It’s on my last visit that September—once my late-night drifting has come to an end and neither his advice nor my expressions of regret are necessary any longer, since I’ve decided to leave, break away, go back to my wife in search of a new routine—when he informs me of the first sign of his illness. He does it so unobtrusively that I hardly notice. I’ve said that it wasn’t like him to clamor for the spotlight, to voice his worries. If this time he does, I can’t rule out the possibility that it’s his contribution to the new climate of trust, that he’s repaying my revelations of the last few days with an equivalent disclosure. Whatever the case, the matter barely occupies the time it takes to be expressed, and it isn’t until after I’ve left Madrid, in our phone conversations at the beginning of October, that it acquires substance in the face of his growing apprehension. His general practitioner has ordered a test, but he has to wait too long for it, the symptoms aren’t letting up, and since in the meantime his alarm has grown, he decides to consult a private doctor. By then my involvement is complete. I encourage him to go as soon as possible, and on the day of the appointment, when we talk on the phone, he tells me with ill-disguised distress that they’ve found a cyst and that, though they’ve assured him that it’s not necessarily malignant, an operation has to be scheduled immediately. I try to calm him with impromptu arguments, but he doesn’t listen. He tells me that when it was time to pay the bill, the doctor refused to take any money, claiming that it was because he had no private insurance. That settles it. Each of us is seized by the same dark foreboding; each of us senses it in the other, just as so many times over the course of our lives each has felt what the other felt or thought without having to say a word. We are completely connected, as always, but for the first time, we fear the same thing, hope for the same thing.
Then comes the anxiety, the frenzy of getting the operation to happen quickly, locating the best surgeon, trying to find evidence in the experiences of others to counter our premonitions of doom.
My father is nervous. The friend he met in Brazil is nervous. I’m nervous. Though we don’t say so to one another, we know that the worst is here. We’re like performers overplaying our roles. My father, the friend he met in Brazil, and me. My father lets down his final defenses and for the first time accepts my help without reservations, even demands it. He’s grateful, vulnerable. The friend he met in Brazil gets an inkling that I might be useful in the days to come, and for the first time, she invites me to visit whenever I like. With an attempt at a girlish smile she tells me that the only thing that makes my father forget the wait is my company. I’m presented with the opportunity to prove that my readiness for sacrifice is as great as my past demands, and for the first time, I don’t hold back. I don’t stop to consider the consequences presented by the future into which we’re advancing. I think, of course, and on occasion my thoughts are egotistical, but immediately I rebel and make an effort to cancel out any petty calculation with my actions. I suppose I’ve speculated so often about this moment that I proceed like someone who’s been programmed, like a zombie obeying the commands of his master. I call him every day, and if I’m in Madrid, I visit him in the evenings; I try to entertain him.
The time for the operation arrives, and my father prepares for it with his usual resignation. Earlier, he’d begun gradually to involve me in the doctor appointments leading up to the operation. For some reason, he trusts me more than the friend he met in Brazil. It must be that I retain more information, I explain the things he hasn’t understood, I look for solutions, I answer his questions promptly, I’m ready with the most innocuous interpretation. I’m not a caretaker who requires care myself, and he puts his trust in me, responds in kind. The night before the operation, at the hospital, he gives me his bag to keep, invites me to withdraw money from his account if necessary, explains his financial situation, and puts up only a token resistance when I offer to sleep there. Later that same night, as I try to fall asleep in a chair next to his bed, I want to make some pledge in exchange for everything coming out all right, but I can’t. I’m afraid to make a promise that I know I won’t keep. It’s strange. I’m someone who spends his life thinking, trying to keep one step ahead, and I can’t allow myself to speculate. Out of fear, but also because I’m still setting my priorities against his. It’s my final moment of resistance. A testament to times past.
From now on, without realizing it, I become his father. In the morning I help him shower. He’s in good spirits, he wants to do everything right, and my help reinforces his determination. It brings us closer to success. If all is right between us, everything else will be right too. The friend he met in Brazil appears shortly before they come to get him, and I note his impatience with the intrusion of a reality separate from the hospital routine that we’ve become a part of after our night of initiation.
I think this is the key to everything that happens next. I don’t linger on the periphery; I accompany him to the very center of his suffering.
I am his father and he is my son. No one knows what the future holds, but it seems that as long as he’s weak and sick, he’ll seek my protection. Is he following my lead or am I following his? Is he setting the pace or am I paving the way for his surrender with my own?
He holds my hand until he enters the operating room, and I can’t help taking comfort in his deference. While he’s inside, my aunt comes, my wife comes, a friend of his comes. My mother doesn’t come, so as not to upset the friend my father met in Brazil, but she waits at home for news from us. All the promises I didn’t make the night before I make now, walking the hallways, counting the tiles, stepping on only some of them according to a predetermined order.
