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many things: for his coldness, for his sadness, for not supporting him in his artistic career, for not making an effort to understand him, for rejecting his advice, for valuing his businesses above all else and then losing them.
    And then there was the absence of his mother, like a perpetual question mark, nagging at his memory with different versions of what might have been.
    I’ve never been in therapy, and my knowledge of psychology goes no further than what I learned in a college class, but I suppose that together these stories present a fairly convincing explanation of the two traits that, beyond painting, defined my father’s life: a tendency to lose himself in the labyrinth of the female minotaur, where his need to seek the shelter of strong women lay hidden; and a terrible fear of the future, of having the rug suddenly pulled out from under him. Add to that a perhaps excessive sensitivity, and two plus one is three.
    As Joan Didion says in The Year of Magical Thinking , we never stop telling ourselves stories. It’s our way of being in the world, of capturing life. I don’t know when I started to plot the story that I’ve just told, made up of bits taken from here and there. Probably when I began to sense that the clay from which my father was molded was not so solid.
    *   *   *
    But we were in 1978, and I’ve said that I would stay aloft.
    Nineteen seventy-eight is the year of my First Communion. No one pushes me, though the fact is that it’s no simple process. As I was baptized under emergency circumstances, the procedure first has to be repeated in front of an ecclesiastical notary. My father attends the ceremony—at which I renounce Satan and all his pomp and works—but not the Communion itself. I don’t care: it’s not in Madrid; he has an excuse. I’m not very sure myself about what I’ve done. My conversion is relative. I want to believe the way my mother believes, and sometimes I pray and cross myself, but I never go back to take Communion again and certainly not to confess.
    The following years bring few changes, but important ones. In 1979 and 1980 my father still makes the occasional halfhearted attempt at family life with us. He even travels with us. To Extremadura with one set of friends, to the Mar Menor with another. I don’t know whether he does this of his own accord or whether the appearances he makes are the tribute my mother claims for me. Whatever the case, he shows up, and though sometimes I may notice that his mind is elsewhere, his lack of enthusiasm is never something he turns against me: it has to do with his relationship with my mother. And yet I’m part of the same package, and it’s inevitable that he should associate me with her. The world that she’s woven so that their separation goes unnoticed begins to come apart, and despite their efforts, there are many moments when I miss him, when I sense that he’s hiding another life, other appetites, and I guess at the lie. Once, he tells me that he’s in Andalucía and a friend of my mother’s happens to tell me that she ran into him in London on the same day. I notice that he doesn’t contribute to my keep, that he doesn’t give me money, that it’s hard to involve him in plans he doesn’t devise himself, that he’s evasive.
    School. I’m not doing well at the public school where he chose to have me enrolled five years earlier (I’m an oddball), and my mother moves me to a private school with a well-deserved reputation for being liberal. She alone makes the decisions that concern me. My father has gradually bowed out; either he doesn’t feel he has the authority to impose his views, or he trusts my mother’s judgment. From now on, that’s the way it will be; though he may criticize her at times, though he’s driven to distraction—as I will be, years later—by what he would call her