Around this time, at the end of May, I have to decide whether to accept the invitation of an Italian foundation to write for two months at a villa in Tuscany. At first I can’t bring myself to abandon my father, but with his encouragement I accept a stay for half of the time after convincing a friend of his to take my place at the bimonthly chemotherapy sessions. In the same room where Bruce Chatwin wrote some of his books, I spend the month of June in Tuscany, starting and almost finishing a story that has nothing to do with what I’m living through. Meanwhile, thanks to a friend of my father’s, my wife’s transfer to Madrid for the upcoming school year seems feasible for the first time, and along with it, the end of my migratory life. Meanwhile, my father calls me frequently. I know that he’s still painting almost every morning. I know that he takes a short trip or two with the friend he met in Brazil, and that on one of these trips he drives the car. I know that they find buyers for the house at last. I know that he demands that the money due to them be paid in two separate checks, and that because of this and other things, relations between them grow more acrimonious.
I return from Italy on July 5, full of uncertainty about the immediate future. In view of the fact that my father plans to spend August with the friend he met in Brazil at her house in the south, I hesitate between a similar solution that will allow me to continue to accompany him on visits to the hospital, or a trip with my wife — intended as compensation for my constant absences — to Kenya, where my father’s older sister has been living for years. But based on a routine scan, which shows that the tumor is active again, the doctors halt his treatment with plans to start a new one in September; and in the office that same day, to mitigate the effect of the news, I ask my father whether he’s capable of traveling to Kenya. The answer is yes, and it’s immediately clear how excited he is by this unexpected prospect. The friend he met in Brazil chooses not to come, but he decides that he will. Meanwhile, the buyers of the house reach a decision too, and on July 10 the contract is signed and my father receives his part of the down payment. The next day, he asks me to go with him to the bank to deposit it, and he makes me a cosigner on his account.
The trip to Kenya is planned for the end of the month, and on the fifteenth, my father goes with the friend he met in Brazil to her beach house. He returns to Madrid on the eve of our trip. More than tired, he’s heavyhearted. He doesn’t say so, but it’s clear that a line has been crossed. With him he’s brought a marquetry box holding four old bullfighter figurines, the only thing he managed to grab reflexively when, minutes before he got into a taxi to the train station, the friend he met in Brazil, like someone granting a onetime chance, offered to let him take whatever he wanted from a house that he thought of as his, too, a house that was absolutely crammed with paintings, furniture, and objects he’d amassed over the years.
In Kenya, things go from bad to worse.
In Kenya we have one good week, during which he’s giddy, up for everything; we visit Nairobi and Mombasa and go on a short safari, but our luck changes after a hellish bus ride that can be blamed solely on my desire to present him with interesting experiences. When we reach the island where my aunt lives, he’s running a fever; he’s done in. When he doesn’t feel better with rest, we fear that it’s a resurgence of the illness or that — the height of bad luck — he’s caught malaria. We’re so terrified by the former possibility that we come to hope that it’s the latter, and it’s hard for us to hide our disappointment when he’s tested at a dispensary and the test comes back negative. Obliged to fear the worst, we visit a bare-bones private clinic where the one and only doctor, wearing a Barça T-shirt, attends with admirable courtesy to our first-world concerns. He takes my father’s blood pressure, instructs a veiled Muslim nurse to draw blood, and examines it under a microscope. This is all he can do for us, and like all doctors when they don’t know what to do and the only thing that matters is that they seem to be doing something, he does it in full awareness of its futility. Later, I get in touch through my mother with my father’s oncologist, and though he calms us by saying that he doesn’t think it’s tumor fever but instead a kidney inflammation brought on by the jolting of the bus, I secretly begin to think about repatriation. Meanwhile, he tries his best to put on a show of strength. He takes walks around the medina, comes to the beach, and even attempts once or twice to go for a sail, but every evening the fever makes its punctual appearance. Each morning we think that it won’t come, and it almost always does. And yet, so hard does he try not to let us down, or so badly does he want to recover that he manages to fool me, and sometimes I grow impatient when he limps behind or shows little interest in the plans I’m constantly devising for him. Still, there are good days. Still, he laughs often and freely. Still, he’s in on all kinds of mischief. The main thing he frets over: buying gifts for his nurses and doctors at the hospital.
* * *
If this were fiction, I should already be lowering the sails.
Have I gotten to where I wanted to go?
The reasons that make you start writing a book aren’t necessarily the same ones that make you keep going when you’re halfway through, or the ones that make you end it. In the end, you just want to get to the end.
That’s where I am.
I just want to get to the end. The end of the book. The end of my father. The end of my life with him.
To know where we got stuck — that’s what I said I wanted at the beginning.
A rhetorical device.
We got stuck in lots of ways. We got stuck where everyone gets stuck. We got stuck because we thought that life was infinite, which is an error in calculation that prompts the worst missteps. We got stuck because he didn’t have the stamina to hold on to me and I didn’t have the courage to let go. We got stuck because he was brought up to keep quiet, to avoid calling things by their names, and I was raised in the world of my mother, which was a world of words. We got stuck because we weren’t the same, or very different either. We got stuck because he had shrunk the perimeter of his defenses to a handspan and I still believed in fighting battles on open ground. We got stuck because his consummate solipsism made him accept the unspoken and I demanded action. We got stuck because we both thought we deserved more than we had. We got stuck because he didn’t know how to grow up and I didn’t either. We got stuck because we shared my mother, someone he might have preferred to be a distant memory if I hadn’t existed, but who for me was a daily reality that I felt obliged to defend and vindicate beyond the necessary. We got stuck because, as a result of this, we had different views of the past. We got stuck because I made him the creditor of a debt that I tried to call in when it had already expired. We got stuck because life’s greatest lessons often come too late.
Such a lot of life. Of stuck life.
What did we learn in the final stretch?
That we wasted time. And that things always have an end, and when that end comes, it’s better if it finds us at peace.
What everyone always and forever knows.
And what we knew as well as anyone.
Is this what we spent our final year doing? Making sure that when the end came, we would be at peace with each other?
Was it all a fiction? A charade?
What would our future lives have been like if the boundary imposed by his death had suddenly been erased? A new and miraculous cure; his sudden recovery.
I wouldn’t have had the strength to go on. He wouldn’t have had the stamina to go on.
We would have gone back to being what we were.