Father and Son (15 page)

I needed his recognition.

I wanted to learn, to be like him, and I imitated him; of course I did. I tried to emulate him.

But I hardly ever succeeded. I lacked so much of the knowledge that I know he possessed. We squandered so many opportunities. We hardly ever permitted ourselves to be together, and most of those times we were so paralyzed that all we could focus on was outmaneuvering each other. We hardly ever went to restaurants or record stores or out for walks, hardly ever traveled together, hardly ever spent time at the beach (absurd even to mention it).

His fault and mine. His fault for not realizing that this was what I most desired, his fault for doling it out by the dropperful, sheepishly, secretly, in the shadow of his other life, his married life, and my fault for choking the already scanty flow with my perennial anger.

I almost never saw him cook, except for very basic dishes, but the one time he invited me to a dinner at his house he served tzatziki and hummus as an appetizer, and days later I asked for the recipe so that I could make it myself. Another time I discovered a jar of mango chutney in his refrigerator, and soon afterward there was an identical jar in mine.

I didn't have the money to buy a house for myself, but when I played the lottery, the houses that my imagination bought were modeled after his.

When he asked me for the jointed wooden mannequin of the Virgin Mary, a piece he had left at my mother's house, I returned it to him, of course, but it wasn't long before I got one for myself that was as much like his as possible.

We might not talk for weeks, but each morning when I sat down at my desk, I imagined him in his studio, faced with difficulties similar to mine.

And I competed with him.

And I wanted to be better than he was, to show him that I could write and have fun and be a good son and look after my mother without giving up anything, that life didn't scare me.

Too much intensity.

*   *   *

The migratory life. My migratory life will continue until July 2006. Every seven days, on average, I'm back in Madrid. After the difficult month of February, in which we accustom ourselves to the routine of treatment, my father keeping watch over himself and I keeping watch over him, in March everything improves. He tolerates the chemotherapy well, he's strong and optimistic, and as a result, he's able to lead a more or less normal life. When I'm in Madrid, I accompany him to the hospital; we invent nicknames for the people we've come to recognize (Miss Dearly Beloved, a patient who comes with her husband and brother; Miss Dynamo, a nurse who does everything eagerly and enthusiastically); we see shows; we go for walks; we go to the movies (
Brokeback Mountain
,
Crash
) … Even his relationship with the friend he met in Brazil, though shaky and punctuated with clashes, seems calmer.

Around this time, on an impulse after a chemotherapy session, he buys himself an ergonomic recliner, which he later nearly returns for being too ugly, but which, with my encouragement, he ends up holding on to throughout his illness. Nestled into it, chewing his fingernails, his feet hooked around the footrest, he'll spend infinite hours each day watching television. Which is all he's able to do later, when his mind and body give out.

But that state of collapse has yet to come. He's still active and alert, and at the end of March his final show goes up. The day of the opening, as always, the friend he met in Brazil makes it her job to take pictures of all those present, and as always, she avoids taking my picture, something that he uses as ammunition in one of their subsequent spats. Though the opening is well attended, sales are modest. Three or four paintings, if I remember correctly, none of them very big. To make matters worse, one of the most important arts sections doesn't publish a review at all, and even after I make the requisite phone calls, the paper I write for gives the show scarcely half a column of type, with a misleading headline, and the painting featured in the accompanying illustration is printed backward. He's greatly disappointed, and so am I. I blame myself for not having insisted more, for not knowing how to get around the editor's lack of enthusiasm. I try to make up for it by bringing people, by seeking out buyers. About one of them, a famous model I know through friends, my father permits himself to boast to the gallery owners without mentioning that the contact is mine. He tells me this himself with a laugh, flaunting his naked vanity. In a way, he acts like a child who's forbidden nothing, as if his pranks and misbehavior were my idea. For the first time, I'm fully the accomplice I never was before.

The apparent dashing of the perhaps excessive hopes he had pinned on the show leaves him deflated. Even so, he still goes up to his studio to paint. He paints to forget, to keep making, to cling to life, to set things right. He paints to escape the worries that never cease.

Around this time, at the beginning of April, I bring him to spend a week in the Valencia town where I live with my wife when I'm not with him. Disoriented, not used to being my guest, he thanks us exaggeratedly for everything: the food, the walks, the movie sessions—the freedom, essentially, we give him to decide what to do at any given moment. At the train station on the way back to Madrid, when he sees a girl with a brightly colored bag of gummy candies, he expresses a passing interest in trying them. It's my wife who, despite his demurrals, goes with him to the store and buys him a similar bag. He wolfs down the contents on the train, and then I buy him a couple of bourbon and Cokes. It's our way of telling him that everything is fine, that he isn't as sick as he thinks he is.

Around this time, I go with him to an opening at a bank. The show is a selection of contemporary Spanish painting. Hanging on the walls are paintings by several generations of artists, not including my father, and among the guests are museum directors and top critics. The cocktail reception comes to a hilarious end when the floor of the tent where it's held begins to sag under the weight of the arriving guests. Safe in a corner, margaritas in hand, bitter but cheerful, we watch the ludicrous scene.

Around this time, I continue my efforts to get my wife a transfer to Madrid for the following school year so that I can put an end to my migratory life, as my father constantly encourages me to do. I compose a blunt official request that makes my wife cry, in which I cite his need for care, and meanwhile I keep calling anyone who might be able to pull strings.

In April, too, toward the end of the month, I give my Thyssen lecture on Kurt Schwitters. My father has already read it, but he's proud and moved when we leave the museum. His friends and mine are there, his sister is there, his cousins are there, my mother is there, my wife is there, my wife's sister is there.

