TE19 Iberian Adventure

Ricardo Menéndez Salmón

radical honesty on myself. If the taboo had expired and the veil was lifted, all that was possible were transparency, the scalpel, and unadorned objectivity. So, not only was it a case of discarding what had been learnt, it was also a case of unlearning literary devices. To speak about my own father, it wasn’t enough to aspire to the truth about lies : instead, I had to court the truth about truths . Merely finding away of distinguishing my father from those others which literature had composed over the course of millennia was insufficient; instead, I had to portray that father without being restricted by the limitations dictated by decency, tradition, or piety, those elements which all fathers impose on a child who decides towrite about him. This involves being able tooperateon two levels, which is a very complex, perhaps impossible proposition. On the one hand, it means throwing overboard all that has been learnt about a cardinal relationship and disregarding anything not relevant to me and my father; on the other, contemplating my father in a dispassionate way, scientifically and forensically, exactly as if my father were not my father. When I think about my father, the first word that comes to mind is illness. I recall my father as a person who was constantly ill, after having a heart attack at age 38 that would hang over him for the rest of his and his family’s lives. I was 11 at the time, but any memories related to the father figure from prior to that date have been erased. I remembermy father enjoying good healthduringmy childhood, 114 ***