Father and Son (20 page)

Or essays, like María Zambrano's on confession as a literary genre.

And I recently saw a documentary film:
My Architect
by Nathaniel Kahn, in which Kahn follows the trail of his father, the American architect Louis Kahn, whom he hardly knew.

In the film, Louis Kahn says something obvious that nevertheless made me think: “How accidental we are, our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.” He's referring to his decision to become an architect, and I can't say whether his son, the director of the documentary, meant to lend added meaning to the statement by using it to conclude two segments, but the fact is that it can easily be extrapolated to fit the more personal subject of his film: the complex ties that bind us to our origins, the need to make peace with them. In essence, our life is composed of fortuitous events. Infinite possibilities spring from each decision we make, not to mention the effects of others' decisions on us. The future is uncertain; we live in the present. The past is the only thing that seems fixed, and we tend to mythicize it. It gives us something to rebel against or reconcile with. Parents may or may not serve the same purpose, and for that reason alone they are sources of conflict. At the very least, they're guilty of having brought us into the world.

Nursing a wound might be profitable from an artistic standpoint. But only the strongest of us or those who've been gravely injured can live forever with an open wound.

Besides, and this quickly becomes clear, our predecessors were also creatures of fate, also had scores to settle, were also cheated.

Each of us is just one more piece in a child's Meccano set, and we matter only as much as we come to believe that we matter.

All the books I've been reading, no matter what drives them, whether it be filial devotion, the urge for revenge, remorse, or mere literary ambition, simply confirm this fact.

Our troubles aren't exclusive to us. To a greater or lesser degree and in one way or another, everyone has faced them.

And most of us, at one point or another, have wanted to resolve them once and for all.

Close the circle.

Though some—just a few—do it only to say yet again: I was right.

And to make a record of it.

For someone of my grandfather's generation, success as a father meant dealing his children a hand no worse than the one he'd been dealt. Beginning with my father's generation, it hasn't been so easy, maybe because we've gotten softer. For further confirmation, we have the testimony of Sibylle Lacan's
Un père
.

My father didn't squander the poor hand that he was dealt. He bettered it. He amounted to more than his father ever did. He was a cultured and sensitive man. Curious about almost everything.

And unlike my grandfather, who was the very image of failure, he didn't fail.

Though it wasn't enough for him, though in the end he didn't get all the recognition he deserved, he was an excellent painter. He never conspired against others, never shut anyone out, as others had done to him.

He liked his work. Toward the end he lived almost exclusively for art. For looking at art, thinking about art, making art.

That much he had. No matter what he said at the end, in the cold fever of approaching death. Unlike my grandfather, his father, who spent his life seeking success in business and was left with nothing when all his ventures failed.

The friend he met in Brazil counts as a failure, impossible to deny it. And yet it would be unfair for him to make his entrance into the next world with that mark against him. No one who gives generously and is betrayed nonetheless, no one who takes a blow when he's down and doesn't shed a tear, can be said to have failed.

Did my father and my grandfather ever talk? Did they make peace with each other?

I don't think so.

And yet I'm sure that my father forgave him. That what he minded most, in any case, was never having told him what all parents want to hear on their children's lips at least once: your mistakes don't count, your intentions were good, and time simply got the better of you.

Because at the end of the day, that's our greatest mistake, from which all others spring: we think that time is much more forgiving than it is.

And that there's time for everything, when in fact there isn't.

I had the time to tell this to my father—not just tell him, but show him—and he did everything he could to smooth the way. There are no scores to be settled; there were none when I began to write.

And, of course, no guilt about his death for which I might seek forgiveness. So strong is my sense of having done right that I haven't even resorted to the exculpatory urge to tell myself that he died of natural causes, since the drugs the doctors gave him, which I was taught to administer, weren't supposed to take effect so soon.

And no guilt, of course, for having tried to deceive him about his illness.

And none for the departure of the friend he met in Brazil.

And none for being unable to say whether my behavior would have been impeccable if his life had been longer. My cards were marked—I knew he was going to die—but so were his.

Both of us tried. A year and a half of our lives we gave each other.

It's not fair, then, to torment myself about what might have been. It simply was.

That, too, I owe to him.

The only real guilt that occasionally nags at me: having delayed, having let time nearly get the better of us. And my excess of zeal.

Nothing substantial enough, in any case, to feed all the pages I've written.

Having realized this and being able to express it is perhaps the one thing I've gained.

In this regard, writing time and living time coincide.

Would I have come to the same conclusion if I hadn't written it?

Getting used to his death. That's the main thing I've done in all this time.

Death. That which cannot be thought, it's said.

