This is 1978.
But my mother recovers. She reinvents herself. She works briefly in television and then more steadily in radio, and immediately we sense my father’s relief. His bitterness lifts and he begins to visit us regularly again. He’s still painting and showing his work, though not with the old fanfare. His former gallery is the most important in Madrid and he’s lost the chance to show there. Intrigues are mounted against him, too, by young critics who champion his rival. He doubts himself, watches others triumph, and gets discouraged. Sometimes he’s strong and keeps working, and sometimes he gets distracted and loses himself in female labyrinths. I come across scraps of this: a picture of him naked with two women; an afternoon when he’s admitted to the hospital with kidney trouble, and when my mother and I arrive, we’re told at the reception desk that his wife has just left; the apologies of the guard at the apartment complex where a married female friend lives for having mistaken him for a thief when he climbed out the window the night before … None of it hurts; I simply remember it. Just as it doesn’t hurt that it’s my mother I see when I get up, my mother who helps me with my homework and goes to school to talk to my teachers. At the same time — probably due at least in part to my mother’s prodding — he’s always there at critical moments. I come down with rheumatic fever and he increases his visits. The nights of my mother’s radio show he usually stays with me into the early-morning hours. I’m with him the day I have an attack of peritonitis, and he pays the surgeon with one of his paintings. It doesn’t even have to be anything serious. In the summer he comes to swim at our community pool, sometimes he stays for dinner when my mother’s father is there, and many Sundays he brings his father for lunch. If I want something, he does his best to get it for me. Then he jokingly makes a big deal about it and says that all I have to do is ask him for the smallest thing and there he is on bended knee, but the truth is that he does come through (the smallest thing, on bended knee, the times I must have heard him say that…).
This is 1978, the year of the constitutional referendum. Behind us are the assassination of Carrero Blanco, Franco’s death, and the elections of ’77. The effects of these events are still being felt in our house. The Christmas of the Carrero Blanco assasination, my cousins and I are playing guessing games, and when it’s my turn, I mime an explosion; the night of November 21, 1975, while my father is in Paris, the phone rings off the hook, and later friends come over. The next day, my mother gets me dressed and sends me to school, but before I can get out the front door of the building, the doorman stops me, long-faced. Around this time, we attend two Communist Party of Spain gatherings, one clandestine and the second by then legal, and we watch the king’s proclamation on television. Stories fly about the guerrillas of Fuerza Nueva and Bandera Roja. I have an album of Civil War songs, and I learn “The Internationale.” In ’77 I’m taught in school to make a basic gelatin print and I print flyers asking people to vote for José Bergamín, who is running for senator on the Republican Left ticket. All of this I essentially live through with my mother, but my mother is a monarchist, my father a republican, and I — like my father — am a republican. I decide this at a traffic light in Plaza de Castilla one afternoon when the two of us are out in his blue Dyane 6. My father has a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard (Lola, they’re called), and what he says is more venal than rational, but I get it. I want to get it, to share this with him.
Then there’s God. My mother has taught me to pray, and that same afternoon, with the pack of Lola on the dashboard, I listen to my father argue against the existence of God and life after death. Here, however, I stand my ground. Where are the grandmothers I never met? I agree with him, I try to convince myself that after death there is nothing, but I’m not being entirely honest. In fact, though I hide it from him, for years I still keep trying to believe. When we visit a cathedral or a church, I cross myself, and he can’t help smiling. He’s moved by it. I’m sure it irritates him that we aren’t alike in this regard, that he hasn’t convinced me, but he’s moved by it.
* * *
Before going on, I should pause here. When coolly catalogued, the facts of the past lose their distinctiveness and come to seem interchangeable. A catalogue like the one I’ve been making does a better job than any digression would of reflecting the transitory nature of life, the nothing that everything becomes when death makes its appearance; still, emphasizing the latter point — important as it is — is not my only goal.
A life, though fragile and ephemeral, is so singular that it comes as a surprise that it should be the result of an act of intercourse. The contrast between the trivial randomness with which two bodies unite and the meaning that the life to which that union may give rise assumes for the person who possesses it obsessed me for a while. On alcohol-fueled nights, surrounded by friends, the calculation of the approximate dates of our origination filled me with hilarity and vertigo. More than our births, it amused and dismayed me to conjure up the moment nine months earlier when we were conceived. Why did our parents’ bodies come together on that particular day at that particular time? Maybe it was dinner out and a few drinks; maybe they had been on a trip to the country and it was the coda to a summer outing; maybe they had fought and this was how they made up. But what would have happened if they hadn’t taken a trip, hadn’t gone out to dinner, hadn’t fought, hadn’t slept together that night? More than any other paradox, the tremendous futility of these questions encapsulated for me the tragedy of the human condition, the arbitrariness of our fate.
When does life begin to be subjected to a multitude of factors capable of altering it, of channeling it in a certain direction?
I’m the result of an act of intercourse that took place at the end of May 1967. I don’t know the circumstances, and I don’t care to know them. Nor do I know what caused the bodies of my father’s parents to unite in November 1939, though here I can take some license: they had spent the war apart, she in Biarritz and he in Madrid, and after their reunion, I imagine that whatever their inclinations, their carnal relations must have been frequent.
I’ll have to go back in time if I want to sketch a comprehensible portrait of my father.
His birthplace itself is revealing: in Madrid, across from the Cortes, in a grand block of apartments built at the turn of the twentieth century to be inhabited by families of the Madrid haute bourgeoisie, among which his was certainly not the least prominent. I’m told that I visited the place, but the truth is that I have no memory of it. Or no memory of the inside, since the building still stands. From the photographs I’ve seen, I know that it possessed all the attributes of the opulent homes of the day. Spacious rooms, gold-framed mirrors, rugs from the Royal Tapestry Factory … In theory it belonged to his maternal grandparents, but just as his parents took refuge there after the war, other family members came to spend some time or settled there more or less permanently. It must have been a happy place, because his mother’s family was happy. Happy and not at all conventional, despite their standing.