Firstly, there are the days immediately following my father’s disappearance, when it was still too early to give up all hope. After the first night spent waiting for a phone call that never came or for him to come home, the light in my mother seemed to go out. She stayed at home and made no attempt to excuse my father’s absence, saying only that he had gone. Her bewilderment was obvious, as was the fact that she had no way of justifying it and was in no mood to come up with a justification. My father hadn’t said goodbye, he had simply left with a small suitcase filled with his best clothes, and it wasn’t hard to infer from this that he had no plans to return. It nevertheless took two days for my mother to grasp this. For two days, she was caught between two impulses, the more urgent one that drove her to stay in her bedroom, and the perennial one that told her not to lower her guard with me for an instant. One minute she would be absorbed in thought or invisible, the next she would be trying to compensate for this by checking up on me all the time, coming into my room or the living room to ask how I was feeling or if I needed anything. Not until the third day — like a watch that has gotten wet and suddenly starts going again just when we thought it had stopped for good — only then did her customary determination reappear. In an ambiguous gesture in which I sensed both a desire to conceal nothing from me and an equal desire not to have to explain too much, she phoned the police, even though I was there with her. She didn’t tell them my father had disappeared, she merely asked about his situation, if he’d been arrested or was wanted and on the run. When she hung up and turned to look at me, her attitude was quite different. I noticed a sudden look of relief on her face and in the way she spoke to me. What she said has remained engraved on my memory: “There’s no need to worry.” I don’t remember what happened after that. I don’t know if she stayed by my side or if we just went on with our separate tasks. I have a feeling, although I can’t be sure, that she began removing all trace of him from the apartment that very afternoon, putting his clothes and belongings into boxes.
It’s as difficult to interpret the days that followed my father’s departure as it is the intervening time between then and our move to La Coruña. Two weeks in which the only revealing thing my mother did was to schedule our trip for the middle of June, when normally, we wouldn’t go until July. Two weeks during which, if it hadn’t been such a short time and I hadn’t been in the middle of taking my final exams, it would have been almost as if we had gone back to our old, pre-Burgos routine. My mother waking me up each morning, my mother telling me to hurry up so as not to miss the school bus, my mother out at work, my mother there to greet me at six o’clock when I came home, where she had been waiting for me since midday. There was nothing in our daily life to remind us of our recent loss, there were no startling outbursts, no melancholy looks or unusual behavior. My mother talked and moved about the house just as she had before, as if with the simple act of packing up and putting away my father’s things, she had freed herself — if not for ever, at least quite determinedly — from any excessive feelings of grief on his account. She didn’t tell me what was beginning to take shape in her head, but now that I think about it, there was one day when she almost did. At the time, I didn’t give it much importance, because I had no idea what was about to happen and her question caught me unawares. It was one Sunday morning, after the gymnastics showcase my school always put on at the end of the year. I’d taken part along with my classmates, and my mother had watched from the stands in the gymnasium. When the performance was over and we were in the cafeteria — where, every year, parents had the chance to chat with the teachers for the last time that term — in what was perhaps a chance remark or something she said after she’d done the rounds of the teachers, and while I was enjoying a cold drink and she was on her second cup of coffee, she asked if I was happy at the school or if I felt like a change. Perhaps that isn’t exactly what she said or she put it in a slightly different way. What I do know is that I didn’t interpret her question as having any hidden meaning, and I replied noncommittally, saying something along the lines that all schools were pretty much the same. My mother didn’t press the matter, and we didn’t touch on the subject again until after we arrived in La Coruña, when she presented me with a fait accompli. I have no idea what would have happened if I’d said I didn’t want to lose the friends I had or didn’t want to have to get used to new faces and new rules. I suppose, though, that it wouldn’t have been very different. My mother could be very persuasive and was always very good at arguing her case, and I suspect, moreover, that she knew better than I did that there was nothing very important binding me to that particular school, nothing I couldn’t do without, like those annual gymnastics recitals.