Days later, as April turns into May, he confides that he has two wishes, contradicting the apparent docility with which he's let himself be deceived about his illness: he wants to apostatize, to renounce the Catholic faith into which he was baptized, erase himself from the church's records, and he wants to make a living will requesting that his life not be artificially prolonged and that, if it comes to it, euthanasia be administered. He takes care of the former himself after overcoming a few hurdles, which he tells me about, delighting in the folly of the successive clergymen who try to make him change his mind. For the latter he needs the participation of someone who will represent him when he can no longer make decisions for himself. Neither when he informs me of this—taking for granted that the representative will be me—nor when, days later, we go to a notary to draw up the document, does he show the slightest sign of grief. On the contrary. It isn't just that the decision brings him relief; if it weren't for the seriousness of the matter, one might say that it elates him. He even laughs in glee about an initial failed attempt to draw up the papers with a notary whom we chose at random and from whose office we fled, joking about his Christian last name, when we discovered that he wasn't willing to do what we asked.

Around this time, in May, the uneasy armistice that he seemed to have reached with the friend he met in Brazil begins to splinter. They've put their shared house up for sale on an Internet site, and although he trusts that they'll keep living together, he doesn't yet understand her drive to sell. Regarding his worries about leaving the house and what a headache it will be to find a place for the paintings that he stores in the top-floor studio, he keeps me insistently up to date. Never, however, does he spell out the perverse logic evident behind her maneuvers; I don't know whether he hasn't processed it or whether, suspicious and fearful of ill omens, he prefers to feign ignorance. Either way, it's surprising but not inexplicable that she insists on selling; it's surprising but not inexplicable that despite her natural inclination to save, she doesn't want to buy a new house but rather suggests that they rent; it's surprising but not inexplicable that she hasn't foreseen that he'll need a place to continue to paint as long as he's able. The explanation is simple, but I can't point it out to my father, because doing so would be like telling him that he really is going to die. So I keep my mouth shut and wait, insisting only—since it's a way of giving him hope—that he should earmark part of the money that he gets from selling the house for the purchase of a studio where he can keep working. Her response is that it can be rented, too, but my father, whether because mistrust has set in or because he's worried about the fate of his paintings, stands firm. Then begins an endless back-and-forth in which the friend he met in Brazil, offering to help him find a studio, tries to reduce the amount set aside for it by searching for something far from the city center, while I argue for a place nearby that he can actually use. More hard bargaining accompanies the initial attempts to sell the house, which she wants to do without his help, nearly making them the victims of an elaborate scam by some alleged Israeli investors who contact her by email.

And meanwhile, my father has to keep struggling with the phantoms his illness conjures up. His doubts are constant, as are his questions and the traps he sets to catch me out. He seems to want the truth, but he wants it to favor him, and so long as I give him half-truths and offer him help and support, he continues to turn to me, to make me his main support. Doing this doesn't trouble my conscience. I give him what I believe he wants, never asking myself whether I'm doing right. I fool myself, too; I too want to believe that if he keeps fighting, he might still live for a few years. I operate in a permanent daze, with just two goals: to ensure that he suffers as little as possible and to ensure that the friend he met in Brazil doesn't leave him penniless. Though the two objectives occasionally coincide, they aren't identical. Untangling them isn't easy, and I often make mistakes that I soon regret.

I let things come as they may. Possibly I force him to be too vigilant, thus obliging him to contemplate what I'd actually prefer that he not contemplate: what's behind the behavior of the friend he met in Brazil.

Around this time, midway through May, we take a night train to Galicia to see the work being done on my mother's future house, where she'll retire at the end of the year. We have dinner in our compartment in the sleeper car, a picnic prepared by me that concludes with whiskey from a flask. In the morning we spend a few hours in Santiago, and that afternoon, when we come to the town where the house is, I can see his surprise at what my mother and I have been able to do. A whole lifetime of lack of trust in us and subsequent flight—wiped away on the spot. Later I'll learn that the impression was lasting, as for months he proclaimed his admiration for our worker-ant labors to anyone who would listen.

Around this time, a trustworthy notary is found, and he signs the living will that was delayed after our escape from the other notary's office.

Around this time, at the end of May, I have to decide whether to accept the invitation of an Italian foundation to write for two months at a villa in Tuscany. At first I can't bring myself to abandon my father, but with his encouragement I accept a stay for half of the time after convincing a friend of his to take my place at the bimonthly chemotherapy sessions. In the same room where Bruce Chatwin wrote some of his books, I spend the month of June in Tuscany, starting and almost finishing a story that has nothing to do with what I'm living through. Meanwhile, thanks to a friend of my father's, my wife's transfer to Madrid for the upcoming school year seems feasible for the first time, and along with it, the end of my migratory life. Meanwhile, my father calls me frequently. I know that he's still painting almost every morning. I know that he takes a short trip or two with the friend he met in Brazil, and that on one of these trips he drives the car. I know that they find buyers for the house at last. I know that he demands that the money due to them be paid in two separate checks, and that because of this and other things, relations between them grow more acrimonious.

I return from Italy on July 5, full of uncertainty about the immediate future. In view of the fact that my father plans to spend August with the friend he met in Brazil at her house in the south, I hesitate between a similar solution that will allow me to continue to accompany him on visits to the hospital, or a trip with my wife—intended as compensation for my constant absences—to Kenya, where my father's older sister has been living for years. But based on a routine scan, which shows that the tumor is active again, the doctors halt his treatment with plans to start a new one in September; and in the office that same day, to mitigate the effect of the news, I ask my father whether he's capable of traveling to Kenya. The answer is yes, and it's immediately clear how excited he is by this unexpected prospect. The friend he met in Brazil chooses not to come, but he decides that he will. Meanwhile, the buyers of the house reach a decision too, and on July 10 the contract is signed and my father receives his part of the down payment. The next day, he asks me to go with him to the bank to deposit it, and he makes me a cosigner on his account.