Father and Son (3 page)

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.

The break came when my father, still a minor, requested his legal emancipation in order to travel to London to study painting. My grandfather granted it, and for good measure, possibly with the intention of getting him to change his mind, disinherited him. This didn't affect my father much, since shortly afterward my grandfather went bankrupt so spectacularly that he had to flee abroad, pursued by his creditors. What my father couldn't forgive was that in an earlier desperate attempt to avoid ruin, he had spent the money that my father and his sisters had inherited from their mother, of which he was trustee.

But I've written about this already—though in a different form—in my second novel.

I don't know exactly what my father thought of his own father; he was never explicit about it. I know that once, when someone took it for granted that he didn't love him, he denied it vehemently, but the fact is that he reproached him for many things: for his coldness, for his sadness, for not supporting him in his artistic career, for not making an effort to understand him, for rejecting his advice, for valuing his businesses above all else and then losing them.

And then there was the absence of his mother, like a perpetual question mark, nagging at his memory with different versions of what might have been.

I've never been in therapy, and my knowledge of psychology goes no further than what I learned in a college class, but I suppose that together these stories present a fairly convincing explanation of the two traits that, beyond painting, defined my father's life: a tendency to lose himself in the labyrinth of the female minotaur, where his need to seek the shelter of strong women lay hidden; and a terrible fear of the future, of having the rug suddenly pulled out from under him. Add to that a perhaps excessive sensitivity, and two plus one is three.

As Joan Didion says in
The Year of Magical Thinking
, we never stop telling ourselves stories. It's our way of being in the world, of capturing life. I don't know when I started to plot the story that I've just told, made up of bits taken from here and there. Probably when I began to sense that the clay from which my father was molded was not so solid.

*   *   *

But we were in 1978, and I've said that I would stay aloft.

Nineteen seventy-eight is the year of my First Communion. No one pushes me, though the fact is that it's no simple process. As I was baptized under emergency circumstances, the procedure first has to be repeated in front of an ecclesiastical notary. My father attends the ceremony—at which I renounce Satan and all his pomp and works—but not the Communion itself. I don't care: it's not in Madrid; he has an excuse. I'm not very sure myself about what I've done. My conversion is relative. I want to believe the way my mother believes, and sometimes I pray and cross myself, but I never go back to take Communion again and certainly not to confess.

The following years bring few changes, but important ones. In 1979 and 1980 my father still makes the occasional halfhearted attempt at family life with us. He even travels with us. To Extremadura with one set of friends, to the Mar Menor with another. I don't know whether he does this of his own accord or whether the appearances he makes are the tribute my mother claims for me. Whatever the case, he shows up, and though sometimes I may notice that his mind is elsewhere, his lack of enthusiasm is never something he turns against me: it has to do with his relationship with my mother. And yet I'm part of the same package, and it's inevitable that he should associate me with her. The world that she's woven so that their separation goes unnoticed begins to come apart, and despite their efforts, there are many moments when I miss him, when I sense that he's hiding another life, other appetites, and I guess at the lie. Once, he tells me that he's in Andalucía and a friend of my mother's happens to tell me that she ran into him in London on the same day. I notice that he doesn't contribute to my keep, that he doesn't give me money, that it's hard to involve him in plans he doesn't devise himself, that he's evasive.