Father and Son Read Online Free Page B

bourgeoisie that established itself in the postwar period. A new brick building with square windows ranged symmetrically on each facade, it was chosen with the needs of my grandmother—who had heart trouble—in mind. The apartment had to be on the second floor, and the building had to have an elevator. Before the war they’d had another apartment, but perhaps because its contents were lost when Madrid was under siege, almost all the furniture was bought new. What wasn’t new was my grandparents’ marriage. They already had two daughters and very little in common. My grandfather was born in Barcelona, and when he turned twenty, he settled in Madrid with one of his brothers to run a glass factory belonging to his father, which he would later leave to start a ceramics factory. He was a solitary man, obsessed with upholding the legacy of his ancestors, as well as the youngest (and probably the least business-minded) son of a family of Catalan industrialists, and the shock for my grandmother—in whose family almost no one had ever worked—must have been brutal. She never understood that for her husband, there was no life beyond the walls of his factory, nor did she grow accustomed to his stern ways. As a result, she threw herself into caring for her children, and most of all my father, the youngest and the only boy. So devoted was she to him that she had a window cut in the wall that separated their bedrooms in order to watch over him at night during the long spells of illness that kept her bedridden.
    The closeness of their relationship was the key to my father’s insecurity, especially from the moment he found himself prematurely deprived of her. He was twelve when his mother died, and his father proved unable to change his ways to give him the support he needed. With the years, the distance between them only grew, and just as emphatically as my grandfather expected him to follow in his footsteps, my father began to make it clear that he wouldn’t. He finished high school with mediocre grades, and he didn’t go to college to study engineering—which is what his father would have liked—or even art, a compromise that wasn’t considered, despite the fact that since he was fourteen, it had been clear that painting was his calling. My father was not the son my grandfather had hoped for, and busy as he was establishing his ceramics factory, he had neither the time nor the sensitivity to engage with him. Someone more open, less single-minded, might have found other ways to involve him, but my grandfather couldn’t even rise to the occasion when at one point my father offered to help design some dishes. When my father told me about this, rushing through the story in his eagerness to be done with it, and probably still bitter, he couldn’t help adding that the proposal he had vainly presented, inspired by Scandinavian design, would have had a better chance of succeeding than the generic pieces my grandfather produced.
    The break came when my father, still a minor, requested his legal emancipation in order to travel to London to study painting. My grandfather granted it, and for good measure, possibly with the intention of getting him to change his mind, disinherited him. This didn’t affect my father much, since shortly afterward my grandfather went bankrupt so spectacularly that he had to flee abroad, pursued by his creditors. What my father couldn’t forgive was that in an earlier desperate attempt to avoid ruin, he had spent the money that my father and his sisters had inherited from their mother, of which he was trustee.
    But I’ve written about this already—though in a different form—in my second novel.
    I don’t know exactly what my father thought of his own father; he was never explicit about it. I know that once, when someone took it for granted that he didn’t love him, he denied it vehemently, but the fact is that he reproached him for