The Photograph Of My Father by Christopher Walker

Every second Saturday, until she broke her ankle bringing home the shopping and told us she wanted to move somewhere quieter, my grandmother hosted our family for dinner. Early in the morning my father would crowd us all into the car and we’d head over to Maldonado. I loved visiting my grandmother, even though I hated being stuck in the back of the car, wedged between my elder sister, Clara, and my younger brother, Roberto, who was just big enough not to need a car seat anymore, but who still needed a booster cushion so that the seatbelt wouldn’t dig into his neck. The arms of the booster cushion were made of moulded plastic and dug into my ribs, especially when we approached a turn – my father would take them too fast, thinking that the seconds he saved this way would mean more time with my grandmother in her big house on the edge of Maldonado. I felt the pain was worth it, that I implicitly agreed to make this sacrifice without my father even needing to acknowledge my pain, because I loved my grandmother. She always cooked elaborately large meals, nothing like the quick fixes we had to make do with at home because my mother and father both worked long hours, and I suppose it was in support of one of these feasts that my grandmother was carrying too much shopping home on the day she fell and broke her ankle.

We always took the same route out of Montevideo, regardless of the traffic or the weather. From our tiny apartment in the Villa Muñoz district of the capital, we would wave farewell to our narrow, tree-lined street, heading east towards the two hospitals and the McDonald’s, crossing onto highway 8. This would carry us inland, and even though I couldn’t see the coast as it receded behind us, I always felt I knew we were leaving it behind, unless that’s just a feeling I have now as I look back on those days. On we would travel, following highway 8 as it traced its way tentatively through the landscape, and sometimes, when things were going badly at school or something at work had upset my mother, I wondered what would happen if we didn’t turn off highway 8 near that funny little house with the glass brick windows, and onto highway 9 instead of continuing on for the rest of the day until we hit the border with Brazil. But no, things at home never seemed to get so bad, I suppose, or perhaps my yearning to escape the bad times was not shared by anyone else in the family, least of all my father, who always took it upon himself to drive us to grandmother’s. Then it was as if the water was calling us back because we would veer south, past the Laguna del Sauce but never close enough to get more than just a glimpse of the pale blue down there. Just when it seemed that highway 9 was giving up on a return to the sea, though, we’d switch one last time, now to highway 10, and this would take us through to our destination. Eight, nine, ten, and finally to grandmother’s, in an old house that had seen several generations of the Pérez family born and raised and ushered on to other things.

One of the last visits we ever made to my grandmother’s house was when she was recovering from the fall that broke her ankle. This time we had been summoned, rather than invited. It wasn’t our week to go, and my mother seemed quite put out by this. I didn’t see how it mattered that we were visiting my father’s mother on the Saturday immediately after our last visit, but I could feel the tension in the car on the ride over, my mother dressed more formally than usual, with more make-up and her dinner-night pearls tight around her neck, sitting with her arms crossed looking at the scenery in a way that seemed interrogative, and on the other side of her, my father, trying to act jovial, as if nothing was wrong, cracking more of his terrible dad jokes than he usually did, and then getting upset with us all for not laughing, even when he explained the punchline to us in the slow and deliberate way he must have used when defending a court case. Of all the days on which we could have continued down highway 8 to its very end, that was it, but no, we turned right as we always did onto highway 9, and then we were there, in Maldonado, greeting my grandmother, who insisted on coming to open the door to us even though it was unlocked.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she called from the front room when she saw us arriving, “I’ll come and let you in. It’s bad luck to let a guest take care of themselves right from the off.”

“I’ve never heard that before in my life,” my mother muttered under her breath, before a switch flicked in her head and she was all smiles and sincere condolences for my grandmother and her bandaged ankle.

“Are you sure it’s broken?” my father asked, pointing at the lumpy bandage.

“Broken, sprained, twisted, they all mean the same thing, don’t they?” my grandmother replied as she hobbled into the living room. My mother shot my father the meanest look I had ever seen in my life when she heard this.

There was no great feast that Saturday. The shopping that my grandmother had bought had, she said, taken on a life of its own when she tripped and broke or twisted her ankle. The first bag, made of paper, split across the bottom, she said, and the fruit and vegetables rolled away, and the second bag had been carried home by a kindly passer-by, though sadly the home that my grandmother had in mind was not the same as the home the passer-by did, and that was the last she saw of the chicken fillets and the spicy sausage that grandmother used to make her celebrated Choripán con Chimichurri. We’d be eating whatever was left in the cold room, and that wasn’t much.

“You wouldn’t mind putting together a little snack for us all, would you?” my grandmother asked my mother, who turned to look at my father with the widest eyes you could imagine. Just then, my father’s attention seemed to have been drawn to something on the large dining room table.

