Side by Side, Their Faces Blurred
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
(Phillip Larkin, The Trees)
People are usually disappointed to match my name to my face. It’s a slight thing, an eye twitch or curl of surprise around the corners of a mouth. It’s not unjustified. I don’t look anything like a Francisco Garcia-Ferrera, aside from the squashed little quadrant around my eyes, punctuated by thick black eyebrows. I’m privy to about four words of Spanish and my voice doesn’t betray anything apart from my London origins. The furthest I’ve managed to clamber clear of my beginnings is Dundee, which no one has ever mistaken for an Iberian outpost.
And it’s true, I’ve seldom set foot in the country aside from sporadic trips to visit some English ex-pat family in Mallorca. None of this is special. I imagine most people must get bored of explaining themselves and the unchosen quirks of their origins and identity. I hardly interrogate it myself anymore. It’s easier to smile and ride out the few seconds of social embarrassment and gently prodded admonishment. Yes, I should really learn the language. Sure, you would done something about it if you were me. Easier by far to grin and nod until the inevitable dissolution into idle pleasantries or football talk.
Although something seems to have stirred these past few months. The reasons aren’t grand, nor were they precipitated by any sort of painful identity prolapse. Instead, it’s a simple thing. Something I took to be a positive, thoughtless decision like getting contents insurance or unfriending an ex on Facebook. Realising that having a Spanish father means easily qualification for citizenship, I decided to apply for a passport. The material proof isn’t difficult to accrue. Notices of birth and death, marriage and residency, 80 quid and a trip to the Lewisham Council buildings. I’ve often joked to family and friends that I might as well ‘get something’ out of my heritage, and it’s true. I’ve spent my life lugging its weight on my back and labouring under the burden of my own self-sustained ignorance. Now, I thought, it’s about time to shift the scales the other way, to draw something out for myself and myself alone.
Yet what I’ve drawn so far is nothing like what I expected and doesn’t have much in common with the minor administrative victory of winning a second passport, or having the right to go and find loose employment in a country belonging to the EU. For me, it represents the best I can do to make sense of the tangled beginnings and competing currents of my younger days. It’s a story about death, disease, adventure and frailty. It’s about memory and the capacity to forget, repress and reshape. But mainly, it’s a ghost story about my father, though not just him alone.
It starts as most things do, with a series of accidents; happy and otherwise. It begins with mum’s obsession with Spain, the result of a trip to Grenada with my aunty somewhere in the mid-80s. It was a holiday that became a revelation. By whatever collision of nature and events, mum had grown up to be a woman of a vastly developed inner life, rich in sensitivity, shyness and secrecy. Prone to myth and fascinated with ritual and all things that gestured to a world outside the drab airlessness and fish scale grey of the South East London of the time.
I love when my aunts tell me stories about her days living among Romani travellers and how she grew her hair down past her waist in affectation and homage. Of her wrapped for hours in contemplation over long forgotten books of folklore and history. Even of a mysterious first marriage from an even earlier period, one from which no details or records survive. It’s more painful to learn of her demons, of her serious eating disorders, of the torments of mind that led her to burn all of her writing, her poetry, her creative labours. Both of them talk- just as my gran, her mother, used to- about the talent she possessed but was crippled from sharing. It makes sense to me now, why Spain held such appeal. Something in its dust and richness which chimed with all that lay dormant and unfulfilled in her. A perfect coming together of person and place such as most people never have the luck to experience.
There’s a photograph that survives of that first trip which manages to capture all this with a clarity that words can’t. Mum, sitting in deep reverie in what looks to be the interior of some significant place, perhaps a church. A few deep shadows envelope her body but her face is tilted to something outside, to a vast expanse of summer light. The shadows are not a portent of some impending melancholy, but speak of calm and refuge from the arid heat outside. It’s striking, just how much she looks like a figure from a Rossetti print, stuck somewhere out of time. A figure poised somewhere just beyond, or behind, the captured moment.
