Father and Son (4 page)

School. I'm not doing well at the public school where he chose to have me enrolled five years earlier (I'm an oddball), and my mother moves me to a private school with a well-deserved reputation for being liberal. She alone makes the decisions that concern me. My father has gradually bowed out; either he doesn't feel he has the authority to impose his views, or he trusts my mother's judgment. From now on, that's the way it will be; though he may criticize her at times, though he's driven to distraction—as I will be, years later—by what he would call her exaggerated enthusiasms, her patrician sense of life, he'll always let her be the one to choose how things are done or undone. He's infuriated by her disregard for material things, her essential optimism, her tendency to be a dreamer, her failure to consider that everything could take a turn for the worse, but since he has no stability to offer us, he cuts himself off. He wants us to save what he can't give us, he wants us to be prudent, he doesn't want to have to worry about us, he wants us to be safe so that he will be too.

My mother and I do spend money. Without a second thought. We eat out whenever we want, we have a maid, and we take taxis everywhere, but the truth is that we lack for nothing. She makes enough. She works and makes money. She has grown up too. She may not save, she may not plan for tomorrow, but she has liberated herself from the world she shared with my father and created her own world, with new friends. Everything is going well. What does my father have to complain about? He thinks he knows her, and he's terrified by her levity, the way she seems to make decisions without considering the consequences. Whenever he can, he seeks my complicity to criticize her. It bothers him that by nature I'm as relaxed as she is, and he tries to reform me.

My mother's world of dreams. My father's paralyzing hyperrealism. I'm torn—my head and my frustrated desires with my father, my heart and my day-to-day life with my mother. Sometimes I ally myself with my father, but it's my mother I live with, and I simply don't understand my father's dissatisfaction, his dutiful lack of enthusiasm when he comes to see us.

In early 1980 my father shows at a fleetingly successful gallery, and a few months later he leaves on a Fulbright to spend a year in New York. The day of his departure he gives me conflicting reasons for why I shouldn't come to the airport, and I suspect that either he isn't traveling alone or he's being seen off by someone he doesn't want me to meet. I get a postcard of fake UFOs flying over the Twin Towers, I get a postcard of a miniature explorer shrunken by natives, I get a postcard of an Art Deco teapot, I get a postcard of graffiti. Those are the ones I kept; I don't think there were any others. No letter. Occasionally he calls me. Hurried conversations in which he barrages me with questions.

Since he left, it's been agreed that I'll visit him, but although it's my mother's understanding that she's coming too, he thinks I'll be coming alone. I don't know whether it's a misunderstanding or whether one of them wasn't honest with the other in previous conversations. The fact is that when my mother and I arrive to spend Christmas, it's clear from the start that my father doesn't want her there. They don't tell me this, but I sense it. I sleep with my father in the double bed, and my mother sleeps on a mattress on the floor. I remember one afternoon when they leave me in the loft to have a private conversation. Even so, my father takes us on long excursions, showing us the city as if nothing is wrong. He buys me John Lennon's
Double Fantasy
, he buys me an electronic flipper game, he buys me some eye-catching yellow radio headphones, he buys me snow boots. At Bloomingdale's, the night before we go back, my mother gets me a brown corduroy polo jacket, and she exits with a black digital watch that—tired of waiting to be helped—my father takes without paying. They try to act normal in front of me; at moments they probably even forget that it's an act. But that trip is key to the severing of the final emotional ties between them, because years later they continue to bring it up, he still angry and she still hurt.

The years 1981, 1982, and 1983 are confused in my memory. Either too many things happen or I begin to be too conscious of what's happening. I've grown up; I'm more aware. I'm not a mere witness anymore. In '81 I spend the night of the coup with my mother and some neighbors, while my father is still in New York. When he returns months later, he doesn't let me know in advance. I sense motives related to those of his departure the year before, but this time when I see him, I'm filled with silent anger. He pretends to have arrived the previous night, but he contradicts himself. It bothers me, but I don't say anything. He brings me the life jacket from the plane and albums by the Talking Heads, the B-52s, Split Enz, and Yellowman, but I hardly thank him. His lie bothers me, and it bothers me that I've been displaced. It's the beginning of the silences between us. The silences happen when he hides something from me that I know he's hiding, he knows that I know it, and I know that he knows that I know it. If he betrays me, I immediately sense his betrayal and he immediately senses that I've sensed his betrayal. It isn't even necessary for him to make a mistake or for me to hide my disappointment. All we have to do is exchange glances.

