Father and Son

by Marcos Giralt Torrente

  I guess.

  Thus the confusion, the silent disenchantment, the contemptuous indifference. The great rancor with which he repaid her toward the end. His stubborn refusal to engage in dialogue with her. His ill will.

  There was no going back once he thought he saw her as she was. All his efforts were directed at keeping away from her.

  When he confronted his illness, when he contemplated the possibility of his death, it made him want to do right by me. And in the best of worlds, doing right by me shouldn’t have meant ruining things with her.

  But we don’t live in the best of worlds.

  And he saw her true face, and when he saw it, he pushed her away forever.

  And in a way it was as if he was relieved of a tension that had been building for a long time. As if the decision brought him new strength.

  But by that point there was no hope.

  And he knew it. By then he finally knew it.

  This brings me to a paradox: my father gave himself to me fully only when he knew that there was no hope, and to the extent that it was she who opened his eyes, I should be grateful to her. In fact, it could be said that she did me a favor without realizing it.

  But at what cost?

  It’s a question I’m afraid to answer.

  At the cost of obliging my father to face his fate, of stripping the veil from his eyes, of ensuring that if any possibility remained of keeping him deceived, that possibility was destroyed.

  Her behavior made it impossible for him to hope, and for a person so fragile, so fearful of almost everything, especially of death itself, this meant consigning him irrevocably to his fate.

  No matter what I did, no matter the time I spent reworking each piece of bad news—aided by my skill with words and his faulty memory—to make it seem neutral or even positive, the negative attitude of the friend he met in Brazil, who was so plainly gunning for the day after, was much more persuasive. I managed to deceive him for a long time, or rather for some stretches of that time, but there came a point when it was impossible to keep it up.

  The day my father gave the final no to the friend he met in Brazil was the day he gave a no to himself.

  Would his prospects have improved if he hadn’t had to give himself that no? Would he have lived longer? Would he have beaten the odds, those odds that always leave room for doubt, or so the doctors claim once they’ve delivered their miserable diagnosis and worse prognosis and—maybe with the intention of preventing the collapse of the patient and his caretakers—they allow themselves to extend the faintest possibility of hope?

  It’s clear that she robbed him of that remote possibility, or at least she made it permissible for us to think she had.

  But the previous paradox is cruel here.

  If I hadn’t become a threat, if I had wiped myself from the map, maybe she wouldn’t have revealed so plainly the future for which she was preparing, and my father could have continued to have faith.

  If I ask myself to what extent her abandonment of him, her preoccupation with the day after, led to the collapse of all hope, I also have to ask myself what might have happened if I hadn’t been so present. It’s just one link up the chain of cause and effect.

  And I do ask myself.

  I asked myself while it was all happening, before my father died; I continued to ask myself as I began this book; and though the question is now scarcely brighter than a distant lighthouse glimpsed in memory’s eye, I still ask myself.

  The intensity has lessened.

  The certainty of his death, even when it hadn’t come yet, established a reality so weighty and irrevocable, so different from any other reality I’d known, that speculating about what might have been became an arduous, unpleasant exercise.

  That’s the thing about death, that it’s irrevocable. And no matter how closely we’re touched by it, so long as it doesn’t take us, life asserts itself in the end.

  The dead leave sadness and not a few questions behind them. They oblige us to contemplate our own death and, at the same time, the futility of life, but our understanding fails us in the face of the inarguable reality that everything comes to an end, that there’s no redemption, that what wasn’t done can no longer be done. After a death that touches us closely, the days go by without improvement. Our bewilderment is as great as it was the first day. The only progress is forgetting and the persistence of life sneaking in through unexpected cracks.

  A little while ago, in David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, one of the books I’ve continued to read about mourning and parents, I noted that among family members of cancer patients it’s common to feel remorse for not having done enough. I was also told by a writer friend that sixty-five percent of the terminally ill are abandoned by their partners. The figure seems too high, but even if it were correct, my astonishment at what the friend my father met in Brazil did wouldn’t lessen, just as we don’t feel less remorse simply because many others also feel it.

