Father and Son

by Marcos Giralt Torrente

  I would do it all again. Why lie?

  Though this is a labor of love, it must be said, I don’t always know how to liberate myself from memory.

  I have to ask where all this weight comes from.

  Everything—the good and the bad—was intensified because our relationship was exclusive, because I was an only child. But it’s also possible that this was precisely what saved us. If he couldn’t support one child, if he couldn’t give that child all that was demanded of him, how could he possibly have succeeded with two or three?

  And maybe everything would have fallen apart more drastically.

  Or maybe not. Maybe his commitment and sense of responsibility would have been greater.

  I don’t know. Who knows?

  Though my job is supposedly that of imagining lives, I can’t imagine the different possibilities of my own.

  What’s certain is that my father’s presumed unhappiness—if the dissatisfaction I frequently noted in him deserves the name—wouldn’t have ended if he’d had me unconditionally by his side. He would have had fewer things to worry about, that’s all.

  And by the same token, nor am I sure that the source of this presumed unhappiness was the lack of understanding between him and the friend he met in Brazil.

  Outside the bedroom, they had nothing to say to each other. Moments of tension seemed more frequent than the moments of peace when they shared silly jokes. They had no common interests. They argued constantly. My father couldn’t count on her in matters crucial to him, and meanwhile, she was in pursuit of a goal—his complete surrender to her—that she never quite managed to achieve, among other things because it required my complete annihilation.

  That’s what I observed and what my father’s friends now tell me was going on.

  But they were together for more than twenty years.

  Clearly there was something there beyond my father’s need for protection.

  Not just sex, which was probably the original cement of their union.

  He accused her of jealousy, of being obsessed with money, and sometimes, I’m told, he was embarrassed by her, but of course he loved her.

  It would wane over time, it was subject to ups and downs, and the logic that sustained it wasn’t always the same, but there was love. A love not of equals, a love that in my father’s case involved a strange moral superiority that led him to forgive her whims, her impositions, her larcenies, seeing them as weaknesses of character—but love.

  And it’s likely that the reason he let her get away with so much, the reason he yielded to her, the reason he sometimes seemed like a broken doll in her hands, lies in that strange moral superiority.

  And it’s likely that here, too, lies the reason for their unresolved conflicts, the reason she felt threatened, the reason for her war with everything in his life that didn’t include her.

  None of these possibilities can be ruled out. What’s more, I’m convinced that they’re true.

  Similarly, it’s likely that my father never stopped to consider the consequences that his capitulations would have for me, since—the affection we felt for each other being unquestionable, despite our problems—he demanded from me a moral superiority equal to his own. Blood of his blood, I should hoe the same row.

  That was it.

  * * *

  And meanwhile, in January 2006, complications arise that postpone his release. Anxious about the delay to the start of his treatment, I convince them to let him go, but the next day he’s admitted again with a high fever. New tests, pleas to the doctors, attempts to grease the rusty wheel of the hospital. The friend he met in Brazil makes herself scarce. It’s he and I who push.

  His eyes show clear relief each time I arrive at the hospital. Still, I’m not always there, and I can’t control what happens when I’m gone: the pressures, the meddling, the ill-timed demands of the friend he met in Brazil. All I hear are the bits and pieces that he passes on to me. She tells him, it seems, that his illness will be very expensive, that he’ll need home care and she won’t be able to pay for it. She asks him for money, and one day she transfers to her own account an important sum that he’s just received for the sale of some prints. My father tells me all this without hiding how upset he is. He’s hurt that she seems less concerned about his well-being than about looking out for herself. He’s stunned. He never considered her capable of such a thing. He knows she doesn’t need the money; years of obsessive saving have left her well covered. Because of this, and because the assumption that she’s preparing for a life without him is to accept something that neither he nor I is yet willing to contemplate, he finds it hard to believe.

  It’s nerves, he tells me sometimes. She’s like a child, and it’s all too much for her. “When I get out of the hospital, she’ll calm down,” he adds, to take the sting out of it. At other moments, however, he begins to talk about separating from her. He’s like a kid fantasizing. He won’t tell her until he’s out of the hospital and back on his feet. He’s wary of her tricks, the snares she might set for him.

