Father and Son

by Marcos Giralt Torrente

  Once he had accepted death, or at least the possibility of it, the only thing that seemed to trouble him was the image of himself that would linger in the minds of those who knew him. Beyond calling attention to his views on religion by making the symbolic gesture of apostatizing, beyond controlling his own demise to make certain—by means of the living will and my cooperation—that he wouldn’t continue to exist past the moment when his mind failed him, beyond orchestrating his own farewell ceremony, his wish was to seem strong in the face of adversity, and in fact he was strong. Strong and brave: I don’t think there’s anyone who dealt with him who thinks otherwise. Not even the doctors or the nurses. With all of them, even in the worst moments when he was a shadow of his former self, he stood firm. He always had a joke ready to fill the silence left by words that remain unspoken when there’s no need to state what’s already plain. He sought strength in this, in his need to rise to the idea he wanted to convey of himself, and though the inner self he concealed was much darker and his nights and reflections were doubtless long and desolate, he found what he sought.

  He was always observing himself from a distance, always watching himself. He wanted to direct things, guide the plot of his illness and future death, and had it been within his reach, I’m sure he would have kept it up until the end. In addition to the legal proceedings he undertook at the beginning of his ordeal and the instructions he gave for after his death, this is illustrated by two revealing anecdotes.

  The first is from the time I took him to see my mother’s house in Galicia, when he was still able to lead a more or less normal life, though in a limited way. We were in the train compartment the morning after our departure. We had woken up, he in the lower berth and I in the upper, and after saying good morning, he confessed with a yawn that before he fell asleep he’d thought that he wouldn’t mind dying there, safe with his son.

  The second is from a few months later, from the trip to Kenya. After our exhausting bus ride, once we had arrived at my aunt’s house, I kept watch over him for three nights, his hand in mine, and on the worst night he said, as if to himself, that after all it wouldn’t be so bad to die in Africa.

  These were the only two times in a year and a half when he referred to his death so explicitly, and both times a kind of manipulative impulse can be glimpsed, as if now that he had gotten used to the idea, what worried him more than death itself was the impression he would make with it. An impression that included the moment and circumstances of its occurrence as well as everything that it brought to a close: his own life, the relationship between us. Ultimately, though different, the two imagined deaths aren’t so dissimilar; both feature me as companion and confidant. The first is purely sentimental: the idea of dying with your son while the two of you are happy together; the other is more romantic, with all the exotic associations of a place like Africa. But it isn’t only the content that’s theatrical here; theatrical too is his reason for making these seemingly inappropriate remarks to me, inappropriate for someone who’s near death and who’d be better off not speculating about it. By saying what he said when he did, he was indirectly providing me with an image of himself, helping to define a little better how he wanted me to think of him: as someone strong and with a touch of sarcasm that persisted even in the face of death, and as someone for whom the proper finish meant dying in the company of his son.

  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting something like that; the end he sought and surely achieved isn’t trivialized by his deliberate pursuit of it. As I’ve said, he drew strength from the image that he wanted to convey, and his behavior wasn’t any less genuine as a result.

  It’s true: 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.

  But don’t the dreams into which we project ourselves reveal as much or more about us as our real selves?

  You don’t lie flagrantly in an epitaph unless you’re crazy. You sum up your life, offer your regrets, or project what you once wanted to be.

  No one draws strength from emptiness.

  Any further speculation would be unjust.

