The Dinner Guest

by Gabriela Ybarra

  *

  In an email to my flatmate just before landing in Madrid, my mother wrote: ‘I’m sorry I won’t be seeing you again. It was a wonderful trip!’

  XIV

  My mother lost consciousness in the middle of the afternoon on 3 September, 2011. She was sitting in bed, looking at me, when her left eye began to quiver. My sister Inés and my great aunt were with me at the head of the bed. My mother’s neck spasmed. Her mouth filled with foam. Everyone stared at her in silence, except for me. As my mother was convulsing, I was doubled over by an attack of nervous laughter. Maybe my subconscious wanted my body to move like hers, to lose control at the same time. I think my sister Inés understood. My great aunt gave me a bewildered look. My mother’s consciousness was vanishing and mine wanted to flee.

  ‘Where is she?’ my sister Leticia asked me a little later. ‘She isn’t there,’ I answered, pointing to the body on the bed. What made my mother my mother had disappeared in the attack. She had spent the morning sleeping, scarcely moving, but you could feel her presence. That afternoon, after her eyes quivered, it was gone. She was breathing, but she wasn’t there.

  I wanted to photograph the room. Open the drawers and the cupboards to take pictures of what was inside. In the end I didn’t do it. I pulled back the curtains and looked out at the mountains on the horizon. The room had been kept dark, but now I needed the light to come in. I put all her things away in a rucksack: two nightgowns, the outfit she’d worn on the plane, her toothbrush, her eau de cologne and her moisturiser. My mother’s appearance was unnerving: propped up in bed, breathing as if she were drowning, there was pus between her eyelids and she got thinner with each breath. We had to keep her company until she was gone. Sometimes I felt like I was in the waiting room of some random doctor, sitting in a chair staring at a poster of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. As she was dying my wisdom teeth started to come in and I looked at photographs of a trip we took together to Chile, to remember her when she was alive. My mother died between 3 and 4 a.m. on Tuesday, 6 September, 2011. My father and some of his siblings were with her. Her three daughters were asleep at home. We knew she would die that night, but for us it had already been three days since she stopped existing. My father and my aunt rang the bell early that morning and I went down to let them in. They told me how it had happened. I don’t remember whether there were tears. I had spent days imagining the moment. Each night I would see some family weeping in the waiting room over the same catalogue of coffins from the funeral home and think that soon we would be the ones looking at it. The day before, I had asked my father to take charge of organising the funeral and the burial. I couldn’t do it. The next morning, my father and his oldest sister sat down on the sofa in the waiting room to choose the coffin.

  XV

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ my father must have thought. I thought it, anyway. I had been here before, in the same room of the Tres Cantos funeral home, my feet on the same yellow marble floor, with the same dazed expression on my face. My mother’s body in the same place that my grandmother’s had been. The same joke about the Memorial Diamonds: gems created from a loved one’s lock of hair. More dazed this time. Though the room was full of people, I had eyes only for my father, my sisters and the box with my mother in it. ‘Do you want to see her?’ my father asked. ‘I’d rather not,’ I answered. Then he told me that they had dressed her in a blue tunic, the same colour as the trousers that she used to wear to paint furniture. He talked to me about my grandfather’s body: ‘I saw it,’ he said. At the time I didn’t pay much attention, but now I think I understand how important it was for him to see his dead father. It helped him to stay sane. To acknowledge that what had happened was real. My father wanted me to see my mother so that I could handle her death better. I didn’t want to. I don’t regret it now, because the last time I saw her, she had already stopped existing.

  *

  21 August, 2013,

  Santo Ángel de la Guarda Municipal Cemetery,

  Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid

  A man with a bucket of water in his right hand and a flat cap strolls among the graves in the cemetery. It’s sunny and the light strikes him full on, so that now and then, despite the cap, he holds his hand up like a visor to shield his face. The man stops in front of a headstone and empties the water from the bucket on it. Then he takes a rag out of his back pocket, sprinkles it with cleaning fluid and scrubs the stone. I watch him as I write on a laptop that warms my thighs. I’m leaning on a granite slab polished by Crespo de Alcorcón Marble Co. Buried underneath it are my mother and my maternal grandparents. The family grave is clean and dry, so I assume that the man with the bucket won’t come by. It’s nine in the morning and there’s lots of activity in the cemetery. The caretaker greeted me a while ago, next to an orange digger in which he now rolls along a nearby path. When he sees me sitting on the stone he waves and I stop writing for a second to wave back.

