Father and Son

by Marcos Giralt Torrente

  The apparent dashing of the perhaps excessive hopes he had pinned on the show leaves him deflated. Even so, he still goes up to his studio to paint. He paints to forget, to keep making, to cling to life, to set things right. He paints to escape the worries that never cease.

  Around this time, at the beginning of April, I bring him to spend a week in the Valencia town where I live with my wife when I’m not with him. Disoriented, not used to being my guest, he thanks us exaggeratedly for everything: the food, the walks, the movie sessions—the freedom, essentially, we give him to decide what to do at any given moment. At the train station on the way back to Madrid, when he sees a girl with a brightly colored bag of gummy candies, he expresses a passing interest in trying them. It’s my wife who, despite his demurrals, goes with him to the store and buys him a similar bag. He wolfs down the contents on the train, and then I buy him a couple of bourbon and Cokes. It’s our way of telling him that everything is fine, that he isn’t as sick as he thinks he is.

  Around this time, I go with him to an opening at a bank. The show is a selection of contemporary Spanish painting. Hanging on the walls are paintings by several generations of artists, not including my father, and among the guests are museum directors and top critics. The cocktail reception comes to a hilarious end when the floor of the tent where it’s held begins to sag under the weight of the arriving guests. Safe in a corner, margaritas in hand, bitter but cheerful, we watch the ludicrous scene.

  Around this time, I continue my efforts to get my wife a transfer to Madrid for the following school year so that I can put an end to my migratory life, as my father constantly encourages me to do. I compose a blunt official request that makes my wife cry, in which I cite his need for care, and meanwhile I keep calling anyone who might be able to pull strings.

  In April, too, toward the end of the month, I give my Thyssen lecture on Kurt Schwitters. My father has already read it, but he’s proud and moved when we leave the museum. His friends and mine are there, his sister is there, his cousins are there, my mother is there, my wife is there, my wife’s sister is there.

  Days later, as April turns into May, he confides that he has two wishes, contradicting the apparent docility with which he’s let himself be deceived about his illness: he wants to apostatize, to renounce the Catholic faith into which he was baptized, erase himself from the church’s records, and he wants to make a living will requesting that his life not be artificially prolonged and that, if it comes to it, euthanasia be administered. He takes care of the former himself after overcoming a few hurdles, which he tells me about, delighting in the folly of the successive clergymen who try to make him change his mind. For the latter he needs the participation of someone who will represent him when he can no longer make decisions for himself. Neither when he informs me of this—taking for granted that the representative will be me—nor when, days later, we go to a notary to draw up the document, does he show the slightest sign of grief. On the contrary. It isn’t just that the decision brings him relief; if it weren’t for the seriousness of the matter, one might say that it elates him. He even laughs in glee about an initial failed attempt to draw up the papers with a notary whom we chose at random and from whose office we fled, joking about his Christian last name, when we discovered that he wasn’t willing to do what we asked.

  Around this time, in May, the uneasy armistice that he seemed to have reached with the friend he met in Brazil begins to splinter. They’ve put their shared house up for sale on an Internet site, and although he trusts that they’ll keep living together, he doesn’t yet understand her drive to sell. Regarding his worries about leaving the house and what a headache it will be to find a place for the paintings that he stores in the top-floor studio, he keeps me insistently up to date. Never, however, does he spell out the perverse logic evident behind her maneuvers; I don’t know whether he hasn’t processed it or whether, suspicious and fearful of ill omens, he prefers to feign ignorance. Either way, it’s surprising but not inexplicable that she insists on selling; it’s surprising but not inexplicable that despite her natural inclination to save, she doesn’t want to buy a new house but rather suggests that they rent; it’s surprising but not inexplicable that she hasn’t foreseen that he’ll need a place to continue to paint as long as he’s able. The explanation is simple, but I can’t point it out to my father, because doing so would be like telling him that he really is going to die. So I keep my mouth shut and wait, insisting only—since it’s a way of giving him hope—that he should earmark part of the money that he gets from selling the house for the purchase of a studio where he can keep working. Her response is that it can be rented, too, but my father, whether because mistrust has set in or because he’s worried about the fate of his paintings, stands firm. Then begins an endless back-and-forth in which the friend he met in Brazil, offering to help him find a studio, tries to reduce the amount set aside for it by searching for something far from the city center, while I argue for a place nearby that he can actually use. More hard bargaining accompanies the initial attempts to sell the house, which she wants to do without his help, nearly making them the victims of an elaborate scam by some alleged Israeli investors who contact her by email.

  And meanwhile, my father has to keep struggling with the phantoms his illness conjures up. His doubts are constant, as are his questions and the traps he sets to catch me out. He seems to want the truth, but he wants it to favor him, and so long as I give him half-truths and offer him help and support, he continues to turn to me, to make me his main support. Doing this doesn’t trouble my conscience. I give him what I believe he wants, never asking myself whether I’m doing right. I fool myself, too; I too want to believe that if he keeps fighting, he might still live for a few years. I operate in a permanent daze, with just two goals: to ensure that he suffers as little as possible and to ensure that the friend he met in Brazil doesn’t leave him penniless. Though the two objectives occasionally coincide, they aren’t identical. Untangling them isn’t easy, and I often make mistakes that I soon regret.

