First part.

Father

Second part. Family

Third part. Mother

Fourth part. Daughters

Fifth part. Father and son

Synopsis

Unable to visit his father, the narrator of this

story decides to write about his family without having that testimony. The fear of
being with him paralyzes him. And so, like an infection that invades everything,
the narrative of this hell emerges. His mother, a beauty of less than twenty years,
was seduced by the father, a man endowed with great charm among friends and very
generous with those around him at work, but a self-centered abuser at home. In this
falsely domestic portrait, the beginnings of tourism in Malaga in the 1970s are
outlined, when European money from vacationers and investors brought an unusual
opening in the form of fun and revelry during the dictatorship, fresh air for a
society that not even in dreams I would have imagined endless orgy nights.

Miguel Ángel Oeste descends into the abyss of his memories and,
in a painful investigation, confronts his memory with that of relatives and
acquaintances to produce a heartbreaking testimony, which at the same time is a
chronicle of the last forty years in this country. A journey in which fear is the
protagonist, first as a condition and then as a writing engine.

I COME FROM THAT FEAR

MIGUEL ANGEL WEST

To Carlota, Sofía and Elena, my house

 I don't know what it is due to.

But the further I go, the more I have the inner conviction that I
had to do it, not to rehabilitate, honor, prove, restore, reveal or repair
whatever, just to get closer. As much for myself as for my children—on whom the
echo of fear and remorse descends, in spite of myself—I wanted to return to the
origin of things.

And that of this search, even if it was vain, a trace would

remain.

I am writing this book because today I have the strength to stop

what crosses me and sometimes invades me, because I want to know what I am
transmitting, because I want to stop being afraid that something will happen to us
as if we were living under a curse, to be able to take advantage of my luck, my
energy, my joy, without thinking that something terrible is going to destroy us and
that pain will always wait for us in the shadows.

There will always be time to cry.

DELPHINE DE VIGAN, Nothing opposes the night

First part

Father

I want to kill my father. Not metaphorically or in the fiction of

a novel in which I have killed him every time the narrative opened up the slightest
possibility of doing so. Even when I didn't even attribute traits to my father's
character, I would develop the action to make him die. For as long as I can
remember, I have fantasized about the ways in which he died, in which he ended his
life. And he did it with anger, with rancor, with restlessness.

It has been very difficult for me to love my father, but it has

not been easy to hate him either.

For many years these feelings fueled the desire to kill him off.
Perhaps then I could free myself from the apprehension and harmful influence it had
on me. I felt that by doing so I was freeing myself from the fear that his figure
produced in me, a figure that was growing inside me, that had settled like a
tapeworm feeding on my body.

I still feel its influence.

Nothing is that simple. It never is.

My murderous thought chains me to that idea of the past that I am

unable to get rid of.

I think: my father dies. I think I kill him. I have thought about

it too many times, so many that I have almost exhausted my imagination. Deep down I
know that I am a coward, an illusionist, which is why this homicidal feeling, this
visceral obsession that lives inside me, causes me pain.

My father still lives.

It reproduces just like wild grass. It becomes strong in the

adverse. That's my father: a weed that grows anywhere on my trembling body, taking
over me.

On July 16, 2009, just as he was about to catch a plane to

Prague, my mother choked to death on her own vomit while he was drunk. I suspect
that he killed her, also that he had already killed her, little by little, with
blows, eroding her sanity as sandpaper erodes wood. A simple, effective simile,
just like the big hands with which he hit us.

My mother ended up fat, crazy, disfigured, she always repeated

the same thing. It was impossible to hold a conversation with her. I was sorry,
although I did nothing to stop it. Nor did she contribute to making things
different. He refused to do so when the opportunity presented itself.

We are in July 2010. My father is still alive and I write about

him to understand what is happening to me, why I am still living in fear.

I am thirty-seven years old, I will be thirty-eight on November

3rd.

I'm not a child anymore. However, the fear that overwhelms me

continues to be the same as that suffered by the child I was, the one who never had
the courage to confront his father, that child whose eyes are like tiny oceans and
looks at his father from below, paralyzed, while tremble inside. Even today there
is not a day that I do not regret that inability.

The fear is incomprehensible.

Perhaps a test of courage is all the years I haven't spoken to

him. Perhaps keeping the silence active through detachment is the highest
achievement I can aspire to. So, why a simple comment from a third person about my
father causes me rejection, concern; why meeting him on the street without him
seeing me stirs my guts and injects me with a dose of contempt; why reading a book
that is a love song towards the father figure, a sign of generosity and
reconciliation, modifies my mood and brings to light this criminal tendency towards
my father.

I want to kill him. I have always wanted it. I repeat it and I

don't stop doing it, as if it gave me pleasure, as if it were possible to find the
necessary courage in repetition. Paradoxically, the idea of calling my father and
interviewing him to extract his vision of the facts in order to capture it here, in
this book, assails me. But I dare not. Something as banal as a phone call is a trip
to hell for me. I haven't stopped thinking about it for days. Despite the
distortions that he may recount, I consider it essential to speak with him so that
his testimony is compared with my memory. The anguish of being in front of him
blocks me. Perhaps it is a mere excuse that I give myself for not starting this
search that confronts my father, the same one who despised everything that had to
do with culture, the one who was in charge of emphasizing to me that writing was a
failure, the one who he never tired of repeating to me that I would never get
anywhere on that path of losers, that he was going to smash me into nothingness and
that he would be there to laugh. So far, perhaps, he has not been wrong. So far,
perhaps, he is winning if this is a fight.

I tell my brother that I'm considering the possibility of

interviewing our father. "You will know." Yes, I will know.

Something that seems important to me: it had been years since I

had ever referred to him like that, my father, what's more, I avoided naming him,
and, if I had to, I would say "those people." She didn't name him, she always
ignored him. In writing it costs me less to call him father. It is one of the
reasons why I have considered writing a book that tells of our relationship. I call
it relationship, although in reality it was absence. Or, in any case, an abject
relationship on both sides. I decide to write, even though at the moment I don't
have enough strength to meet him. Writing is my way of dealing with him.

I wonder if over time the things that happened to me, the ones
that I would like to reconstruct, will continue to affect me, or the mere
possibility that I will be able to write it down is proof enough that a
transformation has begun, that I have finally learned to turn the page. It's
decided, or so I think, I'm a roller coaster in a decadent amusement park, where
everything is eaten by rust and mold. I know that in a story like this, modesty
comes to the fore, forcing you to decide what to hide and what to show, and also
that you have to face up to deceit and veils of memory. And that leads me to
reflect on this need to analyze my parents that drives me, and on the ideal way of
writing to do it. Writing opens doors that one would not dare to open, illuminates
recesses where darkness has always triumphed, unearths the most primitive evidence
of life. And eventually I realize that I can't stop thinking about them with
rancor, and therefore I write with resentment. Ever since I decided to tell this
story, fear has stirred me up.

I imagine that it is an unavoidable stage. I try to iron out the

rancor. I know that if I want to get somewhere I will have to lower that animosity.
I know that I will have to write without rancor. But how to achieve it when there
are so many sad memories, so much suffering and hatred? How do you reach that goal
when you are absolutely certain that your father is a murderer?

I am not sure what I am going to tell or how I am going to do it.

I have not designed any structure nor have I composed a chronology. I simply write
looking for explanations, despite the fact that when you write you usually end up
discovering that you have only managed to multiply the questions.

I look at the calendar, July 16, 2010, a year ago my mother

passed away. Surely it's just a coincidence, but I'm trying to find some kind of
connection that explains the coincidence. I remember again that I did not go to the
funeral. It's not that I regret my decision —it was four in the morning when the
phone rang, I was about to board a plane with my girlfriend to Prague, I picked up
and heard my brother: Mom is dead—, it's just the realization that my father and I
cannot be in the same place even in a circumstance like that.

My first reaction was to go to my parents' house to help my

brother and attend the wake. On the computer at the airport, my girlfriend and I
look at tickets for the next few days. They were all out of our budget. The options
were reduced to two: I stayed, lost the trip and faced my father, or I took the
plane and tried to forget that my mother had died. I called my brother again and
asked him how it had been. I knew that my mother had deteriorated very rapidly in
the last few months. Her body and mind were very damaged after the almost daily
beatings that her husband inflicted on her for years and years. He took an arsenal
of pills, and his eyesight was that of a mole. My brother had not yet arrived at my
parents' house. I didn't know in those first moments what had happened. I asked him
who had warned him. He told me that our father had called him several times, but he
ignored his calls because it was so late. My father usually calls him when he needs
something. I've gotten tired of repeating to my brother to definitely cut off the
relationship. Minutes later, it was my aunt, my mother's little sister, who called
her. It was then that my brother realized that something serious had happened.

The first thing my brother saw when he got to my parents' house

was a stretcher on which was a large plastic bag covering a body. I heard her
broken voice as if she were speaking to me about a stranger. Many times, I had
wished for my mother's death. Though it wasn't anything like wishing my father
would die. My brother was still on the phone as I walked into the bedroom to find
the police and my father drunk as a slug, raving and babbling. He was forced to
hang up on me. The sound of the conversation was suspended in the airport, almost
lonely at that hour of the morning.

I asked my girlfriend what she would do in my place. Later, when

I resumed the conversation with my brother, I consulted him. They both told me it
was a personal decision.

Suddenly, the roles had been reversed: he was now acting like the
older brother. I offered him my help, and he told me that he could take care of
everything himself. They were strange, vague minutes, in which I meditated in a
broken way, going from one thing to the other in just seconds. It was hard for me
to remember moments of happiness, luminous, together with my mother, that would
take me to the wake, while at the same time I thought about what they would say if
I did not attend the funeral. I was certain that my father had killed my mother
because she was in his way; I thought that he had planned everything to look like
an accident and, in the process, pocket the part of the money that my mother had
obtained from the sale of my grandmother's house. It might sound fictional, but
didn't I used to prepare the medicine that I had to take because my mother mixed up
the tablets because of her poor eyesight? There is another piece of information,
the confidence of the only neighbor with whom my mother spoke —and with whom I
spoke the following morning—, which confirms my suspicion. That morning, July 17,
2009, I had received some condolence calls from my closest friends, when my cell
phone rang again and the only neighbor my mother spoke to showed up. He told me
that he had asked my brother for the number, that he was very sorry for the loss
and that he loved my mother very much. It was one of those rare situations in which
the person offering condolences is more devastated than the person to whom it is
addressed, to the point that I found myself consoling the only neighbor my mother
spoke to, who had also suffered from loneliness for years. I don't know how we got
into the subject and how the revelation was, I only remember that, while I was
trying to calm her crying, she told me that a few hours before my mother died, she
had spoken to her and told her that she was afraid of my mother. father. This
unnerved me even more. It made me remember that on some occasion my cell phone had
rang and, reading the word "Ma" on the screen, he had answered uncomfortably, only
to hear his muffled voice, just for a second, just before realizing his mistake and
hanging up. The fact that I suspected my father did not mean that I was not aware
that my mother was already a living dead from the countless blows, from the load of
drugs consumed, from the life she led with my father.

I told her that I was out of Spain and that when I got back I
would call her and we would talk. The only neighbor my mother spoke to had known me
since we moved to number 64 Juan Sebastián Elcano, in the Pedregalejo neighborhood,
at the end of the 1970s. I had listened to my parents' daily rants, and could have
useful information for what I had in hand. But these are the typical promises that
are said and then not made, so when I got back I didn't call her. And I regret.
Because now she's dead.

My mother died at the age of fifty-seven. My father killed her.

If not that July 16, 2009 when she drowned in her own vomit of pills and alcohol,
yes throughout their entire history together, in which, punch by punch and kick by
kick, he turned her into a wreck. , in a sack on which my father poured out all his
violence, all his frustration, all his anger.

I call my brother, he tells me to let it be, that he hardly

remembers anything, that he was out of orbit that day. These are, more or less, his
words. I ask him for the autopsy, he sighs, he tells me that he will look for it. I
don't give up until he admits that he, too, had his doubts. My father's statement
was contradictory, like his behavior at the cemetery while he waited for my
mother's body to arrive. Sometimes I would say to my brother with a point of
madness: And where is your mother?, as if she were still alive and they had
attended someone else's funeral; and other times, with full use of reason, he asked
when they would bring the body, despite the fact that he had already been inside
the funeral parlor for a couple of hours. According to what my brother tells me, my
father went to eat, he didn't watch the body, and then he came home drunk. It's a
good thing you weren't there, he tells me, thank goodness.

He confesses to me that although lately he was reluctant to take

his eight-month-old son to my mother, he was comforted by doing so on some
occasions, seeing the hints of joy mixed, yes, with his dementia. He tells me: Mom
already spoke in a way that was not understood. She imagined that in the afternoons
she would take her grandson for a walk, I would leave her, what was I going to say
to her, I was sorry, at least those two times that I took my son I noticed her
happy. To me, those moments produced me some satisfaction and a lot of sadness. She
tells me: When I lived in the apartment on Bolivia street, very close to her house,
in a moment of weakness, I suggested that if she wasn't well with dad she could
come and live with me. He preferred to stay with him. I also don't know what I
would have done if I had accepted. She tells me: There has always been support from
us when dad disappeared or when he was in jail, but mom never accepted it. She
tells me: The night of Mom's death, the Justice of the Peace told me that I had
handled the situation tactfully, that someone else had hit Dad. I ask you to tell
me in detail. He tells me: I don't remember, he probably told me that because I
didn't lose my cool, and you should leave things as they are, it's your father,
it's what we got and we have to put up with it. He tells me: The other day I called
him in case he was alone. Did not answer. I tell him that he doesn't need him
anymore, that once he's arranged his papers and has mom's money in his possession,
he already has what he wanted. He tells me: I don't care about that, but you should
forgive him.
 I imagine that I call my father, go to his house, sit in front of
him and interview him. I tell him that I know that he murdered his wife, that I
know how he did it. He laughs and yells at me and then I hit him on the head and he
falls dead. What I imagine with this ease, in reality, comes to nothing, like so
many nights in which I am unable to hit my father, after he has lashed out at my
mother, and we, my brother and I, try to stop the beating.

I have already turned eighteen, I am of legal age, I should

already defend myself, I would have to face him, but it is my younger brother who
pushes him and knocks him down one night in 1990; I am still, I do nothing, my
mother is bleeding, a mirror is broken and there is glass on the floor, I run when
my father rushes towards me with my mother's blood on his hands, my brother is also
running, episodes like this happen everywhere. often, this is my childhood and
adolescence, this is my memory.

Partly also my brother's. I envy him, simply, for his ability to

forgive and the generosity that he shows when he talks to that individual we know
as a father. At the same time I reproach him with my attitude. Our way of relating
is abnormal, short-circuited, another family legacy, more evident since my maternal
grandmother died. I am convinced that he senses it, that he perceives it as I do,
although I have never asked him. Thinking about it carefully, we have never
communicated well. What I do tell my brother is that I need him to tell me
everything he remembers from childhood. Repeat: Let it be. Then he agrees and asks
me for a few days, warning me that he hardly has memories. Maybe there is the crux
of forgiveness, in forgetting, in throwing dirt on the field of memory.

I do not forget.

I write without a roadmap. Without net, afraid. As if I were at

the epicenter of a tornado that was tearing apart fragments of what I am, of what I
have been. I feel like this when I remember, when I am frequently assailed by the
questions: what unites me with my father?, what features of him are there in me?

My father was never my father. That's what I told myself and I

told everyone who asked me about him. Was it necessary to specify more?

Although I have many reasons to say it, I know that they are not
enough, that it is not easy to understand.

I have tried to convince myself that my father does not belong in

my life. It worries me and terrifies me to look like him. But how can I deny that
his presence and even his influence —that damn atavistic component— have been
determining in some way in me?

Are my father and I alike?

Would she be able to ask him that question? What would you
answer?

I do not forget.

Memory. Especially the fights between my parents, my heart rising

to my throat, fear bouncing around inside my body like a pinball.

I am in the winter of 1978. A thud wakes me up. I open my eyes

and look to the right: my brother is sleeping in the next bed. I concentrate on his
breathing to match mine to his and, although I succeed, I remain vigilant, a ball
presses the center of my chest, trying to open it, a feeling that has stayed, a
scar that remains inside.

The night emits sounds, as if they did not want to be heard. The
vague noise of the night disguises the voices. In the silence, that concealment
sounds like a distant, ancient steam engine emitting intermittent, pitiful echoes,
before finally stopping, exhausted. They are resonances that I don't know yet.
Moans that I will become familiar with that night. Sobs that represent insomnia
that is here to stay. I call my brother. Continue sleeping. Through the holes in
the blind the light from the street filters in: insects that look like specters
wandering in wait for a victim. I put my bare feet on the floor, it's cold, I feel
restless, I try to understand the unintelligible sounds that come from the corridor
doors until they suffocate in the room, murmurs that seem like words fading away,
mixed with deep, heaving breaths. A new thud breaks out when I head towards my
parents' bedroom, stepping on my pajama pants that are too long for me from time to
time. I hear the bed springs creak. I hear a scream from my mother. I hear another
scream from my father. I listen to my heart as I open the two hallway doors and
stand in front of that closed door. I turn the doorknob and discover my father on
top of my mother, he turns abruptly with his arm raised, his eyes fixed on the
intruder, my mother says something, what, I can't hear her, without waiting for it
my father rushes to where I'm. I don't move, I want to say something, dad? I say,
or I remember saying dad?, and he grabs me and nervously drags me out of the
bedroom and I think he's ordering me to go to sleep, because I keep looking at him,
rigid, unable to move, until his hand comes down against my face and he pushes me
hard and I fall, and I'm up like a spring and I start running for my room and I
trip on the bottom of my pajamas and I fall to the floor and I cry and the door of
his room is closed again with impetus.

That was the first fight I remember between my parents.

From that moment my life is a contest. Or over time I have

revived it that way. After all, the fights with my father grew with the speed with
which he had a birthday. Fights that have not been erased, stuck with the firmness
of a limpet to a rock. I strive to rip them off. It is impossible. My hands are
still those of a six year old. A rock infested with barnacles. A body riddled with
fights. It is curious that the ones I had with my mother, much more numerous, have
faded in my shifting memory. Have I forgiven her? Were they less painful or did
they affect me in a different way? Does a father exert more influence on a child
than a mother? And the other perspective that stings: have they excused me for my
mistakes and the hatred that I poured out on them? I don't know the answers. I'm
only sure of one thing: I want to pluck these questions to the bottom of the sea
and let the tide carry them far, far away.

I need to: resentment comes and feeds them and I can barely stop
it.
 I would be lying if I said that all the memories I have of my
father are unpleasant. Basically it is what I want. Not because of a masochistic
feeling, but because it justifies my thoughts and actions. I remember that at least
in my childhood I longed to spend more time with him. I remember that I competed
with my brother for his affection. Like when he bought the Scalextric and played a
few hours with us for a few days. For several weeks we raced and laughed on that
track that occupied a corner of the lounge on the 2-D floor of the Cumana building,
before it was dismantled due to my mother's complaints or perhaps our own boredom.
In those races in which my hand pressed hard on the control, he stung me with it, I
wanted to beat him so that my father would congratulate me. My father only
congratulated whoever won.

I also remember with happiness one afternoon that he took us to a

toy store and bought us some dolls from the He-Man series, with which the three of
us played until he went to the restaurant and, after that afternoon, he never
played with them again. us with those dolls and they ended up covered in dust some
time later. What I remember the most is the garage of the Cumana apartment where my
brother, seven, and I, nine, played soccer against him and we couldn't beat him.
When we grew up and he started to lose, he would get angry and demand revenge. And
when it became clear that he couldn't beat us, he stopped playing games against us.
Yes, my father was very competitive, he competed with everyone, but more than
anyone, with me.

And I, without being very aware at first, encouraged that

competition.

I read or reread some books that deal with the subject of parents
and children. The big difference with mine is that those books are written by
children whose parents have already died or are in an irreversible phase towards
death. My father lives. I shouldn't be seized with fear by imagining that I visit
him and talk to him after fifteen years. That would help me as a basis for the
narrative.

It could happen that my father does not want to talk to me. I

have not considered that possibility. He is lonely and quite vain. If he finds out
that I want to see him, he'll take it as another victory. I just have to visit him
and talk to him. But fear prevents me. The fear that has never left. Fear
resurrected with writing.

Most parents, if not all, want the best for their children, for
them to be healthy and happy. Most parents want their children to end up being
lawyers, doctors, any of those notable occupations for social status, or at the
very least, they want them to achieve a stable situation. If not all, then most
parents want their children to succeed and surpass them and be better than they
were.

Most parents except mine.

Mine compared himself to me in everything he did and took care

that I didn't surpass him. Mine wanted and wants me to fail. Mine has filled me
with fear. I don't want to look like a victim or make him an executioner. Because,
despite the fact that with these words I try to free myself, forgive him and
forgive myself, I relapse again and again in the reproaches, in the resentment that
memory expels in the form of encysted memories. And yes, I am unable to forgive him
right now. I don't know if I will do it in the future or if with writing I will
manage to achieve it. I don't know if this attitude makes me ungrateful.

I haven't come to any conclusion yet. It may not, and it may not
make sense. I repeat: I write to move forward. It's the only way I can call him a
father and not a bastard or son of a bitch. It is a small conquest. A conquest that
paradoxically stains me with dissatisfaction.

I do not forget.

Memory. And I keep writing with rancor. I only know how to do it

that way when I'm writing about someone I'd like to see dead.

I've been like this for months: today is September 29, 2010, my
saint. I have barely written a few pages and I begin to falter due to doubts. They
are not the first. But until now I hadn't set out to quit. I try to convince myself
that giving up writing is another victory for my father. Although this represents
my fantasy more than anything else, I find points to hold it with ease. My father
doesn't care about everyone except himself. He despised people who read and wrote,
so in that eternally unfurnished house, there were never any books, beyond those on
cooking, chess, and an encyclopedia that he acquired by mistake.

My father did not study. He was one of those who thought that
life was the only school. He underestimated graduates, underestimated cultured
people who had learned from books, and thanks to his mental agility, which he had
and a lot of, he didn't have time to embarrass them. He exuded confidence, he spoke
as if he knew some secret or nuance that his interlocutor did not, which made him
more cautious, and my father gave him something similar to reason because of the
courage and security with which he discussed any matter . He possessed an innate
virtue that is not cultivated no matter how hard one tries: the ability to create
his own solid criteria of the world through what he perceived in the news (and the
press in general) and the information he extracted from certain meetings. in his
restaurant. More than anything, he was a seducer, a liar who fabricated more and
more complex deceptions, built on the impulse of his character, on his unbridled
desire to become someone.

I am telling this because, although other children protested the

vigilance of their parents, who frequently prevented them from doing this or that
or staying out late at night, mine did not oppose anything, only my father hated to
read and he would mess with me if he found that I was writing something other than
school homework. He seemed like a priest from before, who feared the transmission
of knowledge contained in the books. Especially when he told me with threats that
he was spoiling me, that on that path I would be useless all my life. It bothered
him that he was a weak child who fell ill quickly, without certainties, worthless,
insecure, silent, clumsy, who took refuge behind drawn pages or pages with letters.
Perhaps this lack of qualities that I displayed created a reaction, enhancing them,
with the way he behaved with me.

He didn't educate me, he wasn't a model, he was hardly ever home.

He was always in the restaurant and then closing the nights, as many as his body
allowed. Despite the fact that he did not educate me or guide me in the judgment
that a child makes of the world, I took my father as my exclusive reference
throughout my childhood. I did not have nor did I know of another. It was an
obligatory reference. In addition, he was my father, therefore, any action was
allowed, it was justifiable, he had to abide by it with resignation and good will.

Although now I think that, even then, a sensation bubbled up

inside me warning me not to be like him. At the same time, the tendency of nature
and the absence of any teacher pushed me to imitate him.
 For example, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, despite the
fact that I could agree with what he was arguing, I began to express opinions that
were opposite to his. I didn't care, in public I placed myself on the other side, I
fought against it to weaken fear. But the fear grew. On the contrary, when my
father was not around, I used his words and his opinions in front of my friends.

I type the word "forward" many times, filling the computer

screen. Before going forward I have to go backwards. Start at the beginning, or
what I consider the beginning.

Second part

Family

My father was born on February 18, 1949. My mother on March 4,

1952. Both were born into humble, poor, illiterate, hard-working families, with a
high sense of responsibility, who faced hardship with integrity. It is hardly
difficult to evoke that they lived through periods of scarcity, both material and
affective, the families being similar in good times and bad. It was a time when
opportunities were scarce and people went hungry. At least that's what I've heard
from both sides. I mean my parents, who kept repeating it, although curiously they
were not dedicated to saving, they even squandered what they did not have.

My maternal family lived until 1964 in the house of my

grandfather's mother, who died at only thirty when my mother had just turned three.
I know from my grandmother, my mother and my aunt from Opus that, at my great-
grandmother's house, they lived in an oppressive environment that became untenable
when my grandfather died. I remember that my grandmother told me that the
Christmases of 1964, when they moved to the small subsidized apartment on Calle
Bolivia, where she would spend the rest of her days, they remembered as one of the
best that had happened, despite the fact that they only had a couple of mattresses
and basic kitchen utensils.

My maternal grandmother worked from Monday to Saturday cleaning

houses and came to hers at night. Until 1964, it was her mother-in-law who took
care of her children in the afternoon, after they left school. Later, when they
moved to the flat on Calle Bolivia, my grandmother reduced her working hours,
although there were days when she still arrived at nightfall, and she was forced to
leave her children with a neighbor.

It was in this environment that my mother grew up. The absence of

the father figure influenced him when it came to forging his personality and
behavior. A personality that required feeling admired, the need to attract male
attention. She knew that she was beautiful and attractive and that she provoked
manly delusions in men. I have little doubt about this. He was playing with fire,
however I don't think he was conscious.

My mother burned.

And it's hard for me to say this: my mother liked to burn, she
needed it, she had gotten used to it and she felt bad if she didn't.

Maybe it happened to him like with those diseases that all human
beings have, but that develop in some and not in others, depending on the strength
of the immune system. In the case of my mother, this disease that she harbored in
her bowels developed due to the weakness of her immune system in contact with my
father, whom she took to make up for the absence of her real father, generating an
absolute dependence on him. He did it, of course, mistakenly, almost involuntarily,
ignorantly, and according to what she considered a full-fledged man, exuding
confidence and desire to take on the world.

It was a home where the early loss of the father was added to the
scarce maternal presence, since she worked most of the time, in order to offer her
children the studies and opportunities that she had lacked. That didn't stop my
grandmother from cultivating an excessively protective bond with her children. He
took care to watch them, to know what they were doing or where they were going,
with whom they were interacting, demanding that they tell him each of their steps.
He devoted himself to them, pampered them, deprived himself of things to buy them,
he transmitted affection to them. To my grandmother her children meant more than
herself. I don't know if the fact that my grandmother lost her parents at the age
of eight and was sent to live with an aunt had any connection to the values of
family adherence that she tried to instill in her three children. She refused to
talk about the past, she disliked it, as if she feared waking up a monster that was
going to manifest in the present to take away her loved ones.

I remember that when I was in my twenties I used to sit across

from her in her living room waiting for her to tell me things about her life.
Sitting there, I never found out about any other event that I had already seen with
my own eyes or that I knew from third parties. Now is now and before was before, my
grandmother said with a smile; and I had no choice but to let her enjoy the soap
opera in peace. I did not know read and write. Since she was a child, she was
forced to work, without the opportunity to go to school. First in the house of the
aunt who welcomed her and, later, in other houses, until she was a permanent
housekeeper for forty-four years. She was left a very young widow, raising three
children and without the time or mentality (she was also very religious) to remake
her story with another man. His raison d'être was to protect his children, and in
that, I suppose he felt he had failed. However, he continued to devote himself to
them unconditionally until his death despite the constant displeasure they caused
him. That's why he put so much effort into protecting my brother and me, he felt
that in this way he was making up for his frustration with his own children.

When she asked about her husband, she always answered whenever
she looked at his picture hanging in the hallway. When I teased him about why he
hadn't married a second time, he told me that he already was. When she wanted to
know if a man had gone after her, she used to look out the window before answering
and telling me that she liked the sun and not the shade. And I, irritated, urged
him to explain his words to me. His answers were not cynical or cutting or
borderline, on the contrary, it seemed that they belonged to a farewell or an
affectionate greeting. He used to smile when speaking. She considered that the only
thing that scared away the misfortune that was chasing us was laughter.

Now is now and before was before. I search my memory for another
phrase, another word, whatever my grandmother told me, but it's hard for me to
remember anything else from those brief encounters. What I do remember are those
occasions when I took my different girlfriends to her house so that she could meet
them, and once I returned alone and asked her, what do you think?, she answered me:
She has a smile that not bad; or: She seems cheerful, a good girl; o: It's tall,
yes. In the end, I had the feeling that none of them was approved and he was just
trying to say to me: find yourself a good woman, knowing that none of them were
good enough for me, nor were the partners of her children.

Most of the time we ended up talking about my parents. At twenty

years old, even earlier, I already confessed to him that I didn't understand my
mother, that I wished my father would die and that at night I dreamed that I was
killing him myself. If I don't kill him, he will kill me. My grandmother crossed
herself and told me that I shouldn't think like that, that they were my parents, to
then blurt out: It was the downfall of your mother and the whole family. I should
have avoided it when I still had strength. The bastard spoiled my daughter.

I expected her to continue with the confidences, but my

grandmother did not go any further. He would look at the image of Christ hanging on
the wall above the television and cross himself. Believing in God calmed her down.
She was an irreducible devotee. Every Sunday she went to mass, and she was a friend
of the Corpus priest, to whom she made a donation every year, as if the priest were
also a relative. For many years he tried to get my brother and I to be good
believers. And that happened by attending mass, something we only did on a few
occasions when we were still little. Deep down, the subject of my mother tormented
him. She felt that she did not do everything in her power and that she was the one
who ultimately pushed them to get married.

Sometimes I have thought that if my grandmother had had the

opportunity to study, perhaps she would have questioned life and the decorum that
was imposed on her. This brings me to a significant and illustrative aspect of his
way of thinking. He eyed the books warily and with uneasy admiration. As happens to
many people who have not been able to study, he made a sharp distinction between
school books and comics and novels. The first were good books, and the second bad.
I laughed then. And now when I think about it, I want to cry. Although it's been
years since tears have come to me.

Since my grandmother avoided the past —for her, naming it was

already a way of tempting fate and attracting the problems to which the family was
prone—, she went to my grandmother's best friend, the neighbor downstairs, whom I
had known her for seventy years, to ask her the questions my grandmother dodged.

I have not told you this. I haven't told you anything, he told me
after I asked him about my grandfather and he revealed that he was good, except
when he drank. So he did put his hand on it. You had to understand it, it wasn't
him, it was the alcohol, he was good, but the drink made him lose it, the woman
justified, and then added that I was too young and didn't understand it.

Life today is more complicated. Things have gotten worse. Look at

those women who leave their husbands and destroy homes by sleeping with anyone.
That didn't happen before.

I really didn't understand her. When I told her that my

grandfather's behavior and that of my father were similar, my grandmother's
neighbor denied it: Your grandfather was a good person, not like your father's bug.
 Just before they got married, he beat up your mother who turned
her eye on the virulé. Your grandmother went looking for your father at the La
Gloria bar, where he was having breakfast. He threatened him, telling him not to
get any closer to his daughter or he would regret it. When the poor thing came
back, she came here and sat in the chair you're in now. Her hands were shaking and
she began to cry. Your grandmother didn't let your mother out for the weekend. She
cried when the coward came and pounded on the door. Your mother was screaming that
she wanted to see him, and your grandmother was saying that she would call the
police. When your grandmother went to work on Monday, your mother ran away and went
to see him. It all started again. And look what they have done to you...

Both my grandmother and her best friend were dedicated women who
resigned themselves to the circumstances. They had endured the mistreatment of
their husbands when they raised their elbows. If I questioned things, they defended
themselves by saying that it was what they had to live through.

My grandmother's territory was limited to four places: her home,

the house where she worked, the market, and the pharmacy. He belonged to a
generation that had been rooted out by curiosity and ambition. She got up at half
past five in the morning to go to Don Antonio's house, where she worked for more
than forty years as a domestic worker. She started at seven and her chores—
cleaning, shopping and eating, washing, ironing, etc.—went on until the afternoon,
when she would pick me up from school at five, or maybe six.

The last time my father and I met was at my grandmother's wake.

We were about to come to blows. And that despite the fact that we tried never to be
under the same roof. He always had to be the protagonist, he drank and made himself
known by speaking loudly, he did not even let the dead rest. I remembered the night
he kicked my grandmother out of her house, hitting her with the dog leash. He was
spitting out a pasty white foam as he insulted her.

My grandmother went to the greasy house where we lived to clean

as if she were a maid. She also washed our clothes and those of my parents, and she
had been doing it for years, regardless of the fact that her heart no longer had
the same strength.

As I heard her voice at that sad funeral, I remembered her angry

face and the whipping of my grandmother with the belt for having gone to defend her
daughter. I heard his voice, and I remembered the pain in my body when I stood
between my father and my grandmother. The strap on my back. The threats and cries
of my grandmother, who started running towards the front door. And the image of my
mother limp on the floor from the beating and the coke can't get out of my head,
unable to do anything, with her eyes downcast, full of panic, inert.

I could hear his voice, but I remembered his threat: I'm going to
kill you, ungrateful, out of control, throwing the dog's leash at us without
hitting it, staggering, stoned. I was screaming and laughing: bitch, bitch, you're
a bitch. I could hear her voice, but I remembered that already in the street, with
the fright in her body and her breath choking, she told my grandmother that we
should call the police. She looked at me scared and wondered if she wanted me to
kill her daughter. I replied that the one who was going to kill him would be me,
with the pain of the tape on my back, with the stain of having fled. I heard his
voice, but I remembered my grandmother telling me that I shouldn't have those
thoughts, that he was my father, as if with that he had every right over me. I
heard his voice. And I looked at him with contempt. And he turned defiantly without
looking down. I panic. My body felt the pressure, the heat, and I lowered my head.
I left the room where my grandmother was having a wake. Outside, when I found a
secluded spot, I hit a wall with my fist. Once, twice, three, four, five times,
angrily, I scraped my knuckles against the concrete until I felt my skin burn and
blood spurt out. He was impervious to that damage. However, the pain of not having
killed him burned me.

My father was born the same day as Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green
River killer, the man who, influenced by a father who considered all women sluts,
beat up women he thought were prostitutes and then strangled and killed them. threw
into the river Ridgway learned it from his father, who would beat his wife and then
have his son read aloud from the Bible and pray. When it was over, the father
taught the son that death had to be meticulous. For twenty years he was killing
innocents, mocking the police. He was undaunted during interrogations. But one day,
in 1987, he spat out a drop of saliva that, when analyzed, implicated him in the
murder of four women found at the bottom of the river. They were torn apart by
brush, and before they were killed they had been raped. Ridgway then confessed,
pleading guilty to the murder of forty-eight other women.

Instead, my father is guilty and remains at large, unpunished.

My father beat my mother and while he did it he called her a

whore. I was writing down the beatings in a notebook, with the intention of showing
it to her after a month. In parallel, he made small drawings of geometric figures
using the squares of the notebook. I felt that in this way everything would stop
sooner. He kept the notebook in the desk drawer along with the rest of the erasers,
pencils, pens, compass, ruler, and markers. The months passed and the list of
beatings grew. hidden. I was unable to reveal it to my mother. He wrote down the
time, the insults. I counted the blows. The tremors. The drawings became studs,
stripes, anarchic strokes. And now I feel that it was an unconscious way of
recording it inside me. To keep feeling it. Can a person become a junkie of abuse
and suffering?

After a year, my father went into the room to get a piece of

paper and saw the notebook with the list of the beatings. It was a summer day when
we had gone with my mother to the beach, the turquoise blue sky, the crystal clear
water. When we returned, the pages of the notebook were torn off and scattered on
the desk and on the floor. From that day on, he began to come to my room frequently
at night.

My father was beaten by my grandfather. He would release it

gloating whenever he could. It was burned into my memory. I remember the few visits
my paternal grandparents made to my father's restaurant. Normally some Saturday at
lunchtime. Brief visits that repeated the same pattern: my grandparents would sit
at the bar and ask about their grandchildren; if we weren't there, they would call
us; and since the restaurant was one minute from our house, we would go over to say
hello to those relatives with whom we had no business. My grandfather joked with
us, my father made love to him and kissed his mother, but you could see the
tension. They almost never stayed to eat. And in each of these meetings my father
would say to his: You have not hit me times with the leash! You always had time for
that.

On other occasions, if we were late, my grandparents had left

before we arrived. They never set foot in our house. I don't know the reason. I
don't know if they were terrified of going into it or if it was due to a matter of
honor, since my parents also didn't go to the Sunday family gatherings at my
grandparents' house, where the whole family got together.

My father hated his father. I hate mine. That is the inheritance

that leaves me. The inheritance of hate. And the obsession to avenge the fear that
has inoculated me.

Before starting to write this book, I did not know that my father
is the eldest of seven children. Nor that the pus of memories was going to come out
this way. I wanted to understand. That is why I began to investigate the family
with which I was denied a relationship. I spoke with two of his sisters (one lives
in Valencia and the other in Madrid), who offered to help me. The rest of my
father's brothers didn't want to cooperate, but they never wanted to hear from him
because of the problems he caused.

I have found out things. Nothing has changed, nothing has made me
change. My father is a murderer and I want to kill him.

