A cellar in a loft
I had three colour films of clouds. I developed them, got intoxicated with the simple beauty of clouds. Mary Jane was about to go to Pennsylvania for a couple of months, she had a new boyfriend there, she had abandoned her anthropological study on clothes and desirability, she was confusing too many people, she was getting confused herself, she was busy packing her things when I arrived. While she was packing, I asked her whether she had come across any guys who were seriously into high heel boots. Not as such, she said. As a redhead, I’ve come across a few guys who have an unhealthy obsession with redheds, she said. And as a mole-on-the-cheek owner, same. And there are guys who are into dental braces, believe me, and gloves, wigs, nylon, spandex and nappies, she said. Nappies? I said. Yep, and axphysiation, she said while putting multi vitamins in a stripey toiletries bag I hadn’t seen before. I once met a guy with a moustache who was really into dressing up as a flashy tacky woman, he was really into it, I said. Then I told her about my father hugging one of my mother’s ankle boots in his sleep, about the film, it was probably the wrong time. She made a grimace of disgust followed by laughter and apology, then said she loved it, you should do a piece about it, that’s definitely bizaaaaarre, that’s so weird, she said, not as weird as necrophilia though. And what about princesses kissing frogs, isn’t that weird? she added. That’s definitely weird, I said. If you saw my father, you’d think my mother was into bestiality, she said. What’s wrong with weird? I said. Your dad hugging your mother’s boots in his sleep, that’s completely insane, that’s so very weird, she said with a lingering ironic look on her face.
So very weird?
I blushed on my father’s behalf.
Give us a kiss, she said. Then her molecules disintegrated and re-formed in Pennsylvania. She was gone. I had the whole flat for myself. I had never lived by myself before. It was strange being by yourself. I suppose I was lost. I thought being lost enriched me. Without Mary Jane around, I would wander around the flat naked, hearing the cacophony of my thoughts, lost before the window, sometimes observing my next door neighbour washing his car. He washed it twice a week, he washed it slowly, caressing it with a yellow sponge soaked in luscious foam, sprinkling it with water slowly coming out of the hose, then he would polish it with wax until it became shiny, pristine. Now and again I mulled over my mother and the film and my father hugging one of my mother’s high heel boots in his sleep. It had the presence of a gigantic hallucination. It was hard to shake off. How could my head fabricate such a monumental absurdity? I sleepwalked to the Slade everyday, went to the pub with my classmates and to art parties where you were supposed to become inordinately drunk. I also became a dedicated art student while the leaden sky foreboded, day after day, the end of the world.
Time is elastic. It can also shrink into an unremarkable amorphous mass. That’s what happened that year, time disappeared down a drain hole of endless rainy days. I catalogued my cloud pictures into high clouds, low clouds and rain clouds, realizing that the amazing thing about them was that they were suspended in the immensity of sky, which could not be conveyed in a photograph. I was lost for a long time. I wandered around the streets of post-industrial life looking for the chance encounter of my identity in material objects. Wandered around looking at shop windows, looking at people, seeing people talking to themselves, sometimes wanting to talk to people, tell them soothing things. I took forever to decide what to buy in supermarkets, so much choice, bought things and then exchanged them, browsed through charity shops as if in that array of sad objects I would find something that would release me from my trance, looked in expensive shops, in cheap stores, sometimes inhabiting a flaccid time, other times intoxicated by what seemed to me a spectacularised world, receiving thousands of contradictory messages, a chaos of stimuli, a chaos of ambivalent visual dealings, chaos. In busy streets, I gazed at the frozen mannequins on the windows, looked at people, felt sad about the ghostly solitude of all those bodies lost in time and space, wonder why people looked miserable when they were by themselves.
I would look at some people wondering whether they were unkissed people, the unloved. I would also deliberately lose myself behind the main streets, looking for the feel of their innards, the rare alleyways. All these houses that looked identical until you realised all of them had slightly different architectural details that differentiated them, fluting on a shaft, an extra window. So quaint, so different from the environment where I grew up, such an anachronism, undoubtedly a convulsive fairy tale, a rancid imperial dream, that’s what this architecture became with my wandering. Sometimes I enjoyed the brutal indifference of the rows of houses. Other times, I stopped at derelict sites, observe the debris encroached upon by weed, wander around until the air became thick with ghosts.
On a few occasions, I tried to leave the flat and found it impossible. It took me forever to wash, to brush my teeth, to become dressed, to find the keys, to find my wallet, to trace my favourite lipstick. The flat kidnapped me, hid things away to test my patience, the furniture encroached upon my body slowly until I knew I wouldn’t be able to get out. Then I would be rescued by a telephone call. I liked the classmates I was going to the pub with. But I always found Mary Jane’s voice the most grounding, even when she told me that she was going to stay in Pennsylvania a bit longer. There was something that tied me to the flat, and once in the streets, something that trapped me outside. I drifted along libidinal streets, sinister streets, listless streets, dirt, beauty and the ubiquitous smell of burnt petrol occasionally discontinued by slithers of chlorophyll. Perhaps, once in the streets, I was secretly collecting all those ossified moments, all that life, all that death, inhabiting a zone beyond life and death still to be named.
There was something I needed to process, but I didn’t know how to do it.
I became unresponsive to men’s mating calls.
Somehow, I felt sexually lazy.
