I never thought that any kind of connection could be drawn, but clearly I was wrong, for no matter what the characters are like and no matter how different the story is from ours, in some way it portrayed us.
I didn’t have him in my sights. But it had the same effect on my father as if I had.
And I wasn’t unhappy about it.
I discovered that I had a weapon, and I used it.
The first time I consciously availed myself of our problem was in a long story that I wrote for a contest. Under pressure to make the deadline, and afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get a handle on someone else’s story in time, I resorted to a subject I could identify with immediately: a father, a young son, and the triangulation of feelings when there’s dissatisfaction on both sides and one slight leads to another. I chose an isolated and oppressive setting, drastically shortened the time in which the story takes place to ratchet up the intensity, made the narrator take the boy’s side, devised an ending that was theatrical, violent, and unmistakable in its implications, and threw myself gleefully into the writing, swept away by an unfamiliar fury that even led me to scatter clues through the story that my father and his circle would recognize without much effort.
Naturally, there were consequences. A while after it was published and my father had read it, he called one day, and in response to his question about how the new book was coming, I confessed that I was stuck. His answer was, “Stuck? Nonsense. Write about a cruel father and his miserable son.”
What heightened rather more than briefly the guilt this ironic commentary intended to spark was that — though he didn’t know it — the novel I was writing at the time had grown out of that story and was therefore destined to touch on the same subject.
The novel, of course, was more complex than the story, less reliant on insinuation and the careful employment of verb tenses, and more open to digression and a full exploration of the themes. It, too, alternated between two timelines: a recent past that constituted the novel’s present, and a distant, remembered past that functioned as a traumatic explication of the former.
The unresolved conflict that cast a shadow over my narrator’s present was a drama along the same lines as the one I’d presented in the story, an anticipated tragedy that, when it arrives, exposes the guilty parties. The victim was once again a boy, and those responsible for his fate were once again members of his own family: a father unable to act the part and deflect the looming threat, and the father’s wife, trigger of the danger, the instigator. The narrator, like the narrator of the story, participates in the events as an observer, but unlike the narrator in the story — where the action takes place over the course of a weekend — he might have intervened if he chose, which makes his moral position more ambiguous. The reasons he doesn’t intervene — his extenuating circumstances — are his youth at the time of the remembered events and his close relationship to the other three protagonists (son of the instigator, son of the passive father, and half brother of the victim of the injustice described). The simple decision to make the narrator the half brother of the victim allowed me to cast him as a judge of the sins of their common father, much sterner and less prey to charges of Manichaeism than he might have been had he served directly as the victim.
The novel’s other story line, the present-day plot, touched on subjects as varied as love, betrayal, and resistance to assume the responsibilities of adulthood, and there’s no need to summarize it here; suffice it to say that some of the trappings coincided with those of my own life: the narrator’s age, place of origin, social class, and schooling were similar to mine. Also, I scattered so many private references and secret winks for the benefit of those who, like my father, were capable of unearthing them that before I sent the final version to the publisher, I was attacked by remorse and spent a few days deleting or softening the most costly, the crudest, those clothed in the weakest metaphors, those that most transparently betrayed their autobiographical roots, those that gave me the most pleasure to write.
And yet it’s not entirely true, as I suggest in the lines quoted on the first page of this book, that in the novel I killed my father. In the course of the writing, I made the father of the protagonist die for structural reasons, but he wasn’t my father; he didn’t even resemble him. Any connection had to be sought elsewhere. Once the plot was established, I loaned the fictional character some traits of my father’s, through which I sought to direct his attention to the conflict of loyalties played out in the novel, and to the extent that this really was a distorted version of the conflict between us, my intent was to show him something like an image projected on a river, a shadow distorted by ripples of water in motion, an image that hints but doesn’t dictate and could therefore be of anyone. Not a portrait or a true mirror able to return to him a clear image of himself, but rather a cluster of echoes that harked back not only to our story but also to the story of my mother and her father, so similar in many ways to ours that it may have fed my fears, leading to errors of judgment and unfair comparisons that caused me to be too hard on him.
Triangulation, concealment, exaggeration, cross-contamination … The fact is that I used my father. The substance of the book grew out of our deepest misunderstandings; I had him in mind in many passages; and I’d hate it if my memory of him should be tainted now in unjust retribution.
Fiction, even when it’s inspired by reality, obeys its own rules. It alters reality by pursuing different ends than those of fidelity to the truth. The fathers in my novels weren’t mine, and I want the father I write about here to be who he was to me.
I want to strip him of accretions.
I gave my two novels everything I had, I poured myself into them, and I’m still feeling the consequences today; I write against that.
Did he know it?
He must have known, I’m sure, that the intensity of what we shared at the end of his life would inspire me. When — on our last trip, chasing a hope that we knew was remote — I accompanied him on consecutive afternoons to the derelict hospital of an African island, he allowed himself to direct my gaze to our surroundings and even to give me an idea or two. He was already seeing himself from the outside, a dying hero from a Conrad novel. Take a good look at all of this, he advised me, because later you’ll be able to use it.
He probably knew I would want to make up for the times I had used him for my own ends.
But did he guess that there would be no masks, that it wouldn’t be fiction I would write this time?
In his excessive reserve, he would have recoiled at the idea, but as I’ve said, he changed so much toward the end that I can’t be sure. I suppose that when you face death, a new kind of logic takes over. The performance has ended. Your immortality is in the hands of others, and almost anything can be forgiven.
It’s odd, in any case, that in my previous books I was able to explore in depth thoughts that he inspired, and that now, face-to-face with him, I miss fiction.
* * *
From 1984 on, our lives hardly change. My father has become a problem for me. One among others. My mother weighs on me, for example. I feel the weight of her loneliness and my loneliness with her. But even here he’s somehow implicated. It’s his absence that heightens the loneliness.
After a very difficult year in which we go into debt and survive thanks to the help of my grandfather, between 1984 and 1990 my mother embarks on a new period of prosperity. Now she works in publicity, and again we spend without a thought for the future.
Between 1984 and 1990, I finish school and start college.
Between 1984 and 1990, I keep a list of the women I’ve slept with.