I ran some more water.
“Mother’s situation,” as it was called in our family shorthand, wasn’t ever even correctly diagnosed. One day, Mother rose decisively from the sofa and then collapsed with a violent pain in her ear. It didn’t go away after she fell, or once she was sitting, or standing, or when she covered her ears, not to mention the meager results from my father’s home remedies (lemon juice, or camomile and olive oil, or a mixture of chopped garlic and lavender). For half a week she couldn’t sleep, and she sobbed in exhaustion. The specialists we consulted ruled things out one by one: poor drainage in her Eustachian tubes, sinus infections, referred pain (which could originate in the teeth, the throat, or the tongue); they finally convinced themselves it was a problem with her inner ear. After all those examinations we still had no clear idea of what was going on inside Mother’s head. As the uncertainty grew, though, so did my conviction that the inner ear’s design is astonishingly exquisite—a membranous maze within a bony maze that with the help of cochlear fluid somehow transforms sonic waves into nerve signals. Something had gone wrong in those cartilaginous depths and was bathing my mother’s life in pain.
My father managed to divert a Chicago-based specialist from his conference for a few hours. He was forty years old with elegant, hairy hands, and he was delighted at having chosen a profession that enabled him to glide successfully around the world. His treacle-colored eyes gave off a cold boldness; in sum, he was the kind of Anglo-Saxon from whom you can expect nothing but the truth. I even liked how he received us in his shirtsleeves.
“There’s no damage to the organ. I suspect we’re dealing with imaginary pain.”
“When will it go away?”
“We don’t know why the brain imagines pain behind the ear, nor when it will stop. We don’t understand this behavior, and we can’t fix it. We cannot cure imaginary illness, you see? But patients can benefit from what we’ve learned about the brain’s geography to make the area emitting the commands go to sleep.”
“Will it stop hurting her?”
“She’ll stop believing she’s in pain.”
“Well then…?”
“You don’t need me for that, Mr. Miró-Puig. You can consult any general practitioner.”
The result of all those excuses and medical obscenities was some pills: white, blue, and red, a French flag. Three tablets that offset each other’s negative side effects, and kept the patient (my mother!) within the fairly unambitious bounds of what those people consider “healthy.” I don’t really know how it all happened because I had play-offs (thirty-six points and we crushed the Marista team on their own court, three socks supporting the swelling left ankle I twisted in the first quarter). Also because I’d spent a week sweating in fear, convinced I’d be the next one to have some hidden element of my body give out.
“She hardly ever complains. She smiles, but it looks painted on.”
“The doctor says there’s pressure on the nerves that feed her brain.”
“She stayed under the sheets like she was waiting for something.”
Though she recovered from the pain in her ear (or at least stopped complaining about it), the pills dulled her spirits into hibernation. She didn’t care if it was one thing or the other, and she dwindled away so much she seemed incapable of tending to her own basic needs. And that was how a diluted version of my mother settled unannounced into the landscape of our family life. Equidistant from health and sickness, from affection and indifference toward her children, from independence and dependence, she was the woman whose husband both abandoned and did not abandon the home they shared.
The first thing we thought when Dad took off was that, with a son in Madrid and a daughter in Boston, she was going to starve to death. What no one saw coming was that my father would travel from wherever the new center of his activity was, to bring her food and cigarettes (which my mother still had not learned to do without), to clean the apartment (we now have a very Peruvian cleaning lady) and prepare plates of food that could be reheated in the microwave. He was also the one to scour the pharmacies for her tricolored chemical fix. When my sister and I forgot to replenish Mother’s pills she would start humming, writhing like a cat in a bag and scratching herself (one Tuesday I was impressed to see red marks crisscrossing her neck), but we never thought it was anything terribly urgent. Until one afternoon something scared her, and she started talking in a voice borrowed from the little girl in The Exorcist about how much better off the rest of the Miró-Puig family would be if she just kicked the bucket. According to Dr. Strangelove (I’ve lost track of all the doctors we visited), the center governing her consciousness (as if those idiots knew where that is, or what the hell they were talking about) switched off when its demand for lithium went unsatisfied. Then her lips just started moving independently, uninhibited by affection, to transmit the viscous poison that stirred in the secret depths of my mother’s brain—a woman who, two years earlier, could justify spending an entire day sweetly sewing on a button. Dr. Death’s proposed solution wasn’t bad: make her dependence chronic. And we were so frightened, so naive, that we received the proposal like good news. We were a hair’s breadth away from throwing a welcome party for the zombie state that lasted for the next fifteen years. Anyway, after that my father also took care of organizing the capsules into a pillbox that distributed doses by days. Then he’d help her fix her hair, and then he’d leave.
