensions arise from our shared living situation; my father observes it all from such a distance that his interventions are worse than useless. He hints that he doesn’t like my girlfriend, but he seems to want to please my mother, to take her side this time.

  In 1992, one night when I’m passing by my father’s house, partly to rattle my girlfriend, who’s with me, and partly out of the resentment I always feel, I ring the bell and we run away.

  In 1992 my father has a show in New York, and he spends some time there with the friend he met in Brazil.

  In 1992, in June, I graduate from college and my mother gives me a year to write.

  In 1993 my father loans me the keys to his country house so I can go there with my girlfriend for the weekend. Days after we return, the friend he met in Brazil, from whom my father has vainly tried to hide this, calls to berate me for having been there. This time my father joins in on the other phone when he hears her yelling, argues with her, and threatens to move out if she doesn’t give up her obsession with me.

  In 1993 I’ve begun my first book. I write it at night while my girlfriend sleeps in the same room. Each time I finish a story I send it to a writer friend of my mother’s for suggestions. In April I win an arts grant after submitting what I’ve written. It’s just one more occurrence, as fortuitous as most of the others that constitute this timeline. I might just as well not mention it or bring up other equally true-to-life events, and the substance of the story would be unchanged.

  In 1993, one day at the end of the summer when I call my father at ten-thirty at night, the friend he met in Brazil gives me a nasty scolding for calling so late and hangs up after informing me that he’s in the country. I do reach him there, and since he’s alone, he invites me to come out for a few days. I arrive the next morning by train, but late that afternoon the friend he met in Brazil appears. She comes stealthily into the house, bursts into the living room where we’re watching a movie, and without greeting me or my father, she says to her daughter, who’s with her, “I told you he wouldn’t waste any time coming here.” My father, if he hears this, shows no sign of it. That night I sleep with the daughter in a room open to the living room, she in the bed and I on the floor on the sofa cushions. After the light is turned out, in the half darkness and perfectly conscious of what I’m doing, I get out of my makeshift bed, naked as I am, and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I come back, the daughter of the friend my father met in Brazil invites me to climb in next to her. After a second of hesitation, in which I’m tempted to consummate this petty triumph, she thinks better of it and I return to my bed, relieved.

  In 1993, in the fall, my father has an opening in Cologne and then he travels around Germany with the friend he met in Brazil.

  In 1994 they go to Austria, where he has shows at galleries in Innsbruck and Kufstein.

  During one of these trips I risk letting myself into their house with the keys tied to a beach stone that my father gave me a few years before. As I expected, I find the second door locked, and I can get no farther than the entryway. Later, when they’re back in Madrid, I try my luck one day when I know they’re out to lunch. Since their absence will be brief, I suspect that the friend my father met in Brazil may not have taken precautions, and I’m right. I spend a frenetic half hour inside and emerge with two bottles of wine from the cellar. I do this again a few days later.

  That same year, 1994, after finishing my story collection, I send it to an editor chosen because of her friendship with my mother, and the editor soon rejects it with a letter that ends like this: “The same manuscript, on the same subject, once the craft has been learned, might have the potential to become a book.” In 1994 my mother’s business is in trouble, and we spend months cutting corners to make ends meet, but that night my mother, my girlfriend, and I go out to a restaurant for a consolation dinner. Before we go, I talk to my father on the phone, and he hints that maybe the book is no good and asks whether someone trustworthy has read it. He’s at a loss, caught between his realist instincts and his desire to encourage me. For the same reasons he reacts cautiously when a few months later I tell him that another publisher will bring it out in the spring of 1995. He asks me for the manuscript, or I offer it to him; he leafs through it in front of the television and concludes that he’d rather read it after it’s published.

  That fall of 1994, faced with the prospect of my approaching literary debut, I make up my mind to spend four months in Ireland studying English. I still have half of the money from the arts grant I was awarded the year before, but I need a bit more and I ask my father for it. At first he refuses, saying that he went to London when he was my age and worked as a waiter, but in the end he gives in. After I’ve been in Ireland for a while, the money runs out, and I call my mother to ask her for an equal sum. I try to reach her at her office, but no one answers, and finally I discover that she has shut down the business and she’s out of work. She has no unemployment income, either, because she’s been drawing on it for a while.

  My return to Madrid in the spring of 1995 is bittersweet. I’m nervous about the book coming out and I’m nervous about my mother’s situation.

  In May there’s a release party for the book. My father, who has just arrived with the friend he met in Brazil from an opening of a show of his work in New York, asks my permission to bring her. The day in question they arrive first thing, but with a discretion that I appreciate, she stays just long enough to wish me luck. That night, after the celebration dinner, my father leaves in a hurry, not staying for drinks. The armistice has lasted just long enough for us to put on a show of fleeting normality. That same year, on New Year’s Eve, my mother tries to call my father. It’s 11:45, fifteen minutes before the countdown, and I still haven’t shown up, though I’d promised to be there hours before. My mother is worried, but the friend my father met in Brazil answers the phone and hangs up when she hears my mother’s voice.

