Everybody tells me so: when I arrive at the hospital, his face changes.
* * *
There are places I’ve never been and places I never want to go. I have to take the bird’s-eye view.
This is a story about two people, but I’m the only one telling it. My father wouldn’t tell it.
My father kept quiet about almost everything. My father was shy, introverted, and melancholy by nature.
So am I.
One of his multiple birthrights.
We resemble each other.
We resemble each other greatly, but sometimes I have the feeling that I got the worst of him. The gloom, the conformism, the laziness, the inability to get ahead, the fear.
And the best? Our dark sides are similar, but the light comes to us from different places.
My father was shy, introverted, and melancholy by nature, but that doesn’t mean he was sad. He hated any kind of solemnity, including the solemnity bred of sadness. His main obsession, it’s fair to say, was being happy. He harbored all kinds of doubts about himself and was always grappling with them, but just as zealously he sought distraction, sought to brush his doubts aside. Humor was his tool, the territory in which he moved most easily. He used it to defuse potential conflict, to avoid the gaze of others, to shine in public, to demand affection, to offer affection, to judge the world. Also to defend himself. When he was cornered and forced into a prickly conversation, his initial tactic for dodging blows was a humorous remark. It was his way of asking for forgiveness and obtaining it before running into a dead end. It was his way of buying time when he felt corralled, before a blowup, since his incapacity for dialogue when he was questioned often led to fits of anger.
Since he avoided the spotlight, his jokes weren’t stagy; he didn’t seek the coda of a laugh. He preferred to wield irony—an irony that could be devastating when he was talking about things that really mattered to him—and, even more frequently when among friends, he resorted to self-mockery, as when he affected the voice of a child to make his demands for love or to respond to those made of him.
I think that what he was hiding was a pronounced, paralyzing sense of pride. Many of his character traits embarrassed him, beginning with sentimentalism, and he put all his energy into hiding them, keeping them safe from prying eyes. That was why he avoided conversations that were too emotionally charged: he feared that his true self would surface, that a tear would escape him or one remark would lead to another until he ended up saying something he didn’t want to say. In fact, what embarrassed him most, and what his overdeveloped sense of pride was at most pains to conceal, was that he saw himself as weak. Sentimentalism was something he considered to be part of that weakness, along with other things I can only guess at. The central one: his lack of assurance in facing the practical questions of life, of which I—as his son—was a constant reminder.
For years I accused him of being an egoist, and he was. But it wasn’t the egoism of someone who loves only himself, who doesn’t care what happens to anyone else; it was the egoism of someone who does care, even too much, but who has a hard time stepping up if his life will be affected.
Did our similarities get in the way of our relationship? I’m not even sure they’re real and not a pretense that I clung to in times when nothing else seemed to unite us.
Resemblances: inherited and learned. I’ve written about them before. In my second novel I loaned my narrator my perplexity about why we’re stuck with certain traits—attitudes and mannerisms especially—that seem too random to be genetic and too trivial to be learned.
Most of the odd resemblances I cited as examples in my novel were really my father’s and mine. I don’t include them here, because they’ve already been recorded, and when stripped of the mask of fiction, almost all of them embarrass me. I purposely chose them with a parodic slant because that’s what the tone of the novel demanded.
Of course, they aren’t the only traits we shared. Beyond those I’ve used in fiction and beyond our increasing physical resemblance, there are others. Learned and inherited. Both of us melancholy, both quick-tempered, both timid, both insecure, both sentimental, both skeptics, both pessimists, both solitary, both allergic to social climbers and posers, both sober, both slightly exhibitionistic, both stoic, both dreamers, both affectionate, both masculine, both heterosexual, both secretly feminine, both vulnerable, both compassionate, both obsessive, both split, both quiet, both hobbled and thrown off-balance by an excessive awareness of our own limitations.
That’s part of what I inherited from him. The strange thing is that I could hardly have received it by contagion, having spent so little time living with him. Did it come to me in my genes, or did life mold us similarly even though our circumstances were different? He, a motherless child with older sisters, and I, an only child of separated parents; he, a creature of privilege until suddenly he wasn’t, and I, spoiled and pampered until I was made a skeptic by the fragility of the good life my mother and I shared and by the times we plummeted into the void, as well as by my dissatisfaction with him. Maybe that’s it: different circumstances with comparable effects. Or it might be that the resemblance isn’t so great, as I’ve said. That it’s nothing but an old formula for strengthening the bonds between us, recovered now through the subterfuges of mourning. As if I were trying to eliminate our differences in order to hold on to him, to make the line “Your father lives in you now”—which brought me unexpected consolation and that I could even feel physically—come true.
