XXVII
I believed I had witnessed the definitive separation of my parents on that day when I spied on them through the café window, and yet I said nothing about that to my aunt during our phone conversation. I deliberately kept silent, not out of forgetfulness, but for the simple reason that my doubts were focused not on the future but on the past, and I would have achieved nothing by assuaging my aunt’s fears at the news of my father’s reappearance. Yes, I deliberately kept silent, although not out of forgetfulness, just as my mother had kept silent about her meeting with my father and just as my aunt would rather her husband didn’t know about my phone call to her, or, as now seems likely, just as she, over the years, had abstained from telling me things about my mother’s life of which I knew nothing. None of the three of us — my mother, my aunt, or me — was innocent, and seeing the past in this light lends my memories a slightly risible edge that rather undermines their seriousness but does not particularly bother me, for it’s far from reflecting my state of mind at the time. It’s one thing being able to distinguish the different interwoven elements of a past event in retrospect, but the mark left on our memory by that event is quite another matter. My mother concealed things from me and my aunt, I concealed things from them both, and my aunt concealed things from me and her husband; but if I was aware then of that trinity of parallel concealments, the truth is that it did not give me food for thought, nor did it make my need to know any less urgent. I only had eyes for what affected me directly. All that mattered to me was finding out if my mother had deceived me.
In that situation, phoning my aunt was a bold idea that left a bittersweet aftertaste; while on the one hand it served to confirm both her scant regard for my father and her equally scant, not to say non-existent confidence in my mother’s strength of will were she to be confronted by him unexpectedly, on the other, it neither confirmed nor settled the matter that had driven me to phone her, and it also irreversibly blocked any room for maneuver on my part. Delfina had asked me to say nothing to my mother, but I knew that the information I’d given her would inevitably have consequences and that my mother would, in the end, find out about my intervention. Before taking that step, I had abandoned myself to chance, not caring what consequences it might have for me, but having witnessed Delfina’s displeasure when she learned of my father’s reappearance, I could not ignore the fact that, whatever she had said in the heat of the moment, it would be very difficult for her to get the truth out of my mother without revealing the role I had played. It never occurred to me that she would actually come to Madrid, but from the moment I hung up, I knew that, sooner or later, my mother would find out, and that it was only a question of days, possibly hours, before she gave me an explanation, before she discovered, one way or another, that I had betrayed her.
This realization was like a short, sharp shock, which far from stopping me in my tracks, only exacerbated my need to know. I guessed that my mother would not stay silent, that she would not respond with indifference to my unexpected knowledge of something she would have preferred to keep secret. She would be sure to try and restore trust between us as quickly as possible, to quiet the distress that her silence had caused me. I was sure that she would speak and that when she did, she would not make do with a belated explanation of what I already knew or with justifying in some way her unusual decision not to tell me about her meeting with my father. She would probably want to talk, and talk at length, to clarify my doubts, to reestablish the pact we had sealed on that far-off morning on our way to Burgos, a pact of honesty and openness. If I had felt sure that, during our conversation, she would actually touch on the topic that most concerned me, I would have happily sat and waited for it to happen. The problem was that her explanation would almost certainly deal only with that clandestine meeting with my father and would not provide a parallel explanation for what really interested me: the time she had spent in Paris. If I wanted to learn anything about that, I would have to force it out of her, but to do so, if I didn’t simply want to make a stab in the dark, I needed something more solid than the feeble, disconnected intuitions on which my suspicions were built. Yes, I needed something more than that, and I needed it quickly, because if, when the time came, I had no alternative version to offer about the months we were apart, if I could not confront my mother with some pertinent comment that would catch her off-guard and compel her to come up with a more radical and more profound confession than the one she had been forced into, then later, after that conversation, it would be impossible for me to find another such opportunity to get her to talk. Confessions are not given in stages, because that would do away with the whole idea of wiping the slate clean, which, after all, is what confession is all about. Making a second confession would be tantamount to admitting that we hadn’t been quite as open and honest the first time as we might have been, and to admit that is tantamount to saying that this second time might not be definitive, either. That’s why, just as no one risks confessing twice, no one who has been less than frank at some earlier date would be so imprudent as to leave any loose ends, and my meticulous mother would be no exception. After speaking to me, she would almost certainly refuse to consider any new enquiry and would erase or try to nullify the evidence of any other concealments or infidelities she had left behind her.
If I wanted to get any real results, I would, therefore, have to act before my mother found out, I would have to be prepared for the moment when, once my aunt’s foreseeable intervention had taken effect, my mother would finally have to decide to face up to making reparation for her faults. Right from the start, I saw clearly, albeit in a disorderly, impulsive, and rather less considered manner than you might think from what I’ve said, that I would have to anticipate my mother; of that, during the torments that gripped me following my reckless phone call to my aunt, I had no doubt. What I was less clear about — either then or in the two days that passed before my aunt’s sudden arrival in Madrid and the no less surprising and unexpected outcome that emerged from it — was how to do it, how to resolve my burning desire to find out or what to include in that “something more” I needed to know. Of course, I wanted to know if there had been any kind of deceit involved in my mother’s trip to Paris, but the answer to that question was so closely bound up with other enigmas, fears, and griefs — possibly unconscious and unacknowledged but nonetheless pressing and troubling ones — that it would be ingenuous to argue that it was the sole or most important question. Too many things inside me depended on the answer to that question for me not to wonder if it was in fact an excuse that concealed other controversies. Too many things were too closely bound up with each other for me to expect that one answer could resolve them all. There was my mother and everything related to her: What did she want? What had she done? Was she really the cool, persistent person who, almost to the point of exaggeration, carefully weighed up any matter directly affecting me, or was she the gullible fool capable of stumbling again and again over the same obstacles and errors or endangering herself and me by pursuing some unachievable dream? Then there was me and the various ways of interpreting my situation according to the answers given to each of the preceding questions: Should I be grateful or reproachful? Could I free myself from the great weight I felt, or should I, on the contrary, remain tied to my mother, eternally indebted to her unconditional love and devotion? There was my father, too, and his incorrigible egotism, which might come to be seen in a new light, depending on how my mother had behaved: Was he the only guilty person, or was he only partly to blame? Had he himself been deceived or betrayed in some way? But alongside these unknowns, which I converted into stark dichotomies when there was really no reason why they should rule each other out, there were other dilemmas that I found equally worrying and that also referred to a past I knew nothing of, but that would probably have continued to bother me even had there been no deceit, either real or suspected: What to make, for example, of my mother and the childhood she never mentioned? What to think of myself or my father, of the fragility I had sensed in him as I trailed after him through the Madrid streets? Where did my parents end, and where did I begin? Should my view of them depend on their view of me? Was I free to decide on things that had to do with me alone, or was I conditioned by things I knew nothing about? Did I really have the right to use their behavior as the yardstick by which to judge them?