Father and Son

by Marcos Giralt Torrente

  One afternoon I mention that almost all his paintings repeat the same compositional scheme, with a figurative motif—usually a photograph taken from a magazine, distorted and painted over—around which the space of the painting arranges itself. I refer to it in passing, but it makes an impression, since the next few times he makes joking reference to the figurita central, as I innocently called it, and some time later his painting evolves toward a fractioning of the canvas that, by multiplying the centers, puts an end to the very notion of center.

  I like it that he’s a painter. I admire him, I visit his studio, I tell him what I think about his paintings, I help him maneuver the biggest ones out the window when the handler from the gallery comes for them, but I’m not entirely impartial either. It’s in my interest to foster that complicity. I sense that he doesn’t have it with the friend he met in Brazil, and I don’t want to fail him as I imagine that she fails him.

  And meanwhile, life goes on.

  In 1991 I spend two weeks in Mexico with a friend who’s attending a writers’ conference.

  In 1991 I steal books from bookstores.

  In 1991 I dress in vintage blazers and I almost always wear a scarf knotted around my neck, something that he misses no chance to make sly fun of when he sees me.

  In 1991 I flirt with a waitress at one of the late-night bars where I’m a regular, but it’s another waitress—mistakenly believing herself to be the object of my attentions—with whom I end up in bed.

  In 1991 I hardly ever go to class, and when I do, I show up late, sometimes without having slept, often hungover, often feeling dirty.

  * * *

  Today, as I write this in the late spring of 2008, I ask myself whether I’ve properly gauged the play of memories with which I aspire to approach an impossible objectivity. My feelings aren’t always the same, times change, and occasionally I notice that I’m leaving something out. I’ve talked, for example, about my father’s family, but I realize that I haven’t described him, that I’ve hardly said anything about what he was like.

  * * *

  He wore glasses and was a skinny boy who stood out in the rough squalor of the schools of postwar Madrid. He wasn’t fearful, but he preferred his own realms: his grandparents’ house in the summer, his girl cousins on his mother’s side of the family, the French edition of Elle, to which his older sister subscribed and which, in addition to the usual fashion stories, ran reviews of books, music, and art. Once, talking to me in the hospital about those days, he said that he remembered himself as always being sad.

  “After your mother died?” I asked.

  “Always.”

  Adolescence strengthened his body, and in his youth, it was his unexpected beauty, the effect it had on women, as well as the decision to be an artist, that gave him confidence. He became a painter, lived in different places, but the boy in glasses crouched inside of him and occasionally returned to seize control, paralyzing him whenever life most resembled a schoolyard.

  * * *

  He kept a diary of trivial events—what he had done, whom he had seen, his progress on his current painting—recorded in brief entries and occasionally shaded with faint strokes that provided glimpses of his state of mind. Often he crossed out several days in a row and wrote fight or pissed. It was as far as he would let himself go, on the off chance that eyes other than his might read what he had written. The fights were usually with the friend he met in Brazil, but also with me.

  * * *

  He had a tendency to gain weight. He liked food and drink, and because he was vain, he was permanently dissatisfied with his weight. He was a competent cook, but he was just as happy to eat the worst junk, with which he soothed the anxieties that gnawed at him.

  He had a weakness for fried food and for anything in béchamel sauce; he preferred meat to fish, but he had a great fondness for cod and anchovies and also eggplant; he liked cured meats, pasta, meat loaf, meatballs; he liked cabbage, beets, tuna, liver with onions; he didn’t care for any other kind of offal and he didn’t much like salads, most seafood or shellfish, or any raw fish. He liked Chinese food and Indian food and Mexican food and hamburgers and sausages. He liked wine and beer.

  * * *

  Almost every evening he had a drink, but as far as I know, he didn’t favor a particular liquor. He chose based on what was available and on the fluctuation of his tastes. Rum, whiskey, gin, bourbon …

  * * *

  He smoked for a while, but he was one of those smokers who is always trying to quit, and finally he did quit.