  The years that follow my return from Ireland are years of insomnia. In 1996 I’ve begun to write fairly regularly for the papers and I’m making progress on my second book, but my mother is still out of work, and I fear for her future, which is also mine. I help her write CVs, I wait with her for calls that don’t come, and at night I go to my room, where my girlfriend is already asleep, and lie there awake. I can’t sleep, because I’m walking a very fine line; I can’t sleep, because I feel like an impostor. How am I going to support my mother in the future if I don’t even know where next month’s money is coming from? I feel alone, despite my sleeping girlfriend, to whom I cling in desperation.

  Between October 1996 and July 1997, I spend the academic year on a residency in Rome, and I can’t stop worrying about my mother. I invite my father to visit, hinting that I hope he comes alone, but either the friend he met in Brazil won’t let him come or he’s afraid to broach the idea. While I’m gone, my girlfriend continues to live with my mother.

  The same unease accompanies me for the next few years—1996, 1997, 1998 … years of deprivation, of living close to the bone. The present has become so constricted that only the future matters now. And the future is cause for concern. No one helps us.

  In December 1998, a year after my return from Rome, I finish my first novel.

  In 1999, in January, my mother’s father dies. It’s the beginning of a long legal battle between his second family and my mother and her siblings.

  In 1999, in November, I win an important prize for the novel. At the press conference, a reporter asks me why I use a second surname, that of my writer grandfather. I answer with the truth, that it’s in tribute to my mother, but being inexperienced, I go on longer than I should, and the next day, a newspaper condenses what I’ve said this way: “Keeping your mother’s last name is a great tradition, and in my case it makes sense, because where my upbringing is concerned, I feel I owe more of a debt to her than to my father.” In another newspaper I sound harsher and less truthful: “Beca
use of my mother, who has had much more of an influence on me than my father.” Remorseful, I call my father, and he assures me that it doesn’t matter, but days later I’m angered to learn that his family is hurt. This childish back-and-forth, the inclination to punish him on account of the past for my mother’s current difficulties, and my subsequent contrite recognition of the false transposition I’ve performed also define this stage of our life.

  In 1999 my mother has given up on finding a steady job, and her efforts and mine are focused on scraping together enough work so that she doesn’t lose her retirement savings. We’ve also revived an old dream that might secure her future—buying a house in Galicia, where she was born and where it’s possible to live cheaply—and to that end we’ve opened an account where we deposit any extra money that comes in, such as my prize money.

  In 1999, when he’s halfway through my novel, my father calls me, moved by the passage I quoted earlier in which I describe the narrator’s boyhood sense of loneliness. He says “pobrecito,” in the child’s voice he uses when he wants to be affectionate, and I realize that he’s reading the whole novel in a personal key. It’s possible that an implicit recognition of guilt in response to the passage’s overwrought sensitivity has something to do with it, but the point is that because of a book, for the first time he seems to have put himself in my place.

  The effects are felt immediately. Though skittish, he’s more receptive. While he waits for the stormy weather to lift, he lets me air my worries with scarcely a glimmer of impatience in his gaze. Once or twice he buys me clothes; once or twice he gives me a little money; and once he calls one of his collectors to ask him to give my mother a job as a favor, to no avail.

  But that’s all.

  He has no money, he says. What he makes is hardly enough to cover his share of the maintenance of the house he owns with the friend he met in Brazil.

  He wants to see me. He has love to give, but he tries to keep my life from contaminating his. I overwhelm him. He hides when he senses that I’m beset by problems; he turns a deaf ear when I tell him about the endless dispute between my mother and her siblings and her stepmother and children. He’s conscious of the parallels, but he doesn’t let on.

  And he vanishes.

  I don’t mean to suggest that he doesn’t act the part of father. It just isn’t consistent. It’s been the exception rather than the rule ever since the trouble began between us in my adolescence. The spheres in which he continues to exercise a father’s prerogative are as limited as they are symbolic, but occasionally he still does, or I invite him to do so. In the latter case, he goes about it clumsily, whether out of surprise or fear that I’ll change my mind, and of course without ever permitting himself to seem recriminatory; when it’s the former, he does so jokingly and usually limits himself to the odd comment. For example, he doesn’t like it when I go out too much at night, and he often ridicules me for it.

  This is a typical phone conversation between us in those days. The phone rings at noon or one; I pick up and hear his voice:

  “Did I wake you?” he asks. And then, ironically, “What, were you out last night?”

  If I say yes, he says something like “You’ll ruin your liver” and proceeds to the object of his call, which is usually to suggest that we get lunch. If I answer that I’m reading, his response is, “You’ll wear your eyes out from reading so much.” He never asks me where I was the night before, whether he’s woken me up, or what I’m reading, if that’s what I was doing. In fact, the only answer that receives a non-ironic response is when I tell him that I’m writing, though even then he doesn’t ask me what. Probes have been launched to test my mood, a verdict has been reached, and he’d rather not risk a mistake.