“I guess he couldn’t afford full-time help anymore.”
And there you have the oh-so-nuanced version that my sister gave, sitting there on the sofa in the little house Dad had rented for her, with its views of the Charles River. There may have been a twelve-digit number between us, but how easy it was to imagine her moving that big mouth of hers, right above the frog-like double chin she gets whenever she tries to pass for a rational person.
“Just tell me why else he’d sink so low.”
But it didn’t seem to me like Dad was lowering himself. I figured he felt an intermediate kind of love for Mother: not ample enough to deprive himself of the transfusion of new life he was enjoying (or so we suspected), nor so exhausted he could just throw his old life overboard. Regardless, if God decides to remake the earth one day with a little more intelligence and forethought, we’ll all be better off if he opts to use my father’s tender patience as a model.
How could I complain? How could I ask him for explanations? Instead I chose just to be grateful he didn’t tell all three of us— incapable of earning a peseta of our own, our parasitic tentacles so well developed—to take a long walk off a short pier. I visited a lawyer on the sly to ask whether, if I got into a jam, I could demand my inheritance through registered fax. I loved (I love) Mother, but my world revolved around parties and the basketball court. If those things didn’t overextend me, I had plans to take advantage of the familial inertia to open a little business of my own; my hands weren’t made for nursing. Of course, “Mother’s situation” barely caused me any anxiety—it was more like a power outage. If she complained about anything, it was that Dad took up too much space in the apartment, that she couldn’t stand his chatter about business, that she’d grown tired of his voice and his conversation. If I found out someday she was the one who threw him out, it wouldn’t exactly be the surprise of my life.
I came out of the bathroom and resisted the urge to look at the room that, if I were ever to find myself separated from it by an ocean and its three billion fish, would still be mine. From the hallway door I could see my mother’s dear face trying to smile, and her hands embraced by Helen’s young fingers. The light, reduced by the glass into shades of green, illuminated particles and bacteria; around those two women, the micro-universe of the air orbited in slow ellipses.
“We’d better get going.”
And that was my great contribution to the soirée. I didn’t deign to spend more than five minutes with the three of us together. It didn’t matter to me if some pleasant exchange was going on between Mother’s glassy gaze and
the compassionate blue shade glinting in Helen’s eyeballs. I knew all about the therapeutic value of physical touch to cheer up the patient, but that kind of preplanned fondling only seemed phony to me. It was just that we were never a very effusive family…it was just that the cream was melting out of the pastry in repugnant waves…it was just that my mother must have been tired, that the slice of the past she’d retrieved from her mental depths was enough; I needed to get back to my grown-up life. Helen rode the elevator down with her head lowered, ruminating on something that spelled trouble for me, I was sure; I merely tightened my tie, insinuating the magnitude of my displeasure through my body language, hoping to intimidate her. I wasn’t going to stand for any little moral lessons—if Helen wanted to play at that, she could start with the elk back in Montana. I prepared myself for a fight, and a full-blown one at that.
I opened the door for her and I let her go out first. By the way she moved her ass in that dress (the coat folded over her arm: another sign), I realized she wasn’t looking for a fight. She took my arm, pressed against me, kissed my neck.
