Sat together on the bench by the lake I surveyed the boots. The ones I untied at night with demands for tickling. Laced up in the mornings on one knee while he sat back on his armchair and railed information my way. The ones I’d look at some day no doubt, in the corner of an empty bedroom, with no foot to put inside them, my heart heavy as a carthorse, and think of the old man.

I’d gone out to the pampa to keep him company.

Missed two flights in the new year over some internals but as the heatwaves began to curl through London’s crannies and nooks a winter by the fireplace seemed just the ticket, and pops wasn’t getting any younger. I loved our mano a mano sessions. I thought I did.

Three weeks in, with not even a goodbye I flew by night, slipped and slid six miles along a muddy track in the pitch black with thirty kilos of backpack cutting into my shoulders trailed by a stampede of bovine moaning to get into a waiting cab.

Dufresne style.

The course of filial love never did run smooth.

*

Looking out over the galería, he surveys the breadth of his domain and smiles triumphantly. The house has been ballooning for three years and is finally ready.

My tomb has reached completion, he pronounces.

When Gaudí got asked why the Sagrada Familia was taking so long, he said my client is God and He’s not in a hurry. Papa’s client is pops. It’s taken him fifteen years. Thirteen devising, two for construction, and one extra for ironing out the creases. Next to his bird sculptures and ribboned balustrades along winding planks of oak felled by storms he kept for years in stables, he walks la galería flanked by the dogs attending to the birdsong.

When he announced to my mother four years ago that he would return no more to the Yunayteed Keengdum, a place he’d set up shop in for half a century, she exclaimed well what do you expect me to do Martín, we do have our lives here.

I do not care, he baritoned back.

So a new status quo emerged, my mother stratosphering out three times a year warming slowly to her new transatlanticism. She has off days, heavy rainfall cuts the roads and she feels a little stranded in the vast nothingness. She has been painting flowers and trees on doors and walls while she waits for the heavens to send the Ignudi down with a meaty subject for a new book.

Your father is far happier out here in his homeland surrounded by his earth and his ancestors darling, she concedes.

The air miles are a perk.

A mad house. Built by a mad man.

She says eye-rollingly, soupçon of admiration.

For two weeks it is just me and pops.

The mornings are dark and the mists lick the edges of the park and drape the trees and I see none of it cos I am in bed. This was a summer house, he says, the only person who came in winter was Tío Bebé, to administer the campo, and was so cold at night he slept with gloves on.

What I wouldn’t give to watch mamama my grandmother as a girl walk through these rooms. I’d like more ghosts please, there is a distinct lack of them. A couple of times spirits bother me at night but I tell them to jog on. The world cup kicks off. Jonquils fill the room, the smell of winter says pops.

He reads me his latest writing.

And so begins the curious back and forth of a father and son who adore one another, the two of them together alone in an old house becoming new, one they both obsess over. Somehow we don’t repeat the murderous love my brother and I had for this place, despite my son’s continual gambit of ‘When you die I shall…’ We meet each morning on the white staircase, the Rubicon separating our opposite wings, three rooms plus bathrooms, we stand there staring each other down, admiring, fearful, like we were carrying irreconcilable burdens that would do away with us, lost in reveries of the other through cold nights always flooded with the best intentions, as all the while in our periphery the embers of the fire fade. The truth is, for now, that all is enchanting. ‘The love that is forced upon us, that love we do not choose, isn’t it so strange and powerful’, Domingo asks. He has been repeating this thing for some time now.

I sleep a lot.

I don’t know why. I’m not depressed. When I’m up and about I’m quite happy I tell myself. I put it down to jetlag, a yarn I can no longer spin a week in. Pops is spritely. We watch films, have ceremonial lunches, talk deep, go for the odd walk through the garden to the huerta.

Down through the vegetable garden I listen as he tells me about the trees and plants and think how many more walks do I get, til I’m walking through here just trying to remember him, and all the stuff he told me. There is a confusion too. I love him and still sometimes I don’t know if I really enjoy being around him, or if it is something else, something heavier.

