Free Father and Son by Marcos Giralt Torrente

be the object of my attentions—with whom I end up in bed.
    In 1991 I hardly ever go to class, and when I do, I show up late, sometimes without having slept, often hungover, often feeling dirty.
    *   *   *
    Today, as I write this in the late spring of 2008, I ask myself whether I’ve properly gauged the play of memories with which I aspire to approach an impossible objectivity. My feelings aren’t always the same, times change, and occasionally I notice that I’m leaving something out. I’ve talked, for example, about my father’s family, but I realize that I haven’t described him, that I’ve hardly said anything about what he was like.
    *   *   *
    He wore glasses and was a skinny boy who stood out in the rough squalor of the schools of postwar Madrid. He wasn’t fearful, but he preferred his own realms: his grandparents’ house in the summer, his girl cousins on his mother’s side of the family, the French edition of Elle , to which his older sister subscribed and which, in addition to the usual fashion stories, ran reviews of books, music, and art. Once, talking to me in the hospital about those days, he said that he remembered himself as always being sad.
    â€œAfter your mother died?” I asked.
    â€œAlways.”
    Adolescence strengthened his body, and in his youth, it was his unexpected beauty, the effect it had on women, as well as the decision to be an artist, that gave him confidence. He became a painter, lived in different places, but the boy in glasses crouched inside of him and occasionally returned to seize control, paralyzing him whenever life most resembled a schoolyard.
    *   *   *
    He kept a diary of trivial events—what he had done, whom he had seen, his progress on his current painting—recorded in brief entries and occasionally shaded with faint strokes that provided glimpses of his state of mind. Often he crossed out several days in a row and wrote fight or pissed. It was as far as he would let himself go, on the off chance that eyes other than his might read what he had written. The fights were usually with the friend he met in Brazil, but also with me.
    *   *   *
    He had a tendency to gain weight. He liked food and drink, and because he was vain, he was permanently dissatisfied with his weight. He was a competent cook, but he was just as happy to eat the worst junk, with which he soothed the anxieties that gnawed at him.
    He had a weakness for fried food and for anything in béchamel sauce; he preferred meat to fish, but he had a great fondness for cod and anchovies and also eggplant; he liked cured meats, pasta, meat loaf, meatballs; he liked cabbage, beets, tuna, liver with onions; he didn’t care for any other kind of offal and he didn’t much like salads, most seafood or shellfish, or any raw fish. He liked Chinese food and Indian food and Mexican food and hamburgers and sausages. He liked wine and beer.
    *   *   *
    Almost every evening he had a drink, but as far as I know, he didn’t favor a particular liquor. He chose based on what was available and on the fluctuation of his tastes. Rum, whiskey, gin, bourbon …
    *   *   *
    He smoked for a while, but he was one of those smokers who is always trying to quit, and finally he did quit.
    *   *   *
    He was humble with the meek and contemptuous with the arrogant, but humility and contempt alike were expressed from the grips of a nervous agitation, so that neither was perceived by its recipients with total clarity, blurred by the haste with which he hid himself or dealt a blow.
    *   *   *
    He was impatient and, as a result, often committed injustices. In speaking to a waiter or concluding a conversation.
    *   *   *
    He could tell a good jacket or a good shirt when he saw one, and he knew the ways of high society, having