  * * *

  I say goodbye to my father at the airport on November 29, and over the next ten days I visit the notary to sign the contract for the sale of the house, I deposit the check in a joint account, I rent a safe-deposit box for the payment in cash, I pack his clothes; I select—from the scant furnishings that survived the depredations of the friend he met in Brazil—what to bring to the pseudo-duplex that will be our home for the next three months; I perform the move … Meanwhile, my father takes walks with my mother, partially recovers his lost appetite, and, most of all, delights in the house in Galicia, which he can’t praise enough. I feel as if his approval is my final exam, passed with flying colors. I feel, just as I did when he saw it for the first time, that nothing my mother and I have ever done redeems us so thoroughly, that only our years of relentless saving make us deserving of the trust we were previously denied. I feel that if the house didn’t exist, he might not have put himself in my hands as he’s done. Later, my mother tells me that the days he spends at the house are an occasion for confidences, too. Apparently, he’s more open with her than he’s been with me, and he tells her that the only thing that consoles him is the thought that he has something to leave me. Apparently, at some point when my mother was telling him that she still hadn’t forgiven her own father for having favored his second wife and her children in his will, my father defended my grandfather’s memory, explaining that he probably acted as he did out of weakness and that he himself would have left everything to the friend he met in Brazil if she had taken care of him as she ought. I’m touched by this noble gesture, my father dragging himself through the mud to heal my mother’s wound with his own.

  But around this time, December by now, I know from his diary that my father is conscious that the end is nearing. His body doesn’t respond the way it used to. He’s permanently tired. Everything scares him. Everything is a great effort, and the only thing that makes it worthwhile is the affection he feels surrounding him. Just a few weeks ago, difficulties were surmountable because of his will to live. Now, having lost the will, or having come around to the idea that sooner or later his will won’t be enough, the only thing that seems to keep him going is his desire not to let others down. Not to let me down, especially. And also, perhaps, his wish to make the most of his time with me, to repay me with this final burst of devotion for everything that we didn’t give each other in the past.

  He’s exhausted when he gets back from Galicia. He won’t let anyone meet him at the airport. He takes a taxi to the unfamiliar place where my wife and I are waiting for him and where, though it’s only a temporary destination, I’ve tried to arrange some objects that have always accompanied him: the dresser from his bedroom, a carriage from an electric train he had when he was a boy.

  The following days, December days, I lead an exhausting double life. On the one hand, I have to care for him with renewed vigor; on the other, I have to handle matters that could wait but that I need to proceed with to give him the impression that life is going on. I have to supervise the renovation of my mother’s old apartment where we’re supposedly going to live; I have to start work on the studio where I keep telling him that he’ll be able to paint; I have to find a lawyer to set in motion his divorce from the friend he met in Brazil, as he’s asked me to do. While I crisscross the city, he scarcely leaves the house, and when he does, I’m almost always at his side. Few are the days when this isn’t the case. One afternoon he goes with friends of his, a couple, to a Howard Hodgkin show, and he’s so pleased when he gets back that I’m sorry to have missed the chance to once again share the satisfaction he gets from looking at art.

  It’s rare for him to forget, to come out of himself.

  And not because he doesn’t try, because he does. He tries to be attentive, he tries
to please; he’s immediately sorry if his perpetual tenseness (his feet hooked around the extendable footrest of the recliner) makes him snap at someone.

  And he makes jokes.

  But the day is long and full of hours, and it’s hard to turn his waning attention from the television screen. He keeps doing the crossword puzzle from the newspaper, and each day he writes a sentence or two in his diary, but he hardly reads, he can’t concentrate. It isn’t easy to engage him in conversation, unless it has to do with the progress of the renovation work, about which he’s always inquiring. When I’m alone with him, if I ask him about something concrete, he makes an effort not to disappoint me, but he rarely takes the initiative. When he has visitors, his gratitude and happiness gradually fade, and if several people are talking, he eventually falls silent. He has to be asked a question, addressed directly, to be prevented from drawing into himself.

  But there are days that are exceptions; moments, especially. In general, his fitful interest in talking is revived by memories that give him the chance to vindicate himself or by subjects so foreign that they manage to distract him. He also has more of a tendency to let loose when the conversation touches—however tangentially—on subjects from which he thinks I can derive some lesson. He complains, as I’ve said, about not having painted enough, about having wasted time chasing women. To hear him talk, it might seem as if he’s weighed down by a sense of guilt and moral failing that he needs to purge, but the truth is that, beyond any tendency toward exhibitionism and vanity, the invocation of his sexual appetite and his need for women actually seems to be the most immediately accessible way to warn me about dissipation, about all those dead-end temptations whose constant pursuit may be, at the end of the day, an excuse for neglecting anything more arduous, time-consuming, or uncertain. Love itself, work, the construction of a living fortress that, by protecting us from the unexpected, allows us to pursue our calling in peace. He doesn’t say as much, but what he’s warning me against is the sloth of discouragement. What he laments is having shown himself to be vulnerable to setbacks, having allowed himself to be seduced by flight when his work required perseverance.

