In the room he would not let me help him unpack his bags. He was cursing his lumbago. He seemed to have a fear of intimacy, almost as if he had hidden a crime in his valises.
“This old carcass must be subjugated,” he said.
He moved like a cat. Great softness. Yet when he wanted to he could show powerful muscles. He believed in concealing one’s strength.
We walked out into the sun, he looking like a Spanish grandee. He could look straight into the sun, and the tenseness of his will when he said, for instance, “I want,” made him rigid from head to foot, like silex.
As I watched him bending over so tenderly to pick up an insect from the road in order to lay it safely on a leaf, addressing this insect in a soft whimsical tone, preaching to it about its recklessness in thus crossing a road on which so many automobiles passed, I asked myself why it was that as a child I could only remember him as a cruel person. Why could I remember no tenderness or care on his part? Nothing but fits of angerand severity of annoyance when we were noisy, of beatings, of a cold, reserved face at meals.
As I watched him playing with the concierge’s dog I wondered why I could not remember him ever sitting down to play with us; I wondered whether this conception I had of my father’s cruelty was not entirely imaginary. I could not piece together his gentleness with animals and his hardness towards his children. He lived in his world like a scientist occupied with the phenomena of nature. The ways of insects aroused his curiosity; he liked to experiment, but the phenomena which the lives of his children offered, their secrets, their perplexities, had no interest for him, or rather they disturbed him.
It was really a kind of myopia of the soul.
The day after we arrived he was unable to move from his bed. He asked me to find him a pair of pyjamas with a Russian collar; they had to be pearl-grey and soft to touch, because he could not bear coarse textures.
I set out quickly to fulfill his wish. For the moment it seemed enormously important to me that the pyjamas should have a Russian collar and be made of delicate fabric. It seemed important not to offend the regal taste of the man who was lying stiffly in bed with sad, exacting, blue eyes always clouded with discontent.
Everybody in the little shops along the seashore declared that such pyjamas had never been seen.
I came back to him with the feeling that a day in which one of my father’s desires had not been fulfilled was a day wasted.
After the pyjamas a special German medicine had to be found. Samba, the elevator man, was sent out to hunt for it. The bus driver was dispatched to get a special brand of English crackers. Paris had to be phoned to make sure the musical magazines were being forwarded. Telegrams came, letters, telephone calls, Samba perspiring, the bus man covered with dust, the German medicine, the Russian pyjamas, postpone the hairdresser, order a special menu for dinner, Samba is there any mail, will you get the newspaper, no these won’t do all, telephone the doctor, he is having dinner, the spaghetti is overdone, Samba perspiring, the elevator running up and down…
There were no other guests in the hotel—the place seemed to be run expressly for us. The waiters gave us the most minute attention—our meals were brought to the room. Mosquito nettings were installed, the furniture was changed around, his own linen sheets with large initials were placed on the bed, his silver hair brushes on the dresser, the plumber ordered to subdue a noisy water pipe, the rusty shutters were oiled, the proprietor was informed that all hotel rooms should have double doors. Noise was his greatest enemy. His nerves, as vibrant as the strings of a violin, had endowed or cursed him with uncanny hearing. A fly in the room could prevent him from sleeping. He had to put cotton in his ears in order to dull his over-sensitive hearing.
He began talking about his childhood—so vividly that I thought we were back in Spain. I could feel again the noonday heat, could hear the beaded curtains parting: footsteps on tiled floors, the cool, green shadows of shuttered rooms, women in white negligees, the smell of carnations, the holy water, the dried palms at the head of the bed, the pictures of the Vrgin in lace and satin, wicker arm chairs, the servants singing in the courtyard…
He used to read under his bed, by the light, a candle so that his father would not find him out. He had only fifty centimes a week. He had to make cigarettes out of straw. He was always hungry. He gave piano lessons to his father’s pupils, and while they played the piano with one hand, with the other hand they played… on other instruments. It went on like that—five or six lessons a day—and he never got tired. Finally he got the little girls to come without their pants, which made things easier. He cut holes in his pockets so that they could go on playing with their two free hands and nobody noticed anything amiss. He was getting more and more popular as a piano teacher.
We laughed together.
He didn’t have enough money for the Merry-go-round. His mother used to sew at night so that she could afford to rent a bicycle the next day.
He looked out of the window from his bed and saw the birds sitting on the telegraph wires—one on each wire.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll sing you the melody they make sitting up there.” And he sang it. “It’s all in the key of humor.”
“When I was a child I used to write stories in which I was always left an orphan and forced to face the world alone.”
“Did you want to get rid of me?” asked my father.
“I don’t think so. I think I only wanted to struggle with life alone. I think I suffered from pride, which prevented me from coming to you until I felt ready…”
“What happened in all those stories?”
“I met with gigantic difficulties and obstacles. I overcame them. I was handed a bigger portion of suffering than is usual—imaginary suffering. Without mother and without father I fought the world, angry seas, hunger, horrible step-parents. There were mysteries, pursuits, torture, all kinds of danger…”
“Don’t you think you’re still doing that?”
“Perhaps. Then there was another story, a story of a boat in a garden. Suddenly I was sailing down a river and I went round and round for twenty years without getting anywhere.”
“Was that because you didn’t have me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was because I was waiting to become a woman. In all the fairy tales where the child is taken away she either returns when she is twenty or the father returns to the daughter when she is twenty.”
“He waits till she gets beyond the stage of having to have her nose blown. He waits for the interesting age.”
My father’s jealousy began with the reading of my childhood diary. He observed that after two years of obsessional yearning for him I had finally exhausted my suffering and attained serenity. After serenity I had fallen in love with an Irish boy and then with a violinist. He was offended that I had not died completely, that I had not spent the rest of my life yearning for him. He did not understand that I had continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. I had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him. I had written the diary for him. I had loved him by falling in love at the age of eleven with the ship’s captain who might have taken me back to Spain. I had loved him by taking his place at my mother’s side and becoming logical and intellectual in imitation of him, not through any natural gifts for either. I had loved him by playing the father to my brothers, the husband to my mother, by giving courage, strength, by denying my feminine, emotional self. I had loved him in life creatively by writing about him.