And life goes on, and he continues to visit us when he feels like it, and once again he stays with me some nights when my mother has her radio show. Our apartment isn’t the same one that he left — or maybe was kicked out of. We’ve moved to another considerably smaller one, but the furniture and almost all the paintings are the same, since he hardly took anything with him when he left. Regarding the justice of this fact, as well as the payment my mother gave him when she sold the first apartment, they will never see eye to eye.
One night when he’s with me he brings a female friend along. He’s never done it before, and I’m conscious of the fact that my mother wouldn’t like it. What surprises me most is that he points out anything of value with proprietary pride, including my only asset: a drawing my mother asked Miró to make for me when, in ’72, there was an exhibition of his work at the gallery she ran.
The friend is the friend he met in Brazil.
My father did almost no work in New York, and though he tries, he does hardly any when he returns to Madrid. It’s the dawning of a crisis from which — because it sidelines him during crucial years when the art market is taking off — he won’t easily recover. He seeks alternatives, works in the studio of a designer, and goes to Galicia for a few months to fix up and decorate a colonial-era house. From Galicia he writes me letters in which he calls me turkey-cock, lovey, or bratty-cakes, remembers to send his love to my mother, and reminds me to be good. One of them ends like this: “I don’t expect you to write, but maybe someday you’ll have something you want to tell your dad, or ask him (you can always trust your father, who would love to be your best friend.)”
Clearly, he’s at a low point. This is only confirmed the two times I go to see him. Once, when I’ve been there for a few days, a female friend of his arrives and a problem arises that at the time I’m unable to fully appreciate. Since work is being done on the house, there are only two bedrooms. My father and I sleep in one of them, and the owner’s grown-up children sleep in the other. My father tries to get me to move in with them, but I refuse: even with someone else in the room, it seems more natural to me to sleep with them than with two strangers. My father gets angry, grumbles, but accepts it in the end. Two clashing forms of logic: a child’s and an adult’s.
The next year, 1982, is hectic. Hectic because lots of things — contradictory things — happen. Hectic because their effect on me is mixed. Hectic because 1982 stretches on, turning into 1983. In ’82 we visit Paris and Amsterdam; in ’82 I go out at night, march in protests, and wear a little black circle-A anarchist pin; in ’82 I spend the summer in England and buy myself a pair of plaid pants, boots, and a leather jacket; in ’82 I make short-lived plans with some friends to form a band. I tell my father about it one Sunday when we’re at lunch with my mother in a Chinese restaurant, and though at first he can’t help making a joke of it, he ends up becoming our biggest champion, as is always the case when behind some plan of mine he senses an itch to escape my mother’s influence. In ’82 my father adopts the habit of picking me up at school some days and returning me the next morning after the two of us spend the night at the studio where he lives and works. In the evening, after dinner at a restaurant, he takes me to shows or to the movies or — during the season — to a bullfight. I remember seeing Picasso and Mondrian and El Greco and Dalí, and especially a Kurt Schwitters show that for a few evenings inspires me to forget the black Olivetti typewriter on which I’ve begun to write and throw myself into making collages à la Kurt Schwitters: I remember Quest for Fire; I remember City of Women; I remember Fitzcarraldo; I remember a Monty Python movie and a revival of Eraserhead. All in all, in ’82 we see quite a bit of each other; I bask in the novel male camaraderie and imprint on my brain attitudes that I will make my own, but it’s also an era in which the silences between us grow thicker. One day, on what pretext I can’t remember, he brings me to an apartment to which he has a key, and on the doorstep, just before we go in, he warns me that I’ll see paintings and pieces of furniture that belong to him, which he’s loaned to the owner for a story in a design magazine. Weeks later, after he picks me up from school, instead of sleeping at his studio, we sleep at that same apartment, this time with the owner present. It’s the friend he met in Brazil, whom just over a year ago he’d brought to my mother’s apartment.
I spend two or three nights there, sleeping in one bedroom or another, depending on shifting criteria, until for reasons I can’t explain, the evenings with him become less and less frequent. He no longer invites me to spend the night. He no longer comes to pick me up from school.
And yet he doesn’t break ties completely. There are silences, mutual misunderstandings, but in hindsight they look more like a foretaste of what’s to come than a permanent reality. He comes over when he chooses, spends the evening, and leaves in a hurry, briskly, as if escaping from invisible snares.
But there’s more.
A parenthesis.
At some point between ’82 and ’83, my mother, who has a crowded calendar and goes out a lot at night, becomes involved in a romantic relationship with one of her suitors, a writer by trade. At some point between ’82 and ’83, my father asks my mother to be his guarantor in the purchase of a ground-floor apartment for sale in the two-story building where the friend he met in Brazil has her apartment. My mother is prepared to give him the money, but suddenly it’s the friend he met in Brazil who doesn’t want him to have the place. My father is incensed. One Saturday he asks me to come with him to her house, and we take his things. The break deepens the depression from which he’s been suffering for years. He paints very little, his income is minimal, it distresses him to have missed the boat on the new times that are shaking up the art world, he’s probably drinking too much. At some point between ’82 and ’83, my mother gets worried, and during a conversation one night, after decreeing that his studio isn’t the best place to lead an orderly life, she invites him to come live with us. My mother is still with the writer, but he lives in France, not Madrid, and so for a while my father is once again a daily presence in my life. In the morning he gets up at the same time as I do, shares the bathroom with me, teaches me to shave. I get used to his smell, a sharp smell that I now recognize on myself. One afternoon, during an argument I have with my mother, he takes her side and hits me. At night we sleep in the same room, in separate beds.
By now it’s ’83. It’s summer. I spend July in Ibiza, the guest of a friend’s father, and August in the Basque Country with my mother and her writer boyfriend. My father is left alone in Madrid. Our stay in the Basque Country, conceived as a kind of test marriage, is a failure. I return to Madrid a few days before the end of August, and my mother arrives three days later, after ending her relationship with the writer. Over the past months I’ve fantasized about the possibility that my parents will get back together, and this might be the ideal moment if it weren’t for the fact that in our absence my father has reconciled with the friend he met in Brazil.
Still, it’s a while before matters take their course. He’s very grateful to my mother, and I suppose that a sudden exit strikes him as being in poor taste. Until October or November, the days blur. I can’t remember how quickly or slowly the parenthesis is closed. My father appears and disappears, and I’m out almost every weekend with my first girlfriend, the daughter of a friend of my mother’s. We sleep together one night when for whatever reason it’s my father who’s home. He lets me in after midnight as I fumble with my key, and though I don’t say a thing, he jokes that he hopes I haven’t made him a grandfather.