Divorce Is in the Air (14 page)

I must have dozed off after all, because I eventually opened my eyes to overwhelming darkness. The sofa was giving off the same unmistakable leathery odor as his jacket, and as I drifted into a peaceful drowse, I heard the whisper of traffic passing outside, a soothing rhythm from which I was jolted awake by the thunder of a motor that faded without dying away completely, like it was driving down a never-ending street. I lifted my head, and the spongy calluses on his feet reminded me that Dad was still hanging from the ceiling.

I got up, fumbled around on the wall to find the little wheel that controlled the recessed lights; a luminous dust began to fall. I don't know what was going through my mind or what time I thought it was, but when I opened the curtains it was already dark outside, and I was blinded by a white burst, like a flashbulb. When I recovered, I shuddered to think what any insomniac neighbors and the last drinker in the bar would see from across the street: a man standing in his underwear, and a hanged man in silhouette against the violet shadow.

I drew the curtains, but I kept looking out through a gap I held open with my fingers. I'd never noticed how light falling from the streetlamps scatters a layer of golden scales over the pavement. The traffic was easing off; when a car passed slowly by, I tried to narrow my eyes at just the right moment to make its headlights leave an electric filament suspended in the air. Dad liked to collect old telephones, postcards, hookahs, cast-iron junk. All that stuff must have been there but I didn't look for it; instead, there was that shining pavement spread with a greasy layer of damp. It was warm. I knew he drank cherry brandy but I never found out if those people, the cherry brandy drinkers, keep a bottle in the house to fall back on some Sunday, or on a long weekend when the shops are closed, or if for some reason they can't leave the house. I turned to ask him, but then I heard the chugging of a car's engine. I ran to the window, and got there only in time to see the lights moving away. Instead, a motorcycle went by so slowly that its wheels left a trail of water on the pavement. He'd liked flannel and dark green shirts, and when I started looking around I found, beside his bed, some flannel pajamas. I also realized that when the cars got to the end of the street, they started driving more calmly, as if beyond that road's aura the city were dozing; I took it as a sign of respect. The room was permeated with the smell of reheated resin instead of his Chypre cologne: an affectation, like the pure tobacco he smoked, exhaling rings as impeccable as the silk scarf knotted around the open neck of his shirt. The wide range of his tastes, always so elegant except when something upset him and turned his skin pig-red. I was already fairly uneasy at the way the recessed lights beat against the plaster, but when I saw that SEAT car approaching with its headlights off, there was nothing to do but throw myself at Dad's body: I emptied the pockets of his trousers, his shirt and his jacket (standing on a stool), and I found two handkerchiefs, some old cards, and a handful of greasy coins. I gathered it all into a little pile, and then I separated the things and returned them one by one to the welcoming recesses of cloth. Not that he was going to miss them, but I had the impression that my father was still adapting to peace, that there was no reason to deprive him of the objects he had chosen to take with him as he crossed.

I turned on all the lights to look for the telephone. I dialed the number in Boston, and while I listened to the full range of whistles as it connected, I picked up the green file to distract myself from the beloved weight growing stiff in the middle of the room. I couldn't even think of calling my mother.

“Dad?”

It troubled me that my sister recognized the number of this place I'd known nothing about, but the circumstances won out. I had to tell her; I was surprised at how easily my private pain flowed out of me, forming itself into ordinary words to circulate in shared space.

I had to contain my sister over the phone. Or rather, I lent my ear to her emotional dam-burst until (fifteen minutes later) she was finally empty. Her gurgling tirades weren't for listening to; it was enough that someone endure them, so I kept myself entertained imagining the creamy blotches on her cheeks dancing as her offended doll's face contorted. Having invoked Dad's selfishness, I was shaken when she immediately started bemoaning how he had done “this” to her, that he'd turned against her long ago, that he'd never gotten over his distaste at having spawned a daughter with a mind of her own. It was exactly what she would have screeched as a preteen if a twisted ankle kept Dad from driving us to the summerhouse. It's amazing to think about how she managed to go through life without learning a thing, how she could just let it all pass her by the second she became an adult. Mentally, my sister was still a wily fifteen-year-old.