I ticked off sex from my diary: I had done it, overdone it, it got a bit samey. Sex without love tends to leave a mere anecdotal trace. Availability, used to be my motto. It was a motto invented in order to counteract my clumsy looks, my insecurities. Erotic survival made me willing and always the one on top. Maybe I needed a rest, time to digest. I needed silence, to recoil into myself. I had no sex drive at all. It didn’t bother me in the least. I was indifferent to most earthlings and predators. It was as if my own physicality didn’t exist anymore, and at the same time my body felt heavy, unfit. I was doing jobs, little jobs. And then, I was getting on with college work while listening to depressing music which I found uplifting. I had to work harder on the essays, since it wasn’t my native language, but then many art students thought in images, not in words. Over a year slipped by without anything memorable happening. I hardly noticed the seasons changing. And before I knew it, I was in my final year and it was Christmas again. When Mary Jane came back, she was full of strange stories about Ohio, Ontario, Virginia and endless deserted motorways. The guy from Pennsylvania … she wasn’t all that sure about him, familiarity breeds contempt, she said. She spoke winging and whining, taking the piss out of the mighty swell Americans. She had been to New York a few times and loved it, but these other states, they are ‘kinder neat’, they are fragments of the real America, there’s a suicidal sadness in the air that I like, she said. Everything is large, cheap and sad, she said. She tied up her long red hair in a pony tail. And now head down, back to order, she said. She then plunged into college work with a dedication I hadn’t seen in her before. We decided not to go home at Christmas, to carry on working, even if we slowed down our pace. We found a perverse satisfaction in completely ignoring Christmas day and New Year’s Eve.
Around the middle of January, just before art school started, I was summoned back to Spain. I got this call from my cousin Antonio. Bad news. Your father is losing some of his memory paths, he said. He forgets to switch the cooker off, gets locked out, forgets to pay bills until the darkness in the house enlightens him. He can’t live by himself. He has become sick with forgetfulness. Not exactly an absolute danger to himself, but he needs somebody to look after him. Did he really have nursing needs? It was difficult for me to accept. I couldn’t live there with him. Sacrifice my life in order to look after him. Father. Then my father rang me. Said some of his mates were kicking the bucket, mortality sucked, it’s time for me to go to an old dinosaurs’ home, a friend of my GP has started up this community for old dinosaurs like me, my GP has already arranged everything, some of my friends have already moved there, it’s near the desert, the best of all possible worlds, he said. An old dinosaurs’ home? I asked. It’s only for old wrinklies, it’s a commune, a cooperative, he said. He was adamant. And I knew there and then that something wasn’t quite right.
I opened the special door that connected London to Almería and there he was, my father. But this time I saw a slight difference in him straight away. His head seemed to be hijacked by an intermittent, hazy atmosphere that came and went in random gusts. He was in high spirits. He talked about his childhood with a rare streak of nostalgia which flushed his face, sang anarchist songs that he had learnt from his mother and treated me like an adult for the first time, with more care than ever, a robust old man confused by a derelict mind. That’s what he said when I first saw him. He said, I’m OK, I‘m just losing my mind, it happens, don’t worry about it, it’s nothing. He was dressed impeccably. His sad dog eyes became sadder for a prolonged instant. Don’t worry, he said, I’ll be playing the sax, I’ll have an audience, they’ll cook for me, I’ll have company, you get on with your life, he said. And then he added something that could be translated as: I’m not afraid of going, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
Homes were considered dumping sites, where you deposited your unwanted relatives. It’s still a bit like that where I come from. That is the way homes are thought of. Unless the circumstances are extreme. It was my father’s choice. But this wasn’t a home, it was a commune, a cooperative. That’s what my father’s GP said. I could look after him myself, move back home. I thought about my life. What would I have sacrificed from my life? My desultory art degree? My disagreeable objects? My beautiful clouds? Were clouds more important than people? That wasn’t the way to think about it. Except for a few lapses, my father seemed fine. Just odd that he would want to go to an old people’s commune, but he insisted that it was the best possible cure for his loneliness. Neglect. I threw away everything from the fridge, sad at the evidence of degeneration. All the fruit and vegetables in different stages of decay. All the well-out-of-date jam and mustard pots, the yoghurts, other foods where the date had been erased. I helped him pack his things. At the time, I didn’t quite take in what was happening. It affected me, but I found there was within me a denial area, as if by not acknowledging the frailty of life, it simply ceased to exist.
On the day he was leaving, I thought I’d cook something, a special treat, but my father didn’t trust my culinary skills and I ended up buying an expensive, ready-made meal. Roast duck with orange. Duck? He didn’t like duck. He started laughing. He then quickly turned his head to one side half-covering his mouth with his hand and when he turned towards me again, raised his eyebrow and showed me a toothless smile. It quickly became his habitual magic trick. He then ate the duck while going: quack, quack, quack, quack … He had a great chuckle. We exploded in continuous, expanding laughter as he repeated: quack, quack, quack, quack … He was in good humour. The duck episode became a recurrent joke that underwent cow, sheep and dog variations with time: moo moo, baaah baaah baaah, woof, woof.
But the one that persisted as a trigger to infinite laughter was: duck a l’orange quack, quack, quack, quack …
There is the shock of the new and the shock of the old, my father’s GP told me as he wrote down the address of this special new commune he had already talked to my father about. My father was both lucid and confused in equal measure. I went with him to the rest home, which was called El Refugio, the haven. He became friendly with a woman called Eva, with the others, he seemed happy there. At the time I thought that his forgetfulness was just a sign of old age, I didn’t know that it was Alzheimer’s, but that’s what it was. Middle stage of Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is a word that dissolves all hope. It’s a slow-motion word for death. When the GP briefly spoke about memory cells dying during old age, emphasizing that it was as normal as deep wrinkles, white hair and gum disease, he put in such a way that it seemed there was nothing to worry about. I didn’t know he was speaking about senile dementia and was eventually told that my father had asked all the doctors he came across not to mention the ‘A’ word to me. He asked them not to talk in front of me about severe degeneration of brain cells or senile plaques accumulating in the brain substance or neurofibrillary tangles. He asked them to always tell me that he was well. Shhh shhh shhh shhh.