Before I began to write this book, I assumed that there was not
much joy in my father's home, nor in my mother's. However, when I have spoken with
his sisters and with my mother's little sister they have offered me the opposite
version, they agree in the description of pleasant, happy homes. They felt like a
family. I wonder if it's a memory distortion or if it really was.

I have never felt like a son. I have never felt part of a family.
I have never felt like heir to something deep and rooted.

Before starting to write this book, I thought that I should write

without rancor. I'm not so sure anymore. I would have liked to know what my
grandfather thought of his son. My grandfather who started working at the age of
eight and did not stop until his retirement day. He started out as a helper in his
father's butcher shop after the war. His function was to distribute the meat to the
houses of the gentlemen, in one of which he met his future wife, who worked as a
nanny and assistant. He learned to read and write by himself. At the age of
fourteen he alternated working in the butcher shop with that of a bricklayer, until
at eighteen he became a maintenance assistant at the tobacco factory in the Huelin
neighborhood, where he remained until the end of his life.

My father was born when my grandfather was already working in the

tobacco company. My aunts say that my grandparents adored their son. It was the
first, my grandmother's weakness, but my grandfather passed on all his
insecurities, phobias, and frustrations. The word my grandfather used the most was
"fear." Fear of illness, hunger, death, storms... My aunt from Madrid says that my
father was always a problematic child. He never stood still, he was always
inventing some mischief that made my grandfather furious.

My aunt from Valencia doesn't remember the beatings so much;

however, he says that my grandfather regretted it every time he hit his son. He
says that he was very impressed to hear his father cry after those beatings.

At the end of the fifties, my father used to go to the Jaboneros

stream to collect sugar cane for his family. When the time passed for him to be at
home, and my grandfather called out to him over and over again from the window and
my father did not respond, then my grandfather's fears and responsibility surfaced
with the absence of his son. Then she would look for him in the neighborhood and go
to her friends' houses and, since she couldn't find him, she would end up waiting
for him at the entrance of the house, until she saw him arrive carefree, singing,
with sugar canes in hand; and then, my grandfather would put his hand to his pants,
remove the belt and viciously whip his son, while he challenged him: You can kill
me. You kill me if you want.

My aunts hid so that the downpour would not fall on them,

although they tell me that they never suffered that violence. Those nights, my
grandfather didn't eat dinner. Those episodes gave him terrible stomach pains. Then
he would go to the bedroom to be private. And there she cried silently for her
inability to educate her son.

My father didn't cry, he smiled when he hit me.

My aunts say that my father wanted to attract attention at all

costs in any situation and place, as if he had a spring and could not avoid it.
Your father did what he wanted and even though he hung out with older kids he
always pretended to be the captain. You had to do what he said. He didn't mind
fighting with bigger boys or with several at once if he finally achieved his goal.
He was very nervous and when he fought he looked like a snake. For a time they
nicknamed him like this: the Culebra. Until one day a wire crossed him and if
someone called him by that nickname he would throw a punch.

On the other hand, they also say that my father had a good heart
and gave everything he found to others, even though it caused him problems. Like
the time he spent the milk giving it to the stray cats and dogs in the area. The
one in San Quentin was set up when your grandparents discovered that there was no
milk and that your father had wasted it that way. Your grandfather took off his
leash, and your father did not try to escape or hide, he emboldened himself against
your grandfather and even raised his hand challenging him and yelled at him that he
also worked and brought money to the house, and that the milk was so much his as of
him Your grandfather replied that he was a common thief who stole from his own
family, a loser, while your grandmother prayed and asked God for her little boy and
for her husband, so that all this would end as soon as possible and not happen
again. for his son to straighten up once and for all. That night the blows were
heard louder than any other. It was the last time I remember hitting him. Your
father would be ten or eleven years old.

My aunts remember many things that help me reconstruct my

father's childhood. To know the environment where he grew up, to understand what
made him be that way with his family. I wonder what he thinks of his father, when
he did hardly anything to him that he did to me. Like that morning, after I got out
of jail, when he found me in the shower. That morning that I'm still not sure if I
want to relive.

My father started wearing a leash, and when he fought with other

children he would take it off and wrap it around his hand to hit with it. In the
winter of 1959 he went with his friends to a cave in the mountains, to which they
had forbidden him to go, to secretly smoke the Bisonte cigars that he stole from my
grandfather. It was said that several children had died there when climbing the
carob tree that made it possible to enter the grotto. One afternoon that year he
ran into another gang there who had gone to the same thing. My father ordered them
to leave. The other group refused, and my father's eyes and nose swelled, he took
off his belt and began to hit the person who had spoken with it, who was defending
himself as best he could, covering his face with his arms while his friends They
begged him to stop, that he was going to kill him. My father wasn't listening, he
was possessed by the violence of the moment, until he managed to get the kids from
the other group to come down from the tree. My father's friends cheered him on.
They were in euphoria when the boy my father had hit was nudged by one of his own
group, knocking him off balance as he went down and breaking his nose as he fell.
My father and his colleagues celebrated that the blood was gushing out, and that it
was one of their own who had done that damage.

That night, the father of the boy with the broken nose showed up
at my grandparents' house. He told them what had happened between shouts and
threats, making my father responsible for everything. My grandfather's face would
break down for seconds, he apologized and tried to calm the stranger assuring him
that he would give his son a lesson, that it would not happen again, that he would
count on him for whatever was in his hands. His voice cracked as he spoke. When he
closed the door, we thought he would take off the leash. My father had heard
everything, but he didn't move or say anything. I was waiting for my grandfather,
who had leaned his forehead against the door. It took him a while to enter the
living room where the only thing that could be heard was a radio soap opera that
hid the nervous breathing of my aunts and my grandmother, since my father was calm.
Take off your clothes or I'll take them off, my grandfather ordered his son, who
curiously obeyed and remained naked, impassive, defiant, while my grandmother burst
into tears between sobs. My grandfather told him to put on his underwear and go to
the door. This time my father did not obey and my grandfather had to forcefully
drag him out into the street, leaving him in the cold of winter for hours, with the
crying of his wife, who was suffering because her son did not catch pneumonia. My
aunts told me all this, and they assure me that no one slept a wink that night.
They slept in the same room and you could tell that they were all alert to the
noises of the early morning, to the tapping and jumping that my father made in the
street, to the scraping of his nails against the walls or against the door, to his
running around the the house, to his whistles, to the rubbing that he rubbed his
body with his hands to keep warm. My aunt from Valencia confesses to me that she
was peeing that night, and that she held it because she was terrified of getting
up, so she ended up wetting the bed. At dawn my grandfather got up first, made
himself breakfast, and then let his son in. They did not speak. Then he left for
work, so my grandmother hugged her son while she did not stop crying and he
comforted her.
 My aunts don't know that what they tell me brings back bad
memories, that I lived through similar experiences.

I'm in my 80's. I haven't slept all night. I have cried and felt
afraid, cold, I have wanted to run away. But I run in circles inside a room of
mirrors pitted by humidity. I run away to nowhere. I run as far as possible from my
father. I want to distance myself from his breath of alcohol and Ducados, from his
threats that knot the guts, from the smell of sordidness. Get away from that
kitchen with the refrigerator dented by blows. Leaving behind the glasses with
greasy footprints, the dirt that serves as a home for the flies that swarm around
the stove, the living room with the television on top of a chair, the dilapidated
sofa, the shaky table with traces of nicotine and hashish threads, and the ashtray
full of cigarette butts. I have looked at comics of The Avengers, Batman, Superman,
Daredevil, The X-Men, Iron Man, they are brave, and I want to be like them. I got
up when the screams had been inert for a long time, tucking the bottoms of my
pajamas into my socks so as not to step on them and fall, as before when I returned
to my room thrown by my father. I have reopened the two doors to the corridor,
careful not to make any noise, and I am again a few meters from his room, whose
door is ajar. My mother snores, the air emanating from the bedroom is thick. I'm
terrified of getting closer, and that makes me angry. I can't get my dad coming my
way out of my head. I remain on the edge of the hallway listening to their
breathing, hypnotized, tense. After a few minutes I go to the living room and I see
the bottles, the glasses, the cigarette butts, the broken things on the floor. I
stand in front of the TV and turn it on, turn off the sound. The image does not
stop, it looks cut in half, crossed by a black line from top to bottom. I hit the
telly, still the same. I sit in front of the screen, very close, watching the
cartoons until hours later my mother gets up and tells me what do I do and that I
shouldn't get up at night and scare them like that. So I don't tell him, I just
think about it. I think that I want to go, that I have to flee, that she must also
go, and my brother, everyone. Run away from my father. Run away from that house.
Run away from that dirty mirrored room where I'm trapped. I think my father is not
like Batman or Daredevil or any of the superheroes I read about in comics. I think
that in 1980 and then I forget it until this moment in which I write.

In the interview with my aunts, I ask them if there was ever a

time when my grandfather had a father-son conversation with my father. They didn't
know what to say to me, they remember that I did talk to them. And they affirm, in
any case, that he was aware of him, that he supported and encouraged him to study
and that at the age of seven he found him his first job.
 Not only because it was necessary to bring money home, but also
because your grandfather thought that this way his son would get on track a bit,
says my aunt from Valencia.

My father entered the Corpus Christi church in Pedregalejo as an

apprentice as an altar boy. He had to fulfill the initial commitments that this job
required of him before God: promise that he would be faithful and affectionate and
love Jesus, although he did not give a damn about everything related to religion
and already at that age he mocked the priests and the nuns and pretended to pray.
He saw that he could get something out. It was very long, says my aunt from Madrid.

Mass began at seven in the morning. My father had to be half an

hour before to prepare and pray, they gave him a sandwich, which he ate after the
service, and a duro, which they did not give to him, but to my grandfather. It
wasn't the only coin he got. When the mass began, he diligently helped the priest
at the altar, performing his functions with the greatest devotion, so that no one
would suspect him. At the end, a bowl was passed before the parishioners, who
deposited their donations. From the bowl, a coin almost always disappeared that my
father kept in his mouth, with which he bought some gummy, which he used to share
with his sisters, and he still had left for his things. Then he went to the
Francisco Franco school, where not a day went by without a fight. Sometimes he
convinced other classmates to skip classes and go to the rocks to smoke, or play
billiards with the money stolen from donations, or collect glass containers for
which they got a few pesetas. My father hardly studied, he did not pay any
attention in class, however, he managed to pass the exams due to his prodigious
memory. My aunt from Valencia says that my grandfather's words still resonate with
her: My nerves are broken, sitting in a chair in the living room, looking at his
wife, as if waiting for an answer that she resisted.

Notifications of my father's absences would soon reach my

grandfather from school, and about a year and a half later he left as an altar boy
to work at the Los Galanes summer cinema, selling soft drinks and sweets.

It was there that he first saw my mother. And, according to what

my aunts tell me, he said, as soon as he saw her with her long brown hair and her
UFO eyes, that this girl would one day be his. I don't know if I believe this. Only
that my father was a disturbed, selfish obsessive who destroyed everything that got
in his way. My father always achieved his goals. If he got something between his
eyebrows and eyebrows, he would go for it without measuring the consequences.

My father went after my mother, he got into her head, into her
soul, until he ripped it out, until she stopped being her. A woman who, according
to all the people I have spoken to, agrees that she is special, attractive, sexual,
capable of dazzling anyone. The truth is that I did not know that person they are
talking about. I remember her writing and doing homework with her left hand. As a
child I was curious as to why she was left-handed and I was right-handed. I even
tried writing left handed; there was no way. I asked her to write, to take this or
that to verify with my own eyes that mystery that I never tired of observing, but
my mother got bored quickly, she protested, she never had patience with her
children.

I do remember that.

My grandmother told me that her daughter was very conceited,

flirtatious, always dressing up, with an eagerness to please men that led her to
perdition, possessed by a restlessness that prevented her from seeing danger.

My daughter was not like that. Your father changed it, my

grandmother repeated, sprawled out in her rocking chair while she waited for the
soap opera to start.

My mother studied at the Barcenillas School, the one for poor

girls, which not only conditioned the course of education, but also clothes and
other things that mattered to my mother. My aunt from Opus says that her sister
wanted to attend the school for rich girls, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, dress
like them, attend their parties, she was not satisfied with what she had, she
confessed to me. My mother was a good student, she strove to stand out, to stand
out at all costs and to impose her criteria. Her clear and resounding voice made
the nuns choose her to read at mass, also in plays or in public events in which
they selected the most striking students. From the age of five she was a schoolmate
of my aunt from Valencia, with whom she had only been with for six months. From
that moment on, my aunt from Valencia and my mother did everything together:
catechesis, First Communion at the age of eight (in dresses borrowed from the
nuns), regional dances that they reluctantly learned, games, homework after school,
school in the library In summer, as a reward for being good students, they were
sent to the colonies in Ventas de Zafarraya, where apparently only the elect and
malnourished went. There they went on excursions, they taught them to cook, to sew
and even modern dances like the twist or the yenka. The nuns told my grandmother
that her daughter would have a career and that she was a very good girl, despite
the temper and rebellious spirit that came out of her from time to time.

My mother was a difficult girl, with a serious face and a forced

laugh, who worried about men liking her, although she did not allow them to
dominate her. It was like that when my father had not yet broken into his life. She
was still a girl who did doll hair and aspired to be a model. A dream that life put
at her feet and had little impact because it was aborted by her boyfriend, her
future husband, my father.

In the summer of 1960, there was a big stir in the neighborhood

with the filming of a cowboy movie. The production team was looking for children to
act as extras in a scene. They were required to wear dark brown pants, a white
shirt, a black jacket, and a hat. My father convinced his mother to buy fabrics and
make the suit for him without his own father knowing, since he would not approve it
due to the hardships they endured.

My father came to the set every day to help with whatever it was,
dodging cables, transporting boxes..., excited by the spotlights and the frenetic
movement of the technicians. Then, in front of his colleagues, he would boast that
he would be the boy they chose, that he had even befriended the director. Those
days she didn't even show her hair at school, while her mother sewed piecework,
morning, noon and night, tricking her husband to finish the task on time. He was
unaware that the main role of that boy who accompanied the cowboy had already been
decided, that they only needed a few children to appear as extras in the background
of a scene like a funeral procession. When my grandmother showed my father the
clothes, she didn't say anything, she just laughed, imagining herself next to the
protagonist of the film, watching his name go by on a big movie screen. His smile
doubled when on the day in question he saw all those children appear with their
impeccable costumes, more appropriate than his for the scene. Out of nowhere, my
father got into a fight with one of those daddy's boys, dragging him into an alley
to try to get his clothes off. The two of them rolled on the floor and around them
a chorus cheered them as if they were part of a Western saloon sequence until
several adults separated them. A moment of confusion was created, with more insults
and threats. And, as my father sensed his destiny, he left yelling that he was the
best and that they should all go fuck themselves. Upon reaching the house, he told
his mother to throw away the clothes, which the convicts had told him were
worthless and had given their role to one of the sons of the noblemen. My aunts do
not know this first hand, they were at school that day, they know it from third
parties, from the rumors and comments that began to circulate in the neighborhood.
My grandfather did not say or do anything, perhaps he considered that his son had
already had enough punishment. He was wrong.

Between 1959 and 1961 my father worked at the Los Galanes cinema
during the summer and at the Lope de Vega in winter, which were owned by the same
owner and were barely a minute from each other. In both places he had the same job:
he was in charge of the bar. He sold soft drinks, chocolates, popcorn, reloaded the
refrigerated rooms, tidied up the warehouse and wrote down the orders for the
missing products. Half of the salary was given to his parents. At Lope de Vega,
sometimes, he was usher. I saw my first films in those theaters that no longer
exist, and I find it curious how we tread the path of parents. In Los Galanes, the
bar was located at the back, and my father would gather his cronies there, whom he
invited from time to time. He also invited my mother on occasion, although she did
not pay any attention to him.

In summer he spent the day on the Pedregalejo beach with his

friends, with whom he swam to the rocks to jump off or jump from a board that had
been wedged between two stones. He did not hesitate to step on everyone, even his
friends; if not, he felt inferior. He vomited a permanent defiant attitude against
the world, a constant disposition to adrenaline.

So it occurred to him to go, along with some friends, to the

beaches of El Palo to rob bathers of their bags and buy beers and tobacco with the
stolen money. They walked along the shore until they chose their victim. Then they
would lie down on the sand, close to her, and make a circle. They took advantage of
their bath to mount a fictitious fight and get closer to their goal. With the fight
going, one of them would put his hand in the unwary's bag, grab his wallet or
purse, hide it in his bathing suit and they would all disappear running through the
streets of the fishermen's houses. Far away, they looked at the loot, took the
money and threw the wallet or purse into a wastebasket. It was easy, better than
collecting shards from glass bottles. They drank and smoked and masturbated on the
rocks to porn comics that one of them had taken from their father. At seven my
father would go to Los Galanes.

One afternoon in August 1960 the doorbell rang at my

grandparents' house. My aunt from Madrid opened the door and ran into two policemen
who were asking if that was the address where her older brother lived. He didn't
say anything. She got so scared that she couldn't even call her mother. My
grandfather must have been messing up some house. The policemen came by and
explained to my grandmother the problem. They had recognized their son robbing some
bathers. My father, who was changing to go to work, denied it, shouted and swore
that it was a lie. Being a minor, things didn't get any worse, also because my
grandmother gave the police the sum of the last theft. My aunt from Madrid tells me
that my father went ballistic, promising his mother that he hadn't stolen anything,
that it had been his friends. Then my grandmother told her son to go to work, that
he was late, and immediately went to the neighboring houses to beg them not to tell
her husband about the visit by the police, since curiosity he had caused them to
crowd around the patio, and he was afraid of the reprisals my grandfather might
take against him. All this is confessed to me by my aunt from Madrid, whose mother
also made her promise never to tell.

In 1965, my father's family was given the small, subsidized

apartment in the same three-story block where my maternal grandmother lived with
her children. My mother lived in the third and my father in the first. My aunt from
Valencia and my mother celebrated luck. If in the mornings they shared class hours
at school, recess, studies in the library, since 1965 they also had fun in the
afternoons in the courtyard of the block, dancing with the record player that my
grandfather had bought. My father's presence began to become more constant,
bragging in front of her whenever an opportunity presented itself. This way of
acting did not impress my mother, in principle she ignored the arrogant, cocky,
macho poses. For the rest, numerous suitors fluttered around her, which was what
really pleased her. She never liked playing with dolls or those girlish games like
rope. She preferred to dance, to go out without time when adolescence began to
emerge, to meet men and for them to flatter her and surrender at her feet. Since I
was a child, I had heard how my grandmother was told: This girl is good for a
model, and as she grew older, they repeated to her more often how beautiful she
was.

Apart from the dream of being a model, my mother aspired to study

high school, another way to get out of the path of the needy and identify with the
wealthy girls. For this reason, when school finished and the nuns announced that
the eighteen students with the best records (among which were my mother and my aunt
from Valencia) would be asked to study at the baccalaureate, with the sacrifice
that they would spend the whole summer preparing the exam, he didn't care. My aunt
from Valencia and my mother took a bus at nine in the morning that took them to the
center of Malaga, quite an odyssey for them. They did not leave the classes until
lunchtime, at which time they went down to a store and bought the cheapest
sandwich, the one with anchovies. They ate it looking at the windows of the
clothing stores on Calle Larios, before returning to class. At six they returned to
the neighborhood on foot, and when they arrived they took a bath in the beach or
began to study. At night they sat on the stairs of the block to combat the heat,
ate pipes, in exceptional cases orange popsicles, and talked about the illusions
that were getting closer. Sometimes the mothers and grandmothers joined them,
setting up chairs in a circle on the patio, while, a little further apart, the men
set up a table to play dominoes or cards, when they weren't going to the bar to
drink. Some nights the boys from the neighborhood would appear there, making
themselves noticed, insects that fluttered nervously, and that settled from one
place to another, crickets on hot nights with the insistent metallic song to
attract the females. There was one that my mother listened to more attentively than
the others, whom she dated a few months later.

That summer was one of the saddest of our lives. We set high
expectations and were disappointed. Your mother did not understand that having
passed the access to high school with a good grade, they sent her to study
professional training. She considered herself deceived, and she had a monumental
row with a shrill-voiced nun who acted as a tutor, reveals my aunt from Valencia,
who continues: She confronted the nun and called her everything. She made us feel
proud, although none raised her voice, we all kept quiet for fear of reprimand. At
first, the nun tried to explain to her that it didn't just depend on
qualifications, that financial resources were the other part of the cake, but then,
when she saw that your mother was not abiding by reason, she sent her to the
superior and threatened her with death. wrath of God and the like, which your
mother bragged about.

In September 1966 my mother reluctantly began a vocational

training course in the textile industry. Studying was no longer fun because it
didn't serve his purposes. The factories were constantly looking for apprentices,
cheap labor, and working and helping with extra income was never despised, so my
mother decided to go to the interviews to work at Cortefiel. My grandmother would
have wanted me to finish the course, but you couldn't turn down a job either. My
mother hated sewing all day long. It was a job that bored her, to which she did not
see the slightest sense. She managed to get a job as a clerk in one of the firm's
branches, away from the squalor of the factory where she stitched shirts.

She went with her older companions to the bar, to have a coffee,
or even a liquor that would warm them up from the humidity of that ship, because
she had elaborated a plan; one that came out halfway right. I have always heard
that my mother took to drinking early. Perhaps it all began there, in that canteen
where my mother went to get rid of the disappointment in her body. The truth is
that I remember her with her glass of wine in the morning. Alcohol was the
protagonist of his life, he even baptized our dog, a poodle, with the name of
Rioja, and he became fond of drinking wine. During breaks she went to the bar, and
with her smooth talk she soon became friends with those who controlled the factory,
and that's how they introduced her to the boss, a lesbian woman who invited her to
drink liquor and tobacco, and who ended up transferring her to one of the group
stores. Her sister tells me that for a week the boss was showing up on her
motorcycle around the neighborhood to pick up my mother. The neighbors began to
gossip, and my grandmother warned her that people didn't give anything away if they
didn't want something in return. Days later, when the boss wanted to collect the
favor and was rejected, my mother was fired. However, it didn't take long for her
to find another job as a sales clerk at Scholl footwear, after a short
apprenticeship.

The winter of 1966 was rainy. He used to spend the weekends at

the Tele Clubs organized by the Corpus Christi church. They had a place where you
could watch football on television and also dance as a couple to the rhythm of the
music played by a record player, all under the supervision of adults. There my
mother got married for the first time. A boy who gave her flowers and wrote poems,
who would pick her up after work at the shoe store, who would take her by the hand
as they walked through the streets of the chalets, dreaming that they too would
have one of those houses, a boy who had only stolen a few sneaky kisses from her,
but my mother craved more, fueled by a curiosity that fueled her excitement. My
father rarely went to those Tele Clubs. He had worked as a kitchen assistant in a
restaurant, Casa Matías, since 1963, and had begun to get involved in the nightlife
of Torremolinos. Although this did not prevent him from leaving a sign for my
mother from time to time, which she lukewarmly rejected.

But when one Sunday in January of '67 my father discovered my

mother with her boy dancing to a slow song, his desire for possession must have
been activated. He tried to get close to her without success, and at soccer time,
he sat next to my mother's boyfriend with the mischief of tickling him. She wanted
to provoke him in any way, to make him jump, so she could go out and fix him the
only way she knew how: with her fists. To his surprise, the boy was ignoring him,
not falling for his game, which infuriated him even more. In the other room, the
record player kept spinning, and the girls and young people who didn't watch
football kept dancing. So, my father changed his strategy and went to hover around
my mother, who was dancing with my aunt from Valencia and other friends. And he
stood there with the best of smiles, a snake charmer who used his best verbiage, to
tell her the incidents of the night, his ambitions, extolling her non-existent
achievements, promising her that he would give her a bracelet and encouraging her
to smoke in the street, Behind the church. And when she was convinced, your
mother's boyfriend appeared, who stood in front, your father pushed him, and if
looks could kill... but nothing happened, your father left blowing a kiss to your
mother; I knew that by fighting I would not win her over, says my aunt from
Valencia. At that time I was amused when my brother and my best friend went out
together and I talked to her about him, told her good things and was the bearer of
letters that your father gave me for her. Never in my life have I regretted
anything else as much as this. I should have told him the truth. I don't think I
advised her very well, not even when they separated while they were married, she
concludes, and asks me for a break, because all these memories suffocate her, she
tells me. The same thing happens to me, I tell him.

In the middle of 1967, at Scholl footwear, my mother was serving

a client, and he noticed her and asked her if she was interested in posing as a
model. You are photogenic, you have potential, he heard those words from the man's
mouth that spread his smile like the wings of a white butterfly. It turned out that
the man ran an agency, and he gave him a card with the address and explained that
it was nearby, just ten minutes from where they were.

That afternoon she went up the stairs of the blocks two by two,
happy, excited, with the push of her nerves to tell my grandmother. My mother
gesticulated and did not stop moving while she spoke with her habitual fantasy, an
attraction that gradually disappeared in the years of living with my father, my
aunt from Opus explains to me. Apparently, my grandmother objected to him, many,
restless and upset (I imagine that because of the prejudices of the time), and
warned him not to even think of leaving work. That warning, far from intimidating
my mother, only succeeded in reaffirming her aspiration, in that dream that had
suddenly appeared to her. As if she herself had provoked it with her thoughts, and
perhaps even thought that she was one of the "chosen", as she often imagined.

Thus began her fleeting modeling career. The photographers,

delighted with her, recommended that she try not to be in bad company, to be
disciplined, that way the doors of big firms would open for her.

Photos, photos and more photos that my mother couldn't stop

looking at. hypnotized. He was fascinated by looking at himself, recreating himself
in them; like when as a child she stood in front of the mirror and fantasized about
posing in a photo session. The first advertising campaign in which he participated
was for swimwear. My father looked at the photos on the pages of a magazine with a
warm smile. She's not your girlfriend, my aunt told him. So what? It bothers me.
Besides, she's not wearing the bracelet, she replied to her sister. They had broken
up when my father gave her the bracelet he had promised her, and my mother, far
from hearing the other boy's pleas, kept bringing my father's gift until the boy
had had enough and they left him.

My mother went everywhere with the magazine. And when he found my

father, he showed him the photos that he had already seen. He asked her if she
wasn't embarrassed that everyone saw her like that. And my mother, with a smile,
asked if that was jealousy. He told her: No, just disappointment. And he asked
about the bracelet as he took it from her tanned wrists. My mother replied: I put
it on when I feel like it, and my father was left with the word in his mouth,
spitting on the floor. A few days later, she began dating another boy, and when my
father bumped into her on the stairs, he told her that she was like everyone else,
a slut. The next day, supposedly repentant, he sent her flowers through my aunt
from Valencia, who told him that her brother was sorry and that he had asked her to
go to the rocks to bathe on Sunday morning. To which my mother replied: We'll see.

At the age of thirteen my father dropped out of school and went

to work as a scullery at Casa Matías. My grandfather tried to make him reconsider.
He told him that if he wanted to carve out a profitable future and build a career,
training was essential, that he would regret it if he didn't, that he hadn't even
had that opportunity. There was no way to convince him.

He had made his decision, to leave him alone, besides, hadn't he

been the one who had put him to work with the priests and in the cinemas? If she
worried about money, don't worry, he'd still give her half of what she earned to
keep the house. This was my father, he took advantage of any loophole to create bad
blood.

Your father considered that he was the one who contributed the
most to the house, even more than your grandfather. It is true that he was
generous, that he gave us games, like the one for Señorita Pepis, and that he
bought us sweets and that he was an entrepreneur, but your grandfather, the family,
always helped him in everything, when he set up his first restaurant, or even when
He was in jail, my aunt from Madrid told me.

He stayed at Casa Matías until he was fifteen, then he studied

hospitality for a year, and when he finished, he was offered a job at La Pampa, a
restaurant in Torremolinos. It was then that he began to go into the night, to work
in discotheques as a waiter to get extra money.

I was still serving at Casa Matías when my father began to not

get to sleep some nights. Over time it became a habit. This generated tension that
translated into arguments with my grandfather. Despite the fact that he no longer
put his hand on her, my father urged him on, laughing mischievously, replying that
if he was old enough to work and contribute money, it was old enough to come when
he felt like it. He wanted nothing more than for my grandfather to pick on him,
that he dared to raise his hand or make the gesture of taking off his leash and
engaging him in a fight. Luckily my grandmother was always vigilant and smoothed
the tightness of the environment. My aunts agree that father and son never agreed
except on one occasion, one of the worst days of their adolescence, they remember:
when due to financial difficulties my grandmother went to work without my
grandfather or father knowing, and The two discovered it, threatened her and made
it clear that the pants were worn by them, the men of the house. They remember it
as a grim day.

In those days, there were times when my father didn't show up at

my grandparents' house for days, when they wondered, with their hearts pounding,
where he was. And when he arrived, he did it in the morning, tired, leaving a bag
of dirty clothes for his mother to wash and throwing himself into his parents' bed
to sleep for a few hours. Most of the times he used to get up before my grandfather
arrived.

My father had avoided him since the day my grandfather showed up

at the Bossanova disco on my father's shift. He must have stared at him like razors
and would immediately ignore him. I imagine my grandfather leaning on the bar,
drinking a beer awkwardly, while he watched his son in a suit, diligent, fast,
speaking wordlessly to each other in a place thick with smoke and music, with my
father feeling superior, dwarfing his own father. . Surely the customers and
colleagues called his name while serving the drinks and, I suppose, my grandfather
did too when asking for another beer, but I suspect my father ignored him, and I
represent him toasting with a girl, laughing, taking a puff. to a Ducados and
looking at my grandfather again with a look of those who kneel.

A few days later, when my grandfather returned from work, he

found him sleeping in his bed, and he began to think that his son's life was not
healthy.

I feel like I'm there, next to my grandfather, I can see him

smoking and throwing the ashes into his hand. When the cigarette is consumed, he
picks up the Celtas pack, it is empty. He goes to the kitchen and throws it away.
On the coat rack in the living room, he sees his son's jacket and looks for tobacco
in the pockets. Nicotine calms his restlessness, but what he finds instead is a
china de grifa. Furious, he raises the blinds in the room. The light floods the
bed. My grandfather throws the china at his face and yells at him to wake up. What
the hell are you doing? says my father. My grandfather points out the hashish stone
and my father tells him that if he is now stealing, he should leave him alone for
once. With the voices my grandmother appears.

My grandfather yells at him to leave home, tells him that drugs

don't fit in that family. My grandmother, my aunts, and my mother can't quite
believe what's happening, while my father packs up his things and brags that he's
going to come back for his girlfriend.

This is explained to me by my aunt from Madrid, and she lowers

her head at the end of her story, her eyes dull, and reveals something that should
leave me stunned, however, it does not. What I have never told anyone-I never had
the courage-is that your father tried to force himself on me one night.

Third part

Mother

1
 This couple will never be happy, my paternal grandparents used to
say. And it was something everyone who knew my parents saw. The continuous fights
over trifles, his sick jealousy.

This couple will never be happy.

I don't need to write down this sentence. They were never happy,
regardless of what happiness is.

It was written, says my mother's sister, who remembers that the

two families were opposed to the wedding. They got married because of what they
will say after the Acacias incident, says my aunt from Valencia, who qualifies: I
was the only one who supported them, who believed in them, the one who was present
in many of their fights and reconciliations.

The truth is that they have no idea what my brother and I went
through, our incomprehension that they were still together, the almost daily
vileness and humiliation, and then, as if nothing had happened, that practice of
violent sex that seemed to my parents excite them Animals with their breaths and
gasps that penetrated walls, mutual parasites, parasites of the beings that
surrounded them, incapable of living without each other, and, at the same time,
voracious animals with their environment and their prey, filing down our sanity,
injecting an unhappiness that clung like mold, making me wish with all my might
that they would die.

My father had the DNA of a predator.

I prayed at night for someone to free us from his presence. I

woke up with the thought that maybe that would be the morning I would leave that
house, or with the hope that God would do justice and send my father to hell.

That day never came.

Shit on God, open the damn door or I'll break it down, who the
hell do you think you are, you're in my house, rubbish, I'm going to bust you if
you don't open it, and the blows that didn't hit the door of my room, now dented,
but in my head, or so I felt, hiding under the covers, with fear inside, deep
inside me, so much so that I felt it gnawing at my heart, my throat, my chest, my
temples, my stomach. I watched how the padlocks I had put on my bedroom door
gradually gave way to their attacks. You're going to want to never have been born,
sucker; come on, honey, leave it, don't you see that...; shut up, bitch And where
was my brother? The shattered pommel. The door about to give way. Fucking coward,
open if you're a man.

The door gave way, an opening glimpsed his enraged eyes, his
naked, sweaty body. Then my mother would tell her to calm down again, to go to the
bedroom, and my father would backhand her with the palm of his hand, his hands of
crushed blood sausages would feed on her, and then the bruises would not take long
to appear. But I was still in bed, a stone that couldn't move, whore, lazy, just
like your son, ungrateful, until my head couldn't take it anymore, and agitated I
put the key in the padlock and opened the door. His smile screeched, white foam at
the corners of his mouth. The stench of his breath, his fists on my body, the pain
I grew used to blow by blow. And my mother begged her to leave me, her hair stuck
to her face like blood, my father shouting that my grandfather had taught him how
to educate, and that I didn't look like his son, but a beaten dog, a piece of shit,
a piece of shit.

You are worthless, you are worthless, you are worthless. And I
was breathing with hiccups, with the pain that canceled out the pain, with his
frustration marking my body. And the fear bubbled up and made me lie, defend
myself, I called the police. You're going to find out, rubbish, don't you like the
bed?, he spat, kicking my mother when he passed her, breaking what little was left
in the room. And I was trying to pick up my mother, who was bleeding from her nose,
from her lip, leave me, this is all your fault, you couldn't stay still, you had to
give the note, put a padlock on, you deserve it , dumbass. My eyes like shores, the
phlegm in my throat, runny nose that I sucked or rang with my hand, wiping myself
on the blankets, the fault, always mine. Delayed, you will not have called the
police, do you want to ruin us? It would be what we lacked, with everything we
already have on top of us, and you want to ruin us.

And me: Mom, please; and her: Because of you, everything is

because of you. And my father would open and close drawers and suddenly leave, and
I would take the opportunity to put on my pants and run away. I hadn't even
buttoned them when he comes back to my room with a box of matches in his hand, and
starts throwing lit matches at me. Are you crazy? Is that the respect you have for
your father? More lit matches on the sheets, until one lit, panic on my face, his
departure, he enjoyed it, so I apologize to my father for to leave at once, and he
responds by pissing on the small fire, laughing madly, until suddenly his smile
fades along with the fire and he orders me to hug him.

It disgusted me, my father screaming for me to hug him, he

grabbed me by force, sobbing. And her body trembled against mine, and she gave off
a smell that disgusted me.

What year was it when this happened, what year. And the only way
she had to live was to kill him.

A few months after my mother's funeral, I called my brother to

see if he was willing to talk. Silence. I urged him and he excused himself that he
had a lot to do. I insisted, he told me that it wasn't worth it, that he was only
going to hurt me more. At some point in the conversation we fell silent. During
those seconds I remembered a phrase that I had read in a book by Alberto Fuguet:
«Pain, I know, dissipates, shame or bad times also; the untold stories fester,
fester, contaminate.” I asked him if he had found my mother's autopsy. Again mutism
took over the conversation, until he confessed to me: I don't have it. Daddy has
it. He took her away, what was he going to do?

I cursed out of my mouth and hung up the phone in a bad mood.

Rage invaded me. I ran down to the garage. I started the

motorcycle and headed to my father's house. I was muttering insults that died in
the air, shaken with excitement and the desire to kill him while I wondered: why do
you want the autopsy? A thought crossed my angry mind: my brother will always give
my father a chance.

He recognizes it.
 I deny

Maybe my brother suffers from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, I

thought as I parked the motorbike across the street from Corpus Christi. I crossed
the road to reach the Cumana building, at number 64 Juan Sebastián Elcano. In front
of the telephone my heartbeat accelerated uncontrollably. I was sweating, I
swallowed, it was hard for me to breathe, I felt a slight dizziness. I wiped the
sticky sweat with my T-shirt.

I wanted to call, kill him, get this over with. But he was unable
to press the doorbell button. Fear dwarfed me. Fear had been a faithful family
companion. I felt just like the helpless child I was. Fearful, I ran to the
motorcycle, got on and accelerated, accelerated, overtook cars, with the wind in my
face the tears came from the wind or impotence. I wanted to die so that the pain
would be extinguished. A vehicle honked at me and I sent him to hell, the same as
he deserved for not having the courage to call my father's apartment.

When I returned I wrote down: I have the feeling that my father

is saved and that I am condemned by him.

Do I need to write to record how uncomfortable and exhausting our

bond has always been? Because what I don't accept, what I find difficult to accept,
what hurts and crushes me is that, even though I reject it, I will always have a
link with my father. And this simple evidence makes me gag, a viscous, unpleasant
sensation, a tightness in my chest for which I can't find any precise words.

I spend hours in the dark waiting for the images that I expelled
as a teenager, when I curled up in the corner of that room in an effort to erase
the screams and fights of my parents, to return. The psychic wounds they caused me.
The physical wounds that I inflicted on myself by hitting the wall with my fists,
by scorching the blackened gotelé wall with my knuckles until blood gushed out. I
hit myself to appease the anger, the disaffection, the disorientation that gnawed
at my insides. The humiliation I felt: a snake that had entered me to rummage from
within.

I craved the pain, I needed to endure it, to be ready for when my

father hit me so I wouldn't suffer so much.

I wanted to beat him.

But the times that I was in front of him on those terrifying

nights, I escaped in fear. Just like now, when I've been unable to touch the phone.

