The day my father died is irretrievable, lost in some tangle of neural circuitry that I’ll never be able to access. What I’m left with is a replica of a replica that says this: my father lost consciousness at around one in the morning. I rang Mariana to let her know, but the answering machine cut in, so I left a message. I sat on a stool by his hospital bed and began to talk to my father. Although I was initially hesitant—embarrassed in case the nursing staff should overhear or anyone should see me—my words eventually began to come more easily. By about half past three I was speaking fluently, only occasionally lapsing into silence for a few minutes at a time.
I spoke to him about the past: told him about the time Teresa fainted outside the market and when I kicked a pigeon. I told him that when I was ten, Rat had accompanied me to the Taxqueña bus station, and also that I’d seen Rat again, a few weeks before, having an argument with his teenage daughter not far from the hospital. I told my unconscious father about the restroom in the service station on the way to Villahermosa, where I’d left behind my briefs, and about the bathroom in Mariconchi’s house.
I also used those hours to communicate certain focuses of resentment that had been smoldering in my chest for some time. I reproached him for his narrow-mindedness, the way he’d distanced Mariana, his violent rages, his need to control everyone around him. I’d never have dared to say any of that if he could hear me. Unlike my sister, who’d been openly challenging his authority from the age of fifteen, I’d borne my father’s abuse in absolute silence. When my patience was reaching its limits, I’d try to tell myself that Teresa’s death had been as painful for him as it had for us, even more so, because he’d known her longer.
At four in the morning my father briefly recovered consciousness and muttered something I couldn’t make out due to the tubes connecting him to life. Whatever it was, they were his last words. I’m not sure why, but I’m convinced they weren’t important.
Three or four times during the following forty minutes I believed he was dead and called the nurse, who felt his pulse and shook her head, looking me straight in the face without compassion or ceremony. Finally, at seventeen minutes past five, he did die. When his decease had been confirmed, I held his hand for a moment, as a sort of farewell, and then left the room, following the doctor.
Mariana arrived just before six. I’ve no idea if she was sorry to have missed that final moment. The truth is, I guess, that she’d said her goodbyes long ago.
Neither of us cried. We’d had time to assimilate, even desire, the death of the man who had, to a great extent—against his will, against ours—brought us up.
My father’s will stated that the vigil was to be held in a funeral home; a gray, airless place that offered substantial discounts to the staff of the bank where he’d worked.
Someone had left a yellow bucket containing a dirty rag in one corner of the room where the coffin stood. At some point I thought of asking for it to be removed, but then told myself that it wasn’t worth the effort. My father’s former colleagues and their wives must have had the same thought. His boss of the previous ten years, a man his own age, told me a few of the anecdotes about my father that everyone always remembered: the time he bought a cake for his secretary, convinced—wrongly—that it was her birthday; another occasion when he’d accidentally made a pun on a client’s name; and yet another when it had taken three or four of them to prevent him from punching someone in a cantina. They were silly stories that portrayed him as a simple, bad-tempered, but to some extent likeable man.
Mariana had a hard time masking her disdain of those people. She shook hands, smiled occasionally, and then went outside to smoke, taking Katia or one of her female friends with her. For my part, I hadn’t invited anyone; I’d felt no need for moral support. It was all the same to me if I had to spend the night in the company of account executives, area managers, and second cousins.
A week after the funeral, Mariana and I had a meeting with the lawyer. Victor Garmendia was one of the few of my father’s acquaintances who neither worked at the bank nor were members of the club. I’ve never understood how they got to know each other, and he was never invited to our house, but my father used to refer to Garmendia with a degree of warmth that was rare in him.
On meeting the lawyer in the flesh, however, I had the impression that the feeling wasn’t mutual: he spoke of my father as a long-standing client with whom he’d had the occasional beer, but little else.
We agreed that Garmendia would take charge of the sale of the house in Educación—in exchange for a percentage of the purchase price—as soon as we handed over the keys. My task was to clear out the house: to sell or give away everything it contained. Mariana preferred not to be involved.
I’d left my job teaching Spanish as a foreign language to be with my father during the last months of his life. It was a badly paid job that had involved tolerating intolerably spoiled gringo