It's the beginning of the silences between us.

But we also take our first trip alone together. A trip to London, paid for by my mother. This trip and another the following year to Paris and Amsterdam, also my mother's treat, will be the only trips we take until twenty years later. I learn to travel with him, to visit museums with him. I learn to despise all chauvinism with him, not to entrench myself in the familiar, to appreciate variety. I learn how important painting is to him, the pleasure that he gets from looking at art.

And life goes on, and he continues to visit us when he feels like it, and once again he stays with me some nights when my mother has her radio show. Our apartment isn't the same one that he left—or maybe was kicked out of. We've moved to another considerably smaller one, but the furniture and almost all the paintings are the same, since he hardly took anything with him when he left. Regarding the justice of this fact, as well as the payment my mother gave him when she sold the first apartment, they will never see eye to eye.

One night when he's with me he brings a female friend along. He's never done it before, and I'm conscious of the fact that my mother wouldn't like it. What surprises me most is that he points out anything of value with proprietary pride, including my only asset: a drawing my mother asked Miró to make for me when, in '72, there was an exhibition of his work at the gallery she ran.

The friend is the friend he met in Brazil.

My father did almost no work in New York, and though he tries, he does hardly any when he returns to Madrid. It's the dawning of a crisis from which—because it sidelines him during crucial years when the art market is taking off—he won't easily recover. He seeks alternatives, works in the studio of a designer, and goes to Galicia for a few months to fix up and decorate a colonial-era house. From Galicia he writes me letters in which he calls me
turkey-cock
,
lovey
, or
bratty-cakes
, remembers to send his love to my mother, and reminds me to be good. One of them ends like this: “I don't expect you to write, but maybe someday you'll have something you want to tell your dad, or ask him (you can always trust your father, who would love to be your best friend.)”

Clearly, he's at a low point. This is only confirmed the two times I go to see him. Once, when I've been there for a few days, a female friend of his arrives and a problem arises that at the time I'm unable to fully appreciate. Since work is being done on the house, there are only two bedrooms. My father and I sleep in one of them, and the owner's grown-up children sleep in the other. My father tries to get me to move in with them, but I refuse: even with someone else in the room, it seems more natural to me to sleep with them than with two strangers. My father gets angry, grumbles, but accepts it in the end. Two clashing forms of logic: a child's and an adult's.

The next year, 1982, is hectic. Hectic because lots of things—contradictory things—happen. Hectic because their effect on me is mixed. Hectic because 1982 stretches on, turning into 1983. In '82 we visit Paris and Amsterdam; in '82 I go out at night, march in protests, and wear a little black circle-A anarchist pin; in '82 I spend the summer in England and buy myself a pair of plaid pants, boots, and a leather jacket; in '82 I make short-lived plans with some friends to form a band. I tell my father about it one Sunday when we're at lunch with my mother in a Chinese restaurant, and though at first he can't help making a joke of it, he ends up becoming our biggest champion, as is always the case when behind some plan of mine he senses an itch to escape my mother's influence. In '82 my father adopts the habit of picking me up at school some days and returning me the next morning after the two of us spend the night at the studio where he lives and works. In the evening, after dinner at a restaurant, he takes me to shows or to the movies or—during the season—to a bullfight. I remember seeing Picasso and Mondrian and El Greco and Dalí, and especially a Kurt Schwitters show that for a few evenings inspires me to forget the black Olivetti typewriter on which I've begun to write and throw myself into making collages à la Kurt Schwitters: I remember
Quest for Fire
; I remember
City of Women
; I remember
Fitzcarraldo
; I remember a Monty Python movie and a revival of
Eraserhead
. All in all, in '82 we see quite a bit of each other; I bask in the novel male camaraderie and imprint on my brain attitudes that I will make my own, but it's also an era in which the silences between us grow thicker. One day, on what pretext I can't remember, he brings me to an apartment to which he has a key, and on the doorstep, just before we go in, he warns me that I'll see paintings and pieces of furniture that belong to him, which he's loaned to the owner for a story in a design magazine. Weeks later, after he picks me up from school, instead of sleeping at his studio, we sleep at that same apartment, this time with the owner present. It's the friend he met in Brazil, whom just over a year ago he'd brought to my mother's apartment.