In order to help cover the costs of the commune, the house had to be rented, as his savings weren’t enough. My father didn’t belong to a throw-away culture. I had to sort out the detritus of years and years of life, my father’s life. How could he have accumulated so much trash? But of course, what to me was trash, to him must have had some kind of value. Foreign coins, old passports, postcards from exotic places from friends. Gas, electricity, insurance and telephone bills going back more than twenty years. Perfectly ironed handkerchiefs, two huge safety boxes impossible to move, rusty tools, suits from when he was young running up to the present, impeccable ties that took you throughout the last fifty years of fashion, all these vintage clothing and then Russian magazines from the Iron Curtain time, my toys, most of my toys were still there.
And then, the loft. Did I have to empty the loft as well? Couldn’t it be sealed off and forgotten forever? We all have collections of useless objects erected in memoriam to identity, sentimental museums reminiscent of those we had in childhood, our treasures made up of bizarre trinkets. Throw away everything, my father said. He said it was all rubbish in the loft, I could throw everything away, old radios, record players, vinyl LPs, singles, Glen Miller, Elvis Presley, Tito Puente, The Beatles, Jeanette Birking, Louis Armstrong, American comics from the 50s and then boxes and boxes, lots of cardboard boxes. How could I throw away these things? My father’s past? How could I dispose of my father’s wedding ring even if he hadn’t worn it for years? How could I dispose of my father’s old trinkets, even if they were cheap things? I got a ladder while thinking about people who loathe cheap things, people who hid their sentimental museums behind the façade of financial value, measurable value. I felt sorry for them. Status-crazy people. They needed expensive, tangible objects to show their value to the world, without the status of things they became nothing, invisible, expensive things could conceal their insecurities or an inner ugliness, allowing them to love themselves better via the love of others towards their expensive things.
We all use things as extensions of ego-needs, embodiments of the immateriality of the soul, but for some people things were their deepest secret, they had a secret sentimental museum.
My father’s secret sentimental museum, the loft.
It was there, in the loft, that I found these huge cardboard boxes full of shoe boxes full of exquisite shoes. Were all these exquisite shoes my mother’s shoes? Some of them had never been worn. They were completely new. Others had their bottom tips slightly worn. Sandals, stilettos, slippers, platforms, marabou mules, high heeled, flat, orthopaedic, playful, sensible shoes, threatening spikes, laced boots. I opened the boxes, making sure each pair ended up in its box. I listened to the stories these shoes suggested. I took off my slightly smelly trainers, tried a pair of invisible plastic sandals on, tried some other shoes on, but they were all far too small. I looked at my feet as if I had never seen them before, observed their hairy toes, their unvarnished rough nails, bowed down in praise at the effort humanity had made to soften the impact of ugly feet through beautiful hocus-pocus. I held a red shoe up to the beam of light coming from the crack on the roof and marvelled at the architectural beauty of the design, the sensuous line of the arch, the sensual beauty of the natural red coloured leather, the excess of the pointed toe, the undulating lines. Then I held a perfectly poised stiletto, the heel the height of absurdity. I realised that I was seeing these shoes in terms of form and texture. I was seeing them as sculptures. These were ingratiating shoes. Flirtatious, heroic, romantic, delicate, witty, frivolous, aggressive, defiant, unwearable. They were irresistible. There was something redeeming about them, even about the ones that were tacky. Function? Comfort? These were sculptures of hypothetical utility. These shoes pointed to playfulness, to allure, to excess. Some of them were a utopia of androgyny translated into a shoe, others a dream of simplicity, yet others were revoltingly girlie, a walking parody, a dark nightmare of pinkness so sickly feminine that they could only possibly be worn with really hairy legs.
Were these shoes just shoes or were they more than shoes? Shoes have acquired the status of mythological objects. You put a pair of shoes in an empty space and a story soon begins to emanate. If clothes became limp when not worn, shoes were three dimensional forever, like hats. If a man could mistake his wife for a hat, didn’t we see in shoes a particular presence where sex, age and personality were quickly arrived at? I counted the shoes. Ninety five pairs, ninety five stories. I looked at an ornate slipper. At a lime green sequin stiletto. I felt sorry all these shoes didn’t fit me. Ah, the scoundrels. There it was, the immateriality of thought translated into matter, a collective fantasy of excess sculpted into skin-like leather.
All these shoes echoed my mother’s feet. Did I remember my mother’s feet? Were there any photographs of my mother’s feet? How could Cinderella wear glass shoes? Did my mother occasionally wear outrageous stilettos for effect? Would my mother playact more than the usual playact? Was my father fatally dominated by these shoes because they were my mother’s most cherished excess to the point that my mother and her shoes became indissoluble? Or were they ultrafeminine gifts from my father pointing to a secret obsession, my mother being an accomplice? Or was it both? Did the fact that my father slept with one of my mother’s boots mean that he was a fetishist or was the boot an innocent evocation of my lost mother? An innocent evocation? Was my father a man who had a cellar in his loft?
I didn’t want to drown in a pond of facile psychologism. I looked in the photo album again. My mother’s bulging eyes. Perhaps her eyes looked too much like Bette Davis. Also, her extra long forehead, her bitter lips, her elongated triangular face. Maybe that was the problem. The reason her face would not be considered for acting. Today, she could have made a fortune as a Bette Davies look alike, been hired out for exclusive parties, for commercials advertising bitter, for audience grabbing programmes where she would have been voted the best Bette Davies. I am not sure she would have liked that. Her eyes popped out too much, and then perhaps her nose was a touch too big? Also, as an Italian, a 50s Italian, her breasts weren’t big enough for acting. How could have she competed with Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida? A flat, short woman, with bulging eyes that echoed those of the formidable witch?
