“Yes, let’s. Don’t worry, consider the subject dropped. I only said that because it seems to me sometimes that you might feel that way. I said it because sometimes I’ve felt like that when I’ve put myself in your shoes. I’ve been tempted to think that you don’t have everything you deserve to have, that your life could have been different, more satisfying, rather than that of the resigned, perfect wife. .”
“That’s enough. Drop it, please. I can’t take any more.”
“But, Delfina, what’s wrong. Don’t cry, please. There’s no point. I just wanted you to see that you, too, could, that I. . oh, Delfina, it’s OK. Don’t cry, please. . don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying, oh, now you’re starting to cry. Why are you crying? Look, I was crying, but now I’m not. It was just a tear or two. It’s because I’m tired.”
“Don’t worry. It was just a tear or two with me, as well. Aren’t we silly? What’s he going to think of his aunt and his mother?” My mother paused, lowered her head, wiped away her tears with her hands, then looked at me and said, “What a sappy pair, huh?”
My aunt turned to look at me, as well, and my mother, assuming the conversation was over, got up and walked over to her. I was too taken aback to answer and stood, unmoving, frozen against the wall where I had stood all the time they had been arguing. My mother kissed Delfina on both cheeks and, after briefly embracing her, came toward me. Carefully, so that she wouldn’t notice, I removed my clenched fists from behind my back and stepped slightly away from the wall. “What a sappy pair,” she murmured as she kissed me, before folding me in her arms and hugging me for rather longer than she had hugged Delfina. “What a sappy pair.”
XXIX
I don’t know, although I can imagine, why it was that my mother decided to speak, why she wanted to tell me what she had never intended to tell me. I don’t know, of course, but I’m sure that the argument I’ve just reproduced was not the reason behind her decision. It helped to precipitate it, helped her to find the right time and place, but it was not the only reason or what made it necessary. Indeed, I believe that if the idea of talking to me had not already been there in her mind, her confrontation with Delfina would never have happened in the way it did. How, otherwise, to explain her acceptance of my presence there or the fact that, far from stopping their quarrel as soon as she saw me enter the room, she did something that went entirely against her nature and took center stage. In all family disputes that result in a sharp exchange of reproaches, however bitter and stormy that dispute is, there is always a point at which you can decide either to back down and allow the other person to proceed alone along that rancorous path, or else to steam ahead, knowing full well that you will say things you’ll regret later on. If my mother continued to speak despite having me there as a witness, it was because she wasn’t exposing herself to any risk that she had not, in some way, already accepted. Whether or not she made the decision at that precise moment, she nevertheless took that risk, and I would go so far as to say that some of the things she said were intended not for my aunt’s ears but for mine. It was not the argument itself that prompted her desire to speak but, rather, her desire to speak that prompted the argument. The question, therefore, is not Would my mother have told me, had there been no argument? The question is would she have done so if the cause of the dispute had not occurred, if she hadn’t had to consider selling the apartment and there had been three and not two of us living there; that is, did she intend telling me?
Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s a question to which probably not even she had a clear answer. And now no one does. I don’t know why she went to Paris or the reason for her early return, or what terrible disappointment or insult finally forced her to accept defeat; I don’t know what part of her past gave rise to the determination I saw in her tearless eyes the afternoon I watched her leave the café I had happened upon after lingering for no particular reason on my way home from school, nor do I know what arguments persuaded her to take the symbolic step — which so enraged my aunt — of selling the apartment. I don’t know the answer to these unknowns, just as I don’t know the details of my father’s abrupt departure at a time when my mother had such high hopes that he would stay, or what he did with the business cards and the fake ID I found under the table in the room where he used to work during a period I can’t even remember, or a whole multitude of other things that happened without my being there to witness them and of which I know nothing because no one told me and no strange coincidences placed them before my eyes.