The fear is the same.

The images arrive out of order. The scars from the raid in
October or November of 1991, when my father ended up in jail. The confinement that
he imposed on us just when we had final exams at school, around 84 or 85, and that
forced us to repeat the year. That afternoon in 1989 when I caught him fucking his
partner's wife on the second floor of the restaurant he ran on Pedregalejo beach.
The mornings that I would find him in the doorway of the apartment sleeping it off.
The constant flaunting of his huge cock, strutting around the house naked,
unashamed, proud of her. The miasma that emanated from the walls of the Cumana
building where I lived for many years.

I am in the dark, I feel tremors, and I feel how the snake slides
inside my body. I also wait for the images that for so long I tried to put into a
corner to fester. I think my memory is made of rancor. I've been locked up in that
dark, airless room for decades. I suspect I carry my father's frustrations.
Destructive greed and weaknesses are part of their heritage. I know that writing
will not rectify the past. But I am certain that if I stop now, I will regret it. I
know that if I don't reconstruct her story, I will never reconcile with mine.

In 1969 my father had rented an apartment in Torremolinos with

other colleagues from the disco, and he rarely went to his parents' house. At least
once a week, I would visit my mother and I would promise her that soon they would
move in together. At that time, my mother continued with the modeling adventure,
despite the fact that my grandmother was not amused and caused her constant
quarrels with my father, who pressured her to stop posing and threatened to break
up. My mother held on until little by little she fell, weakened by her boyfriend's
sick network of jealousy. All it took was for a boy walking down the street to
notice her for my father to hook her up, accusing her of inciting men. The worst
thing is that things did not end there. My father would ruminate on his ghosts and
then he would bring them out for good, in unexpected situations.

One afternoon my father had gone to my grandparents' house to

have his clothes washed and to see my mother. She quickly came down from her
apartment and sat next to him, glad to see him. He asked him about the celebrities
who had gone to the new nightclub where he worked, Tiffany's, where he said he
earned more than in Bossanova, and my father, pretending to be interesting,
boasting, told him that that night he had greeted Marujita Díaz, a José Luis López
Vázquez, Luis Miguel Dominguín and Massiel. The couple were sitting around the
table while eating, in a relaxed atmosphere. My great-grandmother looked at the
bride and groom in awe: they smiled, they made love to each other, and suddenly,
out of the blue, my father slammed his hand on the table and began to insult her,
my mother replied, getting up just as my mother entered. grandfather and asked what
had happened.

Let's see if they get married once and get out of heat, he said.
But what remained in the air as if printed was my great-grandmother's comment: They
are going to be unfortunate.

After a fight they made up as if life depended on sex. The good

moments of my parents were associated with sex and the night. Seen from now, I
think they were addicted. Or perhaps it was a way to escape from the constant
dissatisfaction that everything caused them. My aunt from Valencia reveals to me
that in public my parents held hands and began to play with their fingers in the
palms of their hands, laughing mischievously. They used that language to say things
related to sex. The two of them would vanish when they did that sleight of hand.
Later he asked my mother and she confirmed it herself. They needed to fuck like
heat was their natural state.

Since my mother started dating him, I went with my aunt from

Valencia to the Bossanova nightclub on Saturdays, while he did his shift. The two
of them spent the afternoon and night dancing wildly on the platforms, as if they
were go-go dancers, with my father behind the bar, watching over them. In Bossanova
there was no room for a pin. The girls in their short skirts and high boots drank
and smoked imitating Nordic tourists. My mother was charmed by the way she dressed,
by her uninhibited behavior. Torremolinos was a permanent party, without measure,
which anticipated the opening of the Transition. But my mother and my aunt had to
return home at twelve. Sometimes they disobeyed and skipped the schedule. They
didn't care about the punishment. Especially my mother, who later managed to
escape.

Until the Acacias incident happened. An episode that would change

the relationship of the families.

In the disco they allowed themselves to be invited by one and the

other, until it was my father's rest shift and they shared some time with him
drinking and smoking the first cigarettes.

My father warned my mother about the dangerous fooling around

with men. She looked at him with her UFO eyes and made him angry, telling him that
this or that one had invited her and that she knew how to protect herself without
his help. On some occasion, when a girl passed by and teased my father, the roles
were reversed, so it was my mother who asked what was wrong with that one. More
than once the two told my aunt that they were going to dance, only to lose sight of
her and return with smiles on their faces. Every time they said goodbye, my father
would blackmail my mother with cutting if she didn't quit modeling. She challenged
him, indifferent, and vehemently told him to go find someone else.

My aunts can't tell me if my father was already dealing drugs.

They only remember that time my grandfather discovered marijuana in his jacket.
They didn't even see him smoke joints at that time. They knew that herbs and
amphetamines were common in the environments in which he moved. My paternal
grandparents, noticing that every day he distanced himself more from them, made an
effort to get closer to him. Even my grandfather allowed him liberties that he
would have previously disapproved of, such as when my father, who was spending
lavishly, would arrive flaunting unnecessary gifts for his sisters and mother. Deep
down, he competed with his father and despised what my grandfather had achieved.

I remember my father's superior faces when he saw his, the

features that concentrated inward, emanating resentment, standing alert to expose
it as soon as the slightest opportunity presented itself.

That never happened to me. I wanted to admire my father. I guess

he became obsessed with being admired. With being someone important at the highest
speed. And the drug enhanced that feeling. It gave him the appearance of security
and power he longed for, and also weaknesses, the ghosts devoured him.

My aunts call it generosity. It seems to me manipulation,

strategies to achieve their ends. My father frequently brought gifts to my mother
and maternal grandmother, and he did his best to seduce them. He was aware that all
this did not like my grandmother. And less since his daughter went out at night,
skipped arrival time, ran away when he imposed a punishment, or caught her smoking
secretly. My grandmother recriminated that he was perverting her. However, what
worried her the most were the fights and the conduct that the couple had in public,
with my father disrespecting her, continually threatening her, raising his hand to
my mother in the middle of the street.

One summer day in 1969, my grandmother told my father that he

would regret it if he ever raised his hand to his daughter again. My mother flew
into a rage, insulting my grandmother and telling her to mind her own business.

Despite these tensions, the families continued to have a cordial

relationship. In fact, my mother continued to go to my paternal grandfather's house
to sit down and talk with him. She felt protected by his side, he made her laugh,
and she behaved as if he were the father she had always longed for. She didn't tell
her boyfriend about this, because she knew it unnerved him. If my mother was not
with my aunts, with whom she shared her daily life, she would look for my
grandfather. From time to time, he would spin the talks around his son. He would
ask my mother how he was doing, recommend that she convince him to give up the
night and look for a decent job; and she herself advised him to think about
starting a family and forget about being a model. In his words, always restrained,
was mixed an underground sadness and reproach. This would make a one hundred and
eighty degree turn after the Acacias incident. From that day on, neither my mother
nor my grandfather ever sat together for company.

I've been a month without writing. During this time I have

investigated as if I were a historian and even a detective, if a historian is not a
detective of things buried in the past. I set out to find someone who knew my
father from his night time in Torremolinos. Through a Facebook profile I found a
guy who knew him and remembered him, but he barely told me relevant facts. He gave
me other names. I inquired without luck. On an internet page dedicated to the Costa
del Sol from the sixties and seventies, I came across a photo of my father on a
card from the Bossanova nightclub, it is a Christmas postcard from 1968. My father
appears with two other waiters and the manager of the club. I write down their
names on a sheet to surf through cyberspace. Before I look at the photo. My father
is the one who is more upright. He seems proud of who he is. He outlines a slight
smile. One of those gestures whose arrogance, I am convinced, hides weakness.
Except for the manager, he and his teammates wear the same: white shirt, dark tie
and gray vest. My father manages to differentiate himself from the others by being
the only one who doesn't look directly at the camera. This detail defines his
character, his obsession with being someone, his absurd belief that he was better
than the rest.

At the same time, I think it is a way of omitting each one of the

shortcomings that he treasured, of burying them in a deep place, while alcohol and
drugs induced him to live or built an inconsistent dream.

What terrifies me is my first impression upon discovering the

photo: my physical resemblance to him.

This resemblance hurts, scares, turns upside down the certainty

that my younger brother looked like my father and I looked like my mother.

I continue without taking my eyes off the photo in which I am my

father.

The image remains as the days go by when I search for the people
on the card. Nothing on the internet or on social media. Nothing in the phone book.
Nothing. I get other possible names. I send messages to their Facebook profiles. I
continue to investigate, I remain with the image from which I intend to escape. The
image is imposed when I get up, throughout the day, when I go to bed.

Physically I am the spitting image of my father and that brings

me down, turns me into a war-torn city, my own war.

When I already think that nobody is going to answer me, I

discover a message in the inbox. I cross several emails with someone who claims to
be the manager of a nightclub where my father worked. After several messages he
gives me his phone number. I immediately call him. I hear his cracked voice, an old
speaker that sounds like tin. It speaks well of my father. They had a great time.

At that time there was absolute permissiveness. We lacked

references. Now everything is more linear.

He talks about the past as a lost paradise.

We lived from day to day, to ourselves, unconcerned with any

responsibility, there was only fun, he tells me with that cracked voice that sounds
like a machine without lubrication. I ask him not to ignore the dodgy things, and I
ask him if he knew my mother. Of course I met her. A beautiful woman that many of
us wanted, but she was infatuated with your father. He was working in the
nightclub, first taking care of the wardrobe, and then public relations. He was
good at it and attracted the uncles and aunts, although your father was not amused
at all. What surprised me was that they got married. Not for her, but for him.

You just can't tell me exactly why. He only tells me that at that
time sex was beastly. They all fucked everyone. And your father was fed up with
fucking, with Spanish women and with foreigners. It's not like I saw him every
night, either. I knew it, period. This does not mean that I was not for your
mother. It was about something else.

I cut him short and ask him if my mother sensed something.

He didn't know anything. That was at the beginning. When their

relationship was still not serious. Later, when he went to live in Pedregalejo with
her, your father changed. He set up the restaurant and started a family. From that
moment I lost track of him. I saw him again when he opened the restaurant, and a
couple more times when I went to eat. He ate like hell. The manager of the
nightclub where my father worked begins to rave about him and his own family. He
confesses to me that the excesses led to fights. I ask him how my father changed
and if he was already selling drugs at that time.

We all did. Your father had rented an apartment with another

waiter where, after closing the nightclub, we would go play poker and get high. We
spent whole days and nights playing cards, taking what we caught, splicing the days
without sleep. The floor exuded vice. The walls smelled like wet pussy. That
comforted us. The floor functioned as a riding arena where all kinds of sexual
favors were performed, and people also came to buy hashish. What we earned we spent
on drugs and having fun. That was what our life consisted of. That was the host. We
barely stopped for a moment. We fucked guys with guys; aunts with aunts; all
together.

I ask him if my father was into those games.

 We all did. Your father the most.

My father's fat cock, I write.

And when I write it I feel it.

My father's fat cock digs into the cracks of memory.

humiliates. tear. My father, who liked to walk naked through the

different rooms of our house, displaying what he was most proud of. That cock that
showed me the same as if it were a trophy. His huge hands of flattened blood
sausages gripped the fleshy, veined member like a club.

What else can you tell me? I ask the manager of the nightclub
where my father worked.

He remains silent for a few seconds.

I remember one night when he was resting. Instead of hanging out

with your mom, like she used to, she went to the disco. Your father drank every
day, but that night he drank with a ravenous urge. We started to take shots and
don't be surprised that something else. In the middle of the night your father took
a foreigner to the store to fuck her. Both the foreigner and your father were very
drunk. At another time, I would have even joined. On some occasion we fucked the
same girl. The fact is that after a while I heard a mess in the warehouse. I peeked
out and found your father assfucking the foreigner with violence and she's already
trying to get rid of him. I intervened, that could have ended badly. I calmed the
foreigner, who wanted to report it. Or so I think. Then I wanted to take your
father to the apartment. Instead we kept drinking until closing. In the morning we
ended up at his flat. Your father had trouble standing up. I put him in his room,
where there were torn photos of your mother in her underwear, scattered on the
floor and on the bed. Your father took the photos and like he was a mad dog he put
them a foot from my face and continued to tear them up while calling your mother a
whore. Then he threw himself on the sofa, but he kept on babbling and insulting. I
don't remember if I told him they were just photos, that he was lucky to be with a
model. Maybe I didn't tell him anything or I gave him the reason. I left him there
with his neura.

I keep looking for information. I tell my aunts about the

manager. I have to get my aunt in Madrid to tell me about the attempted rape. My
aunt from Valencia says: Your mother's underwear campaign brought a tail. There was
quite a stir in the neighborhood. Everyone was talking about the photos in which
your mother appeared. And the truth is that there was nothing wrong with them. The
bad thing was the gossip. They hurt your grandmother a lot and what am I going to
tell you about my brother, he flew into a rage. Yes, the photos gave off sensuality
and sexuality, simply because your mother was innately extravagant. Today you will
tell me what some photos in panties and a bra mean. But that was another time.

My aunts agree that they stopped talking to each other for a

while, and it even seems to them that they cut it off for a week.
 My brother freaked out. He couldn't stand the jokes that were
made at the expense of the photos, says my aunt from Madrid.

Of course, no one —and least of all himself— questioned him for

fucking anyone when he felt like it. Something he always did, even after getting
married.

They both agree that as a result of that advertising campaign my

father got his girlfriend to quit modeling.

To abandon the happiness, the laughter, the innocence of a girl

who was chasing her dreams. That is at least what I gather from what my aunts tell
me. She looked happy. I was still an innocent girl. He imagined that this world
would allow him to achieve his purposes. It has nothing to do with what I'm telling
you, but I remember her playing in the sea, jumping over the waves, laughing, with
a wide smile on her face. That's how I remember it, even the photos and the
Acacias, says my aunt from Valencia.

I would have liked to meet that person. Seeing my mother laugh

out loud. Giving off charm. I remember her with a serious face. I almost never saw
her smile —perhaps she had no reason or she didn't have too many—, perhaps she lost
her joy at that time when her own mother, her older brother, her boyfriend, her
boyfriend's father, everyone, reproached her for pursuing a dream.

I think about the distortion of memory. In what we add and in

what we delete. To what extent is what I tell real and do I face what my aunts
reveal to me?

That night when my drunk father destroys my mother's photographs.

The authority that others felt to judge their own decisions. Some photos that serve
to mark, to stigmatize, to trample on.

Break the photos. Break the wishes of a woman. If before she had
stopped studying due to economic necessity, now the illusion of being a model was
going to frustrate her. And then there would be no escape. Maybe he didn't look for
her either. Maybe he accepted what came to him. Even if she wasn't ready for it. A
girl with the body of a woman, who wanted to lead the life of the winners. A girl
with the body of a woman who masked her frustrations and bathed her dreams in
alcohol and drugs.

The first time I was aware that that marriage could not raise two
children..., he stops, wanders, rambles. I know you will tell me. Those who doubt
are usually good storytellers, and they often offer what they keep and store
because it burns them and they want to share it with others. And if those others
are part of the story, even better. My aunt repeats that she doesn't know if it
will do me any good. But at the same time that he tells me that, he begins to
narrate, as if the above had only been a warm-up. He tells me: I remember the
situation. The facts are not accurate. I was helping your mother, you must have
been three or four years old, and I don't know what happened that your brother fell
and hit his head and your parents, instead of calming down your brother, started
yelling at each other throwing their heads blame each other. Then, at a certain
moment, when it seemed that the storm had passed, your father slapped your mother
and told her not to look at him like that. You were in your mother's arms and you
started crying, verbalizing or pointing out that your father had hit your mother,
and he went to hit you or hit your mother again, I'm not sure, and your mother
released you, I think It's confusing, you were both crying inconsolably, getting
louder, and I didn't know what to do, standing still, with my deranged brother,
ranting against his wife, against you, against me, he threw the ashtray and caught
it on the floor, so I don't remember if it was me who took you out of there or your
father yelled at me to get out of his sight. I imagine that the thing was greater.
But I didn't want to witness it. The next day, when I asked your mother, she told
me not to say anything, that she had fallen and that she didn't need my help. And I
didn't tell. We all knew it even though we looked the other way. However, those
days, when someone asked me about you, I lied to them, I told them that you were
fine, but it was a lie, they couldn't take care of you, nor of themselves.

It is a fact that I have not recorded. Or I have it under others

and I have a hard time digging it out from where it is. My aunt's revelation
confirms that the Superman flight that I remember as the first time I was aware of
violence is not the first. That there are other episodes before, despite the fact
that he has forgotten them or is unable to bring them to light. There's others. How
many? I wonder if my aunt explains the event as it happened or minimizes it knowing
that I intend to write about it.

My aunts give me a shoebox full of old photos. I open it. I take

the photos carefully and feel the weight of the years, dust on my fingers. One more
layer. I review them. I'm turning them around to see if they have a date. It is not
difficult for them to know when they are from. They tell me that they will look for
more. That other more recent ones will be sent to me by email. The word "Acacias"
waits in my head. A rocket in your countdown.

I think that helping me is his way of purging the guilt. That

understandable distance that they established with my parents and with us, their
nephews. We only feel the affection of my maternal grandmother. The rest of the
family stopped being interested in what was happening to us.

Families form calluses from rubbing, hardness that could only be

softened with a pumice stone, selfishness that is camouflaged with cheap costumes,
and at the same time works like an open book that wants to be read. A book torn
from the essential pages of history. Perhaps that is why I am also writing this
book. To rebuild what is gone. What nobody seems to have registered and I want to
recover.

My aunts talk about the photos while I quickly pass them by,
because looking at them seems impudent to me. The photos agitate me. I try not to
notice. I say to myself that I'll look at them calmly, and I barely listen to my
aunt from Valencia when she says that she only remembers the good things about my
mother, her love for her mother and her sister, her passion for life, always making
plans, her head full of ideas, the devotion for my paternal grandfather up to the
whirlpool that was formed by the dress on the day of the Acacias.

I don't listen to them. I'm far away. I'm around. I'm in. In that
bathroom with the rusty faucets and the mirror hidden by the steam. The hot water
runs. And I feel like a lost child again. A child out of his time and space. A
humiliated child.

10

Memory reformulates pain. It makes it malleable, justifies it,

makes it breathable even, if what is told is terrible. Without being entirely
honest, memory is the only tool we have.

The only one.

Memory knows how to adapt to the language of circumstances.

Memory marks the body, what we are.

I have heard from my aunts the story of the Acacias. A story from
that time. Today would have a different reading. Words do not solve anything. Or
they hardly do. Writing digs and digs knowing that it will never find what it is
looking for. When you think you've found a revealing memory, you'll discover it's
something else, and then start over. So over and over again.

I think about all this when I sit at the table to order my aunts'
notes. Count to open the wound. To summon what everyone hides. Bring to the present
some children who were hiding. Write to be real.

eleven

The first thing I heard was: They've taken the bride! says my
aunt from Valencia, who takes a breath as if verbalizing it wasn't appropriate, as
if it had happened just a few minutes ago. They have taken the bride!, the neighbor
next door shouted, who was joined by others: They have taken the bride! That runrún
was going to accompany the lives of my parents forever. A poisonous, unhealthy,
sordid hum.

I didn't know what they meant. I looked out into the patio, and
in the kitchen I found my brother who was busy washing stained clothes. He left the
basin without water trying to remove the blood. I saw it with my eyes. I asked him
what had happened. He looked at me without answering, without ceasing to rub his
pants vigorously. The dark hands Imagine if I'm not going to remember that, my
brother was like gone; I rubbed the blood-stained clothes and from outside the
whirlpool of that runrún that grew little by little slipped in.

My aunt from Madrid is glad that all those images have become
diffuse. What will they say That is what prevailed and prevails, he comments, even
though we have not changed much over the years. Your parents were already the talk
of the neighborhood and that only increased the gossip.
 It was in June. Earlier this month. The day was cloudy. One of
those summer days with the sky covered and the heat, an invisible suit that sticks
to your body. Your mother had put on a white organza dress she had from when she
was a model. It was the first time he had worn it. It flattered her a lot. So dark,
with that long black hair and that penetrating look that contrasted with the
immaculate dress. My brother was free and they went for a walk in the direction of
the Acacias. There were the couples who wanted to be calm. The normal thing is that
they take a detour to avoid that the others could see them, that's why my sister
said what they will say. In summer life was made in the street. It seemed like
people were hours away from getting furniture out of the house onto the sidewalk.
However, your father did not mind being seen heading towards the Acacias. I am
convinced that he even liked being seen. In any case, I see that as a moment of
rupture.

A fracture with childhood, with youth, that we suddenly passed

from childhood to the adult world, with insidiousness and masks.

They all saw her arrive that way. In that state. And it was
forming a bigger and bigger ball. The atmosphere was heating up to horror. Keep in
mind that we are talking about another era. Things are not like now, when you talk
about something and forget it after a few days; no, before an event like this was
not forgotten, it was a stigma.

I think he even enjoyed it.

At this part of the story, my aunts take the floor.

What happened? I asked my brother again. And he told me to go up

to your mother's apartment. Just that, and he didn't tell me anything else, but
from the look on his face I ran upstairs. The parents of neither of them had yet
appeared. I went up the stairs spurred on by that runrún. I didn't know what was
happening. When I called, your mother didn't want to answer the door. I heard her
sobs. I rapped again with my knuckles and begged him to let me in, that I was
alone. It still took her a few seconds to decide to let me in. When I opened it I
squealed. Phrases came from the courtyard: it's a disgrace, it was written, the
song about they've taken the bride, and I remembered my grandmother's prediction
when she saw them fight.

Your mother answered the door, hiding, she was in a bra and
panties. He hesitantly let me through. Without saying a word to us I followed her
into the bathroom. Her legs were covered in dried blood, and from rubbing them, she
had threads and sand stuck to her, her hands red, her face decomposed, her makeup
run from crying. I did not know what to say. The white dress was red. I thought
they had been attacked. After my brother had hit him. Yeah, I thought so too. That
they had quarreled and things got heated and got bigger. I wanted to storm her with
questions, but none came out. Things were going fast. Very fast. Your grandmother
had to go through the group of neighbors before getting home and seeing your
mother. I also think someone went to call my parents. In the sink your mother
rubbed the dress without conviction. She herself looked like a rag. The sink had
been dyed red, just like the dress. Your grandmother appeared, and without saying a
word to your mother, her face crossed her face, and she didn't reply, I could swear
she even stopped crying. I also don't remember if I got out of the way or stayed
there. But I'm almost convinced that he kept hitting her while shouting: What have
you done? Lost, you're not decent, you're not my daughter, I didn't bring you up
like that. And that kind of thing.

Where were you? my father asked when he saw me. From today I
forbid you to go upstairs. Here we are decent. The second I no longer existed.
Listen to him, my mother begged, referring to her son. Let him listen to it?, my
father said angrily. What listen to it? Scoundrel, scoundrel, bastard. He started
threatening him. That he had ruined him and that he was not welcome in his house. I
thought they were going to get into a fight in which there was no turning back. For
some time I had that fear, confesses my aunt from Valencia.

Then my aunt from Madrid interrupts her and tells her that mom
always protected our brother, she was always there to calm dad down, that even
though it was the man who was in charge and who yelled, mom tried to divert our
brother's troubles, take iron from him and even exculpate him He did it all his
life. And in a matter like this, well, even more. For this reason they did not
fight. For that reason and because dad already knew that our brother could do it. I
think I was even afraid of him.

Fear.

Chained to the family's DNA. I don't know what invisible bond is

established, what strange knot is created between parents and children that
generates in the latter a certain state of servitude.

The story of my aunts merges with mine. It does not overturn my

father's sentence. On the contrary, the joint like dogs after having copulated.

Fear.

That is the basis of my education. Not the affection. Fear and

helplessness. What my aunts reveal to me I associate with when the doors opened and
closed hastily, and the intermittent screams and insults joined my insomnia. On
more than one occasion I thought about calling the police. I did not do it. I could
fear my father. He never scrupled to ruin innocence.

Maybe he enjoyed it when he did it. Maybe it was what he had

learned. Maybe that's what he's passed on to my brother and me.

That is the fear. What beats Tick tock, tick tock. Tireless. What
does not allow me to be relaxed. I want to ask my aunts about those traces that
families go through, bacteria that attack the bones, the blood, the heart.

"Is fear enough to shut up?" asks Delphine de Vigan in Nothing

opposes the night.

I remember and I remember. Of the lived and the read. Of the

implosions I suffered.

Do my aunts silence part of the truth? Me too?

Your mother got the worst of it, says my aunt from Valencia.
Those were different times, says my aunt from Madrid. But that means nothing, I
reply. My aunt from Valencia shakes her head, I don't know if to deny or otherwise.

Says: Everyone thought she had gotten pregnant. That's when I

realized that they thought your father and mother hadn't done it before. My aunt
from Madrid smiles, if it seemed like they were perpetually in heat. It is strange
to imagine that our parents did not want to see it. Perhaps it is that today you do
not see the importance that was given then. Before you had to go through the
church, in white, and any hint of doubt was paid.

My aunt from Valencia was closer to my mother, they shared

confidences and spent the days and nights until the Acacias. After the incident the
relationship was never the same. The joys and tears of my mother did not find my
aunt's shoulder. He says: Your parents were jealous. I have already told you that
their problems led them to bed. Not to fix them, just to appease them. That day
your mother was on her period. According to what your mother told me, at first he
refused, until the two of them started with the heat and the situation got out of
control.

I think what happened next was a mistake, because since no one

explained what had happened, gossip grew in the neighborhood. Among them, the one
that was heard the most was that your mother was pregnant and had had an abortion.
However, the worst was yet to come. The bad vibes between families. The accusations
and the quarrels that have always been in the air. That was the Acacias.

Some time later your maternal grandmother came down to our house
to talk to my parents. Look how it is, that each one defended his son. Your
mother's mother and my father were jovial, smiling people, and they got along well.
But that separated them.

My aunt from Valencia takes a breath. You will have imagined more
than once that things could have been different. Her best friend, her brother, what
could go wrong? They are reasonable thoughts.

I remember that and I want to laugh, says my aunt from Madrid,

even though her face is tense. Decency. The neighbors used that word, my parents
and your grandmother too; that if my son was decent, that if my daughter was
decent. Look how deceived they were. How ridiculous. Today things would have gone
in other directions. At least that's what I want to think.

You never know, my aunt from Valencia replies, you never know,
she repeats.

If there hadn't been so much talk about decency, surely we would

be talking about something else or we wouldn't even be talking about this. When
your grandmother came down to our house, our parents accused your mother of what
had happened. It's funny because your grandmother thought so too. The mentality of
the time was that, that the woman was to blame, says my aunt from Madrid.

And her sister completes the story: Your grandmother demanded

that your parents had to get married. That was the only way to fix the mess. But my
father flatly refused, exalted.

12
 Two weeks after the Acacias the situation between the families
was still bitter. My mother barely set foot on the street out of shame. In
addition, my uncle, my mother's older brother, with whom she always had a lot of
friction, also watched over her. The few times he went out, on those days when the
June heat broke out to stay permanently during the summer, he went with his head
bowed. I imagine how hard it must have been for her, how she liked being admired,
having to make herself invisible. He would have liked to go back in time, paint red
white. Although I'm sure I was deceived, it wasn't like that, my mother went ahead
without considering the consequences of her actions too much.

My father was barely seen in the neighborhood. He had his job in

Torremolinos. Your escape route. His drunkenness Their pussies.

He believed himself to be God. I think so.

Some nights, when everyone was engrossed in the patio around what
was being shown on television, I would go up to your mother's apartment without
anyone seeing me. I was the shoulder where she cried. And he cried a lot. He was
asking about my brother. And what was I going to tell him, that he was missing? No,
I told him lies that I believed myself, confesses my aunt from Valencia.

She did not stay long for fear of being found out. They no longer
played with dolls, which collected dust on the shelves, but rather my aunt stole a
cigarette that they secretly smoked together. They talked about the only thing they
could talk about. Fictions. Lies they thought would come true. They narrated the
future as if it were a story, without suspecting that happy endings do not exist.
That life in a working family was just measuring the degree of misfortune that fell
on one and finding out what was the way to mask it.

And perhaps run, without looking back.

In this I recognize myself.

Until today.

My maternal grandmother did not give up in her insistence that

her daughter should marry to clear her name. Every day, when I returned from work,
I would stop by my paternal grandparents' apartment. My grandfather continued in
his thirteen, but little by little the women were filing down their resistance.
When, finally, the first week of June 1971, with over thirty degrees, my
grandfather finally gave in, they found another problem: neither my father nor my
mother wanted to get married.

One of the things that most affected your mother was the distance
that our father established with her, I read in the notes I took from my aunt in
Madrid. My mother had barely met her father and she thought that my grandfather
could fill that gap. My aunts think that since the Acacias incident their father,
my grandfather, changed the relationship with my mother.

But maybe it came from before.

Maybe it was something more subtle.

They forget that the underwear photos caused quite a stir. They
forget about an anecdotal fact that they raised to skyscrapers: the bra scene. They
forget that my paternal grandparents thought that their son needed a calm woman to
take him out of the night, and that my mother, far from it, was like him, or even
worse than him, because if not, what of what happened to him? going to a party, the
innate rebellion that emerged from her.

The distance between my grandfather and my mother grew little by

little, as she made decisions.

My parents hadn't seen each other for weeks. My mother took the
absence of my father badly. As in those romantic love affairs that consume, she
barely ate, she allowed herself to be carried away by sadness, lost in her thoughts
she recreated a fictitious paradise.

Maybe my mother wasn't really the woman that everyone thought

they saw, that with her UFO eyes and her smile, like other women of the time, she
felt protected by a man's possession of her. And, despite this submission, my
mother's internal disputes continued: because when my grandmother demanded that
they get married, she refused, as if she sensed something, as if her nature warned
her of the dormant volcano that would awaken.

And then, year after year, slowly, the lava burned the flesh, the
sanity, the feelings.

swept them away

13

My paternal grandparents and my maternal grandmother did not care

that their children refused to marry. I wonder how much responsibility they bear
for the misfortune that came later. They acted according to the times and even
thought they were doing the right thing, although my grandfather never liked that
wedding. Between him and my maternal grandmother, tensions remained latent. The
accusations went back and forth through third parties. The runrún no longer stopped
from the Acacias. Relationships had lost their naturalness and had been replaced by
human miseries.

And despite the tension of the situation, my maternal grandmother

went every afternoon to the house of her future in-laws to make sure that the
marriage continued its course regardless of marriageability. She had already closed
the details of the ceremony with the Corpus Christi priest. The priest was a close
friend of his and was aware of what had happened. He assured her that as soon as
they were married the waters would return to their course.

I go to the notes of my aunt from Valencia: Your mother agreed to

marry you for your grandmother, who did not want to make her suffer any more, since
she was very bad at gossip. I also think he agreed because that was how your mother
was freed from stares and confinement.

Yet with a week to go before the wedding, my father still hadn't

turned up. My paternal grandfather had gone looking for him again at the nightclub
where he worked, with little success.

Spain was in the midst of a phase of change. In that bustle of

Torremolinos, my father, in direct contact with the most open-minded foreigners,
was aware of the transformation. Although I have my doubts that he was prepared to
digest so many news well. He experienced tourism and the process of social
metamorphosis from the Costa del Sol. And somehow all of that influenced him.
Perhaps unknowingly it opened up to modernity in the collapse of Francoism and the
debauchery that the eighties brought about.

I haven't found out what changed my father's mind about getting

married.

My brother tells me over and over again to let it be. I notice

her growing disgust when we talk about my parents. The invisible halo that emanates
around him. I identify the pain; his not understanding. For months I leave the book
parked, because I am convinced that writing only confirms the defeat of facing my
father. The impossibility of calling his home phone and looking at his face and
trying to fill in the gaps in the story even though he is lying and, above all,
telling him that I still hear that phrase from when he got out of jail, I hear his
breathing, his gasps , inside, deep, tearing my flesh. A failure for which writing
tries to make up for me, if I were able to tell him that the story could kill him,
just as he killed our mother. I want to believe that it is so while I wait.
Although I'm not sure anymore. How to be The enigma prevails as my father's
cavernous voice increases, his breaths, the water, the crystals, the blood. The
blood that was in my mother, in my brother and in me. The blood.

That red that dyes everything.

14

In the process of writing this book, which I've been working on

for three years, questions arise that I don't know how to answer. Painful issues.
Did my brother and I absorb the suffering of my parents? Do we need a diving suit
to keep it safe? And even more suitable, a flame retardant jumpsuit to withstand
the heat of that lava? Can we transmit that suffering to our children?

I have stopped writing just when my parents were getting married,

as if I did not want to be conceived in these pages.

When I resumed the story, I began to reread all the notes I had
written and took the shoebox with the photos that my aunts had given me. I put the
box on the desk, though I was unable to open it to face the images. It is not a
rhetorical device or an attempt to generate a suspense that I am not looking for. I
just didn't see myself as strong enough yet.

Writing opens ditches. Underground galleries, just like a

molehill. I go through them looking for —looking for myself?—. I realize that life
with my parents did not belong to me. I felt like I wasn't me. That I didn't start
living until I was seventeen. Before he was a kind of automaton without decision or
will, stupid, a slave, a vomit. When I vomited I began to be me, to form from the
deformation. I wanted to rip myself out no matter what.
 Until I was seventeen or eighteen, I had this strong feeling that
I had not lived my own life.

I have hardly any memories.

Or I have forced myself to banish them.

My awareness coincides with my father's imprisonment and I wonder

if it has anything to do with it. From that age I began —at least that's how I felt
it— to free myself from some chains that prevented me from being the protagonist of
my own life, as if I were a secondary player or, even worse, as if I were outside
the scene where represented my day to day. Today I think that this annulment of
myself was another way of rejecting the family.

When I resume the story, my mother is pregnant.

I'm going to be a father in a few months.

I have cut my big toe and I have sucked the blood. metallic.

fifteen

The box with the photos on the desk still unopened. A series of
novels and essays arranged horizontally. Notebooks and sheets with scattered
annotations. A glass with pencils and pens with the Superman shield that my
daughter Carlota made me for Father's Day. A white stone from Bleturge on a cork
coaster.

For a time I stopped the narration of the book. I scratched in my

memory and only found broken, unconnected images.

I suffocated.

I wrote those two words to make them tangible.

He noticed that he was another again. I started having

nightmares.

16

On July 2, 1971, my parents were married in Corpus Christi

Parish. It was the wish of my grandparents, who continued to go to mass every
Sunday to tell God about the misfortunes of their children. I don't think my
parents set foot in a church again until our baptism.

In a very short time things changed for my parents. I needed to

understand the reasons why they agreed to go down the aisle, when the reluctance of
both seemed clear. I understand that my mother saw the freedom she dreamed of in
that outing, unable to glimpse what was to come, or perhaps she trusted that she
had the necessary instruments to transform the dynamic they had shared up to that
moment. But what about my father? He was never an easy person to break, and even
less by his own father. Just by denying him the satisfaction he would never have
agreed. I don't buy the trickery or the love for which my aunt from Valencia
advocates. They only know that a few days before the wedding my father went back to
sleep at my grandparents' house, and, for a while, he did not go to work at night
in Torremolinos.

One day, when going to the funeral of Luis's mother, a friend of

my childhood, chance and circumstances that he did not count on come across. Luis's
father knew my father and was a national police officer, although he has been
retired for years. He is sitting in a chair next to the closed coffin of the
deceased while a fan moves to the left and right, denying the scene; as if the
apparatus with the movement wanted to contradict the evidence. The sweat of the
attendees is combined with the pompous flowers that invade the room like a captive
audience. I go among the relatives to offer my condolences. He grabs my hands and
unexpectedly also offers his condolences on the death of my mother. By doing so,
without really knowing the reasons, I feel uncomfortable. He tells me that he was
at the funeral, that he understands that he did not attend. I explain that I was
out. Sounds like justification. His hands remain in mine for a few more seconds.
Look at the mahogany box. He says something towards the coffin that I can't quite
hear. He looks without seeing the wood, the flowers, the fan, the people who put
their hands on his shoulder and rub it as a consolation.

Out of the blue, he tells me that from time to time he sees my

father play dominoes in a bar. Without my asking, he confesses that my father is
better, that he has told him that he is proud of me and that he reads me in the
newspaper. He tells me like I care, but he and everyone who knows me knows I don't.
My only regret is that he hadn't died long ago.

I have wanted it.

I wish it.

I tell him I know it's not the time. I apologize as I organize

and search for the right words in my head. Since I can't find them, I stop beating
around the bush and tell him that I am with a book, one that is still untitled,
that deals with my relationship with the father, although in reality it is about
the family, that I have spoken with my uncles, with people who He knew my father
from the time in Torremolinos, who treated him during that period and if he could
talk to him for a few minutes because he can still help me and offer me another
perspective.

He tells me yes.

And stays silent.

Then a relative arrives, gets up and they hug slowly and cry and
the woman whispers: What a pity, with how well she was and how happy she was now
with the grandchildren. They remain in each other's arms for a while. Movements and
gestures slow down. Then he sits down again dejected. Attendees come and go.

Come to my house tomorrow, she tells me, with tears in her eyes.

I leave the cemetery without visiting my mother's niche. I

remember his swollen face. The smell of DYC whiskey he gave off when he spoke.
Starry UFO eyes. I remember the disgust I felt when I saw her. The times I wished
he would die, because that way I thought he would be forever erased from my
thoughts. I was wrong. His swollen face and intermittent breathing are still close.
Accompany the beats of my heart. The swollen face is the last thing I remember
about my mother.