Perhaps my mother wore beautiful shoes to detract the gaze from her face, perhaps she didn’t appreciate her odd beauty. This eclectic collection of shoes spoke of her eloquent addiction. But my father must have thrown some of her shoes away. I looked for Jeanne Moreau’s boots amongst the boxes and there was no trace of them. I went back to the photo album. My mother with a roll-neck minidress, boots made for walking, false eyelashes, my parents in a white convertible with friends, my parents posing next to their first television set. Then there were a handful of pictures at the back of the photo album that hadn’t been mounted on the rice paper pages. I realised that the mounted pictures ended when I was about five, probably a reminder of my mother’s initial demise. There were all these photographs, but what had happened beyond their frame? I looked for hand written letters, diaries, notebooks, testimonies. I didn’t find anything. I took everything down from the loft. I sorted everything out with the idea of taking it to the Red Cross. I couldn’t possibly keep all these things, all these records, all these shoes. The Red Cross? I saw a starved woman somewhere in a remote dusty village in Ethiopia going to a well in the next village wearing my mother’s absurd stilettos and gently rejected the mental image as politically incorrect. Was my primal scene dominated by a cruelly red stiletto?
Were all these colourful shoes, things of darkness? These shoes resurrected the dead, spiced things up. Golden shoes and then black, green, magenta, red, silver, yellow, white: there was a pair of shoes for every shade of feeling.
Some shoes had been walked to pieces, danced to pieces, others were intact, others I just didn’t understand. During the following days, I unpacked more shoes, admired them, tried on a few, thinking that maybe I should cut my toes off like Cinderella’s stepsister in order to fit into an ideal of female beauty. Then one evening, I came across these extraordinary fake camel fur knee boots that distracted me for a few days from my father’s memory holes. So finely made, so elegant, so sensual. I measured them against my feet, tried them on, stood up, walked. They did fit, but my feet were in an absolute prison, I could barely stand up, they were so tight. They were extraordinary these fake camel fur knee boots, so shinily hairy, with flat soles, a wonder from the 70s. I couldn’t wait until the following day to take them to a shoe repairer to be stretched. So I went down, drowned them in a bucket of water to expand them, waited a while immersed in the TV flow, then tried them on again soaking wet so the inner leather would continue to expand.
The fake camel fur boots ritual started.
A ritual that was just a prelude for my inexhaustible capacity to do dumb things.
The fake camel fur didn’t look wet, it was water-resistant, the trapped water inside the boots made a sucking noise, they weren’t painful if I stayed still, if I sat, but after a few minutes I experienced the first discomfort somewhere in the circuits of pain. I took them off, surprised to see that my feet were a bit bluish, drowned them again in the bucket pressing hard on the inside, thinking I should cut my toenails, even an infinitesimal millimetre off that tenacious matter would count. As I was cutting my toe nails, confronted by the sheer ugliness of my feet, the yellowish thick layers of sedimentation from my ingrown toe nail that I had to file to diminish its outstanding depth, I realised these boots were definite libidinous objects, sophisticated animals, that as such they were entitled to put forth their conditions. What was pain in comparison to the privilege of wearing such extraordinary artefacts? Wasn’t the extraordinary worthy of sacrifice? I tried them on again, walked carefully along the corridor, feeling the sacrificial tightness in communication with all the other muscles of my body. I looked for different things, tomato soup tins, jars, plastic glasses, placed them inside to check the tension against the inner leather. I finally placed a pair of aromatic lemons inside the boots and pushed them against the instep, excited by the prospect of overnight boot expansion.
I tried them on as soon as I got up, tried to walk a bit with them, but they were still quite tight. I took them to a shoe repairer to be stretched, but didn’t think my mother would have liked that man, there was something suspect about him, something beyond the calendar with an image of the Sacred Heart surrounded by orangey pictures of pin up girls torn from magazines held to the wall by gaffer tape. Shoe repairers became suspect. It took me a while to find the right one, a shoe repairer who said he couldn’t stretch them lengthwise, only the width, he would try his best, I could pick them up in three days. When I picked them up, he suggested I wear them everyday for an hour the first week to break them into my feet, then gradually wear them more and more. I put them on there and then, at the shoe repair place. I went shopping for razor blades for my father, shopping for the unknown, but after twenty minutes or so of intense pressure travelling from my feet up to my head, I entered a phone box and changed into my trainers, welcoming the unbelievable respite. Maybe they would never ever fit, after all they were a size too small, the design was for slender feet, my feet were wide, maybe they were as impossible as a squared circle. I immersed myself in the fake camel fur boots ritual as soon as I got home, a bucket of water, tins of tomato soup, until they fitted on perfectly, a five day ritual that distracted me from the fact that my father had become a double stranger, from my sad hours at El Refugio where I was introduced to the gentle world of forgetfulness.
The paradise of forgetfulness
Alzheimer’s is a bewildering illness. It slowly steals away your personality, your humanity. We are nothing without memories. Alzheimer’s destroys the invisible wires that enable communication between different thinking regions, leaving the victim at the mercy of neural cul-de-sacs. If my father would end up confusing me with people on TV or treating me with the politeness you may treat a complete stranger as his illness progressed, I slowly learned to react as if I shared the same confused reality as him. But that daunting word wasn’t part of the landscape, it had been hidden from me, my father wasn’t ill, he was merely senile, he just forgot now and again about recent events, although his secret sentimental museum seemed to have been completely deleted from his memory, otherwise he wouldn’t have told me to throw everything away. When I told him that I was emptying the loft, that there were all these shoes, my mother’s shoes, he laughed, blushed and then reacted as if he didn’t know what I was talking about: shoes? What shoes? Ordinary shoes?
