I’m not really sure about anything until the following morning, at breakfast, and even then the substance out of which my memories are built crumbles at the slightest touch. Were it not for the deceptive slowness with which those hours passed, I would say they were like a wandering mountain stream, as likely to disappear into the earth and travel long distances underground as to resurface later on and cascade over waterfalls — a burbling, sinuous torrent that one moment, divides, leaving behind it unexplored, barely glimpsed byways about which I can say nothing, and the next, swells and swirls deeper in pools and in the labyrinthine meanderings with which it cuts through valleys and riverbeds. Those hours were too dense and too exhausting, the frontier represented by their waters too choppy and full of rapids and whirlpools, its fords and shallows too uncertain, and too few and slippery the precariously improvised bridges and stepping stones providing a way across the chasm between the two banks, between what I had once wanted to know but, despite all my suspicions, never will and what is now fixed but of which I had no inkling then, no knowledge. It’s almost dead time, neither irrelevant nor empty, but as impossible to separate off from the uncertain past that precedes it as from the experiences and thoughts that came afterward. Not only is there a marked contrast between my expectations of what was to come and the subsequent reality, there are still too many unknowns that resist its onslaught. There are still too many burdensome associations, too many persistent echoes of old rules and old ways, too many dilemmas arising out of that meeting in the café, and too much new and as yet unassimilated information emerging from the heat of that recently witnessed argument, too much dizzying anticipation at what I felt sure would be the imminent denouement, and the powerful, all-enveloping sense, projected onto it by the present, that something was about to end; the impression that grips me when I look back is that, afterward, nothing was the same, that everything ended and began again, that while certain stretches of the stream’s course remained unaltered, both its final course and the map were irrevocably changed. No more father, either alone or in company. No more Paris. No more of my mother’s incomprehensible stubbornness. No more only-child inquisitiveness. No more triangular relationships with me as the vertex. But the doubt would last forever. The weight and shock and grief and resentment would last forever. My mother and I would be together forever and forever apart. The need and affection would last forever, as would the threatening murmur of the dark night in which we turn in despair to the warm illusion of the person sleeping beside us.
It wasn’t just my state of confusion and the speed with which things happened, it was simply that those hours represent too large a leap. Any questions I had about the reasons that triggered my mother’s flight from her father’s house began to surface only shortly before her own conclusive explanation. Since there was no room then for suspicion to be born and given due consideration, I cannot now fit it into some neat causal sequence, find some handhold that would allow me to cross the abyss, oblivious of the great void beneath my feet.
In fact, before the truth blazes forth, there is only one point when my paralyzing premonitions loosen their grip on me and something meaningful and reliable emerges in my memory. It happened the following morning, after breakfast. I had been particularly quick and was dressed and ready for the long day of respite that school would bring me. My mother and Delfina, whom I had heard come out of their respective bedrooms and say good morning to each other, were already in the kitchen when I arrived, although, unlike me, they were still in their nightclothes. Both of them looked at me (my mother was heating up the milk and making the toast, and my aunt was washing the dishes from the previous night’s dinner), and before I sat down at the white, marble-topped table, both made some ironic comment about my unusual promptness. Both seemed tired, and there was a heavy atmosphere in the apartment, the sour smell of cold cigarette smoke and human warmth that impregnates and penetrates walls and books after you’ve spent a long time in a room and not taken the precaution of opening the windows. We had all gone to bed at the same time, and I had lain awake for more than an hour, listening for any noises that might suggest a clandestine meeting, but maybe their patience proved greater than mine and they ended up meeting in my mother’s bedroom or in what used to be my father’s room and was now being used by Delfina. They could have waited conspiratorially for me to be neutralized by sleep, or perhaps one of them, unable to sleep or waking in the middle of the night, had gone in search of the other. Perhaps they’d argued again or had been able to speak more calmly, without any intimidating witnesses or the distorting fury of the first shock of conflict. They could have reached an understanding and could, likewise, have dug down deeper into the tunnel of old resentments.