  These are the lessons he has to offer: “You’ll ruin your liver.” That’s as far as he’ll allow himself to go. He doesn’t feel authorized to meddle in my life, and my attitude serves as constant corroboration of this. What does he have to say to me, after all? I think and he thinks: after he left home, he relied on my mother for my daily support, and his involvement in everything concerning me, no matter how affectionate or attentive, was cushioned, protected, at a comfortable remove, far from the daily grind of schools and homework, the illnesses and trauma of childhood and adolescence.

  These are the lessons he has to offer since before I can remember, and from 1999 on, nothing changes.

  In September 2000 my mother and I manage to buy a wreck of a house on the Galician coast. We don’t know when we’ll be able to rebuild it, but it’s an important step in providing for her future, and our pride feeds our hopes. But when I tell my father about it, the speed with which he changes the subject signals to me his wariness and his enduring lack of confidence in us.

  In 2001, after a busy year as a result of my prizewinning first novel, I begin a second novel. The prize has meant that between talks and newspaper assignments, I have no lack of work, and as a result, I’m not so oppressed by money worries.

  In 2001 I’m awarded a residency in Berlin for the following year. Weeks before I leave, my father tells me that he wants to amend a will he drew up years ago on the initiative of the friend he met in Brazil. He doesn’t describe the terms of the earlier will, which I’m hearing about for the first time; he just lets me know that he wants to make me his sole heir, leaving her the use of the house they share. Apparently my tortuous message composed of spoken words, unspoken words, and written words has finally gotten through to him.

  In January 2002 I set up house in Berlin. My mother goes to live in Sevilla, where a friend offers her a job, and the girl in red lipstick, my girlfriend—considering that we’ve been living together for ten years, it’s ridiculous that I’m still calling her that—stays in Madrid, tied down by work. Until she joins me six months later, I’m alone in Berlin. For the first time in a long while, stability is visible on the horizon. And I receive visitors, my father first among them. I’m aware that he’s had to overcome the opposition of the friend he met in Brazil and I repay him by avoiding any conversation that might cause him to feel questioned. I notice his surprise at this, as well as the fact that as the days go by and I persist in my efforts, he becomes more and more relaxed. This is the closest we’ve been since those trips we took to London and Amsterdam and Paris twenty years ago. In the mornings I escort him around museums and galleries, and in the afternoons we talk and drink bourbon at home. The only time I betray my intention to avoid bringing up any hardship is one afternoon when he asks for news of my mother and I tell him the truth: things aren’t going well in Sevilla, her friend hasn’t come through for her, and her life there is lonely and uncomfortable. I also tell him that in a few months we’ll have to pay a substantial sum, which we don’t have, for some necessary repairs to our building in Madrid. These are two slips, a reflection of other times, but they’re the only ones I make, and they don’t disturb the atmosphere of understanding. My surprise is great when, ten days after his departure, I receive a letter in which he offers to sell a painting that he bought before his separation from my mother and to give me half the money to defray the aforementioned expenses. In exchange, he asks me to find a buyer.

  I return to Madrid with my girlfriend in March 2003 with some savings and three-quarters of a novel. My mother, who left Sevilla a few months ago, is beginning to see a bit of light in the dispute with my grandfather’s second family, and she gets some money that she immediately deposits into the account for renovating her future house in Galicia.

  In 2004 I finish my novel, and while revising it, I spend three months in Scotland with my girlfriend, as a writer in residence at the University of Aberdeen. We’ve decided to get married when we return to Madrid; I buy an emerald through a Colombian friend, and while we’re away, my parents take it to a jeweler to be set.

  The wedding, which is attended by just four family members on each side, is held on the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. My father, who bought my suit and shirt, is the only one who is visibly moved. He
cries during the ceremony and he cries later at a convent where the nuns sing us the Salve Regina.

  Slowly, imperceptibly, something has changed between us. I’m still bothered by the same things that have always bothered me, but I’ve decided not to dwell on them, and the truth is that—though at a snail’s pace—he’s making an effort too.

  * * *

  I should say a bit more about my work, because it plays a role in our relationship.

  In a way, it was a calling pursued behind his back, chosen to distance me from him but not too much, as if I’d asked myself what the profession most similar to his might be and I’d chosen literature as it was the closest at hand. Often I’ve thought that if I’d seen more of him during my adolescence, when our interests are established, if I’d visited his studio every day, if I’d had the benefit of his encouragement and guidance, if I’d had access to his supplies or his cameras, today I might not be a captive of the word.

  My mother’s father was a writer, and a rather well-known one, and this, in addition to the fact that I use his last name as well as my father’s, is enough to make everyone think it was his example that made me decide to be a writer. I’ve gotten used to that assumption, but the fact is that my interest in writing had more to do with my painter father.

  The world into which I was born was primordially the world of my father. During critical years he was my main aesthetic referent, and it’s possible that the visual sense I believe I possess, an intuitive ability to appreciate secret harmonies and to create them myself to the extent of my abilities, is simply the vestige of an apprenticeship prior to the one that made me a writer.

  The words were there, in my mother’s mouth, shaping reality, capturing life in stories, but I didn’t make them wholly my own until I had to use them to define absence, to exercise my memory, seek explanations, construct an alternate personality to my father’s, that—being artistic—would at once subsume him and carry with it a necessary dose of rebellion.