But there are days that are exceptions; moments, especially. In general, his fitful interest in talking is revived by memories that give him the chance to vindicate himself or by subjects so foreign that they manage to distract him. He also has more of a tendency to let loose when the conversation touches — however tangentially — on subjects from which he thinks I can derive some lesson. He complains, as I’ve said, about not having painted enough, about having wasted time chasing women. To hear him talk, it might seem as if he’s weighed down by a sense of guilt and moral failing that he needs to purge, but the truth is that, beyond any tendency toward exhibitionism and vanity, the invocation of his sexual appetite and his need for women actually seems to be the most immediately accessible way to warn me about dissipation, about all those dead-end temptations whose constant pursuit may be, at the end of the day, an excuse for neglecting anything more arduous, time-consuming, or uncertain. Love itself, work, the construction of a living fortress that, by protecting us from the unexpected, allows us to pursue our calling in peace. He doesn’t say as much, but what he’s warning me against is the sloth of discouragement. What he laments is having shown himself to be vulnerable to setbacks, having allowed himself to be seduced by flight when his work required perseverance.
A couple of times, though in words distorted by an emotion whose source I no longer recall, he goes so far as to say something to me that until only recently was completely unthinkable: I should have stayed with my family. Both times I realize that the ambiguity of the noun makes it impossible to say whether he’s including my mother or gently excluding her, and I — familiar with mounting waves of feeling dominated by the irrational, and even having come to empathize with the reasons that may have led him to distance himself (ranging from the egoism of someone who would rather seek refuge by himself than risk a shared exposure to the elements, to the tortuous logic of the person who, believing himself to be a burden, prefers not to get in the way of those who will advance faster without him), which I understand not just in an intellectual or abstract way, but through my own experience of the anguish, chaos, and loneliness from which one and the other spring, so that what I’d like to tell him is I understand you perfectly—must nevertheless accept that my immediate rejection of his piteous assertion, I should have stayed with my family, be taken as a formal statement of compassion.
I also have words of praise for his work, and I tell him, with conviction, that others would declare themselves satisfied if they had accomplished as much.
But nothing helps.
It seems it isn’t always a good thing to make him talk.
Or he isn’t in the mood.
Then, if it’s impossible to go out, I force him to watch a movie (nothing dark; classic comedies by Lubitsch or Howard Hawks), and more and more often we listen to music, albums that he asks me to buy: Dylan’s Modern Times, Tom Waits’s Orphans, JJ Cale and Eric Clapton’s Road to Escondido, a Georges Brassens collection, an old Leonard Cohen album, another by Portabales, which have the virtue of lifting his spirits.
Every day, too, we repeat the same nighttime routine. I help him into bed, arrange on his bedside table everything he might need if he wakes in the middle of the night, and sit for a while at the foot of his bed … When at last I go up to the apartment where my wife and I sleep, I call him briefly on his cell phone to check that the monitor is working, and no matter what kind of day it’s been, he whimpers for a few seconds, pretending to cry like a baby. Sometimes — rarely — after that heroic display of humor, I leave the monitor in the care of my wife and escape to a bar to meet some friend. What never changes is our morning ritual, which follows the same pattern as the nighttime one: a pretend whimper before he says good morning and rouses himself.
Meanwhile, just before Christmas, his oncologist tells us that he’s very weak and that he should try a break from the treatment, and later, taking me aside, she explains that the chemotherapy isn’t working and it won’t be administered to him again. I should prepare for an end that won’t be long in coming, she warns. At first she’s reluctant to give me a time frame, but finally she allows that it might be a month, three at most.
Thanks to a friend, I’ve found a doctor willing to honor the wishes expressed in my father’s living will. If before I had no doubts about what I’m preparing to do, I have even fewer when I learn from the doctor the many painful forms — depending on which organ fails first — in which something as apparently simple as death can present itself. After he tells me what symptoms to watch for so that I’ll be ready, I leave the office with a strange sense of duty done, which automatically rusts over with grief when I get home and face my father’s gaze.
The Christmas celebrations are a prolongation rather than an interruption; a confirmation, not a departure. We spend the night of the twenty-fourth in Madrid with his family. He’s happy, has a few drinks, and though no one treats him with special deference and things are lively with all the children around, I can see in people’s expressions and their manner the same sense of anticipated mourning that has come over me. Days later we go to Galicia with my mother and my wife. Before we board the plane, he tries to convince us to change our minds, with the argument that he’s just been there, but in the end he seems to enjoy the trip. He takes pleasure in the house, our drives, any distraction. One day when he’s alone, he slips as he’s hurrying to answer his cell phone. He cuts himself and can’t get up. I still have the gauze and disinfectant that I used to tend to him. One day he buys a vacuum cleaner. Another day he paints greenish gray the frame of a Renaissance panel painting belonging to my mother. The night of the thirty-first, as the year is rung out, he sits in a chair and I stand next to him. We both know that we’ll toast each other first and wait until later to toast the others, but a certain amount of time — a very long time, it seems to me — passes before we do, and during that time we stare at each other. His eyes are very open and fixed on mine, and though I force myself to smile, I can’t keep it up as long as he can. How to wish someone a happy new year when he won’t have one? His gaze doesn’t flag, but mine slips away for an instant as I bend toward him, tapping his glass with mine, wishing him a happy new year, and giving him a kiss as I try to smile. His is the distorted gaze of a sick man, which is why it’s hard to interpret; I don’t know whether what he seeks in my face is the vision of a future that’s still unknowable, or whether it’s the next step: the recognition of his fate and an acquiescent desire to comfort, to feel and elicit feeling, to give what will soon be impossible for him to give.
In January, back in Madrid, everything happens with deceptive slowness. I look for a home health aide; I teach the doctors who begin to visit us not to treat him like someone terminally ill; I keep careful track of the passing days and his strength in order to decide when to give him the cortisone that will grant him a ten-day grace period; I call his oncologist in order to carry on a simulated conversation in his presence that makes him believe that all is not lost, that he’ll restart the treatment when he’s stronger; I get someone he trusts to ask him whether he’d like to see the friend he met in Brazil, not wanting him to be left with that wish, if he has it; I gather photographs and biographical material and write the draft of an obituary to send to the newspapers when the moment comes; I buy a hospital bed, which, in addition to making his life easier now that he spends so much time lying down, is intended as false proof that the end isn’t so near; and meanwhile, I continue to oversee the renovation work on the apartment where we’ll supposedly live, the completion of which he pleads with me for, asking with growing insistence whether I think he’ll see it finished, whether I think he’ll ever live there.