Marcos Giralt Torrente - Paris

I have no idea, I don’t know what that middle ground might be, and I cannot, therefore, give a balanced portrait of his personality, but I have to say that I really don’t miss him. Not since the moment when, just at the point when my own observations were beginning to tarnish the rather idealized image I had of him, my mother seemed to make up her mind to admit defeat, to get rid of him, to be no longer available.

There’s an anecdote that reveals a lot about the kind of person my father was. It dates from long after we’d lost all contact with him, from a time when we rarely even mentioned him, and it’s neither shocking nor spectacular, merely illustrative. It must have happened toward the end of the 1970s or the beginning of the 1980s, and I only know about it because its protagonist, a woman with whom he was living at the time, came to my mother seeking help, something to hold on to, someone to listen to her story. He was, it would seem, a lost cause by then, beyond redemption, and apart from information gleaned from the occasional phone call from people asking for him — which for years gave us an approximate idea of where he was — and apart from one occasion when we happened to see each other in a bar, I’ve had no direct news of him.

The story, as my mother told it to me, is so sordid as to be almost funny were it not for the pain caused to the woman involved. At the time it happened, which was when my mother found out about it and told me, there was no need to tone down any of the details. Had it happened shortly before, when I might still have been affected by who my father was and how he behaved, the version I would have received then would definitely have differed from the original. The bare facts of the case revealed him in a most unfavorable light, and my mother would probably have preferred to say nothing rather than risk giving me the unexpurgated version too soon.

Apparently, my father and the woman had been living together for a year in a rented apartment in downtown Madrid, and no rent had been paid for nine months. My mother told me very little about my father’s previous record, perhaps because she herself did not know or perhaps because she thought it unnecessary to tell me, but it’s not hard to infer that she knew about my father’s capacity for fooling people. To begin with, I imagine he had impressed the woman with his easy way with money at a time when his luck was in, that he had subsequently persuaded her to go and live with him and leave her own apartment, and then, in the end, when the money ran out, she had found herself landed with an unexpected bill, although she nevertheless still trusted in his inevitable assurances that he was expecting to get a windfall any day now or to land some well-paid job or something of the sort. Anyway, this was how things stood, with the landlord threatening to evict them and phoning her every day in increasingly imperative tones, when my father presented the woman with a most unusual solution: moving out into the country and taking over an old battery-style poultry farm that belonged to some acquaintance of his and growing marijuana plants there under artificial light. According to what the woman told my mother, my father had been so excited about this scheme, so convinced it would work, that even though she was aware of the risks she was running, she ended up agreeing to it. They didn’t even have to invest any money, she said by way of an excuse. The neon strips intended to keep the birds in perpetual daylight could be adapted to this new use, and on the understanding that they would share any profits fifty-fifty, the owner of the farm agreed to take care of everything, including providing them with food. It appears that, even so, my father considered that his associate was taking too large a cut, bearing in mind that he was not the one running any risks, because if the police intervened, he would simply have to play the part of the innocent landlord whose trust had been betrayed and he would get off scot free, but it also appears that my father did not, at this point, complain, and, initially at least, he kept to their agreement. After purchasing a few chickens to give some semblance of verisimilitude to the situation, my father and the woman had moved into the farmhouse, fitted out a broken-down old tool shed to make the tiny dwelling slightly roomier, ordered and prepared the hundreds of rectangular planters, sown them with the seeds ready-germinated in rolls of damp cotton wool, and set up an irrigation system, which would mean that when the time came, they wouldn’t have to water each and every plant. From then on, they would have nothing to do but wait until the plants had grown, except, of course, that the irrigation system never worked and they ended up having to water them manually. This, however, was not the woman’s biggest problem. The cannabis plants grew as rapidly as expected throughout the long, hot summer, and when they were ready to be harvested, she and my father picked the leaves, laid them out to dry, chopped them up, and put them in plastic bags. That was when events took a turn for the worse. On the day she visited my mother, the woman said she could not understand how she could possibly have agreed to his suggestion, but she had thought it perfectly natural, even generous on my father’s part, when, in order to keep her from running any unnecessary risks, he proposed that he take charge of the cannabis and come back for her when he had sold it, “in a matter of days,” he said, “just as long as it takes to find a distributor.” She herself couldn’t understand why she had agreed to this, but that is what happened. My father loaded the transparent plastic bags onto a van, disguising them in thick, brown paper sacks that had previously contained fertilizer, and set off with the merchandise one evening as the sun was setting behind the mountains. The problem was that he never came back. He left her alone, with no car and almost no money, to sort things out with their associate, who turned up a week after my father’s departure, demanding his share of the profits. Such was the woman’s trust in my father that not even then did it occur to her to think that she might have been duped and that she would probably never see him again. She resisted the pressure from their intrusive colleague, saying that the fact that she was still there was proof that no one had any intention of running off with his money, and she chose to think that my father had merely run into some difficulty selling the stuff and that it was only a question of waiting a few more days. Not until a whole two weeks had gone by and the pressure had become unbearable was she forced to admit that he would not keep his promise. This happened one night when the owner of the farm visited her again and was more aggressive than usual, insulting her and telling her that he’d heard that my father had been seen in Madrid, in a restaurant he could never have afforded unless he had plenty of money. He said that if my father was still not there the following day to pay him what he owed, then she would have to face the consequences and the police. She ignored his threat and waited until he had gone, then she herself left, walking three miles in the dark to the nearest village, with the surprise and shock of this inexplicable situation still imprinted on her face. She never saw my father again, and when she finally found us a month or two later, it would seem, from her conversation with my mother, that she was still clinging to the possibility that he might have been arrested or had an accident. That was the only explanation for his silence, the only explanation for something that had no explanation.

I looked after my mother when she was ill, I watched her cry and listened in the darkness to her breathing, I cheered her up when she was down and celebrated with her whenever there was something worth celebrating. No one was as close to her or knew her as well as I during that time. For as long as I can remember, whenever her world was falling apart, I was the one who was there by her side to encourage her and help her find a solution. I was the person she saw before she fell asleep each night, the one she said goodbye to in the morning and who was there to greet her on her return from work. Even during the times when my father lived with us, he never played such a role. For years, even when my mother and I were apart, I was the one constant reference point in her life, the only one she could be sure of finding again.