Father and Son by Marcos Giralt Torrente Page A

else—he was the victim of outside agents. That his true nature was other.
    The kind I wanted for myself.
    This was at the beginning, of course. Later, it was different.
    Later, everything got more complicated. With great sacrifice and hardly any outside encouragement, he devoted himself more assiduously than ever to painting and he began his long fight to recover the ground he’d lost. By dint of hard work, he managed to make a place for himself. Once again he showed in galleries vying to be top-of-the-line, returned to the art fairs, relaunched a quiet international career, and won the occasional prize, while, in the face of his seeming indifference, I finished my studies and did everything I could to become a writer. In the mid-nineties, when I published my first book, the skepticism with which he’d greeted the dawning of my interest in writing was replaced by a surprised recognition of my determination, and later, as I faced up to increasingly tough challenges, by an undisguised pride that at times betrayed glimpses of his enduring dissatisfaction with the path I’d chosen, as well as a pained suspicion—beginning with my first novel—that I was denouncing him in literary form. Nevertheless, he continued to be someone who’d risen from the dead and whose every step required enormous effort, while I was all promise, with everything handed to me on a silver platter. And sometimes, very occasionally, though he immediately made fun of himself for it, he revealed jealousy of the greater media attention that my work received, as well as of the reputation and respect I had begun to gain among people in his world—art critics, for example—without seeing that it was in part the result of social skills that he lacked. I remember one fateful afternoon when he discovered—in a hack-job encyclopedia distributed for free by some newspaper—that while there was a brief biographical entry for me, there was none for him. I could see that he was hurt by this, although his happiness on my behalf was undiminished.
    I was pettier. The sadness I felt at seeing the expression on his face, my near-immediate repentance, my regret at his anticipated disappointment, my admiration of his painting, and my sincere belief that he was more deserving—infinitely more deserving—than me, don’t excuse the fact that deep down, even if in a muffled and hidden way that I instantly denied to myself, I took some pleasure in his distress.
    How vexing for my father, whatever the case. What an uncomfortable fate to have in your own family, in the person of your only child, a disgruntled and suspicious notary who, thinking he knows you, makes an accounting of your weaknesses, your deficiencies, and your broken promises.
    But he bore it with dignity, I must say. He permitted himself only the occasional dig. He celebrated my smallest triumphs, and he apparently forgot everything there was to be forgotten: the exaggerations I made, the unconscious blunders in which I discounted his influence on me, and—especially—the misjudgments of him to which some of my literary preoccupations might have given rise. For someone so private, so reserved, this must have been agonizing.
    And there we were, each the mirror of the other, practitioners of similar careers, connected by the telephone line. Watching each other from afar, sometimes in anger, sometimes in hopes of reconciliation, sometimes in a precarious state of bliss. There we were, the two of us: he in his studio listening to music while he struggled with a painting, and I in my apartment struggling against myself as I listened to music.
    What a trial for my father, despite an underlying current of satisfaction in my successes, to see the uncertainty that so tormented him taking shape in his son’s future. What a trial to see everything perpetuate itself, so that in addition to the consequences of having chosen a profession as insecure as painting, he