Songs My Mother Never Taught Me Read Free

that even if my father had been twenty-eight instead of forty-eight at my birth, we would never have had a close relationship. He was not loving. A certain attitude to those around him seemed to indicate that you owed him respect for sharing the same time zone with you. His merciless wit would wound anyone who talked nonsense. He was tall, green-eyed, attractive and cynical. I liked to compare him to John le Carré, master of the Cold War spy thriller. If I was the nightingale in a gold cage, caught in the spiral of my mother’s house arrest, he was the rare exotic fish in an aquarium made for one.
    The Master, as his wife called him, was the only man who could gather under one roof fragmented Social Democrats and disgruntled right-wing intellectuals. He even had a plan to raise the level of prosperity in their unfortunate country to that of Spain within five years, and to become Prime Minister in the first general election.
    On the eve of my fourteenth birthday we received the news of my father’s death. After the first shock I had to prepare myself for what was to come.

    While I was busy concealing my potential genius my mother continued hissing like a snake for three years, ‘When my son finishes high school he’ll enrol in business studies at Harvard.’
    I was accepted by Harvard with the help of influential teachers at my school, references from famous friends of my father and my mother’s efforts, and I was happy for her. But when she had the tabloids print simplistic headlines like, ‘Harvard Chosen for Top Professor’s Son,’ she became, from that moment, the object of my disdain.
    If I didn’t call her twice a day in my first year her partially suppressed anger would find me out at the oddest hours to extract a verbal report. To stop her flying over at once and picking a quarrel with my tutors, I had to make 90 per cent grades. Unfortunately, the summer I passed into the second year she was appointed Project Consultant at Harvard. We were to spend an intimate spell of two terms in a pile of bricks called a villa overlooking the River Charles in the campus city of Cambridge. In the remaining years that seemed to last for ever, while guest lecturer Ada Ergenekon was teaching comparative literature in her pretentious English, I was overwhelmed by depression.
    I’d even prepared myself for the possibility of an American stepfather, as a way of escaping her irritating attentions. But, as she declared to the media world, ‘she could think only of her one and only Arda.’ She made provocative use of dress, speech and body language to keep the men around her under control. I was furious when she flirted subconsciously with friends who came to see me. And with her artificial sincerity, subtlety and powerful mind games she was constantly trying to wear down my poor girlfriends.
    My mother held various trading companies under the umbrella of the Taragano Financial Services, of which she was one of three partners. My grandfather, chairman of the board of directors, was uneasy with Uncle Salvador, his assistant, who was behaving honestly and failing to increase corporate profits. He would tickle my nose with his amber rosary beads and say, ‘Finish your schooling, for goodness sake, then we’ll make a killing and share it between us.’
    My great-great-grandfather had risen into the wealthy class through his black-market profiteering on basic foodstuffs. As for my grandfather, on the eve of the military intervention of 12 September 1980, he’d been involved in smuggling gold and then turned his hand to fictitious exports and pilfered government tax returns, thereby making a profit of $150,000,000 in the process, only to regret that ‘we missed the big one!’
    My mother’s shares were transferred to my name after I graduated with honours from Harvard, but I knew she wouldn’t allow me to move to the high-rise flat my grandfather had given me.