“What’s all this?” he asked, pointing at a collection of large cardboard boxes that cluttered the table.

“Those? Oh, just some bits and pieces that I’ve held onto for far too long. This ankle business has really made me wonder about keeping the house for much longer. You’ve already made it clear you don’t want to inherit it,” she said, shooting a glance at the kitchen for some reason, “so I reckon I should sell up and find a little house out in the countryside. I need to be taking it easy at my age.”

“That you should,” my mother called through from the kitchen.

My father approached the boxes and blew some of the dust off the top of the first one. He peeled back the brown tape that held the two parts of the lid together, and then the box yawned open.

“My goodness,” he said quietly as he pulled album after album of photos out of the box. “I forgot these were all here! I thought I’d lost these photos years ago.”

I have happy memories of that afternoon, although the days and weeks that followed cast their long shadow over those memories, darkening them. The happiness came from discovering another side to my father. It had always been so easy to think of him as this older man, an ageless parent for whom time had ground to a halt. Now there was evidence that contradicted my more innocent notions, and it was a marvel to watch my father change before my very eyes as he looked at the photos with me and my brother and sister beside him. Here he was my age, holding a book – the first he’d fallen in love with, he said, a book about travel by some old French writer; here he was, a few years later, with one hand inside a massive baseball glove and an equally massive smile on his face. On and on it went, one faded photo to the next, some so faded as to be brown and white, others just faded in the top third or down the side if they had been sticking out of the album, exposed to the world and suffering as a consequence.

As he flicked through these old photos my father grew older, the months and years accelerating with every album. Some he passed through quicker than others. The photos of my father at school, or with his school friends, he gave no more than a cursory glance, and I wondered if those memories were not so pleasant. When the photo showed my father alone, showing off some personal possession, or if he was standing in front of one of our nation’s great sites, he would slow down and tell us a little anecdote about the photo. I wondered then if I’d been wrong, that he cared more for the photos of himself because of some deep-seated narcissism, but I wasn’t of an age then to have asked him, and now that I’m older I know why I wouldn’t have asked him.

And then there was one photo in particular, a photo that he treated differently to all the rest, and it was because he treated it so differently, you might even say reverentially, that I felt I had no choice but to steal it when my father’s attention was diverted. I wanted to look at it and interpret it at my leisure.

He reached this photo when he was going through a loose pack, a set of photos that belonged to no given series and that had been stuffed lazily in an unmarked white envelope. I didn’t see it properly at the time, as my father lifted the photo up into the air, as if the elevation or the angle made all the difference in bringing the memory back to life. He sighed as he looked at it, and I thought that he would certainly launch into another memorable anecdote, but then he looked worriedly in the direction of the kitchen, where a lot of banging and shouting could be heard, and then he slipped the photo back into the envelope and continued on with the others.

That was interesting, I thought. My father was hiding the photo, from us, certainly, but most of all from my mother. Not only was he hiding the photo, he was hiding the fact that he had looked at the photo, and he was hiding his reaction to seeing the photo – none of this did he want to share with my mother. Why was that, I wondered.

When he had reached the end of that envelope, then, instead of letting my father return it to the pile, I took it from him, saying, “Let me get the next one for you, papá.” He smiled in a wry kind of way, I don’t know why, but I must have made him suspicious, since I’d done nothing to help him so far that day. I made sure to place my body between his line of sight and the other photos, and as I was replacing the envelope and preparing the next album for my father to look at, I slipped the photo out of the envelope and between the leaves of one of the albums we’d already looked through. I felt very pleased with myself at that moment, for being so quick and subtle and ingenious, and it was only hours later that I stopped to wonder how I would have explained myself if my father had caught me in the act, or if he had found the hidden photo wedged where it was among the photos of my father’s teenage summer camps.

Later, after we had eaten a simple salad that looked like it had taken my mother five minutes to throw together, I retired to one of the spare rooms so that I could take a better look at the photo. It seemed innocuous enough. There were two people in the image, my father and another person, a girl, and the picture must have been taken when my father was sixteen or seventeen, because his face was pitted with acne and he looked like he was smiling in a very forced kind of way, the way that many teenage boys force themselves to smile when their parents are taking their photo. The girl looked like she could have been the same age. She was very pretty, and I could tell that she would grow up to be beautiful. She was looking away to the left, and although my father had his arm around her shoulders she looked on the point of leaving the frame, as if she was only waiting for the photographer to finish their work before she could run off and do something else. She had long, curly hair that was either light brown or blonde, and a thin, pointed nose over a pair of red lips. In short, she looked very different to my mother, but the fact that she was so different didn’t explain my father’s odd reaction to seeing the picture.