“I’m so sorry about your father.”
She moved away, and with her feet perched atop those high heels she’d mastered at fourteen, she raised her arm to hail a taxi. She arched her body until the stretchy cloth of her dress displayed what well-mannered boys would call her “figure”: the voluptuous innocence of her curves. She reminded me then of her generous fullness as a woman in love, keen to make up for all the bad that had ever happened to me or the people I cared about, and she did it with a purity and guile that effortlessly laid me bare.
I’d also been riding in a taxi with leather seats the time I went on my first and last visit to Dad’s secret lair. I hadn’t heard from him in four months, and when he finally phoned me in Madrid, I had to hold back the tears. I made an effort not to mention that my bar was done for, that there was a chasm in its floor and all the money was draining out. A little loan to tide me over wasn’t going to cut it. I’d let it go for too long, and the unpaid bills were piling up. I needed at least a million pesetas to stem the bleeding.
“Son, how are you? I’d like to see you.”
“It’s so good to hear from you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, I don’t know if…”
“I want to tell you something—it’s fairly pressing, would you mind coming to see me?”
“At your office?”
“No. I’ll give you an address. Do you have paper?”
“What I was going to say is that I’ve had some problems, if we could—”
“We’ll talk about it on…how about Friday?”
“Couldn’t it be sooner? It’s a substantial problem, it’s about the bar…”
I’d managed to warn him about my business blunder without uttering a word about Mother. And there you have my true talent: the quitter, that’s me, and I’m not surprised he didn’t care about seeing me. In contrast, Dad was like an iron rod, conducting the conversation exactly as he’d planned.
“Don’t worry about that now. There are going to be big changes. I won’t be ready on Thursday. Better on Friday, at seven fifteen. Are you writing this down?”
“Ready.”
It was a street I didn’t know.
“Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Read it back.”
I racked my neurons—a city’s streets disappear when you’ve been gone for months, but no, I’d never heard that name in my life.
“I’ll make dinner, you bring the wine.”
Red, earthy, with mature tannins—I didn’t need to ask.
“Dress up. Seven fifteen. You know I like to see you in a tie. Until Friday, then, Joan-Marc. Buy the ticket today.”
“See you Friday, Dad. Bye.”
When I hung up, my arm was trembling. A grown man of twenty with a five-day-old beard, about to finish a master’s in something related to the labor yield of other people, my two suits bought at Bel’s…all held together by a nervous system that let itself be intimidated by the voice of that dry but friendly man who’d never raised a hand against me, who assumed my failures with a savoir-faire known only in Frank Capra films. I guess I turned then to those things that are so banal when you write them down: I made a cup of tea, plopped onto the sofa, went to another room, sat looking out the window—the aerials, gas cylinders, air-conditioning units, and dirty café awnings (white, green, maroon). I imagined what my father’s spacious apartment would be like—white furniture, plump cushions, lavender diffusers—and the people who might live with him.
I suppose I loved the man, and I’d enjoyed the manly embrace of his love when he had circulated among us, clean and noble. I used to feel delirous with happiness when he took me to see a football match at the old Sarriá stadium and told me stories about Marañon, the forward with such veiny legs, or when he studied art books so he could impress me the next day at the museum, or when he taught me to ride a horse, when he failed to pass on his passion for polo. I missed having him walk me to La Salle and repeat like a premature grandfather his theory about the benefits of a deep cleanse for a healthy gut. I missed his sartorial flourishes: the corner of a handkerchief peeking from his jacket pocket, the white leather gloves he put on when he drove, the bow tie he wore to make my sister laugh (but that I’d bet anything he longed for a good opportunity to sport in earnest). I miss his way of defusing problems, of looking at Mother, of tempering my outbreaks of insecurity, of falling asleep with a book in his hands on the sofa in the living room, in poses that would have horrified him if he’d seen himself with waking eyes; I miss the deep snoring that Mother called “the walrus attack,” his fingers smudged with ink from the newspaper, the disciplined disgust with which he dedicated himself to his vegetarian diet, the annoyance that accompanied his exit from the bathroom after falling off the wagon again, defeated by constipation and the effect of the word “constipation” on his mood. I missed the chemical odor of deep waste that he left in the bathroom like the sign of a partial victory in his prolonged battle with his insides. My only shame came from having grown until I was twice his size. I blushed at the size of my hands, my well-defined muscles; my feet and bones had grown, my face had caught up with my adolescent growth spurts and stabilized into fairly harmonious features. If what is expected of a son is confrontation, antagonism, and bust-ups, don’t hold your breath: I adored my father, and I missed him. If only he would take custody of me again!
