IV
During the whole of my childhood, my position in the family hierarchy was, I felt, not much different from that occupied by my mother. Even during the times when my father was there, she and I formed the nucleus. It was, if I can put it like this, my father and us, and us and my father. There was no other possible combination. It was a feeling born of my condition as an only child, which was reinforced one morning on our way to Burgos, a feeling that survived both the months during which I was separated from my mother and my father’s definitive absence. Of course, in the intervals when the three of us lived together, I was always conscious that, however peculiar, they were still a couple and there were, necessarily, intimate places into which I could not enter, but such intimacy, to my mind, was limited to what went on inside their bedroom once the door was closed. I never thought there was anything I didn’t know or in which I couldn’t be involved, nothing hidden. If my mother didn’t talk about my father or ask my opinion about matters relating to him, it was because she, like me, didn’t know anything, or because there was nothing to give an opinion about.
It was as a result of the last period of time my father spent living with us that I found out exactly what he had done to deserve arrest, and also that I managed to retrieve the memory of that night of the dinner party when two strangers came into my room while I was sleeping. It must have happened in a moment of despair, when my mother considered that I was old enough to know the details, or at a moment, perhaps, when my questions were becoming less easy to avoid, and more specific, too. Besides, I’ve spent so many hours in my mother’s company, we’ve talked about so many things, and the memory of the occasions when we spoke about him has become so mixed up with other occasions when things were better left unsaid that I can’t pin down one precise moment or separate out the first time from all the other times that followed, not even once he’d already been expelled from our lives.
Apparently, the beginning of the 1970s marked the end of the line in my father’s career and life — the removal of the safety net that had previously allowed him to leap onto the trapeze of each wild impulse with complete disregard for the results. A few years before, his father had chosen to give him his inheritance while he was still alive, in order to provide him with the capital he needed for one of his many failed projects, and when his father died, his brothers, invested with an authority that my father entirely lacked, came out in full force to defend their share of the inheritance and robustly blocked any attempt by their mother to give him any money at all. He was still doing the occasional translation, whenever he had no other source of work, but found this increasingly difficult. His contacts in the publishing world resented the many unfulfilled commitments, the rushed translations, his general unreliability, and even were he prepared to go in search of new commissions, it was not easy for him to find them. Deprived of the family money that would allow him to launch new enterprises, and with his credibility seriously damaged among his oldest friends and his wider circle of friends of friends, he was once again spending most of his time in Madrid, and his friendships were beginning to come almost exclusively from just one end of the social scale, the two sides of which he had manipulated with such consummate skill up until then.
My mother used to say that anyone else finding himself in that position would have taken it as a sign to get a firm grip on the wheel and change direction, but not him. More than anything else, my father needed to be admired. Regardless of the social sphere in which he was moving, he liked to shine, to put on a kind of aura. In the world where people, on seeing him, immediately associated him with his reputation as a freeloader, he needed money to back him up, and in the other world, where his impeccable manners were what shocked or attracted attention, it was enough that they should assume he had money. But in both those worlds, money was essential to him, either as his real reality or as the shadow reality that gave him his self-assurance. The weapon was the same. With no fixed profession, with neither the determination nor the fortune required to undertake new projects, part of his drift toward the darker side must have been an awareness that he had nothing to offer in his own milieu. He took refuge in those places where the least was demanded of him, where he needed only to dress as he dressed and speak as he spoke. What before had been a mere pastime, whether aimed at feeding his own legend or not, then became a necessity. Starting to frequent the underworld, and distancing himself more and more from the people he had known up until then, must have seemed to him the only way out. Whether he considered this to be a possible path to recovery right from the start or whether the opportunity only presented itself later on is something I really don’t know.
Whatever the truth of the matter, this was, broadly speaking, what triggered and hastened his downfall, at least in my mother’s experience of events. She only found out the full details of what happened later, at the trial following his arrest and, to a lesser extent, from what my father was willing to tell her.
According to my mother, it was such a straightforward affair that had she not witnessed the outcome herself, she would have thought it was pure invention. If she is to be believed, my father was not the brains behind the scam, his role was simply to provide a respectable façade, the face and manners that would lend the whole thing credibility. With the aim of creating a dummy company that would serve as a cover, he and the real architect of the plan had used false documentation to rent an apartment on the Calle Serrano, which they then fitted out as an office, hiring a couple of secretaries to add greater realism to the whole performance. Later on, they registered the business and, after that, using counterfeit title deeds, applied for a business loan from a bank where a third associate worked, although he knew neither of them by name. The idea was to dismantle the “company” and vanish without a trace once the money from the loan came through. It had all been meticulously thought out. The principal player was in charge of planning and sorting out the necessary documentation; my father had the most dangerous role to play, that of actually going to the bank, negotiating the loan, and, finally, picking up the money; their contact inside the bank was supposed to speed up the paperwork and raise the alarm should any difficulties arise. The execution was impeccable, and the trick would have worked had fate not intervened in a somewhat comic guise. When the bank realized they would not be getting their money back and reported this to the police, the latter had no clue as to the identity of the fraudsters, and not knowing where to begin, they did what they usually do in such cases and put the bank employees under surveillance. Up until then, everything had gone swimmingly. Their inside man, however, failed to follow the most elementary of security rules and made the mistake of buying himself a luxury car and phoning my father on a couple of occasions — on the emergency phone number he’d been given — to say how pleased he was and to keep in touch with the one person to whom he could boast of his newfound wealth. My father began to get nervous after the second phone call and decided to follow the example of his main co-conspirator, who had gone to Italy early on, leaving the country until the dust had settled. The night of the dinner party and the arrest was, as my father told my mother, the last night he intended to spend in Madrid, and he had shown her the money with the intention that she and I should go with him. It doesn’t really matter whether those plans were real or not, because the police eventually found out about the bank clerk’s lavish spending, and his connection with my father was discovered that very night, when they listened in on a phone call. The most regrettable part did not happen then, however, but a little later on. For when the police burst into the apartment demanding to see everyone’s papers, they knew who they were looking for, but not his real name. They were hoping to arrest one Antonio José Domenech, and that was the name on the identity card that my father instinctively produced instead of his own. By presenting his false ID instead of his real one, he thus contributed to his own arrest. It’s hard to know what would have happened had he presented his genuine ID, but, according to my mother, the memory of that fatal error was enough to make the next two years of his life even more bitter.