Nothing about the journey to La Coruña ruffles that untroubled atmosphere, it neither modifies anything nor introduces any novelty, there are no anomalies to threaten the flat calm of my memory. We made the journey by car, as we had on other occasions, leaving Madrid in the early morning and, after a leisurely lunch in a restaurant on the way, arriving at our destination eleven hours later, but I have no memory of the preparations made on the preceding days and can’t even remember what happened on the night before we set off. I think my mother gave me a quarter of a sleeping pill so that I would go to sleep earlier than usual, but I may be wrong and that could be a memory from other journeys. I obviously wasn’t overly preoccupied or alert, since otherwise, I would surely remember something, which just goes to show that my mother gave me no reason to be worried, that nothing out of the ordinary happened. It would have taken very little to arouse my disquiet, but my impressions in the car, despite my father’s still recent departure and the suddenness of the journey, were clearly not very different from my impressions on other such journeys. I had no sense that anything was about to end, nor was I in the least worried about my mother. It must have been a very quiet journey, with a lot of looking out the window and long silences interspersed with games or my questions about the landscapes we were driving through. She must have been utterly imperturbable, or was pretending to be, she must have behaved as she felt she should, or as she could not help behaving.
With our arrival in La Coruña, my memory grows very slightly brighter. There are a few signs and a few warning lights, but all very faint. There are two images, two interrelated glimmers of light. One has to do with the very moment we arrived at my aunt’s apartment and the other, with a moment on the following day or possibly one or two days later. In the first, I see my Aunt Delfina welcoming us at the door. She has stood to one side to make way for us, she has picked up the suitcase my mother was carrying, and after asking if we’ve left any other bags in the car, she follows us along the path my mother and I have forged ahead on as if we, not she, were the hosts. I could see she was rather agitated. After leaving our luggage in the room assigned to my mother, and once we were able to say our hellos properly, she barely took any notice of me at all, she didn’t, as one tends to do with children and as she herself always did, devote more attention to me at the start, getting the usual questions and jokes out of the way so as to make up for subsequently relegating me to the background because what she really wanted to do was to talk to her sister without any interruptions or abrupt changes of subject. On that occasion, my aunt did exactly the opposite. I could tell at once that she was impatient to get me out of the way. She walked past me, enquired briefly about my exams, affectionately pinched my cheek, and then, from that moment on, devoted all her attention to my mother, asking over and over, “How are you?”; “Are you all right?”; “How did everything go?”—as if the continual repetition of the same question, framed in different ways, concealed a real concern about something she did not dare to name directly. After that image, there is nothing, the final flicker of the candle snuffed out in the cold wax of my memory. I don’t know how we spent the rest of the afternoon or if my aunt made any attempt to be alone with my mother. I find myself faced by a void that is impossible to fill. I can’t remember, however dimly or confusedly, a single incident or conversation. That faint flame is only lit again when the three of us are in the kitchen having breakfast. On that occasion, the image is rather blurred, and unlike the previous one, it isn’t my aunt but my mother who takes center stage. It must have been very shortly after our arrival, because my mother joined us in the kitchen, bringing me a pair of pants from our shared suitcase. She left them folded up on the back of a chair, then sat down without offering to help my aunt, who was feeding slices of bread into the toaster. She waited a few seconds, as if she were angry or bothered by something, then said to my aunt, “I’m sure this is the best way.” Her words, spoken in the middle of a long silence, sounded brusque, even though they weren’t, and my aunt, who had her back to us, turned to look at her. Then she looked at me, as if to check that I was still there, and said, “It’s OK, you’re absolutely right, I just find it a bit strange.” She said this in a conciliatory but slightly weary tone, like that of someone who concedes a point in the middle of a heated debate, not out of real conviction but in order to avoid an insuperable difference of opinion. For a while, no one said anything, my aunt continuing to watch over the toast. Then suddenly, without saying a word, my mother downed her cup of coffee in one gulp, got up, and went off to take a shower.