* * *
But we were in 1978, and I’ve said that I would stay aloft.
Nineteen seventy-eight is the year of my First Communion. No one pushes me, though the fact is that it’s no simple process. As I was baptized under emergency circumstances, the procedure first has to be repeated in front of an ecclesiastical notary. My father attends the ceremony — at which I renounce Satan and all his pomp and works — but not the Communion itself. I don’t care: it’s not in Madrid; he has an excuse. I’m not very sure myself about what I’ve done. My conversion is relative. I want to believe the way my mother believes, and sometimes I pray and cross myself, but I never go back to take Communion again and certainly not to confess.
The following years bring few changes, but important ones. In 1979 and 1980 my father still makes the occasional halfhearted attempt at family life with us. He even travels with us. To Extremadura with one set of friends, to the Mar Menor with another. I don’t know whether he does this of his own accord or whether the appearances he makes are the tribute my mother claims for me. Whatever the case, he shows up, and though sometimes I may notice that his mind is elsewhere, his lack of enthusiasm is never something he turns against me: it has to do with his relationship with my mother. And yet I’m part of the same package, and it’s inevitable that he should associate me with her. The world that she’s woven so that their separation goes unnoticed begins to come apart, and despite their efforts, there are many moments when I miss him, when I sense that he’s hiding another life, other appetites, and I guess at the lie. Once, he tells me that he’s in Andalucía and a friend of my mother’s happens to tell me that she ran into him in London on the same day. I notice that he doesn’t contribute to my keep, that he doesn’t give me money, that it’s hard to involve him in plans he doesn’t devise himself, that he’s evasive.
School. I’m not doing well at the public school where he chose to have me enrolled five years earlier (I’m an oddball), and my mother moves me to a private school with a well-deserved reputation for being liberal. She alone makes the decisions that concern me. My father has gradually bowed out; either he doesn’t feel he has the authority to impose his views, or he trusts my mother’s judgment. From now on, that’s the way it will be; though he may criticize her at times, though he’s driven to distraction — as I will be, years later — by what he would call her exaggerated enthusiasms, her patrician sense of life, he’ll always let her be the one to choose how things are done or undone. He’s infuriated by her disregard for material things, her essential optimism, her tendency to be a dreamer, her failure to consider that everything could take a turn for the worse, but since he has no stability to offer us, he cuts himself off. He wants us to save what he can’t give us, he wants us to be prudent, he doesn’t want to have to worry about us, he wants us to be safe so that he will be too.
My mother and I do spend money. Without a second thought. We eat out whenever we want, we have a maid, and we take taxis everywhere, but the truth is that we lack for nothing. She makes enough. She works and makes money. She has grown up too. She may not save, she may not plan for tomorrow, but she has liberated herself from the world she shared with my father and created her own world, with new friends. Everything is going well. What does my father have to complain about? He thinks he knows her, and he’s terrified by her levity, the way she seems to make decisions without considering the consequences. Whenever he can, he seeks my complicity to criticize her. It bothers him that by nature I’m as relaxed as she is, and he tries to reform me.
My mother’s world of dreams. My father’s paralyzing hyperrealism. I’m torn — my head and my frustrated desires with my father, my heart and my day-to-day life with my mother. Sometimes I ally myself with my father, but it’s my mother I live with, and I simply don’t understand my father’s dissatisfaction, his dutiful lack of enthusiasm when he comes to see us.
In early 1980 my father shows at a fleetingly successful gallery, and a few months later he leaves on a Fulbright to spend a year in New York. The day of his departure he gives me conflicting reasons for why I shouldn’t come to the airport, and I suspect that either he isn’t traveling alone or he’s being seen off by someone he doesn’t want me to meet. I get a postcard of fake UFOs flying over the Twin Towers, I get a postcard of a miniature explorer shrunken by natives, I get a postcard of an Art Deco teapot, I get a postcard of graffiti. Those are the ones I kept; I don’t think there were any others. No letter. Occasionally he calls me. Hurried conversations in which he barrages me with questions.
Since he left, it’s been agreed that I’ll visit him, but although it’s my mother’s understanding that she’s coming too, he thinks I’ll be coming alone. I don’t know whether it’s a misunderstanding or whether one of them wasn’t honest with the other in previous conversations. The fact is that when my mother and I arrive to spend Christmas, it’s clear from the start that my father doesn’t want her there. They don’t tell me this, but I sense it. I sleep with my father in the double bed, and my mother sleeps on a mattress on the floor. I remember one afternoon when they leave me in the loft to have a private conversation. Even so, my father takes us on long excursions, showing us the city as if nothing is wrong. He buys me John Lennon’s Double Fantasy, he buys me an electronic flipper game, he buys me some eye-catching yellow radio headphones, he buys me snow boots. At Bloomingdale’s, the night before we go back, my mother gets me a brown corduroy polo jacket, and she exits with a black digital watch that — tired of waiting to be helped — my father takes without paying. They try to act normal in front of me; at moments they probably even forget that it’s an act. But that trip is key to the severing of the final emotional ties between them, because years later they continue to bring it up, he still angry and she still hurt.
The years 1981, 1982, and 1983 are confused in my memory. Either too many things happen or I begin to be too conscious of what’s happening. I’ve grown up; I’m more aware. I’m not a mere witness anymore. In ’81 I spend the night of the coup with my mother and some neighbors, while my father is still in New York. When he returns months later, he doesn’t let me know in advance. I sense motives related to those of his departure the year before, but this time when I see him, I’m filled with silent anger. He pretends to have arrived the previous night, but he contradicts himself. It bothers me, but I don’t say anything. He brings me the life jacket from the plane and albums by the Talking Heads, the B-52s, Split Enz, and Yellowman, but I hardly thank him. His lie bothers me, and it bothers me that I’ve been displaced. It’s the beginning of the silences between us. The silences happen when he hides something from me that I know he’s hiding, he knows that I know it, and I know that he knows that I know it. If he betrays me, I immediately sense his betrayal and he immediately senses that I’ve sensed his betrayal. It isn’t even necessary for him to make a mistake or for me to hide my disappointment. All we have to do is exchange glances.
It’s the beginning of the silences between us.
But we also take our first trip alone together. A trip to London, paid for by my mother. This trip and another the following year to Paris and Amsterdam, also my mother’s treat, will be the only trips we take until twenty years later. I learn to travel with him, to visit museums with him. I learn to despise all chauvinism with him, not to entrench myself in the familiar, to appreciate variety. I learn how important painting is to him, the pleasure that he gets from looking at art.