  A couple of times, though in words distorted by an emotion whose source I no longer recall, he goes so far as to say something to me that until only recently was completely unthinkable: I should have stayed with my family. Both times I realize that the ambiguity of the noun makes it impossible to say whether he’s including my mother or gently excluding her, and I—familiar with mounting waves of feeling dominated by the irrational, and even having come to empathize with the reasons that may have led him to distance himself (ranging from the egoism of someone who would rather seek refuge by himself than risk a shared exposure to the elements, to the tortuous logic of the person who, believing himself to be a burden, prefers not to get in the way of those who will advance faster without him), which I understand not just in an intellectual or abstract way, but through my own experience of the anguish, chaos, and loneliness from which one and the other spring, so that what I’d like to tell him is I understand you perfectly—must nevertheless accept that my immediate rejection of his piteous assertion, I should have stayed with my family, be taken as a formal statement of compassion.

  I also have words of praise for his work, and I tell him, with conviction, that others would declare themselves satisfied if they had accomplished as much.

  But nothing helps.

  It seems it isn’t always a good thing to make him talk.

  Or he isn’t in the mood.

  Then, if it’s impossible to go out, I force him to watch a movie (nothing dark; classic comedies by Lubitsch or Howard Hawks), and more and more often we listen to music, albums that he asks me to buy: Dylan’s Modern Times, Tom Waits’s Orphans, JJ Cale and Eric Clapton’s Road to Escondido, a Georges Brassens collection, an old Leonard Cohen album, another by Portabales, which have the virtue of lifting his spirits.

  Every day, too, we repeat the same nighttime routine. I help him into bed, arrange on his bedside table everything he might need if he wakes in the middle of the night, and sit for a while at the foot of his bed … When at last I go up to the apartment where my wife and I sleep, I call him briefly on his cell phone to check that the monitor is working, and no matter what kind of day it’s been, he whimpers for a few seconds, pretending to cry like a baby. Sometimes—rarely—after that heroic display of humor, I leave the monitor in the care of my wife and escape to a bar to meet some friend. What never changes is our morning ritual, which follows the same pattern as the nighttime one: a pretend whimper before he says good morning and rouses himself.

  Meanwhile, just before Christmas, his oncologist tells us that he’s very weak and that he should try a break from the treatment, and later, taking me aside, she explains that the chemotherapy isn’t working and it won’t be administered to him again. I should prepare for an end that won’t be long in coming, she warns. At first she’s reluctant to give me a time frame, but finally she allows that it might be a month, three at most.

  Thanks to a friend, I’ve found a doctor willing to honor the wishes expressed in my father’s living will. If before I had no doubts about what I’m preparing to do, I have even fewer when I learn from the doctor the many painful forms—depending on which organ fails first—in which something as apparently simple as death can present itself. After he tells me what symptoms to watch for so that I’ll be ready, I leave the office with a strange sense of duty done, which automatically rusts over with grief when I get home and face my father’s gaze.