  Rieff says that no one does everything that could be done, because it would mean giving up one’s own life. I did give up mine. I did do everything, and I probably did it not just for the sake of compassion or love, but to right old wrongs.

  They’re the ones that linger.

  I regret, as I’ve said, not having ended the tension between us sooner. I regret having made him suffer. I regret the lost time. I regret what was left unspoken. I regret having needed him to prove by deeds that he was my father and I his son. I regret having thought about his death. I regret having placed a symbolic value on material goods.

  Compared to this, any mistakes I may have made when he was sick pale in the light of my extreme devotion.

  I don’t regret having left him alone, because I never did.

  I don’t regret never telling him the truth about his illness. I believed that if he kept hoping, some chance still existed that he would be cured.

  But it wasn’t to be.

  Despite my efforts, he found out in the end, and hope vanished and any notion of beating the odds was an illusion.

  There was no room anymore for magical thinking, and still we refused to relinquish our respective roles, his of clinging to life and mine of persuading him that anything was possible.

  Why did we do it when there was no longer any hope?

  To close the circle, I suppose.

  Because to accept defeat by mutual accord, knowing that the end was so foreseeably near, would have diminished the magnitude of our mutual devotion.

  He didn’t hold back. His sense of guilt probably led him to believe that if he did right by me, he would be rewarded, but when it became clear that not even then would there be hope, he continued to give me his utmost.

  In this unvarnished account, there are things I can’t ignore, much as I might like: the friend he met in Brazil. It would have been best for all of us if she had passed the test, but she didn’t. That I refer to her in such a roundabout way is merely confirmation of the fact.

  * * *

  September comes. The final September.

  In September we finally manage to secure my wife a place at a school in Madrid for the start of the year. My migratory life ends, and my multifaceted life begins. In September, after our return from Kenya, my father continues to run a fever and has various intestinal complaints. In September, as in January, the doctors delay the beginning of the new treatment until he feels better. In September, afraid that it might be tumor fever, I’m once again treading the halls of the hospital that I know so well. In September, though my nudging is successful and they start the chemotherapy again, he doesn’t tolerate it as well as he did before. In September he no longer feels euphoria, but rather a new weariness often accompanied by nausea and fever. The good days that follow the bad aren’t very good at all. He gets tired, doesn’t go up to his studio. In September, as we’re returning from the hospital one afternoon, he breaks down for the first time and, amid tears of despair, tells me things I once used to fantasize about hearing, though said now and said
for the reason that they’re said, they break my heart. In September the sale of the house is confirmed. The closing will be in December, at the buyers’ request. In September the friend he met in Brazil rejects my final attempt to keep my father from having to take such a psychologically difficult step and warns him that if he wants her to take care of him, he’ll have to put his share of the money from the sale at her disposal. In September my father says no. In September, taken aback, incredulous, the friend my father met in Brazil asks me in his presence whom he’ll live with when they give up the house, and with barely contained rage, my father breaks in to say that it won’t be with her. In September, then, we draw up plans for our future together: he’ll live with my wife and me in the apartment that my mother will turn over to us when she leaves for Galicia in October, which means that work will need to be done, since the apartment has only one bathroom and my father wants one for his own use. In September the friend he met in Brazil begins to spirit away fixtures and objects, taking the most valuable furniture, too, and in response, each time I come to visit, my father entrusts me with some of his belongings for safekeeping. In September, after being woken one night by a loud noise and discovering that it’s her rummaging in his studio, my father entrusts me with the task of finding a place to keep his paintings. We take the most recent ones and his painting tools to a friend’s studio and we hire a storage company for the bulk of his work. The day before they pick it up, I help him go through his files, and he dumps most of his papers—personal letters, diaries, photographs—into two big plastic bags that little by little, dividing the contents into smaller bags, he takes out to the trash himself before I can go through with my plans to purge them. In September the keys to his car disappear. In September, upon returning from a chemotherapy session, he finds the house completely empty. The friend he met in Brazil has gone, leaving behind two mattresses, a dilapidated sofa, his ergonomic chair, and little else. In September my father doesn’t fall apart. Instead, when his sister, alarmed, comes to visit, he puts on an old Charles Trenet album and for a brief moment, smiling, takes a few turns to the music with one arm folded on his chest and the other outstretched as if he’s leading an invisible dance partner. In September he doesn’t want to leave the house until the sale is concluded, so my wife and I move in with him. In September the friend he met in Brazil frequently appears unannounced, lets herself in with her own key, and inquires about his health or proposes some plan as if nothing had happened. In September, knowing how painful these irruptions are for him, I suggest that he change the lock, but he refuses, saying that it will only cause more trouble. In September he gives the go-ahead for the purchase of a studio. In September we draw up plans for the renovation of my mother’s apartment, where we intend to live, and I start to look for an apartment to rent while the work is being done. In September, while my mother is going through her things in anticipation of her impending move, I embark on an initial cull of my own. I get rid of books, albums, pictures, letters. Practically everything seems superfluous in the certain knowledge that before long I’ll have to let go of something infinitely more important. I’m ruthless, the opposite of what I used to be. The more tied I feel to something, the more pleasure it gives me to be able to get rid of it.