I don’t think that’s it. I think we are alike, even though there’s no way that all the traits we share could have been handed down to me directly from him; similarly, it wasn’t rejection of him that caused me to be inspired by the ways in which we were different, the things that set us apart: he more of a hedonist, more open-minded, more curious, more voracious, more virile; I more malleable, more chameleonic, warier, stronger, more capable, more independent. Less wounded.
It’s no accident that I’ve written “less wounded.” For years I wouldn’t admit it; for years, when I had him permanently in the dock, I tried to undermine any justification that might excuse his behavior. If he was wounded, I was more wounded; if his life had been hard, mine was harder; if he had something to complain about, I had more to complain about. He might have been mistreated by life, I thought, but he had mistreated me. Now I realize that this way of thinking itself proved that I’d had an advantage over him. I had him to rebel against, to build myself up against.
Competing with him, thinking that I was better than he was, gave me the impetus that so many times I would otherwise have lacked. Pitting myself against him and drawing strength from my rage, I gathered weapons to survive in the world. Pitting myself against him and drawing strength from my rage, I came up with plots for my stories; pitting myself against him, it’s even likely that I became a writer. After all, wasn’t the hatching of my dream and the switch to my mother’s world a consequence of my prolonged rebellion against having to give up the best playroom I ever had: his painter’s studio?
But that’s not all I got from him. What I got also includes what I really did learn.
Of what we shared, it’s hard to say which things—on his side—were a deliberate search for common ground, and which—on mine—were an attempt to emulate him.
For an endless period—almost my entire adult life—he exasperated me. He exasperated me more than anyone ever has. He exasperated me so much that for long periods I didn’t want to see him; just hearing his voice on the phone put me in a bad mood. I was outraged by his resignation, his conformism, the secrets he kept from me. I was outraged by his aloofness, his slipperiness, the way he ignored my arguments. I was outraged by his lack of understanding. I was outraged by his sense of superiority, his social clumsiness, his self-absorption. I was outraged by how fat he was, by the way he dressed, by his increasingly bourgeois life. I was outraged that in order to further refine his irritating stoicism, he had abandoned parts of himself that seeme
d more attractive to me than what he let me see in that endless stage of our life. It’s fair to say that I despised him. So great was my anger at times.
And yet practically all the faults I accused him of were faults of omission. His guilt lay not in what he did, but in what he failed to do, and especially what he failed to do for me. But even there I didn’t consider him to be completely guilty. His sin was having surrendered, having succumbed. The true guilty party, I concluded, was the friend he met in Brazil. His suffering was proof of it. If he had been the one driving it all, he wouldn’t have felt so bad. But he did. He blamed me, I suppose, for being immature, willful, demanding, but I always believed that when he turned out the lights at night, at the mercy of the radio playing in the background, he forgave me and understood me.
That was the excuse that made it possible for me not to burn the bridges between us.
That was my escape route back to him.
And that’s why I could admire him, even though sometimes I despised him.
And I did admire him.
Because it was all a mistake. Because it’s likely that if I hadn’t needed him so much, if I hadn’t missed him so much, if I hadn’t been so conscious of my mother’s and my vulnerability, I wouldn’t have been hurt in the same way by his desertions.
All I wanted was more of him; all I wanted was to spend more time with him.
Because I liked him, because I needed him, because since I was very little I remember adopting his opinions and making them my own; because if I know how to travel, if I know how to cook, if I know how to hang a painting, if I know how to fix a lamp, if I know how to walk into an antique store or a furniture store and distinguish the authentic from the fake, if I know that the world is round and that nature (nature: I owe that to him too) doesn’t make some languages better than others or some countries better than others or some religions better than others, if I know how wrong it is not to rise above one’s situation, I owe it in part to him.
All of this though I may have considered myself to be better at everything he taught me, though I may have girded myself in the material hardship of my daily life and intimately despised the comforts for which I believed he had betrayed me.
I inherited his toolbox, and after he left home I had to stand in for him in every instance where domestic equilibrium demanded it, but I never got used to his absence. If I had, who can say whether he would matter to me as much as he does? If I had lived with him every day, I might not have felt such lasting admiration for him.
I wonder, too, whether, in my perpetual anger at him, I didn’t blame him for things that weren’t his fault; I wonder whether in fact he really was the only one responsible for the rift between us; I wonder whether adversity drove me to make unreasonable demands; I wonder why, considering that I believed myself to be superior to him in nearly every way, I couldn’t have taken the crucial step sooner.
But I was weak, I felt alone, and until my life was more or less on track, I couldn’t forgive and forget. I had to grow up. I had to accept the way things were, stop thinking about my mother and me, stop worrying about what would happen to us.
The rage I would have saved myself.
And the yearning.
