Hernan Carbonel
08/13/2021 20:05
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 08/13/2021 8:13 PM
In November 2014 I published in this same section a text entitled "I never understood how my parents became a couple."
In those few characters there was nothing more than something repeated in many corners of the universe: being the son of separated parents.
I did it by exposing myself, bringing to light situations that touched intimate fibers of the two of them, not to mention mine.
Of the two, the one who stood out the best in public image, paradoxically, was him.
He, who knew how to build trust and intimacy with strangers,
although he suffered for his clumsiness to strengthen true bonds
and relationships crossed by a constant emotional commitment.
This is not new either: the salt inside, the sea outside.
I kept reading
The last picture.
Hernán Carbonel and his father in 2014, in the town of Inés Indart, province of Buenos Aires, a year before his death.
The note was published on a rainy Saturday.
I spent hours in front of the computer and the telephone, thanking messages from unknown readers and friends.
Between that and walking naked through the downtown street of any provincial city on a Saturday night, there were no major differences.
For years I kept asking myself: was it necessary to write about that?
The chronicle ended with a proposal: after decades of silence and respectful indifference, my father proposed to my mother so that, at least as financial compensation, she would have a pension for when he was gone.
The scene took place in the living room of the house, I was a mere witness, surprised, smoking one cigarette after another with the door ajar.
I don't know how many times my father has cried in front of my mother.
That was the last.
I was about to leave that anecdote out of the text, but the editor asked me to think about it.
If I had been in his place, as editor, I would have said the same.
Hernán Carbonel and his daughter.
The grandfather did not find out about this pregnancy.
He was still alive but he was already very bad.
Now, it's time to tell the girl about him.
Obviously, my mother did not accept the proposal.
Discreet, naive but not deluded, she knew that at the bottom of those words there was nothing more than a drowning slap
, the need for a historical restitution not exempt from epic.
My parents had separated on July 7, 1974, when I was just nine months old. The same day that West Germany beat the Netherlands in the World Cup final. Six days after the death of Juan Domingo Perón. Thirty-two years before the death of Syd Barret: since then my story with Pink Floyd was about to be written.
The Wall
(absent father, overprotective mother, school oppression, inability to express feelings, isolation from the world, self-destructive fantasies) would become, from adolescence, my bedside record.
A month after the chronicle was published, my father had a series of abdominal cysts removed.
The biopsy result did not take long to determine what was suspected: lung cancer skin metastases.
A point from which there would be no return.
From then on, the descent was slow, steady, painful, and inevitable.
Four months later he was in a nursing home.
At eight, in a hospital bed, gasping for breath and in a semi-conscious state, cursing lifelong friends, constantly asking the time,
confusing names and geographies (he, who had been a truck driver and had a Google Maps in his head)
.
He scratched his face all the time, in a gesture of his own.
If you were a lover of symbolism, you would say that what you wanted was to get rid of the grim reaper.
He spoke to him, but he no longer responded: his eyes danced in nothingness, searching for an afterlife that only he saw.
That phrase that my father had thrown at Mom in the living room at home ("I know I have little life left") was now becoming a reality.
My five-year-old son came to see the succession of situations in a sharp and illuminating way.
One afternoon he said to my mother: "The man you married is in the hospital."
This certified that, in certain circumstances, the truth does not come from knowledge but from intuition: my son did not know that they had never been married or that they had been separated for forty years.
In those days I had to take care of feeding him by mouth, because he could no longer do it by himself.
Nonsense: I didn't remember him doing it to me when I was a kid.
So:
what obligation did I have to protect him, to help someone who had chosen loneliness over family in transit?
Death does not save, it is true, although sometimes, with the passage of time, it approaches from memory.
Death was going to take it away and, with it, would also go my obligation to maintain the tension of the rope, but also to bank my whip when the rope was cut.
Having grown up with her absence would help make parting easier.
In the midst of that scenario - September 2015 - other tremors awaited me: my wife became pregnant.
The last Wednesday of that month we had an appointment for an ultrasound.
He was waiting to enter the clinic when the phone rang.
It was the number of the nursing home where my father was.
It had been returned from the hospital because there was nothing to do anymore.
I could guess everything to come.
I asked that they wait for at least an hour and went into the office.
As I watched my future second son on the ultrasound monitor move on his mother's belly, it was inevitable for me to think about the cycle of life traversed by those two screens.
The ultrasound machine, the cell phone, some come, others leave.
I didn't get to tell him that I was going to be a grandfather for the second time. I could not, or did not want to
.
My wife tried, but he was no longer in a position to understand the world around him.
Not even the very basic cycle of human reproduction.
In the years that followed his death, I stopped writing.
They were long, strange, numb, foggy days that seemed not to belong to me and yet they pierced through me.
I had no one to yell at that I was there, immaculate in my need to be seen, registered, heard, taken into account.
That it was still that creature that, like weak bushes, needs a guardian to support it against the blizzard and downpours.
I would sit in front of the computer and imagine brilliant or ingenious beginnings left there, in four or five lines scrawled in a word processor.