17

It takes me several days to visit the father of my friend Luis. I

find him on his terrace, sitting in a wicker chair. We greet each other. He was
always a calm, reserved, discreet man, we never saw him in uniform, with a shy
smile and a friendly expression that allowed us to trust him. The murmur of the
promenade rises to the terrace. After talking for a while about how Pedregalejo was
transformed, about his son and grandchildren, and that I am also going to be a
father, I ask him to tell me what he remembers, but I emphasize the wedding thing,
because he appears out of the blue in one of the photos my aunts gave me.

Luis's father knew mine from the neighborhood, but being seven
years older, he hardly knew him. The thing about attending the wedding was more
because of your grandfather, because he felt indebted to me, even though I didn't
do anything, he had just entered the Corps. A silence of a few seconds follows in
which the two of us remain contemplating the sea from the terrace. The sea taking
names and experiences and dreams.

The last week of June '71 was crazy. The governor of Malaga
decreed the closure of several nightclubs and bars in Torremolinos. I perfectly
remember those days, June 24 and 25, in which we carried out various raids after a
few months of surveillance. It's a strange feeling, remembering that, as if it were
the first time, and forgetting what I did a few days ago. At that time,
Torremolinos seemed like another planet. Politicians tried to control the
unstoppable opening that was already underway. Freedom was going to supplant the
Catholic morality vaunted by the leaders. Police inspectors, members of the Armed
Police and the Municipal Police intervened in the raids. They were quick and
intense operations in places frequented by people with disorderly lives, who posed
a threat to Franco's morale. That's what they told us. Your father had been working
as a bartender in nightclubs in Torremolinos for some time. I tell him I know.
Good. In the raids, we detained more than a hundred people. Prostitutes, drug
addicts, foreigners, homosexuals and people we considered suspicious for some
reason. Your father was arrested. So his father talked to mine to see what I could
do to intercede for him. That was just before the wedding. Actually, I didn't have
to do anything because after twenty-four hours all, except a couple of Germans,
were released, although they were at the disposal of the government authority.
During those two days, eleven stores were closed. It was intended to give a wake-up
call. And maybe it served at the time. An attempt was made to control the
trafficking and consumption of drugs and prostitution, but the actions were of
little use, since in just a month the situation was the same, and it would go
further. For your father it was a warning.

My friend Luis's father explains to me other scattered memories

that I write down in my notebook. No one had told me that my father had been
arrested. Maybe they kept it a secret? Or did his brothers not know? He thought
that the time the police arrested him in 1992, in full Corcuera Law, had been the
first time. While Luis's father was telling me about it, flashes of that morning
came to me, the shock it represented for me.

For all.
 I guess my father's experience of being detained, even for
twenty-four hours, made him reflect. Hence, I returned to my grandparents' house.
He got out of the way. And in doing so he met my mother again.

The hoax.

The desire.

The desire to possess that he felt.

Escarbar has these things. The wedding was drawn as salvation for
one and the other, and also for the families. I wonder: how could they be so wrong?
The shoebox with the photos awaits. It's on the right, above the desk. Still
closed. Even though the photos seem to make sounds. They creak. They complain.

It's getting harder and harder for me to sleep. Release the

memories. They arrive at night, mixed. I move into the future. And in that
hypothetical future in which my daughter has already been born and I see her grow,
I am assailed by the fear that has stuck to my body like a slug that crawls leaving
me the drool, the fear of looking like my father, of making the mistakes that he
committed, to behave in a way similar to his. And in parallel I go back to the
past. I feel the fingers of crushed black pudding pressing on my waist, my mother's
reproaches telling me it's my fault, my father's superior laughs, the holes in my
bedroom door, the fear of nightfall, of sleeping , alert, always alert, with eyes
closed and body open.

I try to write in the present.

Let it be, says my brother.

Can't.

And I think or want to think that I do it for him.

For my father.

For my mother.

For me.

Because of the fear.

Fear sitting in an empty audience while from the stage someone

whose face cannot be distinguished reads these pages.

Someone who does not want to be born. Someone who has my features
but who is not me.

18

I look inside my memory for a hug from my father.

Unlucky.
 But on some occasion he must have hugged me. I have looked for a
photo in which my father had me in his arms.

Unlucky.

Just because I don't remember any sign of affection—or from my

mother until she was deranged—doesn't mean there weren't any. I think that despite
the fact that they barely occurred there must have been some, however small, and
that perhaps I have deleted it. I only reproduce the same experiences, enhancing
them over and over again, in a loop, because they are the ones that hurt.

The ones that tear

The ones that humiliate

The ones that make me bleed.

I remember the tension of being on guard, on the defensive, every

time he was by my side, or the few times he stayed home and heard it coming at
night when insomnia was no longer an occasional guest. But none was like that time
in the bathroom. At daytime. The steam in the mirror. The broken glass. Red on
white porcelain. My mother's white dress stained with blood.

Very soon I had insomnia.

Very soon I put locks on my room.

Very soon the nights resembled a trench in which the return of

the enemy awaited.

Fried macaroni and tomato lying on my bed sheets. Matches that he

lit and threw on the bedspread.

Close the door and don't open it. Fall asleep. I am unable to
sleep with the doors open.

Sleep hasn't come yet.

I can't get rid of insecurity.

Every night fear breaks through the doors.

19

Of the photos my aunts gave me, there is one of the wedding in

which my parents appear smiling, luminous, and that I had seen cut in half at my
maternal grandmother's house. The effect it made in the frame in which my
grandmother had it placed in the living room furniture was strange. You could tell
they were two different photos cut and put in the frame, with a small black hole
between the two. In the one on the left my mother appeared and in the one on the
right her brother, both images of the weddings of one and the other. My maternal
grandmother had decided that neither my father nor his son's wife had been good
people and had literally removed them from the photos, leaving only their children.
Hence the strangeness when I see the photo of my parents' wedding day.

The tanned faces shine, the white teeth shine, it seems as if

they were going to project themselves, it seems that they have swallowed the sun.

I watch them for minutes and my stomach turns and I stop and
barely breathe, what's wrong with this photo? My parents hold hands, she dressed in
white, with a veil, a red flower in her right hand, her left hand holding my
father's right, her dark hair falling wavy over her shoulders, to my mother's
right, her Little sister lightly grabs her elbow, she's split, but I can make out
her easily, my father dressed in a suit, bow tie, a red carnation in his lapel, his
head tilted slightly towards the woman who has just become his wife, the mole on
the cheek, like mine, the dimples of the two when smiling, like mine. What does
this photo have? Then, after minutes in which more than passing through her, it
passes through me, I perceive the difference with the other photos that my aunts
gave me of the wedding. The photo has no background. A darkness prevails that seems
to swallow my parents, a darkness that advances towards them, or as if my parents
were not real, they were put there by someone else, as if blackness and their
bright smiles camouflage an evil that already was present and was taking over them.

To reaffirm this theory, I put the computer away and put all the
photos of the wedding on the desk table. In all but one, my mother poses with
family and friends, and the places where they were taken are distinguished. The
photo of my parents seems captured by a premonition or a prophecy.

Apart from the photos in which my mother poses with my paternal

grandfather, both smiling, on the stairs of the official protection blocks where
they lived, or with relatives I don't know, or friends from that time, or neighbors
who crowd to take pictures With the bride, the ones that really reveal things are
those of those people portrayed outside the pose.

In a photo in which my mother is with my bronze-colored aunts

from Madrid and Valencia, my aunts laughing as if it were the end of the course, my
mother more rigid, my maternal grandmother appears in the background, serious,
looking out of focus, worried, I even estimate that depressed, or so it seems to
me.

Then there is also a photo of my mother being taken by surprise

from behind. The foreshortened veil and her image reflected in a vertical and dirty
mirror in a closet, a mirror that I recognize because it is from my maternal
grandmother's house. In the mirror of that closet, with black spots of mold on the
sides, I looked at myself many times when I was getting dressed or when I was being
silly, to see who I was. In front of that mirror my brother and I painted each
other with a marker. In front of that mirror we put our abdomen hard and we checked
who was stronger. In front of that mirror I took refuge when I didn't want to know
anything about anyone.

In this photo of my mother in front of the mirror taken before

the wedding, the expression on her face is different from that excessive smile she
shows with my father. My mother's UFO eyes are somewhere else, yearning for
something. Being in a place without actually being in it. A border expression.
That's what the snapshot captures.

As for the celebration itself, my aunts do not reveal facts that

are different from other parties. Nor do they keep more photos, nor do they
remember the wedding beyond the topics.
 No one noticed the black background of the photo.

That those smiles were unreal.

That the wedding was a black hole from which it would be

impossible to escape.

twenty

From this moment on I should have a clearer idea of what I want

to write, but I don't. Since I have arrived in 1971, the irritable colon that I
suffer from has been activated. As if just the thought of my parents conceiving me
again, even in this role, is an episode that requires effort that I'm not ready
for.

The next birth of my daughter is mixed with mine. I wonder if my

father accompanied my mother to the first ultrasound —if they were already being
done in Malaga at that time—, if he heard my heartbeat and was moved by that blurry
and barely perceptible spot that was me. I wish I could think so, that there was
also tenderness. But my mother did not want to be a mother and my father did not
want to be a father. They were young and always wanted to be. My parents said they
were completely sure of the date they conceived me: Sunday, February 13, 1972. They
used to tell me repeatedly, as if that made them special, and me by extension. That
same day Paquito Fernández Ochoa was crowned in Sapporo. Against all odds he was
the fastest in both sleeves. That Sunday, in front of the TV or with it in the
background, I don't know, my mother got pregnant. I imagine the excitement of
seeing a twenty-two year old win gold at the Winter Games, when he didn't have much
of a choice, must have thrilled my father, who followed all sports. The skier
became a national hero. At that time it was not frequent, as it is now, for a
Spanish athlete to win an international award. You have the star of Paquito, they
said, as if the joy of that athlete was going to infect my entire childhood.

I remember that when I was a child and I would find my father in

the living room, which happened on few occasions, I would look at him in amazement
and try to make him see that I was there. Nor could he say what he was looking for.
Surely a show of affection, I think now. In that image that I remember, the courage
to make myself visible was barely like the fragility of a soap bubble that comes
out to quickly disappear. Mine was disintegrating before I even started. A child
who blew, but was not able to make bubbles. The feeling of restlessness remains in
my memory, of wanting to leave that house. A strange feeling for a child, feeling
insecure in their own home. Getting their parents' attention when they just wanted
to be left alone. The smell of Ducados that turned my stomach persisted, the fear
of calling my father, of pronouncing the word "dad." Maybe my fear is atavistic.
Maybe my fear is that emptiness.

The vacuum.

twenty-one
 As a way of controlling their son, my paternal grandparents
decided that my aunt in Madrid would go live with my parents after they got
married. It was a nightmare, my aunt told me.

After the wedding, during the summer of 1971, my father went back
to work in the nightclubs of Torremolinos with the aim of saving money and being
able to open his own restaurant. My grandparents tried to convince him to look for
something in Malaga, but my father told them that he earned more at night, and not
to worry and trust him. Both my grandmother and grandfather were convinced that the
wedding had changed him for the better.

My mother wanted to work with him, as she had done before, she
refused to be left alone in the apartment, but since the episode with the Acacias
was still hot, she agreed not to stir the water. So that she would not be left
alone, my grandparents suggested that my aunt go to the apartment they had rented
in Pedregalejo. My father used to come back at dawn, sometimes the next day, but
there were times when he was gone for two or three days. It was between eyebrows
and eyebrows to own a restaurant. He knew how to get money and find a partner who
was called like him. His father also gave him the savings he had. A way to get him
out of the night, to start his own business. At least that's what I thought.

A few months before work on the restaurant began, an incident

took place that demonstrated that my father was a voracious predator.

I can't think of another more precise way to call it.

scavenger

I have written it on a sheet of paper where I jot down ideas for

the book.

scavenger

Reading the word written on the page seems more real to me than
writing it on the computer.

I have thought this for many years. I don't like that my father
is, and it's not anger that leads me to this conclusion. The detachment I feel for
him helps me to have an idea of the facts, at least I think so. Throughout his life
he tore apart the people he treated. And the family was his first prey.

In the rented apartment in Pedregalejo, my aunt from Madrid and

my mother slept together at night. When my father arrived he would get into bed
with them. So, normally, my aunt from Madrid would wake up and go to another room
where there was a single bed. In fact, on many occasions, neither of them cared
that she was there to start fucking. They were never too shy. I myself caught my
father fucking the wife of one of his friends at the top of the restaurant that he
set up on the beach at the end of the eighties, when the decline was already
unstoppable.

It's hard for me to tell this. I have always kept it safe and I
have even come to believe that it did not happen, says my aunt. I review the notes.
They are short sentences that reflect the pain of revealing something that one does
not quite believe. I think that my aunt still today does not quite believe what she
revealed to me between smiles of affliction. I ask him why now. She remains silent
for a few seconds, then she tells me that she is asking my forgiveness for not
being there and for the damage my parents inflicted on me.
 Do my father's sisters feel guilty for looking the other way?

On the night in question, some friends had visited my mother and

then had decided to go for a walk. At that time, my mother had been contacted again
to pose as a model, although after the wedding it was she herself who quit the job.
That August evening of '71, my mother left with her friends and my aunt was left
alone. His brother came in at dawn and went to bed. He was drunk and drugged, like
almost always when he worked at night, and he didn't realize that the one sleeping
next to him was not his wife, it was his sister. He started to reach for her and
she stopped him. It was when your father went crazy asking about your mother, says
my aunt.

He speaks to me of a violence that I know perfectly well. The

tension generated by his voice, his body, his hands of crushed blood sausages is a
record that I have marked in my flesh, shod like simple cattle. An emotional and
physical tattoo that nobody sees, but that I know is there forever, that I would
like to tear off, that makes me feel like a slug, a vomit, a limited and deformed
person.

Apparently my father was naked, hard-on, and tried to force

himself on his own sister. She was out of it, she says, and she repeats it once
more, she was out of herself, anchored in that moment, unable to find words for
that event, as if after all these years she was still reliving a vague nightmare,
without precise outlines, with eyes out of orbit.

Among my notes I have pointed out that she holds her hands and
then looks towards the piece of furniture where she has the photos of her children
and grandchildren arranged. I realize that after the revelation, regret has come to
him. He asks me not to write it down, that he is telling me but please don't tell
it in the book, that it's only for me and that it happened a long time ago and he
stayed there, in a scare, he comments. So why are you telling me? I ask him.
Because I owe you.

Your mother saved me. She arrived and your father assaulted her,
and they got into a fight that ended in vicious sex. I went back to my parents'
house the next day. I thought they were going to refuse and ask me what had
happened, but they didn't. Then I went to study in Madrid and lost contact.
Actually, I distanced myself from them, although in reality your parents had
already distanced themselves from the family.

I want to ask you for more details in order to shore up the

chronology and the facts, but I understand the disturbance, the disgust, the
profound terror of a circumstance like the one my aunt revealed to me, because the
unfathomable humiliation of cowardice remained with me forever. when life put me a
test where I had to show what I was capable of.

22

For a while, I cannot abstract myself or forget the words of my

aunt from Madrid. Its echo flies over my days and my nights. I am in March 2012. My
daughter is going to be born in a week. I feel trapped in a whirlpool of
contradictions. I wonder again what legacy my parents have left me. I feel that I
have barely got rid of the scars of fear, insecurity, misgivings, hatred.
 The imminent birth of my first daughter makes me alert. I wonder
if it's fair for her to know my past, if writing this book could somehow hurt her,
rob her of something. The deep feeling that I do not want to be born in this book
makes me uneasy. Maybe it's an excuse not to dig more. Cowardice is a very heavy
suit. Memory works in a capricious way. Sometimes he makes the harshness of life
forgivable, tempers it to accommodate its unexpected blows. That simulating power
of memory did not work in my case, because I did not feel any relief from the pain
of the past, it never comforted me by covering up or disguising the circumstances I
experienced with my parents. I felt raw. A wound that did not heal. I got used to
the damage, and I think I even came to consider that anguish as my natural state.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that leads me to believe in a naive and absurd
way that if I am not born in this book I will manage to get rid of the stigma of my
parents. Although it can also be the fear deeply rooted in me. From the despair
that accompanies me since I was a child when I was denied that fundamental pillar,
that of the family as a safe place, believing with conviction and confidence in my
father and mother, in everything they did and said.

To defend myself against these certainties, I came to convince

myself that one barely remembered a couple of anecdotes from childhood. I thought
so until I started writing this book. I thought that memory would not have archived
certain experiences or perhaps would have covered them up, until writing began to
poke around, to reveal them with a docility that alarmed my senses and overwhelmed
me with the inconsolable sadness of a child. Then he made me perceive that contact
again, my resistance, the hands that slip, the asynchrony of the movements in the
bathroom of my parents' house, the cuts that emerge clearly, as if writing revived
the pain, that torment that was never quite gone, hidden somewhere in me.

And I am aware at the time of the birth of my daughter, upset by

writing and the suffering that I am reliving, and I tell myself what is the point,
how unfair to her, that somehow I could infect her with something of that
degradation. And I feel a chill and I want to cry, although no tears come out, they
stay inside, pus that infects. Tears that stick to the veins, to the bones, to the
flesh, as if they were resin.

The fear was never appeased. A ball in the throat. As the weeks
passed, things got worse. I had parked the book just as my parents were getting
married. Then my birth would come. It was as if, unconsciously, in the recovery he
was making of the family, he refused that moment. I refused to inherit the burdens,
the transmission of behaviors. I refused because I didn't want my daughter to
inherit my guilt in the future. Mortgage a new life with mine when I didn't even
accept myself.

And suddenly two things happened.

One, I received an email from my aunt in Valencia. I reproduce

it:

Hello nephew. I want to tell you something that I can't get out
of my head and that I have never discussed with anyone. It refers to the death of
your mother. Indeed, there are things that escape me. The other day, talking to my
little brother —you know I tell him everything, and he tells me— the subject came
up again and I asked him about the family, in case he had more information, because
he was the one who called me and told me that your mother had drowned in her own
vomit, according to what your brother told her. So, as soon as I hung up on him, I
was left with a whimper in my head. My first impulse was to call your father and
ask him, but since I had invited him to spend a few days in the Fallas, I decided
that I would approach him when he was around. I've been wondering if this is worth
telling you or not. I don't know if it's good for you. If it does us good. Some
time later, when your father came to Valencia, I brought up the subject and he told
me that your mother had died of a heart attack like your grandfather. So I told
him: But didn't he choke? and he released, verbatim: yes, I looked at his throat
and he had a piece of peach from dinner, I tried to get it out and I couldn't. Were
you drunk? asked. "No, no, I got drunk afterwards. I grabbed a bottle of DYC and
drank it all before the police got there." My doubt is if it would not be another
of his many fights and he got out of hand. I can't get it out of my head that there
is something shady, and that everything happened too fast. But then I tell myself
that if they had found any clues, they would have made more inquiries, and the
autopsy would reveal it, right? Still, I can't get it out of my head.

Two, I understood that I had to continue no matter what it took

to get my shadow back, to sew it to my heels. So that every time someone said that
I looked like my mother or father, I wouldn't feel offended; and that the world,
mine, stop falling apart.

I resisted being born again.

Fourth part

Daughters

I am sitting on my eldest daughter's bed watching over her fever.

I hold her hand. Fragility and strength invade me at the same time. Three years
have passed since he was born, on March 18, 2012. In the bedroom, in a crib placed
next to the double bed, sleeps his sister, who was born on October 3, 2014. They
have been years of insomnia and emotions , years of changes, in which the body
seems to be attached to parenthood, as if it ceased to belong to you, as if one
could see oneself in pieces. And not all the fractions that I glimpse of myself are
positive. The tremor remains, the deepest fears, the mist, the helplessness, the
misgivings and the shadow of my father.

I continue holding my daughter's hand. That tiny hand that I feel

protects me more than I protect her.

I have often been asked who my daughters look like. Every time
they did, my stomach twisted, in case someone found a similar trait to my parents.
As I watch my daughter's fever, my resemblance to him strikes me again, like that
photograph I discovered of him behind the bar in a nightclub when he was young. It
is something that comes from time to time. As if it were the seasonal migration of
a bird of prey. When I think about it I notice the physical sensation of discomfort
in my body.

The fragments.

The fear.

The restlessness that one of his genes will wake up in me.

 My father is still alive, but I don't want him to meet my
daughters. On the contrary, my brother has allowed him to associate with his
children. He tells me that he is calmer. I don't believe it. Then, perhaps as if to
justify himself, he tells me that our father is not going to change, but that age
has calmed him down and he no longer drinks or takes drugs like before, that if he
even notices that he has, they won't visit him, but that He is affectionate with
his children.

I tell him it's all the same to me. I still don't talk to him. I
didn't invite him to my wedding. I don't allow him near my daughters. I know he
killed my mother, although I didn't try too hard to prove it either. I stopped
writing the book just as they were going to give birth to me. That painful
tachycardia that I appreciate every time I'm going to be born on paper. That strong
physical sensation of drowning when I look back in time. That embarrassment that I
feel next to my daughter in case some trait that reminds me of him emerges.

Throughout my life I have been determined to do one thing, one

thing only: detach myself from everything that was him. I guess if I keep thinking
about it so much it means I haven't quite gotten it. And this makes me wonder if
that conscientious distance that I have made can be in some way the other side of
the same coin. If I, with my opposite attitude, am the other part of him and,
therefore, I am imitating him by opposition. I am embarrassed by these thoughts
when my brother, at dinner on New Year's Eve in 2015, tells me that our father
bought some dolls for my daughters that he left him to give them to me. I didn't
want to take them when my brother gave them to me: it was as if touching something
that came from my father could infect my family.

That primitive and atavistic fear of their genes.

I also refused to share dinner if he went.

He is alone and I feel sorry for him, my brother told me. None of
me, he asked for it, besides, what I tell you is a lie, he has always deceived us,
always, I replied. Stop thinking with grudges, he's our father, he told me, and I
remembered what my grandmother used to say, what most people tend to think, since
he's your father you let him, but at the same time I was aware of the other side ,
from that other perverse side, that zone in which you allow it to the son. That
mutable condemnation of denial and affirmation that cannot be separated or
dissolved.

I decided to talk about my father, what he meant to the family,

the damage he did, the poison he planted in each of us. A poison that spread. That
contaminated relations. I love my brother, but I don't know who he is. We always
communicate from a prudent and rigid distance. Our relationship works always
pending an alarm about to go off.

Then I understood that he was not only talking about him, nor
about his miseries, about the ignominies that he generated driven by his drug
addiction and alcoholism, but that he was talking about deeper things that became
entrenched and rotted and had to be cleaned up somehow. And that passed through the
completion of the book regardless of who weighed. Because if I didn't, I wouldn't
stop feeling incomplete, severed, violated over and over again.

I think that since the beginning of December 2015 these ideas

were already going around my head. Go back to that book that talked about the
family. A book that would sting if it ever saw the light. I was already aware that
I could not count on my brother to pit my memory against his. And, surely, the
reluctance that he had shown me since the beginning of writing, which I started in
2009, had made me hesitate. I had built a kind of family archeology, however, it
was, or at least I perceived it that way, a fluctuating writing and, above all, it
corresponded to a past in which neither my brother nor I had been born.

I had stopped writing in March 2012, but in reality, during those

three years in which my life did not stop, with the birth of my two daughters,
various personal projects underway, a huge job at the film festival and many other
matters, the book hadn't left my head, it beat and hibernated with unbreakable
drives, like the experiences I had with my parents who frequently stalk and agitate
me. And it was not entirely true that he had not written anything, since he had not
stopped taking notes in notebooks or loose sheets, jotting down ideas in the
margins of the novels he read, or opening a Word document to capture the emotions
of a certain moment, so as not to forget a memory that had come to me unannounced,
with the intention of telling my brother about it or, depending on the memory,
sharing it with a friend, although later the initial impulse would deflate and I
would not do it. I had taken hundreds of notes, long or short paragraphs that
reiterated the conflict between my father and me. Throughout those years, that had
not stopped scratching me. A few days before New Year's Eve 2015, I tried to
retrieve those writings. I didn't find them all, far from it. Reading them got me
discouraged. I felt my stomach drop. The darkness returned; Or maybe he had never
left me.

So when my brother told me about the dolls my father had bought

for my daughters, that mechanism kicked in again. I couldn't say the reason. It was
like a symbol. Return to childhood, with my father taking me to a toy store. And
the exhaustion I had experienced in 2012 evaporated.

I was still overwhelmed.

The fear continued.

But at the same time I felt, or at least I believed it at that

moment, that the stigma of not being born would prevent me from being a confident
man and that the enduring insecurity I felt in my skin would be passed on to my
daughters.

I was thinking this while in January 2016 I was holding hands

with my three-year-old daughter. He had given her Apiretal to bring down her fever.
My partner was with the other little girl in the bedroom. My oldest daughter asked
me to read her a story. I took one that he really liked and read it to him. When I
finished, she asked me to write her a book that she could read in learning to read.
And I also don't know the unfathomable reason for how that unexpected request from
my daughter acted. I only know that when he fell asleep, from the room next door
where I have the computer, I began to read what he had written and I was certain
that, no matter what it took, I would finish two books. The one my daughter had
asked me for and the one those invisible and strange forces had asked me for. I had
to finish this book so that I could begin to forget, or at least try, and so that
my daughters would not have to go on an ominous journey, as I do, to find out who
their father was.

I began to reread what I had written since that distant summer of

2009 in which I began writing the book. I discarded the scattered notes I had taken
throughout the break. In parallel, I embarked on hundreds of children's readings to
analyze their narrative resources. During that 2016, I decided to take up my
father's book and start one that my daughter could read in a few years.

I realized the complexity of the purpose. Writing about my

parents brought up a restlessness that I had no control over. The lacerating
feeling of guilt returned, the anxiety, the most abominable of perceptions, the
uneasiness of finding myself as an adult with the child I was, of resurrecting and
reliving my pleas and shame, everything that is not wanted to be told, what has
been guarded so jealously since childhood, the costumes that one puts on oneself to
carry on.

I remembered a recurring thought from my childhood and

adolescence. From a very young age I fantasized about being born in another family
and in another country. I used to tell my maternal grandmother, and I, in my room,
lying on the bed, imagined it with all my might, because I naively believed that if
I projected it in one way or another it would end up being fulfilled.

The decomposition with which I lived my youth was not just

another simulation, far from it, it was riddled with facts with dates: the year
1983 in which my father forbade us to go to school, locking us in the house during
exams; the year 1992, that of the Corcuera Law, in which the police broke into our
house; the REM song "Everybody Hurts" that I kept listening to around that time;
the year 1994, when my father got out of jail and caught me in the bathroom. But I
had to be born, start at the beginning, because of what I had interrupted, because
despite the fact that my father was not present and did not even know my purpose
with the book, he was there every day, by my side, and that was what more harmful
to me. As if his invisible hand with fingers of crushed blood sausages continued to
roughly grab me by the neck. An action that forced me to double down, while I heard
their threatening screams and my pleas and pleas.

And I resumed writing the book.

As children we are forced to settle the debts that parents leave

behind when they die; although their sins are never forgotten. These sins haunt us.
Perhaps they do it with the same hesitation of a child when it begins to walk. But
they are there. I noticed it in the others when they looked at me.

They thought they recognized the shadow of the father in the son.
And that scared them. They could not tell the son from the father. I wonder if the
sins of one will be reproduced in the same way by the other, if I will transfer
mine to my daughters, and also, if they will perceive in me a refuge when they need
it, or on the contrary they will do the same as me, that From a very young age I
avoided my parents, and I wanted to abandon them, they were not a relief for me,
every time I got close to my parents I suffered, although during my childhood, as
contradictory as it sounds, I looked for their hands, their coat, their shelter . I
felt that I was wandering through the immensity of space, without a diving suit,
with the idea that it would gradually become dust, sandstone, disintegrating every
time I asked for a small show of affection and found a bad face, indifference, as
if doing and causing harm was its state. normal and it would even do them good,
being at ease, was their way of experiencing pleasure.
3

In all the photos that I have recovered from my childhood, I am

with my maternal grandmother or with my aunt from Madrid. Only in two I am with my
mother and in none with my father. There is no record of this type. There is no
image. I have only found the reminder of the First Communion. The record that it
was not important to fix the birth and growth of his son. His physical changes, his
achievements and failures, his hopes and desires, the friends he hung out with; let
alone register any birthday celebration, basketball games, parties, Christmas,
summer trips... because there weren't any.

I had arrived unannounced. They did not have a baby. My parents

gave the best of themselves to others. At least that was the impression I had as a
child. But when they got home, the drug and alcohol comedown would transform them,
make them violent, they would start arguing, breaking things, and their children
would cry and we would be another nuisance that had to be managed. I remember my
parents' house better than any other space, those white stucco walls in which
grease, dirt, the smell of tobacco and vice that settled in the house over the
years like one more tenant could be distinguished. I remember how trivial and deep
those situations that impregnated my character. The silence of the mornings broken
by their strong breaths. It was as if they wanted to turn the house into an eternal
night. As if in a way that I can't figure out, I was still there, locked up,
broken, hurting myself.

I can't help but ask myself over and over again: is it worth
talking to him after so long?, having him face to face again about this book?

Days and weeks go by, but the questions remain. In a way, not
getting out of them is not putting yourself in danger, because at the center of the
target is the fear of losing the fine balance that I have achieved.

I was never clear about what it means to have a place in the

world. I know that I have suffered from that territory that confers security. A
neat legacy from my parents. Even today, having become a father, I have a hard time
finding it. Is it for this reason that I feel so strongly that my life does not
belong to me? I run away, I flee, I get lost in places because I feel condemned by
my father to wander, to pursue something that no longer exists, that he was in
charge of burning, razing, annihilating. I got the idea, rather the strategy, that
I had to learn to live that way, without a home, with the bubbling tendency to
evaporate from time to time. But that no longer works, nor is it possible. Writing
is the opposite of running away. It requires will, perseverance, effort and having
found the world. Also inhabit it.

With the birth of my daughters, I realized the enormous

shortcomings of my father, the grievances that my brother and I suffered, the
absolute absence of his love for us. And as I write it I don't want to fall into
any sentimentality, which I hate, but I feel how my throat closes up and I perceive
how my life suffered from tenderness, from the affection that I try to pour into
them. I don't know if always in the healthiest way, because I also know that my
father's faults can be in me, they belong to me, and that I must bear them to
protect them. The intimate hatred that I breathe, my impossibility to forgive, the
rage with which I write... And, later, when I parked the writing of the family book
and began to read children's stories, I felt comforted, as if protected by those
readings bathed in illustrations, as if I felt the emotions I experienced in my
room, when I felt protected from my father, from his hands of crushed black
pudding, from his smell of Ducados, from his animal voracity, from the intense,
unfathomable fear that he instilled in me. my.
4

I review the photographs my aunts gave me. I stop at two of them

separated by twenty-two years. The distance between those portraits carefully sets
the decadence of my mother and, by extension, of my family. They are two relevant
snapshots for what they relate despite the fact that they are apparently two
anodyne photos.

Only the most current image has written the date and the place
where it was taken, the Dunes of Maspalomas, in Gran Canaria, on January 29, 1995.
It is a horizontal photo, and in the center my mother appears with a red Smirnoff
sweatshirt , a propaganda sweatshirt, a garment that in his youth he would have
vehemently rejected. Her hair is on her face from the wind, but also from the
abandonment induced by years of alcohol and drugs, she is without makeup, her face
worn and swollen from excesses, her eyes downcast, her characteristic expression,
somewhere between rebellious and bored. , is still on the left side of the mouth,
but deep down, as if still believing that a good life is possible, there is a faint
glimpse of a bright future, something that is barely perceptible if you don't know
the person, and, for the rest, it accentuates the melancholy and sadness enhanced
by the greenish and blue colors of the horizon. The oldest photo is vertical, and
has nothing written on the back, but it's easy for me to date. In it my mother has
me in her arms, I had not yet turned one year old. The clothing indicates that it
is summer, June, July or August. And the photo was taken at my maternal
grandmother's house. I recognize her by the door and the wallpaper on the walls. I
have a pacifier, I wear a navy blue dungarees and a yellow shirt. I don't look at
the person taking our portrait, but at someone, surely my grandmother, who must be
signaling me to look towards the camera lens, although I don't, in fact, my left
arm is raised towards that direction . From what I know, my father must have taken
it out, because they used to leave me at my grandmother's house so that she could
take care of me while they worked or went out. The contrast between the images of
my mother is the life that her face reflects. In the one where she takes me in her
arms, without a very maternal attitude, since it is true that she never had one,
her face is fully visible, she is illuminated, she is wearing a pleated Scottish
miniskirt and a tight mustard T-shirt, she is wearing the newlywed wedding ring ,
will soon take it off, and she is smiling, carefree, and her left lip pout is
playful.

These two photos exemplify innocence and moral turpitude. A

quick, imperceptible tour that flooded our arteries of depravity.

At some point, my daughter comes into the studio to help her

assemble a toy. He asks me what I do. Write, I tell you. My tale? No, another one,
but I won't forget yours, I tell him. Then, when he sees the photos on the desk, he
asks me who they are. It's me. How cute, he says. And this is your mom? Yes. Is she
dead? Seat. What a pity. It is striking that he does not pay attention at all to
the photo in which my mother poses in the Dunes of Maspalomas. As if it didn't
exist. When I ask her who the photo is, my daughter looks at her, but doesn't say
anything. This is it, I say, pointing to my mother in the old picture. Ah, he says,
not paying attention; Instead, he notices that the photo is annotated from behind,
but pays no attention to the woman in the image, who doesn't look like the same
person, vampirized, beyond life, struck down by any relief, denied the happiness he
even dreamed of. when one of his dreams came true.

This happens just as I describe. I'm not looking for any fiction
resources. It happened like this. And I limit myself to describing the moment
instantly. Without showing my feelings.

My mother always blamed my father for not having a honeymoon. It

was one of the demands that I always heard from him. His wish to have had a trip to
a tropical island, with white sand, warm and crystal clear water. One of those
places that made her feel special, in addition to getting on a plane and traveling
outside of Spain, another of her wishes.

She was a fanciful, impressionable woman who wanted to have the

life of a character in a romantic movie, only that since their courtship the
relationship between them was built based on arguments, drunkenness, joints,
cocaine, drugs, and an increasing violence that they needed. twist, widen the bet,
perhaps not to get bored, as if they were inside a circle from which they could not
get out, and they had confused feelings with those experiences guided by alcohol
and drugs that led them to barbarism.

From a very young age I heard how my mother recriminated things

to my father. Promises she'd made to him but he didn't keep. All related to deceit,
to lies, to the fraud that my father turned their lives into. Apparently he had
promised that with his savings they would go on a honeymoon to the Caribbean. They
never did. They invested that money in the restaurant that my father set up on
Varela street. The most my mother got was a trip to Almería and the trip to Gran
Canaria in January 1995, after he got out of jail. Two escapades in twenty-two
years. That's what his vacation came down to. Although it can be considered that
their lives were an endless gap.

There are two other photos from that pathetic trip to the Canary
Islands that perfectly define the couple that my parents were, and they stir me up
more than I would like. In one my father is lying on a towel on the lawn of the
hotel where they stayed. Beside him, a saucer full of cigarette butts, several
scattered newspapers (AS and El País stand out), tobacco and almost imperceptible
what must be a bottle of beer or something similar. The next night, my parents are
sitting in white plastic chairs, smiling, stoned, with that pink color on their
faces from what they would be wearing on their bodies, that hallucinated perception
not very different from that of the wedding. On the table, also made of white
plastic, there are two whiskeys with ice, a packet of Fortuna, which is what my
mother smoked, one of Coronas with a lighter on top, which is what my father smoked
at the time, and an ashtray brimming with butts As much as they may seem common
pictures, expose the precipitous decline of the people who conceived me.

It hurts to sink into memories. Perhaps, during childhood, we

miss them and desperately seek their affection, their voice, their hands, although
later, or very soon, they disgust us. Perhaps, we get used to suffering and, in an
invisible way, we also seek the unhealthy, furious and sick perspective of memory
so as not to lose contact with them. I think about it as I go through the writing.
The thought vanishes as soon as I remember the pain of those crystals in the
bathroom. It may be that the reconstruction of all families falls into the story of
memory, that it is neither the absolute truth nor pure fiction, but rather an
intermediate space that reveals a deep and vulnerable vision of the impulses that
we harbor beyond all fables. An event in which one breaks and feels that everything
was always shattered.

5
 Instability defines me. Fragile, wobbly, in a tenacious
hesitation, as if I were trying to perform a tightrope walk in front of my parents,
when those people were a problem for me, alcoholics, angry, drug addicts, paranoid,
violent, carefree, negligent, hedonistic... Their attitude weakened me. , I was
submerged in an ocean of guilt from which I have not yet managed to reach solid
ground, an experience that tarnished my character, my behavior, because how can I
deny that the nature of a father somehow penetrated a child in formation.

Is it possible to eradicate what soaked in me during childhood

even if it was an absent father? Have I escaped its influence?

But the child that he was didn't see it that way. Although it
pains me to write it, I was looking for his recognition, and if he ever gave me his
attention, it comforted me.

I think about all this in the fall of 2016, while the months
advance with speed and energy and the writing of the book with parsimony and
sadness. I am unable to escape the mood and physical fluctuations that I experience
while writing. The unexpected impulses that drive me crazy over trifles and that I
turn against my family, something that eats me, rotten wood. Rage. Resentment.
Resentment.

