Free Father and Son by Marcos Giralt Torrente Page A

grown up with them, but his pride and his masculinity barred him from pretending to be something he wasn’t. Tending to a pair of handmade shoes or a bespoke suit with the calculated care of someone who can’t replace them as frequently as he’d like, taking refuge in appearances, being frugal to strategic effect, donning some disguise would have run counter to his convictions and his character.
    In the fifties he adopted the tailored jacket typical of intellectuals and artists of the period, worn with a turtleneck sweater or a V-neck sweater without a tie; in the sixties, this look was replaced by blazers and jeans, often worn with boots; at the beginning of the seventies he let his hair grow, wore looser clothes, experimented with extravagant accessories and pendants; in the eighties the colors got brighter … Then the years began to pass more slowly; tones changed; fabrics changed. Ever since I can remember, he always owned at least one suit, but his frequent weight swings meant that he couldn’t wear it for long. When he had to dress up, he just added a jacket and a tie to jeans. If solemnity was required, the jacket would be classic, wool or silk, but if the occasion permitted—say, one of his own openings—he was bolder and dug out some gaudy specimen from his collection of tacky ties bought in New York. In winter he wore a military or Barbour jacket; he liked it to have inside pockets, zippered if possible. He wore unremarkable shoes, loafers with rubber soles or moccasins. He kept his keys on a carabiner, hanging from a belt loop, and he carried shoulder bags. In the seventies and eighties they were made of brown leather, which he brushed until it shone, and beginning in the nineties, they were of black fabric, matching the dark clothes he had begun to wear not so much according to the dictates of fashion, but in order to hide his girth. Outside, he walked with a hand on his bag to protect it. At my apartment and his, he always left it at his feet so that it would be nearby whenever he might need it. In it he kept his wallet, an agenda, the case and chamois cloth for his glasses, a notebook, tissues …
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    He hated any kind of distinguishing feature denoting class or group differences.
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    He liked his comforts. He liked comfortable and well-decorated houses, and he liked pretty things, liked to possess them. He was a fetishist, not a collector; he didn’t accumulate. He was attracted to antiques, though he never lost the pop sensibility that made him tolerant of kitsch. He had an eye that could take almost any object out of context and bestow upon it a singularity it had previously lacked. He had no time for the ostentatious or the pretentious, nor did he let himself be seduced by contemporary versions of classic modern furniture. He had a Breuer tube chair, but his was an original. He didn’t seek out specific pieces. He preferred serendipitous finds. Actually, his decorating style, with its integration of diverse elements, was reminiscent of his later paintings. He was always seeing things from a new angle, discovering an unexpected side—of an Elizabethan desk, a religious carving, the vertebra of a whale, a Japanese engraving, a polka-dotted sixties lounge chair, some souvenir … He bought English and American design magazines, and every Sunday morning at eight he visited the Rastro in search of bargains. His greatest domestic sins were committed when he let himself be carried away by whims at antique shops or auction halls, and his trips almost always yielded some piece that for a while sat enthroned in a prominent spot in his house.
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    He was curious about almost everything.
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    He was a cultured man, it goes without saying.
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    When he was young, and into his thirties, he was a conscientious and up-to-the-minute reader of