I didn’t follow my father for very much longer through the rain-filled streets. I remember that we walked for a few more minutes, past bars that had already closed, that we arrived eventually at one with iron grilles on the windows that was strangely crowded at that late hour, and that after a long wait during which I had to content myself with waiting outside, without peering in through the closed windows or through the door — a heavy, wooden affair guarded by a bouncer — I decided to give up.
When I returned home some time later on that evening that was now black night, my throat burning and the book and the folder I’d been carrying under my arm as soaked as I was, my mother opened the door before I had even put the key in the lock, as if she had been watching from the balcony for me to arrive. She was still dressed, and very agitated, and the look on her face, while wanting to appear stern and challenging, gave way nevertheless to her overwhelming sense of relief.
“What on earth have you been up to? Where have you been?” she asked, without standing aside or bending down to kiss me, her voice breaking slightly.
“. .”
And almost seamlessly, trying to recover her censorious tone, when she finally stepped aside and allowed me to cross the threshold despite my dumb, inexpressive face, “Don’t you ever do that to me again. I’ve been waiting for you all evening. I was very worried.”
“. .”
And then, still without waiting for any response, touching my dripping hair, “Look at you, you’re absolutely soaked. You’ll catch pneumonia. Go and get changed this minute.”
“. .”
And immediately afterward, when she saw me heading for my room, either obediently or sulkily, “You don’t have an ounce of sense in you, do you? I have to watch you all the time. I don’t know what will become of you if you carry on like this.”
On that evening that was now black night, I said nothing, either not answering at all or else answering my mother’s questions with vague excuses while I obeyed her every order and she ran to the bathroom to fill the tub and returned to dry my hair and body, rubbing me down with towels, and then, placing her hands on my shoulders, propelling me out of my bedroom, down the hallway, and into the scalding water. On that evening that was now black night, while I was taking a bath and my mother was watching me with disapproving eyes, while I got out of the tub and she wrapped me in fresh towels and again rubbed me vigorously dry and led me back to my room and held out a pair of clean pajamas, while she went to prepare dinner for me and talked to me from the kitchen and brought food on a tray to my bedside, while she sat down to wait and put an aspirin in my mouth and, holding my chin, made me swallow it down with the glass of water she placed between my dry lips, while she was turning on a heater and turning out the light and telling me that we would talk tomorrow and taking away the tray and closing the door so as to keep the heat in, on that evening that was now black night, I said nothing to her about where I’d been and why I was late, and she told me nothing, either — nothing about my father or about her meeting with him, the meeting I had witnessed. I heard her moving around the house, making phone calls, and, when she thought I was asleep, opening my bedroom door to leave it slightly ajar.
XXVI
I remember the days that followed in the confused and disorderly way in which we always remember past events that time has done nothing to clarify. How else can I judge them except under the influence of the profound feeling of disquiet that filled me and kept me hovering between suspicion and trust, between sudden anger and tormented remorse, between an urgent, searing need to know and a proud refusal to ask the one person who had the answers to my questions, between rage at my own ensuing sense of impotence and complete sympathy for my mother’s situation, regardless of what she might have done, and regardless of whether she had or had not been honest when she told me about it later on? Despite her admonishing words to me on the night I arrived home drenched to the skin, which had led me to believe that we would talk about it all the next day, she made not the slightest reference to her furtive encounter with my father, either that day or on any other. She said nothing about the matter, and as the silence grew and grew and my need to know the truth about her time in Paris also grew, my conviction that what I thought had happened really had happened and was not just a figment of my imagination became still stronger and plunged me into a state of nervous delirium. Her clandestine meeting with my father and the months we had spent apart became linked in my mind, and not only did I begin to believe that an explanation of the latter would inevitably bring with it an explanation of the former but in some way, I stopped distinguishing between them. The two events, the known and the imagined, became fused into one, and I felt unable to extricate myself from the anxiety and the contradictory impulses triggered by my mother’s inexplicable silence. My mother did not talk about her meeting with my father, and I