“But you called me selfish. You said that you did what you did because I left home.”
“All I said was please don’t talk to me about selfishness, because you’re still convinced that I did what I did for frivolous reasons, and that’s not true, Delfina. You don’t seem to realize that I did nothing you wouldn’t have done yourself. You couldn’t stand the situation at home and you escaped. Well, so did I. I only said that you forced me to do that in order to make you aware that, just as your choice of exit strategy was influenced by your desire to escape, so the decisions I took were influenced by my feelings of abandonment after you left.”
“But you can’t compare the two! When I left home, I didn’t go crazy. I didn’t just vanish. .”
From where she was standing, my aunt turned toward me, perhaps regretting the vehemence of her last words or perhaps wanting to see their effect on me, and before my mother could respond and before she braced herself for my mother’s riposte, she withdrew her hand from the back of the armchair, moved a little closer, and nervously leaned her whole body against it.
“So what if I did, Delfina? What does it matter? Was that really so inconsiderate of me? I don’t think it would have changed anything if I’d done as you did. I don’t know why you keep harping on about it.”
“Look, there’s no point in continuing this discussion. You mix everything up. I don’t want to talk about the past, it’s of no interest to me. I mentioned your leaving Dad’s house, but that was only because that was the most obvious example, and everything else was just more of the same. That’s all. Let’s just drop the subject. There’s no point talking about it.”
Delfina drew back again from the armchair and began slowly to move away, only to immediately stop and remain where she was, although this time without resting her hand on the chair back for support.
“No, I don’t want to drop the subject, not until you recognize that you can’t judge my life that easily. Everything I’ve done, I did because I thought it was for the best.”
Although my aunt’s suggestion that they bring the discussion to a close had been more rhetorical than sincere, my mother’s instant rejection of her words visibly upset her. She made as if to answer, but at the last moment she seemed to think better of it and waited a moment before saying anything more. My mother was sitting very erect, hands gripping the arms of the chair, her head turned toward my aunt.
“Of course. I’ve never said otherwise. I’ve always thought you were acting for the best, but if you had stopped to think, as I’m asking you to do now, perhaps things would have turned out differently.”
“Don’t you see, Delfina, it’s not a matter of thinking. I’m very happy with the decisions I made. Everything you think of as a mistake, everything you think I could have avoided in order to not end up in the situation I’m in now, I would do again. I don’t regret anything. I’m quite sure that I did what I should have done, that I did what seemed right to me, or what I had no other choice but to do.”
“Don’t be absurd! It wasn’t the best thing or the right thing for you to leave home. Neither was going off to Paris. Or putting up with what you’ve had to put up with. Of course you had other options. You could have saved yourself a lot of disappointment and a lot of loneliness. Why did you have to wait so long? It’s much too easy and too irresponsible to excuse everything by saying that you had no alternative.”
“Don’t simplify matters. They’re two different things. I didn’t say it was always because I had no alternative. I had my own reasons, too. .”
“And you had no alternative. .”
“Yes, when I left home, which you seem to think was so very important, I really didn’t have any other choice. Since then, I’ve always done what I thought was for the best.”
“Forgive me for insisting, but I see no sign of that in your subsequent decisions, nor do I understand what you mean when you say you had no choice but to leave home. Why? Why did you need to leave home, considering all the anxiety and pain you caused? Couldn’t you have just done what everyone else does, what I did?”
The pace and tone of Delfina’s responses to my mother changed according to rules I found hard to predict; having started out by trying to strike a conciliatory note, she had, as she spoke, grown gradually more agitated, so that her last question emerged rather abruptly. She was still standing in the same place, although now she was resting all her weight on her left leg and had her right leg stretched out and balanced on the heel of her shoe, pointing toward me.
“Oh, please, not again. Not appearances again. Why are they so important?”
“It’s not a matter of appearances, it’s a matter of respecting other people. You left without warning, without telling anyone.”
“Yes, you’re right, I did, but you don’t know why. How could you?”
“Apparently it was my fault, because I got married and left you all alone. .”
“Please don’t make fun of me. I said earlier that your absence was a contributory factor, I didn’t say it was the only reason I left. No, that was because of something that happened before. But forget it. . You’re right, these conversations are pointless and absurd, we just end up saying things we shouldn’t. Really, let’s drop it.”
My mother, who hadn’t smoked once since I entered the room, glanced around as if searching for some lost pack of cigarettes. She failed to find it, and before looking back at Delfina, she suddenly met my gaze. As she said those last words, her voice had grown softer, taken on an imploring tone, but her eyes, in the brief moment they met mine, seemed utterly serene.
“What’s wrong with you? You can’t just leave it like that. I need to know what you’re accusing me of. I don’t remember having done anything wrong.”
“No, Delfina, of course not. You didn’t do anything wrong. It was me. . But forget it. There’s no point talking about it. It’s not your fault, so don’t worry. You can’t understand, because you don’t know. You don’t know, and you’re not going to. .”
“Speak to me. Tell me. Don’t just say nothing. I’m your sister. I can at least try to understand. I’ve been very harsh and said things I shouldn’t have, but I do know what you’ve been through.”
“No, Delfina, you don’t. The truth is that you have no idea what my life was like after you left. You don’t know what I talked to them about. You don’t know what we ate. You don’t know where we went or who we saw. You don’t know when we got up and when we went to bed. You don’t know what we did every hour, every day. Do you? Answer me, Delfina. Do you?”
“No, I don’t, you’re right.”
My mother had become visibly distressed, and I saw a look of alarm in Delfina’s eyes.
“You don’t know anything. You don’t know the extent of my despair. You don’t know how lost I felt or what I came to long for. You don’t know how unbalanced I became. You don’t know how powerless I felt in the face of that woman’s meticulous destruction of the past. You don’t know how much I hated her or that I came to hate him even more. You don’t know how much anger I stored up against him. You don’t know the lies I told myself so as not to have to accept that his indifference was actually sheer cowardice, that he actually did care what I thought, but that he didn’t rebel because these were forces against which he was not prepared to fight. You don’t know how discouraged and bewildered I became. You don’t know how helpless I felt to see him so humiliated, so silent and sad. You don’t know that sometimes he didn’t dare to look at me, you don’t know about the knot that formed in his throat when she did or said something intolerable and he would lower his eyes so as not to meet mine. You don’t know how torn apart I felt. You don’t know that I would sometimes have preferred to think that he really was the heartless person we believed him to be, anything rather than see him like that, incapable of doing what his conscience cried out for him to do. You don’t know that at the same time as I despised him, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. You don’t know the extent of my rancor or my understanding or my devotion. You don’t know that sometimes I thought I was the victim, the one who had the right to complain, or that at others I felt responsible and thought he was the one who suffered most. You don’t know that it often seemed to me that he really missed Mom or that sometimes I would have liked to be her in order to comfort him and make up for the things his wife did. I thought that Mom, wherever she was, would approve, that her union with Dad, though no longer an earthly one, was more important than any other. You don’t know that I came to believe I was the link between them. You don’t know that I sometimes thought I was Mom and that sometimes Dad really wanted me to be her, too. . You don’t know how crazy things got.”