  Flies buzz around me. At the mausoleum of the Cantero Núñez family, a bee rubs against a branch, making a noise like a cricket. The man in the orange digger passes me again, climbs down and says: ‘When you’re ready to leave, you should go out the back gate, it’s closer.’

  ‘Your first time here, isn’t it?’ he’d asked when he saw me come into the cemetery with the laptop under my arm. ‘Yes,’ I replied. Then he told me how to find my mother and led me part of the way.

  I thought the grave was to the right of the main entrance and it turns out that it’s to the left. I thought the grave was on the edge of a path, and it turns out that it’s in the middle of a section. Now, typing here on the slab, it’s strange to me that I feel so little. I don’t sense any strange presence and I’m not sad, just a little upset about having no small change to buy flowers from the vending machine at the entrance: ‘Refrigerated bouquets. No credit cards or notes larger than twenty euros.’

  I talk constantly about my mother, but today I’m having a hard time remembering her. Maybe because it’s all so remote. Or at least it isn’t any easier here than in the middle of some ordinary task, like trimming beans for dinner. I make an effort. I remember that the day of the burial I stood to the right of the grave, not to the left as I had imagined it. That morning there was a hearse, a pine box, and a cement mixer that kept turning. I remember the sound of the cement mixer very well. The worker with the bucket, the man with the orange digger, or maybe someone else, scooped up a shovelful of cement and tossed it in the hole while the rest of us pulled flowers from the wreaths and threw them in. The sun was very hot. Like today. The sun and the sweat are the only things that are like what I remember. What isn’t the same is the smell. That morning I was wearing a black dress that I’d taken from my mother’s wardrobe. It hadn’t been washed, and when I began to sweat, the oils of the fabric mingled with mine. Everything started to smell like her. My mother and I, burying my mother. It’s only now, imagining her scent, that I feel her nearby.

  XVI

  On 7 September, 2011, three obituaries appeared in the paper. At first I couldn’t understand why my mother’s death was of interest to the press. Then I was frustrated, because some of the reflections shared had nothing to do with the way I remembered her. I tried to say something about her that would satisfy me, but I couldn’t. When I tried to get to the heart of who she was, everything I wrote seemed irrelevant. My ideas changed by the day or according to circumstances. Sometimes I was sad, because I felt that I hadn’t been able to encompass her nuances. I thought that maybe it was a problem of length. My mother wasn’t three paragraphs long, or six.

  *

  My mother was warmth and presence. Goodness and light. My mother was many of the things that are said about the dead, but in her case they were all true.

  *

  In the book National Politics in Vizcaya, written by my grandfather in 1947, there is a prologue that reflects briefly on the relationship between private life and politics in my family. Towards the end of the seventies, all of Vizcaya’s positions of power we
re occupied by members of ten or twelve families. I belong to one of those families. The author of the prologue, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, believes it’s inevitable that the history of the families be identified with the history of the province.

  My dear Javier, I cannot help but allude to long-distant yet still immediate family memories in speaking of your book […] because, among other things, it is undeniably a book of family memories. ‘How can this be?’ some reader with no knowledge of Basque life and history will ask. All one can do is answer simply: ‘Because it was.’ […] Whereas in all of Spain and nearly all of Europe politics gradually became a politics of the individual, in Vizcaya everything was a politics of the family.

  Now, after having spent months in the archives reading my grandfather’s story, I understand that the symbolic value of Neguri and my last name still endures. My private life is still political. And so is my mother’s death. The language, the silences, the houses, the small tensions of living together, the feelings… It’s all political. Even literature. The fact that one of my favourite books as a child was La vida nueva de Pedrito Andía is political. My father’s tone while reading me Machado’s ‘The Evergreen Oaks’ before bedtime is political: ‘Who has beheld without trembling / a stand of beeches in a pinewood?’ He always stressed those lines. As I write about my family, I reread Machado and I repeat the poem frequently. I imagine my mother and grandfather as evergreen oaks (simple, strong, free of torment).