I can’t even be sure of things that happened only to me, and can’t detach the memory of what happened after the argument with my aunt from the subsequent feeling of dread that filled my mind even before I had any real reason to fear anything. There are times when it seems we can predict what awaits us, and in a fraction of a second, that future appears before our eyes like a melody that suddenly springs to our lips, a melody sprung from some lost corner of time and that our lips spontaneously begin to whistle. These are only ever very brief moments, they tend to occur during times of extreme melancholy or exhaustion, and like those catchy tunes unexpectedly brought back to life, they are forgotten as soon as we become aware of them. It has to happen like that for the premonition to come true, because otherwise, the fear and dread it stirs up would be enough to destroy it. I knew that the conversation between my mother and my aunt would inevitably be continued in another conversation between my mother and myself. I knew this from the moment my aunt ordered me into the living room, from the look my mother gave me when, making as if to get up from the armchair in which she was sitting, she suddenly released her grip on the arms and sat down again. What I didn’t know then, but sensed when the argument between them had finished and they started behaving as if they had never exchanged any reproachful remarks or shed any tears in my presence, was that there would be no room in what my mother would say to me for what happened during her time in Paris — which I would not mention, either — and that she would speak about other, entirely unimagined things.
That desolate, urgent certainty lends a phantasmagorical air to my memory and prevents me from painting a true picture of how we spent the rest of the evening, or even what we spoke about over breakfast the next morning. All real trace of what we did has vanished along with most of the gestures and words we exchanged from the moment my mother finally got up from her armchair, came over to where Delfina and I were standing, and gave each of us a kiss. My aunt did not travel back to La Coruña that night, but apart from that detail, the only impressions I can summon up are far too feeble and subjective. I seem to remember, for example — although I can’t be sure that it isn’t a vision retrospectively contaminated by what would come later — that Delfina seemed very nervous and was more silent than usual. I seem to remember her attempts to disguise her nervousness and to keep from sliding into the dark abyss of her thoughts, the meekness and theatrical stoicism with which she tried to regain her composure, and I seem to remember, too, the silences and the pauses in their hesitant attempts at conversation, as well as my own docility and the dumb fixity with which I waited, paralyzed and expectant, incapable of contributing anything more until what I knew would happen finally happened. I remember, or seem to remember, my mother’s vigilant eyes and her tense posture, like some crazed illuminist, as she searched inside herself for the right words to use the following day, enjoying the kind of illusory truce experienced by a patient or a prisoner in the hours before hearing, from the doctor or the trial judge, their unpostponable sentence. I remember the look on her face, one of concentration and fear combined with a feeling of relief and confidence that her calvary was almost over, the beatific serenity of someone who prefers the certainty of knowing her fate to the torment of uncertainty. I seem to remember my overloaded brain buzzing while I repeated to myself whole segments of their still recent argument, and that on several occasions, I glanced from one to the other, trying to establish which of them had been more wrong, which of them had been weaker and more insincere. I seem to remember, or so it seems to me now, the great, suffocating weight of a past that was not mine and I did not accept as mine, and the fragile and far too dependent future that I represented. I remember their attentiveness, their efforts to reassure me and play down the importance of their argument; I remember their feigned cheerfulness, the anecdotes they insisted on dredging up from their reluctant memories in order to distract me; and I remember, too, how clearly I saw that this was an act they were putting on, and how differently they would have behaved had I not been there. I seem to remember my sporadic attempts, foiled before they even began, to dynamite the whole performance, to say, “Enough is enough,” and I seem to remember my confusion, my touching ineptitude, my inability to take control of the situation. I remember all that, or so it seems to me, and I was, I believe, aware of my mother’s unusual firmness — with her behaving for the first time more like mother than daughter — and aware, too, of my aunt’s fatalism, resignation, and capitulation, and of the irreparable breach that had been opened up between them by the unspoken conviction, shared by all three of us, that nothing would stop my mother now, that she would do whatever she liked and had already made her decision. I think that, despite everything, a certain calm prevailed and that no one mentioned my father by name, not even when my mother and my aunt began spelling out to me, in hesitant detail, the chain of events that had led us to that situation: my aunt’s phone call from La Coruña to ask about the furtive meeting in the café, my mother’s confirmation of this, to which she innocently added the fact that she intended to sell the apartment, Delfina’s fury and her hasty trip to Madrid. . I think there was even a point when my aunt could not help going back in time and asking my mother, “But did he ask you to sell the apartment?” to which my mother, with no trace of anguish or grief, only weariness, answered, “No, he just asked me for money. I was the one who suggested selling the apartment. It seemed only fair.” And I think that after a brief period of embarrassment following their earlier disagreement, and determined not to highlight their palpable dissent, they turned their respective gazes inwards, and my mother added, as if to herself, “I had to do it, the poor guy.”