I spend two or three nights there, sleeping in one bedroom or another, depending on shifting criteria, until for reasons I can't explain, the evenings with him become less and less frequent. He no longer invites me to spend the night. He no longer comes to pick me up from school.

And yet he doesn't break ties completely. There are silences, mutual misunderstandings, but in hindsight they look more like a foretaste of what's to come than a permanent reality. He comes over when he chooses, spends the evening, and leaves in a hurry, briskly, as if escaping from invisible snares.

But there's more.

A parenthesis.

At some point between '82 and '83, my mother, who has a crowded calendar and goes out a lot at night, becomes involved in a romantic relationship with one of her suitors, a writer by trade. At some point between '82 and '83, my father asks my mother to be his guarantor in the purchase of a ground-floor apartment for sale in the two-story building where the friend he met in Brazil has her apartment. My mother is prepared to give him the money, but suddenly it's the friend he met in Brazil who doesn't want him to have the place. My father is incensed. One Saturday he asks me to come with him to her house, and we take his things. The break deepens the depression from which he's been suffering for years. He paints very little, his income is minimal, it distresses him to have missed the boat on the new times that are shaking up the art world, he's probably drinking too much. At some point between '82 and '83, my mother gets worried, and during a conversation one night, after decreeing that his studio isn't the best place to lead an orderly life, she invites him to come live with us. My mother is still with the writer, but he lives in France, not Madrid, and so for a while my father is once again a daily presence in my life. In the morning he gets up at the same time as I do, shares the bathroom with me, teaches me to shave. I get used to his smell, a sharp smell that I now recognize on myself. One afternoon, during an argument I have with my mother, he takes her side and hits me. At night we sleep in the same room, in separate beds.

By now it's '83. It's summer. I spend July in Ibiza, the guest of a friend's father, and August in the Basque Country with my mother and her writer boyfriend. My father is left alone in Madrid. Our stay in the Basque Country, conceived as a kind of test marriage, is a failure. I return to Madrid a few days before the end of August, and my mother arrives three days later, after ending her relationship with the writer. Over the past months I've fantasized about the possibility that my parents will get back together, and this might be the ideal moment if it weren't for the fact that in our absence my father has reconciled with the friend he met in Brazil.

Still, it's a while before matters take their course. He's very grateful to my mother, and I suppose that a sudden exit strikes him as being in poor taste. Until October or November, the days blur. I can't remember how quickly or slowly the parenthesis is closed. My father appears and disappears, and I'm out almost every weekend with my first girlfriend, the daughter of a friend of my mother's. We sleep together one night when for whatever reason it's my father who's home. He lets me in after midnight as I fumble with my key, and though I don't say a thing, he jokes that he hopes I haven't made him a grandfather.

This will be the last time he spends the night. Everything changes as his visits grow further apart, and he becomes more and more reluctant to participate in family plans not dictated by him. He's worked things out with the friend he met in Brazil. He has a foot in two worlds, and he gives most where most is demanded of him. His variability increases, as do the silences and the mutual lack of enthusiasm. The times he chooses to see me are dead moments, interruptions of daily routine. My discontent grows gradually, but busy as I am, I don't have much time for him either. I come and go, see shows on my own, throw myself fully into my romance.