I guess I closed the curtains, I guess I took a sip of tea, left the mug on the table. What I’m sure about is that my delight at the prospect of seeing Dad again was curdled by the fear that all those little secrets were advance warning of some devastating news: that he was going to stop taking care of Mother, that she and her pills and her cigarettes would from then on be my responsibility (those cold fingers moving over my hand were Helen’s, and they belonged to the time frame in which a taxi driven by a raving lunatic was taking us from the apartment on Bonanova back to our Turret).
I bought an Australian wine made from grapes grown in the twisted vineyards of Adelaide, fed by a field so old the sun was already beating down on it when the rest of today’s dry land was ocean floor, a wine rich in tannins and licorice overtones. Believe it or not, I was also uncomfortable at the thought he might have invited me over so he could apologize and return home to live. I chose a beige suit with very fine green stripes that I thought would please him. Of course, I suspected that all the fuss about the bottle of wine and looking sharp was to soften the blow of the news that he was going to get married, give me a sibling, introduce me to another mother, all of which provoked a disgust I couldn’t choke down just by tightening the knot of my tie. My aversion wasn’t based on anything rational: I felt the same way about pepper, or cauliflower’s smell of rotting vegetation. I got the creeps at the mere thought of our bloodlines branching out: the glut of a species in all its excess, and the haughty disdain toward individual specimens. It’s like when you kick over a rock and see the hundreds of ra
sping insects that never mange to join forces to work together coherently. What a waste.
I was already dressed when I looked for the address among the onionskin pages of a city street guide. It was an odd street that cut behind Lesseps. This is back when the plaza was still a giant planning disaster that separated Gràcia from Vallcarca, as if the Mississippi River were flowing between the two sidewalks. I drew myself a map. I’d said good-bye to Mother (who from the back looked like a doll abandoned on a chair, streaks of white winding through her chestnut hair), but then I went back to the kitchen for the marble-handled letter opener, unsure whether my plan was to keep it or return it to Dad. Google Maps didn’t exist yet to check the address, and I got worried when the taxi headed into an area of low houses and kitchen gardens (I thought I saw the phantasmagorical shapes of some chickens). Then I discovered that my father had moved (or at least summoned me) to a single- family home with a garage.
I was twenty minutes early, so I went into a bar crammed with patrons whose faces were round and dry. I ordered a strong coffee; I lifted my hand to check my watch and found a naked wrist. I felt underdressed, informal, and the odd thing is that since that day I’ve never worn one again, as if a moment of time has refused to pass. The rest of the scene: revolving fan blades, the slot machine, the posters of Extremaduran football teams, family photos, a laminated cardboard menu dominated by fried food, the formaldehyde smell of cheap booze. But these could all be the kind of details we add to the texture of deep memories, the ones that have been keeping us company for years.
I went outside, and an ambiguous feeling descended on me. I only had to cross the street and say hello to my father, one half of the familial mass that had conspired to bring me into the world. I rang the doorbell for ten minutes until it occurred to me to try the door; it opened. I went in fearlessly, which I put down to my sense of smell reacting faster than my eyes, capturing the notes of firewood, cinnamon, and rancid wine that mingled to make up my father’s trademark scent.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 10
