My newly married daughter wrote an email to my wife, a brief and seemingly suspicious note, asking why, when she was giving her and her new husband watches from a French house the day after their wedding in New York, … We did not give them the gifts in the red boxes of these wristwatches, but in small boxes of the same color. After reading the email, my wife and I came to the conclusion that if my daughter was asking for the watch boxes, she may have maliciously suspected that these watches were not new, but used, and that is why we delivered them in cases and not boxes. It didn’t take long for me to write to my engaged daughter to tell her that the watches were new, of course, and that we hadn’t taken them in their original box to New York because they were too bulky in our carry-on luggage. My apologies, I told him. I didn’t think the boxes were important, I added. Without backing down, my daughter asked me to please send her the boxes. Before sending them by mail, I sent him the invoice from the French company which mentioned the purchase of these watches, to leave a written record that they were new. A few days later, I went to the post office and sent him the empty boxes. I don’t know if you received them. He didn’t write to me anymore. You now have the watches, cases and boxes, as well as the invoice, in case you wish to exchange them or make changes. Which led me to wonder: if the watches had been used, and yet sold with warranties, would that necessarily disqualify the gift and make it a fraudulent or fake transaction? Is giving a second-hand watch in bad taste and offending the gift recipient? And finally, I find myself with the usual disappointment that parenthood leaves: we do the best we can, but it’s always insufficient when it’s the children who judge us. Instead of appreciating the watches, they are suspicious of the absence of their boxes and ask for proof of their existence. Being a father then means learning to lose.
My eldest daughter, not yet married, a graduate of two universities belonging to the select league of the most elite in this country, who works as a lawyer in a very prestigious firm, who, barely thirty-two years old, works in a spectacular office with a private secretary, who never ceases to amaze me with her intelligence, her ambition and her work ethic, asked me to get her a plane ticket to travel on the eve of the end-of-year vacation. The little detail is that he doesn’t want to spend the holidays with me, because he prefers to share them with his mother, my ex-wife. I understand it perfectly. She came into the world thanks to her mother and despite my doubts and my fears, both cowardly and selfish. This is why it is good that she celebrates life with her mother, who knew how to protect her in the most unfavorable circumstances. That’s why I approve of him spending Christmas and New Years with his mother. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to buy him the plane ticket in the best class, the best seat. Being a father then means learning to lose.
My wife, a young woman of thirty-seven years old, barely five years older than my first daughter, does not want to travel to spend the holidays with her parents. Our youngest daughter doesn’t feel the need to visit her grandparents either. We’ll see them in March, he told me. I wanted to travel to this city because I miss my mother, whom I haven’t seen in months, and I would like to spend Christmas Eve with her, inspired by her kindness. However, there are dark clouds on the horizon and that is why I fear that we will not be able to go to the city of dust and fog. The first and most worrying gray cloud is that they are building two buildings next to my apartment in this city and they have been making an evil noise since eight in the morning, which does not let me sleep. The other dark cloud, full of storms, is that I am at enmity with three of my seven brothers and the idea of sharing Christmas Eve dinner with them alerts me to no less important dangers: after drinking too much, they could slap me, or knee me in the balls, or push me into the swimming pool, and then the night would end up going badly. In the end, my wife and our daughter won the family vote and decided that we would spend the holidays in Buenos Aires, the paradise where no one expects us, where we will be free and perhaps happy. Being a father then means learning to lose. I’m sorry for my mother and my in-laws, who I will miss. We’ll see each other again in March, if we make it to March.
I am sixty years old and I don’t know if I will live to be seventy. When I have to make a more or less important decision, I ask myself what I would do if I was certain of dying in ten years. Remembering the growing proximity of death helps me better choose the things I want to do, the books I should write, the trips still pending, the small acts of courage I still don’t dare to do. My sister died before her sixtieth birthday. My father died when he was seventy-one. My paternal grandfather did not reach his eightieth birthday. The legendary Uncle Bobby, the smartest man in the family, left his sailing boat Finisterre forever when he was barely seventy-five years old. That is to say, my family history warns me that I will probably not become an octogenarian. When I remember these things, when I read the obituaries in the newspapers, when I feel the approach of death, I suddenly think that it would be a mistake not to spend Christmas Eve with my mother, a mistake that I still have time to correct.
The truth is that in recent days Death has appeared to me more alive than ever, giving me signs that it continues to enjoy full and ghostly health. A school friend, now living in Geneva, whom I visited last year, is suffering from cancer which dismayed me. A veteran television colleague, who shared a studio with me for many years, when he presented a show at eight o’clock in the evening, an hour before my show started, and who was fired by this television station last year, announced that he had cancer and was retiring from public life. A dear friend, a cameraman of this television channel, who worked with me for more than fifteen years and who gave me wise advice on politics and on life itself, advice for which I thanked him by offering him bottles of whiskey, has just died these days, although he was strong as a bull and noble as a century-old tree: how happy the dear Chinese was when I criticized the red-haired president who did not enjoy his sympathies.
If someone told me I had ten years to live, I would try to be braver and less stupid. I would spend more time with my mother and less time traveling. I will resign from the television station tomorrow. I would still record videos for my personal channel, but I wouldn’t talk about politics, how lazy. I would publish the unfinished novels about the billionaire uncle and the holy family I was born into. I would publish two books of stories that I keep in my archives. I wouldn’t go to book fairs or book signings. He would go underground. I would not support any politician, I would not vote, I would try to monitor politics, a vile profession which is a fight between rickety dwarves, a Lilliputian brawl, a fight between scoundrels, imbeciles and scoundrels. I was trying to make friends with my three hostile brothers. I would make great gifts, without taking them out of their respective boxes, of course, to my daughters. I would pay for a plot in the cemetery where my Uncle Bobby and my maternal grandfather, who was like a father to me, were buried. I would buy an apartment in the Argentine capital, if possible on the street in honor of the Spanish musician Blas Parera, in Recoleta, whose anthem has moved me since I was a child. And I would wait for death, writing every day and praying to the gods that, if there is an afterlife, and if my father is still angry with me, it would almost be better not to meet him, but rather Uncle Bobby, to give him the hug that was waiting, and then get to heaven, where no one is waiting for me.
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