Father and Son Read Free Page A

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