This will be the last time he spends the night. Everything changes as his visits grow further apart, and he becomes more and more reluctant to participate in family plans not dictated by him. He’s worked things out with the friend he met in Brazil. He has a foot in two worlds, and he gives most where most is demanded of him. His variability increases, as do the silences and the mutual lack of enthusiasm. The times he chooses to see me are dead moments, interruptions of daily routine. My discontent grows gradually, but busy as I am, I don’t have much time for him either. I come and go, see shows on my own, throw myself fully into my romance.
An unexpected event arrives to change everything, making what was once an occasional rumble of annoyance more cutting. Suddenly we’re broke. My mother’s radio contract expires and the program sponsors don’t renew it. She’s out of work. We have no savings, and our financial situation is worrisome. We give up the maid and get some help from my mother’s father, but it isn’t enough. My mother informs her friends of her situation, and every Sunday she goes through the help wanted sections with me and we send out CVs, but nothing happens. My father is aware of what’s going on, of course. I make sure of that, but the only result is that he makes himself scarce. There’s an element in his attitude of getting his own back, of I told you so, of shamefaced compunction at having no other solution than flight. I don’t know what kind of help I expected from him, but this is definitely not it. For the months that my mother’s troubles last, he vanishes, doesn’t even call. My rage grows. For the first time, I feel full force what it’s like to be left in the lurch. The few times that we speak, I can’t be natural. I judge his life from afar. He doesn’t have money, he claims; he can’t help us, he insists. Whereas all I can see is that he’s removed himself from the mess, and I doubt the truth of his excuses. It’s the real estate boom of the mid-eighties and with the friend he met in Brazil he buys apartments to fix up and sell. The initial capital is hers, but the work, the search for properties, the renovation decisions, and the oversight are all his. And he never sees the fruits of his labor. He’s a worker without pay. He works for her in exchange for imagining that he has something to fall back on. His excuses aren’t good enough for me, considering that my mother and I have nothing, but more than anything it’s his desertion that hurts. Even though I sense that he isn’t untouched by it, that it’s at once the result and cause of deep suffering, I feel let down.
This is how things will be from now on.
Could he really have helped us in 1984? Today, March 22, 2009, as I revise what I wrote many months ago, I have my doubts. Was he really absent as often as I remember? Should I have concerned myself so much with our financial problems? Was it my place to take him to task?
* * *
This is a story of two people, though I’m the only one telling it. My father wouldn’t tell it. My father kept almost everything to himself.
Sometimes the responsibility frightens me. I try to strip away all embellishment, set down the memories exactly as they come into my head, but obviously I can’t avoid making some decisions.
Up until now I’d never written in my own voice. I had written fictionally about reality, as one always does, but it wasn’t my reality and I wasn’t the one narrating. It’s a new and confusing feeling. With fiction, you can say anything. In your own voice, either you’re tempted to leave things out or you miss being able to make things up. I’ve passed through both states in previous pages.
Really, though, one of my fears is not having anything to add to what I’ve written in other books — books that were fiction, about other people who weren’t me, but into which I poured myself.
I don’t include my first book. In my first book, a collection of short stories, I wasn’t even conscious that I was writing about reality. I had read, or been warned by someone — an older writer, maybe my own grandfather — that it isn’t a good idea to make one’s first novel a self-portrait, that it blocks the imagination and creates vices that are hard to shake, and so convinced was I of this that in the book’s stories I shunned personal experience and borrowed only some unimportant traits of mine — poor eyesight, for example, or certain habits — to distinguish the different narrators. To none of them did I give anything that was truly mine.
It wasn’t until my first novel that I equipped myself with a spelunker’s helmet to climb down into known depths. And even when I did, it wasn’t intentional. I wanted to write about the insecurities of childhood, and as usual, my desire to write preceded the invention of a story. I remember being paralyzed, unable to come up with anything, until before I realized it, the childhood I was trying to elaborate began to take on elements of my own. The narrator, an adult narrator looking back on his childhood, was an only child, and the epicenter of his family was his mother, with whom he lived and shared the ambivalent memory of an absent father. I lent him the feelings of dread and the thoughts I had at the time, but that was all I took from my own experiences. Or at least so I thought while I was writing it.
My father, however, saw things differently.
Just recently I found out that he was very upset by it, and though the person who told me this isn’t especially trustworthy, in this case the information is credible because I’d previously gotten the same impression. This was very early on, the same day he’d told me he was reading the book. One more drop in the sea of information that flowed between us without need of words.
When you’re an only child, when you don’t have the mirror of siblings, any insecurity about who you are must seem greater than it would if you’d had them, if you’d grown up alongside someone who was shaped by the same influences, who had the same parents and yet was still sharply different from them and — of course — from you. When there are no siblings to turn to, parents are all we have, our only reference, our only vantage point. Everything begins and ends in us, and phenomena like betrayal, love, admiration, or duty are felt with greater intensity. Bonds are stronger or leave more of a mark, and very often it’s hard to distinguish between what’s particular to us and what’s inherited. We have no one to compare ourselves to; loneliness chokes us. Who do we share things with or unburden ourselves to? Who do we go to with questions, answers, accusations? How do we get a measure of distance? How do we construct a balanced account from memory when all we have is a single gaze, and that gaze is shaded — slanted, too — by our own unique selves? When you don’t have siblings everything seems designed especially for you. The danger is that we tend to magnify things, and that from each word spoken to us, each look or slight, each occurrence witnessed (or sensed or reported or even just imagined) we draw infinite conclusions. The result is that we’re bound even tighter and we’re wrong more often too. It may be that we place too much importance on our parents, that the necessary break is harder for us, and it may be that sometimes we don’t value them as much as they deserve. Everything is likely to cause us more pain, and most of all our own singular selves. We’re alone.
This is the only fragment of the whole novel that I would subscribe to in talking about myself: the acknowledgment of my excesses. Otherwise, neither the character of the mother (despite certain vague echoes) nor of the father (an amalgam of bits borrowed from a number of models) resembles my mother or my father, nor was my childhood as claustrophobic as the one described in the book.