Multiple Choice

Everyone gets erased — life consists of meeting people whom first you love and then you erase — but you can’t erase children, you can’t erase parents. I know you’ve tried to erase me, and you couldn’t. I know I have existed, for you, in excess. That I have also existed in absence. When I wasn’t there, when I went weeks without seeing you that year I spent out of Chile, for example: even then I existed too much, because I wasn’t there but my absence was. That’s why I think it is only fair to tell you that I have also tried to erase you. All parents fantasize about those irresponsible lives, about eternal youth, sudden heroism. It’s the distortion of something we used to say, trying to imbue the words with a certain philosophical density: why bring children into a shitty world?

Our parents didn’t think that, they believed in love automatically, they married very young and they were unhappy, but not so much more than we were. They worked a ton and they didn’t even try to associate work with any kind of happiness, so their suffering was more concrete. Plus, they believed in God and they made us believe in God. That’s why we ate our food, that’s why we did our homework, that’s why it was hard for us, at night, to fall asleep: because God was watching us.

But we soon forgot God. We dismissed him as one more character from the stories of our childhood. We didn’t want to be like our parents. We wanted, at most, to have puppies, kittens, and tortoises, even parrots, although the wish to have something as nasty as a parrot has always been incomprehensible to me. We wanted to be children without children, which was the way to remain children forever and thus to blame our parents for everything. What we received when you were born was a little animal that was too alive, and also an excuse, the perfect alibi, a mantra, a multipurpose sentence: I have a son. I was never so motivated as in those first years to ask for raises, to avoid unnecessary commitments, to stop smoking and drinking so much or to smoke and drink like crazy, because in our language the phrase I have a son meant, in a not-so-tacit way, I have a problem. I must admit I knew perfectly well how to add seductive nuances to that phrase: I have a son meant, in some cases, I’m a serious man, I have lived, I’m responsible, I have a history, so go to bed with me. And the next morning, if I didn’t want to stay, or want her to stay for breakfast: Sorry, I have to go, you have to go, I have a son.

Except for those videos your mother got it into her head to show you — I don’t know whether for better or worse — I understand you don’t have any memory of our life when the three of us were together. When you were seven years old you told me that some of your classmates lived with their father and mother and you thought that was boring, because they only had one house. At the time I laughed, I wanted to interpret it literally, but I know there was pain there, a recrimination, though maybe an unconscious one. But in the end, almost all of your classmates had divorced parents. And even so I feel that the abyss separating you and me is deeper and more irrevocable than the abyss that always separates children from their parents.

__________

We never told you why we separated. I’m going to tell you now. The reason for our separation was Cosmo. Yes, Cosmo. It’s a sad story. You have to understand that we were going to separate anyway; for years we’d been looking for reasons, and of course if you hadn’t been born we would have separated much earlier. That afternoon I was furious with you but also unsure: you were barely three years old but you were very self-determined, and when you saw that poor abandoned puppy in the garbage bin on the corner, you picked him up and went right on walking. I told you we couldn’t keep him, but there was no way to make you understand. I was amazed that there was no crying — you were a crier but you didn’t cry then, which in some way revealed to me that you existed, that I couldn’t fool you anymore. You stroked the dog and named him Cosmo, and as we walked home I felt overpowered. I can think of no other word: overpowered. I understood while we were walking that right then a struggle was beginning, and it was one I would lose a thousand times: the struggle that perhaps now, with these words, I’m definitively losing.