It was in Spain that she met my father. Not on the first trip, although this is what galvanised her to return to London and to her administrative job at Lambeth Council. What must have made it bearable is the knowledge that she was going back, and that’s what happened. Armed with a few preparatory classes and the discipline to cram an hour of study in a night, she arrived back in Spain with a baseline of language and a determination to immerse herself. This is where the narrative grows hazy in my mind. I have no idea where, or how, they met aside from that it must have been in La Linea, a small unpretentious city in Andalusia from which my father and his family have been based for generations.
It’s not difficult to imagine the first buds of their romance. Mum, beautiful and eager. And him, considerably younger yet possessing something vital and unique. Strikingly handsome, charming, kind, intelligent. Part-time Flamenco dancer, ex-boxer, here-and-there handyman. Prone to late nights and sessions of song and drinking, accompanied by the Spanish guitar. But this is where memory and misremembered anecdote hit their limits, and where my capacity for imagination hits something harder. At this point, it’s better to return to the drylands of history.
So, things blossomed. All of those blissful first apprehensions of love occurred. Then, marriage. After that, the momentous decision to return to London, to mum’s networks of family, friends and kin. By this time, mum was utterly fluent in her new language. I remember, much later, how popular she was with all the South American mothers at my primary school who relied on her as an unofficial translator. It makes me proud, and it made her and others happy, which is no small thing. Yet perhaps we shouldn’t run ahead to happiness, when there’s so much else to tell first.
The return to London wasn’t smooth. Packed into gran’s tiny one-bedroom flat in Catford, the result was a dynamic packed tight with predictable stresses of proximity and mutual incomprehension. Then, I arrived. Which meant a council flat in Hither Green and the possibilities of partial freedom and space. Gran used to tell me that when I finally showed up, my father was so thrilled by the shape of my hands he ran up and down the ward, telling all the exhausted expectants of Lewisham Hospital maternity wing just how remarkable they were, and what a good portent they would prove to be. That never fails to make me smile, even now.
I realise I’ve said very little about him, not even his name. In truth, it’s difficult. Not just because his memory is a painful thing. Ignorance is a factor, as is the usual tangle of recrimination and dulled stock responses, like a Getty’s Image slideshow for ‘jilted son’. ‘Cristobal Garcia-Ferrera, Painter and Decorator’, as my birth certificate puts it. Simply ‘Chris’ then, as now.
In many ways, it’s much easier to write about the dead. It’s not that your responses to them are static or unthinking, but your bank of recollections is finite even despite their occasional unreliability and flickers in tone and mood. There is a certainty in your communion, a knowledge that your relations are set at an unassailable distance that offers both a kind of peace and something approaching comfort. I know where I stand with mum. In amber, locked into the tomb of childhood where unearthing memories is effort and each burst is something vivid, like tears.
It’s not the same for Cristobal. It’s not that there aren’t flickers of joy illuminating the gaps and confusions. I remember crawling into their bed in that Hither Green flat, to tell them about the demented games I’d composed and the aliens I’d blasted with my invisible ray gun. Burrowing into the soft of mums hair, or asleep into the crook of his arm. Of him, telling me old Spanish fables in faltering English, or picking me up on his shoulders and whirling me around the garden. Things are never bad, until they are. It would be false to deny the good that lies in between. It’s funny, even now I can see my first day of nursery so clearly before me. The two of them, far more nervous than me, grasping the fat of my hands so tight, one for each of them. And then my tears, as they left and their two ashen faces at the window, waving and gesturing. Then, just as they leave my vision, him running back and sticking his tongue out and making his eyes roll back so I would laugh.
