“None of this makes any sense, so don’t even try to make sense of it. I’m telling you now so that you can know what my life has been like, so that you won’t think that I’m acting out of spite. I don’t expect anyone to understand my reasons for doing what I did. Seen from the outside, it does seem crazy, the proof being that I’m talking about it now, three whole years after he left. I’m talking to you about it now in order to explain my silence, not so that you’ll necessarily understand what motivated that silence. I’ve never harbored any real hopes in all these years. I don’t even know when I actually stopped hoping altogether, but when I did, be assured that it in no way changed my feelings. I have lived very happily with you, and the years have simply passed, that’s all. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even give it a thought.”
What fills my mind more and more is my mother’s grave, determined attitude, her slow, almost menacing way of drawing out the thread. It’s the certainty of her presence there before me, quiet and alert, the certainty that no one will come to rescue us, no one will open the front door and interrupt us, that’s what I’m thinking about, not her actual words but this chosen darkness that wraps about us and fills me with a kind of tremulous unease, while everything around me has ceased for the moment to exist and my mother continues to speak only to me.
“Listen. I’m not denying what happened, I wouldn’t dare. I know that what I did must seem strange. I know that the circumstances in which you’ve grown up have been, to say the least, unusual. I know that much of what happened was due to irresponsibility on my part. What I want you to understand is that, if I have been irresponsible, I’ve been irresponsible with you, but not with myself, because you didn’t know the situation, and there’s no reason why you would have made the same decisions I did. I’ve tried to be honest, and I’ve tried to draw us closer together by allowing you to judge for yourself, but I failed to take into account that you weren’t yet a grownup and that I was giving you a distorted view of life by allowing you to think something was normal when it was perhaps just a product of my way of being. It was shameful of me to say to you, as I did just now, that he won’t ever come back to live with us, and that, even though you and I hadn’t talked about it, you knew. You did know, but the problem is that you should have found out directly from me, not through this web of silences I’ve been weaving.”
Perhaps because she’s talking to herself, not to me, and is telling herself things she has never told herself before, my mother’s voice sounds sad and somewhat somber and it occurs to me again to think that no one is going to come and rescue us and that what she says now will remain said forever. No one will contradict her or give me a different version, we will have to live forever with what she tells me now. The two of us together forever, as it has been for as long as I can remember, despite that “he” whom she still refuses to name outright. The two of us together forever, along with whatever she may tell me now and whatever the future may bring.
“It’s up to me if I accept how things evolved. It’s up to me if I choose to behave like a madwoman, to seek satisfactions where there are none to be had, to decide to let time decide for me, but I don’t have the right to impose that same passivity on you. There’s no reason why you should forgive what I forgive. I’ve encouraged you to consider as normal what was only normal for me, never once stopping to consider that time was passing and that you would wake up one day. I’m not infallible, and I was wrong. I didn’t realize how wrong until Delfina phoned me and told me that you had seen us. The fact that you said nothing about it to me demonstrates that you distrusted me in some way, that you had begun to be dissatisfied with the order imposed by your mother. And I don’t blame you.”
My mother keeps going over the same ground and continues to apologize for a mistake I don’t even care about, because it seems so tiny and insignificant in comparison with the great tide washing over me as I suddenly succumb to the thought that perhaps taking the blame for something is worse and less considerate than the supposed error that the admission of guilt is intended to make good, that perhaps it’s more harmful to recant and take responsibility for the silence than to allow that silence to stubbornly persist. That’s what I keep telling myself over and over while she continues to talk and while she stubs out her last cigarette and bends over to put the ashtray down on the table. The lie that preserves is the one that remains unconfessed, and a stronger, more potent truth is all that’s needed for a suspicion to be erased and for everything to carry on as before. No one will come in through the front door, and the lights from our respective bedrooms will be the only ones on in our apartment tonight. Order will be restored, along with our trust in each other.
“Why did I go to that café and why am I going to sell the apartment? I’ve been talking for a while now, but I’ve just been going around and around in circles. I went there because I couldn’t not go, because I’m sentimental, and even though I don’t think he deserves it, it still touches and hurts me that he should be in trouble. You don’t want bad things to happen to someone who has been part of your life, you can’t deny him a helping hand if you’re in a position to hold one out to him. Besides, selling the apartment is an opportunity to cut all ties. I’m not denying him my help, but I’m making sure it’s the last time. I don’t trust myself, and so I need all links between us to dissolve, because I just find it absurd and irrational, this readiness of mine to take him back. I don’t want him back, and I have no intention of starting all over with him again.”
My mother talks as if she were listing a series of imaginary offences, talking more to herself than to me, with a degree of ill-disguised anger and disdain, and this confirms to me that she’s not being honest, that there is always an explanation for any decision we make, and it isn’t only time that decides. While I’m listening to her and thinking about her, I really don’t care if that’s the case and am merely trying hard to neutralize myself against the larger truth that I can sense approaching, so that it won’t affect me too deeply and thus lose its power when it does arrive; I’m trying hard not to listen to her, in order to avoid meekly slipping my head into the noose of her frankness.
“I’m not condemning him, what drove me away from him wasn’t him being in prison or the idea that he was a criminal. I could accept that. What I couldn’t accept was his sheer egotism. Egotists don’t usually realize that they’re egotists, and that somehow reconciles you to them. Since their egotism usually grows up in the shadow of some old trauma, you forgive them easily. You think they feel unprotected and alone or that they behave egotistically because they see you, who love them, as strong and powerful. That’s why the love you feel for them rarely dies. It’s a tyranny, a trap. The truth is that it’s best to keep them at a distance, because otherwise, they’ll entangle you in a long chain of discontents, and they’ll feel and make you feel, too, that every complaint you make, every grievance, and every attempt to get them to think about what they’re doing is just another attack that only aggravates the deep, hidden pain they carry inside them. You can’t reason with them, they’re blind.”
I don’t know where my mother is going. Where is she going, I ask as her words rise and dissolve. Nothing of what she says makes sense. It doesn’t matter that she speaks and corrects herself, or that her thoughts coincide with mine, or that they are fair and acceptable, because she will never be an egotist, and there will never be any deprivations or blunders for which I will need to demand satisfaction. Nothing will change, and her deceit, if it existed, will solve nothing, because it will represent not a break but a parenthesis, and then some explanation will be found or some larger truth will cover it up. No deceits and no concealments, just her and me in this room, just her and me and her words that don’t fade but avail themselves of the space left by my thoughts, which come slowly and cowardly because I fear the noose I can feel hovering over my head.