“It’s not his fault. After all, the way we behave always has its roots in childhood, and that’s especially so in his case. We are slaves all our lives to what happened in our early years, and the circumstances in which we spent our childhood leave a very deep mark. The worst thing that can happen to anyone is to remain enslaved to the past, to become obsessed with the evil done to them by others, because often the worst evil was done by the person who loved them most. Someone who was rich, or was brought up to think he was rich, will resent it when, years later, he goes bankrupt or realizes that he wasn’t rich at all, and will think that other people owe him something. The death of a father or mother can mess you up for the rest of your life. Sometimes it doesn’t even take a trauma. We are so malleable as children, and our parents’ view of life puts down such deep roots and dominates our way of feeling and thinking. That can be very harmful, and parents need to take great care to ensure that their children don’t inherit qualities or views that are already a burden to them.”
My mother’s words persist and seem to speak in veiled terms of her and me, a suspicion I find distressing. I don’t want any parallelisms, I don’t want her to know what I’m thinking or for her to need only look at me to guess my state of mind, I don’t want to discover in her the child she once was and never will be again, nor do I want that child to resemble me. Her words accelerate and grow tangled, and I can only stop them by forcing my thoughts to move more slowly, pausing at random over certain phrases, fixing on bits and pieces that I repeat and preserve with the intention of building a wall to block out the conclusion I can see approaching. There is, however, no escape. My mother isn’t going to stop, and every word she says, even though I try not to hear it, will be further proof of her univocal dedication to me, of my infuriating, tyrannical onliness.
“It’s absurd. Life deals us quite enough blows as it is without exposing us to still more. When we’re growing up, for example, there’s a moment when the whole solid world we’ve been living in so snugly suddenly collapses around our ears, and it seems to us a vile trick. That’s when we realize that time is passing and that we have almost no chance of putting things right. We feel deceived and long for an innocence we will never recover. A lot of people never get over it and let life slip by, thinking that they’re the only people who’ve been through that same experience. But we have to get over it, because we don’t have to look very far to keep finding reasons to lose heart.”
There’s no escape, no chance to protest or rebel. There’s nothing to be done.
“I’ve tried to leave you free, tried to do everything as naturally as possible, for you to have all the necessary information so that you could judge for yourself and so that there would be no duplicity, no shadowy areas between us. But there are things that are beyond my control and that I haven’t perhaps really kept a grip on. If that’s so, then you’ve got to be strong and just think of yourself. I’m not always going to be here. .”
There’s no escape. None.
“I can put up with a lot. I know what it’s like to have the world fall in on you and to feel that life isn’t as sweet and innocuous as you had been led to believe. I’ve had my share of suffering, too, but I’ve been through it and left it behind me, and above all, I haven’t burdened other people with my problems. .”
There’s no escape. None. Only time and death and forgetting and any children I myself might have.
“Selling the apartment, for example. Delfina is right when she says that it’s your inheritance, that I should think about you before I sell it, because you haven’t had a normal father who’s been with you every day, and the apartment would be a way of compensating you. But Delfina doesn’t know, and neither do you, that there are reasons why it has to be like that. There are reasons for my silence, reasons I haven’t told you about before. .”
There’s no escape. None. My mother’s words rise up and cut the air, trying to merge, and her melodious voice wraps around me and speaks of herself alone, and no longer of me or of her and me together. “Listen, everything you heard yesterday is true. We’ve never spoken about it, but it’s true. I didn’t tell you, because I felt the time wasn’t right. That’s why I kept silent, that’s why I hesitated.” This is it, I think. This is the mouth of the deep hole. My mother is going to climb down into that hole and reveal everything she has never told me, and everything is going to end in order to begin again. “There are things you don’t know,” “Delfina is right,” “Everything we talked about yesterday is true.” There it is. The mouth of the black hole. It wasn’t pure chance. It couldn’t be. She spoke so that I would hear her, so that we could talk today. That’s where we’re heading. “Listen. I haven’t been a poor, unfortunate wretch, and I don’t regret anything. I was very young when I met him. You know that, because I’ve told you. What you don’t know, and what you heard yesterday for the first time, is that I left home and ran away with him. And that’s true. I fled and said nothing to my father or Delfina. But that has nothing to do with my life since then. That doesn’t explain his behavior or mine. I ran away with him because it was clear that I was going to at some point. Maybe I could have done it differently, but I would have left eventually. The way Delfina would have liked me to have done, perhaps, taking all the appropriate steps and securing the blessing of my family, but I would have left. I was in love. I loved him. Running away with him just precipitated matters, that’s all.” My mother is speaking hesitantly and without pause. I’m listening, I know what she’s saying, but I try to focus only on snippets of it. I don’t want to listen. I prefer silence to premonitions and honesty; I prefer deceit to kindness and having our bedroom doors open at night, with the light from one room illuminating the other. Paris, I think. “We all have sorrows hidden away in our hearts, and we all make mistakes that are misunderstood or discredit us in other people’s eyes. But even if they’re reprehensible and harmful, they don’t discredit us forever. They might not even be mistakes. They happen as almost everything in life happens, inexplicably and unstoppably.” Everything is happening and not happening, everything is moving and not moving, and with no cigarettes to mark the rhythm, with the haste that grips us when, after a long and difficult conversation, we can see that the end is in sight, my mother’s words tremble before me and make me dizzy. “Even we ourselves don’t understand much of what we do and feel. It’s likely that our deepest feelings, the ones that make us who we are, that make us behave as we behave, cannot be explained, because they’re not born of reasons or real decisions. They are orders that rise up from our subconscious and there’s no point trying to justify them. They happen, and the best thing we can do is to accept them as they are, and not think about them, so that they don’t entangle us, and not talk about them, unless they affect someone else.” I don’t want to listen and I’m not going to. “Listen,” says my mother. “Pay attention and listen,” she says again, as if she were saying pay attention and listen to what I’m going to say but don’t say and which is drawing closer all the time, pay attention and listen to the empty space left by that name I’m concealing and not saying. There’s no escape and no end. There will be no more conversations after this and no protests on my part. It will be back to the same, identical life, every day and every weekend the same, the light from her open bedroom door illuminating mine. It will all be as it was before, repeated over again. Always the same, always the same debt and the same devotion. “Pay attention and listen.” My mother’s reasons superimpose themselves one on the other, circling around the conclusion that never arrives because she doesn’t dare allow it to, even though it’s close and I don’t want to listen or pay attention because, if I did as she asks, I would have to agree with her and she would seem admirable and pitiable and worthy of my compassion for her mistake, for her failure not to realize that everything hurts and that everything repeats itself, that neither her words nor her understanding will save her, and nor, of course, will they save me.