The years that follow my return from Ireland are years of insomnia. In 1996 I’ve begun to write fairly regularly for the papers and I’m making progress on my second book, but my mother is still out of work, and I fear for her future, which is also mine. I help her write CVs, I wait with her for calls that don’t come, and at night I go to my room, where my girlfriend is already asleep, and lie there awake. I can’t sleep, because I’m walking a very fine line; I can’t sleep, because I feel like an impostor. How am I going to support my mother in the future if I don’t even know where next month’s money is coming from? I feel alone, despite my sleeping girlfriend, to whom I cling in desperation.
Between October 1996 and July 1997, I spend the academic year on a residency in Rome, and I can’t stop worrying about my mother. I invite my father to visit, hinting that I hope he comes alone, but either the friend he met in Brazil won’t let him come or he’s afraid to broach the idea. While I’m gone, my girlfriend continues to live with my mother.
The same unease accompanies me for the next few years—1996, 1997, 1998 … years of deprivation, of living close to the bone. The present has become so constricted that only the future matters now. And the future is cause for concern. No one helps us.
In December 1998, a year after my return from Rome, I finish my first novel.
In 1999, in January, my mother’s father dies. It’s the beginning of a long legal battle between his second family and my mother and her siblings.
In 1999, in November, I win an important prize for the novel. At the press conference, a reporter asks me why I use a second surname, that of my writer grandfather. I answer with the truth, that it’s in tribute to my mother, but being inexperienced, I go on longer than I should, and the next day, a newspaper condenses what I’ve said this way: “Keeping your mother’s last name is a great tradition, and in my case it makes sense, because where my upbringing is concerned, I feel I owe more of a debt to her than to my father.” In another newspaper I sound harsher and less truthfuclass="underline" “Because of my mother, who has had much more of an influence on me than my father.” Remorseful, I call my father, and he assures me that it doesn’t matter, but days later I’m angered to learn that his family is hurt. This childish back-and-forth, the inclination to punish him on account of the past for my mother’s current difficulties, and my subsequent contrite recognition of the false transposition I’ve performed also define this stage of our life.
In 1999 my mother has given up on finding a steady job, and her efforts and mine are focused on scraping together enough work so that she doesn’t lose her retirement savings. We’ve also revived an old dream that might secure her future — buying a house in Galicia, where she was born and where it’s possible to live cheaply — and to that end we’ve opened an account where we deposit any extra money that comes in, such as my prize money.
In 1999, when he’s halfway through my novel, my father calls me, moved by the passage I quoted earlier in which I describe the narrator’s boyhood sense of loneliness. He says “pobrecito,” in the child’s voice he uses when he wants to be affectionate, and I realize that he’s reading the whole novel in a personal key. It’s possible that an implicit recognition of guilt in response to the passage’s overwrought sensitivity has something to do with it, but the point is that because of a book, for the first time he seems to have put himself in my place.
The effects are felt immediately. Though skittish, he’s more receptive. While he waits for the stormy weather to lift, he lets me air my worries with scarcely a glimmer of impatience in his gaze. Once or twice he buys me clothes; once or twice he gives me a little money; and once he calls one of his collectors to ask him to give my mother a job as a favor, to no avail.
But that’s all.
He has no money, he says. What he makes is hardly enough to cover his share of the maintenance of the house he owns with the friend he met in Brazil.
He wants to see me. He has love to give, but he tries to keep my life from contaminating his. I overwhelm him. He hides when he senses that I’m beset by problems; he turns a deaf ear when I tell him about the endless dispute between my mother and her siblings and her stepmother and children. He’s conscious of the parallels, but he doesn’t let on.
And he vanishes.
I don’t mean to suggest that he doesn’t act the part of father. It just isn’t consistent. It’s been the exception rather than the rule ever since the trouble began between us in my adolescence. The spheres in which he continues to exercise a father’s prerogative are as limited as they are symbolic, but occasionally he still does, or I invite him to do so. In the latter case, he goes about it clumsily, whether out of surprise or fear that I’ll change my mind, and of course without ever permitting himself to seem recriminatory; when it’s the former, he does so jokingly and usually limits himself to the odd comment. For example, he doesn’t like it when I go out too much at night, and he often ridicules me for it.
