Kamchatka (20 page)

In other traditions, the role of the loving father is also the product of a gradual development. The Greek gods father demigods and heroes right and left, but they don't seem to feel anything for their progeny beyond a vague sense of responsibility; many of them seem more sympathetic to certain mortals than to their own offspring. Saturn, as Goya had revealed to me, went to the extreme of eating his children. Laius tried to kill his son Oedipus, though in the end it was he who was murdered. The first great portrait of a father–son relationship appears in
The Odyssey
, but the glory goes not to Odysseus but to Telemachus, who praises the image of his father during his long absence, which begins with the Trojan War. Homer introduces us to Telemachus in the palace in Ithaca; there he is daydreaming, his heart consumed with grief: ‘He could almost see his magnificent father, here … in the mind's eye.'

King Arthur never gets to know Uther, who sired him. On hearing the prophecy that his own son will dethrone him, Arthur does as herod did and orders the death of every newborn male child in the kingdom; on this occasion Mordred survives, but when he grows to be a man he dies after being run through by his father's lance. In Shakespeare, it is the children who show devotion (Cordelia for example, or Hamlet, who owes much to Telemachus), a devotion
their fathers do not seem to deserve. The best characters in Dickens are orphans: David Copperfield, Pip, Oliver Twist, even Esther Summerson, raised by an aunt who openly curses the day the girl was born. We know nothing of Ahab's father, or Alice's or Dr Jekyll's; they seem to have appeared in the world just as we meet them, like Venus rising from the shell.

This does not mean that our current concept of what a father is did not exist in other times. A seed can be found in the New Testament, in the parable of the Prodigal Son: a father is he who has the kindness to give the best of himself to his children, the wisdom to leave them free to learn from their own experience; the patience to wait for them to attain maturity; and the goodness, when they return, to welcome them with open arms and invite them to sit at his table once more. This notion of the father tempers that of the Olympian, authoritarian father of the Old Testament, in whose image all patriarchs are made, from Lear to Adam trask in Steinbeck's
East of Eden.
In the course of a single book, the balance of power shifts dramatically. In the beginning, fatherhood in the Bible is synonymous with power. By the end, it is centred on love.

Until quite recently, children were born into a world that seemed predetermined and unchanging. Their parents were who they were – shepherds or soldiers, hunters or miners – and remained so until the day they died, categorized into classes and castes that bore witness to an immutable social order, which they accepted without even wondering if there might be some other place for them. Fathers were expected to be distant, authoritarian. They cared for their children as a wolf might, providing them with food and shelter, protecting them from predators. By the time their children could walk, they had taught them to communicate through language, to use their hands – whether working with a plough, a lance or a printing press – believing that their children would go on doing so until the time came for them to teach their own children. That was all, and it was a lot.

That world no longer exists. My grandfather belonged to the last generation of fathers in the classical sense of the word: early in life he chose a career and he stuck with it to the end. He faced down storms and fires and drought (I choose these images because it is difficult for me to separate my grandfather from the land he worked), but he never suffered a crisis of identity. My father, on the other hand, first opened his eyes on a world whose certainties had crumbled. As a result, he did not need to be stern (since boundaries were more fluid now) or distant (because this new world had eliminated all distance) with us, which was a good thing. But at the same time he played out the adventure that was his life in front of us – one adventure that was far from resolved. I'd like to think that, in the long run, this too will prove to have been a good thing, but it's too early to tell.

My grandfather was a distinct, unique man. My father was many men: the fool and the soldier, the donkey driver and the fan of
The Invaders
; the cool father and the rebellious son, the saviour and the lover; the professional lawyer and the defender of hopeless cases. I'm not saying that these things were irreconcilable, simply that they were conflicting elements that existed within my father and were constantly struggling towards resolution, never more so than after March 1976, when the country he thought he understood began to slip away beneath his feet. It is easy to think that my mother was not similarly conflicted, because she had fashioned a mask that perfectly concealed her feelings. But it was obvious that she cowered in the fearsome shadow of grandma Matilde, another member of a generation that never confessed to having any doubts – at least not until it was too late.

After the setbacks of the first few days, our stay at the
quinta
took on a veneer of normality. At first sight, the only thing that appeared to have changed was the sets. We were all still playing the same roles – only the screenplay was different. Me and the Midget still went to school. Papá and mamá went off to work. Even Lucas, a foreign body introduced into the family, had been assimilated: one more son who slipped into a pre-existing long-established family dynamic. Over dinner, he might talk about the news with papá and mamá while playing with a ball made of crumbs of bread, firing it between the goalposts I created with my hands; Lucas had become an equidistant centre, a point of perfect equilibrium. He even kept his toothbrush in the same glass as the rest of ours.

On the face of it, the fact that our new life went smoothly seemed to be a triumph over the Midget's obsessions and phobias. My little brother had been placed in a special rocket, wearing only his favourite pyjamas, with Goofy in one hand and his training cup in the other, and launched towards another planet. It was a disruption that would
have been upsetting to any kid his age; but for the Midget, who was abnormally attached to the rituals and objects that made up his world, the break must have been all the more traumatic. There had been no room on the spaceship for
his
bed,
his
school,
his
LEGO; nor had there been room for my toys and my games which provided his daily diet of destruction, no room for the armchair where he did his little dance every time the TV announcer said ‘Coming up next:
The Saint'
; and there had been no room for the blue and red tricycle he was almost too big for. And yet, in the zero gravity in which we now found ourselves, the Midget floated like an experienced astronaut. There was the small problem of his bedwetting, but that was a secret and the two of us were working to resolve it. Papá and mamá knew nothing about it, and from their point of view, the Midget's adjustment to all these changes had been simply remarkable.