I wonder if the drugs turned my father into the one I knew or in

him there was already a seed prone to it that facilitated his entry into darkness.
A black abyss that engulfed us for decades. Neither of them told me from their
mouth what marked them in childhood. My mother can't anymore. But does it make any
sense for me to confront my father's story? What does he give importance to? What
do you think of the years we haven't spoken to each other? How are the passages of
your memory? Would I deny what he did to me?

I think he would go unpunished again. That his confession will

lack frankness, that I have my vision and that of others to rebuild theirs. I admit
that I am afraid to be with him. let him look at me touch me May its smell permeate
everything again.

After my aunt from Madrid left the apartment my parents rented,

the news arrived about my mother's pregnancy and my father's obsession with setting
up the restaurant. Together with a partner who was named like him, and whom he had
met in the discos, they looked for a place in Pedregalejo, which they found on
Pereda street, perpendicular to Juan Valera. They put all their effort and energy
into the project. My aunts tell me that my grandfather helped him financially,
seeing the opportunity for him to settle down and give up the night and the
flirtation with drugs.

The restaurant opened a few months before I was born. My

grandfather was proud that his son had started his own business, which meant he was
leaving the nightlife behind. At least the first few years it worked fine. There
were some reports in the most important local newspapers that effusively
recommended it, and it soon gained a loyal clientele that had purchasing power and
took the refectory as its place of reference. I have asked my aunts about those
reports my father boasted about, but they don't have them. I remember that he
framed them beautifully, and that they hung for a while, first in the restaurant,
then in the house. I call my brother and ask him if he knows where they might be
and if he could get hold of one of them when I visit my father's house. He tells me
to ask for them myself, but that he doubts that he will keep them, that the
apartment is terrible. I tell him that with how vain and boastful he is for sure
that he keeps them, I doubt that he has thrown them away. He asks me why I want
them. I tell you. You hadn't left it?, and without waiting for the answer, in an
automatic way, he says: You don't know how the house is. No, I do not know. But it
will not differ much from how it was in our childhood and youth. It is worse, much
worse, and the matter is closed. My brother is uncomfortable with the subject of
the book. He refuses to talk about what happened. You have made it very clear to
me.

During childhood the house maintained a decent appearance because

my maternal grandmother cleaned it. She said that she did it for us and for her
daughter, she even made the beds. My grandmother also did it with a weak heart,
despite the fact that on one occasion my father kicked her out of the house by
attacking her with the dog's leash, even when my mother, convinced by my father,
tricked her into vouching for her humble apartment. of official protection and they
could face the debts that the restaurant began to generate in the nineties, my
grandmother continued there, she never abandoned her daughter. And this is
something that I did not understand and that I even came to reproach him for. I had
to be a father to understand the unequivocal behavior of that kind, illiterate
woman, who life turned melancholic.

These memories pop into my head like playing a faulty DVD. One
more sign of sadness, that remembering hurts, that these experiences have their
correspondence in an elusive attitude, in a physical rigidity, and, at the same
time, in the habit with which we assimilate the facts.

And despite this, if I talk about my childhood, the lack of love

and affection from my parents, my grandmother somehow made up for it. She was sweet
and happy with us, she hid a deep sorrow that I didn't realize until much later,
she always tried to be happy even though she had no reason, she taught my brother
and me to distinguish between good and evil, not to be greedy, nor spiteful, to be
compassionate. However, when I examine myself, I recognize that I was a hostile
child against my parents, because I did not feel their love on a day-to-day basis,
I did not perceive that they were ever my protectors, on the contrary, life with
them was a purgatory. In fact, I am writing these lines and I still feel them as a
torment.

I believe that the lack of rest that surrounded me as a child is

the same that I experience at this moment. The wear and tear of being alert every
day and every night. Early mornings in which my thoughts were filled with fear with
the screams and the blood and the white foam that came out of my father's pasty
mouth. A childhood in which I long for my mom and dad to look at me and smile and
be happy, but above all to save me from the darkness. Although how could they do it
if they were that darkness, that black hole in which he wandered without
references.

Daddy, daddy, daddy, I hear my daughter calling me, and I think I

don't remember calling them mommy and daddy, even though I probably had to, right?
Because all kids do that at some point.

7
 The fact that my father stopped working at the disco did not mean
that he stopped going out at night. All the versions that I have been told agree
that the restaurant's first five years were focused on business, so inevitably its
outings were spaced out. He would go out for a drink after closing, but he forced
himself to pick himself up early. On weekends they used to get out of control
together. My grandmother told me that they dropped us off at her house on Friday
and didn't pick us up until Monday, sometimes the stay was prolonged, and we spent
the summer months and vacations with her and hardly saw our parents. These periods
were a break. I didn't know it at the time, but seen through today's prism it was a
way of getting away from the tension that was generated at my parents' house; to
get away from the banging, the screaming, and the escalating violence that was
escalating.

Over the years I tried to downplay the fear my parents caused me.
And not only them, but also that ghostly house that I felt was expelling effluvia,
miasmas, a sensation that terrified me. I needed to convince myself that everything
would pass when I grew up. I remember that I repeated it to myself frequently in
adolescence. And in 2016, about to enter 2017, I realized that it was a rudimentary
way of resisting, of making bearable that excruciating pain that I was unable to
decipher, let alone facing it.

And yes, I have to admit it, I am still not cured of those

whispers, of those tears, of those punches and kicks that my body got used to
accepting —it is true that my mother received many more—, nor of those shocks in
the middle of the night, nor of the screams and insults and broken objects, nor of
the worst humiliation of all, the one that tore me apart. Or the restlessness I
felt when they hadn't gotten to sleep, and I knew that tonight or the next there
would be a fight and I would have to defend myself, I would have to face hell. That
restlessness devoured me, and it was worse and more insane than the confrontation,
that restlessness left me exhausted, almost dead, empty. That feeling has never
left me.

That's why, when we slept at my grandmother's house, the body

relaxed and we didn't wake up so often in the middle of the night. But I have
already noticed that my father, although more controlled because he took the
business seriously, or as much as he could do it, kept going out. From the fifth
anniversary of the restaurant, my father began to organize parties in his own
place. Sporadically at first, then more and more frequently. This was the cause of
her breaking up with her partner, who had also married and had just had a son, and
had radically cut herself off from the night and drugs.

My father was left alone in front of the restaurant. He had

achieved a certain fame and had plenty of clients. And when it closed, the party
was still there. At first alcohol and joints, then poker games, to which cocaine
was added, and, at the end, showing porn movies. At some point things got out of
hand, and orgies were organized in the place and my father turned into a drug
dealer. And he gradually became unconcerned with the business and everything he had
achieved. From having a waiting list in the restaurant, in the late 1970s and early
1980s, customers gradually stopped coming. His gap was such that the managers
cheated and stole from him, but he didn't want to see it or didn't care, he spent
most of the day high, and he kept going, without stopping, considering himself the
best, when his degradation was already very bad. evident.

In addition to the break with the partner, something else

happened, something that affected us, although we were not aware of it. My father
had no end to drugs and alcohol. He became more and more addicted as the restaurant
did well for him and he came into contact with people who had a lot of money. I
remember the empty bottles of whiskey, gin, rum and wine in the living room, in his
bedroom, the ashtrays full of cigarette butts, as well as the accumulation of
unwashed dishes, with remains of food from days before. The house smelled of that
and sex and violence. A combination that if you have sucked it as a child, you can
easily identify it.

The partner was the one who controlled my father, who brought
order to the chaos in which he moved, and to which my father naturally tended.
Thus, without the management and control of the partner, little by little, my
father let himself go. If the gaps were limited before to weekends with my mother,
these became daily.

My mother had no maternal instinct. It was hard for her to stay

at home with us and then receive the beatings from my father, when he would arrive
very late. So she rebelled against him and left him. It was barely five or six
months in which he went to live at my grandmother's house. Apparently, during that
time, he tried to show an affection that he lacked. Failure. She was not prepared.
Nor did she find the support of her own mother, who considered, due to her
education and religious teachings, that the woman should be with her husband.

When a few weeks passed, the predator went in search of the prey.
My father would go to my grandmother's house to see my mother with the excuse of
seeing us. He displayed his firmness and his charm so that I would fall back into
his circle.

The rebelliousness that my mother still treasured lasted until

she got tired of the effort involved in raising two children, and she gradually
relaxed and convinced that all the promises with which my father cajoled her, he
would end up fulfilling.

With the partner gone, my father needed someone in the restaurant

to keep track of his accounts, and he offered my mother a position. So my mother
began to work every day and every night at the premises, and, of course, she also
stayed for the parties that were organized. And alcohol and drugs occupied the
center of his days. They could barely stand family life. They rejected the
everyday. Responsibilities forced them to give up their dissipated life and face a
common reality that did not interest them.

And then my memory pushes me back, to face those memories that I

shouldn't have retained, those memories that seem impossible to store. But the
body, even more than the mind, has memory, keeps sensations and forces me to write
so that I don't forget, so that I recognize the past, my persecutor.

I think he would be seven years old. I got out of bed and began
to go through the rooms of the house without turning on the lights. It was summer.
I see myself with my bare feet on the ground. Street lights filter in through the
uncurtained windows. The whistle of the cars that circulate intermittently along
the road breaks the silence. I walk the corridors that seem different to me. I
perceive the house differently. But the furniture is the same. I am restless,
although I do not know the reason. I go to my parents' bedroom. I do not know what
time it is. It's just night. A warm morning. I explore the rest of the house, I
even go out on the terrace, but my parents are not there. I think about waking up
my brother. I think that my parents have gone shopping and that they will arrive
any minute. But that doesn't happen. I think my parents have abandoned us. My head
is a jumble of sensations during those uncertain hours, awake, worried, suddenly
sobbing, inspecting the furniture without looking for a specific object, seeing the
first light coming, not knowing why I am restless, where the restlessness comes
from that shakes me And suddenly, the sound of the elevator alerts me. My drunk
parents arrive, causing a certain amount of noise, until they lock themselves in
their room, and from there come moans and then those breaths that take over the
space.

All this I did not understand until a while later. But it is a

vivid memory that I keep from that childhood of terrors and vagueness. I don't know
which part may be modified by memory. What is not, because it was something that my
maternal grandmother told me, is that my mother put us to sleep and left us at home
alone to later join my father in the restaurant, which is true that it was just a
couple of minutes away. from where we lived The apartment overlooked Juan Sebastián
Elcano. You crossed the road, went up Juan Valera and the first on the left was
Calle Pereda, where the restaurant was. Perhaps the first few times he would go to
check that we were okay, or he thought that we would not wake up or that we were in
danger. However, after that we started waking up frequently. In reality, neither my
brother nor I were aware of my parents' neglect. But seen through today's prism,
and seen from my father's perspective, his behavior was reprehensible.

I wonder if already in that pivotal experience, I knew that I

couldn't pronounce the words "dad" and "mom."

And that is why I give them so much importance, that even today
the mistrust that incubated in me at that time, and that developed over time,
shaped who I am and what my dad and mom represented to me. The sadness of not
having them. And the consequent arrival of nightmares and a restlessness that still
plagues me today.

During my childhood the state in which I lived was that of

startle. I would have liked a certain monotony, a calm straight line, although I
realize that each stage of my life has always been hectic, full of convulsions of
anguish, restlessness, trembling, fear. Of all, by far, childhood was the most
harrowing.

Or I conceive it that way, as if I moved blindly through

withered, opaque, even incorporeal areas. The contrast is even greater by
opposition since I have been a father. My parents denied me that unconditional love
that is assumed for the simple fact of being parents. I never had it or felt them
close, I suppose that their children did not induce them to be affectionate, to hug
them, to play with them. I have tried to be fair and give them the merit they
should have. I have toiled in the task, tracing the past that haunts me
relentlessly. I do it to understand them and understand me.

I scratch almost desperately a clean, sweet, happy affective

image. But either I do not have those images registered or they have been lost or I
have deleted them involuntarily. Perhaps the weight of the words, the blows and the
humiliations have completely eliminated their minimal attentions; those few
caresses that I try to trace while I dig into the past.

I believed that the past would manifest itself with ease and
fluidity, that I could stretch it at will, give it shape, order the events to make
sense. But perhaps it can only be done through the instability that characterized
my childhood and youth. I gave up doing it any other way. Allow yourself to be
defeated by what arrives, like what the sea returns to the shore, even though the
object that it brings from that trip is eroded, rusty, worn, and lacks its original
function.

I think of this when I recall a recurring dream from that period

in 1978 or 1979, when the partner left and then my mother separated from my father
for a few months. I don't know its meaning, but it must have some, so I write an
email to my therapist, who I've been going to for a year and a half.

For a long time, I kept in mind this dream that was repeated in
childhood, when I was seven or eight years old. It came to me as if it were a
warning. I thought you wanted to tell me something. Then I gave up. It never left,
it remained stored in my memories, and it returned from time to time. In the dream
I almost always saw myself at the top of the steep stairs of my maternal
grandmother's house. Seeing myself up there terrified me. I was afraid to put them
down. After a while my parents appeared, at the bottom, sometimes I called them,
other times I didn't; They never saw me or heard me, they were talking until they
started arguing, or fucking, or laughing, even though whatever they ended up doing,
it was always something shrill, loud, unpleasant. At the top of the stairs I began
to sweat and, holding on to the black metal railing that faced the street, I began
to go down very carefully, slowly putting one foot on the step, then the other,
clinging to a cold handrail, which contrasted with the heat that I emanated. As
soon as I went further, I would fall and bounce off the steps, but I would not
reach them, instead I would remain bouncing on the stairs and then I would fall
into the void, where everything began to blur without completely losing the
contours that defined things. I remember waking up shivering, sometimes sweaty,
even sore. I don't know what the memory trap is in that dream; I only confirm that
it was very physical, that it still is when I remember it, and that it stayed on
record.

My therapist tells me that her husband, also a therapist, who is

a specialist in the subject, will call me because, according to what he tells me,
to interpret dreams, you need to talk to the person. When I see the email I regret
having sent it and I write to him again not to bother, that he doesn't need to call
me. Suddenly I feel that revealing that dream is shedding my skin, staying raw.
Unprotected.

Childhood was a daily test of survival. We never function as a

family. Hence, he was afraid of fatherhood. I still have it today.

Growing up with alcoholics, drug addicts and abusers for whom

children were a nuisance, caused dysfunction and mistrust to normalize, they
transmitted to us a host of frustrations that we ended up sucking like mother's
milk. That stunted us emotionally.

I feel like this now, the first days of 2017. I behave in

opposition to how they did, so I know that I am too protective of my daughters and
that this can hurt them without meaning to. I'm sure my parents never considered
any of this. Although as a child I did not realize these situations, over the years
I did.
 I have to say that the set of these circumstances does not
correspond to them either, it was another time, more permissive and lax. Women
still carried the burden of the domestic. My father never changed a diaper, he was
not responsible for any of the obligations that as a father would have corresponded
to him. And my mother only partially, my maternal grandmother was there to clean
our poop, to wash us, to make the porridge and give it to us patiently. And I
remember that during the first years, my aunt from Madrid used to take me to the
park (she sent me some photos, and I recognize the sadness in those faded black and
white images). My father and mother were worried that the restaurant would work.
The children subtracted time. The others were already there to take care of us. And
as we turned years it was not different, but it was more. I avoid judging, I
already say that a part must be attributed to the context of that period of the
late seventies and early eighties, in which Spain freed itself by forced marches,
breathed from the previous decades.

I guess becoming a father makes me wonder and see things in a

different way. And this change affects the writing of the book, the emotions
themselves when it comes to remembering my past. So, should I thank them for making
me stronger even though they weighed down and mutilated my affections and
inoculated that voracious fear that still consumes me?

I don't know if it started the morning when I woke up at home and

discovered that my brother and I were alone and that it would always be like that;
I don't know if it was the time I went to my parents' bedroom, and my father kicked
me out of there; I don't know if it was about when I got home from school and my
parents were still asleep and there was nothing to eat; I don't know if it was the
night I went out into the street and wandered around the beach at will; I don't
know if it was my father's incursions into our rooms, in the middle of the night,
to beat us for having gotten out of bed when we heard noises of anger... At none of
these moments had I turned ten years old. Between seven and nine an alert was
activated in me. And it was not that they left us alone at home, or that we went to
school without the company of an adult, or that we arrived later and the food was
not ready and there was hardly anything in the fridge; not even that we could do
what we wanted without time. I insist that it was another era, with some social
uses that today would cause a certain scandal. It is about what was happening
inside the house, a terror that spread, harassment and abuse that my father
perfected as we grew up. The certainty that I was a wreck and that everything that
happened was my fault. The consequences manifested themselves in the form of self-
harm, I began to hurt myself, I caused injuries, because it was better to die,
because in adolescence and early youth life lacked value.

10

In the end, I met my therapist's husband at a coffee shop

downtown. There are hardly any prolegomena, nor is it necessary. He tells me to
tell him about the dream. I begin to narrate it to him and I feel that what I am
saying hardly has any relevance, that I am wasting the time of someone who does not
have any spare time. I'll let you know. I apologize because perhaps what I just
said is of no interest. He ignores my comments. He appears attentive and focused.
He asks me to tell him in the first person. That nuance makes me see that what I
have just described seems not to be with me, as if it were a character, someone I
don't want to be, from whom I want to get away.
 I go back to the dream and I realize that when doing it in the
first person, objects and details appear that were not shown in the third-person
narration. Which reveals the crucial importance of point of view.

The dream and what happens in it is the same and at the same time
it is not. An emotion of anguish seizes me. That representation in which I fall
from the steep stairs of my grandmother's apartment speaks of a very stressed
person in his day to day, the psychologist tells me. When I slept at my
grandmother's house, I did it more relaxed, and the curve of sleep was pronounced,
it became more abrupt. It is a mere physiological act, he tells me. Other elements
that appear, or that I have remembered when I have told it in the first person, are
some disco stickers. I can see the Piper's sticker clearly. There is another with a
face that I cannot distinguish. It may be from Bossanova, from Tiffany's, from
Number One, but I can't get it to focus on the memory. Both are stuck on the window
of my room, at my grandmother's house, and I remember that I put them there. The
Piper's sticker was an old convertible car. The black letters on a yellow
background highlighted the name. Diagonally below it was the word 'Disco', and on
the license plate the words 'Bang-Bang'. A car reminiscent of the one in the Ken
Hughes musical, which I saw so many times in my childhood, in which an inventor
turned an old car into one that could fly and called it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I have remembered the day my father gave it to me and I, excited,

stuck it on the window glass at the height of the bed, from where I could see it
when I went to bed. The sticker reminded me. Also other things that manifest in the
dream. A shelf where I put toy cars and motorcycles that my father had bought me
when he took me to a toy store. It's funny that I don't remember my brother. misses
me However, sometimes my father would take me alone. I see myself in the passenger
seat of his gray Ford Fiesta, always dirty, with papers on the floor, dust and that
permanent smell of black tobacco. I wanted to be close to him, as much as this fact
pained me.

The therapist asserts that the dream clearly has to do with my

father. It indicates to me the patent darkness in the dream, which is always
adverse, it is like that in all cultures. Something dark, dirty, disgusting, he
remarks. The dream is full of shadows, and black prevails, blurring the image. The
feeling of falling also indicates something sinister. It comes to be a universal
interpretation, he emphasizes, in case he had any doubts. Then he adds that fear
and sadness seem to coexist in the dream. That there is not so much anguish or
denial, but that as in the phases of mourning, which is a phase of acceptance,
sadness prevails, surely to give them a space in the book, he tells me. I nod and
thank him as we say goodbye. Suddenly, without warning, as so often, when I see
myself alone, my father's sneaky smile comes to me, which would be worth something
in a horror movie, accompanied by three sensations that accompanied me in
childhood: the ball in my throat pressing on me, drowning me , the
paralysis/rigidity that took over my body, and the abrasion in my eyes.

eleven

Although my brother dislikes bringing back bad memories, he tells

me that he perfectly remembers the moment when he realized that things were not
going well at my parents' house. It's something I've thought about a lot and it has
me obsessed. The first time we realized that life with them would only get worse
and worse for us. That this event was only an exponent that would progress until it
took over us, until we drowned in the whiskey and gin they drank, and hid us in the
smell of Ducados and Fortuna that did not stop smoking, that smell, that was fused
with sex and violence characterized them, defined them, although for me it was only
the smell of my parents.

We are in the garden of his house, sitting on white plastic

chairs, on a sunny Sunday, after lunch, and I have brought up the subject again.
His eldest son, ten years old, is sitting next to him reading a comic, but he puts
it down and looks at us, attentive to what we are saying. I think that my brother
will no longer speak in front of his son, but he is pensive, lately he has had
health problems, he has trouble swallowing food, he has been diagnosed with a rare
chronic disease called eosinophilic esophagitis. Before, he had anxiety processes,
dizziness, processes in which he ran out of breath and felt dizzy. My brother keeps
everything, hides it. I have thought that your organism has already endured enough
and is not prepared to endure more as long as it does not expel what it keeps. It's
hard for me to look at him directly, and the same thing happens to him, as if we
were going to discover some nuance, some element that would deny us forever, but I
listen carefully when he tells me that there is no common thread, only flashes,
images, as if They were ghosts or demons that appear when you least expect it.

And then it starts:

Dad had taken me to football to see Málaga, it was the first and
only time. I had been telling him for a long time to take me with him, that he was
a partner. In the end, for not listening to me anymore he did. I was six or seven
years old, it was just before the 1982 World Cup. Mom had not left her room that
day. I remember that in the Rosaleda he bought me what I wanted, and that he was
drinking beer and smoking. Also that he got angry because Málaga had lost. He used
to get angry when Malaga and Madrid lost. When we got home, Mom was in the living
room, and I saw that she had a swollen gumboil. I asked him what had happened to
him and he replied that he had been bitten by a bug, a bumblebee, I think he told
me. But even a child could tell that this was not an insect bite. That was the
first time I recorded it, I remember because I was very impressed to see mom with
her swollen face, sad eyes, bloated, and it came to my head much later. And also
because at home they began to breathe differently.

And where was I? I ask him. I do not remember. I don't know, you
didn't like football either. My brother looks at the lawn and then gets up. So,
when his son and I are left alone, he asks me: And that, uncle, why did you do it?
But I have no answer to offer you.

I feel bad that my nephew overheard our conversation. I look for

a phrase that rescues me, but I can't find it. I can only ask him if he knew him.
He says yes, he saw it a few times, although he barely remembers anything. And
calls him by his name, not grandfather. He was nice to you, right? I insist. Yes,
he tells me, but I can see that his head is still processing what he has heard.

12

After talking to my brother, the need to talk to my father

invades me, even if it's to tell him that he's a son of a bitch, that he screwed up
our lives, that he killed my mother, that he abused everyone. This impulse comes
accompanied by fear.

Fear has replaced my shadow and has stuck to my heels.

 The fear that I have of affection, of receiving gifts, of
becoming attached to people.

The atrocious fear of being hurt, of hurting the ones I love.

The irrational fear of open doors when I sleep.

I remember myself as a fearful, weak, insecure child. As if he

had been born that way, clinging to the hope that as an adult that fear would
gradually disappear. I believed that the grown-ups were never afraid, that my
father wasn't, with his verbiage, his confidence, showing off this and that,
walking naked around the house, as if he himself were a sculpture exhibited in a
museum.

These thoughts weigh me down because I know that I will not dare
to stand before him.

I feel shame. A similar one to the one that invaded me the first
day of school when the teacher asked us to introduce ourselves and asked us about
the profession of our parents. It was a terrifying situation for me. And it was
until he was twelve or thirteen years old; Even today I remember the nerves that
that moment caused me, the discomfort throughout my body, and how it was
impregnated with sweat. While the other children said normally, or even with a
laugh, that their parents were doctors, businessmen, engineers, truck drivers,
lawyers, shopkeepers, fishmongers..., I was ashamed to say that mine was a cook, it
stuck to me. That word felt sticky on my tongue, my voice barely came out, it even
made me slightly dizzy, and that day I ended up exhausted, going over and over that
insignificant situation. Not because my father's job was not a dignified job, of
course it had nothing to do with the current prestige of fashionable chefs, but
because he lived in and for the restaurant, there he found what he needed, he
represented, until he He turned into a camel, his true world, more than his wife
and children, because over time he also discarded my mother, submissive to levels
that I still find it hard to understand today.

How can I not remember that more than one night I asked him—my
brother and I asked him—to come to the restaurant later so that he could put us to
bed before going back to work.

But it never did.

That simple act of putting a child to bed and reading him a story
my parents never did. For this reason, when at a certain stage of my life, with
more pressure from work, I wanted my daughter to go to sleep early, but she didn't
and I got in a bad mood, I told myself what's the point of me recriminate the
behavior of my parents, that makes me angry for the absences, when I myself repeat
their mistakes. Little or nothing matters that he is writing a children's story.
Being a father means listening to the hearts of your children.

13

My father passed on rabies to me.

infected me
 I had nausea, vomiting, continuous mood swings. It was a wounded
animal that doesn't know how it survived in that house in a saturated atmosphere,
an atmosphere that thickened over the years until it became unbreathable.

I feel the thickness of that house in my organism.

Although the memory is intense, I would have liked to keep some

photographs of the house. Compare memory with the sharp image of a photo.

I call Alejandro, a childhood friend, and we talk about other

acquaintances, about people who live abroad, about the weddings we have attended
recently, about our daughters. He already knows about the book project, and I don't
have to delay in explanations. His mother was a representative of the PSOE and set
up the first Women's Institute. He came from a friendly background, even though his
parents were separated. His mother was invested in him and his sister, and his
father, in his own way, too. He tells me that he remembers some things, and that
some phrase he heard from my father stuck with him. I ask him to tell me how he
perceived my house and tell me the impressions he had during those years.

Your house was a complete mess. It was a large house with two
different areas, half was marked by the kitchen, on the right side were your rooms,
a room right at the entrance that was like a storage room, and a bathroom, and on
the left was the Your parents' area, with the living room, the terrace, their
bedroom and another bathroom, which was scary, you never knew what you were going
to find, and both areas were very different, he remarks.

What do you mean, I ask him.

Well, I was in your parents' part only a couple of times, but, as

if to forget it, that space had an impact on me, especially their bedroom, it
looked like a pigsty, it was disgusting, the smell was rancid, there were cigarette
butts in ashtrays and on the floor , blister packs of medicines of all kinds,
discarded clothes, newspapers, bottles of alcoholic beverages, bottles of water
with urine at the foot of the bed, and I remember that your brother asked me with
the greatest normality: Do you want to see my mother eating my father's dick?, and
he showed me several polaroids in which your mother gave your father a fellatio,
but there were also other photos in which other people were seen with your mother.

I tell him that I remember the Polaroid, for a while my father

took to taking snapshots of everything, I even have some with my brother. However,
I avoid commenting on the occasions when everything got out of hand, like that time
when he arrived very late and pissed on us while we slept; or the time she threw a
piece of shit at me and made me roll over it. Where did it come from? What
happened? The opacity of memories may just be a lifesaver. One that I still, even
today, cling to to believe that I have a value that is only a disguise.

Carlota, my first girlfriend, with whom I was between the late

eighties and the first half of the nineties, in that restless adolescence, tells me
that she never entered my parents' part, nor in the kitchen. Since the apartment
had two entrances, we entered through the one that led to your brother's room and
yours. We used to go into your room and we didn't go out anymore, he tells me. I
ask him if he was ever afraid. He tells me no, that he barely saw my parents, and
that I never talked about them. It was as if you lived alone, your parents went out
every night and only when you heard the elevator or some noise on the stairs did
you become alert, and if it was them you commented to see how they came, and if you
had a slight doubt about their condition, you We went and you accompanied me to my
house. Unlike other couples, we had a place to be together, a place of freedom. You
were free, you did what you wanted, he tells me, and at that time with riot
hormones, imagine, I lived it like an adventure or a game. And I have good
memories. It is another vision, without a doubt, because I did not stop to think
during those years. So I mention the holes in my bedroom door, the padlock, the
bolt and the chain that I had placed, the bathroom without a door, and she tells me
that yes, of course she could see it, but that she was used to it or she was
unconscious and that if something happened I would tell him to leave or we would
both leave, he does not remember being afraid or that I experienced it as a trauma
or anything like that, that in fact he believes that I lived it with the greatest
normality. Although he also remembers that during some periods I was sad because I
had nowhere to go, and I spent the night on the street, walking around or on the
beach until I knew that my parents had already fallen asleep.

From that time, do you know what I liked the most?, he asks me.
What do I tell them. That I gave you the keys to my house and you would sneak into
it in the middle of the night, get to my room, wake me up and, very quietly, we
would go to the living room and stay there until dawn, just before my parents left.
they will rise That was very exciting for me, what I have told you, I lived it as a
game. I tell him that I had forgotten. I'm surprised that with how scared I was, I
went into his house, but I do manage to exude the calm that I felt in that room so
different from mine, even with the threat of his parents discovering us. My parents
never caught us, Carlota says, and then, after a few minutes in which we recalled
those early mornings at her house, without sleep, she clarifies that, if she thinks
about it today, maybe I wasn't well: But we were young and we had fun and you were
my first time Do you remember the bloodstained sheet and what we messed up? And how
did your grandmother discover it later and put it in the washing machine?, she
tells me. This brings me to the Acacias incident that caused so much damage to my
parents and their families. And it makes me wonder what my grandmother thought, and
if that bloodstained sheet reminded her of it, too, even though she didn't say a
word.

My first girlfriend tells me that I wrapped myself in my

grandmother, that I couldn't count on my parents, that they broke my comics and
books, they stole things from me. I want to know if she realized that my parents
were drunks and drug addicts. He tells me: With your father I barely crossed a
couple of greetings, you were there to avoid it, with your mother I did talk a
little. I remember that she touched her hair a lot, all the time, and of course she
noticed that she was drinking or that on occasions she was drunk, more careless, as
if she were drunk, and that depending on the day she was exhausted. But they didn't
mean much to you, at least that's what I thought at the time. I do remember that
you were very angry with your grandmother for going to your house to clean, you
told her with everything they have done to you, that you almost lost the house, why
do you have to come and take the shit out of her, let them die, they should die now
.

It is true that there were times when I saw you helpless, like
one night when you were scared because you had a swollen gland and we went to the
emergency room at the El Palo health center on Vespino and the person on duty did
not attend to us, he let us go that what we had to do was go home. That made you
very sad, you got down a lot, you said that this was your life, I didn't understand
it or paid attention to you, because you were always looking for the beans. Over
time I have remembered this anecdote and I have understood the abandonment you felt
in those years, you took refuge in my house even after we were no longer dating,
and you sang the themes of the subjects to my mother, even though I was not there.
over there. I confess that I keep those moments; They were like a rest, a truce, a
relief, I knew that I was safe at home.

Carlota and I keep talking and it's as if those experiences from

thirty years ago were being projected in front of us by an old Super 8 player.
Pictures are fuzzy, colors are washed out, sound is poor, the player's engine
rattles but holds up once it's back up and running.

My first girlfriend tells me that once, when my parents were

sleeping, I took the keys to the restaurant and we snuck in there to get some food.
That the times we went there made me somewhat tense. It was the first time I saw
cocaine in the restaurant, and you told me: Stop that, and you got angry, he
comments, and from that day on I started to be more tense, he emphasizes. And she
also remembers that what bothered her the most was when we were with another
couple, and I suddenly left without explanation, leaving her alone with the couple,
and disappeared, without giving any sign for days, that at first she was going to
look for me. , until little by little he understood that it was not a good idea.

In that behavior I recognize my father. That panic of not being

different from him. A childhood scar that leaves an indelible mark.

When I spoke with my friend Alejandro, he told me that children

do not think, that they act by imitating or rejecting what they see, and that in
the case of my brother and mine, we naturally reject the whirlwind of my parents
and that we take the right side of the house, not the left, when the normal thing
would have been to do what my parents did.

Alejandro tells me: Like all abusers, your father was a great
public relations person, pleasant, friendly, he was strengthened by the weaknesses
of others, he knew how to sell himself. When you got the hang of it, he would
deliver a speech that you believed and you imagined that he was a fucking uncle, he
had conversation, presence, and I came to think, and I am convinced that others
also thought, that you were ungrateful, because in contrast, your father and your
brother, at least on the surface, maintained a complicit relationship. I remember
once when I was in the living room of your house studying with your brother for a
history exam and your father came with his splendid smile and began to talk to us,
asking us about the topics, telling us things and taking an interest in them. ours
and, then, he released to your brother: I am not going to be wrong with you as I
have been wrong with your brother. That stuck with me and, at the time, I thought
he was right, but the next day, we were studying in the same place and your father
burst in there yelling and throwing things and we had to go full blown. Those were
the two faces of your father. That's how he was. Today I can understand you, at
that time, even knowing what he was like, I was shocked by your attitude towards
him, that you passed each other on the promenade and didn't even look at each
other, I didn't understand that, perhaps I was doing it over time.

I listen to what he tells me, without interrupting him. Since

1995, after the bathroom, I didn't speak to him. That tore me apart.

I didn't judge your mother back then and I've tried never to. But
seen with today's mentality, his conduct shocks me. I realized that your mother was
a submissive woman, even though right now I find it hard to understand that they
attacked her children and that she did nothing, what's more, sometimes she threw
the dog at you, she tells me.

I ask him if he remembers anything else that caught his attention

or that he did not consider normal.

It struck me once when we were partying at the Donde disco, and

your mother, who was very drunk, hit Víctor to death. I don't know if he got his
hands on the package, you can ask him. And I also remember one night that we left
our boards and gear at your house, to go surfing at Palmar the next day, and your
father came to the top and started stomping on the surfboards... It was a move, we
all went out from there for legs, I don't know if you remember.

Of course I do, I tell him. One of those and many others in which
the tables were my brother and me.

14

I've been thinking about how to continue this story for days and
I can't get my great-grandmother's phrase about the unhappiness of my parents when
they were still dating from my head.

I feel suffocated.

As if somehow the sensations of those years had returned and were

invading me.

As if the narrative had a life of its own, as if it were Alice

chasing the White Rabbit and she was falling down a great rabbit hole. A tunnel
that blinded the joy that could be in that house. Happiness slips away like sand
between my fingers.

I kept wondering if it was necessary to put myself in my father's

place to understand him. He didn't want to save himself, he dragged us into the
mud, because deep down he was alone and he wanted to have company, entertainment
that would make him feel powerful.

Pain replaced fear.

In addition to his blows, sometimes I self-harmed. It was the

only way I knew to get out of the fear, the fog, the longing that overwhelmed me.

The fear disappeared only fleetingly, but it was enough for me.

I wanted to feel pain, I wanted to endure it, to be prepared, I

wanted when my father hit me it wouldn't hurt and I could laugh. I wanted to beat
him. At the age of twelve I began to burn my knuckles against any surface until I
bled and then I would beat my fists against the wall, I would also head butt
myself, cut my thighs with a knife, all to be prepared, although when night came
and I was In front of him, despite fleeing, I was trapped by fear.

I had spent a week traveling through the areas of my childhood

and youth at different hours of the day and night. In my head I conjectured that
they were going to reveal something that I still didn't know, some hidden detail,
but what these walks brought back was the exhaustion and inconsolation of the
wanderings of my childhood. My brother and I discovered too soon that our life was
not stable at all, that one could be asleep in bed, warm under the covers, and
instantly your father would throw you out of the house and you would find yourself
in the street, numb with cold, taking refuge of shame anywhere.

Ours was a joyless home.

fifteen

In the period in which I do not write, I look for friends from my

father's time to feel that the book does not stop completely. I barely got results
and chance almost always came to find me. One afternoon, when picking up my
daughters from school, I ran into the cousin of Jacinto's wife, one of my father's
friends. She knew her cousin from her youth when the party nights seemed endless.
She gave me Jacinto's phone number.

When I called him, he recognized me, or perhaps he had already

been warned. I briefly told him about the book project. We spent several weeks
trying to meet. Finally, one Saturday morning we decided to see each other. He
showed up with his children. I would have preferred that we meet at another time
when he was alone, but I had noticed that, despite his kindness, every time I
proposed to meet him, he looked for an excuse that prevented him from setting the
date.

The sun was beating down hard and I began to sweat. He introduced
me to his four-year-old and seven-year-old sons, and we began exchanging views on
fatherhood. I appreciated Jacinto, he was not my father's typical friend, he had
always been more focused and he was also younger, he was only eight years older
than me.

I take out the notebook and the pen. Jacinto tells me that ever
since I called him he has been thinking about what he was going to tell me, and if
he was the right person to do it. I sense a certain reserve. It is not new, I have
seen it in my brother and in other people. I tell you that he was quite close to my
father for a time. He nods and smiles almost in disbelief. He begins to talk,
although from time to time he interrupts to attend to his children while they eat
breakfast.

When he speaks, contradiction takes over his words and gestures,

as well as longing. I had your father as a myth. My face contracts against my will,
and Jacinto tries to explain himself. Yes, an idol, because of his follies and
because he was a hell of a cook, with great prestige. Keep in mind that he was ten
years older than me, and when I heard about him, I was freaked out by the things
that were told, until I lived them firsthand. I tell you an anecdote that
represents your father. He asks me if I remember the beach bar that my father had
on the beach, the one with two floors. I tell him of course. He tells me that one
weekend the restaurant was packed and my parents had been partying since the day
before on the top floor, that they had closed to continue their high. In the dining
room below, customers were protesting the delay. There was a particularly ballsy
table that was complaining about the rice, and your father, who was going up and
down, between the party and the dining room service, took the paellera in which the
rice was made and in front of the table said to them: What do you want? ?, what do
you want?, rice?, do you want rice?, he raised the paella pan above his head and
threw it on him. Well, have rice, he shouted. This is done by crazy people or
people who are up to their ass, and your father, I assure you, was not crazy. For
us that was very funny, for the family it would be less so. But your father was the
host in every way, capable of anything for better or worse. At that time we
hallucinated and constantly cheered for things like that and for the balls —he says
it very softly and looking at his children out of the corner of his eye— that he
threw everything. Above all, he was destructive to himself. He was entering a
spiral in which no one could stop him. And the prestige he had was squandered
little by little, he tells me.