  At the end of September I’m awarded a residency in Brittany, and again, my father insists that I accept at least a month out of the three I’ve been offered. I need it. The neglect of my writing weighs on me, I’ve reached my limit, and a break will help me be better prepared for what’s to come. My wife will continue to live with him, and my mother, putting off her departure for Galicia, will relieve her when necessary. Before I leave, he asks me to instruct them not to smother him by trying to make conversation. In my absence, which lasts for almost the entire month of October, he takes walks some mornings, goes out for drinks one Tuesday with his painter friends, attends the opening of a Sargent and Sorolla show at the Thyssen and a Picasso exhibition at the Prado. Most of the time, though, he’s at home, watching television from his ergonomic chair. He has closed down his studio, but even if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have the strength to paint. His diaries speak of sleepless nights. Encouraged by a friend, he accepts psychiatric help. Meanwhile, in an apartment in the port city of Saint-Nazaire, I try to write a story based on the life I’ve been living for nearly a year, but I can’t get past the first few pages. It feels like the worst kind of betrayal to employ the feelings inspired by his certain death in the service of fiction.

  In November, a whirl of activity awaits me upon my return. I travel with my mother to Galicia to help her get settled, and when I get back, I finish clearing out what she hasn’t taken with her. I haul junk and household items to Dumpsters; I sort through, tear up, and throw away papers; I sell books for cheap; I bring suitcases of clothes to a church; and I rid myself of keepsakes, at the same time piling up everything to which I still attach some value and covering the piles with plastic tarps. Next, I resume the search for an apartment where we can live temporarily once the sale of my father’s house goes through. One morning we return to the notary to have him sign a document giving me power of attorney for my father. He doesn’t want to see the friend he met in Brazil again, and he thinks that having me sign the papers as his representative will deal a blow to her pride. Once again I’m his constant companion, his helper in all things, and though sometimes he asks too much of me, he’s so grateful that he bridles if he thinks someone else is taking advantage of me or treating me unfairly. Whenever I have a difference of opinion with my mother or my wife, he immediately and uncritically takes my side. But there’s also time for entertainment, which I’m always urging on him without doing a very good job of gauging his strength: we frequently go out for lunch; one night we go to see the movie Capote, and days later, The Departed, with my wife; we visit the studios of a couple of painter friends who want to show him their latest work; we go to the Rastro one Sunday; and one evening, when an actress friend invites us to the theater, we find time for a visit to a nearby cultural center where there’s an exhibition of contemporary African painting. Sometimes we talk about the work being done on my mother’s apartment, where it’s presumed that we’ll live, going over the details. More and more often he asks me whether he’ll see it finished. At first this seems simply a ploy to furtively probe me about his condition, but in time it becomes an urgent plea, almost a litany. Like the way he tacks the adjective poor onto my name to let others know how appreciative he is of my tireless efforts. Most urgent, however, is the search for an apartment where we can live after the sale of the house. It isn’t an easy task, since we’ll need it for scarcely three months and conventional rentals can’t be had for less than a year. I know that he’ll consider an apartment hotel an extravagance, and indulging in it will alert him that this is an emergency situation, robbing him of a little more hope. At last, a friend of my wife’s rescues us from our fix by renting us two studios, one above the other, near the Plaza Mayor. In the one that can be reached by elevator, we’ll set up my father’s bedroom and the common areas, and my wife and I will sleep upstairs in the other. I feel as if I’ve passed a test, just as—ever since he’s been sick—I’ve felt when I overcome some obstacle. To consolidate my top marks, I buy a baby monitor, and before I confirm the rental with my wife’s friend, I check that the signal is strong enough to allow us to hear any sound coming from what will be his bedroom. I also decide that when the sale of his house has gone through, it’s best if he goes to Galicia to stay with my mother and doesn’t return until it’s all over, so that the leave-taking isn’t as traumatic and he doesn’t have to endure the upheaval of the move.

