I did not, of course, think any of this so literally; these are speculations that arise from recalling my confused state at the time, suppositions that I can’t even be sure existed but that I must, nevertheless, set down and accept as real in the light of a feeling that appeared unexpectedly in the days following that conversation with my aunt, while I was still scrambling vainly around for a way to come up with new evidence that would help prepare me for the moment when my mother did finally decide to talk to me. It was, I suppose, a feeling of irrepressible filial solidarity after my aunt’s harsh words about my father, as well as a delayed bonding reflex that, on the rainy evening I’d spent following him, I had felt spring up between us under the cover of the darkness and the overwhelming weariness clouding my mind. Whatever it was, the fact is that, almost unwittingly, I found myself thinking about my father, and I felt an irresistible need to justify and even absolve him, despite all the rancorous feelings that had been quietly accumulating in the two or three years that had passed since his sudden disappearance. I don’t mean that I began to judge him differently or that I suddenly began to endow him with new qualities. After his sudden departure from our lives, I had placed him outside the field of my preoccupations, and that is how it has continued to this day. I mean only that in the face of Delfina’s scornful comments, I allowed myself to be swept away by anger and was, for the first time, capable of thinking about him independently from what he meant for my mother or for me, and I was filled by a kind of proud acceptance of what he was. In the face of all the conventionalisms and external considerations urging me to condemn his behavior, to understand it as an illness or an oddity that threatened the normal order of things, I was seized with unusual force by the contrary impulse, namely, an involuntary admiration and respect that, in the light of my own rebellion, I felt he deserved because he had broken certain social rules and regulations which, ever since my prolonged stay in La Coruña, I tended to associate with my Aunt Delfina and her husband, with their rigid way of life, their cold way of relating to each other and the world around them.
That same unthinking estimation of him, which sprang unbidden from my deepest memories, that same, sudden fellow feeling for what my father represented, and onto which I spontaneously projected my own latent dissatisfaction and resentment at the hostility shown him by my aunt and uncle, extended to my mother, as well, and to the inexplicable tenacity with which she had tried for years, despite everything, to bind her fate to his; while it’s true that I knew of the urgent, desperate hopes for change she had nurtured all that time, I knew, too, ever since our conversation on the way to Burgos, that those hopes did not, as they did in my aunt and uncle, have their roots in an explicit condemnation of my father’s personality, but in the mere impossibility, for as long as he continued to go off the rails, of their having a life in common, a desire that was as natural in her as the obstacles that planted themselves in her way were inevitable. You could say that, without admitting as much to myself, I sympathized with my mother, and the earlier incomprehension with which I once viewed her insistence on putting her trust in my father over and over again was replaced by a greater understanding, one that allowed me to see how generous and rare and bold she had been in making that choice.
A product of my subterranean reconciliation with my parents’ attitude — in opposition to the gray, hypocritical normality I was beginning to associate with my aunt and uncle as well as with the world of absolute certainties surrounding me at school and among my friends and acquaintances — was the inclusion, in my urgent need to know, of questions that went beyond my understandable eagerness to find out what had really happened in Paris, the extra worry of trying to work out the reasons for my parents’ behavior, above and beyond its concrete manifestations. Shortly after I first became aware that being an only child made me different, I became aware that my parents were different, too, and a need to compare myself with them emerged quite naturally, a need to contrast what was innate and what was inherited, what was mine because that is how I would have ended up anyway and what was, on the contrary, the product of circumstances and of decisions not made by me. It wasn’t just a matter of finding out once and for all if they had been together in Paris and, if they had, what they had done there, but finding out, too, what had led them there, what it was they lacked, what they secretly longed for or desired, if they felt alone or were perfectly content, what they thought, what they hoped for, what their childhoods had been like, if they resembled me or were completely different, if Paris had been what separated them or if they would have separated anyway.
It was thanks to this involuntary process that the day after I phoned Delfina, and while I was still despairing of finding a means of preempting my mother’s intervention by confirming beforehand what had only been mere suspicions up until then, I began working on a plan I first rejected as absurd but that, in the end, presented itself to me as the only possible way forward, the most accessible, the one least likely to be discovered by my mother or to leave any clues, the one most likely to remain hidden, clandestine.
Despite my feelings of solidarity with my mother, and a kind of natural though unconfessed prejudice against my father dating from the time when he lived with us after leaving prison in Burgos, I had watched with veiled interest, and a certain degree of admiration and respect, everything to do with my father’s forbidden world. I had not forgotten things like that chance encounter on our way back from Toledo with the former convict who had addressed him as “Professor,” or the phone calls from people wanting to know where he was, or the strange visit, one or two years before, by those two men who came looking for him, in order, perhaps, to call him to account for some past act of treachery or a failed business deal in which he’d been embroiled, and it’s not so very odd, then — in the circumstances I’ve described, in which I was assailed by a new need to reinterpret everything having to do with my parents — that those encounters and phone calls, along with other memories, should resurface and monopolize much of my thinking. Of all those memories, the one that struck me most was the visit by the two strangers, the bossy young man who did all the talking and the older man, more flexible, or less involved, who accompanied him and, either out of kindness or so that I would know where to find him if my father turned up, had given me the card bearing the name of a bar on the Calle Bravo Murillo, of which he had said very proudly that he was the owner. Not knowing quite why, perhaps out of superstition or because he inspired confidence and I thought it might be useful to stay in touch with him, I had taken the card and put it away in a safe place, even then, when it was still too early to connect my mother’s recent Paris adventure with the younger man’s more or less explicit allusions to his alleged meeting with my father in a place that was not Madrid and at a time when, even though my father had plenty of money at his disposal, he had been obliged to withdraw from circulation and abandon the territory he normally inhabited.