Extraordinary shoes, I said, mum’s shoes.
Mum’s shoes? What are you talking about? he said.
The loft, I said.
He then lost his patience and shouted angrily: I told you to forget about the loft, how many times do I have to tell you? It’s all rubbish up there. I was surprised by this sudden bout of anger since it wasn’t an emotion he was likely to show. Had he really forgotten about my mother’s shoes in the loft? Did his forgetfulness configure into some kind of pattern or was it a somewhat chaotic demolition of memory paths that could capriciously erase an entire memory zone? But it wasn’t forgetfulness. He probably didn’t want to talk about it. Forget about the loft, he said again. He then started talking about a mechanical toy car that he had as a child. I played with it everyday and then one day it just went missing, he said. I looked for it everywhere, even at the loft my mother used to have. You never talk about your childhood, I said. Many people from his generation didn’t talk about it or if they did, they skirted around the Civil War. It was too long ago anyway. But the lingering effect of trauma after the Civil War and the recurrent waves of censorship that ensued had first consolidated into a collective, mournful muteness that had given way to a prolonged silence which couldn’t be broken until the euphoria that the process of democracy brought about had been superseded.
Personal memory added a different dimension to historical memory, sometimes pushing tragedy right to the background. What do you remember about the war? I suddenly said. You couldn’t see a cat around, he said. But you were happy, you always say how happy you were, I said. Terrible happy times, they were intense times, he said vividly recalling his childhood at the end of the Spanish Civil War as his happiest time, his fiercely anarchist mother, the anarchists’ ideals of justice and fraternity, his first encounters with my mother. Almost every trace of my mother had been erased from his memory, every trace except their first encounters in an anarchist theatre group in Rome. He spoke about the sheer excitement of the air raids, the hair-raising sirens, walking amongst the debris of so many shattered lives as if a prolonged naiveté had blinded him to the reality of war. He vividly remembered listening with his whole family to the news on the radio, listening to the nobility of human sacrifice, the heroes, they had truly believed the collapse of the Republic would lead to a future without hierarchies, without leaders, with the responsible freedom of self-government, but then such a senseless game, the war, all those sacrificial bodies, he said. He had changed his mind in retrospect, he had later come to admire Gandhi.
That evening, my father slipped into a fold in time whereby he inhabited simultaneously the late 1930s in 1991. He recounted stories that I had heard a few times before but this time he retold them with an enchanted air and he was obviously emotionally charged. He spoke about his mother’s glorious escape when she was eighteen, how she ran away to Barcelona with a fugitive lorry driver to join the anarchists, how she joined a small theatre that made alternative plays about freer ways of living and different ways of relating to others, how that was when she became a singer of bawdy songs, a cuplés singer, a popular musical genre at the time. His mother had fought for abortion rights and women’s equal pay. He had forgotten that I had written a short-story about it, ‘Yaya’, that it had been published in an anthology and that he was proud about it. He didn’t remember it. This was in the 1930s, he would emphasise, his face aglow with emotion. There was talk of ‘free love’ in the air, he laughed. All these ideas that are taken for granted now, abortion, divorce, were shortly put into practice at that time, some of the anarchist ideas were ahead of their time, they were put on hold for thirty years, they were taken up again in the 60s, but still so much to do, he said. It was a crucial moment in history, change was nipped in the bud, history could have been something else, he said. He then spoke about this guy who had become a human bomb by tying tonnes of dynamite to his body and throwing himself to the enemy’s tanks, like Palestinians do now, he said.
Another evening, I heard him say something that has remained in my head. He said, mother, there is only one, but she cannot be an umbilical chord forever, not even during the first years of your life. My father, Jordi Joan, had a permanent audience now. He could play the sax anytime and a small group of oldies would gather and listen and clap. Now and again, he would play awkward notes and make jokes to erase the traces of his confusion. My father, he looked the same amiable self, the same fine features, same sad dog eyes, same sensual lips, same hair style. And yet, he was slowly becoming in part somebody else, a robust old man whose memory paths increasingly led to the same places: childhood, the war, anarchism, his mother, his happy childhood amidst the chaos. My mother had been such an important part of his life, and yet he never talked about her, her presence had almost been erased, relegated to the realm of acquaintances, an anecdote in his life that was fading to the point of virtual disappearance. Do you ever dream about mum? I said. Not anymore, he said, I used to when she died, but then she vanished from my dreams.
El Refugio was a special old people’s commune. It was run by volunteers, a pilot project that seemed to be working. The patients were encouraged to set and clear the table, wash the linen, sometimes they cooked. The atmosphere was gentle and caring, perhaps a side-effect of the powerful drug cocktails in their systems. When I think about it even the stray dogs that wandered in the courtyard seemed to be inhabited by a narcotised softness. The project had been set up by Dr. Alvarez, a financially savvy flower child with black locks whose presence was like a mild breeze. I was pleased such place existed. It was the perfect place for my father. He would have hated to go to one of those aseptic limbos where bureaucratic design numbs everything with its deadly caress. I’m in Eden, he said. This is Shangri-la, he said.