In one way or another, all of us were trying hard to see the silver lining; as Manolito puts it in
Mafalda
when he breaks Guille's toy car and then shows him how to use one of the cogs as a spinning top: ‘It's all about finding the little victories in the big defeats.'

At the same time I sensed there was something unnatural about the Midget's new-found normality, but it was only a hunch. I didn't know, for example, that our parents' decision to send us back to school was the cornerstone of this edifice: they thought that, in spite of the differences in how they operated, the familiar routine of school smocks, studying and playtime, might serve to counterbalance the silence of the cosmic void in which we found ourselves floating. What calamities might have befallen us had they not stopped by our old house to collect the Midget's fetish objects, my comics and my game of Risk, we will never know, but given the inherent risks involved in making the trip, it was clear just how far they were prepared to go to keep us happy. Even while we were living as fugitives, they were determined that we should have some semblance of a normal life.

When they were with us, they took pains to pretend that they were the same as ever, but it took hard work and courage to feed this illusion. From time to time they would let slip some hint of how worn out they were by the constant pretence that life was perfect: it might be by saying something intended to reassure us that they weren't really worried, or laughing a little too hard, like actors not used to their roles. I noticed these things but kept right on playing the part that had been allotted to me in this drama. But sometimes something happened that took me aback.

In quiet moments, some detail would come unstuck from the background and rush towards me. It was as though I was seeing things through the 3-D glasses they give you in the cinema to watch
House of Wax
. Papá's moustache, for example: it was supposed to make him look older and more serious, but sometimes I'd see it, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, floating in the middle of the living room even after he had already left the house. Or the smart suits mamá had taken to wearing whenever she went out, so unlike the jeans and the bright colours she had always worn at home. Sometimes I'd see a skirt and a blouse floating in the doorway, clinging to an invisible body even though the sound of the Citroën meant that mamá had already gone.

My mind was playing tricks on me, and its sense of humour revealed what all of us were carefully trying to conceal: that we were trying to be other people, living a borrowed life as we floated in a sky that was getting darker and more impenetrable. I knew by now that someone or something had forced my mother to resign from her job at the university, although she still had her job at the lab. I knew by now that someone or something had taken over papá's office and he now worked in a different bar or café every day, to throw whoever was trailing him off the scent. One time he met up with Ligia, his secretary, under some filthy bridge. There were people there digging through the rubbish, and at some point a police car went past and
they had to duck out of sight, but the only thing that bothered Ligia was that when papá handed her a petition of habeas corpus, it was usually covered in coffee rings.

These and other bits of information filtered back to me, but only fragments, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle I couldn't fit together; I was so much in denial that I didn't even have nightmares. For a long time I thought that my parents told me these little things because they believed I wouldn't understand the bigger picture – whatever it was they were not saying, whatever they were hiding from me. Now I think that they did it deliberately, knowing that by the time I put the pieces together and could finally see the picture in the jigsaw puzzle, I would be safe, far from the danger that, right now, threatened us all.

The moment I entered the house, I realized I was not alone. I kept moving, impelled by the inertia of coming home (throwing my schoolbag onto a chair, letting my worried fingers toy with the top button of my school smock), but the evidence hit me quickly like the clip around the ear mothers give to children throwing a tantrum. The house always smelled of dust, dirty socks and last night's dinner. Now it smelled of something different, something sweeter and more natural. I found a TV guide on the table. We never bought the TV guide. This one was open and someone had underlined their favourite programmes in blue pen. As for the rest of the living room, I was more disturbed by what was not there than what was: someone had erased all traces of our existence, the slippers on the floor, the half-eaten box of biscuits, the comics, the Midget's drawings. (By now he was drawing haloes over everything. The cows had haloes. Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole had haloes.)

The first thing I thought was that I should warn him. The Midget was still outside, checking for dead toads in the swimming pool. It
might be too late for me, but I still had time to warn him: all I had to do was scream ‘Run for it!' (In my imagination dramatic moments were always dubbed in Mexican, like cop shows on TV.) The Midget would run away, climb over the privet hedge and run to the spot on the road that papá showed us when he was explaining ‘action stations'. If papá shouted ‘action stations', we were supposed to run to the village and ask Father Ruiz to hide us, probably in the church itself because everyone knows that fugitives are allowed to hide in churches and claim sanctuary.

‘Hello, darling. Are you home?'

Mamá emerged from the kitchen carrying a little bowl of wild flowers.

‘What are you doing here?' I said loudly to overcome the thunderous b-b-buh-BUM of my heart.

‘I got home early today. Where's chubby?'

At that moment the Midget came in. Hardly had mamá set down the bowl of flowers than the Midget hugged her, almost knocking her over.

‘Hello, darling. How was school?'

‘Inndsmsp!' said the Midget, his face still buried in mamá's skirt.

‘What?'

‘I need some soap. We're going to make statues out of soap!'

‘That sounds like fun. I bought milk.'

These were the magic words. The Midget did the short version of his little victory dance and rushed into the kitchen.

‘Wait a minute, I'll open it for you.' mamá turned her attention to me. ‘What about you, how was your day?'

I shrugged my shoulders and followed her into the kitchen with the Midget.

‘What about my
Superman
comic?'

‘It's in your bedroom, where it should be.'

‘And my slippers?'

‘Have you looked in the wardrobe?'

‘They're never in the wardrobe.'

‘They are now.'

Mamá tore a corner off the milk bag with her teeth and spat the little piece of plastic into the sink. This calmed me a little. For a minute I thought she'd been replaced by an Invader, a
Doppelgänger
identical on the outside but programmed to do typical mother things like tidying the house, putting things in their proper places and decorating the place with flowers.