I wanted to beg my father to tell me that he had done something else, something different from what I would have done. I wanted to beg him to assure me I had stayed at the top of the stairs.
But I was not there. We were standing in the street, looking at our empty pocketbooks and wondering wistfully why we were not given, as we gave others, at least the illusion of perfection. We lamented our isolation, yet we were the ones who had run away. The next time we would meet we would show false, high-pitched gaiety and our sensitive ears would catch the sound of the effort. This gaiety which was false, which made him smile with only half of his mouth, was the same gaiety I used on dark days as my last gift.
I wanted to reach out to my father and warn him. I wanted to reassure him and caress him. But everything about him was fluttering like a bird that had flown into a room by mistake, flying recklessly and blindly in utter terror. A bird bruising itself against wall and furniture while one stands there mute and compassionate. A terror so great that it did not sense one’s pity, and when one opened the window to allow it to escape it interpreted the gesture as a menace. To run away from its own terror it flew wildly against the window and crushed its feathers.
Don’t flutter so blindly, my father!
Or perhaps during that taxi ride he had arranged to sever himself from the situation which caused him pain. I knew how he would plan his escape. He was planning a long trip, he was writing letters, addressing the flowers, waving good-byes, enacting the departure. He was cutting all the cords as if he were a ship being launched, slipping down the ways… He would sever the tie, that was simple. A big sabre cut, once and for all, and he would be free. That would be a fancy too, as fanciful as the idea that music, this music which filled the air we breathed, was silenced when the radio was turned off. Life could not be sliced to separate the regions of pain from those of joy. Everything that happened to us happened deep down, where it could not be hacked away.
I grew suddenly tired of seeing my father always in profile, of seeing him always walking on the edge of circles, of seeing him always elusive, always covering essentials with long, dizzy phrases about nothing. The fluidity, the evasiveness, the deviations made his life a shadow picture. He never met life full face. His eyes never rested on anything, they were always in flight. His face was in flight. His hands were in flight. I never saw them lying still, but always curving like autumn leaves over a fire, curlind uncurling. Thinking of him I could picture him only in motion, either about to leave, or about to arrive; I could see better than anything else, as he was leaving, his back, the way his hair came to a point on his neck, the birth mark on his neck. I had a three-quarter picture of him taking leave, his face partly turned towards the door, his hand stretched to say good-bye. In his own home the sound of his steps was unreal—he could arrive without being heard.
When I got into the taxi I had a feeling that I was going to bring the tiger in my father out into the open. I was tired of his secret muscles, his feline mysteries, his ballet dancing. I told myself I would begin by telling him the whole truth, and demand the same of him. I would struggle to build up a new relationship.
He was leaving for a concert with a young violinist. He had asked me to rent a private compartment in which he said he wanted to prepare some notes for a conference. When I brought the ticket to him I said I knew that the compartment would be put to other uses. He leaped up in great anger and said: “You suspect me, you suspect me?”
But he refused to admit that he had been lying. He was pale with anger. No one ever doubted him before—so he said. To be doubted blinded him with anger. He was not concerned with the truth or falsity of the situation. He was concerned with the injury and insult I was guilty of, by doubting him.
“You’re demolishing everything,” he said.
“What I’m demolishing was not solid,” I answered. “Let’s make a new beginning. We created nothing together except a sand pile into which both of us sink now and then with doubts. I am not a child. I cannot believe your stories.”
He grew still more pale and angry. What shone out of his angry eye was pride in his stories, pride in his ideal self, pride in his delusions. And he was offended. He did not stop to ask himself if I were right. I could not be right. I could see, that for the moment at any rate, he believed implicitly in the stories he had told me. If he had not believed in them so firmly he would have been humiliated to see himself as a poor comedian, a man who could not deceive even his own daughter.
“You shouldn’t be offended,” I said. “Not to be able to deceive your own daughter is no disgrace. It’s precisely because I have told you so many lies myself that I can’t be lied to.”
“Now,” he said, “you’re accusing me of being a Don Juan.”
“I accuse you of nothing. I am only asking for the truth.”
“What truth?” he said. “I am a moral being, far more moral than you.”
“That’s too bad. I thought we were above questions of good and evil. I am not saying you’re bad. I am not saying you’re a woman chaser. That doesn’t concern me. I am saying only that you’re false with me. I have too much intuition.”
“You have no intuition at all concerning me.”
“That might have affected me when I was a child. To-day I don’t mind what you think of me.”
“Go on,” he said, “now tell me I am selfish, tell me I have no talent, tell me I don’t know how to love, tell me all the things your mother used to tell me.”
“I have never thought any of these things.”
But suddenly I stopped. I knew my father was not seeing me any more, but again that judge, that past which made him so uneasy. I felt as if I were not myself any more, but my mother, my mother with red face and a body tired with giving and serving, a body rebelling at his selfishness and irresponsibility. I felt her anger and despair. For the first time my own image of him fell to the floor. I saw my mother’s image. I saw the child in him who was loved and did not know yet how to love. I saw the child courting caresses and incapable of an act of protection, of strength. I saw the child hiding under her courage, the same child hiding now behind Laura’s skirts. I was my mother telling him again that as a human being he was a failure… and perhaps she had told him too that as an artist he had not given enough to justify his limitations as a human being. All his life he had been playing with people, with love, playing at love, playing at being a pianist, playing at composing. Playing because to no one or nothing could he give his whole soul. He never brought himself to anything intact. There were two regions, two tracts of land, with a bridge in between, a slight, fragile bridge like the Japanese bridges in the miniature Japanese gardens. Whoever ventured to cross the bridge fell into the abyss. So it was with my mother. She had fallen through and been drowned. My mother thought he had a soul. She had fallen there in that space where his emotions reached their limit, where the land opened in two, where circles fell open and rings were unsoldered.
Was it my mother talking now? I was saying: “I am only asking you to be honest with yourself. I admit I lie, but you do not admit it. I am not asking you for anything, except to be real.”