My mind goes away. I think that my father was, as I have always

believed, the circus clown, the one who wants to stand out so that they praise him
and laugh at him. While the others enjoyed their witticisms and their acts,
mindless, excessive, the family was turned to dust, eroded, ripped off the flesh to
leave it in the marrow.

When do you think it started? I ask.

When he starts hanging out with the people at the Wizz nightclub.
He enters a spiral of lust and drugs. I lived that period of endless vice. I
already told you that the fun was constant. I don't know how he put up with the
festivals he got into, especially after he had a heart attack, he went on and on,
and when the restaurants went badly he started dealing. He was fast, skilled and
tricky at everything, and he knew how to win over people, take them to his
territory.

You know that when he lost the restaurants I took him to mine, in
El Candado, and he worked with me for a couple of years after being in jail. He
doesn't wait for me to reply, he continues. I was going to shop with him. One of
those days your father bought chicken tenderloins and legs, and he put the
tenderloins in the chicken bag to pay for the tenderloin as chicken, which was
cheaper. That speed was surely used when dealing. He was capable of the best and
the worst. Sometimes I wanted to kill him. He even fell asleep in the restaurant
because he had been partying for three days. I was incapable of not providing a
service in my restaurant, my priority was to keep the clientele happy, and your
father, when I met him, was like that too. Then it changed. I loved your father
very much, and people too, very much, really. When they locked him up and
transferred him to Almería we took up a collection to buy him a television and
clothes, which his uncle sold when he left. That's how he was. He was also generous
and offered what he had.

It is noticeable that he says these words with affection. They

are just words, so why do they cause me discomfort? Jacinto must notice my
reaction. I come to wonder if he still has it idealized, or is it the time that he
has enthroned.

His children ask him for a glass of water, and he gets up to

bring it to them. When he returned, he told me again that it was a lot of fun for
those of us outside the family, but for those of you who were inside it wouldn't be
so much. He remembers the dilapidated apartment, full of shit, and that on several
occasions he was in my parents' bedroom and that it was a depressing place.

It was a disaster as a couple. Every night from one bar to

another, and if we didn't end up in their restaurant, which was always open to
continue partying. The lack of respect your parents had for each other violated me.
That of being insulted. One night we arrived at the restaurant and your mother was
there with someone and your father started yelling at her: Slut, you're a slut; and
your mother returned the insults also shouting. However, when a while passed, they
continued as normal. In their own way, I think they loved each other, although
their relationship was an ordeal. Your father was a unique character, but he gave
in to cocaine and alcohol. I don't know if he got horse. The last time I saw him
was in the Rubio bar, in the Cerrado de Calderón, and he surprised me. Accustomed
to seeing a stoned person, I was struck by meeting a solid person, whose life did
not revolve around vice. He told me that he had withdrawn from that world.

I nod, but I know it was just another lie from my father.

16

On February 10, 2017, I met my father in the supermarket near his

house.

In those days, I kept going through the areas of my childhood as

if they were going to reveal some secret to me that would give meaning to my past.

I walked the boardwalk and the streets of my youth; I sat on the

benches of the anchor square where I used to spend time with my friends; I visited
the bars and establishments that still remained from that time. After eating, I
would hang out on the jetty or on the beach of my childhood with a notebook with
the intention of recording whatever came, although I never wrote down a word.

For many years I worked hard to distance myself from my parents

and from those places. However, it had been a while when all he did was explore
them. Even today, after over forty, I feel that my life arrives late, inferior, to
a place that perhaps does not exist beyond the narrative that we transfer to life.

I learned to distinguish the sounds of the night to defend

myself. I listened to the rattle of the elevator and the way my parents opened the
door of the house to know the state in which they arrived. That didn't make me feel
more secure or protected, it made me feel like a misfit.

someone weak

Out of place. That he would sit in the darkness of his room and
on the street waiting for all the violence my parents generated to subside.

How many nights did I run out of the warm bed into the cold night
to wander aimlessly?

When I was a kid I couldn't get them out of my head and it seems
that when I'm older I won't be able to either.

When I ran into him in the aisles of the supermarket, that

February 10, I was seized by the fear that I had thought I had controlled in recent
years.

I thought about it at the time and I think about it as I write,

maybe I was the one who summoned him there.

She had been thinking about him all week. I passed by his house
and around it. Once again she imagined that she was calling the phone to talk to
him after the ignominy of the bathroom.

When I saw him, from behind, I looked at my phone, half past

three. I stayed still for a few seconds. My muscles seized up and I wanted to
vomit.

Feelings overwhelmed me in that empty supermarket at that hour.

Everything seemed to go slowly, and, at the same time, inside my body I noticed
that the sensations were spinning. My father would push a handcart through the
aisles. I hid so he wouldn't see me. I was freaking out. Seeing him dwarfed me. My
whole body hurt. My stomach clenched; pressed tightly, as if the intestines and
viscera could pierce the meat. It was only minutes. I could feel the sweat despite
the air conditioning, and immediately all the anguish that caused me in childhood
came to me. I went to the box because I didn't want him to see me. There was no one
at the checkout, the cashier was placing products on the shelves. I looked at her
urgently, nothing needed to be said, the woman came over to charge me. Then I saw
that my father was also coming towards where I was. I turned my back. I felt a
tremor in my body. The strength was getting out of hand. I don't think he saw me,
although I can't be sure. And if he saw me, he did nothing to indicate otherwise.

I paid and left.

When I went out into the street, I was slapped by embarrassment,

despite the fact that it was February, something similar to terral, a heat that
dried my skin. He was still a fantasist, someone who represented realities in his
mind far from reality. I wasn't ready to face my father and I don't think I would
ever get up the courage to talk to him. Everything he had thought and imagined was
a lie.

Perhaps I was another lie myself.

That incomplete person who had not found what was missing.

I thought that the terral wind could dry the spilled blood. The
wind carried the dirt off the ground with the ease that moved memories.

I decided to return home on foot, and I imagined that the terral

wind that clung to my extremities formed a ghastly sandman that took on my father's
face. That past face of drugs, alcohol and frustration squeezed my head.

My skin and eyes itched. My stomach ached, still shrunken, and I

became dizzy when I saw my father's mouth devour me again, that his hands of
crushed blood sausages hit me with force, that when he screamed he spat out
stalactites that stuck inside me, deep inside.

I felt like an unprotected child again, not an adult. And the

feeling of helplessness was even harder because I was a father and I was supposed
to protect my daughters; and yet I hadn't even been able to face mine, settle
accounts with memory.

17

After that meeting everything came back.

My head was burning as I walked home.

I thought that for most of my life I had worked hard to escape

from that house and from those people and that with the writing of this book,
paradoxically, I was returning to them.

Was I trying to be by his side in some way? Did he want to feel,

even fleetingly, the protection and tenderness of a father?

As I walked down the promenade, the embarrassment tugged at me to

drag me down, to crush me, to stigmatize me with guilt. I felt guilty. I kept
feeling persecuted.

The past is an experienced poacher, always on the lookout, always

ready to hurt, who enjoys bleeding. Cronos ate his children because he feared they
would dethrone him. My father kept us wounded, he had spread over my brother and me
shadows that scratched our flesh and soul.

When I entered my house, everyone was asleep. That silence

stopped the shadows and calmed me down.

18

I had verified how the presence of my father continued to squeeze

my stomach and led me to the same terror of childhood.

I don't know from what age words like "whore", "bitch", "I'm
going to kill you", "you're useless" became part of my vocabulary... although it
must have been soon. When I was six or seven years old, I was already aware of my
parents' arguments, and I am able to see my brother and me approaching the source
of the screams to see what was happening, as if it weren't really them, as if the
screams and the blows came from other people. Somehow all that surfaced in me. I
recognize that there is an anger inside me that frustrates me every time I lose my
patience and scold my daughters with a word out of place, and immediately guilt
slaps me in the face and I regret that moment that condemns me and that reflects on
me. my father, a lawnmower inside that does not stop making noise. It is useless to
be with my daughters, nor to write them a children's story if the springs of the
past manifest themselves like this. I just hope that in the future they can talk
and laugh with me about any subject, that more things unite us than divide us, that
when they leave behind the supposed adolescent rebellion we hug again.

I wonder at what point I stopped fighting to be close to my

father. Because despite the beatings, the screams and his absence, as a child, I
begged to spend time by his side. I asked him to go diving together, as he was
going with one of his friends. I fondly remember the blue diving goggles, the tube,
the fins, the red mesh that I filled with mussels and reeds, the harpoon with which
I once caught an octopus. In the sea, under the water, I felt alive and clean. Down
there the silence and the sounds and my body were mine again. I longed for my
father to take me away on a boat to dive together, as he used to tell me. He
promised things, but instantly forgot them.

19
 As a child I couldn't get the terrible bad luck I had with my
family out of my mind. My friends had a different view. They considered us lucky,
they envied the freedom my brother and I enjoyed. Even when they saw first-hand the
true face of my family in adolescence, they continued to maintain that absurd idea
that my brother and I had more autonomy than any boy our age, a mistaken idea that
actually masked the fragility of our day by day, we were drifting soap bubbles.

The problem was the inability that he still demonstrated to erase

those ideas and sensations that persisted like a chronic, degenerative disease,
signaling deep resentment, a form of emotional cannibalism that I doubt will end
even when my father dies.

Compared to my brother, who is and was a more courageous child,

unafraid to face any situation, my father must have seen me as a weak being, who
confronted him with what he hated the most, considered my prudence a defect and was
ashamed of it. in front of his friends, always witty and witty due to the effects
of alcohol and drugs.

One of the recurring images from that time is that of my father

naked around the house clutching his dick. My father displaying it to anyone who
passed by. It didn't matter who it was. It was his scepter of power. She used to
hold it like little children do when their diaper is taken off. This is the only
thing that matters, he would shout, showing me his black prick as if it were a map
that hidden treasures. As if she hypnotized people with it. That dwarfed me. It
transformed me into a goblin. I stopped being me. I ceased to exist.

If he answered when they rang the doorbell, he usually did it

naked. That violated me. Especially because of what my friends might think. As a
child he lived with these shocks and was alert to their arrival, to his blows, to
his hands, to his cock.

twenty

Ever since Alejandro told me days ago that he didn't understand

my mother's behavior, how she threw us into the bulldog that was my father, I can't
stop thinking about it, perhaps looking for moments of light that show me that my
friend is wrong.

I dig like another dog, a stray, stray, not to bury a bone, but
to trace a memory of how that woman limited or calmed in some way the fears that
plagued me in childhood. Anxieties that still cripple me today. Fears that I fear
reflecting on my daughters.

I'm not even talking about love, or sweetness, or sympathy, I'm

just talking about finding memories in which that woman I was born from supported
me when I was breaking inside, when my father took to penetrating us until fucking
our being. That fear that germinated powerful and abject when I was a child.

The only thing that comes to meet me is his hard voice, throwing
shovelfuls of sand at me. Those grains got between the tendons, joints and bones,
impairing my integral mobility. A voice that hardened over the years.

As she grew older she did not strike me as a woman capable of

coping with difficulties. So, now I see it clearly, something broke inside of me.
At that time I was not conscious, I am only conscious when writing these pages,
after the conversation with my friend.

My mother proved her inadequacy when my father was jailed. It

seemed to me like a possible liberation, the opportunity to leave miseries behind
and start anew, with all that cheap fiction has to do with it; My mother, on the
other hand, insisted on getting him released as soon as possible, and charged at
me, reproached me for wanting to let him rot in prison, and said that she would
leave us on the street first, and that I was a rat for wishing that on my own
father. Her husband was above her children and herself.

twenty-one

It was a strange period. Until then, my brother and I never lived

calmly, we knew that any situation, no matter how trivial, could trigger the
conflict. I learned to survive in that state of alertness, something I still
haven't been able to get rid of today, nearing forty-five. I recognize myself as
suspicious in situations that for most are not. I fall, I descend into that period
as if the mistreatment of that time could return unexpectedly, without warning, a
hurricane that would take away everything I have built over the years. It is a
tension that I extend to my family. lacerating. A crack that traps the lava of the
ghosts that want to go outside to burn and feel powerful. Having seen my father by
chance in the supermarket has intensified this sensation and has widened the crack
in which what I was, what I am, and what I want to keep hidden, imprisoned,
bubbles. And yet, I feel incapable of closing it, because through that cleft I
contact in a more physical way what I experienced. The moldy mixture that gave off
the floor, a combination of a closed house, damaged wood, dirt, Rioja (which was
our poodle), tobacco, alcohol and late-night sex; an amalgam that came to be one
more entity that could feel. That apartment never smelled fresh or clean, on the
contrary, it exuded a stale, corrupted aroma.

I remember the daily tension of climbing the stairs of my house,

a minefield ready to explode whenever my father wanted.

I go up to my house with Gonzalo, a friend from Getafe who spends

the summer in Malaga every year. We go up the stairs slowly because my parents have
been partying for several days, drunk, getting into everything, and I don't know if
they're asleep or not. We want to take the surfboards in case waves come in. The
clock says three in the afternoon. I don't know the reason for my embarrassment, as
if I were Peter Parker and sensed the danger that was coming. We have reached the
door of the apartment. The landing is dark. I'm going to put the key in the lock
when, hidden on the side of the corridor, my father comes out, crouching down, his
eyes wild, his mouth red like a demon, his clothes wrinkled, he gives off a smell
of tar, he smiles disgustedly. and that crooked smile crushes me like a cockroach
that has risen to the surface and then, without having time to react, it grabs me
by the hair and slams me against the door. Gonzalo storms out, yells for fuck,
yells for me to run, but my father grabs me by the hair and hits me again, my lip
starts to bleed, he rants against my mother, against me, against my brother. I am
fourteen years old, the keys have been left hanging from the lock, I try to get
them without luck. From the stairs, Gonzalo yells again for me to run, I'm
incapable, I feel pain when my father pulls hairs from my head, my mother insults
him from the other side and also knocks on the door, calls him a fag over and over
again, and that turns him on Even more, he yells for me to open the door, twists my
hair even more and urges me to open it. It is as if he had lost his will, his
strength, as if he were a lifeless doll in the hands of an angry child who hits him
to calm down. He tells me useless, pushes me away and tries to open it. Then I try
to get away but he grabs me again, my lip won't stop bleeding, my friend Gonzalo is
still on the stairs bellowing for me to get the hell out of here, what am I doing,
he yells with a seismic voice. He has told me this episode many times, so I
remember it. More painful than the beatings and the wounds is the defeat that
invades me when I think of all that, the inferiority, the subsequent bitterness
that increased day by day.

These days I have called Gonzalo to explain my book project, and

he tells me: For me, yours was not a tragedy, but something normalized. It was not
talked about. Nobody said anything. It was not magnified or taken to the extreme of
grief. You know that children are very bastards, but blood was never drawn from it.
At that time I didn't even think about it, however, now that I think about it,
maybe that helped you get over it.

I interrupt him to ask him why, and he replies that none of us

who made up the group of friends at that time magnified what was happening in your
family, and that we immediately forgot about it.

We stayed in silence for a while. I write down on a piece of

paper what he tells me. Then he breaks the silence, comments, as if explaining
himself, at least we forgot and my impression, well, I think everyone's impression,
was that you and your brother also turned the page immediately. My parents, for
example, didn't know anything about your life and I never told them about it
because they wouldn't have let me go with you anyway. Your parents and mine were in
different circles, but your father had a reputation as a good cook and my father
told me that he was Golden Nose in the seventies.

Mutism was a shell. A defensive weapon. How to tell my friend

that it was deafening and that it was always present. cysts nodules Tumors. Lumpy.
They are still. They still spread. They still ooze pus.

I ask him if he remembers anything else about the house and my

parents. I remember the terrace that overlooked Juan Sebastián Elcano and that was
where we arranged the tables. The smell of resin, catalyst, epoxy, fabric, the
music on the boombox at full blast, the laughs we shared there and the
conversations about going to one place or another to surf, I remember it as great
afternoons, just us because your parents They weren't there or if they showed up at
some point they didn't even notice us. Also so many afternoons that they were
sleeping and your brother or you would take their keys and we would break into the
restaurant like thieves and get some food and drink. We caught several farts with
shots during those summer afternoons. You were always more cautious than your
brother, you told us: Be careful, he's going to find out, don't touch that, and if
someone moved it you would put it back exactly as it was.

Gonzalo is telling me this, and while I think that on some

occasion they had to realize despite what they were getting into and that they
never said anything. Those are good memories, he concludes, but, he continues, I
also remember when your father's Ford Fiesta and motorcycle were burned in his
parking space for a settling of scores. I spent the year thinking about Malaga. In
Getafe he led another, more controlled life. I was looking forward to June. It was
like entering another world. At least that's how he felt. Then, out of the blue,
out of mere curiosity, he asks me: Don't your daughters ask you about their
grandparents? Of course they have, especially in comparison to their friends. I
objected to them meeting my father. My partner supported me in the decision. I
don't know if I have the right to deprive you of your grandfather. There are times
when I feel sorry. They have had bad luck with grandparents. All I know is that it
would infect them, just like it did my brother and me.

22

It had happened on other occasions. My father would arrive

drugged, he would tickle us and forbid us to go to school. I have always thought
that it caused him a certain resentment that we studied, because he did not manage
to do it. Although it is only a theory taken from his behavior. In June 1987, he
forbade me from taking the EGB 8th grade exams. I failed several subjects because I
didn't show up. At that time my parents were more out of control than usual. The
fights were daily. When I started writing this book, I asked my brother if he could
retrieve the School Book from my parents' house. I wanted to have the exact dates.

He got it. I have it here. I am convinced that the atmosphere

that prevailed in my family is at the bottom of what happened in the spring of
1981. Before I was enrolled in a public school, my parents enrolled me in a
subsidized private school, León XIII, of the that I was expelled when in the 2nd
year of EGB I stamped a child at recess and opened a gap in his head. In that
school he tried to go unnoticed. He was a withdrawn and silent child, the perfect
target for the other classmates, until one day, at recess, I exploded, I took out
all the frustration I had accumulated from the sleepless nights, from the slaps I
had received and threw them at that boy who He wouldn't stop bothering me every
morning.

I don't remember if they expelled me or my parents had no choice

but to change me to another school. The School Book reveals that I entered the
Jorge Guillén public school in April, in the middle of the academic year:

I authorize by the Provincial Technical Inspection of Education

of Málaga its official use and assignment to the student Martín Ruiz, Miguel Ángel,
born in Málaga on November 3, 1972 and resident in Málaga.

Malaga on April 22, 1981

Then a stamp from the Technical Inspection and the following:

Registered with the number 201.398 in the Provincial Delegation

of the Ministry of Education and Science of Malaga.

Again the date of April 22, 1981 and a stamp of the Provincial
Delegation appear.

The owner of this SCHOOL BOOK Martín Ruiz, Miguel Ángel is

registered at the Jorge Guillén Center with the number 1,810 in the Registration
Register.
 Malaga on April 28, 1981

With the signature of the director of the school and a stamp of

the National Mixed School in which YOU CAN READ THE EMERGENCY PLAN.

In the Observations:

It is hereby stated that the student holding this document was

evaluated upon joining this Center having passed the 1st level of EGB.

According to the book, I attended school regularly, it indicates

the names of the tutors, the grades, and the name of my parents and the address
where we lived before moving to Juan Sebastián Elcano also appears.

In June 1987 my father locked me in my room.

He had been beating us all night. My mother was bleeding from her
eye and insulting us all. My brother had fallen and his arm was in a sling and I,
who had stood up to him at some point, couldn't stop shaking. My whole body ached
from the strapping, and I felt disgusting from the subsequent hugs my father had
given me to redeem himself. Then, he took me by the genitals and told me that the
dick was the power of men and that mine was not worth even for dogs. And
immediately he hugged me. My father was naked, half hard. That caused me a strange
restlessness, but I kept thinking about my exams.

I remember the tutor I had since sixth grade, she imposed on me

with her coldness and contempt, because I felt that she despised me, that she
didn't give a damn about the circumstances of her students. He never asked me what
was going on at home, when it was obvious something was up.

In the confinement that my father imposed on me, I remembered the

spring of 1981, when I hit that child. My father was even amused. It did him almost
as much as preventing me from attending exams. I got a failing in the Language
Area: Spanish Language and in the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Area. That night
lasted through the summer, because my father forced me to work, and every time he
saw me with a book or reading a comic, he would take them off and throw them away.
He told me that I was going to learn the hard way, that I needed a strong hand,
that I was a girl, that until I was a father I wasn't going to understand shit. He
would release that to me while he hit me or tore up my comics, and I became smaller
and smaller, without speaking, as if I had really lost the Language Area and my
nature was transforming.

I was still confident in the option of recovering the subjects in

September.

The summer passed, and I presented myself to the recovery with

hardly having prepared the subjects. I passed Mathematics. I suspended Language.
Indeed, I noticed that I had lost the ability to communicate, although I felt that
the exam had done well. Later I found out that the tutor called my father and spoke
with him and that she recommended that he should repeat the course to consolidate
the contents. There is a sheet stapled to that course of '87, with a new teacher,
who indicates that I passed with flying colors on June 7, 1988. However, that June
of '87 comes to mind in which my father kept me isolated in my room, throwing me
the food, giving me sticks, appearing naked with his cock upright.

23

A couple of years later, one Sunday morning when I return from

the club, I pass by the entrance of the restaurant when I see the open door. That
puts me on notice. I think about turning around and taking another path. Then I see
two strangers with cases of beer. I get closer, and when I look inside I notice
that my father is lying in the corridor of the premises, with his clothes wrinkled,
blood on his nose and on his shirt, visibly positioned, up to the bars. I interfere
with the guys who are stealing the bottles, but they push me against a wall and run
away insulting me or my father, I don't know, who is uttering some words from the
ground that I don't understand. The scene already seemed foggy to me at that time,
although in memory it is more so, as if they were shaded vignettes with many lines.
I don't know what makes me let my guard down with my father, bend down and ask him
what happened and if he's okay when it's obvious he's not, despite the fact that
I've seen him in that state countless times. I grab him by the armpits to lift him
up. I guess I did it because there must be some invisible bond between parent and
child that pushed me to do it. At first he looks at me weird. Blood stains my
shirt. The fucking blood infects. It gives off a strong smell, a mixture of
whiskey, black tobacco and the pasty secretions from his mouth. Without expecting
it, he confronts me and reproaches me for being a coward, a fag, a fucking brat.
The grievances are die-cut. His saliva reaches my face. The foul, evil smell is
like a virus spreading across my skin. I remain paralyzed, like other times,
without learning from what I have already experienced in the past. I get kicked and
start crying. This infuriates my father even more, as if my crying were fuel for
him, as if I transferred power to him, the rictus of his face changes, his muscles
stop being flaccid and tense, he grabs me by the shirt and, when I try to escape ,
enlarges it tightly. Broken words come out of his mouth again, as if the language
problems in my academic record had been transmitted to me through parenting. In the
end I manage to get away, I escape, I run, he doesn't follow me, he's not fit; and,
despite everything, I do not stop until I reach the beach, the jetty. Restlessness
invades me because of the open restaurant, because of my father lying there. That
feeling blames me. I remember it precisely, as if even today, while writing these
facts, someone pressed an awl on my head. Maybe it's that internal punch that took
me back to my parents' house, the one that made me wake up my mother, who was
sleeping, alien and smeared by so many pills she was taking. And, since I couldn't
get him to get up, perhaps it was that awl that was piercing my feelings that led
me to take his keys with the intention of closing the restaurant. But I did not
dare. Fuck him I didn't want to feel my father's trail. I put the keys back and
wandered around without going home for several days.

It was not the only time that I stayed to sleep on the street,
without going to my parents' apartment, gripped by fear. Then, when I decided to go
back, I did it with the utmost care, I didn't want to be seen. However, that time,
one Wednesday in 1989, when I entered my room, the posters were torn and crumpled
on the floor, the comics torn, smashed to pieces, the 14-inch Condor television and
VHS video had disappeared, the materials from the school were also scattered.
Crying came to me. A deaf, helpless cry. I felt even smaller. And I saw my mighty
father, laughing wildly at my tears.
24

I remember that in 1990 I kept a calendar of the days that my

father would arrive at night and attack my mother and, by extension, against us.

Fear never left me.

Little by little it became hulking, and artfully twisted. A fear

that still runs through me today as if it were a slug that crawls, leaving that
sticky mucus that contains zinc, copper, iron... a viscous fluid with memory that
increases suspicion, difficult to eliminate from the body.

These situations transferred power to my father, with them, in

some way, he ironed out his weaknesses and frustrations, and he felt the fleeting
energetic pleasure of ejaculating.

One morning I was caught off guard. I had already bolted and
padlocked my room so he wouldn't vandalize my things or catch me by surprise. His
methods consisted of smashing the door open with clubs and breaking whatever was in
his way. If I remember that night it was because he acted differently. The house
was silent, with dirt seeping from the walls and the stale smell that was like
musty fabric. My father knocked and asked if he could come in. This was so unusual
that I was immediately on my guard. I knew letting him in was a mistake, and yet I
did. I think of all the times I deluded myself into believing that a dialogue could
be established with him.

I had let my father in despite the fact that the red alarm light
was blinking insistently. I had let my father in, who began to examine the room. I
thought that he would rip out the pirate flag hanging on the wall again, that he
would destroy the books and comics on the desk, that at the least carelessness he
would destroy me with his hands of crushed blood sausages, those rough, gigantic
hands that did not remove my hair, nor they took me in their arms or caressed me. I
had let my father in because deep down I wanted to feel his warmth.

I am rigid, anguish expands with the clumsiness of plasticine in

the hands of a child.

My father, with a crooked smile, looks at the desk where there

are a bunch of index cards from a script I'm working on and some stories I've
written. He rubs his nose, he's high on coke, I think; and I immediately regret
letting it go. I especially remember that night in more detail than other occasions
—even better than the afternoon in the bathroom, when he got out of jail, and which
I still don't know if I'll be able to tell—, as if that early morning had passed
for me in slow motion. I remember when he sits on the bed and takes out the sheets
on which he had written down the sequence of my father's mistreatment, the
imperious desire for him to die, the hatred and rage poured into that kind of
record that I kept in the drawer of the desk. Tear the pages. He throws them to the
ground. He gets up, and I instinctively protect myself, shrink back. He smiles,
takes the stories from the desk, the script cards and smashes them into pieces,
confetti. I'm scared Petrified by fear, by his hands. Now write this down,
ungrateful, you ungrateful son of a bitch, he tells me. Or is what I think it tells
me. I remain mute. I want to run, but it's like my legs are stuck in solid
concrete. Raising his hands of crushed black pudding I beg him not to hit me. He
spits at me with disgust. I'm disgusting. A coward. A useless Sugus whose role
cannot be removed. His saliva on my face burns me. Smells bad. I gag. I wipe the
spittle with my shirt, leaving a strange hollow on my skin. My father pulls down
his pants, pulls out his dick and pees on me, pees on my bed and then shits on it.
Get naked, he yells at me. I don't do anything, I'm still stiff, I start to tremble
inside, I want to die, I want to kill him. In seconds I commit suicide in hundreds
of ways and kill him with hammers, blows, bites, burning him, suffocating him with
my hands, with a rope, with a bag... Take off your clothes, you son of a bitch, he
yells, while wiping his ass with the sheets I continue like a rock, a stone, a
statue eroded by the centuries. Get undressed, you fagot, which is the insult that
turned my father on the most when my mother threw it at him. Get undressed, fagot,
repeat, but I stay rigid. Then he shakes me with his rough, giant hands. Take off
my clothes, fagot, and start ripping them off me until he strips me naked and
forces me to roll around in shit and piss and leaves me there shaking, smelling of
him, a stench that lingers and, over the years, from time to time, memory will
bring me that nauseating memory. I stay there for a long time, and when he leaves,
I suddenly burst into tears, disconsolate, overwhelmed by all the humiliation. And
I start banging my head against the wall, hitting myself, I want to feel pain,
damage, I want to bleed, and I'm not satisfied until the blood mixes with the shit
and the urine.

I decide that I should talk to my father.

Tell him that I'm still writing and that he won't be able to tear
it apart anymore. I call my brother to ask for our father's phone number. My
brother worries, he questions me before giving it to me.

I've decided to talk to him, I tell him.

yourself, he says.

I wait for him to say something else, but he shuts up.

Writing down the phone number on a piece of paper, I recall a

lifetime of shame and ignominy, that early morning when my mother's bloated balloon
face appeared to me, the cries for help and threats, the beatings my father gave
me. she gave my maternal grandmother when she kicked her out of her house, the time
my parents tricked her into collateralizing their house, the only thing the poor
thing had, to pay off the debts and try to get him out of jail, they tricked her
because she didn't know what was coming to her and if she didn't lose the house it
was because that characteristic X of her illiteracy had been set by her own
daughter, not her, and that was what the lawyer who found her the little sister of
my mother.

My parents slept with other people. They would have orgies in the
restaurant, where they would show porn movies and other home recordings that they
filmed themselves.

All the facts overwhelm me just by writing down the numbers on

his mobile.

I decide that I should talk to my father.

I will be able?

I want to cry, I can't. I want to kill him. I want to stop

running from that bathroom.
25

I look at the paper on which I wrote my father's phone number.

From looking at him so much I have memorized it, however, I still haven't had the
courage to call him. When I'm going to do it, my throat closes up, it's as if I had
a bug inside that was strangling me. Then his crushed black pudding hands come to
me, those rough fingers that I represent as tentacles and that whore my body so
many times, creating a twisted bond against my will.

My daughters flutter down the hall while I have my laptop open

and the crumpled piece of paper with those figures that I dare not dial. I wonder
what bond I will establish with them when they grow up, how they will see me, the
times I will inadvertently harm them, if our relationship will be distance or
close. These are questions that my parents never considered. From 1990 to 1992 the
mistreatment was daily. They no longer tried to hide or control themselves. They
used coke at home, bottles of alcohol were everywhere, people of the worst kind
came to the apartment. Even my father, who with his dealings began to get into a
hole whose bottom could not be guessed, ended up burning his car and motorcycle, a
Ford Fiesta and a Honda Africa Twin, in his own garage for a price adjustment.
accounts. The bad environment also led to a estrangement with my brother.

We began to be strangers to each other, a feeling that has always

remained, as if what we had experienced separated us and made us strangers. Even
today that is the most characteristic sign of our relationship. The feeling that we
are die cuts from a craft cardboard. I am saddened by the way I feel when I think
about my relationship with my brother. I know the book will sting. But it's the
only way I can find to face my father, the past, the pain he inflicted on me. Maybe
he should do the same. His stress and dizziness, his eosinophilic esophagitis and
his other diseases and deficiencies, derive from those years of mistreatment in
which our sanity was reduced. Because my brother and I also interacted with each
other with violence, which is what we were used to. My broken upper incisor and
some scars are a memory of my brother. We were snakes, snakes crawling and stinging
as soon as we had the slightest opportunity. I don't know if that damage can be
repaired. I don't know how to shorten the distance, the strangeness and discomfort
we feel with each other, even though we love each other.

I look again at the piece of paper with my father's phone number

on it. I repeat to myself that I have to call him. And I do it to immediately hang
up, without letting it ring, although how to be sure.

Thoughts take me to that distant but persistent past in which the

doors of the house were opened and slammed shut. Sounds that I remember clearly and
that still scare me today. On more than one occasion I thought about calling the
police. He ruminated on it like children who make a ball when eating.
 I never did, I was terrified.

I wanted revenge, but I didn't want anything to happen to them.

I think of the fear that my father still instills in me, there is

a force that leads me to protect him, to protect them. I don't know where this
invisible bond is born.

They were tragic years, in which my father, already violent in

himself, took pains to undermine the family. From sixteen to nineteen I failed to
repair the wear. I wrote down the continuous aggressions as if I could find a way
out in them, or to acquire the courage that I lacked in the lack of protection that
overwhelmed me in front of my father. I remember that it was at that time that the
image of my body hidden by its fingerprints came to me. My body was now just the
code of fears and obsessions that he had generated in me with his crushed blood
sausage hands, his upright cock, his screams and insults. Perhaps this is how the
incapacity he faced when he wanted to denounce my father can be understood. And yet
I saw myself unable to do it, and that impotence burned me as much as his
onslaught.

That's how I spent adolescence, from sixteen to nineteen. The day

I dialed 092, I hung up as soon as they picked up, without saying a word, without
even hearing the voice on the other end of the phone line. Fear and guilt assailed
me, I thought my father knew what he had done, and the craving took hold of me even
more deeply, reaching out to devour me. Actually, nothing came right away. Fear,
guilt and longing were the traces of that man in my aching body. Despite these
feelings, or precisely because of them and my self-destructive thirst, I repeated
the action several more times and even dialed once and left the phone off the hook.
The police never came, but I lived for hours in a state of absolute anxiety, short
of breath, cut my thighs with a knife, pulled hair from my eyebrows, hit me to hurt
myself and make the blood flow. I needed my body to ache. I needed something to
happen, to grab his neck like he did me.

1992. Weeks after that call and after my father's Ford Fiesta and
motorcycle were burned, some police officers forcibly entered the apartment thanks
to the Corcuera Law, the one that kicked in the door. It all happened very fast. It
was half past three. I remember it because my brother and I had just come from
school and my maternal grandmother had come over to bring us a pot. At that stage,
my parents didn't get up before five or six in the afternoon and we never had food.
They opened the restaurant in the evening, starting at eight.

They banged on the door vehemently, and banged on it again. The

door frame reverberated as if there had been an earthquake, and I, who was right
next to it at that moment, answered ranting, thinking that they were people who
came to get coke or hashish, something, on the other hand, every time more usual.
As soon as I opened it, two policemen pushed me and immobilized me. Others stormed
in to push my brother and grandmother, who were in the kitchen, against the wall.
The agents had immobilized us and were asking insistently about the jewelry and
money. Then they wanted to know where we kept the drugs, while they withdrew
through the rooms as if it were the safe house of a terrorist cell. My grandmother
began to cry and said that the children had nothing to do with it. The police
whirlwind didn't abate until they picked up my parents and ended up leveling the
entire house. This caught my parents off guard. Their faces bloated by sleep and
excesses. At first it even seemed that it did not go with them. The situation soon
changed. The agents continued with the refrain of jewelry and money after finding
some drugs, although it seemed that they expected to find much more. That law of
the kick in the door allowed to enter by force in any house without a judicial
order. For a long time, I have mistakenly considered that the policemen who burst
into the apartment like a whirlwind had to hallucinate in that space without
paintings, with the refrigerator that did not close and in which we had to put a
five-liter bottle to keep it locked, with the doors of the halls dented, with the
parquet raised, with the television on top of a chair, with bare light bulbs,
without lamps to illuminate the rooms, with rusty faucets...

While the agents held us, I was tormented and I was happy about
what was happening. My head was a pressure cooker and even today I wonder if my
calls alerted the police, or, simply, they were already watching my father's
movements. I remember the frustration of the police officers at not finding what
they expected. At a certain point, they started again with the questions about the
money and the rest of the drugs, and they threatened all of us.

They had turned the house upside down, including my brother's

room and mine. My father did not open his mouth. Or in my memory he doesn't say a
word, although surely he had to say something. It is my mother who seems to wake up
and begins to say that the children have nothing to do with it, nor do they know
anything, as if she were following in the footsteps of my grandmother. It seems
that everything was the same to the policemen, they warn us that they will take us
to the police station to be interrogated. My mother begins to rant, becomes a
basilisk and tells them that neither her mother, my grandmother, nor we know shit,
that we are athletes, surfers. The police had something to do with it or something
they already knew, because after a while they let my brother, my grandmother and me
go. When we left there, my grandmother was crying, saying something about my
mother's misfortune, that she knew this was going to happen, that she was to blame,
that it was her daughter, that she should have killed my father, not allowing what
allowed, that he should have died already. My grandmother released this while we
went in silence. They had removed our ability to speak and feel, each one went
their own way, my grandmother to her house, with concern in her body, we to the
beach, still without being aware of what had really happened. Now I look back on it
and I know we were lucky. We could have ended up in a cell. Although, in reality,
he was going to suffer the effects of prison a few years later.

26

No matter how eager I have been to forget and lose that tremor I
felt in my childhood and youth; the diminishing of who I am.

Childhood bursts through all the traps that we set up to cover it

up. It drags us to the surface and cuts through us like broken glass. My father was
destructive to his family. It was his way of dealing with his failures. He became
powerful with our weakness. As a child I was not able to discern this or to have
these thoughts. It was as if a syringe had been inserted into me to extract my
feelings and humanity. As if every time I regenerated them they would prick me to
take them out again.

I must not delay any longer. On the desk, mixed with the book's
annotations, just like the pages written in my adolescence and smeared by him,
remains the crumpled piece of paper with his phone as if it were a warning, a
watchful eye.

I play with mobile. I spread out the piece of paper. In the

living room, my eldest daughter cries. The mother tries to calm her down, little by
little I perceive that her patience is running out. I mark the written numbers that
one by one are reflected on the phone screen.
 I hear my daughter call me again.

Dad. I want to be with dad.

The mother tells him that I am working. I also called my father,

my mother. Although they never were. I don't want it to sound like a complaint or a
victim.

Dad. I want to be with dad.

