My friend opened fire by asking whether it was regret or liberation that my father had felt most strongly in the end, when, faced with betrayals like those he had long forgiven, he gathered strength that he didn’t have and took the step that for years he hadn’t dared to take. My friend thought that he must have felt liberated, but my father’s friend and I corrected him. It’s hard to see it any other way. If liberation was what he felt, why choose the worst possible moment to act? If liberation was what he felt, why the wait? He must have felt regret. It was the support he had from so many of us that allowed him to act, and it’s likely that then he felt something like relief, but how to erase the previous twenty years, how to erase the things that had happened, how to erase the hostility created between us? No. He must have felt terrible regret. Though his final act of rebellion guaranteed that at least not all was regret, he must have felt cheated.
Or not.
Maybe it was another way of making amends to ensure his recovery. One of the temptations of those who’ve suffered some trauma is to think that it’s a punishment and that everything will be all right once the wrong is righted.
A guilty conscience. Magical thinking.
Or maybe, presented by death with the chance for a grand gesture, he did it just to erase the enmity between us.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m making the same mistake that I may have made with him: living in anticipation, thinking I know what he’ll do.
I’ll talk later about survival strategies — his and mine — in the face of illness.
The point is that after this sterile debate with my friend and my father’s friend, I went on to tell them about the unnecessary cruelties he suffered during his illness, and once I’d begun, I came up with some examples that give a good sense of the magnitude of the self-deception in which he’d lived up until that point, and of my belief — which might seem exaggerated but in fact isn’t so exaggerated — that for some time, while imagining himself to be sheltered and protected, he was really the one providing shelter and protection. I explained all this even though it wasn’t new to them, and then my father’s friend said something he had mentioned on another occasion, to which I hadn’t wanted to pay too much attention: he said that my father wasn’t happy, that for the last ten years he’d been subdued, not his usual self, trapped in an unfulfulling partnership. Though my father’s friend didn’t include me as a cause of this unhappiness, while he was speaking, I thought that if what he said was true, I had contributed to it; that if I had stood unconditionally by his side, if I hadn’t complained, if I hadn’t constantly been throwing his behavior in his face, he would have been less unhappy. And if it’s possible to repent of something while knowing that if you had another chance, you’d make the same mistake, I’ve repented.
I would do it all again. Why lie?
Though this is a labor of love, it must be said, I don’t always know how to liberate myself from memory.
I have to ask where all this weight comes from.
Everything — the good and the bad — was intensified because our relationship was exclusive, because I was an only child. But it’s also possible that this was precisely what saved us. If he couldn’t support one child, if he couldn’t give that child all that was demanded of him, how could he possibly have succeeded with two or three?
And maybe everything would have fallen apart more drastically.
Or maybe not. Maybe his commitment and sense of responsibility would have been greater.
I don’t know. Who knows?
Though my job is supposedly that of imagining lives, I can’t imagine the different possibilities of my own.
What’s certain is that my father’s presumed unhappiness — if the dissatisfaction I frequently noted in him deserves the name — wouldn’t have ended if he’d had me unconditionally by his side. He would have had fewer things to worry about, that’s all.
And by the same token, nor am I sure that the source of this presumed unhappiness was the lack of understanding between him and the friend he met in Brazil.
Outside the bedroom, they had nothing to say to each other. Moments of tension seemed more frequent than the moments of peace when they shared silly jokes. They had no common interests. They argued constantly. My father couldn’t count on her in matters crucial to him, and meanwhile, she was in pursuit of a goal — his complete surrender to her — that she never quite managed to achieve, among other things because it required my complete annihilation.
That’s what I observed and what my father’s friends now tell me was going on.
But they were together for more than twenty years.
Clearly there was something there beyond my father’s need for protection.
Not just sex, which was probably the original cement of their union.
He accused her of jealousy, of being obsessed with money, and sometimes, I’m told, he was embarrassed by her, but of course he loved her.
It would wane over time, it was subject to ups and downs, and the logic that sustained it wasn’t always the same, but there was love. A love not of equals, a love that in my father’s case involved a strange moral superiority that led him to forgive her whims, her impositions, her larcenies, seeing them as weaknesses of character — but love.
And it’s likely that the reason he let her get away with so much, the reason he yielded to her, the reason he sometimes seemed like a broken doll in her hands, lies in that strange moral superiority.
And it’s likely that here, too, lies the reason for their unresolved conflicts, the reason she felt threatened, the reason for her war with everything in his life that didn’t include her.
None of these possibilities can be ruled out. What’s more, I’m convinced that they’re true.
Similarly, it’s likely that my father never stopped to consider the consequences that his capitulations would have for me, since — the affection we felt for each other being unquestionable, despite our problems — he demanded from me a moral superiority equal to his own. Blood of his blood, I should hoe the same row.
That was it.
* * *
And meanwhile, in January 2006, complications arise that postpone his release. Anxious about the delay to the start of his treatment, I convince them to let him go, but the next day he’s admitted again with a high fever. New tests, pleas to the doctors, attempts to grease the rusty wheel of the hospital. The friend he met in Brazil makes herself scarce. It’s he and I who push.
His eyes show clear relief each time I arrive at the hospital. Still, I’m not always there, and I can’t control what happens when I’m gone: the pressures, the meddling, the ill-timed demands of the friend he met in Brazil. All I hear are the bits and pieces that he passes on to me. She tells him, it seems, that his illness will be very expensive, that he’ll need home care and she won’t be able to pay for it. She asks him for money, and one day she transfers to her own account an important sum that he’s just received for the sale of some prints. My father tells me all this without hiding how upset he is. He’s hurt that she seems less concerned about his well-being than about looking out for herself. He’s stunned. He never considered her capable of such a thing. He knows she doesn’t need the money; years of obsessive saving have left her well covered. Because of this, and because the assumption that she’s preparing for a life without him is to accept something that neither he nor I is yet willing to contemplate, he finds it hard to believe.