That is what occurs to me now, in the light of subsequent events, but such an idea never entered my head during the months I lived with them. As far as I was concerned, my time spent in La Coruña was merely a rather longer than usual vacation, and it never for a moment interrupted a line I thought of as infinite, the line drawn by my mother and myself with our silent understandings and our almost never mentioned and possibly never perceived differences. Nothing unusual happened until the last week; I never thought of my aunt and uncle as something enviable, and I never compared them with my parents. Even then, separated from my mother for reasons I didn’t understand but did accept, there was still nothing lacking in my life. Those months could have been the right moment to start asking a few questions, to come up with a few objections, or find grounds for disagreement with all those things I normally never questioned. The distance and separation from my mother could have constituted the right moment, the initiation or apprenticeship that would suddenly allow me to find my own place, rather than the one I had inherited from or owed to my mother. I had plenty of excuses. It’s clear, for example, that my uncle must have found it distressing to have someone like my father in his family, even though he was not a blood relative and had nothing to do with him directly. But if that were true (and I can’t help but suspect that it was in those days, when one’s personal life was an open book and could have proved problematic for someone of his rank), I didn’t think about it until long afterward. Just as, in one way or another, my mother, though absent, was a constant presence, my father was never spoken about, did not exist, no one mentioned his name. I myself only thought about him from time to time. I would occasionally wonder where he was living or what he was doing, but the lack of any answer did not trouble me unduly; it was a bit like when we wonder what happened to someone we used to know but with whom we feel no real connection once we’ve lost all contact, partly because we can’t even be sure he remembers us. I noticed the silence that surrounded his name in my aunt and uncle’s home, but I assumed, and still do in the case of my aunt, that it was out of delicacy on her part, so as not to remind me of something she thought would bring back painful memories. Not until two or three years later did I realize how alone my mother was in what she was trying to do, how little support she had.
Something similar happened, although for very different reasons, with my maternal grandfather, who died when I was four years old, and about whom I knew almost nothing because I’d hardly ever seen him and because, once he was dead, my mother never mentioned him unless I specifically asked about him. I attributed her silence to the family rift caused by my grandfather’s remarriage, which I did know about, and so I was surprised when my aunt, who must also have been affected by this, was far more forthcoming and not only talked often to me about him but enjoyed saying how much I resembled him. It’s true that many of the anecdotes she told me hinted at the same resentment evident in my mother’s silence and that often during those conversations, her eyes would darken just as my mother’s face would darken on the few occasions she spoke of him, but the contrast between their very different attitudes was still not enough to arouse my interest. I was aware of that contrast and felt intrigued by the figure of my grandfather for the first time, although, as with the silence that my aunt and uncle wove around my father, I never thought about it or did anything more than notice it.