From the day of his death to the day on which I write this, March 24, 2009, I've seen—to the best of my recollection—a Miguel Ángel Campano show, I've seen an Albert Oehlen show (both painters he respected), I've seen a Kippenberger show, I've seen a Darío Villalba show, I've seen a Dürer show, I've seen a Patinir show; I've seen a show titled
The Abstraction of Landscape
, I've seen a Joseph Beuys show, I've seen a show of Javier Riera's photographs, I've seen an Alejandro Corujeira show, I've seen a Julio Zachrisson show, I've seen a show of avant-garde movements in the time of art historian Carl Einstein, I've seen a Nancy Spero show, I've seen a show of Greco-Roman sculpture, I've seen a show of Renaissance portraits, I've seen a Picasso show, I've seen a Tàpies show, I've seen a Rembrandt show, I've seen a Twombly show, I've seen a show of the work of a Spanish photographer whose name I can't recall, I've seen a Juan Ugalde show, I've seen shows in the same gallery by Bendix Harms, a young German I liked, and by Secundino Hernández, whom I'd never heard of, I've seen a strident show of contemporary Chinese artists, I've seen a show by the Czech photographer Sudek, and the other day, on my way back from doing the shopping, I went into a gallery because I thought I glimpsed a distant resemblance to my father's final works in the way that space was sliced up in the paintings in the window. Cristina Lama, born in 1977 in Sevilla, was the artist.

And I'm forgetting a few, I suppose. Shows that I saw accompanied by his ghost, as it were.

Many days spent without hearing a person's voice on the phone are needed to understand his absence; many days spent resisting the impulse to call are needed to understand that he'll no longer answer; many days spent silencing remarks meant only for him are needed to understand that this is how it will be from now on; many days spent wondering what he'd say about something that we're well aware he knew best are needed to understand that now our own judgment will have to suffice; many days spent looking at pictures of him are needed to understand that these are pictures of a dead person; many days spent contemplating the objects we inherited are needed to understand that they're no longer his but ours; many days spent taking stock of common experiences are needed to understand that they'll never be repeated, that all that's left of them is the memory. A memory, too, that won't remain unchanged.

I've been down that road. I've caught myself thinking about calling my father when he'd been dead for months; I've found consolation in gazing at things that were his and then felt the desire to avoid looking at them as my eye grew accustomed to them and made them mine; I've saved up questions for the next time I'd see him without realizing that it would never come.

A month ago, going to see a show that I was asked to write about, I felt freed for the first time of his ghost. I was in a hurry, working on deadline, and I hardly thought of him until the next morning, when I saw the article in print and wanted his approval, as I always used to when I wrote about art.

Days later, at a Bacon retrospective, he was on my mind; I couldn't stop thinking about him. He made the rounds with me, prodding me to reject psychological interpretations and just look at the painting, but it wasn't enough. I felt a little lost. I needed his commentary, which, though always admiring, wouldn't have failed to alert me to Bacon's every slip, every mannerist flaw.

Life doesn't stop.

Seven months ago, early in September 2008, I learned that I would be a father at the end of the following May. Just a month and a half from now.

Life doesn't stop. Life has gradually carried me away from him, mitigating his absence. Not the pain, which—though buried deep—is surely the same as it was when I began to write. The same as it will always be. As I write this, with a Django Reinhardt album of his playing in the background, I know with cruel clarity that he is no longer painting in his studio, as I so often imagined him. His studio doesn't exist, his paintings are in storage, and the next show of his work, if I can manage it, will be a retrospective.

Life doesn't stop. I'm coming to the end of this book.

If I could turn back the clock and change the way I was for so many years, I would do it, but to say so now, when I already know the ending—even if I mean it—is false tender.

So I think about my unborn son, who will bear his name, and I ask myself how I'll mold him, how I'll fail him, what I'll have to forgive him for, and what he'll have to forgive me for when—if he doesn't do it sooner—I, like my father, fade into nothingness.

What he'll remember fondly about me.

I'd like to preseve some of the best of my father so that it passes on to him through me.

Madrid, April 16, 2009

 

Also by Marcos Giralt Torrente

The End of Love

 

A Note About the Author

Marcos Giralt Torrente was born in Madrid in 1968 and is the author of three novels, a novella, and a book of short stories. He was a writer in residence at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome and at the University of Aberdeen, and was part of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program in 2002–2003. He is the recipient of several distinguished awards, including the Spanish National Book Award in 2011. His works have been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese.

A Note About the Translator

Natasha Wimmer has translated Roberto Bolaño's
2666
, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and
The Savage Detectives
, among many other works. She lives in New York City.

 

Sarah Crichton Books

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

 

Copyright © 2010 by Marcos Giralt Torrente

Translation copyright © 2014 by Natasha Wimmer

All rights reserved

Originally published in Spanish in 2010 by Editorial Anagrama, Spain

English translation first published in the United States by Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First American edition, 2014

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Giralt Torrente, Marcos, 1968–

   [Tiempo de vida. English]

   Father and son: a lifetime / Marcos Giralt Torrente; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. — First American edition.

       pages  cm

   ISBN 978-0-374-27771-0 (cloth: alk. paper) —

   ISBN 978-0-374-71000-2 (e-book)

   1.  Giralt Torrente, Marcos, 1968– —Family.   2.  Authors, Spanish—20th century—Family relationships.   3.  Fathers and sons—Spain—Biography.   I.  Wimmer, Natasha, translator.   II.  Title.