Today is the anniversary of the last time I spoke to my son. My daughter followed in silence a few weeks later. For a long year my children, who are no longer children though English, unlike Spanish, keeps them children all their lives, have not talked to me. The reasons are too complicated to explain, even to myself.
I feel like a jilted lover. It’s like that Neil Diamond song. You give them your heart and you give them your soul and you’re left alone with nothing to hold. A former colleague once chided me with the words: “Gustavo, with you everything is personal.” And so it is. What doesn’t touch me, doesn’t reach me. But if you’re born with the gift of transposition, too many things touch you. Like songs of lost love.
I’m happily married, have been so, with unpredictable bumps along the road, for more than thirty years. Mary Anne loves me. David and Miriam, mis hijos, they do too. Probably they can’t help it; but by the way they behave you couldn’t tell the difference. Things might have been different had I never divorced their mother, except that Mary Anne’s not the problem. They like her better than they like me. There must be something about me that makes my offspring, slinky-like, bounce away from their father.
I’m listening to Sinatra: “This love of mine goes on and on, though life is empty since you’ve been gone.” Transposing, I hear a torch song about my son and me. He has carved a void that no one but David can fill. The Cuban sonero Rolando Laserie sings “Mentiras tuyas” (Your Lies), a famous bolero about a woman who tortures herself trying to forget the man who loves her. He tells her: “Yo soy algo en tu vida imposible de olvidar,” a loose translation of which would be: I’ve been too important in your life for you to forget me. That’s what I’d say to Miriam were she willing to talk. If I did, I suspect she would reply: “Pop, what you’re saying is very hurtful.” As if trying to live without me were not, for both of us.
Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s is published in The Paris Review and The Southern Review among others. He has also published books of literary and cultural criticism, a memoir, Next Year in Cuba, and poetry collections in Spanish and English. Pérez Firmat is David Feinson Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Columbia University.
