* * *
My father died in February. By December we knew what was coming. He, apparently, let himself be deceived. At the end of January, he experienced a fleeting revival thanks to the cortisone, and when this wore off like the illusion it was, he attributed his rapid weakening to the belated effects of the last chemotherapy session. He repeated this to everyone who came to see him. Especially the doctors who made house calls. Polite and formal until the end, he begged their pardon for being unable to get up, for making them come to him. I called the angels of death one Saturday when he began to speak incoherently, and on Sunday morning a doctor and a nurse came. They were with us for four hours, during which they gave him the first dose of drugs (an opiate, and a derivative of lysergic acid to combat the nightmares) and showed me how to give him further doses as needed, until in two or three days the end came. They left us prepared to expect a wait, but as so often over the course of his illness, there was no wait. My father died that same night. He died alone, in his room, while in the living room my mother and my wife tried to convince me to go in to him, since—as indeed happened—he might die that very night. I refused because it had been an especially hectic day, with multiple visitors in addition to the doctor and nurse, and I wanted to let him rest, and also because we’d had the same argument the night before and I felt bolstered by the precedent. Though his death loomed over us, and at moments I wished for it, I refused to contemplate it. I won the argument, as I had won it the night before, and when my wife and I went into his room half an hour later, this time with the practical purpose of turning him in bed, my father was gone. That’s the main thing I remember. The feeling that he had gone. Of course there were tears, scattered words, hurried searches for a mirror, tremendous anxiety, and at last, when we had accepted that he was dead, I embraced him and began to talk to him as if he could still hear me. And yet in all that time, ever since I had come into the room, I never lost the feeling—the painful feeling, because it was a physical absence—that my father was gone. The body that lay in the bed and that I was embracing was no longer my father. My father had vanished, had gone to nowhere, the place where memory is defeated and disappears. For the first and only time in my life, my hopeful agnosticism gave way to the harshness of atheism.
Two hours later I helped a nurse prepare his body for burial. Ten hours later I was heading into one of the big department stores to buy the outfit that I would wear at the wake. Twelve hours later I was calling the art critics at the three big national papers to give them the news and ask them to write his obituary. Two days later I received the urn with his ashes, and I buried it, at his sister’s request, where his parents lay. Four days later, on my own, I got rid of most of his clothes. Three weeks later I emptied his apartment. A month later I moved his paintings to a new storage space out of fear that the friend he met in Brazil would try to seize them. Two months later the work on my mother’s old apartment was finished, the place where my wife and I were supposed to live with him. The day of the move, I gave away the ergonomic chair he had used during most of his illness. Three months later, on a terrace at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, I hosted a cocktail reception with jazz, the party he had requested as a lay funeral. While I was organizing it, I couldn’t help thinking that he would have been horrified at the expense, but—always unsure of my affections—he wouldn’t have been unmoved by this public display of filial loyalty. Four months later I retrieved his last paintings from the studio of the artist friend who had been keeping them since September, leaving behind his easel, a chest of drawers, two chairs, a big basket for papers, and a table. I spent an afternoon choosing what to get rid of, what to keep, what to give away. Five months later I went on vacation. Seven months later I got rid of his glasses. I threw them, along with his last bag, into a Dumpster.
This is the first thing I wrote when I could write:
It’s been eight months since my father died and two years since we learned that he was sick. In all this time I’ve hardly written a thing. I didn’t have the time or the head for it. I haven’t read, either. I’ve lived facing outward, split into as many facets and tasks as his needs demanded. I’ve been his main companion, his intermediary with the doctors, his psychologist, his helper, his executive arm, his waiter and nurse. I’ve set my own life aside, annulled myself, and merged with him. I’ve been his partner, the person who accompanied him to the hospital on chemotherapy days, who stayed with him while the treatment was administered, who took him home, who answered his questions, who supplied the strategies of deceit calculated to nourish hope and who consoled him when hope was elusive, who encouraged him to make the decisions that only he could make and who began to make them for him when he couldn’t make them. It was I who designed the approach to his future and set it in motion, making sure that each element, each thing that I did or suggested, seemed normal and not dictated by his impending death. I’ve measured my words, I’ve made jokes when I didn’t feel like it, I’ve lied, I’ve held my tongue, and I’ve meted out my silences when the vagaries of his married life advised it. I’ve gone to live with him, done the shopping for him, cooked; I’ve spent all day on the phone trying to get information, dealing with bureaucracy, asking for help, giving detailed accounts of his condition to everyone who called. I’ve signed papers, I’ve talked to notaries and lawyers, I’ve secured the money from the sale of the house that he shared with his wife, I’ve made transfers, rented safe-deposit boxes, and negotiated with bank employees. I’ve transported furniture and paintings, I’ve rented storage spaces to keep them in, I’ve been builder and architect of the house where we were going to live, as well as of the little studio where he was supposedly going to paint as long as illness permitted, but most of all I’ve lived for him, only him. I’ve had no other occupation. I’ve learned to watch him, to be alert to his changing symptoms in order to anticipate the different ends that his many metastases left unknown, consulting with doctors, planning the exact time to step in (neither too soon nor too late, as he asked me to do when he learned he was sick, though he didn’t want to know too much about it). I’ve visited pharmacies and clinics almost daily, I’ve taken care of unexpected cuts and scrapes, I’ve helped him in and out of bed, I’ve led him to and from the bathroom, I’ve feared his death, I’ve wished for it at moments, and when all that was left was suffering and no joy that the pain didn’t cancel out, I made the call that he asked me to make. I received the doctors who this time weren’t coming to heal him, I let them teach me what to do, I waited for his death, I saw him die, and I dressed him in his burial clothes. I’ve carried out his wishes in every possible way, and the effort of it has left me exhausted. Exhausted and empty.