  * * *

  He was humble with the meek and contemptuous with the arrogant, but humility and contempt alike were expressed from the grips of a nervous agitation, so that neither was perceived by its recipients with total clarity, blurred by the haste with which he hid himself or dealt a blow.

  * * *

  He was impatient and, as a result, often committed injustices. In speaking to a waiter or concluding a conversation.

  * * *

  He could tell a good jacket or a good shirt when he saw one, and he knew the ways of high society, having grown up with them, but his pride and his masculinity barred him from pretending to be something he wasn’t. Tending to a pair of handmade shoes or a bespoke suit with the calculated care of someone who can’t replace them as frequently as he’d like, taking refuge in appearances, being frugal to strategic effect, donning some disguise would have run counter to his convictions and his character.

  In the fifties he adopted the tailored jacket typical of intellectuals and artists of the period, worn with a turtleneck sweater or a V-neck sweater without a tie; in the sixties, this look was replaced by blazers and jeans, often worn with boots; at the beginning of the seventies he let his hair grow, wore looser clothes, experimented with extravagant accessories and pendants; in the eighties the colors got brighter … Then the years began to pass more slowly; tones changed; fabrics changed. Ever since I can remember, he always owned at least one suit, but his frequent weight swings meant that he couldn’t wear it for long. When he had to dress up, he just added a jacket and a tie to jeans. If solemnity was required, the jacket would be classic, wool or silk, but if the occasion permitted—say, one of his own openings—he was bolder and dug out some gaudy specimen from his collection of tacky ties bought in New York. In winter he wore a military or Barbour jacket; he liked it to have inside pockets, zippered if possible. He wore unremarkable shoes, loafers with rubber soles or moccasins. He kept his keys on a carabiner, hanging from a belt loop, and he carried shoulder bags. In the seventies and eighties they were made of brown leather, which he brushed until it shone, and beginning in the nineties, they were of black fabric, matching the dark clothes he had begun to wear not so much according to the dictates of fashion, but in order to hide his girth. Outside, he walked with a hand on his bag to protect it. At my apartment and his, he always left it at his feet so that it would be nearby whenever he might need it. In it he kept his wallet, an agenda, the case and chamois cloth for his glasses, a notebook, tissues …

  * * *

  He hated any kind of distinguishing feature denoting class or group differences.

  * * *

  He liked his comforts. He liked comfortable and well-decorated houses, and he liked pretty things, liked to possess them. He was a fetishist, not a collector; he didn’t accumulate. He was attracted to antiques, though he never lost the pop sensibility that made him tolerant of kitsch. He had an eye that could take almost any object out of context and bestow upon it a singularity it had previously lacked. He had no time for the ostentatious or the pretentious, nor did he let himself be seduced by contemporary versions of classic modern furniture. He had a Breuer tube chair, but his was an original. He didn’t seek out specific pieces. He preferred serendipitous finds. Actually, his decorating style, with its integration of diverse elements, was reminiscent of his later paintings. He was always seeing things from a new angle, discovering an unexpected side—of an Elizabethan desk, a religious carv
ing, the vertebra of a whale, a Japanese engraving, a polka-dotted sixties lounge chair, some souvenir … He bought English and American design magazines, and every Sunday morning at eight he visited the Rastro in search of bargains. His greatest domestic sins were committed when he let himself be carried away by whims at antique shops or auction halls, and his trips almost always yielded some piece that for a while sat enthroned in a prominent spot in his house.

  * * *

  He was curious about almost everything.

  * * *

  He was a cultured man, it goes without saying.

  * * *

  When he was young, and into his thirties, he was a conscientious and up-to-the-minute reader of fiction and poetry and essays, but little by little he was overcome by laziness and became more of a dilettante, fussier. He asked me to recommend books for him, lend them to him, but since he almost never actually read them and was slow to return them, I seldom did.

  * * *

  He liked Cioran.