I slipped the photo into the back pocket of my shorts and went down to join the rest of the family. Now that we’d eaten, I felt sure we’d still have a good couple of hours to explore the area around my grandmother’s house, and I was rather keen to nip down to the Torre del Vigia, a squat whitewashed tower in the park that I had once mistaken for a lighthouse. I’d never been inside the tower, but I loved imagining climbing up to the top of it so that I could see out across the city, not that there was that much of a view to admire. Perhaps, I reckoned, today I’d finally get the chance to go inside, but it was not to be – as soon as I came down the stairs, taking short steps to protect the photo in my pocket, I saw that we were getting ready to leave. My parents looked like they were either having an argument or were building up to one. My mother was saying something like, “It’ll never all fit in the back. Leave it for next time,” and my father was saying something like, “We’ll take it if it kills us,” and I figured he meant that we’d be taking all the boxes home with us. He was loading them into the boot of the car with my sister’s help, my mother saying that she’d worked quite hard enough for one day, muchísimas gracias, and then when the boot sagged so far down it looked like it was going to pop the rear tyres she finally spoke up and said that we’d all have to take a box on our laps for the journey home.

And then with the briefest of waves, we left my grandmother behind, we left Maldonado behind, and I had the pain of a heavy box of photos to add to the pain in my ribs from my brother’s booster cushion. It was not the merriest of journeys, and we all spent it in silence, even my father, who must finally have realised that no amount of jovial bluster was going to placate my mother.

I couldn’t wait to get back to my room as soon as we were home. Mumbling about a headache, I went up to my room and climbed into bed, pulling the cover up as far as my knees so that if somebody suddenly entered the room I’d be able to hide the photo quickly.

The photo was such a mystery, but I began to feel, looking at it as if it were not a static image but a whole movie, that it might somehow hold the secret to my parents’ decaying relationship. Decaying was definitely the word, and as I sat there meditating over this snapshot of the past, my father with his arm around another woman, I could hear shouting from downstairs and the noise of things being pointedly dropped.

I must have been meditating too deeply over the photograph, though, because without warning the door to my room swung open and my sister strode in, slamming the door behind her. I didn’t have time, or even the presence of mind, to hide the photo. I simply stared at her like some kind of idiot.

“It’s wretched down there,” Clara said at last, not looking at me but casting her gaze out through my window. Fittingly, it looked like it was going to rain, with heavy dark clouds making a low ceiling over the neighbourhood.

I said nothing. The photo was still in my lap.

“I think this time mum’s really going too far,” she continued. As the eldest sister, Clara seemed to have taken on the role of dad-protector, and whenever there was an argument between our parents, she could be relied upon to take dad’s side. That generally left me to stand up for mum, but I wasn’t very good at it, and that must have left Roberto feeling pretty confused about everything happening around him. Poor kid.

I continued to say nothing.

“What have you got there?” Clara asked, finally noticing the photo.

I shrugged, and when Clara came over and took the picture from me, I didn’t offer any resistance at all. I let her take it, as if it had belonged to her in the first place.

“Hmm,” she said, inspecting the picture. “Well, this changes things a little.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, so you do have a tongue, after all!” Clara said, laughing. She patted my legs to make me move over on the bed, and then she sat down beside me.

That’s when Clara told me all about the photograph, and the girl that dad had put his arm around. As I had expected, she was dad’s first girlfriend. Our grandmother had told Clara all the old secrets in the family’s history years ago, when I was too young to understand what was being said around me. This, Clara said, was like our grandmother’s revenge against our mother, though I didn’t understand what she meant by revenge, and frankly that’s a word that continues to puzzle me to this day. I think that the girl in the photograph had been a Maldonado girl, and perhaps our grandmother had hoped that dad would marry a local so that he would stay in town, instead of running off to the capital as he had ended up doing. Maybe that’s why our grandmother bore such a long-lasting grudge, but that didn’t quite add up.

“It’s funny, actually, because not long after this photo was taken, a year or two from what I’ve been able to find out from other sources,” Clara said, winking mysteriously at me, “the girl in the picture left Maldonado and went to live in Argentina. Can you imagine if she’d married dad and taken him off to another country? Grannie would have gone ballistic.”

“So, why did dad seem so interested in this photo that he tried to act as if he wasn’t interested at all?” I asked.

“I reckon that it’s the usual case of the one who got away. I’m a lot older than you are, sweetheart. I know more about affairs of the heart. And let me tell you, it’s always easier to love someone that you’re not with than to love the person you wake up next to every day for twenty years.”

I wondered how Clara could know all this. She’d had a few boyfriends, but nothing serious, and though she’d talked plenty of times about being in love, there had always been something so frivolous about her affairs that I couldn’t imagine her truly empathising with the position our parents found themselves in.

