I return to Madrid with my girlfriend in March 2003 with some savings and three-quarters of a novel. My mother, who left Sevilla a few months ago, is beginning to see a bit of light in the dispute with my grandfather’s second family, and she gets some money that she immediately deposits into the account for renovating her future house in Galicia.
In 2004 I finish my novel, and while revising it, I spend three months in Scotland with my girlfriend, as a writer in residence at the University of Aberdeen. We’ve decided to get married when we return to Madrid; I buy an emerald through a Colombian friend, and while we’re away, my parents take it to a jeweler to be set.
The wedding, which is attended by just four family members on each side, is held on the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. My father, who bought my suit and shirt, is the only one who is visibly moved. He cries during the ceremony and he cries later at a convent where the nuns sing us the Salve Regina.
Slowly, imperceptibly, something has changed between us. I’m still bothered by the same things that have always bothered me, but I’ve decided not to dwell on them, and the truth is that — though at a snail’s pace — he’s making an effort too.
* * *
I should say a bit more about my work, because it plays a role in our relationship.
In a way, it was a calling pursued behind his back, chosen to distance me from him but not too much, as if I’d asked myself what the profession most similar to his might be and I’d chosen literature as it was the closest at hand. Often I’ve thought that if I’d seen more of him during my adolescence, when our interests are established, if I’d visited his studio every day, if I’d had the benefit of his encouragement and guidance, if I’d had access to his supplies or his cameras, today I might not be a captive of the word.
My mother’s father was a writer, and a rather well-known one, and this, in addition to the fact that I use his last name as well as my father’s, is enough to make everyone think it was his example that made me decide to be a writer. I’ve gotten used to that assumption, but the fact is that my interest in writing had more to do with my painter father.
The world into which I was born was primordially the world of my father. During critical years he was my main aesthetic referent, and it’s possible that the visual sense I believe I possess, an intuitive ability to appreciate secret harmonies and to create them myself to the extent of my abilities, is simply the vestige of an apprenticeship prior to the one that made me a writer.
The words were there, in my mother’s mouth, shaping reality, capturing life in stories, but I didn’t make them wholly my own until I had to use them to define absence, to exercise my memory, seek explanations, construct an alternate personality to my father’s, that — being artistic — would at once subsume him and carry with it a necessary dose of rebellion.
I imagine that my father often wondered about my motives, but I suppose he fell prey to the same assumptions as others and took my gradual slide toward literature as proof of my devotion to my mother’s family. An homage to the grandfather rather than to the father.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The comparison was there to be drawn. In the early eighties, when my father was going through the period of depression that distanced him from painting, on sleepless nights I sometimes asked my mother whether he would ever be able to recover and make a name for himself, and she always reassured me that it would be the same for him as it had been for my grandfather, her father, who was in his sixties before he received the honors he had previously been denied. I listened to her, conscious of my grandfather’s greater tenacity, of my father’s fragility, but despite these reservations, in a comparison of the two of them my father came out on top. My grandfather was too established, too unassailable by now, too self-satisfied, and despite his great learning, too provincial in certain intolerable ways for my inordinately anticonventional taste at the time, whereas my father was a bohemian and had my grandfather beat in eclecticism, rebellion, curiosity, and everything that an adolescent who reads Rimbaud might admire. His lack of money, the absence of the legitimizing umbrella of success didn’t undermine his prestige in my eyes, but rather endowed it with an aura of doomed romanticism. Not even the incipient signs of bourgeois lifestyle, when they came, were an obstacle. I explained them away by telling myself that — as in so much else — he was the victim of outside agents. That his true nature was other.
The kind I wanted for myself.
This was at the beginning, of course. Later, it was different.
Later, everything got more complicated. With great sacrifice and hardly any outside encouragement, he devoted himself more assiduously than ever to painting and he began his long fight to recover the ground he’d lost. By dint of hard work, he managed to make a place for himself. Once again he showed in galleries vying to be top-of-the-line, returned to the art fairs, relaunched a quiet international career, and won the occasional prize, while, in the face of his seeming indifference, I finished my studies and did everything I could to become a writer. In the mid-nineties, when I published my first book, the skepticism with which he’d greeted the dawning of my interest in writing was replaced by a surprised recognition of my determination, and later, as I faced up to increasingly tough challenges, by an undisguised pride that at times betrayed glimpses of his enduring dissatisfaction with the path I’d chosen, as well as a pained suspicion — beginning with my first novel — that I was denouncing him in literary form. Nevertheless, he continued to be someone who’d risen from the dead and whose every step required enormous effort, while I was all promise, with everything handed to me on a silver platter. And sometimes, very occasionally, though he immediately made fun of himself for it, he revealed jealousy of the greater media attention that my work received, as well as of the reputation and respect I had begun to gain among people in his world — art critics, for example — without seeing that it was in part the result of social skills that he lacked. I remember one fateful afternoon when he discovered — in a hack-job encyclopedia distributed for free by some newspaper — that while there was a brief biographical entry for me, there was none for him. I could see that he was hurt by this, although his happiness on my behalf was undiminished.