  * * *

  He liked Madrid, the city where he was born, and he liked to read books about it.

  * * *

  He had seen good American and European postwar films, Bergman, nouvelle vague, Italian neorrealism, but as the years went by—and this was true for him with fiction as well—he gradually developed a kind of distaste for plots that were too involved, especially those dense with tangled sentiment.

  * * *

  He preferred humor. He liked Buster Keaton, he liked Charlot, he liked the Marx Brothers, he liked Cantinflas, he liked Tati, he liked Jerry Lewis, he liked Woody Allen, he liked Benny Hill, he liked Mr. Bean, he liked Tip y Coll, he liked Faemino y Cansado.

  * * *

  His friends say that he was a good correspondent, that his letters were witty and amusing. And yet when he had to write about painting, he was overcome by modesty. It wasn’t his thing to play the expert, pontificate.

  * * *

  Like so many men of his generation, he was something of an erotomaniac. For a while he collected old erotic postcards, and his library never lacked for good photography collections of contemporary nudes. On my first trip to Paris on my own, when I was seventeen, I bought him a book of 1890s erotic daguerrotypes, titled—I believe—Kaleidoscope.

  * * *

  In addition to Spanish, he spoke English and French. Not fluently, for he had hardly studied them, but confidently—well enough to read and carry on a conversation.

  * * *

  Beginning with his first show in 1959, he moved from abstract expressionism through informalism, through the so-called new figurative art, through pop art. In his best work, over the last twenty years, he favored abstraction, incorporating into it written words and small figurative elements that, following a certain initial lyricism, gradually became part of an increasingly sharp play of planes. The expressionist inheritance of his paintings can be seen in their gesturalism, and as a result, they never seemed especially labored. And yet that was what he was: laborious. He had excessive facility, and he struggled against it with fierce tenacity. On his lips, the worst criticism he could muster for one of his own works was gemlike. His understanding of painting was too deep to allow him to settle for some decorative or complacent attempt that didn’t reflect the tension that arises from true works of art. Alone in front of the canvas, he thought not about his rivals, but about his masters. He yearned for simplicity (sometimes simple complication), but he arrived at it by tortuous paths. Hidden beneath many of his paintings, under layers of paint, are several earlier paintings. In general, when a painting didn’t come out right the first time—his greatest joy—he circled it, closing in on it obsessively until it did come out right. Hardly ever was he able to abandon a painting.

  After his return to painting in the mid-eighties, he usually worked in the mornings. He painted on the floor, with acrylics. Listening to music. I never saw him at these moments, but I understand that he prowled around for a while preparing his materials, studying the canvas, and that once he had begun, he alternated between a deep absorption in his task and frequent pauses during which he sat and contemplated the painting. If he got stuck, the pause was longer, and he turned to something else for a breath of fresh air. In recent years he cut pictures out of the newspaper, pictures that said something to him, pictures of cardinals descending a staircase, of anonymous people, of politicians at their podiums, of animals, and he glued them into a notebook, labeling them with the date.

  The floor of his studio was covered in paint spatters, drips in every shape and color, the outlines of pieces of card that he’d painted without worrying about going over the edges with the brush, sticky spots, and heaps of clots where a pot of paint had spilled. From the walls hung pieces of tape that he used to trace straight lines in his paintings, and every object—his tools, of course, but also the radio and the telephone—was covered in splashes of paint.

  * * *

  He was handy, but not meticulous, and like all those who tend toward disorder, he tried to assign each of his possessions a place. In the studio this was clearly impossible, but everywhere else in the house he managed it. Each photograph, each book, each medicine was easy to find. In his bedroom, he was especially pleased with a 1940s dresser in whose many drawers he kept everything from a shoehorn and his headphones to the wristwatches (never expensive, almost always eccentric) that he retired one by one. Until recently, as a final testament to his departure, at my mother’s house we kept a drawerful of his X-rays.