  He talks to me in bursts. He tells me things he’s never told me. He criticizes her, ridicules her, accuses her of being greedy, says that she has the brain of a mosquito, and suddenly the next day he’s defending her again. These are brief moments. Flashes. Most of the time he keeps quiet. Most of the time he doesn’t want to think. Tense, preoccupied, he clings to any distraction. Maybe by denying it, by refusing to acknowledge it, it will go away. Essentially it’s the same kind of behavior that’s always governed him. But not wanting to think about something is already a way of thinking about it. He avoids asking himself why she acts the way she does, but secretly the question is asked and answered.

  Consequently, each day he and I grow closer. I entertain him; I deny what he wants to deny. We watch television, talk about things of no consequence, take walks down the hallways, poke fun at other patients, make plans for the future, break the rules in small ways, like eating takeout from KFC when the nurses aren’t watching.

  One afternoon I confess that I’m feeling the urge to become a father, and he advises me against it, telling me how exhausting it is to have a child, and then he realizes the incongruity of what he’s said and tries to make up for it by complimenting me. I don’t know what’s more pleasing to me: the rather obligatory declaration of love with which he corrects himself or the masculine camaraderie that for a few instants seems to make him forget that we’re related.

  And there’s his tact—inflected with modesty, which always surprises me—in his dealings with others. The nurses, the doctors, his roommates … With everyone he displays an almost pathological humility. With some of the nurses, too, he flirts timidly, a bit perplexed, sometimes, by their excessive familiarity. He’s bothered by the brusqueness, the lack of formality, their casual way of speaking to him and their habit of treating him with the condescension of people used to dealing with patients, their habit of talking to him as if he were a child or an old man. His favorites are the ones who don’t talk to him that way. When his departure approaches, he asks me to buy them presents. It must be hard for a man in his condition, who was once attractive and who always liked women so much, to expose himself to the female gaze. It moves me to realize this for the first time. The speed with which he hides his belly when one of the nurses comes in, his outsize efforts to spare them any contact with his body.

  It moves me.

  The last days are the worst. The friend he met in Brazil still hasn’t taken responsibility. She misses whole days at the hospital, and when she appears, she stays for only a little while. One morning she says that since he won’t be able to work, they’ll have to sell the house they own together and use his share of the proceeds to defray the cost of his illness. Another time she talks to him about mortgaging his part of the house. Afraid that this is simply a ploy to leave him with nothing, my father refuses the mortgage but accepts the sale, with the intention of separating, he tells me, as soon as it’s accomplished.

  “If s
he’s so worried, why doesn’t she sell one of her other houses instead of making me leave my house and studio, sick as I am?” he asks me.

  I’m silent. I could come up with excuses for her, reassure him, but I don’t.

  Meanwhile, the fever hasn’t subsided, but I manage to convince the doctors that it may not be caused by an infection, as they fear, but by the tumor, and after several anxiety-ridden days in which he leaves everything in my hands, I persuade them to let us go.

  The release has an immediate beneficial effect. It’s only logical. In addition to leaving behind the weariness and despair brought on by such a long stay, exiting the hospital means beginning the treatment, and beginning the treatment means beginning to recover. At least as he understands it.

  On his first day of freedom, I take him home. He’s tired, but in good spirits. The friend he met in Brazil greets him with a show of cosseting to which he responds curtly. At one point, when she goes out of the room and leaves us alone, he raises his fists to his temples, pricks up his index fingers, and calls her Beelzebub. I laugh.

  For the next few days, until the beginning of the treatment is set, I ferry papers back and forth from the hospital. They explain the routine to me and I explain it to him. It’ll be every other Wednesday. He’ll have to show up at eight in the morning for tests and return at eleven to be hooked up for five hours. Then, until Friday afternoon, he’ll wear a plastic bottle that will continue to introduce a gas into his bloodstream. That’s when I tell him what I’ve had the hardest time coming to terms with: first they’ll have to implant a catheter near his shoulder, in something the doctors call a reservoir, an access port to the body. I’ve been in the chemotherapy room, and I know it isn’t something that all the patients have, but I don’t mention this, not wanting him to ask me for the explanation that I was given. No one has told me whether it’ll ever be removed, whether it’s planned that one day he’ll stop being a cyborg. No one seems to contemplate the possibility. But he doesn’t seem concerned. All he cares about is starting to get better. The day of the procedure, he’s happy when he comes out, declaring how simple it was.