When the surgeon emerges, I’m the first to spot him. He leads the friend my father met in Brazil and me into his office, and there’s no need for him to speak the words he’s already speaking. The friend my father met in Brazil is sobbing, and I try to contain myself, but in the end I’m overcome when I ask the practical questions, the questions about time that make doctors most uncomfortable. I feel wrenched apart, outside myself. The person speaking, acting, isn’t me. I don’t know what goes through my mind. Everything and nothing. When I leave the office, I hug the friend my father met in Brazil and we promise to forget our differences, to pull together from now on. She asks me to keep after her, to constantly be telling her what she should do, and in the first place we agree not to tell my father how little time the doctor says he has left. It’s clear that this is all too much for her. “What will become of me?” she asks insistently. She can’t hide what for now is her main concern: loneliness.
The worst moment comes that afternoon in the ICU. We enter wearing surgical masks, and my father smiles, flashing a V for victory. He doesn’t seem to consider that the news might be anything other than good. But before the end of the time we’ve been allotted, he asks the friend he met in Brazil to leave us alone. I don’t know why. He doesn’t say anything to me, doesn’t ask me anything. I try to act cheerful, like him, but I’m not sure whether I succeed. I start training myself to dole out information in bits. I explain that they’ve removed the tumor but there are still some nodes that will have to be treated with chemotherapy.
It’s what he would want. Or so I believe. His ancestral refusal to verbalize drama allows me to think so. He couldn’t handle it.
Over the next few days I continue the tightrope walk of preparing him for what’s to come without dashing the hopes that his wide-open eyes plead for, alert to any sign from me. I spend most of my time with him. We’ve made a schedule to take turns by his side. The friend he met in Brazil is supposed to be with him in the mornings, but it’s Christmas, a sister who lives abroad has come to stay, and she begins to cut short her visits. There are even days when she doesn’t come. On Christmas Eve she doesn’t, and my mother and I have dinner at the hospital.
It’s too early to accuse her of desertion, and I play it down when my father expresses his surprise, but I can’t help some rejoicing when my lack of fait
h in her is confirmed yet again. She also mounts strange maneuvers that I notice and that my father must notice too. One morning when we run into each other at the hospital, she invites me to breakfast and tells me that when my father is gone, she’ll help me in any way she can. It’s clear that gears are turning in her head and she’s already contemplating a future without him. She vacillates, caught between two impulses: on the one hand, the need to create a strategy that will require her to become more involved than she is, and on the other, her inability to act selflessly. Probably she’s begun to talk to lawyers, or her family is giving her advice, and she gets confused trying to listen to everyone. One minute she’s fleeing, gone, and the next she demands unrealistic degrees of responsibility.
One day, all of a sudden, my father asks me for his bag, which I still have in my keeping. One day all of a sudden his dread reappears. One afternoon he’s in a state of terror when I come in. He’s read a report that the friend he met in Brazil shouldn’t have given him, and though the medical jargon prevents him from understanding the full gravity of his case, he’s managed to grasp that more organs are affected than we’d let on. I place great stress on the word microscopic, which appears in the report, and he calms down, but in his eyes there’s a shadow of suspicion, defeat, and desolation that will never go away. On another visit he tells me that the friend he met in Brazil has informed him that he’s very sick and he’s going to die. As he hopes, I flatly deny that this is true. The following days, he asks me again and sets traps that I don’t fall into. Each time, it’s harder to keep my footing. So hard do I work to protect him that there are moments when even I begin to believe that there’s hope. I think about miracles. I think that if time is on our side, a full recovery might still be possible. But it doesn’t last. Often, when I’m alone, I cry. In the Metro all I have to do is walk past a street musician to fall apart. I feel remote from everything, especially other people. I can’t forget that not long from now the day will come when my father won’t be here. I feel his defenselessness as my own, and it makes me even sadder to think that his life has been incomplete, that he’ll exit it unfulfilled, with business left undone. I know this is a presumption I’ll never be able to confirm, but that’s what makes me saddest. Not so much the loss of him as the possibility that he’ll die with the feeling that he’s been a failure.
* * *
It’s likely that my father’s inability to understand the negative effect of some of his actions on me arose from the comparison of his own circumstances with mine, in particular his relationship with his father. It’s a supposition, but suppositions say something about us too.
First and foremost, I had a mother. First and foremost, I had a father like the father he would have liked to have had.
And on top of that, my childhood and early youth were spent in much freer and more stimulating times than his.
If only I’d been lucky enough to have a life like his, he must have said to himself.
And I, on the other hand, didn’t realize how difficult his life might in some respects have been, and when I did realize it, I didn’t consider that this excused certain debts he owed me. Debts of responsibility, involvement, reciprocity, and also financial commitment, to the extent that this backed up the others.
When he didn’t have money, I never asked him for it or minded that he didn’t share expenses with my mother.
But I did ask him for it and I did blame him in a thousand different ways for not helping when he did have it, though often he didn’t know he had it.
That was the problem.
That generally he didn’t know.
And as a result, his resentment at feeling himself treated unfairly sometimes led him to commit other injustices that lengthened the list of charges.
The main one: believing that my discontent was only material, thus ascribing to me all the petty motives—never explicitly mentioned or even insinuated—that such an accusation presumed.
Though he could see for himself that my discontent lingered even when he was generous with me.
