Although they had each married only once, Rafa and Clara shared the fact that both had married partners of a higher social standing than our own, though in the case of my sister-in-law Isabel, who had blue blood on both her mother’s and her father’s side, the size of our family fortune somewhat took the shine off aristocratic names.
In each case, I had remained on the sidelines. I did not work for the family business, I had been the last to marry, my only wedding had taken place in a register office, my wife worked as a civil servant, her family were practically paupers, and my son was the only one of my parents’ grandchildren to go to a state school. To top it all, I was the only member of the Carrión family to vote for the left until my sister Angélica, the perfect wife, capable of winding herself around the man by her side with the sinuous intimacy of an orchid to a tree, kicked off the twenty-first century by unexpectedly leaving her first husband - a rather dumb urologist who had already walked out on her a couple of times - for an oncologist who was more intelligent than she was, handsome, charming, a militant atheist and even more left-wing than me.
Since then, my brother-in-law Adolfo had sided with me in these arguments and my sister followed our lead, albeit with some difficulty, since she had previously had no interest in politics beyond an instinctive, I would almost say pathological, approach to law and order which consisted of blaming everything on the victims. Five years into her second marriage, she could just about keep this trait in check and I was grateful to her for having brought someone interesting into our family discussions.
My isolated position meant that I could maintain a similar, equidistant relationship with all my siblings, including those like Rafa and Angélica whom I loved but did not get along with. Julio, who as a little boy had seemed destined to idolise and emulate the firstborn, had adroitly managed to shed this role to become a very different man, someone whose moods veered from light to shade with equal intensity. He was very likeable, funny, he adored his children, and he knew how to get the most out of those pleasures in life that cost nothing. In addition, he was much weaker than Rafa, which to me seemed a virtue, and although we didn’t have much in common, he was the closest thing to a friend I had among my brothers and sisters.
Clara and I still shared a special closeness, though I knew that there were times when she looked at me as though I were from another planet, wondering what I had done with her brother Álvaro. None of this bothered me much, until the day my father had another heart attack and the gravity of the prognosis meant we kept vigil into the long dark hours, the brothers- and sisters-in-law all vanishing, leaving me alone with Clara and Mamá in the waiting room of UCI. Then, perhaps because I had nothing else to do, I thought about my family, what we were, what we had been, about the things that brought us together and those that kept us apart, about the things that had endured and those which time had obliterated.
My father made it through the night; in fact he would live for almost a fortnight. From that moment, my sister and my mother became inexplicably important, almost indispensable, to me, not simply for what they represented, but for that part of me contained in each of them. And I knew that this was simply a side effect of grief, a trap set by my tired brain, which was frantically attempting to commit to memory every date, every place, every image of this man whom we could now do nothing to save. To remember my father was to remember us all, freshly washed and combed and dressed, posing for the camera in every family snapshot in the photo album which Mamá kept in the attic, along with the folders in which she kept our school reports. And I was thinking about this as I unwillingly, almost fearfully, prepared myself for my father’s absence,
In each case, I had remained on the sidelines. I did not work for the family business, I had been the last to marry, my only wedding had taken place in a register office, my wife worked as a civil servant, her family were practically paupers, and my son was the only one of my parents’ grandchildren to go to a state school. To top it all, I was the only member of the Carrión family to vote for the left until my sister Angélica, the perfect wife, capable of winding herself around the man by her side with the sinuous intimacy of an orchid to a tree, kicked off the twenty-first century by unexpectedly leaving her first husband - a rather dumb urologist who had already walked out on her a couple of times - for an oncologist who was more intelligent than she was, handsome, charming, a militant atheist and even more left-wing than me.
Since then, my brother-in-law Adolfo had sided with me in these arguments and my sister followed our lead, albeit with some difficulty, since she had previously had no interest in politics beyond an instinctive, I would almost say pathological, approach to law and order which consisted of blaming everything on the victims. Five years into her second marriage, she could just about keep this trait in check and I was grateful to her for having brought someone interesting into our family discussions.
My isolated position meant that I could maintain a similar, equidistant relationship with all my siblings, including those like Rafa and Angélica whom I loved but did not get along with. Julio, who as a little boy had seemed destined to idolise and emulate the firstborn, had adroitly managed to shed this role to become a very different man, someone whose moods veered from light to shade with equal intensity. He was very likeable, funny, he adored his children, and he knew how to get the most out of those pleasures in life that cost nothing. In addition, he was much weaker than Rafa, which to me seemed a virtue, and although we didn’t have much in common, he was the closest thing to a friend I had among my brothers and sisters.
Clara and I still shared a special closeness, though I knew that there were times when she looked at me as though I were from another planet, wondering what I had done with her brother Álvaro. None of this bothered me much, until the day my father had another heart attack and the gravity of the prognosis meant we kept vigil into the long dark hours, the brothers- and sisters-in-law all vanishing, leaving me alone with Clara and Mamá in the waiting room of UCI. Then, perhaps because I had nothing else to do, I thought about my family, what we were, what we had been, about the things that brought us together and those that kept us apart, about the things that had endured and those which time had obliterated.
My father made it through the night; in fact he would live for almost a fortnight. From that moment, my sister and my mother became inexplicably important, almost indispensable, to me, not simply for what they represented, but for that part of me contained in each of them. And I knew that this was simply a side effect of grief, a trap set by my tired brain, which was frantically attempting to commit to memory every date, every place, every image of this man whom we could now do nothing to save. To remember my father was to remember us all, freshly washed and combed and dressed, posing for the camera in every family snapshot in the photo album which Mamá kept in the attic, along with the folders in which she kept our school reports. And I was thinking about this as I unwillingly, almost fearfully, prepared myself for my father’s absence,
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