TE19 Iberian Adventure

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

but I have only a faint, blurry image of him during those years, barely even a silhouette. If I trawl the expanses of my rational mind, that realm of lucidity, I discover that it’s empty. So empty that inordertobelievethatmy fatherwasonceayoungandhealthy man with aspirations, I have to consult a handful of photographs that show him to me before the collapse. My father and me, him sporting hideous 1960s styles and with his striking resemblance to the French actor Muarice Ronet, whom I will discover years later in one of my favorite films, Louis Malle’s “The Fire Within.” My father and my mother in Elda, Alicante, shortly after I was born, young and blissful, the laughter frozen on their faces rendering them strangers to my eyes (I’ve never witnessed anything resembling this kind of jubilation beyond the borders of this photo.) My father teaching me how to ride a bike in the Cantabrian town of Navejada, where my great uncles had a ranchwherewe spent part of the summer. Here, he nowpossesses a bulky frame, the product of a sedentary lifestyle characterized by shifts at work, alcohol, and an atrocious diet. Although I’mpresent in two of these three photos, although I still retain clear memories of my childhood in Gijon and in Navajeda, although I can even accurately reconstruct the realities of my childhood existence during that time, the interests, generally quite fleeting, that brought color to my days, I have to confess that, apart from these photos of us together, there is a void surrounding my father and his role in my life. This gives rise to a paradox, one which, after having applied it to my own experience as a father of three, has often kept me awake at night: the unsettling fact that my father only begins to 115