My aunt and uncle, on the other hand, did notice these repeated postponements. My aunt tried to conceal her feelings but was obviously upset. She would become still more frantically active and redouble her various plans and questions. My uncle never got upset, but whenever he asked me what day of the week my mother would be coming or when it was that I was going to join her and I told him that all visits had been postponed, he fell silent, as if he were mulling something over or didn’t know quite what to say. I imagine my aunt’s reaction had more to do with her private sadness over the effect all these delays might have on me. As for my uncle, I don’t know if he felt the same or if he simply disapproved of whatever it was that was keeping my mother in Paris. In any case, the deep frown line on his forehead, which made him look still sterner, seemed to indicate anger or displeasure rather than real concern.
Nevertheless, as with much of what I have described, I didn’t notice this at the time. As long as it was the present and not the past, my mother’s trip to Paris meant very little to me. I remained quite unaffected by not having her near or by what I may have heard or seen or intuited during the period of her absence.
XX
My mother and I didn’t see each other even once while she was away, I didn’t go and see her in Paris, and she didn’t come to see me in La Coruña. Even more inexplicable is her return to Spain at the beginning of May, just after Easter, eight months after her departure and two months earlier than planned.
My mother couldn’t stand it any longer, she didn’t even finish out her contract. She decided instead to come back to La Coruña and wait until I’d completed the school year so that we could then return to Madrid in September together. Just when we’d all assumed that the plans drawn up the previous summer would continue along the agreed-upon path, just when I was embarking on the final stretch of my stay in La Coruña and beginning to think about the challenge of learning a new language and going to a new school in a new city, my mother phoned and told Aunt Delfina that she would be arriving in La Coruña in a week’s time. She had grown tired, or so she said. She couldn’t see how we could live on the little she earned there, the work she had found so far was scarce and badly paid, it would be absurd to carry on with her plan if we were going to be so much less comfortable than we could be in Madrid.
I won’t dwell on the feelings this news aroused in me. The most striking thing about the afternoon when my mother phoned to say that her escapade was almost the past and no longer the present is that this was the only time since her departure that anything related to her had made me feel uneasy. I don’t mean the fact of her imminent arrival, which surprised me and might even have given me food for thought, although it didn’t. I’m referring to something that occurred because of that phone call and a little after the announcement of her unforeseen arrival, when my mother had already hung up and my aunt had told me of her sudden decision to leave Paris and abandon both her work there as a Spanish teacher and the plan that I should join her the following year. Everything that happened afterward, everything that I would, if it were possible, ask my mother about now, boils down to that moment. Although it did not occur spontaneously and it had to be wrung from me, that was the first manifestation in me of any genuine unease, the first time I was presented with a truth that did not coincide with my own. It doesn’t much matter that I completely forgot about it afterward or that, as on other, similar occasions, the truth did not take verbal form and it wasn’t until much later that I found the words to express it. That afternoon was the first time I felt uncomfortable in La Coruña, when my mother was not there and could not, with a single look, tell me if I was right or wrong. That truth came from the person most like my mother, the person closest to her.
At the time, I felt so injured, so deeply offended, that I could not see beyond my overwhelming feeling of indignation. Any concrete thoughts, any doubts I might have had were immediately canceled out by a far stronger feeling of shock and wounded perplexity. I will never know if what I heard that afternoon from my aunt was the only thing that caused me to react like that, although it probably wasn’t; it seems likely that behind my reaction lay a feeling I have not yet mentioned because I experienced it almost simultaneously with my mother’s last phone call from Paris, such an arbitrary, baseless feeling that I find it hard to put into words or to put those words into written form now.
My mother’s announcement was not quite as unexpected as I described a moment ago but was preceded by something that, although it did not forewarn me, at least had the effect of making her sudden return seem somewhat less extraordinary. It did not emerge suddenly but rather at a time when her calls had become more urgent, more emotional, and, if possible, even more unpredictable. Taking a rather questionable approach — questionable because it sets too much store by a supposition that is in itself extremely flimsy — I would say that, for some time, she had not appeared to be responding simply to the perfectly normal, pressing need to know if I was all right, but to a more egotistical need, like when we find ourselves alone and frightened in the dark night, hemmed in and harried by all our doubts, when we can see no way out of a life we imagine we have irrevocably chosen for ourselves and we need to be in touch with someone dear to us, not so much because that person will be able to give us the impossible answer we seek, but simply in order to hear their voice, feel their affirmative presence, and have them confirm to us that we are on the right path, that they support our choice, regardless of what right or wrong decisions we have made or not yet managed to correct. As I say, I did not realize this at the time, and I’m not even sure that’s how it was. It’s merely a retrospective presentiment, the unverifiable impression that my mother began to linger far longer on the phone, that her calls became more frequent and unexpected, and above all, the feeling I had — and which I actually did feel at the time, although I immediately rejected and forgot about it — that she wasn’t always phoning in order to talk to me, but sometimes actually wanted to avoid me, and phoned when she thought or knew I would not be there, so that she could speak freely with my aunt. There were two such phone calls, two occasions when I came home and found my aunt talking to my mother. Neither occasion was the first time she had called when I was not there, and on neither occasion did I hear anything I should not have heard, and my aunt never denied that she was speaking to my mother. On both occasions, Aunt Delfina told my mother that I had just come in and, having said her goodbyes, immediately passed the phone to me. Nevertheless, although those two calls could be explained quite easily by an error of calculation on either side, I remember noticing a flicker of unease in my aunt when she noticed my presence, something unnatural about the way she announced my arrival, a certain embarrassment on the part of my mother when my aunt handed me the phone, and a certain slowness in the way she began her interrogation, as if the news that my aunt was putting me on the phone had caught her unawares while she was still immersed in other thoughts.