Father and Son (16 page)

The trip to Kenya is planned for the end of the month, and on the fifteenth, my father goes with the friend he met in Brazil to her beach house. He returns to Madrid on the eve of our trip. More than tired, he's heavyhearted. He doesn't say so, but it's clear that a line has been crossed. With him he's brought a marquetry box holding four old bullfighter figurines, the only thing he managed to grab reflexively when, minutes before he got into a taxi to the train station, the friend he met in Brazil, like someone granting a onetime chance, offered to let him take whatever he wanted from a house that he thought of as his, too, a house that was absolutely crammed with paintings, furniture, and objects he'd amassed over the years.

In Kenya, things go from bad to worse.

In Kenya we have one good week, during which he's giddy, up for everything; we visit Nairobi and Mombasa and go on a short safari, but our luck changes after a hellish bus ride that can be blamed solely on my desire to present him with interesting experiences. When we reach the island where my aunt lives, he's running a fever; he's done in. When he doesn't feel better with rest, we fear that it's a resurgence of the illness or that—the height of bad luck—he's caught malaria. We're so terrified by the former possibility that we come to hope that it's the latter, and it's hard for us to hide our disappointment when he's tested at a dispensary and the test comes back negative. Obliged to fear the worst, we visit a bare-bones private clinic where the one and only doctor, wearing a Barça T-shirt, attends with admirable courtesy to our first-world concerns. He takes my father's blood pressure, instructs a veiled Muslim nurse to draw blood, and examines it under a microscope. This is all he can do for us, and like all doctors when they don't know what to do and the only thing that matters is that they seem to be doing something, he does it in full awareness of its futility. Later, I get in touch through my mother with my father's oncologist, and though he calms us by saying that he doesn't think it's tumor fever but instead a kidney inflammation brought on by the jolting of the bus, I secretly begin to think about repatriation. Meanwhile, he tries his best to put on a show of strength. He takes walks around the medina, comes to the beach, and even attempts once or twice to go for a sail, but every evening the fever makes its punctual appearance. Each morning we think that it won't come, and it almost always does. And yet, so hard does he try not to let us down, or so badly does he want to recover that he manages to fool me, and sometimes I grow impatient when he limps behind or shows little interest in the plans I'm constantly devising for him. Still, there are good days. Still, he laughs often and freely. Still, he's in on all kinds of mischief. The main thing he frets over: buying gifts for his nurses and doctors at the hospital.

*   *   *

If this were fiction, I should already be lowering the sails.

Have I gotten to where I wanted to go?

The reasons that make you start writing a book aren't necessarily the same ones that make you keep going when you're halfway through, or the ones that make you end it. In the end, you just want to get to the end.

That's where I am.

I just want to get to the end. The end of the book. The end of my father. The end of my life with him.

To know where we got stuck—that's what I said I wanted at the beginning.

A rhetorical device.

We got stuck in lots of ways. We got stuck where everyone gets stuck. We got stuck because we thought that life was infinite, which is an error in calculation that prompts the worst missteps. We got stuck because he didn't have the stamina to hold on to me and I didn't have the courage to let go. We got stuck because he was brought up to keep quiet, to avoid calling things by their names, and I was raised in the world of my mother, which was a world of words. We got stuck because we weren't the same, or very different either. We got stuck because he had shrunk the perimeter of his defenses to a handspan and I still believed in fighting battles on open ground. We got stuck because his consummate solipsism made him accept the unspoken and I demanded action. We got stuck because we both thought we deserved more than we had. We got stuck because he didn't know how to grow up and I didn't either. We got stuck because we shared my mother, someone he might have preferred to be a distant memory if I hadn't existed, but who for me was a daily reality that I felt obliged to defend and vindicate beyond the necessary. We got stuck because, as a result of this, we had different views of the past. We got stuck because I made him the creditor of a debt that I tried to call in when it had already expired. We got stuck because life's greatest lessons often come too late.

Such a lot of life. Of stuck life.

What did we learn in the final stretch?

That we wasted time. And that things always have an end, and when that end comes, it's better if it finds us at peace.

What everyone always and forever knows.

And what we knew as well as anyone.

Is this what we spent our final year doing? Making sure that when the end came, we would be at peace with each other?

Was it all a fiction? A charade?

What would our future lives have been like if the boundary imposed by his death had suddenly been erased? A new and miraculous cure; his sudden recovery.

I wouldn't have had the strength to go on. He wouldn't have had the stamina to go on.

We would have gone back to being what we were.

Less at odds, more conciliatory, but unchanged.

There was no room for anything else.

Was there space for him in my life? Would he have been capable of making a separate life for himself?

I think it was a conscious choice, being the way he was with me in the end; he knew what he was doing and why.

Because he was going to die.

I've often wondered how well I succeeded in my efforts to keep him in the dark.

But I know I failed.

I think he was asking to be deceived and that he deceived himself; it's likely that when he got sick, he bet on the youngest and most dependable horse, the one that could be relied on for what was to come, but I think that he didn't deceive himself fully, and deep down he knew.

And because he knew, he did what he did.

He wanted to close the circle as best he could.

Even in the face of doubt.

And the circle is closed.

Who worked hardest for it?

He did.

Who was in the biggest hurry?

He was.

Who risked more?

He did.

It wasn't easy. Easy would have been what he didn't do.

My devotion had a day after. His didn't.

And there was a reward for me, though it was only what tradition or common sense dictates.

I'd have done the same if I'd known that I wouldn't get it (as it was, for a long time I didn't know that I would). Though it's likely that in that case the circle wouldn't have closed. Not for me and not for him.

