My mother did not change her life after that final performance. She remained true to the criteria that had characterized her before, although she did, perhaps, become more withdrawn, more isolated and alone. She did not remarry, nor, as far as I know, did she ever have any love affairs, and as for friends — who were never very many and tended to desert her as soon as they recognized her inability to give herself — they became still fewer and harder to replace. Only one thing changed: she did not go back on her word as regards my father. She sold the apartment and kept her promise to give him half of the money, and that was that.
Twenty-two years have passed, but I still don’t know what he did with his half of the proceeds from the sale. My mother never explained what the debt was, perhaps because she didn’t know, and I can’t be sure that she didn’t just use it as an excuse in her argument with Delfina. The money clearly didn’t last him very long, because I understand he spent two more periods in prison. There is, of course, no trace of any lucky breaks he may have had, although I imagine they would have been few and far between. To the best of my belief, my mother never saw him again apart from a single meeting at the bank, of which she told me almost nothing. She never made any attempt to find him, and he kept well away from us. For a long time, I thought cynically that he would turn up again as soon as he needed some safe haven and that it was just a matter of time, but eventually it became clear to me that this simply wouldn’t happen. I can’t quite explain how, but a curtain, far thicker and more impenetrable than I could ever have imagined, now separated his life from ours. Strangely, this desire for separation came not just from my mother, but from him, too, something that initially made me still more suspicious. Did he no longer need us? Did he sense, from his place of exile, that he would not be welcome? Had my mother persuaded him to keep away and had he, for once in his life, respected her wishes? Or had persuasion been unnecessary, and had he accepted that everything was over between them? There were many unanswered questions, and they all led me, as they do now, to one solution: Paris, the final insult, the final straw — which eludes me and always will.
My father’s physical absence did not, however, mean that he was forgotten. My father did not vanish completely from our identical days. After my mother sold the apartment and gave him half the money, there was a brief period while we were getting used to our new apartment when she and I avoided talking about him, but later, although I can’t remember which of us was the first to break the silence, he resumed his usual place in our lives. We continued to receive calls from people asking for him, although not as many as in our previous apartment, and we were soon telling each other about these as blithely as we had before. When we had heard nothing of him for some time, we would begin speculating about his whereabouts, and it didn’t take long for us to include him in our conversations for no reason at all, either because I would ask my mother about past events in which he had been involved or because she would mention him spontaneously while recalling some other incident. It was a very strange situation. We certainly didn’t expect to see him again, the door of our apartment was definitively closed to him — as my mother had demonstrated by making that last confession to me — but in a way, he was still alive and still present. Much of what I know about the early days of their marriage dates from that time.
I’ve often wondered how this was possible after what had happened, and the reasons I come up with differ depending on whether they apply to her or to me. In my case, I suppose that as well as being a more or less conscious way of preserving a certain illusion of distance between us, of diminishing our cruelly highlighted closeness by drawing into the present the one thing that separated us and that we did not share, it was also a more secret and unacknowledged way of denying the truth about my origins. In my mother’s case, the reasons are more uncertain and harder to discern. On the one hand, it seems to me proof positive of her new distance and remoteness from him, that the thought of him had ceased to affect her, and that she was simply trying to reestablish the normality she had so longed for without making too brusque or categorical a break with the past, one that would have been a continual reminder to me of what she herself preferred not to remember; on the other hand, I cannot help but see it also as an irrepressible reflection of her still unextinguished love for him.
Whatever the truth of the matter, there is still a great deal I don’t know about them, much remains obscure to me about their strange union and my role in it, there is still much I find hard to absorb. I feel I lack the necessary information by which to judge them, and my own feelings grow confused when I try to find an answer to the remaining unknowns. I don’t know if he knew that I was not his son, and supposing that he did, I don’t know if he had always known it or if my mother had told him, as she had with me, only at a moment of her own choosing. That last possibility would perhaps explain his long and unexpected silence, but I’m not sure that would be my preferred explanation. I don’t know whether to miss him or despise him, I don’t know whether to make him the victim or the villain. Again, there are just too many questions that remain unanswered and always will, which means that I can’t choose. The only thing I can say is that I feel nothing for him and certainly don’t miss his unpredictable presence, even though he is the person I still think of when I say “my father.”
I only saw him again once. It was one winter’s night when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, in a bar I used to go to, one of those gloomy, unapologetically squalid dives, the haunt of a motley crew of inveterate night owls, one of those places that only really comes into its own once all the other bars have closed and the city’s streets slowly begin to fill up with people strolling unhurriedly into the new day that is just beginning. I’d gone there with a friend, after hours of fruitless peregrinations around other, more alluring establishments, drawn by the prospect of meeting some acquaintance who would invite us to join the last shift of drinkers of the night. We had sat down at a table, in order to avoid a nasty-looking drunk who had cornered us on the way in, and I suddenly spotted him leaning on the bar, surrounded by a group of five or six foreigners rather younger than him. I recognized him at once, despite all the time that had passed since that sighting at a café on that far-off afternoon, and despite the visible deterioration in his appearance. The hair at his temples had turned a rather yellowish gray, and after years of disorderly living, his very straight back, that feature so characteristic of him, had grown bent beneath the weight of head and shoulders; his clothes (jacket, tie, boots, and jeans), although nice and put-together enough, looked unmistakably worn, and his face, the alert, guarded face of someone accustomed to entrusting his survival to the whim of the moment, was a pathetic, faded reflection of what it once was. His companions, though, seemed not to notice this and stood around him in a semicircle, looking at him with the reverential gaze of tourists who think they’re having an authentic experience that can be added later to their store of traveller’s anecdotes or that will, at least, forever color the way they view the country they’re visiting. He was waving his arms around and showed every sign of being drunk, but he nonetheless retained his composure and spoke without pause, while his audience greeted his jokes with somewhat belated smiles. He was holding a glass of red wine in one hand, and when, on the excuse that I wanted to order a drink, I got up and went over to the bar so as to be nearer to where he was standing, I wondered with sudden sadness if those smiles would be his only payment for the special performance he was putting on for them. I didn’t approach him, I didn’t speak to him, I didn’t want to break the spell he had worked so hard to create. I positioned myself just close enough to overhear his conversation, and until long after I had been served, I waited for our eyes to meet, while I listened to him discoursing in French on a wide range of topics, from politics to recent Spanish history, from bullfighting to flamenco, interspersed with a few comments on drugs and Madrid’s nightlife. He had been in the right places at the right time, he mentioned the names of important people he claimed to know, he gave facts and figures, and drew appropriate parallels with subjects familiar to his listeners, which showed a fairly thorough if somewhat dated knowledge of French culture and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. The sole opportunity for him to recognize me arose shortly after my friend had left — annoyed at my having neglected him — and once the tourists had left, too. He had accompanied the group to the door, exchanging farewells and promises to meet again the following day, and when he came back inside, he stayed at the farthest end of the bar, leaning against the wall. I was a few yards away from him, but there was no one standing between us, and I was able to study him at length. All trace of his earlier apparent euphoria had gone, and he didn’t even bother looking around him at the other customers. He stood there, unmoving, sunk in his own thoughts, taking sips of wine. When he had finished his drink, he put the glass down on the bar, took out a cigarette, lit it, drew himself up a little, turned up the collar of his jacket, and prepared to leave. At that point, our eyes met, and, just for a second, I saw a flicker of doubt cross his face. Then, as if he’d forgotten that he’d already done so, he once again made as if to turn up his collar, and left. He didn’t recognize me, or perhaps he did but was too embarrassed to come over to me.