I decided that the photos I had already taken would be enough. The next step was to find a place to get them developed. It couldn’t be near my house. It had to be in another neighborhood. Luckily, a city like New York allows you to be anonymous.
I got them developed the next day in Chinatown. My plan involved tying up my right arm in a sling. I went into a camera shop and spoke to a very friendly Chinese woman: I insisted that I needed to have the photographs at once. “Tomorrow,” she said, but in the end she gave in and said I could have them in three hours. I had an envelope with me and asked her to write down the address because my right hand was bandaged. She did not complain and even told me where the nearest post office was.
I had abandoned the idea of adding a note saying, “Your wife is cheating on you.” The photos themselves told a sufficiently obvious story. They were clear proof of my mother’s betrayal.
All I had to do now was wait a few days for the envelope to arrive at my father’s office, which was the address I had had the woman write. I must confess that I felt a little nervous as I waited for the big day to arrive. Every afternoon when my father came home from work I looked at him, to see if he was angry or upset. And finally the great day came.
That Monday my father came home earlier than expected. My mother had been on duty the night before and was at home. Jaime was in his room studying and I was drawing a picture.
“Tell my wife to come into the study,” my father said to María as soon as he had come through the door.
“She’s in the kitchen,” María said, a little surprised by my father’s sullen tone and bearing.
But he said nothing and went straight to the study. My mother went there a few seconds later, confused by his request. She didn’t shut the door and I hid in the hallway, excited to imagine what would happen next.
My father handed her the envelope without saying anything. She looked at it uncomprehendingly.
“What is this?”
“You tell me.”
She opened the envelope and took out the photographs. She went through them one by one; there were more than twenty of them. Then she put them back in the envelope and handed it back to my father.
“It’s you who needs to give me an explanation. Are you spying on me?”
“I need to give you an explanation? Well, you’ve got nerve at least.”
“Juan, don’t raise your voice…” When she was nervous, my mother would use the Spanish version of my father’s name.
“Don’t call me Juan and I’m not raising my voice. I’m asking you for an explanation and you have the nerve to tell me that I should be giving you one.”
“Yes. I want to know who took these photos, who has been following me, and why. And you have the photos, so you should be able to give me an explanation.”
My father barely managed to contain his indignation. I saw his clenched fists held down at his sides and my mother in front of him, looking him in the eye, defiant.
“They came to me in the mail this morning.”
“Who sent them to you?” my mother insisted.
“The charitable soul who found you out neglected to include a business card,” my father replied.
“Right…And this ‘charitable soul,’ as you call him, what exactly has he discovered?”
“Who is this man, Carmela? Why do you go to this house?”
“You’re asking me for explanations?”
“Are you surprised?”
“We’ve always had a relationship of mutual trust,” my mother replied. “I’ve never asked you about your dinners with clients or why you stayed late working in the office. And I wouldn’t be suspicious of you if tomorrow I came across you walking down the street with a woman I didn’t know.”
“You’re good at this, Carmela! You’d have made a great lawyer. Turning the victim into the aggressor. Amazing!”
“No one has attacked you, but you are attacking me. I insist that you give me an explanation.”
I had never seen my father so angry. He was an even-tempered man who never raised his voice. This was the first time I had heard him shout.
“Where do you go on Thursdays, Carmela?”
“Thursdays! Goodness, you’re so on the ball that you can even put days of the week on these photos.”
“You owe me an explanation,” my father insisted. “Or else…”
“Are you threatening me, Juan?”
“I’m asking for an explanation. Nothing more.”
Up to that moment they had been standing up, facing each other. Now my mother sat down in an armchair, first lighting a cigarette, even though she knew it annoyed my father greatly when she smoked.
She greedily sucked in the smoke while my father remained standing.
“I suppose you know that in this country you can die without good medical insurance, without anyone feeling the need to look after you in a hospital like you deserve. That there are treatments you don’t get if you can’t pay for them, no matter how sick you are. The man in the photo is…He’s a friend of mine and Alta Gracia’s. He worked in hospital reception for a while, then they fired him, you know how these businesses are. They thought that a younger, more attractive woman was better than a middle-aged man. And he, well, he worked at the jobs he could get, and now he keeps the books for most of the businesses around where he lives. He’s a good man. When they threw him out of the hospital his wife abandoned him. She took their two little children and he hasn’t heard anything about her since. Now he lives with his daughter Natalie, from his first marriage. She’s twenty years old and has cancer, and she’s not going to get better. She needs palliative care, but he doesn’t have the money to pay for it. So Alta Gracia and I help as much as we can. I go and help wash her and…well, I give her morphine injections for the pain. I help them. I usually go on Thursdays, which is when Alta Gracia has her guitar lessons. I spend two or three hours there; I wash her, I change her sheets, I give her the morphine…Natalie is aware that she is going to die, that she’s living on borrowed time. The doctors told her that she wouldn’t live more than six months, and the end is near. And if you want to know more, I’ll tell you. I think George is a good man. I don’t do what I do just for his daughter, but also for him. He’s a good man, an upright man, who has been denied all the good that he deserves. You wouldn’t like him, and do you know why? Because George is a loser and you don’t want to hear anything about losers. Life has been good to you. You haven’t had to struggle to get what you’ve got; it was always there, and all you had to do was stretch out your hand and take it. The rest of us have had to fight to make our way. I’ve been lucky; George hasn’t, and he’s been left behind.”
