Father and Son (2 page)

How to rid myself of the new feeling of futility that overcomes me when I think about writing?

I read a note in his diary, dated April 14, 2006: “To paint is to make something that didn't exist before, not to erase or to forget but to do and to live, so I plan to keep on with it.” Admirable. And yet, as vivid as the act of recognizing his handwriting in that diary entry is my memory of how dismissive he was one afternoon a few months later, when two of his most loyal friends, thinking that it would entertain him, talked to him about painting.

I can't remember his exact words when they left—how he expressed the distress it caused him to think in the past tense about something to which, until not long ago, he had given the best of himself. Words like: to what end all that effort, to what end all those hours spent struggling over a painting, all those hopes?

I understand it.

We're still bound by the invisible thread of our solitary professions. While I write, I can't imagine him in his studio anymore, but on my computer I listen to music that was his, music that many days he probably listened to as he painted, and I keep working.

I keep working just as he would himself.

In trepidation, taking myself to task, not biting my nails like him, but jiggling my leg nervously, smoking.

I'm trying to understand what we lost, where we got stuck.

*   *   *

There are places I've never been and places I never want to go. I can't tell everything. I have to take a bird's-eye view. I'm trying to open a window, show a piece of our life, not its entirety.

My parents were married in 1964. My father was twenty-three and my mother twenty-five. Months earlier, my father had bought an apartment on Calle de la Infanta Mercedes in Madrid with money inherited from his maternal grandfather. The money for the furniture, as was apparently the custom, was contributed by my mother's father. Years later, after he got sick, my father told me that what had attracted him to my mother was her elegant beauty and the imperturbable mystery of her gaze. From the time he was twenty, he had been traveling around Europe; he had lived in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and nowhere had he lacked for female companionship, as photographs of the era attest. My mother, meanwhile, still lived at home and hadn't had a boyfriend, properly speaking, but rather romantic friendships with a sailor, a German, a poet friend of her brother's. I don't know what attracted her to my father: his blond hair, the fact that he was a painter … Anyway, they got married, and then they left for Brazil, where they lived for two years in São Paulo. My mother didn't work. My father had shown his paintings at galleries in Madrid and London and Amsterdam, and he participated in the São Paulo Biennial. There are pictures of the two of them, dressed up, at dinners and parties, restaurants, galleries, the Spanish embassy; there are pictures of them with friends in private homes or on the beach; there are pictures of them as tourists in Brasília or Bahia or São Paulo, in sandals and jeans; there are pictures of them in the jungle, where they lived with the Karajá Indians. In all the pictures they are smiling, and in some they're even mugging for the camera. It's the dawn of their marriage.

In Brazil my father met the woman who—once he was separated from my mother—would be his wife for the last twenty years of his life. But that's another story, and it came later.

The dawn of their marriage was prolonged after their return to Madrid in 1966. My father paints and shows his work. They have no responsibilities yet; they don't have me. They're always coming and going. Friends visit: painter friends, writer friends. Friends—some of them—whose outlandish appearance in the Madrid of the day could stop traffic. In the photographs I have they look more relaxed than in the earlier ones, their displays of happiness toned down. And yet it seems an artificial calm, as if they're playing at being grown-ups. My father in an armchair, with a glass of whiskey in his hand, and my mother behind him, leaning against the back of the chair with an arm around his shoulders. They go through some hard times, times of uncertainty, when money is scarce. At some point between 1966 and 1968, when I'm born, my father goes to work as a page designer at the newspaper
Informaciones
. At some point between 1966 and 1968, when I'm born, my mother finds work as a buyer for a textile chain. Years later, my father confesses to me that he couldn't understand my mother's incredible nonchalance, her lack of concern about practical matters; they might have no money to eat the next day and it wouldn't bother her. Years later, my mother tells me that my father didn't last long at the paper, he couldn't stand it. My father steals things from stores, including food, steaks that he slips under his arm. He wins a prize for prints at the Tokyo Biennale, spends a season in Paris on a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation. But they're happy, or so it seems to me, and soon I arrive to confirm it. It has taken them four years, and not because they've done anything to prevent it.

