Father and Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

what’s happening. I’ve grown up; I’m more aware. I’m not a mere witness anymore. In ’81 I spend the night of the coup with my mother and some neighbors, while my father is still in New York. When he returns months later, he doesn’t let me know in advance. I sense motives related to those of his departure the year before, but this time when I see him, I’m filled with silent anger. He pretends to have arrived the previous night, but he contradicts himself. It bothers me, but I don’t say anything. He brings me the life jacket from the plane and albums by the Talking Heads, the B-52s, Split Enz, and Yellowman, but I hardly thank him. His lie bothers me, and it bothers me that I’ve been displaced. It’s the beginning of the silences between us. The silences happen when he hides something from me that I know he’s hiding, he knows that I know it, and I know that he knows that I know it. If he betrays me, I immediately sense his betrayal and he immediately senses that I’ve sensed his betrayal. It isn’t even necessary for him to make a mistake or for me to hide my disappointment. All we have to do is exchange glances.
    It’s the beginning of the silences between us.
    But we also take our first trip alone together. A trip to London, paid for by my mother. This trip and another the following year to Paris and Amsterdam, also my mother’s treat, will be the only trips we take until twenty years later. I learn to travel with him, to visit museums with him. I learn to despise all chauvinism with him, not to entrench myself in the familiar, to appreciate variety. I learn how important painting is to him, the pleasure that he gets from looking at art.
    And life goes on, and he continues to visit us when he feels like it, and once again he stays with me some nights when my mother has her radio show. Our apartment isn’t the same one that he left—or maybe was kicked out of. We’ve moved to another considerably smaller one, but the furniture and almost all the paintings are the same, since he hardly took anything with him when he left. Regarding the justice of this fact, as well as the payment my mother gave him when she sold the first apartment, they will never see eye to eye.
    One night when he’s with me he brings a female friend along. He’s never done it before, and I’m conscious of the fact that my mother wouldn’t like it. What surprises me most is that he points out anything of value with proprietary pride, including my only asset: a drawing my mother asked Miró to make for me when, in ’72, there was an exhibition of his work at the gallery she ran.
    The friend is the friend he met in Brazil.
    My father did almost no work in New York, and though he tries, he does hardly any when he returns to Madrid. It’s the dawning of a crisis from which—because it sidelines him during crucial years when the art market is taking off—he won’t easily recover. He seeks alternatives, works in the studio of a designer, and goes to Galicia for a few months to fix up and decorate a colonial-era house. From Galicia he writes me letters in which he calls me turkey-cock , lovey , or bratty-cakes , remembers to send his love to my mother, and reminds me to be good. One of them ends like this: “I don’t expect you to write, but maybe someday you’ll have something you want to tell your dad, or ask him (you can always trust your father, who would love to be your best friend.)”
    Clearly, he’s at a low point. This is only confirmed the two times I go to see him. Once, when I’ve been there for a few days, a female friend of his arrives and a problem arises that at the time I’m unable to fully appreciate. Since work is being done on the house, there are only two bedrooms. My father and I sleep in one of them, and the owner’s grown-up children sleep in the other. My father tries to get me to move in with