I haven’t seen him since. For many years after that night, we continued to receive news of him fairly frequently, then, suddenly, at around the time when the first symptoms of my mother’s illness appeared, he vanished completely. No one phoned to ask for him and no one mentioned having seen him by chance in such and such a place. Sometimes, I like to think that perhaps he’s finally seen sense and gotten out and is now resigned to living in a village on the coast or in the mountains, accompanied by some charitable woman he has managed to inveigle into staying with him — one last thing to cling to in what has otherwise been a most unfortunate life. At others, I imagine him trying his luck until the very end, or languishing in prison somewhere, or even dead. None of these ideas moves or repels me more than the others. I think I favor the first option, but then, when I think about my mother, I get to feeling rebellious and find the second option rather pleasing. Given the awfulness of her situation, I find it painful to think that he might be living a discreetly contented life, and then I rage against his memory, knowing, at the same time, that I’m being unfair, and still feeling a twinge of nostalgia for his marriage to my mother and for what might have been.
It’s a somewhat similar situation with me and Delfina. Delfina is still alive and phones regularly from La Coruña to ask how my mother is doing, but I don’t feel any particular fondness or affection for her. She appears to feel the same about me. When she phones, I notice how difficult she finds it to speak, I notice the put-on sadness, the way she almost holds her breath while she receives the never-very-hopeful news. I also notice her pent-up impatience, her desire to end the conversation as quickly as possible. She insists on knowing all the details, responding to my report in a tearful whisper, only to say goodbye almost immediately afterward. She rarely asks how I’m feeling or if I’m weary after two long years of coping with my mother’s illness. For her, I represent memory. I don’t blame her. Since that morning in Madrid when she advised me to take no notice of what my mother had said, a lot of things have happened — and not all of it good. She lives alone now, immersed in her own griefs and anxieties, but this isn’t because her husband has died, it’s because he left her for a woman he’d been seeing in secret for several years. When he left, he took with him their various mutual friends, the dinners and galas at the golf club, and my aunt’s busy social life was snuffed out. She never mentions this and never complains, she pretends not to care, and even to feel a certain relief, but I know how ashamed and embarrassed she feels and how bottomless is the pit of her despair; I know that, however much she would like to, she cannot change the past, and however much she longs for revenge, revenge is impossible. Her situation grieves me, living, as she does, in a city that is not her own and having to accept what money her husband gives her, she, who has never worked and never dreamed she would find herself in such a predicament. I regret this and feel sorry for her, but I can also see that the situation has its instructive side, and what reconciles me to her distress is the realization that what has happened to her takes away any authority she might have to judge my mother. I imagine that she herself is aware of this, which is why she remains silent. And that’s sad, because without my mother, the bonds uniting Delfina and myself grow weaker and somehow more artificial. Without either of us wanting to, we behave at a distance much as two recent acquaintances would behave in the flesh when the mutual friend who has just introduced them leaves them alone for a moment. We know too much about each other, and that knowledge brings us closer, but without my mother there, we’re incapable of giving expression to that closeness. We depend too much on her memory. Her living death has left us with too many differences. I would like to be able to talk to her freely, and I’m sure that Delfina would find comfort in talking to me, but we could only talk about my mother, and that’s impossible, because neither of us knows how much the other knows, and I’m sure she would rather not know what I know. Indeed, I sometimes think it’s precisely my knowledge of that secret that separates us, but this would imply that Delfina either knew or somehow sensed it, too, and from the way she behaved during the argument she had with my mother, I couldn’t say for certain one way or another. She might well know the secret and have simply refused to accept it, or she might just as likely suspect nothing. The way she kept reproaching my mother for having run away from home seems to indicate the latter, but then my mother’s insistence on defending herself against her sister’s accusations and her own veiled allusions to an explanation Delfina would prefer not to acknowledge both point to the possibility that she did know. I can’t be sure either way, I don’t know and never will; it’s a mystery that, like so many others, I can’t resolve or understand, because I can’t conceive of what it’s like to have a brother or sister and can’t, therefore, imagine what labyrinths of communication might open up between two siblings.
It’s even more difficult for me to talk about my mother and my relationship with her over those twenty-two identical years. If I allow myself to be carried away by what my heart tells me in moments of despair, I would have to conclude that our whole life — up until the cruel joke of her illness — has merely confirmed my worst fears about the future, fears I once harbored as a child. However difficult it is for me to say, however painful, this is the only sense I can make of the path our lives have taken up to this point. I find it hard not to resent my mother’s determination to remain single, oblivious to the burden she was bequeathing to me. I find it hard not to feel bitter toward her for not making things easier for me and for leaving me no one with whom I can share her unexpected misfortune. I find it hard not to feel angry with her for the helplessness and dependence that are the result of her overprotectiveness, and I sometimes wonder if she at any time considered the damage she might be doing to me, all the while thinking it was for the best, or if she could see no further than her own urgent need to keep me safe from the phantom of my origins. I find it hard not to wallow in all that negativity, and yet I have to say that we’ve lived very harmoniously all these years, and with the exception of her illness, no insuperable problem has come between us. It has all been very simple and transparent, and much better than one could have hoped. I don’t recall her uttering a single word of complaint or putting any obstacle in my way. I can’t recall her doing or saying anything, however insignificant or unthinking, that contributed to laying the foundations of anxiety in me. We went through all the usual stages of growing up without any great traumas. We went from living together and seeing each other every day to living apart and meeting once a week for lunch, from telling each other everything on a daily basis to exchanging brief summaries of our respective routines. We grew apart physically and emotionally, and my mother had a chance to experience fully the solitude she had so longed for, but none of these things appeared to affect her. She not only happily put up with the successive separations imposed on her by my independence, she accepted even those that were avoidable and were simply a response to my changing moods.