I press the call key. I listen to how it sounds several times,

how my daughter continues to cry. My heart flutters. I am invaded by anguish,
tremors, collapse.

No one answers on the other end.

I feel relief.

I close the computer and go in search of my eldest daughter. By

hugging her, I perceive that she calms the restlessness and discomfort that I have
endured since my childhood.

27

After the kick in the door, my brother and I spent a week without
going through my parents' apartment. I admit that I was ashamed and startled at the
idea of going back in there. We used to sleep over at my grandmother's house, like
when we were little. We didn't go to school either. They were days of uncertainty
that he spent on the beach, sitting on the bench eating pipes, on the jetty, on the
sand, wherever he went, waiting for the waves to come in and for his colleagues to
arrive. My grandmother came to the house the following afternoon, to see if she
could find out anything about her daughter, and she took clothes from us.

My grandmother was carried away by restlessness. I tried to calm

her down by telling her that it was the best thing that had happened, because I
really thought so, not without feeling contradictory and guilty. My mother called
my grandmother's neighbor and told her how the situation was, that they were going
to lock up my father and that she had escaped because he had assumed everything, or
so he said. At that time we didn't know much about what was happening, and we
didn't want to know either. We had enough to endure sanity. What would come from
that moment.

It is curious that an impression that I do keep is the parsimony

of the hours. As if time had stopped for us while it continued to advance for the
others. It oppressed my chest. It tore at my throat. I remember it because I wrote
it. He also fantasized about starting a new life in another place. I was very filmy
and I still am. I invent other possible realities in my mind, I prefer to stay
inside it and abstract myself from what is real. A mere way of not losing sanity.

Throughout that week that my mother was away, I organized my

thoughts and hoped that she would arrive to tell her what we had to do, that this
was our opportunity to achieve a peaceful life, without living with the anxiety and
daily violence, without having to put up with the blanket of sticks from my
father's son of a bitch.

When I started to tell my mother that the best thing to do was to

sell the house, she didn't let me finish. He looked at me with disgust and
contempt. The contempt he felt towards me, the resentment towards some children
that he loved in his own way, but more than anything else, he despised. That hatred
that grows above all among close beings, in the family. Hate, a vine impossible to
prune.

I remember your words. One by one. The hostility they contained.

I remember my helplessness, my abandonment, the disbelief, the frustration at
hearing my mother. Sometimes, the events experienced are confused with the
deformation that memory performs when they are remembered. It is not the case. Not
what my mother blurted out to me: You're a piece of shit, trash, get out of my
sight. The house is mine and your father's, wretch. I wish you were in the trullo.

28

In the period in which my father was in jail, the economic

situation became worrying. The restaurant was closed, so we didn't have any kind of
income. My mother was lost in a spiral, possessed to get him out of there. The verb
I use has every intention. She only thought of him and getting him out soon, as if
he were a vampire without will, under the control of the one who bit her.

After the run-in I had with her, I kept giving her the rattle, I
didn't care about the animosity she felt when she saw me. During those first weeks,
I kept telling him not to do anything, to leave him locked up, that it was our
moment; and I asked him to think about the idea of selling the house and to start
over with what we got. All this that I was saying to him, I found out as soon as he
left, I would later tell my father.

I never understood it. Never.

I understood even less that my mother, by herself a lazy person,

who barely moved except for fun or sex, would start getting up early to go see
lawyers, look for money under rocks —she worked so hard that she had no in no hurry
to deceive her own mother, who was about to lose the only thing she had, the house,
with the signing of a guarantee—, to visit my father daily in the Alhaurín
penitentiary, and, later, when he They were transferred to the Almería prison, I
went every week to see him there. My mother seemed like a different woman.

I think it was a week or two after his imprisonment that my

brother and I returned to my parents' flat. My mother rarely passed by, and when
she did, as soon as we ran into her, a fight would break out. I told him that if he
wasn't ashamed to take money from Grandma, we would resolve any issue out loud,
spitting out resentment and a cruelty that I noticed was growing even though my
father wasn't there.

The months passed. I hadn't gone back to school, nor was I going
to that year. I spent the hours stretched out on the benches or the jetty, unable
to concentrate, without moving from a small space that led from my parents' dirty
apartment to the beach, obsessed with the fact that it was time for change, to do
everything possible so that my father I didn't get out of jail, lost in that loop
that hurt me. At the same time, I was pierced by weakness, fear, guilt for thinking
and feeling all that hate, especially when good memories came with my father. They
were few, but they exist. Most have to do with shopping for toys and sportswear.

I am eight or nine years old. I put on the blue goggles, the

transparent snorkel and the black fins that he gave me. I tell him that we go
together to catch mussels and octopus. I write it in the present, so as not to wear
it out. I fondly remember that one time I went with him. Pluck the mussels and the
reeds from the stones and store them in a red mesh. The harpoon in my left hand in
case we saw an octopus. Diving calmed me down and made me feel clean. One of the
wishes I had at that time was that my father would take me on a boat far from the
coast to dive deep. His friend, a rich homosexual who hung out for money, or that's
what I heard my mother recriminate him on more than one occasion between slaps and
dicks, had a yacht that he had told me about and in which he promised to take me
sailing, but it never happened, nor was it repeated that my father and I went back
to dive together.

That year of the Expo in Seville and the Olympic Games in

Barcelona, I exuded hatred, guilt, and I stuck like a barnacle to a rock at the
idea of my father rotting in prison. And if any experience came to me that was not
bad or violent, I would reject it, repeating to myself that it had been a lie, a
simulation of my mind.

Did he want to delete any good memories along with him? Maybe not
consciously. Thinking of normal and even pleasant moments with him made me weak and
led me to self-harm. I dreamed that my father did not exist, that he was someone
else. These immature thoughts were accompanied by thigh slashes, hair pulling,
knuckle-scorching, blows to the head. Then I thought something that alerted me to
myself: did I miss his hands of crushed blood sausages?

In 92, the months run fast. Community fees and bills add up. I
have to work, I tell myself; and my grandmother also tells me. While my mother
recriminates me with that face of disgust and contempt with which she usually tells
me that I am worthless and I am not capable of finding a job. I shyly walk shops
and bars. I approach the places diffident, shaky, the words come out of me
hesitantly, and the sentences remain in the air, like an exhausted athlete who
breaks down in the middle of a race.

One morning I am sitting on the benches in the anchor square,

when a friend of my father approaches me and asks if I want to start working at La
Chancla, a trendy bar in the area. Now that I remember it in the present, so that
memory doesn't distort or embellish it, I think my father's friend didn't even ask,
he took it for granted. In this way, I began to work from Monday to Sunday from
twelve in the morning to eight in the afternoon. In addition, on Friday and
Saturday I also work the night shift, from ten to three in the morning. I have to
earn money to pay the bills. I have to prove that I'm better than him. Although
deep down I know that the job was achieved by my father, and that irritates and
frustrates me.

The crumpled up piece of paper with his phone number remains on

my desk table next to a stuffed sea urchin. I'm afraid to call him. I'm afraid to
hear his voice, that his cracked and rough voice will bind me again.

I dial his number.

Nobody answers.
 I feel relief.

Then I suffer, it squeezes my stomach, it locks me in my

childhood room. There I am still cowering in the same corner.

29

In prison my father had to feel humiliated, a failure, damaged. I

wonder if everything is paid. With people like my father you have to be careful.
It's what I've always said, but even I let my guard down and I've already called
him twice.

I write: is it necessary to confront his memory with mine? Has

prison transformed him in some way or is it an excuse I give myself so that what he
did hurts less?

I think that my parents, my brother and I are like the

photocopies of the Family Book that I have obtained in the Civil Registry, simple
information without any affinity. The Family Book does not reveal anything about
us, except dates and names. It doesn't tell what happened. Not a measly detail.
There is no life. No story. Not chronic. What is it for? My parents' marriage never
behaved like a family, neither they as parents nor us as children. I think they did
not know how to educate us. And we? Were we strangers? In reality, we were enemies,
we related with suspicion until little by little we sought to harm each other. And
if at least the Family Books designed the essential lines of the relationship
established between parents and children?

I return to my father's confinement. It was a period in which I

felt partially liberated. Although I would wake up with a start at night, I still
kept the door to my room locked with a bolt and a padlock, because I had nightmares
about my father getting out of prison and coming straight to destroy me. In a way,
that's what happened. Sometimes I have thought that even I was the one who caused
it. That tendency to blame me for the negative events that my parents inoculated me
with.

It has been hard for me to get an idea or to realize that prison

must have been terrible for my father. He had to survive that confinement where you
get trampled if you show weakness. And he was someone weak, very weak. But does
that exempt him from what he did?

A flash came to my mind that left me shocked, although it has

nothing to do with the story I'm telling—perhaps I need to take a breath to reveal
the unspeakable.

A few years ago, one of the activities of the film festival where
I work was to show a film in prison and then it would go on to a discussion with
the prisoners. A way of bringing the exterior to the cloister in which they live.
The year to which I refer, I went with a colleague and, when we were about to start
the talk, an intern from the audience came up and hugged me, calling me by my name,
and he began to cry and I didn't know what to do. Several guards quickly arrived to
subdue him. I told them I knew him, though it hardly mattered. He was the brother
of a friend, a kid younger than me whom I had known since I was a child and who had
ended up there because of his parents. So, did I have to be grateful to my father?
My mother always blamed us for the fact that it was my father who paid. Wasn't it
his decision and his alone to deal drugs and become a pusher, and worse?

I ask myself again: is it necessary to confront his memory with

mine? Did jail change him in some way or is it an excuse I give myself so that what
he did hurt less?

You have to be careful with people like my father because they

can respond in any way. They betray you and humiliate you because it's in their
DNA. They breathe violence.

30

There are things that are never forgotten and that cost a horror
to explain, that's why I think I'm writing this book. In the background remains
what I have not said. With writing I do scuba diving to tear out the pain, the
grief, the grievance, the worst ignominy that he did me. Even today, closer and
closer to fifty, I cringe, I get overwhelmed, I want to vomit.

The memory bleeds.

It does not coagulate.

From the moment my mother told me that my father was going to be

released from prison, my spirits turned sour. She looked happy, even my brother
showed hope for a change, even if there were no reasons. I took it as a punishment.
I didn't want to see him, nor did we need to. With the money he earned as a waiter
in the trendy beach bar, he was enough for us. He had shown that we didn't need
him. So why the joy of my mother and my brother for their imminent departure? In my
guts, cliché as it sounds, I felt like a beast was pulling me. But that beast had
not learned to be fierce. It was hard for him to walk.

The day he came home I managed not to be there, despite the fact
that my mother had insisted that he be there, because he really wanted to see my
brother and me. My father wanted to celebrate. Not to count on me, I told my
mother. She spat at me the hatred she had sucked from when I sucked his cock and
swallowed his semen impregnated with resentment. There's no other way to describe
it.

During the years that he was locked up, I had not visited him
even once, however, as I write these pages, I realize that he was more present than
ever. Not only did I not show up the day he was released, but I also avoided going
to the apartment when I knew he could be there. I took advantage of the fact that I
was in charge of opening La Chancla to sleep on a plastic mattress for a few days.
I barely slept. The insomnia returned. Also the dirt and the disturbance by any
idea or feeling related to it. When I remember that time I perceive anxiety. Nausea
invades me, it's my state of mind, identical to those years. I was behind the bar
and it made me uneasy to see my father come through the door, with his crooked
smile and his words. I remember my brother insisted that he looked good. He's clean
and he wants to see you, he told me, as if that would settle everything. I was
scared to find it, although I knew that sooner or later the moment would come. They
were anguishing days that I remember especially because of the dizzying sensations
that invaded me.
 The memory bleeds.

It does not coagulate.

When I stayed to sleep in the bar, I would look for an hour in

which I was completely sure that he would not be in the apartment to go shower and
get clean clothes. Several days had passed since he left and one morning, as I used
to do, I was testing the space, I showed up at home but not before making sure that
no one was there. He was very careful. He entered without making noise and tried to
take as little as possible. Like a thief. He was lurking. Actually, I realize that
it had always been like this.

That sunny, blue, clean June morning, I'd quickly tidied up the
comics and VHS tapes, and gone into the bathroom to take a shower. I had barely
been there for a few minutes when he opened the door and asked me, with his crooked
smile, his bright eyes, and his squashed blood sausage hands resting on the frame,
what was wrong with me. Immediately my body went rigid. A worn rope that is pulled
taut and frayed by force. I answered him without looking at him, how good. I had
soaped myself and the water was falling on my head. He was smiling. Don't you want
to see your father? he said. I don't remember if I answered him. My head was bowed
and my gaze followed the foam disappearing down the drain. He asked me again if I
knew who he was; then, I must have told him something, because I remember that he
went to look for a cheap brass cup, a kind of trophy, that he had won in prison,
and he began to tell me about his achievements in there, how he had won everyone in
the races that they had organized among the inmates, and he also explained to me
that he had played sports and was clean.

It was a lie.

His glassy eyes said a different thing. His breath reeked of

whiskey and hashish. So, she offered me the glass, I didn't take it, I looked at
her with contempt, and I told her with indifference that very well. This is how you
treat your father, he said. I felt the oppression growing, or in my memory that
sensation in which past and present mixes assails me. The water kept running, no
longer foaming, and I felt more helpless every second, when he went to give me a
hug and I reflexively moved away and was about to slip. He looked at me strangely
and made an abrupt gesture, then he composed himself, and I made out his crooked
smile and his crushed blood sausage hands raising the glass and saying that he is
giving it to me. I tell her that I don't love her. The water runs. My hair is still
shampooed. My eyes itch. But I catch a glimpse of his wild eyes and how he suddenly
raises his arm and smashes the glass against the mirror, which explodes into
hundreds of little pieces that are scattered everywhere, some also falling into the
bathtub. After the outburst, I start to tremble. I try to get out of the bathtub,
but he won't let me, I cut the soles of my feet, it hurts and a little blood comes
out. I don't complain, I don't cry, I don't say anything, I just feel disgust and
disgust and fear. Suddenly, I have lost any security, I am totally defenseless, I
cannot defend myself, I do not have the ability to think, I do not control my body.
So he penetrates me, fucks me, tears me apart, pierces me, pierces me with rage,
flesh against flesh, but I don't cry, I don't do anything, I just hold on, without
moving, a stick, he talks, he screams, he tells me things that they do not surface
in memory, they are blurred. The tremors, yes, I remember that, the tremor, the
fucking tremor that wouldn't go away, the tremor outside and inside, and the daze,
him yelling things about prison at me, that he would make me a man, that he was
shit, an ungrateful person, and I feel how he nails me, how he takes me to an
abyssal place from which I don't know how to get out. I have tried to look from the
outside, to draw another me, but I am the one who trembles, who bleeds, with torn
flesh, with bruises, who makes an effort not to cry, perforated forever, living
with that damage that love took from me. . I still tremble. I still wonder why I
didn't defend myself, why I put up with that humiliation that doesn't want to go
away, as if he were already in me forever.

What happened in that bathroom ended up contaminating my life.

This is the first time I write it. My brother senses it. My

mother was also aware. Still today I don't know how to clean the infected area.
Even today I feel the hands of crushed black pudding rubbing on my meat to stick,
leaving traces of them on me. I still try not to cry today.

31

The last time I suddenly burst into tears, inconsolably, was on

August 9, 2005. Since that day the tears have not come back. That morning I
received a call from my brother. I knew, before he verbalized it, that my maternal
grandmother had died. He had been in the hospital for a week after the heart
attack. His heart was very weak from all the suffering he had endured throughout
his life. I did not cry at the time of the call. I sat up in bed and looked at the
time: half past six. My partner sensed what had happened. He didn't say anything.
It was me who told it:

"My grandmother is dead.

I remembered some words that she used to repeat. Grief is

contagious, misfortune sticks. I remembered moments with her. I wanted to cry, I
wanted to.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed for a while trying to cry,
the tears didn't come. It wasn't until I got to the hospital and saw her there, in
white, at peace, that the crying came unexpectedly. It was a heartbroken reaction
that I hadn't expected. I have not cried like this again, in that way in which the
environment and the people disappear.

32

I write slowly. Slower every day, stopping at the words, at the

emotions and feelings that have hardened, a scab, taut with each step, as if I were
wearing a walker and short of breath. I am an old man when I write, leaving more or
less long intervals between writing.

Maybe I want to erase my father's face.

As I drag my memory to reveal the facts and the decisions I made,

I am invaded by the memory of the tear in my flesh and the fever I felt afterwards,
as if the hot stream of water was still drenching me that morning naked in the
bathroom. My father's face appears to me in a livid image, not at all ghostly.

I never lose it.

Is there.
 Breathing strong and labored. The hands of crushed black pudding
digging into my hips, their laughter and their mockery and the desire to frighten
me. His figure occupies all the space all the time.

Of course, I hardly feel relief in writing. The tendency is to

think so, that writing brings out these tearing demons, that squeeze my stomach and
close my throat when I bring them back, numb, slipping through that unspeakable
moment as you scream. Relief is not for oneself, it is for others, to avoid saying
the word that gives it its name.

Perhaps what words do create is a fence. It is difficult to

describe what is inside, it is very difficult, the smudges come out, the
hesitations, the guilt, always present with my father's crooked smile, the mole
that I also have on my face almost identical to his, the vision of the world when
wet , defenseless, naked, limited to the dimensions of that bathtub, longing for
happiness and finding abandonment, tension, suffering.

Since that morning fear and shame were constantly present in me,
also in my body. Today I think they were also in my father. Writing is hardly a
relief, but at least it takes me out of the void I fell into.

I don't know what options I had, I just know that I gave in, that
I let myself go, that I became obsessed with forgetting previous memories. So many
years of efforts to forget and then do just the opposite, gradually recovering
those forgotten experiences that are soaked in sweat, stuck in the depths of my
flesh and that I force myself to tear out when it would have been easier to invent
them, because memory opposes a fierce, savage, cruel resistance.

I often wonder obsessively where happiness is. I also wonder if

going back, to before that, I would have found it. Summer, with the heat, numbs
that obsession until it fills it with saltpeter and it itches again and I scratch
my back, my arms, my chest again..., wanting to bleed, wanting to get it out,
perhaps what remains clings like a mollusk to the rock.

33

The piece of paper with my father's phone number remains on the

desk. I touch it, I feel it, I wrinkle it even more, I spread it out again, its
folds contracting by themselves, a heart that gives its last beats.

I call my father again. I redial those numbers that seem to twist

on the paper. The phone is turned off or out of range. I feel relief.

I relax.

My father repeated to me that I was not a man for not having done
military service and having declared myself an objector. I fulfilled my
conscientious objection by teaching problematic children from broken families in a
Red Cross center. I understood those guys. I was one of them. I connected with the
kids, and they connected with me. Perhaps they noticed the invisible thread that
united us.

I see myself in that room at the Red Cross center sitting next to
the children, looking at what I don't want to see. The professor's face is a smooth
mask without eyes, mouth, nose, or features. We don't listen to what he says. It
looks like he's panting. A wounded soldier who has seen the horror.

Again I stop the narration for weeks. After that time I force
myself to read what I have written but the text stirs me and fear returns, it
paralyzes me. I look for any excuse not to write, not to finish the story, not to
call him, not to confront him.

3. 4

Time passes and I don't write, but at night the cemetery of

memory assails me.

I profane.

Christmas was a strange celebration for us. My parents never

decorated the house with a tree or any kind of Christmas decoration. During those
dates they spent day and night in the restaurant, preparing orders and not missing
a party until the year he went to jail.

I put up my first Christmas tree at the age of thirty-nine, with

my current partner, the year before the birth of my first daughter. Contrary to
what you might think, I fell into a pit of sadness and discomfort. I found myself
locked in my room again, with my VHS tapes, the comics collection neatly arranged,
the fourteen-inch television set on a chair facing the bed. He did everything
within those poster-covered walls. Contemplating my first Christmas tree, with its
blinking colored lights and carol music, I wanted to retreat into a non-existent
shell. I was assailed by the suspicion of happiness, for which I was neither fit
nor allowed to enter, and I began to listen again to the shrill and resentful
voices of my parents. A rake that moved in my head.

Two fictional characters that struck me when I read them also

came out of memory, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat: Andrés Hurtado
created by Pío Baroja and his panic that things would go well for him, and Captain
America, a superhero out of his time. I mixed them in my head, it was a combination
of both, it was its darkness, without limits or contours, it was scratches and
shadows.

The only time we shared as a family was Christmas Eve dinner; a

few hours of unbearable tension: my parents were already wearing it, up to their
ass, and as my brother and I grew, the fights also increased. At that time I
avoided asking myself because of the strangeness I felt. I preferred to take refuge
in reading a comic or a book. I fantasized that these stories protected me from
him. I was looking for clarification in the stories that I read, that someday I
would end up being within those four-color superhero comics. In the pages of those
comics, cities are torn apart in amazing fights to be quickly rebuilt, the heroes
always take the blows, and when it seems that they are going to be definitively
defeated, they remake themselves to achieve victory. I identified with the mutants,
outcasts, marginalized by humans. But above all with Daredevil, the man without
fear, blind, with the other senses as altered as his feeling of guilt. He wanted to
be Daredevil.

That Christmas Eve in 1991 he should have already guessed it. My

parents arrived stoned. They always returned from the restaurant with dinner
prepared. They served it at the dining room table, which always seemed improvised,
with the bulbs hanging from their wires, no lamps, no pictures, no shelves, no
books; with the dilapidated sofa, the old chairs, the blackened walls on which the
grudges of one another were stuck. I was locked in my room, copying the cover of
the US number 126 of The Invincible Iron Man, drawn by Bob Layton.

"Come out of your room, let's go have dinner," my mother called

to me on the other side of the door.

I looked at the gold and red armor. Many times he had wanted to
be inside that armor.

Seen from outside it was the scene of any ordinary family. I just
didn't want to go out.

I never wanted.

But they called me back. Maybe it was my way of rebelling and I

did it consciously, although when I think back on it I just feel like I don't want
to get up from my desk until I finish the drawing. That I don't care if my father
comes in and hits me, because I am convinced that the Iron Man's armor protects me.
This childish thought has always accompanied me. My mother knocked on the door and
I told her I was coming.

I didn't move.

Then the screaming started. The insults. My father pounded on the

door of my room, which already had several holes. He had placed a padlock and a
latch so that he would not enter.

It will be a son of a bitch. Open up or I'll break down the door.

I wanted to resist, to hold on, instead I got up from the desk

and opened to stop the screaming and banging on the door.

Stop that retard shit already, he said, and he took the drawing
and the Iron Man comic and folded them to throw them away while he grabbed me by
the neck to lead me out of the room.

I remember all that, my hatred, the desire to kill him, the urge
that flowed from my body sitting at that table with my drunk parents, yelling at
each other, messing with us, insulting at any insignificance.

Eat, my father urged, picking up the lamb in his hands and

reluctantly placing it on my plate.

It had happened on more occasions, but that night of '91 I not

only understood it, it's that I perceived it throughout my body, as if everything
didn't matter to me, and I felt divided from myself.

Leave it alone, can't you see that he always has to hit the mark,
my mother said with a disgusted grimace on her lips, Fortuna balancing between her
lips.
 I told you to eat, ungrateful. You are ungrateful. I've been
cooking all day.

I was nineteen years old. It was the last time the four of us
would sit together on Christmas Eve.

So I did. I don't know what prompted me. Perhaps it was the

unfolding that I noticed, that strange ingenuity that I treasured despite the
sticks and what I had in front of me daily. My father's breath of Ducats and stale
alcohol was a widening cloud.

I got up.

Sit down and eat.

I was disgusted by the cigarette butts in the food dishes, the

smoke and the dirty smell as if it were a disturbing creature created by my father
to scare us. Effluvia seemed to be coming from the dirty walls, for this reason the
walls of my room were covered with posters.

Sit down for a fucking time!, he yelled and grabbed the plate
with the lamb to throw it at me, but I ran away with my heart in my mouth.

I ran without looking back until I reached the beach. My legs

ached, I was barely breathing, I spat several times when I stopped. Some
streetlights were off. The calm sea, asleep, contrasted with my agitation. There
was no one and no one could hear the sound of the water, so still that it looked
like a painting. It was a clean and cold night. The silence and the wet sand calmed
the shock that was groping my heart.

I stayed there waiting for my friends to arrive in a few hours.

We had agreed at twelve to go out to a party. That laxity took me a little away
from myself, whom I hated as much as my family. Why didn't I have the courage to
leave and be someone else, like the characters in books and comics? Why didn't I
dare to start somewhere else?

That morning I drank as much as I could. I needed my head to

explode. I had a fight attempt. He encouraged others to drink. I wanted to lose
consciousness. The night was consumed as a lighted match burns. At seven in the
morning, with the sun already up, I put my fingers in to vomit. I drank water from
the fountain and lay down on the sand for a while. I felt like a sack of rotten
potatoes thrown away. My colleagues were already sleeping it off in their houses
while I kept wandering the promenade. At eleven, some locals began to prepare their
terraces. I wanted to get into my bed and I was scared too. He was back in the same
place. He was unable to escape. I remember that early morning with whipping. I
resist as long as I can, but in the end exhaustion wins over me and I head,
defeated, like an elephant that falls due to lack of water and is scorched by the
sun until only its bones remain, to my parents' house.

The identical routine of going up the stairs of the apartment

carefully so that no neighbor would see me—that atrocious shame that battered my
spirits—and straining my ears in case my parents were still awake. It took me a
while to climb the steps, to get to the door and put the key in the lock.

When I opened the door I would get breaths of that stink of stale
tobacco, late-night sex, dust, spoiled food and the sour smell that my parents
radiated, with their turbulent breaths taking over the floor; that smell that
permeates my memories, a strange cobweb from which I can't get away. The door of my
room had two new punches. The stickers were tucked inside the hollow wood. On the
floor, the bed, and the desk, the torn pages of my comic collection were scattered,
dead. A mountain of colors crying, with the forced figures of the heroes in
unlikely positions. I picked up some pages as if they were a dead animal. I felt
every piece of damage in my body, and I noticed the shortness of breath and the
hatred.

I lay down next to my torn-up comics.

Dying was like that.

Fifth part

Father and son

On April 14, 2017, I go to Almería with my wife and daughters to

visit her sister. At eleven o'clock in the morning of the next day I receive a call
from my brother and he gives me some random news.

I feel nothing, except strangeness and even disappointment. I

tell him that I'm out of Malaga and he tells me that our friend Alejandro is with
him, that I do what I have to do.

When I hang up I remain mute, alone with the pain, with the
shaking of uncertainty and guilt. Also, why not say it, with the feeling of a lost
opportunity and that the narrative ends here.

Final point.

I'm wrong, of course.

Just two months ago, in my wanderings around the family home, I

ran into my father in a supermarket. What if our energies crossed precisely to face
each other? And if that meeting that I avoided, from which I fled, was the last
opportunity that fate offered me —or whatever each one wants to call it— and I
missed it?

Three weeks later, at the beginning of March, I started again

with my tours of the area, in case I ran into it again by chance, but also because
somehow the restlessness of those years came to me, as if walking around the places
that I walked in my childhood the memories became physical again. I went to La
Peña, next to a friend's house, where my father goes to play dominoes, to La
Milagrosa cafeteria, where he usually goes for breakfast, to Nicolás's store, next
to the pharmacy. In all these places, they recognize me and ask me the same
question: How is your father?, as if I were the person who was taking care of him.
And I always finish the tour in the same place, its portal, in front of the phone.
Sometimes, I press the button, but no one opens. It sure doesn't work, like in the
past. I barely stay there for a few seconds, I don't want any neighbor to see me,
shame seizes my spirit, I don't want anyone to ask me what I'm doing there, if I'm
going to see him, if he'll be happy, if how many years without seeing you, and all
those issues that vanish, that cover with a veil the only important topic, the
desire to kill him and that I won't be able to do it.

I then convince myself that I am not going to look for him

anymore. I let it be. It's already dead to me. He keeps screwing up my life without
being present. Maybe I'm a sick fuck. During all these years I never stopped being
sick. I will only rest when I am not there.

Respite.

I am also wrong about this.

Respite.

I tell my partner what has happened and that I don't know what to
do, that I still have to go back to be with my brother. He makes a strange face at
me and replies that we just arrived and that a beast like my father doesn't deserve
me to move. I'm not sure that it says beast either, but I remember it that way.
Then he tells me to do what I want, that if I think I should leave, I should do it.
The situation of eight years ago with my mother is repeated.

I call my brother again, and Alejandro answers: Your brother is

talking to the police. I ask him if he needs anything, and our friend tells me not
to worry, there's not much I can do there. I hang up with the warning that I'll
call back in a bit.

What I know, from what my brother has told me: the owner of the
Pedregalejo rock, with which my father played dominoes, contacted my brother to
tell him that it had been a month since my father had shown up at night. grief.
That he had asked for him and no one had seen him, not even in the bars in the
area. So, through one of the surfers, I had gotten my brother's phone number.

At first my brother hardly cared. That was frequent in my father.

But after a couple of days he continued with a kind of runrún that he did not let
go of and he approached his house. He called the phone several times without
finding an answer. And he decided to try a neighbor's apartment. He told her that
my father lived with someone, a guy who came in and out, and sometimes other
strangers stopped by as well. The neighbor next to my father's door got out of the
elevator. He recognized my brother and told him to wait, that he had rented the
garage space from my father, but he hadn't seen him in a while. Without knowing
exactly why, my brother called Alejandro, who lived very close, and then the
police, who in turn called the fire department. They didn't have to break the door,
they just pushed it. It was open, just locked. My brother and I knew that of the
two doors that gave access to the apartment, one was usually open, stuck with a
piece of furniture, because my father was like that, he left the doors open, the
car open, as if life slipped from him. If my brother had thought to push her, there
was something that stopped him.

The first to pass were police and firefighters. My brother and

Alejandro were told to wait in the living room. One of the walls, the one that
faced a fireplace, was covered with photos of my brother, of me, of the family, of
our old girlfriends and friends, as if it were a criminal sketch, one of those
schemes that are being used. sick of seeing in any television series in which a
murder case is investigated.

Dad was in the bathroom, in a pool of blood, he's been dead for
three weeks, maybe longer, so imagine the musty smell in the house, my brother
tells me that the police told him. The lucubrations begin in my head. I tell him
that it must have been a fight or one of his deals, didn't he live with a guy?
However, my brother calmly interrupts me before I can take a run, to explain to me
that it could have been a heart attack, At least that's what the scientific police
have told him, because there seems to be no evidence of violence, and he adds that
the dried blood is from the blow he received when he fell, and that if he lived
with someone, he had to be scared and took off. I want to know what it is that
there are no signs of violence, as if we were in a cheap TV movie —which, on the
other hand, is what our lives have been, a TV movie with no budget, shot in any
way. I don't know, my brother justifies himself, if you want, come and talk, and he
remains silent. I think that I only want to go for the writing of the book, for the
material that this experience can provide me. And just thinking about it I feel
abandoned. I am filled with hate. A hatred that has always been there, growing,
weeds that entangle thoughts.

I didn't come back, I decided to stay that weekend with my family

in Almería, although my head wasn't ready to keep an eye on them either. My brother
told me that a large police team arrived and that they explained to him that the
results of the autopsy would take years. She also told me that my father's older
sister, the one who lives in Madrid, would come over to take some photos and
objects, and she asked me if I wanted anything. He had also taken photos, the
wooden chess board my father taught him to play with, and The Old Mermaid, the book
he bought for our mother to take to jail.

Perhaps my brother has stopped feeling the hatred that grips me.
I need to stop being who I was. someone humiliated someone who hates The hatred
that one feels for failing to love them despite the greatest of disappointments.

Later, my brother tells me that in my father's kitchen there were

yogurt lids with the date of the end of March and that there was no money in his
wallet, but there was an ONCE ticket for March 23. My brother is more eloquent than
on other occasions, maybe he needs to talk, get rid of the damage, that erosion
that has grown since childhood.

Are you going to the funeral? he asks.

Without coming to the point, anger, disgust, disappointment, rage

comes to me. You know the answer.

Give it up, he says.

Stop what, I tell him, stop what, I repeat on fire, if I rescue

him, if I say it, it's because it still turns my stomach, I still feel it inside,
in my conscience, it still terrifies me, maybe that's why I'm writing, I think , to
modify my life as if it were the life of a fictional character.

Leave it now, my brother repeats.

And maybe you should understand. His way of alleviating damage is

to silence him, not take him for a ride anymore.
3

April 29, 2017. Eleven in the morning. All night it was raining.
It's a miserable and cold day despite being spring. The wet earth rises, I feel it
when I breathe, and the humidity gets inside to get the heat out of the body. Since
I got up in the morning, my stomach has been doing its thing and I haven't stopped
going to the bathroom.

It's the first time I've been back in that house since I left. My
brother told me what he had seen. The keychain, in my hand, weighs a bag of tons of
sand. The door creaks when I turn the key, the old door and the old floor that
smells of abandonment.

Poverty smells.

It smells distinctively stronger, like ammonia.

When I enter the kitchen, the first thing I see is a fruit salad
in half, its lid is stuck to the counter, it indicates April 9, a different date
than the one my brother told me. The blackness of the walls is the blackness of the
past. The doors sound like they did in childhood, the blows, the threats, the
grease that seems to catch its breath when I'm there, alone, alert, as if at any
moment he could appear by surprise behind me. The living room is the same as I
remembered it, except for a wall on which there are photos of my brother, myself,
our friends and girlfriends stuck with thumbtacks or tape, some of them wrinkled,
placed haphazardly. On the only glass table, moldy, dirty, there are also scattered
photos, others are on the floor. My father ended up surrounded by images, looking
for that refuge, slipping over and over again.

It's hard for me to breathe. Despite the fact that the windows
are open, the floor gives off its strong, sour smell. Its effluvia remain. A miasma
that squeezes. The rooms are darker and smaller than I remember them. There are
holes in the walls. The house is a monster made up of our misfortunes, it erodes
us, tears away what we are until we forget it. The bathroom still has a stain of
dried blood, a rough, lumpy stain, next to it a discarded bucket and mop, just like
the toilet brush. There is also in the sink an ashtray overflowing with cigarette
butts, a tube of shaving cream, a razor with traces of hair and foam, and pieces of
toilet paper on the floor, like the remains of a desolate geography. The white
tiles are yellowish, tarnished, some have fallen from their places, scabs, unhealed
wounds, the bathtub is blackened and pitted, a blue towel hangs on the wall that
seems out of place, the plaster on the ceiling is a physical map from which they
are falling its ranges and its mountains. I watch from the hallway, without going
in, next to the bedroom. I stay in the doorway, on the duvet, blister packs of
pills, diazepam and other medicines, a thick striped fabric serving as a headboard,
in front, a chest of drawers with a dirty glass, and on top a pair of jeans and a
shirt wrinkled grey. My brother's phone number and address are written down on a
piece of paper, next to his wallet, and the ONCE number. The chronology of his
death can be reconstructed between that lottery number and a half-eaten yogurt.
That is what we are.

The house devours itself.

A behavior learned from its tenants.

This is my father's estate.

 At night the dirty wall of the living room appears to me covered
with the photos fastened with thumbtacks or tape. The images do not reflect what
was happening inside the apartment. No one could guess it from those snapshots. My
father's face breathes next to me, pressing into mine. The swollen body of my
mother is also manifested, who laughs while crying. I hear the barking of Rioja.
And the urge to vomit returns and the frustration for having left the apartment
without even having seen my room.

I have returned to the neighborhood. A place that is hard for me

to recognize, where I feel, I don't know why, a foreigner. I did it with the
intention of alleviating these wrinkles that I have contracted since I entered the
house, and also to talk to a childhood friend, Nils, who got along well with my
father to the point that he became a cook for him. .

I walk restlessly through the streets that sheltered me when I

was little.

Nils is waiting for me in a place with a fifth at the table. He

gives me his condolences and that reassures me. You know why I have summoned you.
Before I can speak, he motions for the waitress to bring me a beer, and asks why I
want to write a book like this, what I'm after, if my brother is willing to
participate. I don't tell him that I have to take it out, remove whatever is
piercing my insides, words fail to express the depths of fear.

A direct question versus multiple answers.

We clink beer bottles to celebrate this reunion and drink. I

prepare the notebook and pen and write: "a book like that." That's what he called
it.

Between my character, which helps to sweeten things, and my

philosophy of avoiding problems, I have forgotten our childhood, says Nils, before
finishing the fifth and ordering another.

And that? I ask.

He raises his hands as a sign of ignoring him and makes that

characteristic grimace of his, pressing his lips together, which I've seen him do
so many times since we were dwarves.

I've thought about it and I don't want to bother you.

What do you mean? I insist.

He moves his hands again as if to say wait. He has never liked to

open up, he feels vulnerable, as if a scab were being removed from a wound and
blood was coming out. I share this reflection with him, he laughs and tells me that
let's see if he's going to have to ask me and not the other way around. The bottles
collide again and we look cool, happy, despite the mob of problems that thronged
the neighborhood. He picks up the bottle, smiles, and tells me: It's always
bothered me that you couldn't empathize with your father, unlike your brother. Your
father was a brilliant guy, talkative, he must have had a high IQ, he was the one
who taught me to play chess, he had a lot of chess books in your house. He gave for
haute cuisine when catering was a trade without the current predicament. I have
already told you what influenced me when it came to becoming a chef. He respected
him, and so did people, despite the controversies that surrounded him. I liked
talking to him, I liked him and enjoyed his witticisms. Surely I have spoken more
with your father than you yourself. I remember when he boned a leg of ham in front
of me without breaking a sweat, and how he ran the kitchen when he was sober. When
he left El Acebuche in Almería we talked a lot. He spent the day at the beach. He
was a chess champion in there, did you know?

