In 1991 I flirt with a waitress at one of the late-night bars where I’m a regular, but it’s another waitress — mistakenly believing herself to be the object of my attentions — with whom I end up in bed.
In 1991 I hardly ever go to class, and when I do, I show up late, sometimes without having slept, often hungover, often feeling dirty.
* * *
Today, as I write this in the late spring of 2008, I ask myself whether I’ve properly gauged the play of memories with which I aspire to approach an impossible objectivity. My feelings aren’t always the same, times change, and occasionally I notice that I’m leaving something out. I’ve talked, for example, about my father’s family, but I realize that I haven’t described him, that I’ve hardly said anything about what he was like.
* * *
He wore glasses and was a skinny boy who stood out in the rough squalor of the schools of postwar Madrid. He wasn’t fearful, but he preferred his own realms: his grandparents’ house in the summer, his girl cousins on his mother’s side of the family, the French edition of Elle, to which his older sister subscribed and which, in addition to the usual fashion stories, ran reviews of books, music, and art. Once, talking to me in the hospital about those days, he said that he remembered himself as always being sad.
“After your mother died?” I asked.
“Always.”
Adolescence strengthened his body, and in his youth, it was his unexpected beauty, the effect it had on women, as well as the decision to be an artist, that gave him confidence. He became a painter, lived in different places, but the boy in glasses crouched inside of him and occasionally returned to seize control, paralyzing him whenever life most resembled a schoolyard.
* * *
He kept a diary of trivial events — what he had done, whom he had seen, his progress on his current painting — recorded in brief entries and occasionally shaded with faint strokes that provided glimpses of his state of mind. Often he crossed out several days in a row and wrote fight or pissed. It was as far as he would let himself go, on the off chance that eyes other than his might read what he had written. The fights were usually with the friend he met in Brazil, but also with me.
* * *
He had a tendency to gain weight. He liked food and drink, and because he was vain, he was permanently dissatisfied with his weight. He was a competent cook, but he was just as happy to eat the worst junk, with which he soothed the anxieties that gnawed at him.
He had a weakness for fried food and for anything in béchamel sauce; he preferred meat to fish, but he had a great fondness for cod and anchovies and also eggplant; he liked cured meats, pasta, meat loaf, meatballs; he liked cabbage, beets, tuna, liver with onions; he didn’t care for any other kind of offal and he didn’t much like salads, most seafood or shellfish, or any raw fish. He liked Chinese food and Indian food and Mexican food and hamburgers and sausages. He liked wine and beer.
* * *
Almost every evening he had a drink, but as far as I know, he didn’t favor a particular liquor. He chose based on what was available and on the fluctuation of his tastes. Rum, whiskey, gin, bourbon …
* * *
He smoked for a while, but he was one of those smokers who is always trying to quit, and finally he did quit.
* * *
He was humble with the meek and contemptuous with the arrogant, but humility and contempt alike were expressed from the grips of a nervous agitation, so that neither was perceived by its recipients with total clarity, blurred by the haste with which he hid himself or dealt a blow.
* * *
He was impatient and, as a result, often committed injustices. In speaking to a waiter or concluding a conversation.
* * *
He could tell a good jacket or a good shirt when he saw one, and he knew the ways of high society, having grown up with them, but his pride and his masculinity barred him from pretending to be something he wasn’t. Tending to a pair of handmade shoes or a bespoke suit with the calculated care of someone who can’t replace them as frequently as he’d like, taking refuge in appearances, being frugal to strategic effect, donning some disguise would have run counter to his convictions and his character.
In the fifties he adopted the tailored jacket typical of intellectuals and artists of the period, worn with a turtleneck sweater or a V-neck sweater without a tie; in the sixties, this look was replaced by blazers and jeans, often worn with boots; at the beginning of the seventies he let his hair grow, wore looser clothes, experimented with extravagant accessories and pendants; in the eighties the colors got brighter … Then the years began to pass more slowly; tones changed; fabrics changed. Ever since I can remember, he always owned at least one suit, but his frequent weight swings meant that he couldn’t wear it for long. When he had to dress up, he just added a jacket and a tie to jeans. If solemnity was required, the jacket would be classic, wool or silk, but if the occasion permitted — say, one of his own openings — he was bolder and dug out some gaudy specimen from his collection of tacky ties bought in New York. In winter he wore a military or Barbour jacket; he liked it to have inside pockets, zippered if possible. He wore unremarkable shoes, loafers with rubber soles or moccasins. He kept his keys on a carabiner, hanging from a belt loop, and he carried shoulder bags. In the seventies and eighties they were made of brown leather, which he brushed until it shone, and beginning in the nineties, they were of black fabric, matching the dark clothes he had begun to wear not so much according to the dictates of fashion, but in order to hide his girth. Outside, he walked with a hand on his bag to protect it. At my apartment and his, he always left it at his feet so that it would be nearby whenever he might need it. In it he kept his wallet, an agenda, the case and chamois cloth for his glasses, a notebook, tissues …
* * *
He hated any kind of distinguishing feature denoting class or group differences.
* * *
He liked his comforts. He liked comfortable and well-decorated houses, and he liked pretty things, liked to possess them. He was a fetishist, not a collector; he didn’t accumulate. He was attracted to antiques, though he never lost the pop sensibility that made him tolerant of kitsch. He had an eye that could take almost any object out of context and bestow upon it a singularity it had previously lacked. He had no time for the ostentatious or the pretentious, nor did he let himself be seduced by contemporary versions of classic modern furniture. He had a Breuer tube chair, but his was an original. He didn’t seek out specific pieces. He preferred serendipitous finds. Actually, his decorating style, with its integration of diverse elements, was reminiscent of his later paintings. He was always seeing things from a new angle, discovering an unexpected side — of an Elizabethan desk, a religious carving, the vertebra of a whale, a Japanese engraving, a polka-dotted sixties lounge chair, some souvenir … He bought English and American design magazines, and every Sunday morning at eight he visited the Rastro in search of bargains. His greatest domestic sins were committed when he let himself be carried away by whims at antique shops or auction halls, and his trips almost always yielded some piece that for a while sat enthroned in a prominent spot in his house.
* * *
He was curious about almost everything.
* * *
He was a cultured man, it goes without saying.
* * *
When he was young, and into his thirties, he was a conscientious and up-to-the-minute reader of fiction and poetry and essays, but little by little he was overcome by laziness and became more of a dilettante, fussier. He asked me to recommend books for him, lend them to him, but since he almost never actually read them and was slow to return them, I seldom did.