An adulterated citrus fragrance enfolded El Refugio. A deaf-blind person would have guessed its position between citrus fields and a busy main road solely through the sense of smell. I kept taking trains backwards and forwards to see my father. El Refugio was an immense villa that had been recently restored. Dr. Alvarez had recruited volunteers and raised funding to deal with the restoration. It was a beautiful white building of simple lines. And at the back of it, there was field after field of greenhouses, an enormous alien sprawl swathed in plastic solely populated by a community of promising vegetables. It was cold. And sometimes the greenhouses were chilled. I liked those frosty mornings with the sun gently lighting the day, but powerless about changing its low temperature. Experiencing the luminescent frost made me wonder about the traumatic effects upon the psyche of living in England, a country whose sky was struck with sharp mood swings. Was I staying longer around my father partly because of that, the gentle, nourishing light, the persuasive sun?
With the discovery of my father’s secret sentimental museum, my mother’s shoes, I began to listen to him with a new heightened sense of awareness, waiting for a comment that will make me understand him better. It seemed that he had forgotten about his secret sentimental museum, he had forgotten my mother, but he would passionately quote Durruti’s words, the Spanish anarchist’s well-known words, which he must have heard so many times from his own mother: We have always lived in slums and holes in the walls. We’ll manage. It was the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain, and in America, and everywhere else. We can build others to take their place. Better ones. We’re not in the least afraid of ruins. We’re going to inherit the earth. That’s a fact. He would remark how much he loved those words, we’re not in the least afraid of ruins. And as his memory was becoming precisely that, a pile of ruins, I loved him all the more for remembering those words, although with time I began to wonder whether it was also an oblique reference to his preference for libidinal fragments such as my mother’s shoes. My father spoke about Durruti and the anarchist’s unforgettable experiments, but other patients didn’t remember any of that, the war, the ideals, the loss. Perhaps they preferred silence, the war was just too far away, perhaps what they remembered was precisely that, the silence, these people’s secret for happiness was to be found in the fact that they didn’t remember much, amnesia, that’s what their happiness was made out of.
I spent three weeks going to visit him, growing fond of all these old people who would give me stale biscuits hoarded for special occasions, played mnemonic games with them, realised it was a torture for others to see them like that, not for them. I listened to some of their relatives, heard stories about previous hospitals where their demented parents and uncles forgot to tick the menu order sheets and were left starving for days.
Soft, soft, soft, ever softer, that’s what I became with these people who carried their hearing aids and dentures in their pockets, who suffered from long strings of illnesses, who were walking pharmaceutical cabinets, who took slowly one step after the other. Extraordinary white haired heads, then grey, then silver. I had never been with so many old people before. In the world I inhabited, old people were more or less invisible. And now I entered a whole new world that was strange and genuine at once, a gentle world where pretence had been discarded in favour of humility. The world these people sick with forgetfulness had built seemed to be shaped by a new vision, a vision based on empathy and genuine caring. This particular group of people, in these particular circumstances, a self-governed home, had definitely reached a concord about empathy. Somehow, through them, I learnt to look at old people in a new way. I had always thought of old age wisdom as a myth. Of course, some of them were stubborn, some others moaned, others talked incessantly to keep dangerous silence at bay, but my fondness for these gentle amnesiacs who carried their spare parts in their pockets, grew with every visit to my father. While I was there, I experienced a strange sensation that I could be there forever. And I knew it would be necessary to leave sooner rather than later. Had I found paradise? Were they preparing themselves for a lengthier stay in heaven? Would all this softness soon start to asphyxiate me?
I joined my father, the others, in their prescribed games. We played scrabble being open about spelling, any spelling was allowed as long as the word sounded right. This way of playing had its fans, but also its fierce critics. My father profoundly disliked this small violation of rules, perhaps because his spelling had always been good and although he couldn’t remember his closest relatives’ names, he still had his own spelling intact, perhaps spelling was for him an ideal of order without which the world would collapse into a myriad of splinters.
Then at times, I wondered whether I was idealising these people, whether I was denying the reality of their fragility. The joy some of the old men felt as they kissed me on the cheek was something new to me. When my friends kissed me, it wasn’t a big deal, a kiss. My friends took kisses for granted. These old people had abandoned all the nonsense of being competitive, the senseless race, the senseless hurting each other through action, through lack of it. They had abandoned all this in favour of being empathic sentient beings. I learnt. I respected their strengths, blurred their weaknesses, being aware that perhaps, if I had stayed there longer, I would have started to perceive them in a different way.
Soft, cute animals, that’s what the female patients had in their rooms. Some of the women had been given cute teddies, fluffy bunnies, ducks, penguins, as if their senility had transformed them into cute little girls rather than old women on the road to the final regression. The men didn’t get these flannel worlds as presents. The men got warm gowns, chequered sleepers, after-shave, useful things, as if men weren’t capable of such regression, as if their world was one of pure functionality. I myself had got my father a couple of paisley silk pyjamas, a pair of navy blue espadrilles like the ones he usually wore. My father, a piece of history. He wasn’t a child, he was an adult made vulnerable by increasingly devouring memory gaps. If we don’t entirely choose what we remember, he certainly hadn’t chosen to forget bits of who he was, who he had been.
He became good friends with Dr. Alvarez, an indefatigable presence always dressed in medical white. I soon realised that Dr. Alvarez needed his patients as much as they needed him. I admired the man for being so simple in his methods, focusing on the patients strengths to show there can be joy and purpose in senile decay. He gave them diets rich in anti-oxidants, omega 3 and claimed curry was good for memory. He made them walk backwards, he also made them count from 100 to 1 backwards, wear their watch on their right-hand or left-hand if they were left-handed and watch pictures upside down. It was all about breaking habits as a way of exercising the brain.
