“A few things have happened lately that we need to talk about. They’re not important, but they deserve an explanation.”
My mother is nervous. I can tell, because, again, she stops speaking, as if she didn’t know how to continue, then suddenly she straightens up and slides her legs to the floor and puts on the shoes that are lined up before her on the carpet. She bends over toward the coffee table in front of her and takes out a cigarette from the pack lying there on a pile of books, next to her lighter. She lights the cigarette and leans back, holding an ashtray in her left hand. This time she doesn’t take off her shoes or sit with her legs up; she crosses one leg over the other and remains silent while she exhales the first puff of smoke, having first held it for some time in her lungs. The music stops, and for a moment, I can hear the dull buzz of the speakers, until the arm swings back to its rest and the platter stops spinning.
“We have to talk. That’s the only way we can restore trust between us.”
My mother speaks slowly and hesitantly, although she has now made an effort to soften the somewhat chilly tone of her first words and is smiling more broadly. She’s holding the ashtray steady on the arm of her chair and gently swinging one foot as she starts to thread together the explanations that will help create the diaphanous cloth on which she will later embroider her whole argument. I haven’t even opened my mouth, and she seems to prefer it like that. There’s nothing I can say, she is the one doing the talking.
“I know how shocked you must have been by that meeting in the café and how confused you must have felt when I didn’t even mention it to you. You must have been in quite a state if you felt driven to phone Delfina.”
She is finding it difficult to begin, and perhaps that’s why she’s looking at me so hard, as if to make sure I’m following what she’s saying. For a few seconds, she says nothing, and I think of the veiled reproach in her last words, which I know was entirely involuntary, and of the strange way she described that meeting. “That meeting in the café,” she said, instead of saying what would have seemed easier, that meeting with your father. But we’re only at the beginning, we have to go step by step.
“I’m not excusing myself,” my mother says, after taking another puff of her cigarette, causing the coral and ivory bracelets on her wrist to slip down over her sleeve to her elbow then slip back up again once she has removed the cigarette from her lips. “I don’t need to. I know you’ll understand. I didn’t intend to hide that from you. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and until I’d made that decision, I didn’t want to alarm you. Do you really think me capable of concealing something like that from you?”
These words are spoken without much conviction, and the question seems more rhetorical than anything else. She falls silent again, and before the silence grows too dangerously long, I utter an almost inaudible “No” to speed up the pace of her argument. “Of course not,” I add more loudly. She seems grateful for this and smiles with spontaneous intensity. I can see the expression on her face, which, even in the dim light, looks terribly pale.
“He asked me for money, but you know that already. He phoned in the morning wanting to arrange a meeting.”
Again, that lack of a name, I think. Again, that artificial void. Meanwhile, her smile has disappeared, as if, you might say, it had gone in search of the words with which to vanquish the shame and fear pursuing it.
“That’s the only time I’ve seen him,” she adds quickly, as if it were important to make this clear, because she thinks this is the main point of friction: seeing my father without telling me. She’s right, although the emphasis is wrong. It isn’t because of him, but because of her. Like Paris, I think, without being able to think beyond that because my mother continues to talk.
“At first, I refused, because we simply don’t have that kind of money. But he seemed so defeated, and although he tried not to show it, I could see that he was really worried. He said it was some debt he’d run up, and that he needed to pay back the money as soon as possible.”
My mother lists these facts, as if she were reciting a text learned by heart, and I tell myself it couldn’t possibly have been that way. He hadn’t seemed particularly defeated to me, so why did she say he was?
“I told him I couldn’t give him the money, and the idea of selling the apartment only occurred to me after I’d left the café. I didn’t want to tell you anything about it until I’d thought it through properly, but then you preempted that decision, and, well, what happened happened. I can quite understand why you did it. I would have done the same. My silence led you into deceit.”
I hear her last words while I’m still thinking about my father, whom she doesn’t refer to as my father, and about that lowness of spirits that I had failed to notice when I was watching them from my hiding place on the opposite sidewalk. I could, I realize, quite easily believe her version, but I don’t really care, something stronger than her possible betrayal of me gets in the way. It isn’t Paris, although Paris continues to preoccupy me and I still want to find out the truth about it, even though I’m beginning to think it’s an insoluble enigma.
“I believe I made the right decision. Delfina can’t understand it. She leaps to conclusions. She’s too influenced by all those cocktail parties she goes to and the stuffy people she meets. Plus, she’s never had children herself.”
I don’t know why she mentions children. I have the impression this isn’t the first time she’s used that lack to explain my aunt’s behavior, along with those cocktail parties and that scornful reference to my uncle’s world, but it’s the first time I’ve really noticed it. She emphasized my aunt’s lack of children, but given the absorbed way in which she said it, it was almost as if it came out unthinkingly, like one of those set phrases we often resort to and that, repeated ad nauseam, end up summarizing everything we think about a particular subject.
“Delfina doesn’t understand. She worries about us too much and doesn’t realize there are certain decisions that have to be made, even if they might prove prejudicial to us. We’re all the family she has. I’m not saying she’s not happy, she might well be. But she’s too much alone. We represent the future for her. That’s why she wants to protect us, and her desire to protect blinds her to other things.”
I don’t know what she means, but that doesn’t matter, because I know it’s purely incidental, coincidental, and I look away and see the little red light that tells me the record player is still on although it’s no longer playing. “She’s never had children herself,” I repeat inwardly while my mother again pauses and takes a pull on her cigarette, gestures betrayed by the tip glowing more brightly in the darkness and by the bracelets that rattle their way up and down her arm.
“But you’re not like Delfina. You’re like me, and you know that this is a better way to do things. He paid half the cost of the apartment — well, his parents did — and it wouldn’t be right to deny him what is his. It would be ignoble. After all, now that he no longer lives with us. .”
My mother stops talking, as if she regretted what she’d said, or regretted not weighing her words more carefully. She doesn’t hesitate exactly, it’s merely a slight vacillation, just long enough for her to realize that to remain silent would be worse. She takes advantage of that pause to knock the ash off her cigarette and into the ashtray balanced on the arm of her chair. Despite the encroaching darkness, I can still see her pale, freckled face, from which all trace of a smile has gone. I think briefly about my father and tell myself that, this time, the void left by his unspoken name was more obvious, because, in her desire not to say it, she has had to replace it with a pronoun. She says, “He no longer lives with us and never will again, let’s be quite clear about that.”