Money was part of it, but more than that, it was everything he should have done for me and didn’t do, because he was forbidden to; everything he didn’t do and simply didn’t know that he should do; everything he did do but did in secret; and everything he didn’t do, fearing my reaction.
It’s hard for me to cloak our perpetual rift in logic. It isn’t that the logic strikes me as prosaic or puerile, or that time and experience have made it meaningless. What sometimes seems prosaic and puerile to me is my determination not to give in. I should have been more conciliatory. The first to forgive.
In the end, I always knew that either he wasn’t aware of his failings or he hadn’t weighed the consequences, and that he suffered as much as I did from the effects on me.
But why did I always have to be the generous one? Why was I the one who had to make do and put up with everything?
And how could he permit himself not to see, not to notice, not to weigh the consequences?
I know that when my financial situation was at its most desperate, it tormented him. I know he suffered. Without being asked, two friends of his recently said as much, and both were very explicit.
But why didn’t he open his eyes, then?
Occasionally I did say to him that his finances didn’t add up; occasionally I did say to him that he was deceiving himself about money. And he must have been aware that there was something to what I was saying, because for a long time, whenever he sold a painting, he did everything he could to hide it from me.
Occasionally I did complain that when he gave me something, it was always in secret; occasionally I did complain that we saw each other only for lunch, and almost always on Tuesdays, when it was easiest for him to hide it. And he must have been aware that there was something to what I was saying, because when he was alone in Madrid, he broke with all the imposed routines and did all he could to see me more often than usual.
Such insecurity. Such a way of being. Such fears.
He lived in fear of life’s uncertainties; he lived in fear of being left with nowhere to turn; he underestimated his abilities; he thought that on his own he would go under, and he clung to the life raft that the friend he met in Brazil lent him on punishing terms, without realizing that it was his own two legs that were carrying him.
He felt indebted for a life raft cobbled together of scraps that cost him sweat and tears, and he trusted and trusted and trusted in the future, waiting perhaps for me to grow up, waiting perhaps for a stroke of luck that would pay him his due, and pay me mine, too.
And in matters where no one would have thought of hindering him, it’s likely that all of the above made him feel so trifling that he didn’t think he had the right to intervene.
But he shouldn’t have and couldn’t make his surrenders mine; he shouldn’t have and couldn’t make me yield and inherit his capitulations.
He had abdicated his authority, but he shouldn’t have and couldn’t make me abdicate with him.
And ultimately that was what he wanted.
Today I had lunch plans with an old friend of his, also a painter. We met at his house, he showed me his paintings, and then we went out to lunch at a neighborhood restaurant where we were joined by a friend of mine who spent time with my father toward the end of his life. Everything was so much like what he and I used to do together that he was constantly on my mind, and though in general I try to avoid the subject and not harp on his failings or my grievances, I ended up talking about him. So many times in the past I’d talked to my father about this friend of his that doing the reverse inevitably made me feel uncomfortable.
My friend opened fire by asking whether it was regret or liberation that my father had felt most strongly in the end, when, faced with betrayals like those he had long forgiven, he gathered strength that he didn’t have and took the step that for years he hadn’t dared to take. My friend thought that he must have felt liberated, but my father’s friend and I corrected him. It
’s hard to see it any other way. If liberation was what he felt, why choose the worst possible moment to act? If liberation was what he felt, why the wait? He must have felt regret. It was the support he had from so many of us that allowed him to act, and it’s likely that then he felt something like relief, but how to erase the previous twenty years, how to erase the things that had happened, how to erase the hostility created between us? No. He must have felt terrible regret. Though his final act of rebellion guaranteed that at least not all was regret, he must have felt cheated.
Or not.
Maybe it was another way of making amends to ensure his recovery. One of the temptations of those who’ve suffered some trauma is to think that it’s a punishment and that everything will be all right once the wrong is righted.
A guilty conscience. Magical thinking.
Or maybe, presented by death with the chance for a grand gesture, he did it just to erase the enmity between us.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m making the same mistake that I may have made with him: living in anticipation, thinking I know what he’ll do.
I’ll talk later about survival strategies—his and mine—in the face of illness.
The point is that after this sterile debate with my friend and my father’s friend, I went on to tell them about the unnecessary cruelties he suffered during his illness, and once I’d begun, I came up with some examples that give a good sense of the magnitude of the self-deception in which he’d lived up until that point, and of my belief—which might seem exaggerated but in fact isn’t so exaggerated—that for some time, while imagining himself to be sheltered and protected, he was really the one providing shelter and protection. I explained all this even though it wasn’t new to them, and then my father’s friend said something he had mentioned on another occasion, to which I hadn’t wanted to pay too much attention: he said that my father wasn’t happy, that for the last ten years he’d been subdued, not his usual self, trapped in an unfulfulling partnership. Though my father’s friend didn’t include me as a cause of this unhappiness, while he was speaking, I thought that if what he said was true, I had contributed to it; that if I had stood unconditionally by his side, if I hadn’t complained, if I hadn’t constantly been throwing his behavior in his face, he would have been less unhappy. And if it’s possible to repent of something while knowing that if you had another chance, you’d make the same mistake, I’ve repented.
Father and Son Page 9