* * *
He liked Cioran.
* * *
He liked Madrid, the city where he was born, and he liked to read books about it.
* * *
He had seen good American and European postwar films, Bergman, nouvelle vague, Italian neorrealism, but as the years went by — and this was true for him with fiction as well — he gradually developed a kind of distaste for plots that were too involved, especially those dense with tangled sentiment.
* * *
He preferred humor. He liked Buster Keaton, he liked Charlot, he liked the Marx Brothers, he liked Cantinflas, he liked Tati, he liked Jerry Lewis, he liked Woody Allen, he liked Benny Hill, he liked Mr. Bean, he liked Tip y Coll, he liked Faemino y Cansado.
* * *
His friends say that he was a good correspondent, that his letters were witty and amusing. And yet when he had to write about painting, he was overcome by modesty. It wasn’t his thing to play the expert, pontificate.
* * *
Like so many men of his generation, he was something of an erotomaniac. For a while he collected old erotic postcards, and his library never lacked for good photography collections of contemporary nudes. On my first trip to Paris on my own, when I was seventeen, I bought him a book of 1890s erotic daguerrotypes, titled — I believe—Kaleidoscope.
* * *
In addition to Spanish, he spoke English and French. Not fluently, for he had hardly studied them, but confidently — well enough to read and carry on a conversation.
* * *
Beginning with his first show in 1959, he moved from abstract expressionism through informalism, through the so-called new figurative art, through pop art. In his best work, over the last twenty years, he favored abstraction, incorporating into it written words and small figurative elements that, following a certain initial lyricism, gradually became part of an increasingly sharp play of planes. The expressionist inheritance of his paintings can be seen in their gesturalism, and as a result, they never seemed especially labored. And yet that was what he was: laborious. He had excessive facility, and he struggled against it with fierce tenacity. On his lips, the worst criticism he could muster for one of his own works was gemlike. His understanding of painting was too deep to allow him to settle for some decorative or complacent attempt that didn’t reflect the tension that arises from true works of art. Alone in front of the canvas, he thought not about his rivals, but about his masters. He yearned for simplicity (sometimes simple complication), but he arrived at it by tortuous paths. Hidden beneath many of his paintings, under layers of paint, are several earlier paintings. In general, when a painting didn’t come out right the first time — his greatest joy — he circled it, closing in on it obsessively until it did come out right. Hardly ever was he able to abandon a painting.
After his return to painting in the mid-eighties, he usually worked in the mornings. He painted on the floor, with acrylics. Listening to music. I never saw him at these moments, but I understand that he prowled around for a while preparing his materials, studying the canvas, and that once he had begun, he alternated between a deep absorption in his task and frequent pauses during which he sat and contemplated the painting. If he got stuck, the pause was longer, and he turned to something else for a breath of fresh air. In recent years he cut pictures out of the newspaper, pictures that said something to him, pictures of cardinals descending a staircase, of anonymous people, of politicians at their podiums, of animals, and he glued them into a notebook, labeling them with the date.
The floor of his studio was covered in paint spatters, drips in every shape and color, the outlines of pieces of card that he’d painted without worrying about going over the edges with the brush, sticky spots, and heaps of clots where a pot of paint had spilled. From the walls hung pieces of tape that he used to trace straight lines in his paintings, and every object — his tools, of course, but also the radio and the telephone — was covered in splashes of paint.
* * *
He was handy, but not meticulous, and like all those who tend toward disorder, he tried to assign each of his possessions a place. In the studio this was clearly impossible, but everywhere else in the house he managed it. Each photograph, each book, each medicine was easy to find. In his bedroom, he was especially pleased with a 1940s dresser in whose many drawers he kept everything from a shoehorn and his headphones to the wristwatches (never expensive, almost always eccentric) that he retired one by one. Until recently, as a final testament to his departure, at my mother’s house we kept a drawerful of his X-rays.
* * *
He was an iconoclast and he was irritated by commonplaces, but that doesn’t mean he rejected the past. It held an attraction for him. I wrote this somewhat unthinkingly, but I realize that it’s true. He read history; he had a fondness for the whole genre of biography — memoirs, collections of letters, diaries — and when he traveled or stayed awhile somewhere, he researched it thoroughly. At his country house he spent endless afternoons going through two chests he found in the cellar that were full of the papers of previous inhabitants. Everything merited his interest, from a 1910 boundary dispute to the price of wheat in 1930.
* * *
And yet he was terrified by anything that had to do with death, and especially occultism.
* * *
He was moderately superstitious and often wore good-luck charms. The final one was a crow’s bone that he removed from around his neck after he got sick, concluding that it brought him bad luck.
* * *
He liked music of all kinds. African, French chanson, bossa nova, jazz, reggae, salsa, flamenco, classical … He bragged jokingly about having danced better to rock and roll than anyone else in Spain, and up until nearly the very end, if he was happy he would get up from the sofa and improvise a few solo steps. He accused me of not knowing how to dance, though the truth is that we were never together on the right occasion, or at least an occasion that wasn’t forced.
* * *
He was competitive.
* * *
Not a day went by when he didn’t do the crossword puzzle in the paper, and if someone in his presence hadn’t completed a puzzle or was completing it too slowly, he would grab it and finish it himself.
* * *
He watched television, enjoyed it, and was irritated by the phoniness of other people’s public denial of the habit. He watched it after lunch as he dozed or did other things, and possibly at night.
* * *
At cheap restaurants he wiped his glass and silverware with a napkin. He was squeamish. If I touched my shoes or my feet, he scolded me; if I didn’t wash my hands before eating, he scolded me; if I touched a bar or strap unnecessarily on public transportation or touched anything on the street, he scolded me. He could be very scathing about it.
* * *
He was affectionate. Brusquely affectionate: his hasty pats on the back were intended to cancel out the ease with which he got choked up.
* * *
I have to pick up the chronological thread again because otherwise I’m afraid that the distance I feel from the person I used to be will paralyze me and all my efforts will be in vain.
From 1991 to 2002, it’s the same feelings all over again, and sometimes worse, the skein of mutual resentment growing tangled.
From 1991 to 2002, I make frequent attempts to absolve and forget, turn over a new leaf, but something always happens to stir everything up again.
From 1991 to 2002, there’s an extremely long period during which I’m in serious financial straits, during which I face responsibilities for which I’m not prepared, and the contrast with my father’s comfortable life wounds me. From 1990 to 2002, I often feel brushed aside by him, abandoned in my difficulties.