We sit on the bench by the little lake.

I survey the boots.

Make our way back to the house along the path.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.
My words echo thus in your mind.

*

My father wasn’t the best when we were kids.

Sitting outside a cafe in Recoleta one afternoon I said to him, couldn’t you see whenever you screamed at me as a child my heart was breaking. Perhaps I hoped he would deny it, that he would tell me my recollection of events was skewed. But he didn’t. Instead he stared sadly into the middle distance and told me he was sorry. You know what I’m like, he said. You were small, I wouldn’t have noticed.

On a train journey once, must’ve been six, in full brat meltdown, he yanked me and marched me to the gap between the two carriages and made me stand there, terrified, until I shut up. I was trying to impose power over you, he told me, I wanted to scare you. No wonder the sound of his steps on the stairs as a kid meant fear. It was just a bad combination. It’s not that I didn’t feel loved, he was just so temperamental I couldn’t make sense of it.

My brother was sturdier. I could’ve protected you more, my mother told me the other day. I think it was the hot and cold thing, surely lukewarm must be better than hot and cold, I protested. Course it is, she said. It just affected me a lot. Like the kid left for too long alone in the supermarket. That was the trouble. I was drizzle and he was hurricane. I don’t know how you survived growing up with those two, my sister in law Vic said to me once.

*

I feel a spirit inside me building.

Over dinner one evening with my couz and the old man, he throws some accusation at me and I feel something bubble, stand up and say calmly but strongly. Watch out papa, I will rise to you, I’m done kotowing. Be careful.

The days go by, the sleeping gets worse, like I don’t want to be out in the house, in my father’s presence, the girls working there going in and out of rooms. I stare Call Me By Your Name style into the fire, delete the thought that says bounce, if you leave now you will find no peace.

Bravefacing it, I fight back to a semblance of calm. Even with you in bed next door I am in heaven, pops laughs, we shoot the breeze by the fire, talk about nice things, spin some Bach on his new record player. I think of the most exciting thing I can think of doing and do that. The dogs drag me out to the laguna through the wood by the Virgin.

A couple of times I don’t leave my room all day. To be clear, in my waking hours I am present and cheerful. My mother arrives in the pampa and my brother springs a surprise. There are squabbles and guffaws and brief moments of calm. Family 101. I move over to the other building away from the domestic madhousery. You’ll be better off there, says Analía smiling. Más tranquilo.

At night I pray. The morning cracks slowly through the dark, the dogs greet me at the bottom of my staircase, I talk football with the guys as they bring in the firewood.

The light fades.

*

So there we were, the four of us, rambunctious time afoot, tiptoeing round each other’s energies doing our best Patrick Swayzes. One evening, all rosy I recall, papa interrupts the chatter and looks serious. We need to talk about your sleeping, he announces.

Really.

Not if you’re going to criticise me, I say.

You’re going to tell me all I’ve done is sleep since I got here, aren’t you. I feel myself sink. He expresses expressionlessness like some Yogi mystic. Me, exasperation. Something in me rises.

Papa please recall, amidst my sleeping hours, we’ve had a fun time. You spend half your time cackling with glee saying you’re in heaven. He looks blank, over-earnest, shrugs, as if I my words constitute un disparate.

The kettle begins to whistle. I walk up to him, arching over him, licking distance, him sat in his chair, and I raise my right hand. Eye witnesses will recall a face contorted into a cubist jumble. Body language experts will murmur to each other breath-batedly.

I point my finger in his face, and I begin to scream.

It is a sound that has only come out of my mouth once in my life, during a domestic with a fiery red head. Hell hath no fury like this decibel. My voice curdles blood through three octaves and back as some tortured ghoul imprisoned in my throat strikes out for freedom.

