I walked aimlessly, pursued by my mother’s flawless image, until I came to a subway station and went down the steps, eager to hide, to conceal the anguish overwhelming me, to silence the uproar beginning inside me and gradually closing in around me, propelling me toward the sounds of battle, silencing my desire to surrender and accept. I had no idea where I was going. I bought my ticket, waited in the musty passageway beneath the lugubrious yellow neon lights for the first train to appear, then went down to the platform and, for at least an hour, traveled back and forth, choosing at random where to get on and off, making unnecessary transfers, and going up and down the same line several times. For at least an hour, I was alone, accompanied only by the clickety-clack of the various carriages I traveled in, by the dull whistle after every stop, by the few passengers who sat silhouetted in their seats like ghosts with neither past nor future, like specters belatedly summoned to a séance in which they were not called upon to participate. I managed to clear my head of all trace of thought and, cut off from everything, let myself be lulled by the swaying of the train, which plunged me into the tormented oblivion in which children must find themselves immersed just moments before they succumb to the hypnotic rocking of the cradle. Like them, I knew that sooner or later, the movement would stop and the thing I was struggling to avoid would engulf me like a particularly heavy sleep. Like them, I simultaneously resisted and longed for it, but my strength was as nothing compared to the far greater potency of the thick fog luring me on, compared to the fear of unreservedly facing up to the darkness.
I don’t know when the idea occurred to me, I don’t know what secret impulse drove me to it, perhaps some troubled attempt to cling to the past, some misplaced nostalgia for something I didn’t know how to value when it was still mine and that I was obsessively trying to hang on to once I saw that I’d lost it, or perhaps, on the contrary, it was a theatrical gesture of farewell to something I didn’t particularly mind leaving behind. I only know that I found myself once more on the Calle Bravo Murillo, after hurriedly leaving the train when I saw the name of the station, and that suddenly everything seemed to come together, everything was coherent and crystal clear, everything was consistent and had a reason for being. There was no break, no rupture with what had happened, each piece of my memory fitted perfectly with the next, seamlessly linked. There was no reason why I should be surprised, there was no cause for it, the fault was mine. How had I not realized, how had I never suspected, how had I not dealt better with my suspicions, how had I so misinterpreted my mother’s sorrow and sadness, fragility and vulnerability, her dependence on him? It was my fault entirely, I was the one who had been blind, I was the one who had been mistaken and wasted so much time.
It was not far to walk, or so it seems to me now. I emerged from a different station entrance than I had gone into a few days before, but it didn’t take me long to orientate myself in that almost traffic-free street, with its troubling resemblance to an empty movie set, like a shopping mall when all the shops have closed and the only evidence of the hustle and bustle that had filled it just hours before is a scattering of a few fast-fading bars. It never occurred to me that the bar might be closed. I didn’t hesitate or falter as I had on my previous visit. I was excited and nervous. I felt embarrassed by my earlier naïveté, like a gullible witness conned into fabricating a false alibi, and I was gripped by an uncontrollable longing for revenge. I wanted redress. Even at this late stage, I wanted more than just a walk-on part in this play and would have liked to be given unlimited power to manipulate and alter the plot and my own role in it. I was walking quickly, and every step I took inflamed and bewildered me still more, driving me into the labyrinth of my urgent need for oblivion. I had no plans, I didn’t know what I would do when I arrived at the bar, but that fact did nothing to check my unruly desire to build a wall of activity around myself that would temporarily protect me from what had just been revealed to me. The bar that I’d visited only four days earlier, when I was still determined to know what had happened in Paris — and which I’d left feeling unexpectedly comforted, having learned nothing but having felt a sudden, salutary distance from all that it symbolized for me — seemed to me now like the appropriate backdrop against which to manifest my detachment, to demonstrate to whoever cared to listen that I, too, could make decisions and change the course of events, that I wasn’t a mere puppet subject to the whims of strings I did not control. What I hoped to find there was the world I was leaving behind, and propelling me in that direction were the faces of my mother and the person who had never behaved like a father, and, it turned out, was not my father.
The bar’s neon sign had already been turned off when I spotted it some way away, but I thought I could see a tenuous light coming from the barred window, and so, far from being discouraged, I quickened my pace, while the craziest, most contradictory plans flooded into my mind. I imagined my father would be there; I imagined finding him there along with my mother and forcing him to confess that it was all a lie; I imagined him not being there and denouncing him to the owner, telling him, as he had asked me to do on that distant afternoon when he had turned up at our apartment and given me his card, that I had seen my father in Madrid; I imagined helping his friend, the one with the jacket and the leather boots, to take revenge for the money he was owed; I imagined becoming a member of that same profession and thieving, mugging, and stealing left, right, and center; I imagined calling the police from a phone booth and having all the customers arrested, figuring that exactly the same people would be there as on my first visit.
When I arrived, the folding aluminum security grille was closed, but not padlocked, and seeing that there were still people inside, I opened it a few inches, reached through the gap, and rapped on the glass door; terrified by my own boldness, my thoughts grew suddenly cloudy and my mind went blank. I could make out two other people apart from the old man: the woman with the red hair who had served me the other night and was now scrubbing the floor outside the restroom, and a tall man with a frank, open smile, who was standing at the bar, chatting. The woman leaned her mop against the wall and made as if to come over to me, but, casually prevented from doing so by her husband, she took up her mop again, still with her eyes fixed on me. I considered running away, but couldn’t move. The owner did not take long to reach the glass door, which he unbolted and gently pushed open, and he said, “We’re closed. We’re just cleaning up for the night.”
His voice was friendly but weary, and it was obvious that he didn’t want to waste any time on me. I avoided his eyes and looked instead at the woman, who was working her way with mop and bucket toward the back of the establishment. He didn’t move, and still I said nothing. I wanted to, but couldn’t.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, focusing his gaze exclusively on me, rather than on me and whatever else might be going on in the street. “Are you going to stand there all night? Like I said, we’re closed.”
This time his voice sounded firmer and more abrupt, but not cutting or unpleasant. Feeling tempted to run away, I still said nothing, and he looked at me more closely, as if noticing something he had failed to notice before, and as if he were trying to use that insight to decipher the reason for my presence there.