Marcos Giralt Torrente - Paris

Perhaps she did weigh up and foresee everything, even my indecision and my many contrary impulses, and that is the conclusion I tend to reach in moments of extreme despair, when I allow myself to succumb to distrust and resentment and to return to the ingenuous idea of her possible deceit, even though I know that if she did conceal things from me, no betrayal could ever outweigh her devotion. I struggle with this whenever I’m mired in pessimism, but at the same time, I’m still not sure and I immediately feel ashamed of my own exaggerated obsessiveness and drive it from my mind, blaming everything on my own lack of balance. It doesn’t matter whether things were done deliberately or not, I tell myself. She might well have weighed up and foreseen everything, even my uncertainty and the contrary impulses doing battle inside me, but even were that so, it would still not justify my disaffection, it wouldn’t make her protective shell any thicker or save her from the attacks she was armoring herself against. Underneath her apparent strength, I see how vulnerable and fragile she is — as deserving of compassion as if she had trusted entirely to providence and shown no more foresight than the amount one needs in order to survive from day to day with just a vague awareness of looming misfortune; as confused as if she had found herself forced to improvise and every act or decision relating to me had been the product of an oft-repeated, sterile debate in which any benefits from the winning side of the argument were cancelled out automatically by the losing side; no colder or more egotistical than if she’d let herself be guided solely by instinct and there had been neither despair nor planning, only a need to adapt herself to events as they happened; no less considerate, either, than if she’d limited herself to doing only what she wanted to do, ignorant of the many interpretations and consequences that her actions would have for me; no more devoted and dedicated than she would have been if I weren’t her only child and I’d had brothers and sisters with whom to share her attentions.

Time passes, and memories grow hazy, and what never dies loses intensity and inevitably, in hindsight, seems less important than it was. There are no answers to the unresolved unknowns, apart from those I myself can offer, but I shouldn’t complain. No word can change the past, and no word is the right word if you say it when what it describes is the past and not the present. In the present, there are no words. Words come later, and then we all use them in the same way, we can all describe things and give our opinions even though what we are describing and giving our opinions about is not ours, even though it never happened to us. We don’t need someone to spell out what we can only guess at, because we can never be sure that what he or she is telling us is the whole thing or only part of it, and our doubts will remain unassuaged. I’m tired of feeling that I’ve been the exact same person for far too long, tired of thinking about my Aunt Delfina, and my mother, and my father who is not my father. I’m tired of the grief and pointless complaining, of longing for what I do not have and might perhaps loathe if I did have it. I’m tired of the anger and remorse, and of the suspicion that it is merely my own egotism that drove me on then and still drives me on now.

Today I went to visit my mother in the hospital, and as usual, I went with my wife. I prefer her to come, too, because I would find it much more upsetting without her. I would feel I was being cruel keeping my mother there rather than at home, and I would be beset by all kinds of anxieties. As happens more and more often, my mother didn’t recognize me, but she hadn’t deteriorated physically since the last time I saw her, and, within limits, she seemed well. Naturally, I was glad to see this, but when I left, I felt sad to remember her life, how quickly it had passed, and I couldn’t help asking my wife, as I so often have before, if she believes that Paris ever really happened.

“What does it matter,” she said, “when nothing matters any more.”

And she’s right.

It’s a feeling of dread. It’s nostalgia. It’s fear. It’s the dreams that loom in the darkness. It’s time. It’s wanting to run to her bedside and say, “Forgive me, it’s all right, I know everything, go to sleep.”

I would like to thank Marcos Giralt Torrente, Annella McDermott, Cecilia Ross and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.

MARCOS GIRALT TORRENTE is an award-winning writer from Madrid. He has published several books, including the novels París (Herralde Novel Award), Los seres felices and Tiempo de vida (Spanish National Book Award), the novella Nada sucede solo and the collections of short stories Entiéndame and El final del amor (International Short Fiction Award Ribera del Duero), released by McSweeneys in English as The End of Love and longlisted in the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. Paris is his first novel in English-language translation.

MARGARET JULL COSTA has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Luis Verissimo. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz’s masterpiece The Maias , and, most recently, she won the 2012 Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão, for which she was also runner-up with The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes.