I don’t know who made those calls, if they were people he knew from before or if they were new nocturnal acquisitions. I don’t even know if they were as frequent as I remember or just a few calls that grew in number in my child’s mind and continued to grow with the passing time, but whatever the truth of the matter, what I heard gave me my first inkling of my father’s duplicitous nature, of his need to lie. Not that I caught him telling any untruths. I simply realized that, for some reason, he had no need to pretend to the people who phoned him, or else his pretense had some other aim; he changed completely when he spoke on the phone. His usual tense, laconic way of speaking vanished, and he adopted a relaxed, often humorous tone, which was quite the opposite of how he spoke to us.
Apart from that one furtive discovery, gleaned from the odd moments when I would linger in the hallway or hang around in a doorway, I can’t remember anything else, just the look of apparent indifference in my mother’s eyes — gentle and lost in thought, as I recall — whenever we sensed or felt his unexpected presence.
That unexpectedness found its fullest expression three or four weeks after his arrival home, one Saturday or Sunday morning, on the twenty-eighth of November. I remember the date exactly because it’s my Aunt Delfina’s birthday, and my mother and I had just gotten off the phone to her and were sitting in my bedroom deciding on a date for our next trip to La Coruña. My father was in his room, supposedly sleeping, and perhaps because of that or because we unconsciously excluded him from all plans, we were talking quietly. I didn’t notice him at first. He crept up so stealthily behind my mother that I didn’t realize he had entered the room until he was actually there. After raising one finger to his lips as if asking me not to betray him, he stood stock still and silent, and when, because of some imprudent look of mine, my mother seemed about to discover his presence, he bent down and affectionately put his arms about her waist. This wasn’t the first such gesture I had seen, but it was the most spontaneous and, therefore, the most sincere, as evidenced by what happened next. As if she had been waiting a long time for this embrace, my mother did not start or turn around. She clasped the hands embracing her and, smiling, drew them more tightly around her, as if they were the buckle on some strange belt; and while he tightened his embrace and topped it off with a smacking kiss on her neck, she gently turned her head and leaned back against the body holding her close, thus prolonging the contact.
“So what are you two plotting, eh? Aren’t I included?” asked my father after a moment, as he detached himself from the embrace. “Why don’t we go and have lunch somewhere and talk about it?”
That was the first time he had shown any interest in our plans, the first time he had spoken in the plural. I’ve forgotten what my mother said in response and what else happened before we left the house to go to the restaurant where we had lunch. The only image I have is of the three of us walking down the street and of my surprise when my father at one point suggested coming with us to La Coruña. Even though his suggestion came to nothing and we never made that trip together, it has remained lodged in my memory because, from that day on, he began to coordinate his schedule with ours, and the only life he led was the one he began to share with us. Despite all her efforts to simulate normality, my mother had clearly been waiting for some such sign and could finally relax, and I, too, stopped being quite so obsessed with my father’s activities. I can’t imagine what brought about that change in him, whether it was a sincere attempt to adapt himself to us, a renunciation of his own interests in favor of some hypothetical family harmony, or, once again, merely the dictates of his own egotistical instincts just happening to coincide with what was expected of him. The fact is that the months that followed must have far outstripped even my mother’s most optimistic expectations.
XI
As regards my mother, I have only questions. I don’t know what hopes she had for that change in behavior or if she ever seriously believed in it; was it so very unusual that she could allow herself to believe he would not slide back into his old ways, or, on the contrary, could she not help but fear or foresee what would inevitably happen even if she denied it to herself moments later?
One thing is sure, once a certain degree of normality had been restored, regardless of whether or not she hoped it would last, my mother’s behavior changed, too. It was not a spectacular transformation, she didn’t suddenly become more cheerful, nor did she behave in any way that was substantially different from before. It was more subtle than that, almost imperceptible to anyone who was not, as I was, aware of every signal she gave off. During the early days following his return, not only did she avoid mentioning him when she was alone with me, she did her best to never even say his name, fearful, perhaps, of provoking any discussion for which she was not sure she could find the right answers. However, from the time my father began to stay at home, she grew far less cautious. Since there were fewer areas to avoid, fewer areas that, should my father come up in conversation, would have forced us to mention matters on which it was still too early to make any firm pronouncement, she allowed herself to be a little more spontaneous. If she came home and found he wasn’t there, instead of falling silent, as she would have done before, she would ask quite fearlessly where he was. If the three of us were sitting around the dining table joshing with my father and he suddenly got up and disappeared for a moment, she would go on joking, rather than stopping either out of fear or prudence. She went no further than that, though. She never referred to him without some specific reason or without relating it to some event in the day. After that morning in Burgos, when she had spoken to me for the first time about his idiosyncratic personality, she never returned to the subject. She didn’t offer me any new information, nor did she probe his motives for behaving as he did. Sometimes I would notice a melancholy look in her eyes when some incident aroused painful memories or when she could have done with an explanation, an explanation she never demanded. Day-today remarks were fine, but nothing that touched on the very heart of the problem — nothing about my father’s possible fears or hopes or misgivings, or what he was planning to do, or if he would stay with us permanently. She spoke only of the present, never of the past or the future.
Now I understand what a difficult balance her life must have been. On the one hand, there was me — ostensibly the most important person, the one for whose stability she was sacrificing everything else. It’s impossible to believe that anything she said or did then was spontaneous, or that she would have said or done the same thing had I not existed. She never allowed her feelings to run away with her. Her every gesture, her every action was rigorously assessed according to what she judged to be in my best interests. That’s why, while it was inconceivable that she would have told me about my father too soon, it was just as inconceivable that she would have tried to maintain that fiction when he was no longer in prison. She concealed the truth when she thought it best to exclude me and stopped doing so when she thought that deception could turn against her, and fell silent again when she realized that any comment she made about my father’s habits — habits I could now observe for myself — might prove to be mistaken or spark questions on my part which she didn’t know if she was able or willing to answer. On the other hand, there were her doubts, the fact that, in a way, this whole situation was built on shifting sand. After all, whether she liked it or not, she had to accept that a great deal had to be left to chance. There would have been no point in her drawing up any plans on her own if, later on, my father did the exact opposite. That was where the silence came from, that’s why she never mentioned him at first, and afterward only referred to him in safe, everyday situations, avoiding any confidences that could create a dangerous precedent between us.