XXXI
More than fifteen years have passed since that evening, and I’m well over twice the age I was then, but any attempt to explain the feeling of blank astonishment that filled me when I repeated to myself the words that, for several minutes after my mother had spoken them, I hadn’t wanted to hear would be poor and inexact. My immediate reaction is of no significance, and no real notion of what I felt could reasonably be extracted from it, because the way we react to those things that touch us most deeply is often not a reflection of our inner feelings but born of an effort to act in accordance with the blow received. If it were up to us, we would say nothing, we would laugh hysterically or give a sigh of relief, and yet we force ourselves to act as we think we should and to shout and slam doors. I was dumbstruck, paralyzed, plunged into a terrible clamor of conflicting feelings, but more than apprehension at the magnitude of what had been revealed or embarrassment at never having once imagined anything remotely similar, what I found most difficult was not knowing what attitude to adopt. My mother was still watching me and would have forgiven anything I did, and it was that waiting and that ready acceptance of hers that drove me to proceed according to her expectations, that and the sudden increase in the feelings of oppression and claustrophobia I’d experienced throughout the conversation.
Time has passed and nothing is as it was, but it’s also true that I don’t remember feeling then that the world had fallen in on me. I remember feeling confused and afraid, but not the sense of tragedy or drama one might expect. In a way, it’s as if the tension that had accumulated while my mother was speaking had prepared me for it. Having drawn me into her circular discourse, she had fixed me with a look of such yearning, and just at the point when I was capable of taking in the gravity of what she had confided in me, I, in turn, looked at her, and I saw that she seemed bowed and somewhat broken despite her efforts to remain apparently unshaken and in control, and then, after studying her hard and feeling exhausted by the suffocating lack of air and space, I got up without saying a word and went to my bedroom, with her following me; I hurriedly pulled on some shoes and, picking up my red parka, which suddenly felt inappropriate and rather childish, I headed for the front door, while my mother, rather unconvincingly and more in order to do what was expected of her than out of any real desire to stop me, issued a series of questions and warnings: “What are you going to do?”; “Are you crazy?”; “Don’t be absurd”; “Where on earth are you going at this hour?” I didn’t respond, I didn’t say a word, and just before I reached the door, I wondered whether I should venture into the room formerly belonging to the person whom I no longer knew whether or not to call “father” and replace my parka with the pearl-gray jacket abandoned there when he left and that, encouraged by my mother, I had begun wearing from time to time on special occasions, but I didn’t dare do it and didn’t want to delay leaving. Now, from this distance in time, I think I would have come to regret taking the jacket, a gesture that might have been misinterpreted by her, and all I wanted then was to get away from there and to be alone, and certainly not to emphasize her influence on me by bearing away with me the symbol of a union I wanted desperately to shake off.
I wasn’t thinking, I couldn’t. My head was spinning before I got into the elevator and pressed the down button, and it continued to spin as I saw my mother’s drawn, anxious face disappear from view. It was just after half past eight when, from the wood-and-glass cabin transporting me downward, I heard the apartment door close up above, and as my descent grew faster, I felt neither gratitude nor relief that she had allowed me to leave, nor any resentment, either, as might have been the case in different circumstances, because she had given me no reason to behave in a surly manner, to shout and slam doors, or to cry my eyes out. As I struggled to recover from the shock, I had time to reflect, and yet I didn’t think about the strange, dark nature of what I’d just been told, I didn’t wallow in feelings of either pity or horror. Once I reached the ground floor, I held open the green, wooden door at the entrance of the building for the doorman, who was just putting out the trash, followed him outside, and then set off aimlessly down the sidewalk peopled with shadows hurrying past, their eyes bright with the promise of the night to come. I wasn’t thinking, I couldn’t. Nothing seemed to matter any more, and I didn’t even try to take any precarious consolation in the thought that Paris no longer mattered since my mother had continued to exonerate my father even after her performance was over and I knew everything, and this was palpable proof that I had never really counted — that everything she might have done ever since I could remember, her every sacrifice, her patient waiting, had been not for my sake, but for hers. Right from the very start, I had been excluded from their relationship, there had never been a triangle, just two parallel lines with my mother in the middle, and knowing this did not lighten my load one bit. He and I represented two different things. I would still occupy the place I had always occupied, there was no escape, no betrayal that could outlast hope; I was the one to whom my mother had to answer, I was the one from whom she concealed things in order to protect me when it seemed advisable to say nothing, and I was the one to whom she explained things when common sense required her to. Nothing mattered and everything was useless, because everything had ended and begun all over again. Our singularity had grown more singular, my onliness more obvious and more irreversible than ever.
I wished I could disappear. I wished time would pass more quickly. I wished Delfina lived in Madrid or that I had a father or an older brother I could turn to. I wished I could erase the last few days, I wished I didn’t have to go home to face my mother’s kindly, inquisitive gaze. I wished I didn’t admire her courage in telling me something that others would have kept to themselves. I wished she were angry and vengeful toward a person who didn’t need her protection, that she were less calm and collected and scrupulous when she had lied about and, so I thought, concealed from me the final insult he had inflicted on her. I wished I could free myself from the feeling that it didn’t matter what she did, and from my awareness of the abyss into which I was being dragged by her honesty and integrity, because my admiration and my dependence would grow in parallel with the distaste and anxiety aroused in me by my own inability to rebel. I wished she were selfish and insensitive, and that I didn’t know about her weakness and her past sorrows. I wished many things, but all of them were impossible and would never happen, because my mother would not change and I could never put my reproaches into words. I wasn’t thinking, I couldn’t. I needed to find something safe to hold on to, something not passed down through the generations, not inherited, and so I set off aimlessly down the street, fleeing from the pressures pursuing me. I wasn’t thinking, I couldn’t, because I didn’t want to surrender one inch more of my body to the new noose she had thrown around me, and what I regretted most was not my failure to realize this while there was still time to escape. What I regretted most was having insisted on finding out rather than doing nothing, having enquired too closely rather than simply forgetting all about it. I would rather she had not spoken to me, I would have preferred not to know, to go back to the situation before my phone call to La Coruña, but it was too late. The situation was the same, nothing had changed, and it was best to simply accept that.