  The following Wednesday we arrive at the scheduled time. The patients go in for the testing in fives. Some—most—have come alone. Some hide the patchy balding of their skulls under wigs or scarves. Some speak among themselves as if they’ve known one another for a long time. They have encouraging words for each other and they remark upon how well one or another supposedly looks, while my father takes refuge in his shyness with a patrician air that his excessive humility fails to hide. I joke with him, trying to turn his gaze from the most ravaged, until his turn comes. Then we go out for breakfast. We’re both afraid of the side effects. We don’t know whether he’ll lose his appetite or his hair; we don’t know whether he’ll vomit or grow weak. It’s a time of unknowns, but also of apprenticeship. Back at the hospital, the nurses address him by name when they speak to him, just as they do the other patients who doze connected to sophisticated blue drips, and he smiles, amazed by their powers of retention, grateful for the deference, though he’s aware, I suppose, that it isn’t by chance, that it’s on the instructions of the psychologists. Over the next few hours his sister comes, a friend comes, and finally, the friend he met in Brazil comes … In the afternoon, we’re alone again. It worries my father that I haven’t gone back to see my wife since his operation, and we agree that from now on, I’ll split my time: one week with her and one week in Madrid, coinciding with the treatment days. At first he refuses even this, but then he accepts. He doesn’t say so, but it’s plain that he needs me. It’s plain that he’s grateful and moved. Maybe that’s why he tells me that the friend he met in Brazil has replaced the lock on the door to their house and hasn’t given him the key, so he can’t make me a copy. She claims that while he was in the hospital, I came to the house and stole the holographic document, drawn up years ago, that lists their respective belongings. Of course I’m indignant at this false accusation, and if my father harbored any doubts, he dismisses them when he sees my reaction. My anger is so great at being repaid like this for what I’m doing that when it’s time for us to leave that afternoon and they attach the bottle he’ll have to wear until Friday, I take him home but don’t come inside with him, out of fear that I won’t be able to control myself if the friend he met in Brazil is there.

  The next morning, we head to the hospital again, where he has his final appointment with the surgeon who operated on him. Then we go walking to meet my mother for lunch. The walk is long, but he feels so good that we speculate jokingly about whether chemotherapy includes some stimulant. Though wintry, it’s a bright morning. Before we reach the antique shop where my mother is working while she waits to be able to move to Galicia, we stop for a moment and sit on a bench in front of a nightclub that was famous in the seventies. He asks whether it’s still open and I tell him what I’ve been told: it’s now a high-class brothel. We start to talk about sex, and he laments that it’s all over for him. Though actually it’s not a lament. It’s bait for me to contradict him. I do so immediately, and soon he confesses that it’s been a while since he slept with the friend he met in Brazil. It’s a casual confession, and he makes it clear that he doesn’t miss it. I offer to get him Viagra to use with anyone he wants, and he doesn’t reject the idea, but suddenly he retreats into a modest silence. Then, casting modesty aside, he reveals bedroom intimacies that confirm the lack of compatibility that I always suspected between him and my mother in that regard. I’m perplexed, I want to know more, but my role is to follow his lead—I talk when he talks; I stop when he stops—and now he’s decided to stop.

  Five minutes later we get up from the bench. When we reach the antique shop, he goes in first. I’m behind him, so I don’t quite hear what he says to my mother; all I see is that he tells her something and then he steps away, overcome by emotion, and raises a hand to his eyes as if to wipe them. Hours later, my mother tells me that he thanked her for the son they share, and it was her reply, thanking him in return, that made his eyes grow damp.

