I suppose that, basically, what I need is a candle to light my memory. Living with my mother, seeing her every morning and every night, talking to her more than to any other person throughout the day, it was difficult to find a dissonant note, some ever-widening crack that might put at risk the stability of the edifice she had created in order to give me shelter. When I look back at those distant days, I’m surprised by the tranquility, the lack of color, and the monotony with which they passed. My mother, as I said, was very disciplined, which meant that life with her followed strict rules, not only regarding superficial matters — the organization of time and the tasks we undertook together — but also what could not be observed directly, the inner life that, with most people, is subject to the changeable tides of mood, but that in her case, rarely got in the way of what she deemed appropriate for each moment and its fulfillment. That’s why she exuded such confidence, why there were no upsets or unforeseen incidents and why, in her company, few things seemed unattainable. Life with her was like a straight line. There were no particularly serious problems, no enigmas that could not be resolved with a look, a few words of consolation, or a discreet silence.
The time of year in which the most evocative sensations and moments are concentrated — where the bellows of memory fills up most often and leaves the fewest empty spaces — coincides with the arrival of summer. My image of my mother from July to September grows clearer, more distinct. In the winter, whole hours go by without our seeing each other; there are certain times of day when our lives barely touch, and this only makes the fog grow denser. In the summer, we spend all day together, and the frontiers between the hours dissolve, which means that, even at a distance, I know where she is and how she’s using her time; I can see her reading, sunbathing, sitting and staring into space, or watching television just for the pleasure of it and not because I’m there and she wants to make the most of having that moment by my side. In the summer, her image grows in importance and becomes, were that possible, even more indispensable. We used to plan the summers together months in advance, and apart from the few visits we received from my father or some friend or other, we spent the time mostly alone. Always in different places, always in houses that my mother would rent for two months and that she would enter like a whirlwind in order to make everything new, moving furniture around, and taking with us sheets, towels, and even pillows from our own apartment in Madrid. Always that same unchanging ritual repeated year after year, until I began to spend the summers on my own. First, two weeks in La Coruña. Then a plane or a train or a day’s journey by car, and once we reached our destination, a couple of days were spent cleaning (everything had to be thoroughly washed, all trace of the previous inhabitants expunged, so as to make the house our own), and at last, two whole months lay ahead of us, sixty intense days that ended in the first week of September, when she had to go back to Madrid to sort out the syllabus for the new term and negotiate timetables with her colleagues.
The summers were a performance put on for our benefit alone, and they provide the best summary of those years, the compendium that best illustrates them. The story of our life together could, I believe, be told entirely through those summers without greatly distorting the sequence of events. Firstly, lost in a time when seasons did not yet exist for me and the year was not divided up according to fixed dates, there would be the summers my mother and I spent with my father. They were the only ones the three of us shared, and yet if I try to remember them, it is she, not he, I think of, she is the person who filled my mind with what little of those summers I know, with the few reference points that allow me to imagine them. Almost immediately afterward, albeit separated by a clear boundary, come four or five summers for which my memories are only slightly less hazy, retaining as they do a few images in which my father is always just about to arrive but never does, or only rarely; these are followed by two consecutive summers when my father does not appear and is not expected; one summer that was supposed to be a reunion but ended up being the first that my mother and I spent entirely in the company of my aunt; and lastly, the one that signaled the final rupture, or depending on your point of view, the onset of normality, another summer spent in La Coruña, a summer followed by a long list of summers in which we waited for no one, summers that are distinguishable only by the different decors of the various houses we rented.
That, let us say, is the chronology, the temporal framework as experienced by me. Then there is what was going on inside my mother’s mind, and it is precisely because those summers are the most perfect expression of our very close relationship that they aren’t enough and are of no use to me. My father hardly appears in those summers, and, in a way, he needs to appear for the figure of my mother to make sense. I need to feel my father’s presence, I need to think about him in order to begin to think about her. About my mother without me, not about the two of us putting up with my father, but about my mother alone. About my mother and what she hoped for and didn’t hope for, about my mother being happy and sad, satisfied and dissatisfied, or simply accepting the way things are, perhaps finding compensations for her strange life, or not even looking for them.
I need my father, I need him to leave prison, I need to start thinking about him.
VIII
My memory grows confused, and I can’t separate that morning from all the ornaments and extras I’ve added over the years, every time I spoke or thought about it. I’m not sure whether what appears in my memory now is a faithful reflection of what really happened or if the truth has become contaminated or modified by later events or by how I’ve assimilated those events as my personality has developed. I don’t even know why I keep remembering it. I mean, we often forget crucial events and remember others that are far less significant. We remember details such as the fact that we were wearing a new sweater on a certain day, or that it was a Tuesday, and we forget, on the other hand, that we received a slap in the face or that our father returned from the doctor’s and shut himself up in his bedroom never to come out. Often our memory of important things is built precisely on the banal, often it’s the memory of something that had no apparent effect on us that brings with it the memory of what endures, of what is important now, but which, when it happened, was not important, or did not appear to be.