TE19 Iberian Adventure

Ricardo Menéndez Salmón

an admission of guilt or trying to find the beat of his heart. His gaze is fixed on the room’s sole window. That gaze contemplates something insignificant, a landscape unrelated to any epiphany afforded during his final breaths. Here, death is a prosaic affair. I know this because I have peered out of this opening and are there is nothing beyond it whichwarrants a second glance. Roofs. Ariels. A silly patch of sky. After my father’s death, I felt that a taboo had been lifted. I could finallywrite about him, about his life, about his achievements and his failures. I’d always wanted to do so, but a stubborn reticence, or perhaps a discomfort at the thought that my father might have read what I wrote, repeatedly made me put it off. And yet, even in death, my father was able to impose a fresh moratorium. What I had believed would be possible after my father’s death only started to take shape two years later, when, after discovering the anecdote about the painter Han Gan, there now seemed to be a sense of urgency. Writing is a mystery, capable of connecting what is most distant with what is most intimate, hooves of fictitious horses with the breath of a dying father. ***

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The first challenge I faced when writing about my father was resisting the temptation of making him into a literary character. 112