  The Christmas celebrations are a prolongation rather than an interruption; a confirmation, not a departure. We spend the night of the twenty-fourth in Madrid with his family. He’s happy, has a few drinks, and though no one treats him with special deference and things are lively with all the children around, I can see in people’s expressions and their manner the same sense of anticipated mourning that has come over me. Days later we go to Galicia with my mother and my wife. Before we board the plane, he tries to convince us to change our minds, with the argument that he’s just been there, but in the end he seems to enjoy the trip. He takes pleasure in the house, our drives, any distraction. One day when he’s alone, he slips as he’s hurrying to answer his cell phone. He cuts himself and can’t get up. I still have the gauze and disinfectant that I used to tend to him. One day he buys a vacuum cleaner. Another day he paints greenish gray the frame of a Renaissance panel painting belonging to my mother. The night of the thirty-first, as the year is rung out, he sits in a chair and I stand next to him. We both know that we’ll toast each other first and wait until later to toast the others, but a certain amount of time—a very long time, it seems to me—passes before we do, and during that time we stare at each other. His eyes are very open and fixed on mine, and though I force myself to smile, I can’t keep it up as long as he can. How to wish someone a happy new year when he won’t have one? His gaze doesn’t flag, but mine slips away for an instant as I bend toward him, tapping his glass with mine, wishing him a happy new year, and giving him a kiss as I try to smile. His is the distorted gaze of a sick man, which is why it’s hard to interpret; I don’t know whether what he seeks in my face is the vision of a future that’s still unknowable, or whether it’s the next step: the recognition of his fate and an acquiescent desire to comfort, to feel and elicit feeling, to give what will soon be impossible for him to give.

  In January, back in Madrid, everything happens with deceptive slowness. I look for a home health aide; I teach the doctors who begin to visit us not to treat him like someone terminally ill; I keep careful track of the passing days and his strength in order to decide when to give him the cortisone that will grant him a ten-day grace period; I call his oncologist in order to carry on a simulated conversation in his presence that makes him believe that all is not lost, that he’ll restart the treatment when he’s stronger; I get someone he trusts to ask him whether he’d like to see the friend he met in Brazil, not wanting him to be left wi
th that wish, if he has it; I gather photographs and biographical material and write the draft of an obituary to send to the newspapers when the moment comes; I buy a hospital bed, which, in addition to making his life easier now that he spends so much time lying down, is intended as false proof that the end isn’t so near; and meanwhile, I continue to oversee the renovation work on the apartment where we’ll supposedly live, the completion of which he pleads with me for, asking with growing insistence whether I think he’ll see it finished, whether I think he’ll ever live there.

  I remember one sunny morning when we go out for a walk with my mother and visit the San Isidro Museum; I remember another morning, this time with my wife, when we have breakfast on the Plaza Mayor and then try to go to FNAC to buy music; I remember a lunch at my aunt’s house; I remember pirated DVDs of Marie Antoinette, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Queen; I remember friends coming to say goodbye; I remember the visit of two young artists, women, who—not by chance, I believe—my father greets with Tom Waits, the most jarringly discordant of all the albums in our scanty collection at the pseudo-duplex; I remember a day when we have lunch at a Chinese restaurant and afterward go to visit a photographer friend, and as we drink whiskey and listen to an old Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart jam session, the friend takes twenty shots of us with a Leica; I remember one day when he surprises me by asking me to buy paper and watercolors; I remember one morning when I give him a new appointment book and he fills out the first page in shaky handwriting, giving the address of the building where it was now almost certain that he would never live; I remember a tea that I prepare, according to his instructions, for three of his female cousins; I remember a friend, someone he hasn’t seen in a while, who brings him two CDs of Mozambican music from the seventies; I remember his praise for his new bed; I remember the first time he doesn’t get up until noon; I remember one morning when I come down from the apartment where my wife and I sleep to find him collapsed on the bathroom floor, unable to get up; I remember his look of mute assent when I tell him that from now on, I’ll sleep in the apartment with him, on a mattress on the floor; I remember the nights when, if he needs to go to the bathroom, he rings a little bell to call me and I assist him in his fragile walk; I remember the extreme care with which he listens to everything I tell him regarding his condition; I remember his growing detachment from the reality that surrounds him, his lack of interest in anything to do with his past struggles; I remember his weary words after the visit of two disciples who come to see him on one of his last days and talk to him about painting, thinking to entertain him; I remember the drop of blood that falls on one of my shoes when I bandage a scrape for him. I’m wearing them now; the reddish ring is still visible.