And how can I not know, I think.

His words affect me, however, I force myself not to interrupt or

influence the appreciation he has of my father. Nils goes on, jumping from one
subject to another.

The first time I saw cocaine was at your house. That, for a kid,
was amazing, and also nonsense. How did we realize in those years? Look, he sighs,
I always thought your mother treated you worse than your father. She was more
vehement and harsh when addressing you, constantly yelling at you and losing her
mind no matter who was in front of her. In the neighborhood people commented on how
beautiful she was, what she could have been, how she ruined her life and all that
stuff that has always been said, you'll be sick of hearing it.

The story of a cheap soap opera, I mean, with a pasty mouth.

My friend puts his lips together, laughs, to say: I've already

met her sour. Maybe because of the beatings and the drugs. What I want you to
understand is that I didn't talk to your mother and it was scary, but with your
father I did.

Order two more bottles. We clink beers again as if we had

something to celebrate. The greatest certainty or revelation that I have achieved
throughout these years of writing the book is that nobody, absolutely nobody, was
aware of what was happening in that house, not even what my parents were really
like.

I ask him to clarify the idea that my brother had a healthy

relationship with my father, unlike me.

I don't think so, rather he took some kind of responsibility. We

are children of the context in which we live or reflections of our times or however
the hell you want to express it, people with more defects than we imagine, he
comments.

He takes a swallow of his drink and continues: A fight between a

man and a woman was not identified as abuse at the time, and it was very common.
And even less psychological abuse, and today that has not completely changed, only
that it is named.

And how did you see me in those years in relation to...? It won't
let me finish the question; Nils is comfortable with memories, that strange feeling
of memory of retrieving what is gone forever.

I have seen you distant with your brother. Whoever didn't know
you wouldn't even consider you brothers. He had a protective instinct with you.

How? I can't help but be surprised by this perception.

Yes. You've always been more introspective, weirder, with your

obsessions. I tell you an anecdote. When you weren't at home, we would sneak into
your room to read your superhero comics —you're the first geek I've ever met, when
people still didn't know what it was to be a geek—, and your brother had a terrible
time, he told us: He's leaving. to realize that we have touched it, be careful, and
he left everything exactly as it was. Although it did not matter, you always ended
up asking who had entered your room.

I nod, not cutting it off.

You held on to everything, he says. You clung to sentimental

relationships, basketball, swimming, comics, books, movies. You were very obsessive
about everything that interested you. For example, how long did you go without
studying?

Three years.

You see. I envy you.

What are you talking about?

That you draw a line and fulfill it, even if you have many
doubts. How many of those in the neighborhood finished their studies?

For a while we talked about current issues, then he keeps telling

me things from when we were cool. For the children of the rebalage, you came from
above the cart, and then we considered you posh. At first, we gave you and your
brother a hard time. It was an unwritten rule, those who came from above were posh
little ones who had to be tanned. It didn't matter if your apartment was blown up.
And that for you perhaps your house was a horror, but for us it was a zone of
enjoyment. I remember the stark contrast between your room and your brother's. Your
brother's room was the most punkish room I've ever known, with condoms hanging from
the ceiling, all over the shoulder, with wetsuits and boards thrown away. There it
smelled of surf wax, Sex Wax, do you remember? The half-fallen posters, I was
freaking out; and yours, on the other hand, was all in order, with the comics, the
books, the VHS tapes, the drawings and the notebooks that you already treasured at
that time. Notice that you didn't look sad or weird or anything. Your father or
your mother would arrive and mess it up because they were wearing it, they would
break whatever it was and we didn't think there would be any problems. You didn't
even think about it. At least no one talked about it. You pushed forward. I don't
know if it was the time or the neighborhood; Do you remember the father who made us
try on swimsuits with the excuse of whether they would suit his son? We lived with
an attempted pedophile as normally. We told it to each other one afternoon at the
jetty eating pipes, and another matter. I'm telling you, you pushed forward with
whatever it was.

Have you been to therapy? he asks suddenly.

Yeah.

That's what I mean. I would have liked it, but I can't open up
and that I was lucky with my parents, I admit it.

You are on time.

 I've given it up, don't you think? I deal with the ups and downs
that come and go.

What are you talking about?

Nils continues with his gummy face and his lips together and at
the same time I notice his darkness.

At that time perhaps I was not fully aware, now I understand your
brother's anxiety attacks, my own neuras, and I also perceive your character, he
says with a firm voice. I understand your need to flee, to seek emotional
stability, your fidelity and loyalty to those who show you affection, kindness,
whatever. At the same time, over the years, I clearly notice your sadness, the
defeat that crushes you, that inability to enjoy, as if that smoke bomb —do you
remember when I called you a Smoke Bomb because you were always escaping from any
situation, whether it was good or bad? ?— will already be part of you. I'm curious
about the relationship you have with your daughters, with how obsessive you are and
the children who are as free as kites in the wind.

We are silent for a few seconds. The waitress comes to our table,
removes the empty bottles and my friend tells her to put another two. The last
ones, he tells me.

You are sad, repeat. That's why I asked you about such a book.

The new beers are already in front of us. This time we don't
clink the bottles, we just take a drink.

...Don't make that face, I know you don't believe it, but in his
own way your father cared about you.

I prefer not to enter that barren terrain in which my father

crawled to get information. I tell him:

You told me you respected him. How can you respect a drug dealer,
a junkie, a drunk...? I shut up. Nils looks at the table, then at me, I continue
talking: Besides, you will know that he had many enemies, and that his friends were
nothing more than those who moved drugs.

We drink for a while without saying a word. "What's Up" by 4 Non

Blondes is playing, a song from our youth. I sing inside my head:

Twenty-five years

And my life is still

I'm trying to get up

That great big hill of hope

For a destination

Hierarchies have always existed among junkies. When we were kids

your father was on the ridge. I didn't know that he was selfish, self-centered, nor
did I care that he hurt his family. Of course I was shocked by the contempt he
showed for your mother, especially in comparison with the way my parents treated
each other, but I'm telling you, I didn't take notice. Notice that for a long time
I was mistaken that your father came from a wealthy family that had gone downhill,
until I found out that he had been born into a humble family in the Huelin
neighborhood. It may fuck with you, but I respected it. And he had enemies because
they were envious of him. He could have been one of the greatest chefs, and I truly
believe that for a few years he was. I have ever wondered if drugs had something to
do with his genius, have you wondered?

Sure. Drugs inspired him. He would arrive in the middle of the

morning and he would burn our sheets or get us up to continue with his games... A
psychopath.

I did not know it.

My friend's gesture has lost its kindness.

I'm sorry, I don't want to make you change the idea you have of
him, I tell him.

I regret this outing I've had. It had not happened to me with any
of the people and relatives with whom I had spoken for the writing of the book.

Don't worry, I won't do it, he says, and continues: After prison,

the situation deteriorated. Your father carried on with the dealings, the
restaurant was already a mere cover and he became a junkie who gradually crept,
until he brought the lowest junkies in the neighborhood into his life. That was the
end. When your mother died, he was alone, very lonely, and he took the junkies home
with him. Good thing he at least behaved himself at your brother's wedding.

What do you mean?

Your brother had invited him, you know?

Yes of course. He caught one of his giddiness. He drank every

day.

But you know that that day your brother called him and offered to
pick him up and take him.

No, he didn't tell me.

He was very high. According to what your father told me days

later, he wanted to go to the wedding, drop by, see you for a while, see us, eat,
toast and leave, although he was terrified, he was afraid of meeting you, facing
you. In this way, he justified what he had on his body.

I wonder if there are forbidden moments for memory. Moments that

are put to a halt. Moments that prefer to be away to protect us from others and
from ourselves, because telling it with words perhaps the only thing it achieves is
prolonging the suffering. Little by little, without realizing it, I forget myself.
Little by little, I feel relief when he doesn't touch my hair, or caress my cheek,
or place his hand on my body, or hug me.

And, at the same time, I want it.

I miss that he never puts his hand on my head, or kisses me, or

ruffles my hair, or hugs me, or tells me that he loves me.
5

On May 1, my brother and I met with a company that is dedicated

to cleaning homes where a death has occurred. I thought it was an impersonal
company, however, we were met by two middle-aged women, familiar and attentive. I
think the workers perceive our objections when entering the house and tell us that
there is no rush, that we take our time. They go first, I see them walk, take
photos, write notes in a small notebook with the utmost naturalness, while they
inspect the spaces to prepare the budget. The air is running, all the windows are
open, however, the dirt is still attached, also the bad smell, the stench that my
parents gave off. I think what am I doing there, and at the same time I have the
vain hope of finding something that will help me to close the book. Although I know
this would be a shortcut, and it won't happen.

I barely recognize the house.

Or I don't want to.

When I entered I stayed in the kitchen. I go back to the yogurt

container on a white plate, to the forks and spoons placed haphazardly, to the
bread crumbs, to the cans, to the three heads of garlic and a roll of Fixo that is
next to them, I photograph it, a still life, the last thing my father ate. In the
sink an empty rum bottle. The blackened pans on the stove are disgusting, they are
those of a shack with no resources, like the sink. Scab invades space. How does it
hold up in those conditions?

I go into my old room, which is also hard for me to recognize. On

the desk I open the drawer and I am surprised to discover my school grade, old
photos of my child self.

What bothers me about being here?

My body deflates.

I resist bringing back the sensations of the past. With the phone
I take photos that I will delete instantly.

What's the point of registering such a place?

I am already another.

So what irritates me?

On one side of the cabinet is a drawing of Iron Man that I did

when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I see myself copying it over and over
again; it is perhaps the most recognizable, a zone of relief that saddens me. Apart
from the drawing and some books, there are objects that my parents left there, and
that are not mine.

How do you hold up in a house like this?

The women from the cleaning company call us. They say that they
have finished, and they explain to us that they will throw away everything we
discard and that they will keep what we tell them in a room, along with the
photographs and personal belongings. I tell them that there are no personal items
and that everything is garbage. My brother remains silent, but I sense that he does
not agree. Life is based on a transaction. This is what it all comes down to. The
women nod in agreement, though they insist that we take our time, and that we'll
tell them.

A few minutes later we leave from there. I am impregnated with

the smell of dirt, misery, death, that viscous smell of black tobacco, alcohol and
saliva. My throat itches, I feel something that has gotten inside me, as if I had a
vermin ripping into my windpipe. I spit. Repeatedly. It remains. It is part of me,
I was just hibernating and has woken up.

The next day, May 2, my brother calls me to tell me that the

Sunset woman has told him that things seem to be going on for a long time, since
the judge still hasn't authorized the cremation. My brother explains to me that in
cases like my father's, if we bury him, things are worse because at the age of five
we have to take him out and find another niche for him. We don't want to do that.
La del Ocaso has also told him that, from her experience, she thinks that it should
not be a natural death, that it could be a violent death or suicide.

I wonder if we should call the police and report as immediate

family? But I give up. The house has squeezed me, it has left me touched. The smell
of rust persists, and the laughter of my parents, and their fights and their gasps
and my pain and my running away. I am so absorbed in my thoughts that I barely hear
what my brother is saying to me on the other end of the phone. Dad told me that he
would die alone. He affectionately calls him dad. Dad, I repeat with saliva in my
mouth, with the vermin tearing my esophagus. Can you name a person who did what he
did with the nickname of dad? I remember a successful novel in which the author was
sad because his father had never told him I love you, even though the facts of that
father's actions were loving in their own way. Perspectives.

When did you last talk to him? I ask him. At Christmas, he

answers. Silence has once again taken over our communication. I'm not telling him
that I ran into him a couple of months before he died in the supermarket. Did fate
want to offer me the opportunity to say goodbye to him? I ask my brother if he
wanted to say goodbye. It takes a few seconds to answer, can you hold back your
tears? Yes, and I also would have liked him to see more of my children. My brother
is not one for many words, but he is broken.

I know that I was not the son you dreamed of. Perhaps my brother
found that invisible thread of affection with him and forgave him for the insults,
the offenses, the reproaches, the neglect and the catalog of humiliations that have
left an indelible mark on us. Anxiety attacks, choking problems, eating disorders,
my brother's esophagitis start from that house. I want to tell him, but I keep
quiet. Dad suffered a lot, he tells me. Daddy again in that sad and loving way.
That way that denotes that she misses him. I forgave him a long time ago, and you
must do the same, he comments.

Maybe you're right. Although that will not restore affection or

make us regain confidence in ourselves. we are nicks gaps. And nothing will come
out in those wastelands. Perhaps fear, threats. I close my eyes. And I go back to
the bathroom. The prison trophy. A hail on my tongue. His hands on my back. Then
only planes that leave scars in the sky.

And silence.

Can you put silence on paper or just the facts?

The estimated death of my father is established between March 22

and April 9, 2017. My mother died in 2009. Two months later, my father went to
Valencia to see his sister, and he was enjoying the Fallas. According to my aunt,
the mess. There is a photo record.

During all this time that I have been writing, I have wanted to
cry. Despite the desire, I'm still dry. A feeling of unreality and absence
possesses me.

I cried with the death of my grandmother.

But I didn't cry for my mother's death nor do I cry for my

father's.

In both deaths I was outside Malaga. And I found out about both
from my brother.

Perhaps if I had cried, I would have cleaned myself, the tears

would have washed away part of the accumulated dirt, although it may be more of an
illusion than a manifest one to feel better, a mere simulation.

Pain does not lie, it reveals us, it tells us, it makes us

visible.

I write about the pain of the family and about its shadows, and I
know with certainty that it will antagonize me with more than one person, that they
will see me as the one who opens the garbage bags, when what I should do is throw
them into the landfill and crush them to always, because it is more important to
omit the unsayable.

Delphine de Vigan's question returns: «Is fear enough to keep

silent?».

I repeat it over and over again.

As I repeated it to myself in the nineties when I had not even

read Nothing opposes the night.

I copy the question on a piece of paper and paste it with Fixo on

the desk where I write. "Is fear enough to silence?"

More than two decades later the question has the same value. I
guess if I don't leave anything in the shadows something will transform. Or not. My
mute ingenuity, like a deserted beach in winter, the rocks pierced by the onslaught
of the waves. I have come to believe that a book will change things, when most
likely nothing will. The damage will be there. And silence too, fossilized.

Violence against the body remains, adapts, emerges in the memory

and only fictions provide a haven of peace, a few moments of rest. A refuge.
7

I realize that to take refuge from fear I read, I hug my

daughters, I put all my energy into finishing the children's story that we are
building orally. I look at my house: illustrated books, novels everywhere, comics,
toys, and suddenly the memory of my parents' apartment comes up.

I avoid asking myself any more questions, it's like falling into
an abyss, being again and feeling like the child locked in those filthy walls, the
blood that I share by inheritance shakes my spirits.

But everything around me, the space I inhabit, is different.

I try to be different from him.

Every night, before going to sleep, my daughters ask me to read

them the story of the tigress Carlota, they ask me when they will be able to see
it, touch it, turn the pages of the book. I explain to them that I have sent it to
a publisher and that they have to answer me. Dad, we want it now, they complain to
me, and I tell them that it doesn't matter when it arrives, that it could take
years, but all that doesn't matter as long as we keep telling each other stories.

One morning I go shopping at an organic store in the Cerrado de

Calderón, and I meet an old friend of my father's. On other occasions I have come
across people from his time who knew him, however, I was unable to approach them
when the idea of the book was already around me. Even when I had started writing
it, I ran into a guy I recognized from the restaurant's regulars, although I didn't
have the conviction to introduce myself. What if by writing I attract, like a
magnet, people who had contact with my parents in the past? It is a naive idea
that, however, haunts my thoughts during this calcined time. When someone tells me
that it is easy to live, I look at him with that face of tides, of leafless
branches, of unexpected tremors.

Meeting this friend of my father's, I act differently. I go over

to greet him and ask him if he remembers me. Of course, man, he asserts, with his
characteristic handsome smile, his perfectly groomed medium length hair, his jeans
and his designer T-shirt. He smokes a covered joint while having a beer on the
terrace. We briefly catch up, without delving into anything or bringing up any
sensitive topics. For a few seconds I feel the shifting reality again. I lack the
confidence to tell him what I'm after, but I don't know where I get the strength,
the fact is that we exchanged phone numbers and I agree to call him to talk about
my father. He's friendly, just like in the past, when he'd ask how things were
going for me. On weekends he would occasionally stop by La Chancla, the trendy
place where I worked, to have a coffee and a drink, and we would talk like a
colleague. As we say goodbye, I feel a slight euphoria.

He was one of those friends with whom my father drank whiskey

until he was in an ethylic coma, they smoked everything at arm's length, they got
lines at the speed of light and they fucked like there was no tomorrow. For me,
already as a teenager, the man represented an enigma. A guy with charisma,
graceful, who didn't give a blow to the water but who always had money, who only
seemed interested in fun and his cock, one of those people who always land on their
feet no matter what they do.

The following week, as we have arranged, I call him to make an

appointment. He tells me that he had forgotten that he has his daughter on those
days, that we better see each other after the weekend. We agreed to meet on Monday
at eleven in the cafeteria where we met. At the same time, I make inquiries again
to find out about my father's background and find other people who knew him. None
of the issues is easy or fruitful. What I clearly notice is the fragility in which
I live, in which I still remain, furtively, inhabiting the hidden part of
childhood, with the secret, repressed wounds, with cloudy emotions and thoughts
that destabilize the father I pretend to be. .

Sitting at the desk I write the questions for my father's friend

in a notebook. I read them, then I cross them out. I only write down: "The
aggressiveness my parents showed at home and how cordial they were with their
friends hurt me."

On the Monday in question I arrive twenty minutes early at the

cafeteria. I order a coffee with milk and a muffin with oil and tomato. It's
summer, and mothers take their children shopping or to the beach. At five past
eleven I look at my phone and ask for a bottle of water. At eleven twenty, nervous,
I call my father's old friend; your phone is turned off or out of range. I know it
won't show up. In the afternoon, he calls me back, and tells me that he forgot to
tell me that he had an appointment with the dentist, that he will call me. Days go
by and he doesn't. After a week I call him with no luck. I send him a wasap telling
him if we can talk, even on the phone, that I'll only take him half an hour. We are
like this for a month and a half. A certain impotence and rage invades me because I
know that he has things to tell, that he could reveal topics that at the time went
unnoticed. I send him another message on the phone explaining it to him. Then he
sends me a voice note telling me that he has thought about it and that he does not
want to talk about misery, that that was a precious time and that he prefers to
leave it as he remembers it. Don't call him anymore.

I open the notebook and read what I wrote. "I was hurt by how
aggressive my parents were at home and how cordial they were with their friends."
They appear to me at this precise moment in which I try to close this story that
keeps me anguished. Again they bring the trembling to my lips and my arms, that
feeling that turns into tiredness and makes everything dirty.

I wanted to kill my father, the murderer of my mother, the one

who abused his son, the one who took out his frustrations on our bodies, the
perfect friend who entertained others and invited generously. And the only way to
do it was by writing. The only one I knew. I have compared my memory to that of
other relatives and friends who knew him, I have gone to records and courts to look
for any data that could serve the narrative, I even wrote an email to the police in
case they could provide me with his background and any other information that could
be relevant, they have not answered me yet and the truth is that I do not think
they will. I have gone to the Civil Registry and have obtained the birth, death and
marriage certificates of my parents. The coldness of the data with dates, times,
witnesses, secretaries and judges that authorize it makes them unreal; the complete
opposite of what I was looking for.

In reading those documents I noticed a detail that reaffirms this

feeling: my name does not appear on any of them, but my brother's does, on both
death certificates.

10

The end is coming. With everything, I keep looking, I try to

avoid the traps of my memory so that others see me blurred by my story, above all I
avoid reflecting on my tarnished memories and I persist in doing so in those of
others, combining them, aspiring to a certain well-being, to that ephemeral peace
that makes you understand who you are, who you have been. Through Facebook I
contact my EGB tutor from 85 to 87 at the Jorge Guillén school. I write you a
message. The next day I have his answer with his phone number. I begin to have
hopes, to think that it will reveal something crucial about myself, something that
I don't know after more than thirty years.

My EGB teacher is happy to hear from me, I let her talk and ask
questions, until I tell her the purpose of the call. I tell him that I send him the
photos of the School Book via WhatsApp so that he can physically remember what it
was like then, and I also tell him that I don't want to tell him anything about my
situation back then in case I condition it. Listening to her, I recognize her calm
and resounding voice, a strong, rigid voice, from which she disconnected almost at
the beginning of the class in the last row. I began to draw, to imagine myself in
other places, to see myself within the colored cartoons that I read whenever I
could, to write scribbles, sentences with misspellings, and syntactic errors that
described my state.

When talking to my teacher so many years later, the sadness and

disorientation that I felt in my adolescence comes to me, that feeling that they
were constantly biting my stomach, throat, eyes, head, as if in addition to my
father's hands in my body, life would pierce my flesh and twist it inside. I
compose myself so that he does not perceive anything, the disguise that we all put
on at some time so that our fear is not noticed.

And despite the fact that he tells me that he can't define me

clearly, that he barely remembers, I feel that he knows more than what his voice on
the other end of the phone tells me:

We knew the family history of some children and that helped us

understand their environment, although not many of us had reports, we didn't even
talk too much with their parents. I can barely tell you about you brushstrokes, as
I tell you, unclear, far back in time. I do remember you, I don't know if the words
are right, like a surly child, closed, quiet, withdrawn, maybe, I don't know, shy,
short, introverted, they are subtle appreciations, although I already told you that
you didn't stand out precisely for being the boy It's bad that he intervenes, that
bothers him, that he asks... Perhaps you didn't appreciate a colleague very much,
I've investigated around, but there's nothing worth noting. I remember you, of
course I remember you, although I can't tell you anything, and look how sorry I am.
Because things are remembered about the most notable, I don't remember anything
notable about you, I don't know if you were trying to go unnoticed, but to be
honest I can't tell you anything else, I don't want to make things up, I'm very
sorry.
 I ask him about the partner I didn't get along with, in case I
could talk to him, that it would be good to contrast the visions of that time. She
tells me that she can't please me in that, she simply tells me that she has a group
of classmates from those years and that when they can meet up she will ask if they
could add any more memories. My tutor's voice is kind and for a while inflexible,
and I realize at that moment that she is not going to go any further in her
confession, that if she has any information she is going to keep it quiet. This
reaffirms an intuition that she felt in that inhospitable classroom, for her I was
one of those students who irritated the teachers because of my absent attitude or
for whatever reason, and my call reminded her of that. So, I decide not to ask him
any of the questions I had anticipated, that if he warned me as a surly and
intractable student, shy and introverted, visions that are still contradictory, why
didn't he contact my parents as he did with me? Didn't he see anything strange in
me? Didn't he see me uncomfortable at breaks? Didn't he realize that while I passed
easily in the 6th and 7th years of EGB, the grades plummeted in 8th? Didn't notice
any alarm?

Nor do I tell her that my parents only went to tutoring with her
once, and it was because I missed several 8th EGB exams in 1987 —that year of
permanent partying for my parents. I remember that sometimes, even if I knew the
answer in any subject, I preferred not to answer or to say that I didn't know, to
do it wrong, because my tutor from those years was right about one thing, she
didn't want to exist, she wanted to disappear, that's when I started to feeling
that only if my father died could I live. I remember that I would copy drawings of
Iron Man throwing his lightning bolts, of Wolverine taking out his claws, of Thor
with his hammer, and I would paste the head of a photo of my father on the sheet on
which the hero had drawn and tear it into small pieces, which they were the
fragments into which I decomposed myself in the late eighties.

I wanted to kill him.

But he knew that he didn't have the courage for that or to run
away, that perhaps he would be like the villains of superhero comics doomed to fail
forever. The only thing that calmed me down at first was cutting my thighs, burning
my knuckles, hitting my body, banging my head against a wall.

Only reading comics and books protected me, safeguarded me for a

few hours from the madness and destruction in which I lived, from the constant
alarm that my adolescence represented. As much as I wanted to escape my father's
influence, I couldn't. He slept at his house. I was unable to distance myself from
his influence, my father exercised an invisible power over me, so when he received
the call from the school to attend a tutorial, I considered it a victory, a
possible way out. But when my father returned, I was plunged into fear. As my
friend Alejandro told me, my father was a person who won over others, who knew how
to get what he was looking for from his interlocutor. My tutor from those years
does not remember that meeting. I myself don't know how that meeting happened, I
only know that it happened, and that my father arrived in a rage because of what
the teacher had told him about me, who recommended that, even though he passed the
exams, he should repeat the year because he didn't I looked mature enough to face
high school. My father's words were harsher, but first he beat me up, then he set
about destroying the comic book collection. He told me that that summer I was going
to get to work, that I was going to learn the hard way, like his father had done
with him, that I was a fucking retard and that for the hell of it I was going to
straighten myself out, thank goodness that good teacher had seen the shitty son he
had.

And those big hands with fat fingers destroyed my superheroes

while I begged them not to do it, to please stop, and I cried and my body wrinkled
into the same impossible folds of those comics that I had read so many times and
that I couldn't anymore. get again. Nor will I be able to recover many of the
distant memories of those classes in which I lowered my head to rest from the
battlefield that was my home.

eleven

And yet, despite everything that had happened on that floor, it

was hard for me to leave my room. There is always a place to go, where to take
refuge for a while, but I told myself in those younger years that if I didn't
leave, it was because of my mother. I didn't realize then that my mother was
already part of it.

Perhaps that is why not even today the walls of that house, even
when it has been renovated, have disappeared nor have I forgotten them, they first
become visible in my memories to see me inside there shortly, infected with the
chaos that my father created. My friend from Melilla tells me that when he met me,
and for many years afterwards, I rejected gifts, which was perhaps a way of
rejecting affection. And that when he came to my parents' house to help me get some
things, because he let me live for a while in a house that he had not inhabited, he
was hallucinated no matter how much I had told him what that house was like. Seeing
that room with the two padlocks, the holes in the door, the humidity, the dirt, the
smell of evil and violence, the oppression of vice that floated between those
walls.

I will no longer be able to trust, and unintentionally or

intentionally I have become a neurotic who does not know how to get out of that
bathroom or those walls if he does not write. Pain and grief and hate like an
erupting volcano that spews out lava so it can be reshaped. Lava wonders if it is
worth returning to the child, integrating it into the new chaos that is any life
and in which the monsters have the faces of your mother and father, and feed on
their children.

12

Several weeks after the email that I sent to the Malaga Police
Press Office, I receive a call informing me that they have studied my request
regarding my father's background, but that since they are not public documents they
will not be sent to me. can facilitate. In any case, they tell me that they want to
help me and they present me with three options. Write a formal letter requesting
what I want precisely and justifying the urgent need for the book and that they
will send it to Madrid, and it will be the corresponding ministry that has the last
word. Or through a judicial authorization, which they already warn me is really
complicated and a slow process. Or go to the Dean's Office or to the Courts to
request the preliminary proceedings, in which I will find the proceedings on my
father's history, in the event that it still exists.

I know that nothing I discover will interfere with the

relationship we had, nor with the questions that still arise today, but I decide to
write the letter and see what happens.

At the same time, around that time, I finished the children's

story. At night, when I put my daughters to bed, I read it to them while they
listen surprised, curious, they make gestures as if they were the animals in the
story, and they interrupt me from time to time to imagine other possibilities,
other adventures to the one already embodied. During the day, I barely have
patience, I don't even stop thinking about this book thinking that it will sting;
and I am upset, irascible, with a contraction in my stomach, as if I had a stick
that was stirring my intestines.

I know it's the end and I know why I went down this descent, to
understand the fear and anger I feel. To get out once and for all of that floor in
which I am trapped. Have I got it? Don't know. I was bitten by a mad dog and I will
never be able to get rid of that damage.

I return one last time to that house as if it were a mutant story

that will never stop being written, where I meet him again, always at night, those
early mornings that had no hours, with anxiety in my body, and an upset stomach,
and I ask him why he does it, then my father laughs at me, calls me soft, useless,
hits me until I beg him to stop, I cover my head with my arms, crying drowns me,
and when he leaves tired of my body, the pain is not enough, I just harbor
frustration, so I hit myself in that closed room that I can't get out of while the
water rises and I think how long I can last without breathing when the water floods
everything, despite that in the eighties I did not ask myself this question or any
other, I only harbored hatred and fear, fear that gnawed and gnawed at my head, my
tendons, my muscles, a nail that scratches the wall, a nail that bleeds, a nail and
all the nails that fall infected from the fingers of my hands, I return one last
time to that house and that restaurant that my father rented on the beach, I sneak
in one afternoon in 1982, wearing the Italian national team jersey, through a
window that could be opened to get ice cream for me and my friends when on the top
floor I hear sounds and I don't know why I'm going up, I just know that I want to
go and call my father, however I grope up, hesitant, and I see my father and
another man from behind with the mother of a friend, naked, sweating, howling , and
I unintentionally and from the impression I make a slight noise, enough for my
father to turn and see me and come towards me like a rocket, on fire, eyes in a
sidereal orbit, and he yells at me even though I don't understand what he says, it
seems that he speaks another language, and he takes me out of there by the arm
throwing me down the stairs, the ice creams that I have in my hand fall to the
floor, crushed, spoiled, my father says things that I do not hear and I run out and
I start to cry, how much I cried in that distant year that is always present au
Although I no longer know how to cry, despite the fact that I keep running and
imagining that my father apologizes for this and for each of the marks he left
every day in the seventies, in the eighties, in the nineties, my father apologizes
and tells me that nothing is wrong, that it will not happen again, that he
understands me, but I am lost in that fog in which there will be no more
forgiveness or a simple show of affection, I return one last time to that house,
when one day in 1980 I arrived from school with a drawing made for Father's Day,
and since they are asleep, I go into their dilapidated and dense bedroom and leave
the sheet with the drawing that I have done at school on top of the television, so
that my father can see it when he wakes up, and then I go with my brother to my
grandmother's house to eat, and when we return in the afternoon, my father has
already gone to the restaurant and my mother is about to leave, I go into the
bedroom and I don't see the drawing, and then I smile thinking that he has taken
it, that he has stuck it on the kitchen wall of The restaurant or somewhere more
visible for customers to see, it's a pleasant feeling, of harmony, I feel like I
can go on, I lie on my back on the bed, it smells like my parents, do I smell like
them? I wonder ; when I sit on the end of the bed I see the sheet with my drawing
on the floor, I pick it up and look at it and I make a ball with it and throw it
away, with that anger that has burned me for as long as I can remember, my I wish
to be a cartoon to avoid suffering, a drawing of primary colors, a drawing that
when crushed instantly recovers its three-dimensionality, as if cartoons didn't
suffer, at least I suspected that as a child, cartoons don't suffer, they crush
them and they instantly recover their dimension, I return one last time to that
house to talk to him, but fear gets the better of me and I am always trapped in all
the images of the past that dance disturbed in my head, the broken night, the feet
on the cold floor, I go to my brother's bed, what do we do?, the ingenuity of his
madness has not yet appeared, only the imitation: the blows, the insults, the
silence, the anxiety, the smell of alcohol, hashish , sweat, smells of memory, and
my father who yells at me: What are you looking at?, and I Push. Defend yourself,
yell again and pull me and open the door of the apartment and leave me on the
street, and I, who have always wanted to leave that house, to escape, feel like a
fish stranded on the sand that flutters desperately, suffocating me, with the salt
water that comes and goes, unable to reach me, those waves to drag me back to the
sea, dying in the sand, moving so as not to feel cold, scratching the door, the
wall, like the fish that digs in the sand to approaching the water again, I begin
to hurt myself physically to feel, I am a child of the mud that sinks in the
gravel, looking at the sky that is already clearing up, I return one last time to
that house imagining more and more often that my father did not existed, that I
could erase it and even transform it into another person, until after days or weeks
without speaking to us, he would arrive with a smile and get me in the Ford Fiesta
and take me to Juguetes Carrión and buy me a He-Man doll, and if lit a Ducados and
I made a face of displeasure turned it off, ha until I couldn't open a can or I
spilled the oil and then it was as if an electric shock seized him and he would
punch, insult, cut whatever it was with the knife and feel how the body absorbed
the terror, he returned once last time to that house, I touch the roughness of the
gotelé again, to catch a glimpse of myself inside, walking through those corridors
that seemed immense to me, the strange sensation of being lost in my own house, of
wanting to flee every minute and then wanting to return despite the horrors,
because I don't exist outside of that place either.

13

I wake up and call my mom, then my dad, and since they don't
come, I cry, and since they still don't come, I get up and turn on the lights and
call them again, and I'm afraid, that gelatinous fear that melts into the skin and
then I start to walk through the different spaces of the flat, my brother is also
awake, is he crying? I don't remember, after touring the house, I stand at the
front door, crying and thinking that I don't want to be there. There, because I was
born in another family, although I never used that word, I study the sounds that
come from the street, I memorize them, and when I least expect it I hear the
elevator, my father's hoarse voice, my mother's slurred voice, They open the door
and see me on the floor, limp, broken. What are you doing, I don't remember if I
answered, I just call them mom and dad, when they ask me again what I'm doing awake
and they take me to my room, I peed my pajamas, I smell, my smell is the smell of
the house, they They don't notice, they insist that I get into my bed but I can't
sleep and my father thumps the wall with the palm of his hand and then I cry and I
contract and I remember something my mother told me, when I stained that time: I
wish I had miscarried, I wish I hadn't had you, the blood stains, the screams and
the words of my grandmother and my brother and my aunts and my parents appear and
disappear, the slamming doors and the whispers and what escapes through the cracks
in the doors to enter me, and the fear of the legacy recovers the tears, but they
are different tears, another fear.
 Push. Push. Push.

6.02 a.m.

Push. Push. Push.

Here it is.

It is November 3.

I fall into the world

14

The simple words are the hardest to say.

And when it comes to starting the pain? Not to lie and handle
real facts to investigate the family and oneself and discover the shadows and what
is hidden in them.

One of my daughters has trouble sleeping. Almost every night the

scene is repeated: she asks me to get into her bed and hold her hand until she
falls asleep. Every night I tuck them in and tell them that I love them, unable to
avoid the thought of whether their fear is an inherited fear.

As they have turned years old, my daughters have started to ask.

Why do we only have grandparents?

open and close doors

(by way of thanks)

A book never ends. It's like a house. Not like the

house of my childhood and youth, but like what most understand as a home. Houses
are inhabited for a while and even for a lifetime. You change the decoration (new
objects enter, novels, comics..., and you throw others away), you invite friends
and family to come and stay as long as they want, welcome/treasure feelings and
emotions. Suddenly, you even discover something that you kept many years ago that
takes you to that corner that you forgot. In a house, doors and windows are opened
every day. And they also close. Without thinking.

The houses breathe what we have lived.

The book is never quite closed. And less one like this, in which
it is barely an intimate part of what it was. In a way, this book functions as a
refuge. One where I felt protected, that it was difficult for me to abandon, that
as my editor Iván Serrano told me "It is difficult for you to let go." In the end,
I got out of it. I closed the door to open others. Perhaps because there are more
houses to go to, although, from time to time, I still approach it, go around it,
enter and search the rooms, to perhaps discover that the only possible desire for
reparation, as I discovered in childhood, is to continue opening and closing doors,
although sometimes those doors are torn off, full of blows. The doors of childhood
and youth are the traces of not feeling loved. The anguish of overcoming the lack
of love and the hidden. What only one knows because the body never lies. The desire
to erase oneself. Disappear to understand one's own pain and that of others: that
destructive feeling of parents with their children. That violence that over the
years one identifies in a different way and even comes to understand, because my
parents also suffered. But that does not exempt them from the violence, from the
nested fear, from the destruction with which they devastated the house and those of
us who inhabited it. Perhaps another fear, that of transmission, is what has
allowed me to build this other house with words. And call my parents by their names
(something so simple I was unable to do for decades). And realizing that the fear
is still there, fear of transferring something to my daughters, but, at the same
time, the certainty that there are other houses and shelters that I can go to.

And, now yes, I open the door of thanks.

Thanks to my brother, friends (they know who they are), aunts and
acquaintances of my parents for their time and the trust they showed.

To Moisés Salama for the friendship during all these years and
the unwavering faith in this book.

To Juan Bonilla, my older brother in the literary field, my first

reader, whose name I never say in vain.

To Isabel Bono for the mijitas and little papers and shopping
lists.

To Dani Ruiz for the Kelme shoes that we share.

To José Miguel Molero for sharing secrets.

To the Tusquets family (Juan Cerezo, Iván Serrano, Delia Louzán,

Alejandra Segrelles, Natalia Gil, Ana Estevan, Cristina Martínez and Albert Andreu)
for welcoming me as one of the family.

To Elena, Carlota and Sofía, who breathe in the same house.

And to all those who are here or have been. Open the door...

I come from that fear

Miguel Angel West

 The total or partial reproduction of this book is not allowed,
nor its incorporation into a computer system, nor its transmission in any form or
by any means, be it electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or other
methods, without prior permission. and in writing from the publisher. Violation of
the aforementioned rights may constitute a crime against intellectual property
(Art. 270 and following of the Penal Code)

Contact CEDRO (Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights) if you

need to reproduce any part of this work. You can contact CEDRO through the website
www.conlicencia.com or by phone at 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47

Cover photo: © Roy Bishop / Arcangel

© Miguel Ángel Oeste, 2022

All rights reserved for Tusquets Editores, SA

Av. Diagonal, 662-664 - 08034 Barcelona (Spain)

www.tusquetseditores.com

First edition in electronic book (epub): September 2022

ISBN: 978-84-1107-164-2 (epub)

Conversion to e-book: Planet Realization

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