Clara handed the photo back to me. The topic had ceased to interest her now that she had explained everything to me. She took a magazine up off my desk and began to flick through it, and when this too bored her she kissed me on the forehead and got up to leave.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her hand on the door knob, “this’ll all blow over, this fuss between mom and dad. It’s just another little argument, a flare up, nothing serious.”

Only it was something serious, and a week later dad had packed his things and moved out. He hugged us all and said that it might not be a permanent thing, but he had to go and find something out, and when he’d found out that thing he promised to come back and be close to us. Roberto cried, because he didn’t understand what was going on. Clara didn’t cry. She looked angry, not just because dad was leaving, but because she’d gotten things so terribly wrong. She thought she understood adult relationships but she must have realised now, I could see it in her eyes, just how mistaken she had been.

As for me, I watched everything unfold as if it was part of a film. It didn’t seem real, and because of this unreality I let the world wash over me. After dad left, I went back up to my room and finished my homework. I tidied my desk, I went to bed that night at the same time I always went to bed, and the next day I went to school as if nothing at all had changed in my life. I felt myself at such a great distance from events in our household that I didn’t notice when dad’s absence went from being a week to being a month, then another month, and then that stretched on into a year and then two years.

Suddenly, I was quite grown up, finishing school and getting ready to go to university. Although I would still be studying in Montevideo I decided that I wanted to move out of our home, and mum went along with this more reasonably than I thought. She even helped me to pack my bags; she cried a few times as she sorted through my wardrobe, and I saw her holding my favourite sweater to her face to breath in its aroma, but otherwise I think she managed the whole thing without ever becoming too sentimental.

It was then that mum discovered the photo, which I’d quite forgotten about, tucked away in one of the drawers of my desk.

“How on earth did this end up here?” my mum asked.

“Oh, that,” I said. “I stole it from one of dad’s photo albums years ago.”

Mum sat down on the edge of my bed, holding the photo in her hands. It was strange. She looked at the photo in a way that suggested she’d seen it before, and I wondered how that could be. So, in the spirit of openness that I had accidentally found myself in, I asked her.

“Yes, I’ve seen it before,” mum said. “Your grandmother had a habit of occasionally leaving things around her house for me to chance upon during our visits. Generally these would be chosen to upset me, and it was all I could do not to let it get to me. After a while, it became quite funny. Your grandmother left this photo out several times. I think she must have forgotten that she’d tried to surprise me with it the first time. Her memory was not the greatest, you know.”

I sat down with my mother and we looked at the picture together.

“Did dad leave you to go after this girl?” I asked.

Mum nodded, and then shook her head.

“Yes, he did, in a way, but it wasn’t quite like that. You probably look at this photo and think that the girl in it was your dad’s true love, or some romantic nonsense like that.”

This reminded me of what Clara had said.

“But that’s not quite the truth. Look closely. You can see that the girl is squirming to get free. She doesn’t like having your dad’s arm around her, right?”

I agreed that I could see that.

“Your dad confessed to me once that he wasn’t sure if the girl had actually loved him at all. He was sure of his love for her, he said once, when we were arguing. He might have meant it, but we say a lot of silly things when we’re in love and shouting at each other. He also felt sure, once upon a time, that she must have loved him, but every time he saw this photo the doubts would return.”

“So he left to go and find her…” I said.

“…to see if she’d ever loved him to begin with,” my mother said, completing the sentence for me.

I was astonished. I’d always felt that Clara’s interpretation of the photo had been incomplete, but this side of the story I had never even imagined. It seemed somehow far-fetched, and I began to doubt whether I could believe what my mother was telling me. What if she was making this up in an attempt to turn me away from my father? What if he’d left her for an entirely different reason? We’d never had an adult conversation about why my father had left, and why we’d heard nothing from him in all this time. He was a lawyer, after all, and in those days it was not unheard of for lawyers in Uruguay and Argentina and especially in Brazil to find themselves on the wrong side of the law and having to run off. Sometimes when I had lain in bed at night struggling to get to sleep I would hear my mother’s whispered voice on the telephone, but I had no idea who she was talking to, and I could never quite make out what she was saying.

It entered my head then that my mother was using the photo, which I had clearly once been deeply fascinated by, to offer me a convincing lie to explain my father’s absence. But even then I wasn’t convinced. Her story seemed so likely, so possible – and more than that, I couldn’t credit her with the imaginative skill required to come up with an interpretation I myself had never stopped to consider.

My mother handed back the photo. I don’t know why. I thought she would have wanted to rip it up, not offer it to me as a memento. Then she took a deep breath, stood up, and went back to her task of helping me pack for university.

I tucked the photo inside a large book and placed it in a box with all the other books, and then mum and I started talking as if we had never looked at the photo, as if it never existed, and the movie of my life continued to play.