If I think back, it is touching that there were two different times when my son and I were at loggerheads this way: there was the time he secretly raged against me for about a year, while I, according to a memory that does not register the past but feels it, and of which I can therefore be as certain as of a fact, was intensely fond of him, as in the years before that. And the time when I, on the contrary, the father, moved away from him in my thoughts — this is putting it too innocuously — that was later, and I feel, likewise in memory, several glances of my son’s resting on me, as if from the far corner of a dim hall, and I know they stemmed from helplessness, a wondrously tender helplessness.
Unthinkable, back in his childhood, that there should be a question of anything between the two of us but a lifelong story. I experienced hours, even entire days with him that above and beyond that had to lay the groundwork for something, something enduring, a bond that could not be banished from the world.
That did not come immediately with his birth, when, at the sight of that fuzz-covered, dark-skinned little creature, in the presence of his almost bloodless mother, I recoiled as if the woman from Catalonia had foisted a changeling on me. During the first years of his life, which I spent without my family, far beyond the Urals, I saw him so seldom that every time he failed to recognize me and at the word “father” was more likely to look at the Mongolian faces around us than at me, and I, too, felt as though the word did not refer to me. Although I had felt a powerful urge to have a child, and with this particular woman, who would clearly bear me someone extraordinary, whenever “my family” came to mind, it was never the three of us, but, as always before, my grandparents, my mother, her brothers, long since dead, my sister, my brother; and that most decisively where I find the measure for what I call “real”: in my dreams. Deep in my dreams, the woman from Catalonia, my son, and I never appeared in the context of a family; the three of us did not even appear together. Even when we were finally living together in Paris, at first I felt so ill at ease with my son that I avoided being alone with him and often did not come home in the evening until he was sure to be in bed already.
Yet my memory also preserves a few very different moments from that period: the face of a child, behind a door in the dark, where he has hidden and is smiling, a smile in profile such as one sees only during hide-and-go-seek. And in a particular stretch of sidewalk, which I let him walk on the day they were paving it, his footprint, next to that of a large dog. And my searching for refuge and elan, and not only once, in his cowlick. And then, in our first suburb, initially so quiet after the roar of the metropolis, up there in the Seine hills, on the side streets the postman’s regular morning whistling, and inside the house the two of us, intent each time on not missing a note of it, our moment of shared experience.
And in spite of that our life together continued to be determined by an expression in my son’s eyes that has been gone for many years now, and even then appeared only occasionally. I understood that look as one of distrust, as a sign of a serious disturbance. The child’s distrust focused on no one in particular. It was a matter of principle, or at least in the process of becoming a matter of principle. I knew that kind of look from earlier, from myself, in the only photo from my boarding school, a group picture, and I encounter it likewise in children today, more and more, including smaller children. I see it every day in some here in the neighborhood.
For one in particular — he has not been walking that long, and speech is still new to him — the word distrust does not seem strong enough: it should be suspicion. This child looks around for suspicious sights, and not only from time to time — he does so uninterruptedly, eyes darting, somberly from below or over his shoulder. Paraphrasing a saying of the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, I then think, “Two years old — and already it’s all over,” and although it is clear to me that the blame rests with his parents (or someone else), I cannot help condemning the little fellow himself; that’s how upset I am by his unremitting wariness.
My son had that look, but quite unexpectedly, between two looks quite normal for a child. Yet even then I was repelled and felt a surge of rage, directed against him, myself, something unknown. In the face of this sudden darkening of his gaze it seemed to me that it would take only a little for that look to become permanently fixed on his face. I felt an urgent need to dispel that facial expression, by force. Something had to be done about this distrust, unbearable to someone who was subjected to it day in, day out from close up. But I did nothing.
The person who did something after all was my son. Valentin, in defiance of the usual expression, did not “come” to me. He ran, galloped, flitted, leaped, stumbled, dashed. That usually happened after periods of separation, which had meanwhile become infrequent. Previously, even if he had caught sight of me the moment I appeared, his first movement had been a looking away, almost a violent swiveling of his head, as if he had been waiting for anyone but me. But now, picking me out without any particular peering around, even from among a crowd of people in a railroad station or airport, he would promptly break into a run, looking straight at me from way across the building. I did not see the need for help and the pleading quality that later replaced distrust in his eyes and can still appear there, even now that he has come of age; rather, it was an instance of uninhibited pleasure, never preceded by the slightest surprise, even when he could not know I was going to turn up. For he took it as a matter of course that when he had climbed the lighthouse at the end of the earth with his grandparents, in La Coruña (or somewhere else), on the platform at the top I would appear around the corner. And he did not even need to be separated from me to run toward me that way. Once we had just spoken with each other and then met by chance on the street, on opposite sides — he surrounded by friends — and he immediately slipped away and came flying and leaping toward me, a glow on his face that embarrassed me and at the same time made my heart bleed.
For an entire decade the child and for a while also the adolescent and I lived together this way in harmony; or we were of one mind, without words, each of us, wherever he happened to be just then, equally preoccupied with nothing of moment, like two idiots.
Only when we walked together did this boy otherwise so silent — to his teachers “silent Val”—begin to speak, the first speaking in tongues I ever witnessed. As a rule, it occurs to me, this happened when we were going gradually downhill, after a longish ascent, and if I still feel drawn today to places from the past, it is to those nameless stretches where my son did nothing but enumerate the world for me.
One time, after we had gone up and down in the Seine hills, we descended to the Métro station in Issy-les-Moulineaux, located in one of those suburban streets for which the dictionary of commonplaces would offer the word “gray,” and he began to speak about the colors of the houses, and by the end of the street each house had its own color, shading, and nuance; yet he was not inventing or adding anything, simply comparing what was there, making distinctions, emphasizing, and when a building remained gray, which was the exception, it became dove gray, beech-trunk gray, slate gray, so that when we looked back over our shoulders the row of houses stood there as a strip of colors, more varied than any human being could dream up, and even the asphalt of the sidewalks displayed that tinge of red that is a fact in this region on the outskirts of Paris and takes on the deep red of animal blood in the lightest showers.