  I let things come as they may. Possibly I force him to be too vigilant, thus obliging him to contemplate what I’d actually prefer that he not contemplate: what’s behind the behavior of the friend he met in Brazil.

  Around this time, midway through May, we take a night train to Galicia to see the work being done on my mother’s future house, where she’ll retire at the end of the year. We have dinner in our compartment in the sleeper car, a picnic prepared by me that concludes with whiskey from a flask. In the morning we spend a few hours in Santiago, and that afternoon, when we come to the town where the house is, I can see his surprise at what my mother and I have been able to do. A whole lifetime of lack of trust in us and subsequent flight—wiped away on the spot. Later I’ll learn that the impression was lasting, as for months he proclaimed his admiration for our worker-ant labors to anyone who would listen.

  Around this time, a trustworthy notary is found, and he signs the living will that was delayed after our escape from the other notary’s office.

  Around this time, at the end of May, I have to decide whether to accept the invitation of an Italian foundation to write for two months at a villa in Tuscany. At first I can’t bring myself to abandon my father, but with his encouragement I accept a stay for half of the time after convincing a friend of his to take my place at the bimonthly chemotherapy sessions. In the same room where Bruce Chatwin wrote some of his books, I spend the month of June in Tuscany, starting and almost finishing a story that has nothing to do with what I’m living through. Meanwhile, thanks to a friend of my father’s, my wife’s transfer to Madrid for the upcoming school year seems feasible for the first time, and along with it, the end of my migratory life. Meanwhile, my father calls me frequently. I know that he’s still painting almost every morning. I know that he takes a short trip or two with the friend he met in Brazil, and that on one of these trips he drives the car. I know that they find buyers for the house at last. I know that he demand
s that the money due to them be paid in two separate checks, and that because of this and other things, relations between them grow more acrimonious.

  I return from Italy on July 5, full of uncertainty about the immediate future. In view of the fact that my father plans to spend August with the friend he met in Brazil at her house in the south, I hesitate between a similar solution that will allow me to continue to accompany him on visits to the hospital, or a trip with my wife—intended as compensation for my constant absences—to Kenya, where my father’s older sister has been living for years. But based on a routine scan, which shows that the tumor is active again, the doctors halt his treatment with plans to start a new one in September; and in the office that same day, to mitigate the effect of the news, I ask my father whether he’s capable of traveling to Kenya. The answer is yes, and it’s immediately clear how excited he is by this unexpected prospect. The friend he met in Brazil chooses not to come, but he decides that he will. Meanwhile, the buyers of the house reach a decision too, and on July 10 the contract is signed and my father receives his part of the down payment. The next day, he asks me to go with him to the bank to deposit it, and he makes me a cosigner on his account.

  The trip to Kenya is planned for the end of the month, and on the fifteenth, my father goes with the friend he met in Brazil to her beach house. He returns to Madrid on the eve of our trip. More than tired, he’s heavyhearted. He doesn’t say so, but it’s clear that a line has been crossed. With him he’s brought a marquetry box holding four old bullfighter figurines, the only thing he managed to grab reflexively when, minutes before he got into a taxi to the train station, the friend he met in Brazil, like someone granting a onetime chance, offered to let him take whatever he wanted from a house that he thought of as his, too, a house that was absolutely crammed with paintings, furniture, and objects he’d amassed over the years.

  In Kenya, things go from bad to worse.

  In Kenya we have one good week, during which he’s giddy, up for everything; we visit Nairobi and Mombasa and go on a short safari, but our luck changes after a hellish bus ride that can be blamed solely on my desire to present him with interesting experiences. When we reach the island where my aunt lives, he’s running a fever; he’s done in. When he doesn’t feel better with rest, we fear that it’s a resurgence of the illness or that—the height of bad luck—he’s caught malaria. We’re so terrified by the former possibility that we come to hope that it’s the latter, and it’s hard for us to hide our disappointment when he’s tested at a dispensary and the test comes back negative. Obliged to fear the worst, we visit a bare-bones private clinic where the one and only doctor, wearing a Barça T-shirt, attends with admirable courtesy to our first-world concerns. He takes my father’s blood pressure, instructs a veiled Muslim nurse to draw blood, and examines it under a microscope. This is all he can do for us, and like all doctors when they don’t know what to do and the only thing that matters is that they seem to be doing something, he does it in full awareness of its futility. Later, I get in touch through my mother with my father’s oncologist, and though he calms us by saying that he doesn’t think it’s tumor fever but instead a kidney inflammation brought on by the jolting of the bus, I secretly begin to think about repatriation. Meanwhile, he tries his best to put on a show of strength. He takes walks around the medina, comes to the beach, and even attempts once or twice to go for a sail, but every evening the fever makes its punctual appearance. Each morning we think that it won’t come, and it almost always does. And yet, so hard does he try not to let us down, or so badly does he want to recover that he manages to fool me, and sometimes I grow impatient when he limps behind or shows little interest in the plans I’m constantly devising for him. Still, there are good days. Still, he laughs often and freely. Still, he’s in on all kinds of mischief. The main thing he frets over: buying gifts for his nurses and doctors at the hospital.