And what about her, the friend my father met in Brazil? This is a book about two people, as I've said, and it's not my aim to unearth her motives. Why did she act the way she did? Was it greed, immaturity, egoism? Whatever the determining factor, it doesn't matter. Maybe greed was the childish tool of her egoism that she wielded to enable her to step out of the picture, to reject a responsibility she was incapable of assuming. That's the best-case scenario. Or worst case, maybe the failure of her egoistic aspirations was the immature fruit of her excessive greed.

I can judge her, but it isn't my mission to redeem her or condemn her.

More essential, anyway, is to determine the mark that her actions left on my father.

And the mark changed over time.

It began as incredulity, turned into silent disenchantment, and ended up as contemptuous indifference.

Did he really not see it coming?

When the signs were already alarming, he continued to make excuses for her.

He made excuses for her in order to retroactively excuse himself.

Or he made excuses for her because he wasn't yet convinced that he was going to die, and knowing that I would be with him on every front of his illness, but not every front of his life, he still needed a life after his illness.

Or he made excuses for her because he still believed her to be innocent. A schemer, with the brain of a mosquito, as he said, but innocent.

That's the answer, I think.

I guess.

Thus the confusion, the silent disenchantment, the contemptuous indifference. The great rancor with which he repaid her toward the end. His stubborn refusal to engage in dialogue with her. His ill will.

There was no going back once he thought he saw her as she was. All his efforts were directed at keeping away from her.

When he confronted his illness, when he contemplated the possibility of his death, it made him want to do right by me. And in the best of worlds, doing right by me shouldn't have meant ruining things with her.

But we don't live in the best of worlds.

And he saw her true face, and when he saw it, he pushed her away forever.

And in a way it was as if he was relieved of a tension that had been building for a long time. As if the decision brought him new strength.

But by that point there was no hope.

And he knew it. By then he finally knew it.

This brings me to a paradox: my father gave himself to me fully only when he knew that there was no hope, and to the extent that it was she who opened his eyes, I should be grateful to her. In fact, it could be said that she did me a favor without realizing it.

But at what cost?

It's a question I'm afraid to answer.

At the cost of obliging my father to face his fate, of stripping the veil from his eyes, of ensuring that if any possibility remained of keeping him deceived, that possibility was destroyed.

Her behavior made it impossible for him to hope, and for a person so fragile, so fearful of almost everything, especially of death itself, this meant consigning him irrevocably to his fate.

No matter what I did, no matter the time I spent reworking each piece of bad news—aided by my skill with words and his faulty memory—to make it seem neutral or even positive, the negative attitude of the friend he met in Brazil, who was so plainly gunning for the day after, was much more persuasive. I managed to deceive him for a long time, or rather for some stretches of that time, but there came a point when it was impossible to keep it up.

The day my father gave the final
no
to the friend he met in Brazil was the day he gave a
no
to himself.

Would his prospects have improved if he hadn't had to give himself that
no
? Would he have lived longer? Would he have beaten the odds, those odds that always leave room for doubt, or so the doctors claim once they've delivered their miserable diagnosis and worse prognosis and—maybe with the intention of preventing the collapse of the patient and his caretakers—they allow themselves to extend the faintest possibility of hope?

It's clear that she robbed him of that remote possibility, or at least she made it permissible for us to think she had.

But the previous paradox is cruel here.

If I hadn't become a threat, if I had wiped myself from the map, maybe she wouldn't have revealed so plainly the future for which she was preparing, and my father could have continued to have faith.

If I ask myself to what extent her abandonment of him, her preoccupation with the day after, led to the collapse of all hope, I also have to ask myself what might have happened if I hadn't been so present. It's just one link up the chain of cause and effect.

And I do ask myself.

I asked myself while it was all happening, before my father died; I continued to ask myself as I began this book; and though the question is now scarcely brighter than a distant lighthouse glimpsed in memory's eye, I still ask myself.

The intensity has lessened.

The certainty of his death, even when it hadn't come yet, established a reality so weighty and irrevocable, so different from any other reality I'd known, that speculating about what might have been became an arduous, unpleasant exercise.

That's the thing about death, that it's irrevocable. And no matter how closely we're touched by it, so long as it doesn't take us, life asserts itself in the end.

The dead leave sadness and not a few questions behind them. They oblige us to contemplate our own death and, at the same time, the futility of life, but our understanding fails us in the face of the inarguable reality that everything comes to an end, that there's no redemption, that what wasn't done can no longer be done. After a death that touches us closely, the days go by without improvement. Our bewilderment is as great as it was the first day. The only progress is forgetting and the persistence of life sneaking in through unexpected cracks.

A little while ago, in David Rieff's
Swimming in a Sea of Death
, one of the books I've continued to read about mourning and parents, I noted that among family members of cancer patients it's common to feel remorse for not having done enough. I was also told by a writer friend that sixty-five percent of the terminally ill are abandoned by their partners. The figure seems too high, but even if it were correct, my astonishment at what the friend my father met in Brazil did wouldn't lessen, just as we don't feel less remorse simply because many others also feel it.

Rieff says that no one does everything that could be done, because it would mean giving up one's own life. I did give up mine. I did do everything, and I probably did it not just for the sake of compassion or love, but to right old wrongs.

They're the ones that linger.

I regret, as I've said, not having ended the tension between us sooner. I regret having made him suffer. I regret the lost time. I regret what was left unspoken. I regret having needed him to prove by deeds that he was my father and I his son. I regret having thought about his death. I regret having placed a symbolic value on material goods.