“I know you,” he said after a few seconds, still looking at me, then he opened the door wider, drew aside the security grille and stepped out to meet me. “You were in here a few days ago. You drank a Coke and then left. You should have been at school. It was in the morning.”
“Yes,” I said, involuntarily taking a step back, relieved that he remembered, but caught off guard by that reference to school. For a few more moments, I said not a word, then, seeing that he wasn’t speaking, either, and finally dredging up some courage, I managed to stammer out, “But. . but we’d already met before. .”
“Really? I don’t remember. Where exactly?” he asked, visibly interested. I noticed that the woman had stopped cleaning the floor and was leaning on her mop, watching us, and that the other man was also watching from where he sat slumped behind the phone.
“Three years ago,” I finally managed to say. “At my apartment. My mother was out. .”
I saw him screwing up his face in an effort to remember, all the while thoughtfully looking me up and down, and I could see that he came to no conclusion. I told him my full name, but he still didn’t react, either pretending or because he really didn’t recognize it.
“You were looking for my father,” I explained, not knowing what to do now, heartily regretting the situation I had gotten myself into and feeling his gaze becoming ever more oppressive. “You and another man. .”
“Now I remember,” he broke in. “Yes, now I remember,” he repeated as if he really were remembering. “Of course, you’re that kid. Sorry about that, but you’ve really gotten bigger since then.”
I thought he was going to continue, but instead he stopped abruptly and waited in silence for me to speak. I didn’t know what to say and answered lamely, “You gave me your card and invited me to come and see you. .”
“Did I?” he asked in some surprise. “Well, you’ve certainly taken your time.”
He was trying to be funny and to appear unruffled, but I realized that, now that he had recognized me, he had gone on the defensive, as if having me remind him of that episode from the past made him wary or uneasy. I suddenly found it hard to recognize in him the stranger who had forced his way into our apartment looking for my father. Physically he was the same, the same nicotine-stained fingers, the same scruffy appearance, but just then he seemed much smaller and more inoffensive than I remembered.
“I was only joking. No need to blush. It’s just that three years is a long time. .”
I recalled my first visit a few days before and must have seemed abstracted, because he asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine,” I said at once, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t know what you want exactly, but I think you’d better come back some other day. It’s really late for you to be out and about. Your mother will be worried. Besides, we’re closed.”
I nodded and again peered inside, at the woman and the other man, who were still watching us. I wondered if he and the woman had children, and what they would be like. I imagined being his son and immediately thought of my Aunt Delfina and her husband, and my eight-month stay in La Coruña. Then I became aware that the old man was talking, and I had to make an effort to understand what he was saying.
“Come back another day if you like, but you’d better get going for now. .”
I could see that he was anxious, even eager to get rid of me, and I gave him a reassuring smile. He took advantage of this truce to step back inside the bar, while I set off to the subway station again. I hadn’t gone ten yards when I heard him asking in a somewhat shy, uncertain voice, “You say it was your father we came looking for?”
“Yes,” I said, stopping briefly and turning my head. He had closed the security grille now and was looking at me, peering around the glass door, his right hand gripping one of the metal triangles of the grille.
“Did he ever turn up?” he asked, more brightly now that his hunch had been proved right and now that I was leaving.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s waiting for me at home.”
That same night, when I arrived back at our apartment and walked down the hallway, I saw that my mother’s bedroom door was closed. The light was on, but she turned it off as soon as she heard my footsteps on the parquet floor. The living room no longer smelled of cigarette smoke, and I felt a cold draft coming in through a window left cautiously ajar. I didn’t bother to close it. I went straight to bed, knowing that the next morning, my mother would be sure to send me off to school just as if it were a normal day. Just as if we were a normal mother and son.
XXXII
Since then, twenty-two years of largely normal and perfectly predictable days have passed, but I still remember that crucial evening with the same mixture of darkness and light. In the eyes of other people, I’ve grown up, but maturity has not brought with it sufficient distance for me to be able to judge what happened then. I’m calmer now, less subject to my emotional ups and downs, but, basically, the same conflicts prevail. I still can’t understand where my mother found the strength or how she managed to find the words. I know that, like her confession on the way to Burgos, she believed it was necessary, which is why she spoke out, but her determination, the intrepid integrity it reveals, continues to amaze me and, like almost everything else about her, arouses contradictory emotions. I should be grateful, I should admire her for what she did, and I am and I do, but I still wish it hadn’t happened, and I sometimes distrust her motives. Since I cannot doubt her honesty, I try to come up with reasons to suspect her, and I wonder if perhaps she felt she had to do it and if there were other things she didn’t tell me. Not that I do this often, because I rarely think about that evening. Incredible though it may seem, it isn’t something that obsesses me, and I myself find my own indifference alarming, but that’s how it is. I just can’t work up much interest; it’s as if what I found out then hadn’t really affected me.
In that strangely casual attitude to what would normally be such a troubling revelation, it would be ingenuous on my part not to acknowledge the beneficent influence of my mother, who overcame and survived adversity and the obstacles that she herself erected — the final and possibly futile triumph of her rare mixture of strength and weakness, her subtle combination of mystery and stoicism, of sincerity and a stubborn resistance to reveal herself. She never mentioned it again directly, and although I could not, at first, get it out of my head, I eventually forgot all about it, so much so that, when I did occasionally remember it, it took me a few seconds to persuade myself that it was real rather than imagined. I suppose it was better that way, that my mother foresaw what would happen, and that her subsequent silence on the subject was deliberate; indeed, not until the first signs of her illness became apparent did the whole scenario come back to me. As if her gradual deterioration made me the guardian of the memory she was losing, I slowly began to look back at our past life and forced myself to ask questions and to consider what I remembered of that particular fragment of memory. And yet, if the content of her confession to me on that evening twenty-two years ago doesn’t really grip my imagination even now, if my gaze wanders off in other directions, and if rather than focusing on any direct implications it has for me, I focus, for example, on the courage she showed in talking to me about it, this means that her saying nothing more about the matter was not the sole determining factor in my strange indifference to what she told me; other circumstances have intervened, of which that indifference is a prolongation and a consequence.