Perhaps because it was my mother and not my father I was following on that rain-drenched evening that was fast becoming night — perhaps that’s why I ended up forgetting about time and never for a moment considered giving up or abandoning my pursuit, until darkness overtook the streets and my father’s trail through the steadily depopulating city became ever more difficult to fathom, with ever-longer stops in the bars he went into, ever-longer periods of time that I had to spend outside in the elements, with his search for something he could not find but that kept drawing him on becoming ever more complex and urgent, my feelings for him ever more detached and distant, the gulf of understanding separating me from my mother ever wider, and my unconfessed desire for all my theories about Paris to be true ever more pressing.
But before that happened and before I finally went home, there was a moment when I grew confused, and it was no longer the distorted image of my parents but my own image that I found myself escorting through the deserted streets. I think this occurred at a moment when the rain had grown still heavier, or perhaps when I had become more aware of it, and we were walking down from the Plaza de Antón Martín toward the more recondite and, for me, unfamiliar Plaza de Lavapiés. I had, I think, begun to shiver by then, and due to the steep slope or to having had one too many drinks during his repeated stops en route, my father was stumbling along many yards ahead of me. It must have been a moment when he had tripped or lurched violently and, without my noticing, come to a full stop, intending to rest or catch his breath, or simply wondering where to go next. I was walking along, head down and hood up in a vain attempt to protect my already dripping hair, scored on either side by two rivulets of rain water, and if I hadn’t chanced to look up when I was five or ten yards away from him and seen him standing in the middle of the street, I would probably have run straight into him, so distracted was I, so immersed in thoughts that I can now no longer rescue from oblivion. Even today, when so much time has passed, I still start at the sudden fear that filled me then, thinking that perhaps he had discovered my presence and was waiting patiently for me to reach his side. Even though I realized at once that I was mistaken and that my father was simply lingering there, looking straight ahead, his umbrella open, with the same hieratic calm the wives of miners or sailors must feel after a catastrophe, standing by the mine shaft or on the pier, waiting for confirmation of what they already know. As if he, too, were deep in thought or bent beneath the weight of some crushing fear, at no point did he turn his head. I came to an abrupt halt, and without retreating or seeking shelter in a doorway or behind a car, I stayed where my steps had stopped, incapable of moving or feeling, or, perhaps, bold and defiant. The distance between us was minimal, and only the insistent drumming of the water on the rough asphalt and on the many uneven paving stones kept us from hearing each other’s breathing. The street curved downhill ahead of us, and there was no light on the horizon announcing the imminent promise of a bar. We were quite alone — my father unaware that I was so close, and me, motionless, watching for the slightest movement of his back. Then, suddenly, without knowing why, with no possible explanation, I felt an enormous desire for him to turn his head and see me, to find me there, for everything to end once and for all. For a few seconds, I saw myself in my father, and I needed for that figure, which was at once him and me, to become one with the figure that was only me, for him to come and meet me or for me to go and meet him. For a few seconds, while my father stood stock-still in the street, what I represented on the one hand and what he represented on the other became mixed up in my head. For a few seconds, there was no distinction between us. For a few seconds, we stopped being just me, or me and him, and became the two things together, indissolubly united, with nothing in between. This hallucination, the product of tiredness or the cold or both things at once, lasted only a few moments, but during those moments, before my father set off again, we not only formed part of one body but, thanks to that, I was able to imagine a life in which we had never been separated, and I found myself feeling that old, familiar solitude, the onliness of being an only son. Odd though it may seem, that onliness was still present when I put myself solely in my father’s shoes. Being my father, thinking I was him, I experienced exactly the same enveloping emptiness, the same discontent, the same doubts, and the same rebelliousness and revolt that I experienced being myself. It wasn’t that I understood my father better in those moments or felt an unexpected sense of pity for him. I didn’t absolve him, that would have been impossible — one cannot absolve oneself. It was more that in removing myself from me and projecting myself onto him, the weight I was carrying and considered to be my own, most peculiar burden was still present inside me, inside the person I was then, and so, for a few seconds, it was also my father’s. You might say that, during that time, I identified totally with him and we were one and the same. The hallucination began to fade as soon as he set off again, and, allowing him to get some distance ahead of me, I once more followed after him. My father very quickly recovered his lost impetus, and again I was alone with my intuition, alone following my father, alone struggling with thoughts of my mother, alone walking the streets of Paris, all the while thinking I was walking the streets of Madrid. Even so, something of that illusion must have remained, because during the minutes that followed, what did persist was a feeling that immediately replaced it and that I cannot help thinking was a consequence of it, because it happened automatically, almost as a continuation of that dying illusion. Once more walking behind my father, once more letting myself be guided by him — his route dictated, it seemed to me, by an obscure plan that he himself had drawn up — by steps that again seemed to me faltering and fragile beneath the rain that continued to fall and vulnerable to the darkness that surrounded us despite the occasional streetlamp, very slowly, I say, sheltered by the night and the distant figure of my father, I began to think about myself and was filled by a vague fear about my own future. The memory suddenly surfaced of that distant winter morning when my mother and I went to pick him up from the prison in Burgos, and some of the words that she had said to me so that I would not be alarmed and would better understand what she was about to tell me echoed obliquely in my mind, just as I remembered and set them down here some pages earlier: “The fact that I haven’t fallen doesn’t mean that I won’t one day. No one is immune, not even me and not even you, although I hope, of course, that you never find yourself in such dire need and never feel you have no other way out.” I felt afraid and helpless, too, and while my strength was beginning to fade and my father was getting further ahead of me, I couldn’t help but wonder,
Will I be immune? What will become of me when my mother is no longer here? Will there be someone to help me when I need it? Or will there be children and wives who will turn their backs on me, whose patience will run out?