“I’ve lost too much time hating you.”
“And I, forgetting you.”
Who said what, Jorge? He or I? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know which of us said, “If you don’t tell me I deserved your hatred, I won’t tell you you deserved to be forgotten.”
I want to believe I didn’t love him when he died. Ever since I went back to him after you left for Cuba, I always asked myself, Why does he accept me again? Is he weak or perverse? Is he making a profession of his failure so he can get the only form of love left to him-the compassion of others? How could I abandon such a weak man?
Every day, my son Santiago makes me think that everything I love is dead.
I console myself the way we all do. Time will pass. Gradually, able to bear the absence.
Then I react violently. I don’t want my pain to fade, ever. I want the absence of my son always, always, to be intolerable.
Then my pride takes control of me. I wonder if a love with no other foundation but memory won’t ultimately become tolerable, I wonder if a love that always wants pain should subdue that caress of memory and demand a void, a great void in which there is no room for memory or tenderness and where absence, knowing him to be absent, will admit no consolation.
It came from where she least expected it. Pity.
It was Juan Francisco’s tears over the body of Santiago. The father mourned the death of the son as if no one in the world had loved him more, more secretly, less openly. Why had he kept his distance from Santiago and drawn so close to Danton? To suffer less when Santiago died? Did he weep because he was never close to him, or did he weep because he loved him more than he loved anyone and only death allowed him to show it?
Seeing the father weep over the body of the son returned to Laura’s memory one verbal slap after another, as if everything her husband and she had said to hurt each other over the years was being repeated, more venomously, at that very moment, marrying you was like turning the other cheek to destiny, don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a temptress, speak to me, look me in the eye, why didn’t you judge me for my will to love you, Juan Francisco, instead of condemning me for the adultery? I have no idea why I thought you an exciting, brave man, that’s what they said about you, you were always “they say about him,” a whisper, never a reality, between the two of us there was never love, only illusion, mirages, which never last, not love based on respect and admiration, life with you has overpowered me, you’ve left me perplexed and sick, I don’t hate you, you just tire me out, you love me too much, a real lover should never love one too much, should never cloy, Juan Francisco, our marriage is dead, either everything or nothing killed it, who knows? But let’s start burying it, dearest, because it stinks to high heaven.
And now she could say thank you, thanks to your all too facile adoration I was able to achieve something better, that constant expectation which requires passion, thanks to you I reached Jorge Maura, the difference between you let me understand and love Jorge as I could never love you.
“I thought I had more strength than I do, Laura. Forgive me.”
“I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory. You forgive me.”
And now she saw him weeping over the body of the exhausted son. She would have wanted to ask his forgiveness for having been unable, for thirty years, to penetrate beyond appearances, legends, the mystery of his origins, the myth of his past, the betrayal of his present.
It was terrible that they were finally able to speak thanks to the death of their son.
It was terrible for them to identify themselves, Laura and Juan Francisco, revealing that both, in secret, were staring with equal love at Santiago the Younger, thinking the same thoughts, he has everything, good looks, talent, generosity, everything but health, everything but life and time to live it. Only now did father and mother discover that both had refused to pity Santiago because in this house no one was permitted to pity anyone. We can betray with pity those whom we love.
“Is that why you favored Danton so openly, Juan Francisco?”
Laura had boasted of the eloquent silence between mother and son. Solitude and quietude had united them. Was that also true about the relation of Santiago to Juan Francisco? Was being explicit about what was taking place more than an offense? Was it a betrayal? Mother and son lived a skein of complicities, shared thoughts, ways of saying thank you, everything but compassion-damned, forbidden compassion… did the father also live and feel this, at a distance, celebrating the other son, father of both?
Every mother knows there are children who take care of themselves. Trying to protect them is an effrontery. That was how it was with Danton. To her, his father’s nearness to him seemed an abuse; Juan Francisco understood nothing, gave everything to the son who needed nothing, Danton who almost from infancy played all day unaware of what might be happening in the shadows and silence of their home where his brother lived. But Laura knew instinctively that even if Danton needed no attention and Santiago did, an excessive display of it would have been more offensive and damaging to the weak boy than to the strong one. That wasn’t the problem. Danton moved through the world adjusting everything to his own advantage. Santiago disregarded everything except what he considered essential to his painting, his music, his poetry, his Van Gogh and his Egon Schiele, his Baudelaire and his Rimbaud, his Schubert…
Now, seeing both father and son, Juan Francisco and Danton, weeping over the handsome, ascetic body of the young Santiago, Laura realized that the brothers had loved each other but were too modest to show it-brotherly love is virile; sometimes it must wait until the moment of death to show itself as love, affection, tenderness… Now she blamed herself. Had Laura Díaz stolen all her glories from the world just to give them solely to Santiago? All the virtue for the weak brother? Didn’t the strong brother also deserve something? Had she in reality lost two sons?
“Did I ever tell you,” said Juan Francisco after the funeral, “that one night I surprised them talking to each other like men? Both were saying, ‘We’re all we need.’ They were declaring themselves independent of you and of me, Laura. How incredible to surprise your sons in the very moment when they are declaring independence. Except that Santiago really meant what he said. All he needed was himself. Danton’s different. He needs success, money, society. He needs more than himself; he’s fooling himself. That’s why he needs us more than ever.”
Would there be time to correct thirty years of errors in a shared life with two adult sons, one already dead? Santiago wrote a poem just before he died that Laura showed to Juan Francisco, especially one line: “We are translated lives.” What did it mean? What did those everyday phrases the boy used mean? Don’t leave the cage door open, those are homing pigeons in there and they won’t leave, but cats are different, they go and come back to hurt… “The sun doesn’t always hit me on the head.” Perhaps they meant that Santiago knew how to detach himself from himself, transform himself, discover the other within. She discovered it, too, but didn’t tell him. What about you, Juan Francisco?
“My sons are my biography, Laura. I don’t have any other.”
“What about me?”
“You’re part of it too, darling.”
Was that Juan Francisco’s secret, that his life had no secret because he had no past, that his life was only external, the fame of Juan Francisco the orator, the leader, the revolutionary? And behind it, what was there that opened up behind it? Nothing?