Marcos Giralt Torrente - Father and Son - A Lifetime

The closeness of their relationship was the key to my father’s insecurity, especially from the moment he found himself prematurely deprived of her. He was twelve when his mother died, and his father proved unable to change his ways to give him the support he needed. With the years, the distance between them only grew, and just as emphatically as my grandfather expected him to follow in his footsteps, my father began to make it clear that he wouldn’t. He finished high school with mediocre grades, and he didn’t go to college to study engineering — which is what his father would have liked — or even art, a compromise that wasn’t considered, despite the fact that since he was fourteen, it had been clear that painting was his calling. My father was not the son my grandfather had hoped for, and busy as he was establishing his ceramics factory, he had neither the time nor the sensitivity to engage with him. Someone more open, less single-minded, might have found other ways to involve him, but my grandfather couldn’t even rise to the occasion when at one point my father offered to help design some dishes. When my father told me about this, rushing through the story in his eagerness to be done with it, and probably still bitter, he couldn’t help adding that the proposal he had vainly presented, inspired by Scandinavian design, would have had a better chance of succeeding than the generic pieces my grandfather produced.

The break came when my father, still a minor, requested his legal emancipation in order to travel to London to study painting. My grandfather granted it, and for good measure, possibly with the intention of getting him to change his mind, disinherited him. This didn’t affect my father much, since shortly afterward my grandfather went bankrupt so spectacularly that he had to flee abroad, pursued by his creditors. What my father couldn’t forgive was that in an earlier desperate attempt to avoid ruin, he had spent the money that my father and his sisters had inherited from their mother, of which he was trustee.

But I’ve written about this already — though in a different form — in my second novel.

I don’t know exactly what my father thought of his own father; he was never explicit about it. I know that once, when someone took it for granted that he didn’t love him, he denied it vehemently, but the fact is that he reproached him for 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 exaggerated enthusiasms, her patrician sense of life, he’ll always let her be the one to choose how things are done or undone. He’s infuriated by her disregard for material things, her essential optimism, her tendency to be a dreamer, her failure to consider that everything could take a turn for the worse, but since he has no stability to offer us, he cuts himself off. He wants us to save what he can’t give us, he wants us to be prudent, he doesn’t want to have to worry about us, he wants us to be safe so that he will be too.

My mother and I do spend money. Without a second thought. We eat out whenever we want, we have a maid, and we take taxis everywhere, but the truth is that we lack for nothing. She makes enough. She works and makes money. She has grown up too. She may not save, she may not plan for tomorrow, but she has liberated herself from the world she shared with my father and created her own world, with new friends. Everything is going well. What does my father have to complain about? He thinks he knows her, and he’s terrified by her levity, the way she seems to make decisions without considering the consequences. Whenever he can, he seeks my complicity to criticize her. It bothers him that by nature I’m as relaxed as she is, and he tries to reform me.

My mother’s world of dreams. My father’s paralyzing hyperrealism. I’m torn — my head and my frustrated desires with my father, my heart and my day-to-day life with my mother. Sometimes I ally myself with my father, but it’s my mother I live with, and I simply don’t understand my father’s dissatisfaction, his dutiful lack of enthusiasm when he comes to see us.