—
They didn’t say anything. What more was there to say? I scarcely dared breathe for fear that they would realize I was there.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this man and this girl?” my father asked in a hoarse voice.
“I don’t know. I suppose because it has nothing to do with you. Why should you care what happens to someone you don’t know?”
“George is a part of your life you don’t share with me, is that it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“When someone’s hiding something…”
“Yes, they end up looking suspicious.”
“What is there between George and you?”
My mother said nothing. She seemed to be trying to formulate her answer as if she were afraid of what she was going to say.
“Nothing to be ashamed of. But I do feel close to him, close to his pain. I admire him, okay? Yes, I admire him because in spite of everything he hasn’t given in. He’s lost his wife, his two young children, he’s about to lose his daughter forever, and he still keeps on fighting. I don’t know where he gets the strength to carry on.”
“What do you want to do?” my father asked, aware now of the depth of feeling that existed between my mother and George.
“What do you want to do, John? You sent people to s
py on me.”
“I didn’t send anyone. I don’t know who sent me these photos.”
“You might not know who, but the reason is clear: there’s someone who wants to hurt me, who wants to hurt the both of us,” my mother said.
“Well, they’ve done it,” my father replied.
“George is not my lover,” my mother said in a low voice.
“Yes, but you yourself have said how important this man is to you. You spoke about him in a way that I don’t imagine you’d speak about me. Sometimes the betrayal is greater when it has nothing to do with sex. Carmela, it’s you who has to explain yourself, to tell me why you didn’t share this with me, why you pushed me to the side. I think that both of us know the answer.”
My mother seemed to be afraid. The security that she had so rejoiced in was starting to melt away. My father was standing, facing her, looking at her as though she were a stranger. She had wounded him deeply. All the certainties of his life were falling apart in front of his eyes.
I wanted to shout, that’s how happy I felt to see my mother about to be ruined. Yes, ruined! And by me! I was sure that my father would not be able to forgive her and that they would end up separating. They had no other option.
“I’ve got work to do. I’ll sleep here,” my father said, making a sign that my mother should leave the study.
“Juan, we can’t leave things like this. I…Perhaps I wasn’t entirely aware of how important it was, what I was doing.”
“I’m not blaming you for wanting to help someone who worked with you. You know that that’s not the problem. I’m not a monster. The question you need to answer, and answer to me, is why you hid what you were doing, why you couldn’t share it with me, why this man is so important to you.”
“There was nothing between us, I swear!”
“Please, Carmela, that’s not what we are talking about and you know it.”
—
My father had decided that the conversation was over, and my mother did not seem to have the strength to continue. I hurried away, scared that she would find me. I couldn’t sleep that night, as I was enjoying my triumph.
Our lives changed. The change was not rapid, but it was clear. I waited desperately for my parents to tell Jaime and me that they had decided to separate, and I grew impatient that days went by without either of them saying anything.
They didn’t say anything, they didn’t speak, apart from saying, “Please pass the sugar,” or, “Would you mind giving me that cup?”
María noticed the tension between my parents and seemed to have been struck dumb, and she even stopped annoying me with her constant reproaches.
Jaime was worried. He knew something was happening but did not know what it was.
“I don’t know what’s up with Dad and Mama. They’re not talking at all. It’s like they’re…not angry, but distant. Don’t you think it’s strange?” my brother asked me one day.
I shrugged, as though I didn’t care. I don’t think Jaime expected this reaction, and he kept on talking to me even though he was in fact talking to himself.
“Dad sleeps in the study a lot. I heard them talking a few days ago. Mama asked him to come back to the room they always used to share, and he said that he was busy with a case and that he’d sleep in the study that night as well. I hope it’s nothing serious; I’d hate it if our parents split up. I love them both so much.”
“You stick to your own business and leave them to deal with theirs. Why do you care what happens to them?”
“Of course I care, and you should care too, they’re our parents…”
“And they’re old enough to know what’s best for them. And don’t be dumb, you’re not a kid anymore.”
One afternoon when I came home I saw that the study door was shut. I wanted to go in, but María stopped me.
“Your parents are talking and they told me that no one was to disturb them. You’ll have to wait.”
“Have they been talking for a long time?” I asked.
“More than two hours. Don’t be nosy. Go to your room. You must have some homework to do.”