  * * *

  Sometimes those who are about to die rehearse or perform final acts that aren’t so much the epitaph that sums up a life as a way of making amends or settling a score that they believe is still pending.

  This was my greatest fear for a long time. In some sense—it’s clear to me now—I may have begun writing to exorcise it. I was afraid that
much of what my father did once he knew he was sick—first with hope and later with the growing conviction, whether articulated or not, that he was going to die—was part of a performance that had me in a privileged seat in the audience. I worried that not all his decisions had been arrived at naturally, as the expression of his desires, and that instead they were shaped by how he wanted to appear before others, especially me. It worried me that, as suggested by events previously discussed, he spent much of his time calculating how to rewrite a part of his life—in other words, that the urge to shape the coming months was fed by the need to correct the past, to strive for a death that would bring to a harmonious close everything in his life that was lacking in harmony; that in all he did, in the decisions he made, there was an element of overacting determined by a past that tormented him. Specifically, the part of his past with which I took issue.

  On the other hand, the possibility that there was no overacting or pretense, that he behaved the way he did out of conviction, which would suggest that he really did feel some remorse, was no less frightening. He hinted as much in a thousand ways toward the end. He regretted two things, he said. He didn’t rank them: having been inconstant in his career as a painter, allowing himself to be distracted by fleeting romantic conquests; and having neglected his family, for similar reasons.

  There’s a third possibility, complementary to the latter, which is that his sole intent was to surreptitiously indoctrinate me about my future, as if to say: what I did is what you shouldn’t do.

  Ultimately, my father faced death the way he had lived: close-lipped, in silence, entirely committed to the idea of himself that he always wanted to project, an idea that wasn’t sentimental in the least (though he himself was), that rejected any hint of self-importance, that was allergic to the notion of arousing compassion. Just as, in life, he was terrified of words, terrified of their capacity to reveal his inner self, in his illness, aside from brief laments or the occasional plea for consolation, he didn’t allow himself to speak of death. He fell apart only a few times: twice that I know of, and both times when he was alone with me. In public he never complained. Even when what was happening became too calamitous to ignore, he tried to assume an attitude of resignation. His only preparations, shortly after he was operated on—when the progression of the illness hadn’t yet made him give up hope of a cure—were to apostatize and make a living will. After those two procedures were completed, he retreated into silence and delegated to me everything that might be necessary from then on: doctors to see, places to live, life itself. He wanted nothing to do with anything. He made just one request of me: that when the moment came, instead of a funeral there would be a party at which his friends could raise a glass.