Still, I could have been more of a help when she started to shriek that Dad's suicide covered the Miró-Puigs in opprobrium (my word, but it more or less summarizes her feelings). It was such an outdated attitude; Michael Jackson still hadn't been declared Man of the Year for staying home and dying, but all signs were pointing in that direction. I didn't calm her down, I brushed her off, I'd had enough. It took me two months to realize that Dad's inheritance was a dying star, a situation that may or may not have been linked to his decision to do himself in, to deprive us of his presence, to withdraw his counsel from our lives. It was almost a year before I suspected that those negative balances had accumulated enough dark energy to implode in a black hole. And don't forget in the middle of the whole mess I read my name on that label; the knowledge that Dad had chosen me to heat up the family's financial oven again acted as my anchor, it stabilized me. I didn't even think about the fact that the poor guy had no alternative. They say that when a parent dies, you open a previously undiscovered eyelid that had always protected you from seeing the dark face of the void. But I didn't have time for such disgusting conjectures: my father's blood was staining his remains as his capillaries burst, transforming the man who'd just pushed me onto the stage of adult life into a sinister clown.

I tried to reach an agreement with Dad. I decided to believe, without submitting to any belief system in particular, that his consciousness would not disperse, but would go on wandering the earth with his mind almost intact, receptive and able to hear me whenever I talked to him. It wasn't in my best interest if he could just watch me any time he wanted, of course. Not that I worried about him observing my more intimate moments (death would have to change him a lot before he'd glimpse his son and Helen half naked and not avert his eyes). No, I was more troubled at the thought of him spying on my conversations with Mother, or my domestic arguments, or my botched job with Passgard. His sticking around could be a complicated business, crisscrossed with shadows. I decided to believe he could only make contact with my reality when I summoned him. It was, naturally, too capricious an agreement ever to be taken seriously.

Before leaving and shutting the door behind me, spitting out wine-soaked cork particles, I started opening and closing drawers until I found the robe I hadn't seen him wear since my mother told him she'd had enough of him walking around the house in that rag. An animal instinct made me thrust my snout into the folds of cloth. It smelled of tobacco and old clothes, of little-aired material; only deep within it did a more personal layer unfold, one that could call up no other name but his. And as the scent moved from my nostrils to the crown of my brain, it reminded me of the softness of his manners, so incapable of offending, and the speed with which his eyes would grow calm after he said something cross, as if they wanted to rid themselves of an emotion that was too muddy, too coarse. It was a habit that for years I'd confused with a cold compassion. Now I understand it came from the way he held his feelings in check: methods of emotional management that I neither inherited nor will ever learn. Character traits that were as much his as the line of his lips, the shape of his knees, his fingerprints.

I took the robe with me.

“You really didn't think to take him down?”

Even Helen had the nerve to reproach me, her feet buried up to the ankles in sand as we passed back and forth the bottle of murky wine the bar had lent us in exchange for a blue note. Of course, she wasn't the one who'd had to confront our family's financial wasteland. As I started to unravel the catastrophe Dad left behind, things weren't so bad in the practical sense: I paid the bar's debts, I convinced myself we had enough property, I didn't have to worry too much, Mother wouldn't end up on the streets and my sister could find whatever she had gone to Boston to look for. It was an interpretation with more text, you might say, but it was still a valid one. The only company that wasn't boiling in bad debt paid me a salary: I bought suits, shirts, ties, and a pair of shoes so soft I miss them still.

They were emotional days. I pretended to be strong for Mother's benefit, organized the funeral, went to the lawyer, signed papers and checks. I had two conversations with the regional director of the bank, I bought a coffin for Dad and went with him to the incinerator, and while his carcass burned I focused on sending him supportive vibes. I'm not sure that his ashes could hear my thoughts, but it never hurts to try. Why not admit it? I was sedate, contained, so suave in my three-piece suit, the feel of my black tie so pleasant. But there were all kinds of turbulent emotions teeming inside me. But I'd had enough of the joke: the only humane end to that whole performance was for Dad to get up from the casket. And if that resurrection was too theatrical for the heavenly powers that be, I'd have been happy just to find him at home in the living room, his legs crossed and his eyes buried in his almanac.