I never thought it would be so simple. I always imagined that it would be more tortuous, that the skein we had patiently wound between us wouldn’t vanish with him.
Then come all the failed attempts that I talked about at the beginning.
I’ve included parts from some of them in this book.
And all the reading about fathers and mothers and mourning that I talked about too.
But I wasn’t constant.
For a long time I was lost, and I let time go by. I did things I shouldn’t have done.
I had money. My father’s money. A cushion of sorts.
And I amused myself.
I went out, I stayed out late, I went to the movies, I had dinner and lunch out, and I spent hours each day finishing the apartment where my father would never live with my wife and me, putting up bookcases, arranging furniture, upholstering sofas, decorating it as he would have done. Better, in one regard: I didn’t economize. I also hung more paintings of his than he would have hung.
I saw people I hadn’t seen for a while and I learned to tell them what had happened to me. The short version for those who simply asked, the longer and more detailed one for those who wanted more, and, for special occasions, the one explaining how his wishes were carried out. It was in these trial efforts that I began to use the i
mage of the circle.
One day the newspaper I write for asked me to review a book. Little by little I began to lead a life resembling the one I’d had before my father got sick, and another day, in the early stages of the writing of this memoir, I wrote the first chapter almost in one sitting.
Since then, there’ve been many times when I wanted to give it up, and each crisis was followed by periods of straying.
My scruples only grew, as did the fear of hurting others, and my doubts about whether what I was writing would transcend the interest it held for me and take on literary substance.
But no matter how long I strayed, I always came back to it in the end.
Partly out of stubbornness, partly because I felt that it couldn’t be any other way, partly because I lacked the energy to quit a book and start from nothing again.
And especially, I suppose, because I didn’t want to abandon my father so soon.
As a result, I’ve written and I’ve run, I’ve written and I’ve run; and no matter which it was, the only way I went was around in circles.
Meanwhile I’ve kept reading. Modiano: Un pedigree; Pamuk: My Father’s Suitcase; Simenon: Letter to My Mother; Héctor Abad: Oblivion; Peter Handke: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; Juan Cruz Ruiz: Ojalá octubre; Simone de Beauvoir: A Very Easy Death; Giani Stuparich: L’Isola; Lolita Bosch: La familia de mi padre; A. M. Homes: The Mistress’s Daughter; J.M.G. Le Clézio: The African.
And from the opposite perspective, the father’s: Quieto by Màrius Serra; Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey; The Film Club by David Gilmour …
I read a graphic novel about a father and his autistic daughter.
And though it isn’t directly related to the father-son pairing, Perec’s Je me souviens.
Circles. Random but always suggestive books, like My Life as a Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrère.
Or essays, like María Zambrano’s on confession as a literary genre.
And I recently saw a documentary film: My Architect by Nathaniel Kahn, in which Kahn follows the trail of his father, the American architect Louis Kahn, whom he hardly knew.
In the film, Louis Kahn says something obvious that nevertheless made me think: “How accidental we are, our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.” He’s referring to his decision to become an architect, and I can’t say whether his son, the director of the documentary, meant to lend added meaning to the statement by using it to conclude two segments, but the fact is that it can easily be extrapolated to fit the more personal subject of his film: the complex ties that bind us to our origins, the need to make peace with them. In essence, our life is composed of fortuitous events. Infinite possibilities spring from each decision we make, not to mention the effects of others’ decisions on us. The future is uncertain; we live in the present. The past is the only thing that seems fixed, and we tend to mythicize it. It gives us something to rebel against or reconcile with. Parents may or may not serve the same purpose, and for that reason alone they are sources of conflict. At the very least, they’re guilty of having brought us into the world.
Nursing a wound might be profitable from an artistic standpoint. But only the strongest of us or those who’ve been gravely injured can live forever with an open wound.
Besides, and this quickly becomes clear, our predecessors were also creatures of fate, also had scores to settle, were also cheated.
Each of us is just one more piece in a child’s Meccano set, and we matter only as much as we come to believe that we matter.
