That, in my own words, is the long and short of what my mother said that morning — before she mentioned my father. Her words were doubtless gentler and more maternal, as befits someone trained to speak to children. And yet after that very impersonal introduction, she did not move on from the general to the particular. Whether for her own convenience or because she was thinking of me and how I might react, she felt she should have her hands free and thus be ready to deal with whatever my response might be; we had left the main road and were parked outside a bar, with the engine off but with no indication as yet that we were going to get out of the car and into the intense cold that was already making itself felt and go in search of a second breakfast. She didn’t beat around the bush this time. She told me directly, and then looked at me like someone studying the effect on another person of a particularly harsh statement. I still can’t remember her exact words. I heard the word “prison,” I heard the word “Burgos” again, and then I said nothing, absorbing this confession, and at the same time trying to imagine the remote, diffuse figure of my father in a prison cell; a confusion of bars, roll calls in corridors, and prisoners with wicked faces went through my mind, more like a movie than anything that actually related to me. For a moment, neither of us said anything; any explanations came later. My mother was looking at me, but I said nothing. She was looking at me and I was looking at her, and neither of us broke the silence, because neither of us really knew how to. I imagine that what I was feeling was not what my mother was expecting I would feel; she imagined that part of my world must be falling in on me, and yet my only world was her. It could not collapse as long as she did not collapse, as long as she was there studying my face intently, waiting for some expression of doubt or pain to appear, and meanwhile frozen by her own expectations of what she imagined was going on inside me; even when she reached into her purse to take out a cigarette and light it, she still waited, keeping her eyes fixed on me. We must have spent several minutes like that, because the next thing I remember is what she said, first in the bar and then again back in the car, trying to exonerate my father, abandoning the abstract language she had used initially in favor of more concrete terms, painting a picture of him that was real and at the same time comprehensible and forgivable. I can no longer separate what she told me from what I know now, from what she gradually confided to me in later, lonelier years, and from what I’ve since found out for myself, what I dared to think, or what I made up. I imagine that the resulting notion was more innocuous, more hopeful or less crude, than the one I have now. In what way or to what degree, I really don’t care. After all, if that morning has endured over the years and I can speak about it now, it’s not because of what I found out then. Even if she had chosen not to take me to Burgos and had told me nothing about my father, what I would have known then is pretty much what I know now. “Listen,” my mother said that morning, stubbing out her cigarette and turning to look at me again. “Pay attention and listen.”
IX
There’s a photo we took that day, over which I linger whenever I come across it or whenever a pang of nostalgia makes me seek it out. It was taken shortly after that last scene, once we’d arrived in Burgos and walked across the deserted city. It was taken with the camera on delayed action, and it shows my mother and me, along with my father, standing by the side of an empty road. My father is looking very blond and tanned, and at his feet sits a large, old-fashioned suitcase. You would think the photo had been taken in summer if it weren’t for the snowy field in the background and the fact that the three of us are wearing overcoats (I’m clutching my blue balaclava). We’re smiling, although my father’s smile, somewhat blurred and out of focus, seems rather forced, as if he were impatient to be doing something else. They’ve put me in the middle (I come up to about shoulder height on both), and because they didn’t get the angle quite right, next to my mother you can see a concrete wall topped by a sentry box. It’s the prison wall, but that isn’t why I linger over the photo every time I look at it. It isn’t the situation, which I can remember perfectly and which, therefore, doesn’t trouble me.
When a fundamental part of the backdrop to our childhood hasn’t always been fixed and immovable, when we haven’t been shown, right from the start, how it really was, when it’s been hidden or disguised up until a certain moment and we then have to go back and learn to see it from a new perspective, nothing ever seems quite certain again. Duplicity and deceit make us suspicious, and what has just been revealed, what we’ve actually lived through and experienced, and what has merely been a matter for speculation become so intertwined that it’s hard to tell them apart. Our intuitions have as much weight as hard evidence, and while there may be occasions when those intuitions turn out to be right, there are, on the other hand, many others when we can’t distinguish what we really know from what we’ve simply imagined, where we see silhouetted figures when there’s really only a wall, a shadow, and a plant swaying in the wind. If, moreover, that revealed reality is a very unusual one which then begins to be treated as perfectly normal because it is normal for the person who has revealed it to us, the person who has removed our blindfold, then the whole confused skein of events becomes still more tangled.
I began to face up to the problematic figure of my father and what his nebulous personality meant for my mother, and I began this some time after that morning in Burgos, precisely when we had most reason to believe that one era was coming to an end and we were about to begin to lead a normal life. Up until then, any information I’d been given about him had reached me in adulterated form. My mother made use of her position as intermediary, and not only did I never doubt the excuses she gave for his absence, I also considered as normal things that weren’t normal at all. If she told me, as she did initially, that my father had had an accident and was in the hospital or, as she said later on, that he lived abroad, working for some international organization, that is what I believed and what I would say if some school friend asked me about him. It didn’t even occur to me that this was no justification for such a long separation, that he could easily have come to visit us now and again or we could have gone to see him over vacation, or he could have phoned or written a letter.