  A month and a half after my mother died, on 20 October, 2011, ETA announced a final halt to armed conflict.

  XVII

  Like most skating rinks, this one was rectangular, and it was in the middle of a park. The surface was artificial ice and it was kept hard by a machine that made a constant noise like a fan. I can’t remember exactly why we decided to go there. I think my mother saw an ad in the paper with a picture of the rectangle surrounded by snowy hedges and thought it would be a nice Sunday plan. We rented skates in an iron and glass palace that smelled like wet socks. My parents and two other couples sat in the café overlooking the rink. My sisters and four friends put their skates on with me, then headed in a pack out of the changing room and onto the ice.

  When I had finished tying my laces, I got up and walked slowly to the rink, digging my skate blades into the stone, before gliding into the crowd. I went around a few times. The fourth time, a waiter with a black bow tie brought drinks to my parents and their friends: six cups, a teapot, a coffee pot and a little jug of milk. On my next lap I saw my mother lift a cup to her lips, the red tag of her rooibos tea dangling. As I kept skating I remembered a recurring dream that I’d had again the week before. My family and I were landing one Friday morning at Heathrow Airport, and as we waited for our suitcases, a man with a piercing voice shouted through a megaphone: ‘Bomb alert! Bomb alert!’ Chaos was unleashed. Frenzied crowds swarmed around the room, looking for a way out. On the other side of the belt, my father grabbed his suitcase and vanished, pushing a trolley. A policeman with a whistle herded us all out onto the runway. We walked among planes and buses until we came to an empty car park where we spent an hour going in circles as if on a skating rink. My mother kept asking: ‘Where’s your father? Do you see him, Gabriela?’ The nervous crowd waved and shouted at a policeman who remained inscrutable in the face of their insults. The rest of us kept looping around the perimeter of the car park.

  At the ice skating rink I watched my father drinking coffee. He looked calm. But as relaxed as he seemed, I thought he might be ready to jump up and run out. He talked to his friends and laughed. He put his arm around my mother and watched us circle the ice.

  At the end of my dream the policeman got tired of searching for bombs, and my mother and I were reunited with my father at an Italian restaurant. He was eating spaghetti with his napkin tucked into his shirt and he smiled, his teeth red with sauce: ‘There you are! I’m so glad you’re all right,’ he said before raising the fork to his mouth. My mother and I sat down and ordered two plates of pasta. I felt a great urge to scream, but I didn’t.

  *

  There were four pairs of black shoes lined up under the desk, heels together. The neatness of the row stood in contrast to the untidiness of the room: piles of newspapers on the chair, the dresser and one side of the bed. My father picked up a shoe and polished it with a baby wipe.

  During my mother’s illness, my father and I had to get to know each other again. I’m not sure when we lost touch. Sometimes I think it was the day I banned him from my room, forbidding him to read me any more bedtime poems. ‘I’d rather read on my own,’ I said, and he vanished down the hallway with a volume of the verse of Catullus under his arm.

  Ever since I’d been living in New York, we’d hardly talked. ‘I didn’t want to bother you,’ he said one day. Meanwhile, I never felt the need to find an excuse. It was his responsibility as a father to seek me out, I thought, and mine, as the daughter, to try to escape his control.

  Some days I felt distant from my family, but other days I worried that I was too independent. Still, when my mother got sick, I realised that my father, my sisters and I had got used to being apart because she bridged the gap.

  A wipe stained with shoe polish lay on the floor. My father took another pair of shoes and turned them over to check the state of the soles. He lingered over the scuffs; he contemplated the unequal distribution of the weight of her body. He took a clean wipe from a blue container and one by one he rubbed the little folds sewn along each side of the instep. There was no tension, no sound, just my father’s hand smoothing the leather.

