Marcos Giralt Torrente - Paris

My mother still did not look at me, and Delfina, who until then had looked at me every time she spoke, now forgot to do so, temporarily overcome by the urgent need to respond.

“But I didn’t abandon you. It was my life! I had to get out of there. You know I did my best to stand up to her, but I lost the battle. I objected right from the start, as soon as she started demolishing everything that had to do with Mom, as soon as the first photo was taken down and we began to discover that we couldn’t do or say things that we had considered perfectly normal before, as soon as she began to deny Mom’s whole existence, not only at home but in our lives as well, and Dad let her do as she pleased, even things he shouldn’t have let her do. You know how I stood up to her. I’m not to blame for our father’s passivity or for her piling on the pressure all the time. I was young, too. I lost the battle. I couldn’t stand it, and so I escaped. That’s all.”

“That’s exactly my point. That’s what I mean. You escaped.”

“But I didn’t abandon you. After I got married, I was always there for you. For all these years, you’ve always been able to come to me. Who listened to your fears? Who gave you refuge? I was even your accomplice. . You can’t accuse me of having neglected my obligations to you. It’s just that I can’t accept this latest thing, you simply can’t—”

“I know you were always there for me. I know how hard you fought. I know how much you’ve had to keep silent about. I know how much you’ve done to help. And believe me, I’m grateful. Even though I did the opposite of what you advised, even though I’m about to ignore your advice yet again, you’ve always helped me and you still do. I mean, even your coming to Madrid to try and make me change my mind is helpful. . But I’m not talking about how you’ve behaved over the years. I’m not even talking about what I thought about your getting married or about the two years you virtually disappeared. As you say, it was your life. As you say, you had to leave. I’m not talking about what I thought of it at the time. What I’m talking about is how I felt . I’m saying that everything, absolutely everything, affects us. I’m saying that an event, however seemingly trivial, like your sister leaving home, can affect you. That’s what I’m saying, and it just so happens that it did affect me. I’m not saying whether or not I was right to feel abandoned. Who am I to say!”

I noticed a touch of reluctance and artificial coolness in the condescending thoroughness with which my mother had spelled out her motives for complaint. She had uncrossed her legs now and was sitting leaning slightly forward, arms resting casually on her knees in marked contrast with the stern look on her face.

“And yet you talk as if it still affected you. You say you’re not reproaching me, but you are. You’re contradicting yourself. .”

“Of course it affects me. I think about my situation then, and I still feel like crying. My whole world collapsed. Suddenly, almost without being aware of it, I went from feeling safe and secure in a solid family of four to only having a father I could barely recognize. To tell you the truth, it still affects me. But it’s something I can’t control. Thinking and feeling are two different things. Feeling influences thinking and both are part of us, but they’re different.”

“But you called me selfish. You said that you did what you did because I left home.”

“All I said was please don’t talk to me about selfishness, because you’re still convinced that I did what I did for frivolous reasons, and that’s not true, Delfina. You don’t seem to realize that I did nothing you wouldn’t have done yourself. You couldn’t stand the situation at home and you escaped. Well, so did I. I only said that you forced me to do that in order to make you aware that, just as your choice of exit strategy was influenced by your desire to escape, so the decisions I took were influenced by my feelings of abandonment after you left.”

“But you can’t compare the two! When I left home, I didn’t go crazy. I didn’t just vanish. .”

From where she was standing, my aunt turned toward me, perhaps regretting the vehemence of her last words or perhaps wanting to see their effect on me, and before my mother could respond and before she braced herself for my mother’s riposte, she withdrew her hand from the back of the armchair, moved a little closer, and nervously leaned her whole body against it.

“So what if I did, Delfina? What does it matter? Was that really so inconsiderate of me? I don’t think it would have changed anything if I’d done as you did. I don’t know why you keep harping on about it.”

“Look, there’s no point in continuing this discussion. You mix everything up. I don’t want to talk about the past, it’s of no interest to me. I mentioned your leaving Dad’s house, but that was only because that was the most obvious example, and everything else was just more of the same. That’s all. Let’s just drop the subject. There’s no point talking about it.”

Delfina drew back again from the armchair and began slowly to move away, only to immediately stop and remain where she was, although this time without resting her hand on the chair back for support.

“No, I don’t want to drop the subject, not until you recognize that you can’t judge my life that easily. Everything I’ve done, I did because I thought it was for the best.”

Although my aunt’s suggestion that they bring the discussion to a close had been more rhetorical than sincere, my mother’s instant rejection of her words visibly upset her. She made as if to answer, but at the last moment she seemed to think better of it and waited a moment before saying anything more. My mother was sitting very erect, hands gripping the arms of the chair, her head turned toward my aunt.

“Of course. I’ve never said otherwise. I’ve always thought you were acting for the best, but if you had stopped to think, as I’m asking you to do now, perhaps things would have turned out differently.”

“Don’t you see, Delfina, it’s not a matter of thinking. I’m very happy with the decisions I made. Everything you think of as a mistake, everything you think I could have avoided in order to not end up in the situation I’m in now, I would do again. I don’t regret anything. I’m quite sure that I did what I should have done, that I did what seemed right to me, or what I had no other choice but to do.”

“Don’t be absurd! It wasn’t the best thing or the right thing for you to leave home. Neither was going off to Paris. Or putting up with what you’ve had to put up with. Of course you had other options. You could have saved yourself a lot of disappointment and a lot of loneliness. Why did you have to wait so long? It’s much too easy and too irresponsible to excuse everything by saying that you had no alternative.”

“Don’t simplify matters. They’re two different things. I didn’t say it was always because I had no alternative. I had my own reasons, too. .”

“ And you had no alternative. .”

“Yes, when I left home, which you seem to think was so very important, I really didn’t have any other choice. Since then, I’ve always done what I thought was for the best.”

“Forgive me for insisting, but I see no sign of that in your subsequent decisions, nor do I understand what you mean when you say you had no choice but to leave home. Why? Why did you need to leave home, considering all the anxiety and pain you caused? Couldn’t you have just done what everyone else does, what I did?”

The pace and tone of Delfina’s responses to my mother changed according to rules I found hard to predict; having started out by trying to strike a conciliatory note, she had, as she spoke, grown gradually more agitated, so that her last question emerged rather abruptly. She was still standing in the same place, although now she was resting all her weight on her left leg and had her right leg stretched out and balanced on the heel of her shoe, pointing toward me.