Days before I'm born, my father paints the room that will be mine and finishes the portrait of my mother that hangs in it. After the birth, a hemorrhage leaves my mother on the verge of death, and days later, some poorly administered antibiotics leave me on the verge of death. I'm given an emergency baptism in the bathroom, without my father's knowledge and with my mother's consent.

During a not-so-short period of my early life, I suppose that my father was a more daily presence than I was able to observe in other stages that served me as the model for our common past. If only because he worked at home, his presence had to be more constant than my mother's, since she always went out to work.

I remember a day in the place where we lived until I was three, when he brought me to the room where he painted and had me color some circles on a painting; I remember that in the mornings, on the way to the school bus, he recounted the adventures of a monkey called Manolo, who went to school like me; I remember that I loved the story so much that if my mother or the nanny was with me, I asked them to tell it, and either they couldn't do it very well or they hardly ever had to substitute for my father, because the name Manolo always reminds me of him. I remember that one afternoon—and it must be a fairly early memory because I have the sense that I experienced this all from a playpen—he went out for a minute to buy something and I burst into tears when, despite all his soothing words, his absence was more terrifying than anticipated; I remember how impatiently he tried to calm me and the attempts he made—like those he would later make in response to any complaint of mine—to downplay my unhappiness, suggest that I was exaggerating and blowing things out of proportion. I remember the afternoons at our second apartment that he spent teaching me how to ride a bike, how he would pick me up from school with our first dog, and for a few seconds, before going out through the glass doors, I could watch him without being seen; I remember looking for slugs in the yard together; and—it sounds made up, but it isn't—how one day he showed me the newspaper and told me that Picasso had died. I remember one night at our next place with some of his friends—they must have been high—when we divided up into teams and made a game of throwing felt dolls onto a Velcro-covered trapeze; I remember the first time I ran away from school and how, when I got home, he punished me for the first and only time; I remember writing, at his request, the names of my friends on a painting he was making; I remember many afternoons in his studio, the two of us painting, he with an eye on my scribbles, which he gathered up meticulously and kept in folders.

Now that I think about it, though, that early stage wasn't so linear, nor was his presence so constant. I know, for example, that in the six years and three apartments spanned by the memories I've just recounted, he lived for a long time in Paris and then in Essaouira, Morocco, where my mother and I visited him twice. The problems in the marriage had already appeared, and though it's likely that both my parents thought it could be saved, my father's dissatisfaction, his instinct to liberate himself from the burden that my mother and I represented in a milieu—that of his painter friends—where family responsibilities were the exception, took inexorable hold of him in the end. Nevertheless, the fact that I have these memories, and no recollection of discontent or unhappiness, leads me to think that it wasn't yet the problem it later became for me. Either my mother managed to cover up his absences by giving them a convincing patina of normality, or I unconsciously compensated for them by granting him an unassailable place in my life.

In fact, not even for the next four years (1975, 1976, 1977, 1978) does the landscape change much. My father is gone more and more often, disappearing completely from my daily life for long stretches, but he keeps his studio, and though later I learn that his relationship with my mother was almost nonexistent, there are no serious repercussions for me. My mother keeps things normal even when they're not; my mother ensures that my father is still my father, leaving no room for doubts, complaints, or dangerous fissures.