My father also became friends with this feisty seventy five year old woman, Eva. She was still quite agile, a few of them were quite agile, their age didn’t correspond to the youthfulness they showed. But then, why should it? At exercise time, as I heard some of their bones creak, I came to admire Eva, who had asked a nurse to remind her everyday of her running time. It was arranged for the trainer to go along with her. Eva didn’t seem to mind. She jogged around the grapefruit fields for half an hour every morning, sometimes bringing a grapefruit back and peeling it with her hand, relishing the grapefruit’s spray as the peel was removed with her rheumatoid fingers, the fragrance, the adhesive perfume it left on her finger tips. My father had always looked younger than he was, as if all those years of celibacy had softened the ageing process of his skin. At El Refugio, he became close to Eva. And I could see in the way he talked to her, in the glint on his iris, in his final joining her for her half an hour run, that he was falling for her. But then that was what I told myself. How could that happen with a shaky short-term memory? Did he recognise her everyday, was everyday forever the first time?
Then I thought that the fake camel fur knee boots were perfectly beautiful objects that perhaps could trigger my father’s secret memories. It was none of my business, but I had been thinking about it now and again. Questioning my motives. Questioning whether the idea of triggering his secret memories by wearing my mother’s fake camel fur knee boots wasn’t an alibi for an unresolved love to leak out. Questioning whether his friendship with Eva had confused my judgement. I knew I had a tendency for disorderly conduct, just to see what happened. I knew the idea was absurd, inappropriate. A sign of my endless capacity to do dumb things. But I did it. Driven by only god knows what. One afternoon, I put on a pair of light green corduroy lederhosen, placed my mother’s fake camel fur knee boots in a carrier bag, put them on just before I got off the train to economize on the hurt, and visited him. I expected a comment, a story, my mother’s name dropped casually in the conversation. I found myself crossing and uncrossing my legs several times as if my lower body had taken a life of its own. I was trying to direct his gaze towards my mother’s boots. The fake fur camel boots were met with supreme indifference. My father was playing scrabble with Eva and then we watched Gone with the Wind. But then when I left El Refugio that evening, my father greeted me goodbye with what sounded like a smooth chat-up postponement. He whispered to me: hasta la vista, baby. Then later that evening I started wondering whether his remark was provoked by the lederhosen I was wearing rather than my mother’s fake camel fur knee boots: I shouldn’t have worn the light green lederhosen! Back to square one, I thought.
The snowing dream
During those crispy luminous days, while I cleared my father’s house, I became aware of the furniture’s fuzzy presence, the austere still life forever on the wall. It was as if I was witnessing the beginning of a haunting process, a rearrangement of molecules that superimposed a hazy layer of resistance onto the ever familiar surroundings. I found the ghosts at my father’s flat difficult to share the space with, especially at night, with the darkness. Except for my father and my cousin Antonio, except for my love of the language, I had more or less severed all contact with the place where I was brought up. Hadn’t been in touch with my friends there. Felt strange about being there. Had no sense of purpose when I was there. It wasn’t so much that I had severed all contact with my friends, but that there was this gap that separated me from them. Time-space separated me from them. I still had school friends. Deep down I was attached to them, but I only saw them briefly during my stays. I saw any attachment to the past as nostalgia. Nostalgia, what a dirty word! The past was something I didn’t have time for. Too busy immersing myself in a sheer present, in the next adventure, too busy to realise fragments from the past forever re-organise your present asking for acknowledgement, soliciting a revision.
Revel in the ephemeral, that’s what I used to do.
I saw my father, I saw my solitude, I saw my cousin Antonio. Seeing Antonio rescued me from the ghosts at my father’s flat, from myself. I started hanging out with him in the evenings, staying overnight at his place. Antonio was a few years older than me, his black straight hair hung down to his chest, he was studying cartoon animation, his flat was full of empty bottles of rum, blurred mementoes of intoxication altered by the dry dripping wax left by melting candles. Together we increased the rum bottle collection. Jokes. Our friendship was mainly based on that, humour. Everything can be lightened up into a joke. I needed that at the time, the lightness. Antonio gave me lightness. He loved flea-markets, bazaars, second hand clothes, the traces of life on objects, the possibility of bargains, the chaotic display of sacrificed goods. So did I. One morning we went to El Rastro, the main second-hand market, good junk, bad junk. He was looking for an old leather jacket, while I found myself looking for my mother’s boots, Jeanne Moreau’s boots. We walked. We stopped. We separated. We met again. Walking around these sacrificed goods you created an intimate map where you could get lost, a map with landmarks created by involuntary objects, a broken vase, a legless doll, a German edition of Mallarmé’s poetry next to a tiny plastic dinosaur, then all these spaces of disconnection, mini waste lands where objects failed to trigger anything except for the delayed sadness that utter apathy transmits. Amongst all the colourful and neutral trash, Antonio found an old leather jacket. A pilot’s jacket. As fashions were endlessly recycled in a dizzying whirlpool to trick you into a mirage of change, his theory was you only had to own a few trousers and shirts from a handful of periods to look forever updated.
Some of my father’s polyester suits and shirts were now the last retro fashion. We went to my place. We ran up to the loft. We went through my father’s suits. While I was tinkering with an old radio, finally tuning into a mystifying Arab Station, Antonio tried on a few suits including a navy blue stripy one that looked as if tailored for him. It was strange seeing him with my father’s stripy suit on, it was strange seeing his high rib-cage partly covered by his long black straight hair when he took his top off to try on a shirt. The Arabic song brought with it the fake camel fur knee boots. I showed him some of my mother’s shoes, a green pair with ‘comma’ heels, a deep-throated shoe with a 7-inch heel, then the fake camel fur knee boots. He touched them, he loved them, he jokingly kissed their aura. They’re the most extraordinary boots I’ve ever seen, he said. I slipped the boots on, felt the pressure on my calves transferring all my blood upwards. We spun around and around to the Arabic singing until we fell exhausted against a beam. Then we did everything everywhere.