  *

  The week after my mother died, my father rearranged the furniture and art in our house. One day he piled all of his wife’s clothes on the mattress, loaded everything into the boot of his car and took it to his office. Another day he brought two portraits out of storage and hung them over the sofa in the living room. In one of them my mother is wearing a green dress and has her hands hidden behind her. On the canvas, her eyes slant like my sister Inés’s. That night, my father asked Inés to please sleep in the same room with him.

  When I think about my mother’s illness it’s hard for me to remember my father. All I get are flashes. My father laying cold washcloths on my mother’s forehead. My father writing in a notebook, taking down everything that she said at the hospital. Otherwise, most of my memories are of me and my mother. My picture of him sharpens three days before her death, when I began to feel weak and he made all the decisions about palliative care and the burial. Sometimes, he talked about my grandfather. He compared the two deaths. It surprised me.

  In my family there were familiar stories that we told about my father. There was the story that he was hung up on security precautions and the story that he talked too much about the family’s past. Sometimes, when he brought up one of these subjects, we would give him a baffled look, as if there were no danger and as if our last name was of no consequence. Now I think I didn’t listen to him much during my mother’s illness. When he told me he was afraid that she was dying, I thought he was exaggerating.

  Until we moved to Madrid, my father fantasised about shedding his social class, about being the son of a cook or a nanny and running wild in the fields of Kanala. As an adolescent I had the same wish. I thought that what happened in other neighbourhoods was much more interesting than what happened in ours. I walked along Calle del General Ricardos de Carabanchel, imagining that this was where people lived who had read the same books and listened to the same music as me. When my father dreamed of life in the country, he yearned for its freedom and simplicity.

  When my mother died, I was essentially the same age my father had been when my grandfather was killed. He was twenty-nine; I was twenty-eight. Both of us were living in New York.

  *

  My father is the opposite of my mother. My mother was a feather. My father is a concrete block that wishes it were a feather. My mother left little trace and travelled by bus. My father couldn’t move without a security detail. My
mother let the past go. My father is always aware of the family history.

  My father wasn’t able to loosen up until after my mother’s death. In October 2011 ETA stopped killing and in 2012 he was able to give up his bodyguard. During the mourning period he grieved for his wife, but he also enjoyed more freedom. He lost weight. He started to do some things that my mother never let him do: work from his bedroom, walk shirtless from his room to the kitchen for water. Yesterday he called me and said that he wanted to start writing again.

  I hadn’t read anything my father wrote until this summer. One night, when we were sharing a room in a country house near Santander, he went out for dinner with a friend and I stayed home alone. Wandering around the room in my nightgown, I caught sight on the bedside table of a volume of the book that he has spent half a lifetime writing, in a plastic ring binder. I opened it and read some bits. I was afraid that it would disappoint me, but it didn’t, even though most of the chapters were in pieces. I read a passage about Regina, a friend of my father’s whom I met as a child. Regina lived in a red house on Ereaga Beach with a dog cemetery in the garden. The English names of her pets and the pets of deceased family members were chiselled on tiny tombstones. The graveyard was surrounded by a wooden fence in a garden that sloped down to the sea. One day Regina invited my parents and me to her house for lunch. She must have been well over seventy, and she greeted us in black high heels and leopard-print tights. I couldn’t stop staring at her outfit. I had never seen anyone so old dressed like that. She gave us a little tour of her living room. She showed us her collection of grandfather clocks and the portrait that Julio Romero de Torres had painted of her when she was an adolescent. Back then I had no idea who Romero de Torres was. In the portrait, Regina is posed with her mother, Serafina Longa, who had a rose cultivar named after her by a Bilbao botanist: the ‘Serafina Longa’. Everything in the house was a curiosity or English. This is the backdrop of my father’s big, fragmented novel: the vestiges of Neguri at the turn of the twentieth century, when the industries along the estuary were being built up and all the neighbours were trying to be British. It is also about the eighties, the decline of the neighbourhood, the shuttered factories, the problems of living in peace in the region, and about Regina Soltura, a rara avis nearing eighty, strolling around town in leopard-print tights and heels.