It’s so much easier to bulldoze nuance. So much better to wrap him up in scorn and base level pity. His drinking, chaos and vanishing. Later, the frightening spectre that would occasionally appear, breath syrupy with cheap spirits and vision glazed by whatever the long nights had thrown up. Painful thoughts- after mum’s diagnosis and long after he’d left or was chucked out (I’m not sure) with the two of us living in our Forest Hill basement flat- of dreading his visitations like you do the touch of a spider, and the two of them locked in argument at the front door using words I couldn’t understand. All of that anger and bound together misery, It was frightening, one of the dual rocks on which you helplessly depend crumbling into something unsafe. Until recently, whenever anyone asked me about him I’d grunt something dismissive, or rude. Much simpler, that way. To see the world and his memory without shade and history, as something to be deplored and dismissed or ironised into paste.
Yet to remember in these terms isn’t just an injustice but a cop-out. Lifetimes can be swamped in bitterness and why would anyone actively choose to sour themselves because of a past they can’t control? As I get older it’s a shock to discover he must have been younger than me, then. A new life in a strange country, decked in poverty, taken advantage of at work, with a newly delivered child and marriage. Finding your tongue caught thick around an odd language, locked into the mesh of an alien city. It’s nice to think love is the most important thing, but it’s not enough alone. His was an immigrants diet of exploitation and incomprehension. And I can’t help but feel tenderness when I’m told of his chronic ill health and frailty, much like you would when confronted with a sickly child. But then who wants to feel pity for their father? Recently, I was told about a few weeks he spent on remand and for some reason, it nearly brings out tears. Nothing to do with the fact itself, but that there’s no left who even remembers why.
The last time I saw him was in Spain, six months after mum had died late in 1999. Me and my aunty went over, a brave and loving move from her that I only now appreciate how difficult it must have been to organise and enact. My family there is vast and chaotic. A succession of Iberian matriarchs and siblings, full of problem members and a few petty criminals. They were very kind to us. My grandmother Lourdes, who had been so welcoming to mum and so keen to get to know me, in particular. My mother’s death wasn’t the only tragedy swamping the waking hours. Another aunt, my father’s sister had also died in a car crash earlier in the year. 36 years old. I was too young to really remember much of that trip, aside the sense of absence and desolation married to a thick heat that seemed incapable of abating.
Though I do remember him, trying what I think was his best. His voice more muffled, his arms thinner and body hunched through a combination of what I imagine to be grief and other things. Reading me stories in that same broken English, frailer now and with the cadence of someone trapped somewhere far removed from the present. A spectre in dodgy leathers, with greasy palms. Asking my aunt for money to take me out, only for her to return a few hours later to find him with bulging eyes and me, walking in mute circles around his shabby apartment. And that was it. It all feels so very long ago, now.
We received a letter a few years later. Life was easing into another groove, shifting gears to another stage. One where the initial gut punch of mum’s death was starting to abate. It was written from a monastery, somewhere in northern Spain. The writing was thick with corrections and smudged with evident care. He was sorting himself out, he promised. Things were changing and he wanted me to know that he loved me and was sorry. He had loved mum but things hadn’t worked out and it was his shame. It went on and on, for three pages. It worked up to a sudden climax. Could you, he said, please look into seeing if I’m entitled to a pension from Lambeth Council? I can’t remember what, if anything, we replied.
It’s funny that it took a passport application to bring this back to me. Occasionally I think about finding out his fate. If he did ‘sort himself’ out or if he died young, finished off by the demons that had their talons gripped so firmly into flesh. Or if he found love again and some peace with it, his memories of London and his son there transfixed to the fragments of a fever dream, thoughts suitable only for the long, unpeaceful night. But what good would that do now? Sometimes it’s best to let curiosity idle unless you’re prepared for the full range of what you might discover. And I’m not sure that I am. No.The peace that I’ve made is an image, locked in by imagination.
When I narrow my eyes, I can see them. Mum and Dad at the fringes of Andalusia.Two tiny figures standing where the land becomes rock, becomes sea. With fragile hands enmeshed, they cut delicate figures standing frightened and hopeful under all that sky and unnatural blueness. Poised together at the midday juncture with only the heat and silence as company. They might think to stay a little while longer, had they any idea just how quickly this vision of their futures would turn to past.
