Father and Son Read Free Page B

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…).
    This is 1978, the year of the constitutional referendum. Behind us are the assassination of Carrero Blanco, Franco’s death, and the elections of ’77. The effects of these events are still being felt in our house. The Christmas of the Carrero Blanco assasination, my cousins and I are playing guessing games, and when it’s my turn, I mime an explosion; the night of November 21, 1975, while my father is in Paris, the phone rings off the hook, and later friends come over. The next day, my mother gets me dressed and sends me to school, but before I can get out the front door of the building, the doorman stops me, long-faced. Around this time, we attend two