Because I had sensed it was her, I should not, therefore, have felt uneasy when I saw her, her face silent and indecipherable as she proceeded in the direction indicated by my father. The truth is, though, that the moments that followed were moments of confusion, during which my heart beat faster and I felt something akin to panic. My parents reached their chosen table, pulled out the chairs, placed their respective jacket and raincoat on one, then sat down, but I didn’t see any of those actions, because I had hidden behind the tree next to me, afraid they might look out, and with just one solitary thought occupying my mind: who could I talk to about this, to whom could I confide my surprise and my doubts? It was an absurd thought, I know. There before me were my mother and my father, together for the first time in years, when she had given me no indication that they were going to see each other, but I didn’t spend time wondering how that meeting had come about, if it was simply what it appeared to be or if it had been arranged very recently, a few hours ago, if my father had phoned while I was out and she had had to go and meet him without telling me first. No, rather than asking myself that question — to which I would have no response until my mother left the café and we saw each other later on at home and she either did or didn’t tell me what she had done that afternoon — what was worrying me was an entirely unnecessary question, one that answered itself. I had no one to confide in apart from my mother, no one to whom I could describe what I’d seen and would continue to watch, because she alone fulfilled that role, and clearly on this occasion, she could not. After about a minute, I did ask myself about the nature of that meeting, but that was when I had finally dared to emerge from my hiding place behind the tree and look directly across at them. They were both seated, my father with the glass of wine he had brought with him from the bar and my mother with a tall glass of tomato juice before her and her raincoat neatly folded up on the chair that served as their cloakroom. They were sitting across from each other and sideways to me, so it was easy for me to scrutinize them with no danger of being seen, unless, during an awkward silence, one of them needed to rest his or her gaze on some neutral spot, although that seemed unlikely just then, because when I emerged from the tree’s protective bulk and all the questions I had not initially asked myself began to rain down upon me, they were deep in conversation, oblivious to what was going on in the bar and, of course, to what was happening out in the street, where I was now sitting crouched on the curb between the two parked cars.
For a while, I didn’t notice their very different attitudes, evident in their looks, their posture, their pauses, and their silences, the moments when one of them began speaking and the other intervened and interrupted, the imagined abruptness with which some answers were given, and the very definite way in which heads were shaken, far more emphatic than mere words, which I could not hear anyway. For a while, I looked at them both almost without seeing them, impervious to all gestures, paralyzed by the fact that they were together right there in front of me, and incapable of overcoming my surprise, of hearing or feeling anything other than silence as the sole answer to the questions I was asking myself and no one else heard — How was this possible? How had this happened? Had my father been the one who wanted to talk to my mother, or had she sought him out?
Little by little, and still without any of those questions having been answered, everything arising from the fact that they had met without my knowing, everything that was vaguely indicative of their inner lives and yet had remained unseen — because it had more to do with the way they were sitting and the looks they exchanged — began slowly, irreversibly to become clear to me. I began to observe them and realized then that, contrary to what I would have expected, it was my father who did most of the talking, who seemed most solicitous, who tried hard to hold my mother’s evasive gaze, and who was, apparently, making the greater effort to keep the conversation going. He was the one who maintained and sustained it, while my mother, looking nervous and upset, resembled the engaged but dispassionate reader of the few final dramatic touches added by someone else to a play of which she was the principal author. She was the one who remained largely silent, who seemed to be thinking about something else, who seemed least affected. So, almost without realizing, I began to observe them and notice things that gave new meaning to what I was seeing and allowed me to guess at and understand what I had not known and was only now beginning to grasp. It soon became plain to me that this was not a casual meeting at which the topic of conversation had been left open. It appeared, rather, to be a meeting arranged in order to discuss a particular subject and clear up some unfinished business. Given the seriousness with which they acted out their respective roles, it would be easy to infer that this was a negotiation in which both parties were equally involved, however, my mother — and I noticed this with growing surprise — seemed in no mood to play the game. Despite the nonchalant air my father tried to impose on the conversation, despite the jokes he made, which, to judge by the frequent smiles that died on his lips, failed to find the hoped-for echo in my mother, he was the one with the more difficult role, the one who wanted something and was trying to shape and present his argument to gain the other person’s agreement. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to be in the stronger position, that of the person who could say yea or nay, and who could also, if she chose, give in to his requests. She was sitting very upright in her chair, slightly back from the table, looking down at my father, whose free hand lay diagonally across the table top, prepared, at any moment, to invade her territory. He wasn’t nervous or afraid, he didn’t seem embarrassed or prepared to surrender. There was a stubbornness in his attitude, and a touch of shamelessness. Not that he was preparing to eat humble pie, but there was something shocking about such a prolonged struggle with such poor results. This was never clearer than when, after a silence in which they both sat looking hard at each other, he reached out his hand to intercept my mother’s as she reached for her glass. She did not remove her hand, but the cutting coldness with which she left it there, motionless and inert beneath his gently stroking fingers, contained the very essence of a decision on which there was no going back, and which inevitably left me feeling deeply perplexed.
I was witness that afternoon to my parents’ definitive separation, to my mother’s refusal to remain caught up in the chain of deceits that was my father’s life. I couldn’t tell what he was saying to her, what he was hoping to achieve or gain with his wooing ways. I don’t know what words he used or what she said in reply. Not that it matters; nor does it matter that my mother may have given in on certain points — which, according to her, she did. What I could see, what was being played out before me, was not just my mother’s refusal to agree to my father’s concrete proposal, but a much wider-reaching refusal aimed not only at my father, but principally at herself, a cessation and a renunciation, a radical break with the past that would be as damaging to her as to him. That afternoon when I skipped class provided me with the most potent confirmation and demonstration of everything I had noticed in the last two or three years since her return from Paris: her stubborn determination, her self-absorption, her decision to reduce her world down to just her and me, her solitude, which, unlike mine, was chosen, not imposed from without.