The next morning, we head to the hospital again, where he has his final appointment with the surgeon who operated on him. Then we go walking to meet my mother for lunch. The walk is long, but he feels so good that we speculate jokingly about whether chemotherapy includes some stimulant. Though wintry, it’s a bright morning. Before we reach the antique shop where my mother is working while she waits to be able to move to Galicia, we stop for a moment and sit on a bench in front of a nightclub that was famous in the seventies. He asks whether it’s still open and I tell him what I’ve been told: it’s now a high-class brothel. We start to talk about sex, and he laments that it’s all over for him. Though actually it’s not a lament. It’s bait for me to contradict him. I do so immediately, and soon he confesses that it’s been a while since he slept with the friend he met in Brazil. It’s a casual confession, and he makes it clear that he doesn’t miss it. I offer to get him Viagra to use with anyone he wants, and he doesn’t reject the idea, but suddenly he retreats into a modest silence. Then, casting modesty aside, he reveals bedroom intimacies that confirm the lack of compatibility that I always suspected between him and my mother in that regard. I’m perplexed, I want to know more, but my role is to follow his lead — I talk when he talks; I stop when he stops — and now he’s decided to stop.
Five minutes later we get up from the bench. When we reach the antique shop, he goes in first. I’m behind him, so I don’t quite hear what he says to my mother; all I see is that he tells her something and then he steps away, overcome by emotion, and raises a hand to his eyes as if to wipe them. Hours later, my mother tells me that he thanked her for the son they share, and it was her reply, thanking him in return, that made his eyes grow damp.
That same day, after lunch, we spend the afternoon with a friend of his. It’s the happiest day I’ve spent with him since he was admitted to the hospital, but not all is bliss. When we get to his house, he’s tired and goes to bed. The friend he met in Brazil appears while I’m making him dinner. We haven’t seen each other since I learned that she accused me of having stolen from her. I’m the one who brings it up. In a low voice — attempting to be conciliatory, much as it galls me — I try to plead my innocence, but it’s hopeless; as soon as I start to speak, she interrupts me, and screaming and railing at me as if I’d tried to assault her, she flees upstairs. When I bring up his dinner, my father, who’s heard the racket, asks why I didn’t keep what he told me to myself, at which moment she bursts into the bedroom like a hurricane to continue the fight. She accuses me again of theft, she accuses me of coming between them, of conspiring, of plotting to take what belongs to her. I try to make her stop, but I can’t. My father tries, but he can’t either. Unable to contain myself, I reply sarcastically to the nonsense she’s spouting. I ridicule her, I tie her up in dialectical knots. She answers back, getting more and more upset; she raises her hand to hit me, and I hold her gaze with a scornful smile. She doesn’t dare land the blow, and it’s at this moment that my father, flushed with anger, gives a howl and she abandons the room in tears. Half an hour later I leave the house with a vague feeling of guilt and the well-founded fear that for him the night isn’t over yet.
Friday we go back to the hospital for the removal of the plastic bottle that since Wednesday has been insufflating a gas into his system. From now on, the idea is that we’ll be able to remove it ourselves, and they offer to show us how. This time the friend he met in Brazil doesn’t make herself scarce. She’s realized, perhaps, that she’s doing herself no favors by failing to show up, and she wants to regain lost ground. But when the nurse who’s instructing us suggests that she draw out the needle that attaches the tube to the implant, she exits with an excuse, leaving us alone. That night she tells my father in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t want me to be the one responsible from now on. She also warns him that she doesn’t want me to spend the night at the house, as at some point she’s heard me offer to do.
As my father and I agreed, I go back to my wife the next day. I don’t return until a week later, on the eve of his next chemotherapy session. This same sequence will repeat itself for the six months that the treatment lasts: five to seven days in Madrid accompanying him on his trips to the hospital, and seven to nine days in Valencia with my wife. Since I don’t drive, all my traveling is by bus, six and a half hours each way, during which I’m not capable of reading or even thinking. When I’m with my wife, I try to work. And yet that whole winter I manage to write only five micro-stories, requested by a painter friend for a portfolio of engravings, and a lecture I’m scheduled to give in April at the Thyssen Museum as part of a series titled The Painting of the Month. I conceived the talk as an explicit homage to my father, and that’s why I’ve chosen to speak about a collage by Kurt Schwitters, in memory of the exhibition we saw twenty-odd years ago at the Juan March Foundation. Meanwhile, I try to get my wife granted a temporary transfer to Madrid for the next school year. I make calls, I fill out forms, I pester everyone who might be able to help us. I periodically inform my father of my efforts and he hardly tries to disguise the relief he would feel to have me permanently nearby, my migratory life at an end. I also go out too much at night when I’m in Madrid. I arrive on Tuesday, stop by to see my father, and slip into the murk, eager to kill time and seized by a deep fatalism that makes it hard for me to answer when someone asks me about him. Often I show up on Wednesday mornings at the hospital without having slept much. My father can tell at a glance. I never deny it, though I trim hours off my escapades. Even then, I don’t think I manage to fool him. All he does is meet my eyes, without venturing to give me the recriminatory look with which he used to convey his disapproval. I don’t know whether he restrains himself in belated recognition of the fact that I’m a mature adult, which is something that had previously escaped him, given the circumscribed and cautious nature of our interactions, or whether it’s his way of compensating for the disruption caused by his illness, as if he considers my antics a necessary diversion from the care I owe him. But I think it’s something else entirely. I think his happiness to see me trumps everything, and with his long, searching gaze he’s expressing his gratitude that I’m faithfully honoring my commitment to him. The only consolation of a sick man: the fortitude of his successor, his principal legacy, his future life, his own blood.
Everybody tells me so: when I arrive at the hospital, his face changes.
* * *
There are places I’ve never been and places I never want to go. I have to take the bird’s-eye view.
This is a story about two people, but I’m the only one telling it. My father wouldn’t tell it.
My father kept quiet about almost everything. My father was shy, introverted, and melancholy by nature.
So am I.
One of his multiple birthrights.
We resemble each other.
We resemble each other greatly, but sometimes I have the feeling that I got the worst of him. The gloom, the conformism, the laziness, the inability to get ahead, the fear.
And the best? Our dark sides are similar, but the light comes to us from different places.
My father was shy, introverted, and melancholy by nature, but that doesn’t mean he was sad. He hated any kind of solemnity, including the solemnity bred of sadness. His main obsession, it’s fair to say, was being happy. He harbored all kinds of doubts about himself and was always grappling with them, but just as zealously he sought distraction, sought to brush his doubts aside. Humor was his tool, the territory in which he moved most easily. He used it to defuse potential conflict, to avoid the gaze of others, to shine in public, to demand affection, to offer affection, to judge the world. Also to defend himself. When he was cornered and forced into a prickly conversation, his initial tactic for dodging blows was a humorous remark. It was his way of asking for forgiveness and obtaining it before running into a dead end. It was his way of buying time when he felt corralled, before a blowup, since his incapacity for dialogue when he was questioned often led to fits of anger.