Everything.
The following morning we behaved as if nothing had happened, as if what had happened had happened on the other side of the mirror. Antonio took the suits he wanted. Other things we took to the Red Cross. But I kept all the boxes with my mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, I couldn’t possibly part with them, with my strange inheritance.
There was a tacit agreement that what had happened between us belonged to the set of things that only happened once. Throughout, I had neglected the accumulation of things piling up in London. Mary Jane was opening my post, answering calls for me, sorting out bills, the rent. DHL deliveries to Mary Jane containing documents signed by me were proving expensive. I had faxed Mary Jane a page with a few samples of my signature so that she could sign things on my behalf. Had felt odd about that. Somebody else forging my signature with my permission. There were things for which I had to be there, my presence was needed there, filling in forms, cashing cheques, problems with the bank better solved in person, the bureaucratic trail that follows everyone like a shadow from hell.
Then one day Mary Jane’s call shocked me out of my torpor. El Refugio had had over me an anaesthetising effect mixed with a real but quiet concern towards these people who shed memories on their way to paradise. We have to move out, she said. The housing market is booming obscene, Mr. Bloodsucker wants to sell the flat, we either pay a substantial rent increase or we’re out, he’s given us a month’s notice, she said. Then she said that she had finally dumped the Pennsylvanian guy, he was a rat, she was now seeing a beautiful boy, Sam, she was also producing new work, she couldn’t wait for me to see it, she said. She didn’t know how to say she'd rather I came straight away. But then she talked at length about the mountain of things piling up, my things.
Slowly, my gaze changed mode during the following days. I started seeing everything as more distant, my surroundings started fading, as if I was already somewhere else. My new gaze embodied this process. I was slowly absorbing the fact that I should make a move, say goodbye, unconsciously digesting the possibility that perhaps this would be the last time I saw my father. My father was busy with Eva. Or that’s the way I deluded myself that he was fine. He was fine, the doctors and nurses said, he was fine.
Somehow, I restrained a tear when I said goodbye to him. I said to him, hasta la vista, baby. It was a way of lightening the moment. But he didn’t react. Some of the people at El Refugio hugged me goodbye stroking my hair, stroking my cheek. Others were amiable too. But I knew that some of them didn’t know that I was the same person who had played scrabble with them the day before. For them, I was forever a kind new face that left no indentation on their minds. The days before my departure had a strange taste. That’s when I saw them all naked, some time during the days before my departure, I had this strangely familiar dream. It was snowing gently. It was a luminous day. Eva was the first to take her clothes off, in the living room, in front of everybody. Others started doing the same, uninhibited, indifferent to their bodies. Others went into their bedrooms. I saw them all naked, with their beautiful shrivelled bodies walking unaware around the living room, being tactile with each other. Then this couple of old women came towards me, invited me to dance, I could see the stains, the freckles, stitches on their stomachs, scars that spoke about the physical memory of flesh, time written on their bodies, there was a beauty about this time, about its folds. I saw my future in those bodies. I became aware of the difference, of my unwritten body. It only had a few, gentle stretch marks, the effect of gravity wasn’t quite there yet. The old women pushed me towards the others, who had gathered in an amorphous circle. I looked for my father. He was nowhere to be seen. He was probably in his room. He was glaringly absent. Dr Alvarez and a nurse came with blankets, reminded them they could catch a cold. They all laughed, they had relished their nudity spell thoroughly. The amorphous circle of naked bodies now covered by blankets broke apart. Dr Alvarez explained. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Old age related illnesses could affect the inhibition centre in the brain, some of them did things like that, one of them would now and again urinate on the corridor, then somehow realise what he had done. Then Dr Alvarez left with Eva, they were both naked, they were holding hands, walking slowly on the snow carpeted road towards the grapefruit trees, admiring the sheer whiteness, oblivious to the ice in the air, admiring the hypnotising snow flakes.
My cousin Antonio, that dream, my father, my gaze underwent a further change, reality was definitely elsewhere, I had to finish my art degree, it was time for me to go.
I couldn’t throw away, give away, all these shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, my father’s sentimental museum, my mother’s shoes. I counted them. Ninety-five pairs, ninety-five different identities, ninety-five stories. I didn’t know where to store them, couldn’t choose a few, forget about the rest, most of them were meaningful in some kind of way. The truth is I couldn’t part with them. I wanted to keep them. I wanted to revel in such a splendid collection. The truth is when I first saw them in the loft, I knew I would take them with me. Was I stealing from my father, from my parents? Was I being voyeuristic over their ineffable secret? I had told my cousin Antonio about the shoes, my mother’s shoes. I didn’t want him to store them for me. I hadn’t told him about my father hugging one of my mother’s boots in his sleep, the boots that looked like Jeanne Moreau’s. He had asked no questions. Now he was taking me to the airport with all these boxes full of shoes. I barely had any personal luggage. The shoes didn’t weigh that much. It was the volume. Three large cardboard boxes full of exquisite shoes. I wrote my name and address on all of them. Put the warning label ‘fragile’ on all of them. Explained to the navy blue uniformed creature at the counter that they were my inheritance, my mother’s personal belongings. The hostess-like attendant consulted with another navy blue uniformed woman, she smiled, the flight’s luggage boot was half empty. I put the boxes on the conveyor belt and watched them go through the rubber tussled doors into their journey, then dishevelled Antonio’s hair as if I was going to see him the following day. Not sure where I was while the X ray monitor scanned the unrecognisable contents of my handbag, no tumours, no cancers, only black and white translucent volumes that the security guard had been trained to recognise.