I didn’t realize what this meant until long after the time I’m talking about now, when I began to wonder if I hadn’t taken too much for granted, and when the weight of what I knew and didn’t know about my mother on the one hand and what the two of us together represented on the other first began to intrigue me. But occasionally, albeit only vaguely, I had already felt the unnamed, unimagined void of the absent sibling. The first occasion I can remember was the one I’ve just described. Kneeling under the table — not immediately after I had discovered the package, but once I had opened it and sealed it up again and restored it to its original place, where I could still see the marks left by the insulating tape, and especially in the days that followed, when the temptation to share the discovery with my mother was greatest, as was the caution that prevented me from doing so—that was when I began to feel, as I never had before, the loneliness, and the fear that loneliness creates. My disloyalty, and the wall it erected between us, really hurt me. My mother was my only ally, my only security, and the idea that I might be harming her in some way made me suddenly aware of the precariousness of my position. I realized that without her, I was lost, and that if she failed me or I failed her, if she were to disappear or we were to become separated, there was nothing else. The empty, unknown void of a future in which, unless I myself ever had a child, there would be no such unconditional love.
I didn’t ask myself anything at the time. It was a feeling that assailed me suddenly, without provoking or bringing with it questions of any importance, but it was enough, nonetheless, to fill me with renewed unease and disquiet. For two weeks, the time it took for what both of us feared would happen to happen, I felt that a gulf opened up between my mother and myself, that we were not the close-knit unit we had been (she and I alone or she and I vis-à-vis my father), but that, for the first time, there were three of us, including my father, each one the vertex of an imaginary triangle, each one (or at least two of us) with a secret to keep.
XVI
Apart from the parallels with other occasions when I felt that same sense of separation — through no fault of my own this time — the reason I mention the new experience of those two weeks is because I think they influenced the ease with which I accepted what happened afterward: my father’s departure, our move to La Coruña, and, in particular, the beginning of what I’ve described elsewhere as my mother’s Paris period, her decision to set off for the first time along a path that would temporarily separate her from me.
There’s no real point in looking for causes, there’s nothing so very odd about it. It’s likely that the most important things that happen to us are things we would never have predicted. We live our lives thinking we know who we are and how we’ll react in any given situation, but we just have to dig around a little in our memories to find significant examples of when we reacted quite differently from how we should have reacted. There is no model for how we behave. We can’t trust how we think we’ll respond to a particular stimulus. There are no constants. The variables that govern our responses, like the variables of memory, are entirely unforeseeable. What do we remember, and why? What is it that affects or moves us, and why? We can’t even be sure about our most automatic responses, those that shape our character and allow us to define ourselves and others, to say things like “That’s how I am” or “This person is like that.” For every reflex reaction, every habit or obsession that forms part of our way of being, how often have we also been moved to tears by things that have nothing to do with us, things we are even ashamed to be seeing? Likewise, how often have we accepted, without a flicker of emotion, other situations that do have to do with us and should touch us, that cry out either for our repudiation or our support? As soon as we explore our memory more deeply, it comes up with a multitude of occasions when we experienced incidents or situations that should have upset us but, despite everything, passed and left no trace, or left a very different trace from the one we might have expected. There are times when we think we couldn’t possibly laugh at or be offended by something, and yet we can’t help ourselves and duly end up laughing at or being offended by that very thing. Deep down, we know very little about ourselves, very little of what might affect us. Even our reactions or responses to the same stimulus are not always the same.
I’m thinking and saying all this as a way of trying to understand my behavior then. But I’m thinking, too, about how things developed after my father’s disappearance, the changes it wrought in my life, the transformation, in part definitive, brought about by the subsequent separation from my mother, and the undramatic way in which I accepted those changes never fails to surprise me. It seems unnatural. My father disappeared toward the end of May, by mid-June my mother and I were in La Coruña, and just over two months later, she went off to Paris, leaving me with my aunt and uncle, but in my memory, this sequence of events is not accompanied by any pain or sadness. For what seemed like a very long time, my mother and I stopped living in the same place, our centers of gravity moved apart, but I can detect no hint of resignation, distrust, or resentment in myself. There is, rather, acceptance, a predisposition to understand the reasons I sensed lay behind her decision. Of course, it’s impossible to say what would have happened if I hadn’t found those business cards, if I hadn’t felt guilty about concealing it from my mother, and if my father’s departure hadn’t confirmed all the foreboding that my discovery had awoken in me. I don’t know if my attitude or my feelings would have been any different. Yet I can’t help thinking that, albeit unconsciously, the bad taste it left in my mouth somehow influenced my acceptance of that new phase. I’m not saying this was a conscious calculation on my part, an attempt to compensate for my guilt. I’m just saying that one thing followed the other, and it seems highly likely that the former had some effect, however tenuous, on the latter, even if I myself didn’t notice it and had possibly forgotten all about my earlier deceit.
On the other hand, there were no such attenuating circumstances with my mother, and I can’t imagine what she would have done if, instead of me being an only child, she’d had three children, because in that case it would have been impossible to leave us all with my Aunt Delfina. I can’t imagine what would have become of her if she hadn’t been able to temporarily shed her responsibilities, how her life would have changed if she hadn’t been able to escape to Paris, if she’d had to stay in Madrid even though doing so meant deepening the wound. What is certain is that, even though I was her only child, even though it was her choice, even though she was the one who decided to take that step, it could not have been easy for her. She must have thought long and hard about it.
XVII
What I observed in my mother after my father ran away was not insubstantial, but it was all very contradictory and would be of little help in getting even a vague idea of her true state of mind if I hadn’t had the example of previous occasions when I was able to glimpse how deeply she was affected by what had now become a reality — her possibly definitive failure. We need not go very far back. For example, in comparison with her joy on that weekend trip to Toledo, when my father told her that he had found a job, or with that more recent example when he went off unexpectedly and she feared she would never see him again, her reaction this time was moderate, one might even say cool, but perhaps that’s not so very strange. In a way, it could be considered an indication of the magnitude of her despair: the greater her despair, the greater the effort required to mitigate it.