This is a typical phone conversation between us in those days. The phone rings at noon or one; I pick up and hear his voice:
“Did I wake you?” he asks. And then, ironically, “What, were you out last night?”
If I say yes, he says something like “You’ll ruin your liver” and proceeds to the object of his call, which is usually to suggest that we get lunch. If I answer that I’m reading, his response is, “You’ll wear your eyes out from reading so much.” He never asks me where I was the night before, whether he’s woken me up, or what I’m reading, if that’s what I was doing. In fact, the only answer that receives a non-ironic response is when I tell him that I’m writing, though even then he doesn’t ask me what. Probes have been launched to test my mood, a verdict has been reached, and he’d rather not risk a mistake.
These are the lessons he has to offer: “You’ll ruin your liver.” That’s as far as he’ll allow himself to go. He doesn’t feel authorized to meddle in my life, and my attitude serves as constant corroboration of this. What does he have to say to me, after all? I think and he thinks: after he left home, he relied on my mother for my daily support, and his involvement in everything concerning me, no matter how affectionate or attentive, was cushioned, protected, at a comfortable remove, far from the daily grind of schools and homework, the illnesses and trauma of childhood and adolescence.
These are the lessons he has to offer since before I can remember, and from 1999 on, nothing changes.
In September 2000 my mother and I manage to buy a wreck of a house on the Galician coast. We don’t know when we’ll be able to rebuild it, but it’s an important step in providing for her future, and our pride feeds our hopes. But when I tell my father about it, the speed with which he changes the subject signals to me his wariness and his enduring lack of confidence in us.
In 2001, after a busy year as a result of my prizewinning first novel, I begin a second novel. The prize has meant that between talks and newspaper assignments, I have no lack of work, and as a result, I’m not so oppressed by money worries.
In 2001 I’m awarded a residency in Berlin for the following year. Weeks before I leave, my father tells me that he wants to amend a will he drew up years ago on the initiative of the friend he met in Brazil. He doesn’t describe the terms of the earlier will, which I’m hearing about for the first time; he just lets me know that he wants to make me his sole heir, leaving her the use of the house they share. Apparently my tortuous message composed of spoken words, unspoken words, and written words has finally gotten through to him.
In January 2002 I set up house in Berlin. My mother goes to live in Sevilla, where a friend offers her a job, and the girl in red lipstick, my girlfriend — considering that we’ve been living together for ten years, it’s ridiculous that I’m still calling her that — stays in Madrid, tied down by work. Until she joins me six months later, I’m alone in Berlin. For the first time in a long while, stability is visible on the horizon. And I receive visitors, my father first among them. I’m aware that he’s had to overcome the opposition of the friend he met in Brazil and I repay him by avoiding any conversation that might cause him to feel questioned. I notice his surprise at this, as well as the fact that as the days go by and I persist in my efforts, he becomes more and more relaxed. This is the closest we’ve been since those trips we took to London and Amsterdam and Paris twenty years ago. In the mornings I escort him around museums and galleries, and in the afternoons we talk and drink bourbon at home. The only time I betray my intention to avoid bringing up any hardship is one afternoon when he asks for news of my mother and I tell him the truth: things aren’t going well in Sevilla, her friend hasn’t come through for her, and her life there is lonely and uncomfortable. I also tell him that in a few months we’ll have to pay a substantial sum, which we don’t have, for some necessary repairs to our building in Madrid. These are two slips, a reflection of other times, but they’re the only ones I make, and they don’t disturb the atmosphere of understanding. My surprise is great when, ten days after his departure, I receive a letter in which he offers to sell a painting that he bought before his separation from my mother and to give me half the money to defray the aforementioned expenses. In exchange, he asks me to find a buyer.