  That same day, after lunch, we spend the afternoon with a friend of his. It’s the happiest day I’ve spent with him since he was admitted to the hospital, but not all is bliss. When we get to his house, he’s tired and goes to bed. The friend he met in Brazil appears while I’m making him dinner. We haven’t seen each other since I learned that she accused me of having stolen from her. I’m the one who brings it up. In a low voice—attempting to be conciliatory, much as it galls me—I try to plead my innocence, but it’s hopeless; as soon as I start to speak, she interrupts me, and screaming and railing at me as if I’d tried to assault her, she flees upstairs. When I bring up his dinner, my father, who’s heard the racket, asks why I didn’t keep what he told me to myself, at which moment she bursts into the bedroom like a hurricane to continue the fight. She accuses me again of theft, she accuses me of coming between them, of conspiring, of plotting to take what belongs to her. I try to make her stop, but I can’t. My father tries, but he can’t either. Unable to contain myself, I reply sarcastically to the nonsense she’s spouting. I ridicule her, I tie her up in dialectical knots. She answers back, getting more and more upset; she raises her hand to hit me, and I hold her gaze with a scornful smile. She doesn’t dare land the blow, and it’s at this moment that my father, flushed with anger, gives a howl and she abandons the room in tears. Half an hour later I leave the house with a vague feeling of guilt and the well-founded fear that for him the night isn’t over yet.

  Friday we go back to the hospital for the removal of the plastic bottle that since Wednesday has been insufflating a gas into his system. From now on, the idea is that we’ll be able to remove it ourselves, and they offer to show us how. This time the friend he met in Brazil doesn’t make herself scarce. She’s realized, perhaps, that she’s doing herself no favors by failing to show up, and she wants to regain lost ground. But when the nurse who’s instructing us suggests that she draw out the needle that attaches th
e tube to the implant, she exits with an excuse, leaving us alone. That night she tells my father in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t want me to be the one responsible from now on. She also warns him that she doesn’t want me to spend the night at the house, as at some point she’s heard me offer to do.

  As my father and I agreed, I go back to my wife the next day. I don’t return until a week later, on the eve of his next chemotherapy session. This same sequence will repeat itself for the six months that the treatment lasts: five to seven days in Madrid accompanying him on his trips to the hospital, and seven to nine days in Valencia with my wife. Since I don’t drive, all my traveling is by bus, six and a half hours each way, during which I’m not capable of reading or even thinking. When I’m with my wife, I try to work. And yet that whole winter I manage to write only five micro-stories, requested by a painter friend for a portfolio of engravings, and a lecture I’m scheduled to give in April at the Thyssen Museum as part of a series titled The Painting of the Month. I conceived the talk as an explicit homage to my father, and that’s why I’ve chosen to speak about a collage by Kurt Schwitters, in memory of the exhibition we saw twenty-odd years ago at the Juan March Foundation. Meanwhile, I try to get my wife granted a temporary transfer to Madrid for the next school year. I make calls, I fill out forms, I pester everyone who might be able to help us. I periodically inform my father of my efforts and he hardly tries to disguise the relief he would feel to have me permanently nearby, my migratory life at an end. I also go out too much at night when I’m in Madrid. I arrive on Tuesday, stop by to see my father, and slip into the murk, eager to kill time and seized by a deep fatalism that makes it hard for me to answer when someone asks me about him. Often I show up on Wednesday mornings at the hospital without having slept much. My father can tell at a glance. I never deny it, though I trim hours off my escapades. Even then, I don’t think I manage to fool him. All he does is meet my eyes, without venturing to give me the recriminatory look with which he used to convey his disapproval. I don’t know whether he restrains himself in belated recognition of the fact that I’m a mature adult, which is something that had previously escaped him, given the circumscribed and cautious nature of our interactions, or whether it’s his way of compensating for the disruption caused by his illness, as if he considers my antics a necessary diversion from the care I owe him. But I think it’s something else entirely. I think his happiness to see me trumps everything, and with his long, searching gaze he’s expressing his gratitude that I’m faithfully honoring my commitment to him. The only consolation of a sick man: the fortitude of his successor, his principal legacy, his future life, his own blood.