It did not flow;
the mere search for the right words turned into constant and resounding anguish.
As if it wasn't easy to deny yourself permission to be happy.
I remember reading a note in El País's Cultural where they talked about authors who had written only one book and later became prototypes of Bartleby.
"Fear, pain, perfectionism, scream and glory form mythical literary oases surrounded by silence," said the interviewee.
"The silence of a writer is in general an open wound and the reasons can be many".
"Don't let this take away the gift of the written word," a dear friend told me
over a table.
That is what friends are for and that is what after-dinner parties are for.
At that time, I felt that, while my father was alive, always –it's always a lot, but suppose there is also an always– it was me who adapted to him so as not to lose what little he had achieved.
Living according to the desire of others, training in the rigorous art of stumbling in a vacuum.
I couldn't expose myself to being completely forgotten, I didn't have the guts to take such a risk.
What stay?
Negotiate.
When you found your own Frankenstein, the image of the creator belongs to you, everything you are in the other belongs to you, it is your copyright.
I went as far as he left me and as far as I was able to afford it.
He had had a son, which didn't mean he was a father.
I had had a father, which didn't exactly make me a son.
I would see what to do with the pain: some pains, it is known, are missed.
Anyway.
Individual ideas that one owes to the notes in an old hardcover Gloria notebook after psychoanalysis sessions.
I told this anecdote in the previous chronicle, but it still seems representative to me.
We had eaten a barbecue with my father, we went out to smoke a cigarette on the sidewalk, it was a beautiful summer night and we began to look at the sky.
He said: sometimes I'm at home, I look at the sky and think: where will my son be?
What will you be doing at this time?
I answered point blank, without thinking: a child is not raised by looking at the sky.
There can be multiple readings of that scene, of course, but over the years, after several decoding, I was left with this: that being a father is not an obligation, but, among many other things, a conviction.
As Sartre wrote, we are what we do with what they made of us.
Accustomed to the silence of my father, a silence that was not made of the lack of words but of their excess, but with a marked commitment to anodyne, everyday things, and little depth in that bond that united us, I imagined, in my youth, and even in the first years of parenthood, that with my children it would be enough to do the opposite.
That in the calm of the words a way of relating would grow. That in the embrace it would never be cold. That, on the journey, four eyes would always see more than two. Then, of course, reality is that docile slap that is in charge of letting you know that absolutes do not exist.
Yes, you can be friends with your children, but for a little while. That a hug is also a limit
. Talking too much (didn't you know, already?) Is boring. That getting out of that space of selfishness to warn the desire of others is a goal from the middle of the field ("What do you mean you don't like trap, daddy ?!"). That the brand of the cap does not scratch and that the distance is also a way of being close.
Once, my wife's mother told me: I admire the patience you have to explain everything to your children. The hopeless patience, the raw man who couldn't even wait for his turn at the restaurant, realized that he was not missing as much vizcachazo as he thought. As I read there: “It is one thing to educate your son, another is to tame him. Educating is helping him to be himself. To tame, is to force him to be what he is not ”. Well, in that search for balance the days go by.
The day my father died, my younger sister was in Varanasi, India. (My two sisters, I did not say, they are not my father's daughters, but my mother's first marriage, but they are MY sisters.) Varanasi is also known as Benares, and it
is one of the seven sacred cities for Hinduism, Mecca for the elderly and the sick who want to spend their last hours there
and be cremated on the banks of the Ganges River, to be freed from the unfailing cycle of reincarnations. "When the message came to me where you told me that your father had died," my sister told me when she returned from her trip, "I knew I was fine, that this was the place where I had to be at that moment."
The night of the wake we went to a restaurant next to the wake room.
There were eight of us.
Generous mince and beer.
There were at least two hours of talk that made us forget the world around us to focus on the world we were building.
That's what friends were for, that's what after-dinner parties were for.
Today mom is eighty-something.
She is a bit crafty, but she lets herself be loved.
Last year we signed the papers with which the house where I live donated me.
He prefers the landline to the cell phone.
He is tired of walking, retirement is not enough, he needs to take a nap, he resists using the internet.
She likes to watch series and movies on television, spoil her grandchildren, sew stockings, and her meatballs with mashed potatoes come out very good.
It's been several years now, and the question remains the same. Was it necessary to write about this? Yes of course. There is always a provincial town waiting for someone to walk around naked on a Saturday night.
---------------
Hernán Carbonel
is a cultural journalist, lives in Salto, Buenos Aires province, and writes for the literary supplement of La Gaceta de Tucumán and Acción magazine. He gives reading workshops and runs Coda, a reading club. He published the books "Old owners of the land" (Ediciones Amauta), "The boy who didn't grow up and other stories" (Children's Gallery) and "The Arroyo Dulce case". He is about to publish his first digital book, Sediments, an anthology of articles, interviews and short essays. He has collaborated in various graphic and digital media of culture, tourism and general interest, and some of his stories were published in various anthologies.