Where do they lead, these few memories I'm able to dredge up? Where are they taking me? They lead to an afternoon when I hear loud voices in my mother's bedroom, and when I open the door, frightened, I see my mother on her knees, in tears, and my father brandishing the empty frame of a painting he's just smashed on the floor, the very one on which he'd asked me to write the names of my friends. I remember that I closed the door and that, after a period of time I can't specify, when we passed each other in the hall and I asked him where he was going, he said to the movies and left, slamming the door. Though my mother still insists that he came back to say goodbye, the only thing I remember is a postcard, of two Angora cats, that I received a few weeks later from Paris; and later another one of an old cycling poster; and a few more that arrived every so often until, a few months later, he came back and took away his easel, boxes of paints, pencils, aerosols, stretchers, rolls of canvas, drawing paper, notebooks, scraps for making collages; and what had been his studio became my huge bedroom, the bedroom of a privileged only child. My father was gone from our daily life, and not even then did it come as a shock. My mother was there to soften the blow, and he came back occasionally, sometimes even sleeping in the room that had been mine before I took possession of his studio.

My father comes and buys me clogs like his; my father comes and—reluctantly—buys me a doll that I've requested; my father comes and buys me an Elvis Presley album. We spend the summers together too. Strange summers on Formentera. My mother and I in one house with assorted guests, and my father and his guests in another house, sometimes next door.

And that's not all. I get used to other men coming to the house. Actually, it's just one man. I still don't know whether he was my mother's boyfriend, though I suppose that's the word that best describes him. He brings me things, pets; I'm fond of him, and we make a life with him. More than with my father.

And that's not all. Since 1970, my mother and father have worked together. My mother is the codirector of an art gallery in Madrid and my father is one of her painters. These are fertile years for both of them. They're at the heart of Madrid's cultural scene. My mother wears a miniskirt, is admired and desired by almost everyone, and my father is a prominent member of a generation of young painters. At a show of his in 1974, everything sells. And the buyers are other painters.

And that's not all. Tired, she claims, of the clashes between the other director and the owner, my mother leaves the gallery in 1975, and three years later my father leaves too, after a falling-out with the remaining director for having favored a rival painter. My mother goes to work for a collector, but the job doesn't last long and it takes her a while to find something else. Meanwhile, my father is heading for a crisis. Without the gallery where he's shown for the last eight years, he lacks the confidence to face up to his career. Financial problems overwhelm him, and his visits aren't as relaxed or as frequent as before. I remember one afternoon when he comes with us to sell a gold coin that someone has given me. He's tense. I imagine that he'd like to be able to help and is ashamed that he can't. This fixation and his air of bitterness will become familiar over the course of our lives.

This is 1978.

But my mother recovers. She reinvents herself. She works briefly in television and then more steadily in radio, and immediately we sense my father's relief. His bitterness lifts and he begins to visit us regularly again. He's still painting and showing his work, though not with the old fanfare. His former gallery is the most important in Madrid and he's lost the chance to show there. Intrigues are mounted against him, too, by young critics who champion his rival. He doubts himself, watches others triumph, and gets discouraged. Sometimes he's strong and keeps working, and sometimes he gets distracted and loses himself in female labyrinths. I come across scraps of this: a picture of him naked with two women; an afternoon when he's admitted to the hospital with kidney trouble, and when my mother and I arrive, we're told at the reception desk that his wife has just left; the apologies of the guard at the apartment complex where a married female friend lives for having mistaken him for a thief when he climbed out the window the night before … None of it hurts; I simply remember it. Just as it doesn't hurt that it's my mother I see when I get up, my mother who helps me with my homework and goes to school to talk to my teachers. At the same time—probably due at least in part to my mother's prodding—he's always there at critical moments. I come down with rheumatic fever and he increases his visits. The nights of my mother's radio show he usually stays with me into the early-morning hours. I'm with him the day I have an attack of peritonitis, and he pays the surgeon with one of his paintings. It doesn't even have to be anything serious. In the summer he comes to swim at our community pool, sometimes he stays for dinner when my mother's father is there, and many Sundays he brings his father for lunch. If I want something, he does his best to get it for me. Then he jokingly makes a big deal about it and says that all I have to do is ask him for the smallest thing and there he is on bended knee, but the truth is that he does come through (
the smallest thing, on bended knee
, the times I must have heard him say that…).