Marcos Giralt Torrente - Father and Son - A Lifetime

In early 1980 my father shows at a fleetingly successful gallery, and a few months later he leaves on a Fulbright to spend a year in New York. The day of his departure he gives me conflicting reasons for why I shouldn’t come to the airport, and I suspect that either he isn’t traveling alone or he’s being seen off by someone he doesn’t want me to meet. I get a postcard of fake UFOs flying over the Twin Towers, I get a postcard of a miniature explorer shrunken by natives, I get a postcard of an Art Deco teapot, I get a postcard of graffiti. Those are the ones I kept; I don’t think there were any others. No letter. Occasionally he calls me. Hurried conversations in which he barrages me with questions.

Since he left, it’s been agreed that I’ll visit him, but although it’s my mother’s understanding that she’s coming too, he thinks I’ll be coming alone. I don’t know whether it’s a misunderstanding or whether one of them wasn’t honest with the other in previous conversations. The fact is that when my mother and I arrive to spend Christmas, it’s clear from the start that my father doesn’t want her there. They don’t tell me this, but I sense it. I sleep with my father in the double bed, and my mother sleeps on a mattress on the floor. I remember one afternoon when they leave me in the loft to have a private conversation. Even so, my father takes us on long excursions, showing us the city as if nothing is wrong. He buys me John Lennon’s Double Fantasy , he buys me an electronic flipper game, he buys me some eye-catching yellow radio headphones, he buys me snow boots. At Bloomingdale’s, the night before we go back, my mother gets me a brown corduroy polo jacket, and she exits with a black digital watch that — tired of waiting to be helped — my father takes without paying. They try to act normal in front of me; at moments they probably even forget that it’s an act. But that trip is key to the severing of the final emotional ties between them, because years later they continue to bring it up, he still angry and she still hurt.

The years 1981, 1982, and 1983 are confused in my memory. Either too many things happen or I begin to be too conscious of 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 them, but I refuse: even with someone else in the room, it seems more natural to me to sleep with them than with two strangers. My father gets angry, grumbles, but accepts it in the end. Two clashing forms of logic: a child’s and an adult’s.

The next year, 1982, is hectic. Hectic because lots of things — contradictory things — happen. Hectic because their effect on me is mixed. Hectic because 1982 stretches on, turning into 1983. In ’82 we visit Paris and Amsterdam; in ’82 I go out at night, march in protests, and wear a little black circle-A anarchist pin; in ’82 I spend the summer in England and buy myself a pair of plaid pants, boots, and a leather jacket; in ’82 I make short-lived plans with some friends to form a band. I tell my father about it one Sunday when we’re at lunch with my mother in a Chinese restaurant, and though at first he can’t help making a joke of it, he ends up becoming our biggest champion, as is always the case when behind some plan of mine he senses an itch to escape my mother’s influence. In ’82 my father adopts the habit of picking me up at school some days and returning me the next morning after the two of us spend the night at the studio where he lives and works. In the evening, after dinner at a restaurant, he takes me to shows or to the movies or — during the season — to a bullfight. I remember seeing Picasso and Mondrian and El Greco and Dalí, and especially a Kurt Schwitters show that for a few evenings inspires me to forget the black Olivetti typewriter on which I’ve begun to write and throw myself into making collages à la Kurt Schwitters: I remember Quest for Fire ; I remember City of Women ; I remember Fitzcarraldo ; I remember a Monty Python movie and a revival of Eraserhead . All in all, in ’82 we see quite a bit of each other; I bask in the novel male camaraderie and imprint on my brain attitudes that I will make my own, but it’s also an era in which the silences between us grow thicker. One day, on what pretext I can’t remember, he brings me to an apartment to which he has a key, and on the doorstep, just before we go in, he warns me that I’ll see paintings and pieces of furniture that belong to him, which he’s loaned to the owner for a story in a design magazine. Weeks later, after he picks me up from school, instead of sleeping at his studio, we sleep at that same apartment, this time with the owner present. It’s the friend he met in Brazil, whom just over a year ago he’d brought to my mother’s apartment.