Father and Son Read Free

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