I liked to listen to him talk about painting, go to shows with him; I liked to tag along with him at flea markets, stop in at antique shops or almost any kind of shop, guess what would catch his eye and what he would sneer at; I liked to catch even the slightest remark that he let slip when his guard was down, learn what stimuli he responded to; I liked to watch him with his friends, to delight in the provocative firmness with which he expressed his almost always heterodox views; I liked to listen to music, go to the movies, and drink at the bar with him; I liked to watch television, to walk with him; I liked it when he considered me an equal, an artist, when he let me in on his secrets, when he included me in his plans; I liked to match his dilettantish hedonism, his omnivorous tastes; I liked it when he instructed me, valued my judgment, asked my advice; I liked it when he noticed seeds in me that he had sown, liked to surprise him with my assimilation of his teachings; I liked it that he had in me a listener whose interest increased the less he confided; I liked him to celebrate my successes; I liked to invade his territory, buy something he had bought, go somewhere he would have liked to go, do something he would never have done.
I needed his recognition.
I wanted to learn, to be like him, and I imitated him; of course I did. I tried to emulate him.
But I hardly ever succeeded. I lacked so much of the knowledge that I know he possessed. We squandered so many opportunities. We hardly ever permitted ourselves to be together, and most of those times we were so paralyzed that all we could focus on was outmaneuvering each other. We hardly ever went to restaurants or record stores or out for walks, hardly ever traveled together, hardly ever spent time at the beach (absurd even to mention it).
His fault and mine. His fault for not realizing that this was what I most desired, his fault for doling it out by the dropperful, sheepishly, secretly, in the shadow of his other life, his married life, and my fault for choking the already scanty flow with my perennial anger.
I almost never saw him cook, except for very basic dishes, but the one time he invited me to a dinner at his house he served tzatziki and hummus as an appetizer, and days later I asked for the recipe so that I could make it myself. Another time I discovered a jar of mango chutney in his refrigerator, and soon afterward there was an identical jar in mine.
I didn’t have the money to buy a house for myself, but when I played the lottery, the houses that my imagination bought were modeled after his.
When he asked me for the jointed wooden mannequin of the Virgin Mary, a piece he had left at my mother’s house, I returned it to him, of course, but it wasn’t long before I got one for myself that was as much like his as possible.
We might not talk for weeks, but each morning when I sat down at my desk, I imagined him in his studio, faced with difficulties similar to mine.
And I competed with him.
And I wanted to be better than he was, to show him that I could write and have fun and be a good son and look after my mother without giving up anything, that life didn’t scare me.
Too much intensity.
* * *
The migratory life. My migratory life will continue until July 2006. Every seven days, on average, I’m back in Madrid. After the difficult month of February, in which we accustom ourselves to the routine of treatment, my father keeping watch over himself and I keeping watch over him, in March everything improves. He tolerates the chemotherapy well, he’s strong and optimistic, and as a result, he’s able to lead a more or less normal life. When I’m in Madrid, I accompany him to the hospital; we invent nicknames for the people we’ve come to recognize (Miss Dearly Beloved, a patient who comes with her husband and brother; Miss Dynamo, a nurse who does everything eagerly and enthusiastically); we see shows; we go for walks; we go to the movies (Brokeback Mountain, Crash) … Even his relationship with the friend he met in Brazil, though shaky and punctuated with clashes, seems calmer.
Around this time, on an impulse after a chemotherapy session, he buys himself an ergonomic recliner, which he later nearly returns for being too ugly, but which, with my encouragement, he ends up holding on to throughout his illness. Nestled into it, chewing his fingernails, his feet hooked around the footrest, he’ll spend infinite hours each day watching television. Which is all he’s able to do later, when his mind and body give out.
But that state of collapse has yet to come. He’s still active and alert, and at the end of March his final show goes up. The day of the opening, as always, the friend he met in Brazil makes it her job to take pictures of all those present, and as always, she avoids taking my picture, something that he uses as ammunition in one of their subsequent spats. Though the opening is well attended, sales are modest. Three or four paintings, if I remember correctly, none of them very big. To make matters worse, one of the most
important arts sections doesn’t publish a review at all, and even after I make the requisite phone calls, the paper I write for gives the show scarcely half a column of type, with a misleading headline, and the painting featured in the accompanying illustration is printed backward. He’s greatly disappointed, and so am I. I blame myself for not having insisted more, for not knowing how to get around the editor’s lack of enthusiasm. I try to make up for it by bringing people, by seeking out buyers. About one of them, a famous model I know through friends, my father permits himself to boast to the gallery owners without mentioning that the contact is mine. He tells me this himself with a laugh, flaunting his naked vanity. In a way, he acts like a child who’s forbidden nothing, as if his pranks and misbehavior were my idea. For the first time, I’m fully the accomplice I never was before.
Father and Son Page 11