At last! I thought. At last they’re talking, deciding how to manage their separation. That’s what they must be doing, I thought. But I was wrong. My parents came out of the study having made an agreement: they would carry on living together. That weekend we resumed our custom of eating out after going to the exhibitions our father wanted to see.
We returned to our routine, but did so without much enthusiasm. I was furious that I hadn’t achieved my goal of breaking up my parents, and my parents seemed to be resigned more than anything else. The only person who seemed happy was Jaime.
No, I hadn’t managed to break them up, but I consoled myself with the thought that I had destroyed my father’s trust in my mother, and that she would never be able to recover it. It seemed that they had stopped being happy, although they went back to sharing a room.
My father treated my mother with a coldness that was not at all a matter of calculation, but rather the result of something having broken inside him that could not be repaired. My mother stopped laughing. She seemed to stop caring about her looks; she got fat. Worry made her eat more than she should have.
I asked myself why they had decided to stay together if it was clear that they now felt very separate from each other. But I could not figure out a reason.
Now it was my father who sometimes came home late, while my mother stopped going out on Thursday afternoons.
I broke their life together, and although I enjoyed this at the time, now I realize how useless my triumph was. I shouldn’t have sent those photos to my father. No, I definitely shouldn’t have done that.
If I could turn back time I would go back to the afternoon when I had the photos developed. Yes, I should have stopped at that moment. I imagine how things would have been:
The Chinese sales assistant would have asked me when I needed the photos. As soon as possible, I would have insisted. Then I would have asked her to write my father’s address on the envelope and I would have set off toward the post office. Imagine the scene. Once all the stamps were in place, the post office clerk would have stretched out his hand for the envelope, and I would have taken a step backward.
“Do you want me to mail it or not?” he would have asked, surprised at my reaction.
“It’s just that…Well, I think there’s something I forgot to put in it…I just remembered…I’d better check and bring it back.”
I would have pressed the envelope to my chest and once I was safely out in the street I would have gasped for breath, asking myself why I hadn’t done what I promised myself I would do.
“It’s a crime what you were planning to do to your parents,” I would have said to myself. “The truth is that your mother hasn’t done anything serious enough to you for you to try to destroy her. You’re going to hurt Dad a lot, and he won’t recover from this.”
I would have struggled with myself for a long time. I would have gone over the list of grievances I had against my mother and then would have thought about the harm I was about to cause my father. He had shown me infinite kindness, even though I had always been the person I was. No, he didn’t deserve to be punished this way. Perhaps my mother did, but not my father.
I could have carried on with my little petty revenges against her, there was always something to do, but there was no need to destroy my father.
Walking up and down while I marshaled my thoughts, I would have eventually come to a decision. I would have gone over to a storm drain, opened the envelope, and torn the photographs into unrecognizable pieces and dropped them through the grating.
As I tore them up I would have felt a slight discomfort with myself for having been so soft, for having felt compassion for my father and allowing that to stop me from taking revenge on my mother.
When I got home, I would have found my father in the study, absorbed in some papers.
“Come in, Thomas, come in. How was school today?”
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We would have spoken for a while about nothing much: my classes, my classmates, María’s last complaint about how untidy my room was, and we would have heard my mother’s key turn in the lock, heard how tired she was as she came in. She would have come over to my father to give him a kiss on the cheek, then squeezed my arm and said hello, and then gone to say hello to Jaime in his room.
Yes, everything would have been the same as it had been up to then. My mother would never have abandoned us for the man in the mysterious building. It was just an illusion, a means of feeling alive, of overcoming her deadening routine.
Marriage to my father had played a key role in her personal and social ascent in the world. She, the daughter of an immigrant, had been transformed into an East Coast upper-class wife. Yes, she had come a long way, not just because of her education and her work, but also because her place in the world had been transformed when she married John Spencer.
She liked calling my father Juan, but that was a joke between the two of them. John Spencer was a respected lawyer, as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him had been. He had a spacious apartment in Manhattan, insurance in case of sickness or unanticipated expenses, and a dozen good friends with whom he could spend weekends sailing off Newport, as well as traveling every now and then to Europe.
They had a good life in which nothing was lacking, and my mother enjoyed all the advantages she had not had as a child living in Miami and, later, in Queens.
No, she would not have taken any step that would have cost her all this. I was sure of that.
That night, I would have felt a bittersweet sensation in my stomach. Bitter because I had not delivered the coup de grâce to my mother, sweet because I had saved my father.
I would have observed her, at dinner, and said to her wordlessly: “You owe me your life, this life that you are enjoying, and if I wanted to I could tear it away from you.” I would look at my father and at Jaime and think that, even though they didn’t know it, they would always be in my debt for having allowed them to remain ignorant of my mother’s lies, to keep them living this life that flowed peaceably, without great upheavals.