  * * *

  He was an iconoclast and he was irritated by commonplaces, but that doesn’t mean he rejected the past. It held an attraction for him. I wrote this somewhat unthinkingly, but I realize that it’s true. He read history; he had a fondness for the whole genre of biography—memoirs, collections of letters, diaries—and when he traveled or stayed awhile somewhere, he researched it thoroughly. At his country house he spent endless afternoons going through two chests he found in the cellar that were full of the papers of previous inhabitants. Everything merited his interest, from a 1910 boundary dispute to the price of wheat in 1930.

  * * *

  And yet he was terrified by anything that had to do with death, and especially occultism.

  * * *

  He was moderately superstitious and often wore good-luck charms. The final one was a crow’s bone that he removed from around his neck after he got sick, concluding that it brought him bad luck.

  * * *

  He liked music of all kinds. African, French chanson, bossa nova, jazz, reggae, salsa, flamenco, classical … He bragged jokingly about having danced better to rock and roll than anyone else in Spain, and up until nearly the very end, if he was happy he would get up from the sofa and improvise a few solo steps. He accused me of not knowing how to dance, though the truth is that we were never together on the right occasion, or at least an occasion that wasn’t forced.

  * * *

  He was competitive.

  * * *

  Not a day went by when he didn’t do the crossword puzzle in the paper, and if someone in his presence hadn’t completed a puzzle or was completing it too slowly, he would grab it and finish it himself.

  * * *

  He watched television, enjoyed it, and was irritated by the phoniness of other people’s public denial of the habit. He watched it after lunch as he dozed or did other things, and possibly at night.

  * * *

  At cheap restaurants he wiped his glass and silverware with a napkin. He was squeamish. If I touched my shoes or my feet, he scolded me; if I didn’t wash my hands before eating, he scolded me; if I touched a bar or strap unnecessarily on public transportation or touched anything on the street, he scolded me. He could be very scathing about it.

  * * *

  He was affectionate. Brusquely affectionate: his hasty pats on the back were intended to cancel out the ease with which he got choked up.

  * * *

  I have to pick up the chronological thread again because otherwise I’m afraid tha
t the distance I feel from the person I used to be will paralyze me and all my efforts will be in vain.

  From 1991 to 2002, it’s the same feelings all over again, and sometimes worse, the skein of mutual resentment growing tangled.

  From 1991 to 2002, I make frequent attempts to absolve and forget, turn over a new leaf, but something always happens to stir everything up again.

  From 1991 to 2002, there’s an extremely long period during which I’m in serious financial straits, during which I face responsibilities for which I’m not prepared, and the contrast with my father’s comfortable life wounds me. From 1990 to 2002, I often feel brushed aside by him, abandoned in my difficulties.

  In 1991, after a nearly sold-out show, my father buys me a stereo and heads to Peru and New York for a few months with the friend he met in Brazil. In 1991, when he returns, I tell him over the phone that while he was away, her children moved back into their house, and when I visit later, the friend he met in Brazil lashes out at me. She screams that I have no say there. She screams that the woman is the mistress of the house and she gives the keys to anyone she likes. Her rage grows, the insults mount, and there’s a moment when I break down and cry. It bothers me that one of her children witnesses it all, and that after a few weak attempts, my father doesn’t stand up for me. For days I don’t pick up the phone when he calls, and when we see each other at last, he brings me a set of house keys on a ring to which he’s tied a beach stone. Some time later, however, I discover that the friend he met in Brazil has replaced the lock on the door that separates the entryway from the rest of the house. When I point this out to my father, he claims that the door in question is never locked and that he doesn’t have a key to it either. When I tell him how absurd that is, he says he doesn’t care, that if he ever finds it locked, he’ll break it down himself. Soon afterward, he actually does, but the door is repaired and the lock changed.

  In 1991 there are a few months when I don’t see my father.

  In 1991, one morning when I’m especially tired of myself, on my way out of class I notice a girl, in red lipstick and a beige coat, sitting on the stairs, and because of her I become a regular at the university library and cafeteria.