Later on, papa said he was proud of how he’d faced me down in silence, but that’s not what I saw. I saw the scared and embarrassed expression of a child taking cover under an old man’s brow. I can’t remember what I said, but it went something like YOU ARE THE REASON I AM LIKE THIS. I DON’T NEED YOUR CRITICISM. I NEED YOUR COMPASSION. YOUR CURIOSITY AND YOUR LOVE, literally wrecking my vocal chords, air hockey expletives kapowing this way and that.

He said not a word.

I walked down the stairs and out into the night and was hit by the cool air and felt an adrenaline surge through me and I beamed. Wow. What was that. No tree can grow to heaven, said Jung, whose roots don’t run all the way to hell.

Practising in the mirror later I summoned what must’ve been half the fury and the glass reverberated. It alarmed me. My father came up after a film, sat down on the bed breathless and said nunca en mi vida te vi tan furioso.

Never in my life have I seen you so furious.

I felt no inclination to speak. I told him again, be careful with your words. He got up and left. The next morning I spent in my room, I forayed in and from across the hall he proffered me good morning, I replied frostily, I wanted to be nowhere near him. Analía gave me a big hug in the kitchen, your voice went through the whole house, she said.

That night I Dufresne’d it out of there, slalomed through the dark slipping along the endless muddy road with all my things, took me and hour and forty five to reach the highway.

Talking to Miguel two days before on the galería, he went in. That’s where your people-pleasing comes from bro, you just honed it into a superpower and started using it across the board. But it’s from him. You were always trying to get his attention, to pacify and placate him. And it’s fucking knackering, that living on high alert. That explained the sleeping then. I was just too tired of this game, I needed a new one.

I suppose these myths are there for a reason. You have to kill the father, shape yourself into a new human. Take up the space. That, or you just leave altogether. If you leave now you will find no peace.

It was full-circle.

Him shouting at me, me small, scared, half his size. Me growing up, growing cojones, standing over him, pointing down, spitting rage, tearing his head off.

*

I wasn’t even fighting him.

I was fighting myself.

Fighting this persona I’d concocted from my past, constantly gunning for the approval of someone who was always running away, dodging strays, who went cold at table, bellowed from impatience, all this to a child who folded in the face of the slightest breeze, was just monumental rejection. So I ran towards his approval like chasing a villain in a super hero flick, just around the next corner and twice as far away. And who paid for that. I did.

It was a sign of rude health.

Back in BA two days went by, I sent an email.

He hit me back, sweeter than I’d predicted, mentioning the need for hardpound psychoanalysis. Maybe. The last person I’m going to for advice on aspirin is the same dude who hit me in the face.

I recalled that feeling immediately afterward. An adrenaline turning to peace as I walked through the park beyond the halo of the house into the dark of the trees. A lightness, one of the most necessary emotions I’ve ever felt.

REDUX

Looking through old photos for content, I realised my reading was a little skewed. He was there. He had been there. He just had a weird way of showing it. Every family is a shit show. Your parents, said Alain de Botton, only need to have done a good enough job.

Who isn’t angry with their parents. We contain multitudes, said Whitman. It’s not even his fault, all this stuff, you could put it down to shoddy man management. Either way there is a ticket. To try and wrap your melon around this stuff without dwelling on it. Like you’re Sherlock Holmes and you’re the crime scene. And forgive. If we don’t forgive we’re prisoners.

Vivian, a friend of our family, said just kill him metaphorically. How do I do that. Stop caring so much about what he says. Pops had given me the same advice many times.

Ten years ago I would have gone awol for months. Stewed in a soup of my own baloney til I was done. Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time. What did my mother want I asked myself. She wanted harmony, that’s all she has ever wanted. I think she deserves that.

The old man wouldn’t be around forever. If writing this is anything, it just makes me think how bummed I’d be if he suddenly decided to not stick around. Alberto, the man from Salta who used to drive him and my mother around the Andes for days on end, said it best.

Cuando estás con él, no das más, pero ya cuando se va, lo extrañás.

When you’re with him, it’s too much sometimes.

But once he’s gone, you miss him a whole lot.