Mystery and fantasy can help you soothe some of the pain for a loss, and I can
imagine how for someone whose life had been cut in two an object can
acquire that magic quality of triggering those comforting dreams. Maybe this
is why my father surrounded himself with so many of them, why he painted
them, and why he could produce that wonderful atmosphere around him,
perhaps it is what gave him a feeling of continuity between his two lives. It
was a world created from his dreams, from his oldest memories which
seemed to be not decades, but centuries old. And it was inside this world of
his that I was born.
My mother's past was not a presence like my father's,
and she transmitted to us no sweet or magic recollections from her own
youth. Her background was completely different. She came from a working
class Jewish family of Brooklyn, and her childhood seems to have been very
grim. Her mother died early, leaving four young children, and her father had
to work very hard and had little time for them. The little my mother would
tell us about her childhood I recreated in my mind in a cold and cloudy
atmosphere, a sad image produced by my mother's sadness.
She was much
younger than my father, and was probably overwhelmed by him. She had
abandoned her origins, married out of her faith against her father's will and,
as
did my own father (for this they did have in common), she wanted to choose
her own identity.
The idea of marrying a Spanish artist whom she found
distinguished and handsome and whose life-style probably evoked in her that
of the European artists that we see photographed in their studios during the
first decades of the centuries; black and white photographs of spaces with
high ceilings, full of books, paintings on the walls, perhaps an African mask,
some ceramics, the artist himself sitting on a couch with pillows made from
some ethnic fabric, half of him in the shadow, half in the light that came in
through a tall window (at an angle). The artist probably smoking a pipe and
looking at a book. How seducing this must have been!
But trying to raise three
daughters in a foreign country, in a new language, married to a man of
overpowering personality who didn't seem to understand that the world had
changed since his childhood, 60 years before, must have been exasperating.
Just getting us to go to school was a struggle because my father didn't see
the need; he even questioned the value of learning to read and write. "They
can sign their names with an 'X'," he'd say, half joking and half serious.