needed to know about the past, to confirm the suspicions that her silence only fostered. My mother did not talk about her meeting with my father, and just as I knew that I lacked the necessary coolness to ask her directly about her time in Paris, her failure to talk about that meeting made me distrust her sincerity, and so I confined myself to dropping the odd hint about what had happened. My mother did not talk about her meeting with my father, and although I felt sure that I would bring up the subject myself if her silence continued, I also felt quite incapable of doing so. I sensed that she would eventually offer me some explanation, but the longer her silence lasted, the stronger my belief that when the explanation finally came, it would only be a partial one. Not knowing what form that explanation would take, I could not know what my reaction would be if my hunch about Paris was right. On the one hand, although I did not confess as much to myself, I hoped I was right, that this final concession by my mother was what I imagined it to be, a concession I believed would change my view of her and of our relationship. On the other hand, though, I had to admit that it was precisely the feeling that I might be offended by some possible deception that egged me on. Consequently, while one moment I found my suspicions ridiculous and told myself that what mattered was the present, the next, I would be wallowing in the state of phony orphanhood to which I had been relegated by my mother’s supposed treachery. One moment, I allowed myself to sink into melancholy and consider my mother a monster of hypocrisy, and the next, I felt moved by her situation and driven to absolve her by the mere thought of the vulnerable, fragile state to which she would be reduced if, as I presumed she might, she gave in to my father’s designs. One moment, I considered myself utterly alone, with even fewer reference points as to how I should behave, and the next, I was filled by the liberating thought of the one thing that might redeem our wearisome solitude — namely, my mother’s unconditional devotion.
In that overwhelming state of confusion, I did a lot of silly things, false steps for the most part, which, while I regret them, I can also understand and even forgive, even though time has passed and my mother and I are no longer the people we were then. The various energies bristling inside me, churning around in my mind, leapt out in disorderly fashion, prompting me to make strange remarks — ingenuous, frivolous, abrupt, and unexpected — which far from achieving their hidden aim, only contributed to increasing the tension between my mother and myself and widening the gulf between us. The day after the evening when I had followed my father through the deserted streets, I waited patiently to receive my mother’s postponed reprimand for coming home so late, thinking that even though she had made no such promise, it would bring with it an explanation of their furtive meeting, but in the days that followed, when the reprimand still did not come and my hopes of an explanation gradually faded, alarm began to spread through my being, and my emotions quite simply exploded. Even though I had few uncertainties about what the future held for me, even though I had witnessed through the café window my parents’ definitive separation, my questions about what had really happened in the past burned inside me and drove me to rebel against a future that seemed about to be built on the shifting sands of pretense and lies. I doubted everything. I doubted my mother and the extent of her possible deceit. I doubted her reasons for going to Paris. I doubted what she had done there and even the months that preceded the moment when, on our arrival in La Coruña, she told me about her decision to leave, to put some physical distance, or so I understood it, between herself and the knowledge that her plans for a normal married life had once again been frustrated by a reality that refused to conform to her desires. I even wondered whether her deception had consisted purely of meeting up with my father in Paris after having found out he was there, or whether it went further back than that, to the time when he was still living with us and I had not yet discovered the package containing the fake ID and the business cards carefully hidden away beneath the table in what we called his office, in other words, whether my father’s final departure had really been a surprise to my mother or whether, on the contrary, it had been the first step in a plan previously agreed upon between them, one that would imply a sudden refusal on my mother’s part to continue battling for some hoped-for change in him and her surrender — whether or not it was total, I don’t know, but it was certainly desperate — her blind surrender to whatever kind of irregular life he chose to impose on her. At the time, the image of my defeated mother, unable to bear my father’s departure and temporarily giving me up in order to rejoin him in Paris, seemed to me as insane and unthinkable as the much colder and less innocent, albeit equally defeated image of her planning the whole adventure beforehand.