Among the swarming emotions, a cautious, paranoid current had begun to flow when I saw the calluses on Dad's feet. And I couldn't look away from the sad yellow enamel, corroded right down to his cuticles. Dad had plenty of defects (though I can't think of any right now), but no one can deny that he always looked his best. He taught me the difference between stylish clothing and clothes that were truly elegant, that I shouldn't wear button-down collars with a tie, and never to unbutton my cuffs. He taught me how to choose a good spencer, how to combine the wide range of beiges and sandy shades, to lose all respect for the color yellow, to value a Ferragamo design, and to take off my hat with my right hand when I greeted someone (a flourish whose academic equivalent would be to study a dead language). So for weeks, the state of his toenails and their shameful exposure drove me to suspect that someone had murdered him. My father's idea of a discussion about ethics included recommending a dental checkup and a reminder to wash one's hands before (as well as after) urinating. He was certainly not one to shrink from talking about his physical ailments. He embarrassed my mother and sister no end, because he didn't seem to consider anyone enough of a stranger to spare them updates on his heart or intestinal issues. I understood them, of course I understood their mortification when he couldn't resist telling some total stranger (a cashier, the mechanic, one of those people who look after cars in the plaza) all about the frequency and strength of his stomach cramps. I especially understood them when, without telling anyone and with my face burning, I swiped a personal notebook Dad had used to keep track of his bathroom visits, annotated with precise impressions of each evacuation. On the other hand, they should have known that if we'd been able to listen comfortably to his health problems, he wouldn't have had to embarrass us by subjecting neighbors and friends to those interrogations, in search of a little solace and complicity. We just never understood that his chattiness about bodily functions (veins, stomach cramps, gases, intestines) was the other side of his grooming: the basic preoccupations of a life.

If I let the murder idea slide, if I never managed to consolidate a sordid theory, it was thanks to my inability to imagine any context in which a murderer would take the trouble to hang my father and then remove his socks, which I found a few days later beside the bed. As I calmed down (that is, as the growing avalanche of financial worries sidelined any troubles that didn't reek of money), I understood that the most shocking aspect of that scene—which had branded itself white hot into my heart, and if I'm honest I don't think it will ever cool—was to think that Dad had neglected and ignored his nails long enough to let them turn into those rough, lemon-colored claws. Something had been pounding at him pretty hard for almost a year to make him disregard what mattered most to him in life. It was more forgivable for him to have overlooked the fact that, once he was hanging from the ceiling, his nails would be floating level with my eyes (assuming he had indeed planned for me to find him). After all, when a guy is thinking about killing himself, he can't have many things on his mind, but they sure as hell must be absorbing.

“I'm going to be your sister's best friend, John. Your sister needs a best friend, there's no denying that.”

My sister's favorite activity was keeping a detailed catalogue of my defects and mistakes. At some point she'd decided that I was an utterly hopeless idiot, and in spite of the condescension she'd found it necessary to display ever since, her sentence had been liberating for both of us. It was strange, if you think about it. We were both children of a crazy mother and a suicidal father (the very same ones, in fact!), and we'd both unexpectedly been left penniless: we should have gotten along quite well. The fact that I'd ended up painted as the hopeless one and she as levelheaded was a dirty trick of the gender distribution of roles. It was me (so much for any feminist sentiment) they sent as the family's representative, me who stood before the board of specialists who bled us with the fees they charged for exercising their incompetence. “Circumstances,” they said. “Our hands are completely tied,” they said. And they called themselves professionals! Seriously, I'd been brought up to manage my life within a range of pretty comfortable circumstances. They hadn't prepared me to survive in the wild. I was created (and I say this swallowing my pride) to be a comic character. I didn't even hear the death knell when they recommended I invest in cheese.