Father and Son Read Online Free

Communist Party of Spain gatherings, one clandestine and the second by then legal, and we watch the king’s proclamation on television. Stories fly about the guerrillas of Fuerza Nueva and Bandera Roja. I have an album of Civil War songs, and I learn “The Internationale.” In ’77 I’m taught in school to make a basic gelatin print and I print flyers asking people to vote for José Bergamín, who is running for senator on the Republican Left ticket. All of this I essentially live through with my mother, but my mother is a monarchist, my father a republican, and I—like my father—am a republican. I decide this at a traffic light in Plaza de Castilla one afternoon when the two of us are out in his blue Dyane 6. My father has a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard (Lola, they’re called), and what he says is more venal than rational, but I get it. I want to get it, to share this with him.
    Then there’s God. My mother has taught me to pray, and that same afternoon, with the pack of Lola on the dashboard, I listen to my father argue against the existence of God and life after death. Here, however, I stand my ground. Where are the grandmothers I never met? I agree with him, I try to convince myself that after death there is nothing, but I’m not being entirely honest. In fact, though I hide it from him, for years I still keep trying to believe. When we visit a cathedral or a church, I cross myself, and he can’t help smiling. He’s moved by it. I’m sure it irritates him that we aren’t alike in this regard, that he hasn’t convinced me, but he’s moved by it.
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    Before going on, I should pause here. When coolly catalogued, the facts of the past lose their distinctiveness and come to seem interchangeable. A catalogue like the one I’ve been making does a better job than any digression would of reflecting the transitory nature of life, the nothing that everything becomes when death makes its appearance; still, emphasizing the latter point—important as it is—is not my only goal.
    A life, though fragile and ephemeral, is so singular that it comes as a surprise that it should be the result of an act of intercourse. The contrast between the trivial randomness with which two bodies unite and the meaning that the life to which that union may give rise assumes for the person who possesses it obsessed me for a while. On alcohol-fueled nights, surrounded by friends, the calculation of the approximate dates of our origination filled me with hilarity and vertigo. More than our births, it amused and dismayed me to conjure up the moment nine months earlier when we were conceived. Why did our parents’ bodies come together on that particular day at that particular time? Maybe it was dinner out and a few drinks; maybe they had been on a trip to the country and it was the coda to a summer outing; maybe they had fought and this was how they made up. But what would have happened if they hadn’t taken a trip, hadn’t gone out to dinner, hadn’t fought, hadn’t slept together that night? More than any other paradox, the tremendous futility of these questions encapsulated for me the tragedy of the human condition, the arbitrariness of our fate.
    When does life begin to be subjected to a multitude of factors capable of altering it, of channeling it in a certain direction?
    I’m the result of an act of intercourse that took place at the end of May 1967. I don’t know the circumstances, and I don’t care to know them. Nor do I know what caused the bodies of my father’s parents to unite in November 1939, though here I can take some license: they had spent the war apart, she in Biarritz and he in Madrid, and after their reunion, I imagine that whatever their inclinations, their carnal relations must have been frequent.
    I’ll have to go back in time if I want to sketch a comprehensible portrait of my