Father and Son by Marcos Giralt Torrente

on the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. My father, who bought my suit and shirt, is the only one who is visibly moved. He cries during the ceremony and he cries later at a convent where the nuns sing us the Salve Regina.
    Slowly, imperceptibly, something has changed between us. I’m still bothered by the same things that have always bothered me, but I’ve decided not to dwell on them, and the truth is that—though at a snail’s pace—he’s making an effort too.
    *   *   *
    I should say a bit more about my work, because it plays a role in our relationship.
    In a way, it was a calling pursued behind his back, chosen to distance me from him but not too much, as if I’d asked myself what the profession most similar to his might be and I’d chosen literature as it was the closest at hand. Often I’ve thought that if I’d seen more of him during my adolescence, when our interests are established, if I’d visited his studio every day, if I’d had the benefit of his encouragement and guidance, if I’d had access to his supplies or his cameras, today I might not be a captive of the word.
    My mother’s father was a writer, and a rather well-known one, and this, in addition to the fact that I use his last name as well as my father’s, is enough to make everyone think it was his example that made me decide to be a writer. I’ve gotten used to that assumption, but the fact is that my interest in writing had more to do with my painter father.
    The world into which I was born was primordially the world of my father. During critical years he was my main aesthetic referent, and it’s possible that the visual sense I believe I possess, an intuitive ability to appreciate secret harmonies and to create them myself to the extent of my abilities, is simply the vestige of an apprenticeship prior to the one that made me a writer.
    The words were there, in my mother’s mouth, shaping reality, capturing life in stories, but I didn’t make them wholly my own until I had to use them to define absence, to exercise my memory, seek explanations, construct an alternate personality to my father’s, that—being artistic—would at once subsume him and carry with it a necessary dose of rebellion.
    I imagine that my father often wondered about my motives, but I suppose he fell prey to the same assumptions as others and took my gradual slide toward literature as proof of my devotion to my mother’s family. An homage to the grandfather rather than to the father.
    Nothing could be further from the truth.
    The comparison was there to be drawn. In the early eighties, when my father was going through the period of depression that distanced him from painting, on sleepless nights I sometimes asked my mother whether he would ever be able to recover and make a name for himself, and she always reassured me that it would be the same for him as it had been for my grandfather, her father, who was in his sixties before he received the honors he had previously been denied. I listened to her, conscious of my grandfather’s greater tenacity, of my father’s fragility, but despite these reservations, in a comparison of the two of them my father came out on top. My grandfather was too established, too unassailable by now, too self-satisfied, and despite his great learning, too provincial in certain intolerable ways for my inordinately anticonventional taste at the time, whereas my father was a bohemian and had my grandfather beat in eclecticism, rebellion, curiosity, and everything that an adolescent who reads Rimbaud might admire. His lack of money, the absence of the legitimizing umbrella of success didn’t undermine his prestige in my eyes, but rather endowed it with an aura of doomed romanticism. Not even the incipient signs of bourgeois lifestyle, when they came, were an obstacle. I explained them away by telling myself that—as in so much