Mourning is a strange thing. Mourning is something that you feel only after it passes. Mourning isolates you even from yourself.
I came up with the idea for this book before it was appropriate to take notes for it. For months, as my father faded before my eyes, I knew that I would write about us, and this certainty became my best defense against the flood of feelings in which I was foundering. I felt dazed, and by convincing myself that in the future I would make an accounting of it all, I was able to put off the moment of absorbing what I was experiencing. I took refuge in the present, in my stupor, using it as a barrier. Things were happening, but they weren’t fully happening. They were lacking the depths that I refused to contemplate.
When at last my father was gone, I felt like someone who’d been shut up in an air rifle. I was told “Your father lives in you now”; I was told “Go slow, it’ll take you a year to recover”; and both pieces of advice seemed equally ridiculous. I decompressed, shooting off into life, and nevertheless, after some time had gone by, both warnings turned out to be true. I’ve dwelt in nothingness, and all that’s left of my father is his memory.
I’ve become more fragile, sadder, more fearful, skeptical, older. This is the path that’s brought me here.
I’ve thought very little. I haven’t asked myself questions. The only unexpected conclusion I’ve come to is that — pain aside — everything was as it had to be and as we never believed it could be. A circle has closed where there might have been a parting of ways, the widening of a split. Maybe it’s the simplicity of this statement that allows me to continue to wear the same deep-sea diver’s helmet that I put on when everything began.
How is it possible that something that was about to go one way should have gone another way? Who worked harder to make it happen? Can generous decisions spring from egotistical impulses? Do I have any regrets? Have I put them to rest? Should he have had regrets, as in fact he told me he did? Were they sincere? Were they merited?
The helmet prevents me from answering. Or maybe I’m not fully recovered. Or maybe I am and this is what death is all about: leaving questions unanswered.
So why persist in writing about the two of us?
I’ve already given some reasons.
Because I tried to go back to writing a novel that I had abandoned when things began to fall apart, and I couldn’t do it, and I tried to come up with an idea for another one and I couldn’t do that either.
Because writing about something so intimate, so excruciatingly real, seemed a good incentive for recuperating lost routine, the habit of writing.
Because I don’t know much more now than I knew when everything started, and establishing the incomplete map of what’s known might help me find what eludes me.
Because even though ugly moments will surely slip in, I believe with the conviction of a drowning man that the story is happy; otherwise, I wouldn’t tell it.
And maybe it really is true (though this is a trick of mourning) that by making him my own in writing, I cement his memory in me, the only life he has left.
But even all those reasons together aren’t enough. Sometimes they’re not.
It’s hard.
I write more slowly.
Sometimes I attribute it to a loss of discipline, other times to the difficulty of exposing myself like this. I offer up both excuses when friends ask me about my writing, concerned as the months go by. But I’m also convinced that something has broken in me, that something is gone. I’m not talking about the emptiness. I’m not talking about the anguish of loss. I’m talking about the rage with which I used to write.
The memory of him doesn’t provoke me, my grievances have vanished, I’m not competing with him, there’s no sense in trying to prove anything to him. Nothing affects him anymore, not even what I’m writing now.
How to rid myself of the new feeling of futility that overcomes me when I think about writing?
I read a note in his diary, dated April 14, 2006: “To paint is to make something that didn’t exist before, not to erase or to forget but to do and to live, so I plan to keep on with it.” Admirable. And yet, as vivid as the act of recognizing his handwriting in that diary entry is my memory of how dismissive he was one afternoon a few months later, when two of his most loyal friends, thinking that it would entertain him, talked to him about painting.
I can’t remember his exact words when they left — how he expressed the distress it caused him to think in the past tense about something to which, until not long ago, he had given the best of himself. Words like: to what end all that effort, to what end all those hours spent struggling over a painting, all those hopes?
I understand it.
We’re still bound by the invisible thread of our solitary professions. While I write, I can’t imagine him in his studio anymore, but on my computer I listen to music that was his, music that many days he probably listened to as he painted, and I keep working.
I keep working just as he would himself.
In trepidation, taking myself to task, not biting my nails like him, but jiggling my leg nervously, smoking.
I’m trying to understand what we lost, where we got stuck.
* * *
There are places I’ve never been and places I never want to go. I can’t tell everything. I have to take a bird’s-eye view. I’m trying to open a window, show a piece of our life, not its entirety.
My parents were married in 1964. My father was twenty-three and my mother twenty-five. Months earlier, my father had bought an apartment on Calle de la Infanta Mercedes in Madrid with money inherited from his maternal grandfather. The money for the furniture, as was apparently the custom, was contributed by my mother’s father. Years later, after he got sick, my father told me that what had attracted him to my mother was her elegant beauty and the imperturbable mystery of her gaze. From the time he was twenty, he had been traveling around Europe; he had lived in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and nowhere had he lacked for female companionship, as photographs of the era attest. My mother, meanwhile, still lived at home and hadn’t had a boyfriend, properly speaking, but rather romantic friendships with a sailor, a German, a poet friend of her brother’s. I don’t know what attracted her to my father: his blond hair, the fact that he was a painter … Anyway, they got married, and then they left for Brazil, where they lived for two years in São Paulo. My mother didn’t work. My father had shown his paintings at galleries in Madrid and London and Amsterdam, and he participated in the São Paulo Biennial. There are pictures of the two of them, dressed up, at dinners and parties, restaurants, galleries, the Spanish embassy; there are pictures of them with friends in private homes or on the beach; there are pictures of them as tourists in Brasília or Bahia or São Paulo, in sandals and jeans; there are pictures of them in the jungle, where they lived with the Karajá Indians. In all the pictures they are smiling, and in some they’re even mugging for the camera. It’s the dawn of their marriage.
In Brazil my father met the woman who — once he was separated from my mother — would be his wife for the last twenty years of his life. But that’s another story, and it came later.
The dawn of their marriage was prolonged after their return to Madrid in 1966. My father paints and shows his work. They have no responsibilities yet; they don’t have me. They’re always coming and going. Friends visit: painter friends, writer friends. Friends — some of them — whose outlandish appearance in the Madrid of the day could stop traffic. In the photographs I have they look more relaxed than in the earlier ones, their displays of happiness toned down. And yet it seems an artificial calm, as if they’re playing at being grown-ups. My father in an armchair, with a glass of whiskey in his hand, and my mother behind him, leaning against the back of the chair with an arm around his shoulders. They go through some hard times, times of uncertainty, when money is scarce. At some point between 1966 and 1968, when I’m born, my father goes to work as a page designer at the newspaper Informaciones. At some point between 1966 and 1968, when I’m born, my mother finds work as a buyer for a textile chain. Years later, my father confesses to me that he couldn’t understand my mother’s incredible nonchalance, her lack of concern about practical matters; they might have no money to eat the next day and it wouldn’t bother her. Years later, my mother tells me that my father didn’t last long at the paper, he couldn’t stand it. My father steals things from stores, including food, steaks that he slips under his arm. He wins a prize for prints at the Tokyo Biennale, spends a season in Paris on a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation. But they’re happy, or so it seems to me, and soon I arrive to confirm it. It has taken them four years, and not because they’ve done anything to prevent it.