All the books I’ve been reading, no matter what drives them, whether it be filial devotion, the urge for revenge, remorse, or mere literary ambition, simply confirm this fact.
Our troubles aren’t exclusive to us. To a greater or lesser degree and in one way or another, everyone has faced them.
And most of us, at one point or another, have wanted to resolve them once and for all.
Close the circle.
Though some—just a few—do it only to say yet again: I was right.
And to make a record of it.
For someone of my grandfather’s generation, success as a father meant dealing his children a hand no worse than the one he’d been dealt. Beginning with my father’s generation, it hasn’t been so easy, maybe because we’ve gotten softer. For further confirmation, we have the testimony of Sibylle Lacan’s Un père.
My father didn’t squander the poor hand that he was dealt. He bettered it. He amounted to more than his father ever did. He was a cultured and sensitive man. Curious about almost everything.
And unlike my grandfather, who was the very image of failure, he didn’t fail.
Though it wasn’t enough for him, though in the end he didn’t get all the recognition he deserved, he was an excellent painter. He never conspired against others, never shut anyone out, as others had done to him.
He liked his work. Toward the end he lived almost exclusively for art. For looking at art, thinking about art, making art.
That much he had. No matter what he said at the end, in the cold fever of approaching death. Unlike my grandfather, his father, who spent his life seeking success in business and was left with nothing when all his ventures failed.
The friend he met in Brazil counts as a failure, impossible to deny it. And yet it would be unfair for him to make his entrance into the next world with that mark against him. No one who gives generously and is betrayed nonetheless, no one who takes a blow when he’s down and doesn’t shed a tear, can be said to have failed.
Did my father and my grandfather ever talk? Did they make peace with each other?
I don’t think so.
And yet I’m sure that my father forgave him. That what he minded most, in any case, was never having told him what all parents want to hear on their children’s lips at least once: your mistakes don’t count, your intentions were good, and time simply got the better of you.
Because at the end of the day, that’s our greatest mistake, from which all others spring: we think that time is much more forgiving than it is.
And that there’s time for everything, when in fact there isn’t.
I had the time to tell this to my father—not just tell him, but show him—and he did everything he could to smooth the way. There are no scores to be settled; there were none when I began to write.
And, of course, no guilt about his death for which I might seek forgiveness. So strong is my sense of having done right that I haven’t even resorted to the exculpatory urge to tell myself that he died of natural causes, since the drugs the doctors gave him, which I was taught to administer, weren’t supposed to take effect so soon.
And no guilt, of course, for having tried to deceive him about his illness.
And none for the departure of the friend he met in Brazil.
And none for being unable to say whether my behavior would have been impeccable if his life had been longer. My cards were marked—I knew he was going to die—but so were his.
Both of us tried. A year and a half of our lives we gave each other.
It’s not fair, then, to torment myself about what might have been. It simply was.
That, too, I owe to him.
The only real guilt that occasionally nags at me: having delayed, having let time nearly get the better of us. And my excess of zeal.
Nothing substantial enough, in any case, to feed all the pages I’ve written.
Having realized this and being able to express it is perhaps the one thing I’ve gained.
In this regard, writing time and living time coincide.
Would I have come to the same conclusion if I hadn’t written it?
Getting used to his death. That’s the main thing I’ve done in all this time.
Death. That which cannot be thought, it’s said.
From the day of his death to the day on which I write this, March 24, 2009, I’ve seen—to the best of my recollection—a Miguel Ángel Campano show, I’ve seen an Albert Oehlen show (both painters he respected), I’v
e seen a Kippenberger show, I’ve seen a Darío Villalba show, I’ve seen a Dürer show, I’ve seen a Patinir show; I’ve seen a show titled The Abstraction of Landscape, I’ve seen a Joseph Beuys show, I’ve seen a show of Javier Riera’s photographs, I’ve seen an Alejandro Corujeira show, I’ve seen a Julio Zachrisson show, I’ve seen a show of avant-garde movements in the time of art historian Carl Einstein, I’ve seen a Nancy Spero show, I’ve seen a show of Greco-Roman sculpture, I’ve seen a show of Renaissance portraits, I’ve seen a Picasso show, I’ve seen a Tàpies show, I’ve seen a Rembrandt show, I’ve seen a Twombly show, I’ve seen a show of the work of a Spanish photographer whose name I can’t recall, I’ve seen a Juan Ugalde show, I’ve seen shows in the same gallery by Bendix Harms, a young German I liked, and by Secundino Hernández, whom I’d never heard of, I’ve seen a strident show of contemporary Chinese artists, I’ve seen a show by the Czech photographer Sudek, and the other day, on my way back from doing the shopping, I went into a gallery because I thought I glimpsed a distant resemblance to my father’s final works in the way that space was sliced up in the paintings in the window. Cristina Lama, born in 1977 in Sevilla, was the artist.
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