  * * *

  If this were fiction, I should already be lowering the sails.

  Have I gotten to where I wanted to go?

  The reasons that make you start writing a book aren’t necessarily the same ones that make you keep going when you’re halfway through, or the ones that make you end it. In the end, you just want to get to the end.

  That’s where I am.

  I just want to get to the end. The end of the book. The end of my father. The end of my life with him.

  To know where we got stuck—that’s what I said I wanted at the beginning.

  A rhetorical device.

  We got stuck in lots of ways. We got stuck where everyone gets stuck. We got stuck because we thought that life was infinite, which is an error in calculation that prompts the worst missteps. We got stuck because he didn’t have the stamina to hold on to me and I didn’t have the courage to let go. We got stuck because he was brought up to keep quiet, to avoid calling things by their names, and I was raised in the world of my mother, which was a world of words. We got stuck because we weren’t the same, or very different either. We got stuck because he had shrunk the perimeter of his defenses to a handspan and I still believed in fighting battles on open ground. We got stuck because his consummate solipsism made him accept the unspoken and I demanded action. We got stuck because we both thought we deserved more than we had. We got stuck because he didn’t know how to grow up and I didn’t either. We got stuck because we shared my mother, someone he might have preferred to be a distant memory if I hadn’t existed, but who for me was a daily reality that I felt obliged to defend and vindicate beyond the necessary. We got stuck because, as a result of this, we had different views of the past. We got stuck because I made him the creditor of a debt that I tried to call in when it had already expired. We got stuck because life’s greatest lessons often come too late.

  Such a lot of life. Of stuck life.

  What did we learn in the final stretch?

  That we wasted time. And that things always have an end, and when that end comes, it’s better if it finds us at peace.

  What everyone always and forever knows.

  And what we knew as well as anyone.

  Is this what we spent our final year doing? Making sure that when the end came, we would be at peace with each other?

  Was it all a fiction? A charade?

  What would our future lives have been like if the boundary imposed by his death had suddenly been erased? A new and miraculous cure; his sudden recovery.

  I wouldn’t have had the strength to go on. He wouldn’t have had the stamina to go on.

  We would have gone back to being what we were.

  Less at odds, more conciliatory, but unchanged.

  There was no room for anything else.

  Was there space for him in my life? Would he have been capable of making a separate life for himself?

  I think it was a conscious choice, being the way he was with me in the end; he knew what he was doing and why.

  Because he was going to die.

  I’ve often wondered how well I succeeded in my efforts to keep him in the dark.

  But I know I failed.

  I think he was asking to be deceived and that he deceived himself; it’s likely that when he got sick, he bet on the youngest and most dependable horse, the one that could be relied on for what was to come, but I think that he didn’t deceive himself fully, and deep down he knew.

  And because he knew, he did what he did.

  He wanted to close the circle as best he could.

  Even in the face of doubt.

  And the circle is closed.

  Who worked hardest for it?

  He did.

  Who was in the biggest hurry?

  He was.

  Who risked more?

  He did.

  It wasn’t easy. Easy would have been what he didn’t do.

  My devotion had a day after. His didn’t.

  And there was a reward for me, though it was only what tradition or common sense dictates.

  I’d have done the same if I’d known t
hat I wouldn’t get it (as it was, for a long time I didn’t know that I would). Though it’s likely that in that case the circle wouldn’t have closed. Not for me and not for him.

  And what about her, the friend my father met in Brazil? This is a book about two people, as I’ve said, and it’s not my aim to unearth her motives. Why did she act the way she did? Was it greed, immaturity, egoism? Whatever the determining factor, it doesn’t matter. Maybe greed was the childish tool of her egoism that she wielded to enable her to step out of the picture, to reject a responsibility she was incapable of assuming. That’s the best-case scenario. Or worst case, maybe the failure of her egoistic aspirations was the immature fruit of her excessive greed.

  I can judge her, but it isn’t my mission to redeem her or condemn her.

  More essential, anyway, is to determine the mark that her actions left on my father.

  And the mark changed over time.

  It began as incredulity, turned into silent disenchantment, and ended up as contemptuous indifference.

  Did he really not see it coming?

  When the signs were already alarming, he continued to make excuses for her.

  He made excuses for her in order to retroactively excuse himself.

  Or he made excuses for her because he wasn’t yet convinced that he was going to die, and knowing that I would be with him on every front of his illness, but not every front of his life, he still needed a life after his illness.

  Or he made excuses for her because he still believed her to be innocent. A schemer, with the brain of a mosquito, as he said, but innocent.

  That’s the answer, I think.