And sometimes it’s very hard for me to bear the fact that I was unaware of my mother’s serious illness, Lolita was her name. It was kept from me and I wasn’t living in Madrid and didn’t see her often and was too immersed in the passing problems — or perhaps misfortunes, or only chagrins — of my twenty-sixth year to perceive the concealment and try to find out a thing you believe cannot happen and which is therefore the explanation you first rule out. A still juvenile, or superstitious, or complacent belief. And when I came to my belated realization of what was coming to her, I quickly returned from the pointless travels of those months of turmoil and she lasted only a few hours longer after my arrival; sometimes I’ve thought that she lived those hours and then no more because with me there we were all at her side, at home, the four sons — and the fifth or first still closer, soon to be in her care, the child — and at last she could let herself go, knowing that all four of us were, for the moment, safe and with her and at home. Yes, it’s possible. A little more than a year ago I found what must have been her penultimate letter to me, the fourth son she gave birth to, third among those still living, dated November 3, 1977, less than two months before her death; in it she discreetly offered to help me, because during a recent brief visit of mine at home she had seen me looking sad, without knowing why (“The capacity for respect that leads me to forget the secrets people tell me, for I never reveal them, and I try to make peace, has been useful to other people more than once … and to you boys? Can’t I help you?”), and went on to say, “I slept better while you were here, as I alway do when I know you’re here, sleeping; but now I can’t sleep and I turn it over and over in my head, I know that there is something I don’t know, and that always makes me give free rein to my imagination when it has to do with you boys … There are so many problems around all of you!” And perhaps, once she knew that the only one who was missing was now nearby, at home, and that he had said goodbye to her, she could sleep once and for all. I sometimes wonder whether she didn’t hold out against that sleep until my arrival, more than she should have and beyond exhaustion, it would have been unlike her not to wait for me before saying goodbye. Not long before she had said to my father, “I’m a doctor’s daughter and I know what I have,” because they had hidden the seriousness of her condition from her, as well, and she went on to describe precisely the nature of her illness and what it was going to do to her. In the final hours during which we coincided something ordinary happened that ceased to be ordinary because it was among the last things, and so it is what I remember most. I had recently been in Paris and seen a very large Rubens exhibit there and bought a number of postcards. She was in bed and I sat down on the edge, she had stopped dying her hair — but for me it is always black — and it was a very clean grey, surrounding her face that was so much like mine and that never became wrinkled, or hardly, her skin full and smooth. She looked drowsy and dazed, and I showed her postcards of Rubens paintings to distract her, she enjoyed museums very much. She looked at each one in turn, having to force herself a little to focus her attention and her gaze, I made a comment here or there. She stopped at the portrait of a woman, Helen Fourment, less brightly colored and more sharply etched than the large compositions. “Look at that hand,” she said, pointing to the young woman’s right hand, then smiling at the extravagant hat. “If I’d worn that I would have looked taller,” she said playfully. Every time I see a Rubens now I remember that moment, Helen Fourment’s hand, and the hat, and her. It goes without saying that I hadn’t allowed her to help me, almost two months earlier; I rarely told my parents about my personal affairs, which generally upset them; like most children, or those of my generation at least, I said nothing. Well, I must have told her something, just enough to keep her imagination from mistakenly wandering toward worse things than those actually happening to me and to calm her apprehensions a little, because in her last letter, which I lost in one of my moves, I remember that she responded tactfully, saying, “No, I don’t understand, but I also understand that I don’t understand.” In the car that took me to her burial the next day I saw my face in the rear view mirror, and I rode along, drowsy and dazed, thinking: “I’m what’s left that’s most like her. I’m what’s left that’s most like her.” It was December 24; I don’t have many other memories of her final hour, I arrived on the 23rd, a little late.
And I didn’t know it was the last time when I last saw Juan Benet, my literary teacher and friend for twenty-two years or more. We did know he was gravely ill and we wouldn’t have him with us much longer, but I was sure I would still see him a few more times, and the last visit I made to his house with Mercedes López-Ballesteros wasn’t felt to be the farewell by either of us, we weren’t somber, we didn’t think the time had come yet to say goodbye, in our minds. I had recently come back not from Paris this time but from London, and was spouting funny and semi-apocryphal anecdotes I had heard from Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his wife Miriam Gómez, both stupendous storytellers — imitating their Cuban accents for good measure — and Don Juan, who held them in great affection, always enjoyed their stories. Some of the anecdotes were so ludicrous that they made him laugh very hard, so hard that at one point he started to protest and told me with little conviction, amid gales of laughter, “Ouch, don’t make me laugh so much, it hurts me here,” pointing to his chest or his side, I don’t remember. But I was merciless and went on raving and recounting and exaggerating, I no longer know if it was the incredible story of Borges in Sitges (“a very savage place”) with the slice of pa amb tomàquet that got stuck, or the one about the erect “homosexualistic” kangaroo in Australia, or the one about the actor Richard Gere and the amatory device that got stuck, or the one about Dr. Dally, half of whose body (longitudinally) was immobile but of varying colors and who sold books that he shouldn’t have, the Cabreras are inexhaustible. And thanks to them I made Don Juan laugh endlessly that night and how glad I am now that I did, and that I didn’t stop when he said the laughter was hurting him, because it turned out to be the last night, and so my penultimate vision of him is of a Juan in great hilarity. I didn’t see him again after that, I only spoke to him over the phone to tell him I had re-read Volverás a Región—his first novel, published nearly twenty-five years before — for an article I was writing and that now it had become truly good. “Yes? You think so?” he asked with unfeigned ingenuousness. In fact, I did see him again, but it was a few minutes after he had died, in the first hour of January 5, 1993, almost five years ago now. Vicente Molina Foix was with me and he went home to get some cufflinks for Juan to be buried in, because neither his wife nor his children could find his own that night (no one could have identified Don Juan from his cufflinks). The night Mercedes and I paid our visit was the night of the 12th to the 13th of December, a Saturday. He came to the door to say goodbye, it was late, and the final glimpse was of his tall figure at the top of the stairs to the door of his house in El Viso, with a smile still lingering from the recent laughter like a slight, somnolent trace on the face of someone who’s falling asleep, the long shape veiled in penumbra and outlined against the light from inside, saying goodbye with a waving hand, but not in his mind. As soon as he closed the door and we’d gone around the corner, Mercedes burst into tears and buried her face in my shoulder, getting my coat wet. She had worked for him every day for three years, and she, I think, had said goodbye, in her mind.