Father and Son Read Online Free Page A

father.
    His birthplace itself is revealing: in Madrid, across from the Cortes, in a grand block of apartments built at the turn of the twentieth century to be inhabited by families of the Madrid haute bourgeoisie, among which his was certainly not the least prominent. I’m told that I visited the place, but the truth is that I have no memory of it. Or no memory of the inside, since the building still stands. From the photographs I’ve seen, I know that it possessed all the attributes of the opulent homes of the day. Spacious rooms, gold-framed mirrors, rugs from the Royal Tapestry Factory … In theory it belonged to his maternal grandparents, but just as his parents took refuge there after the war, other family members came to spend some time or settled there more or less permanently. It must have been a happy place, because his mother’s family was happy. Happy and not at all conventional, despite their standing.
    I know, for example, that my great-grandfather had a brother who was a morphine addict and another who never left the house or even his bed, where he spent his days reading travel books surrounded by maps, and that my great-grandfather looked after both of them, administering their fortunes. On my great-grandmother’s side, an emblematic case is that of a rather quiet and retiring brother—so quiet that strangers imagined he was mute—who, after a life as a model bachelor, appeared at his mother’s house one day with a former maid and three boys already in long pants, whom he introduced as his children. When my great-great-grandmother, beyond scandalized, asked why he’d had relations with the maid, his answer was “Because she brought up my meals every day…”
    Socially, both branches of the maternal side of my father’s family constituted two unique but related versions of the haute bourgeoisie of the Madrid of the era. They weren’t industrialists or government officials or professionals. My great-grandfather’s family came from the north of Castilla and boasted noble origins, though my great-grandfather’s fortune, when my father was born, was founded on speculation in securities and real estate; my great-grandmother’s family on the maternal side was from Madrid and on the paternal side from a mountain village that my great-great-grandfather had left at the end of the nineteenth century to come and open a perfumery, which in its day was the best in the capital, one of those businesses petulantly displaying a sign reading OFFICIAL PURVEYORS OF THE ROYAL FAMILY . The differences between my great-grandfather’s family of landowners and my great-grandmother’s family of tradespeople were amplified by various shades of behavior that aren’t worth elaborating upon here. What matters is that both represented a way of life that was soon to disappear, a way of life for which neither family—whether out of ineptitude or because of copious wartime losses—was able to find a substitute. The truth is that my father never knew this life in all its glory, but rather at the beginning of its decline. And yet, that world—unequivocally bourgeois, but with sufficient outlets for the cultivation of taste and judgment—was the lost paradise to which he always dreamed of returning. A paradise that was equal parts bourgeois stability and the happiness mentioned above.
    I stress happiness to underscore one of my father’s defining characteristics: his yearning to be happy, to recover the lightness that the passage of time tends to make more difficult, less permanent, as well as to distinguish the atmosphere of faded but cheerful prosperity that reigned in the home of his mother’s parents from that of the home into which he moved with his parents shortly after his birth. If my great-grandparents’ house reflected the taste of the haute bourgeoisie of the 1890s, my grandparents’ exemplified the preferences of the