Page 165 of Two Marlboros

My mother huffed again. “And maybe you also think your brother is a replacement because we didn’t want you anymore.”

It was just as she said. If she had given me those certainties, how could I have gone on living? I would have wanted someone beside me, someone to hide in his arms so that I could listen to the continuation of that speech with a shield.

I felt a tapping on one thigh and observed a small patch darker than the rest of my pants. I pulled up with my nose and wiped my wet face.

“Now listen to me.”

And I thought: no, I didn’t want to hear anything, that I would give anything to disappear in that moment, to live forever in doubt about how that conversation would continue. Another sob shook me, and I threw out the air with a cry. I hid my whole face in my hands, now soaked and unable to give me any comfort. I wanted to run away from there, to hide somewhere, but I could not. There was no place to house my shame and hide it from the eyes of others. It could only stay there, under the critical gaze of people, who would point their fingers at me and tell me I was wrong. No one would have been spared, because no one ever does that when there is to denigrate someone. How much better does it make us feel when we do that? The otherperson becoming worse than you immediately makes you look like a saint.

“Nathan, I said you have to listen to me.”

“I don’t want to!”

I plugged my ears and folded in on myself, rocking like a fool who doesn’t want to hear that he is one. I was sobbing and screaming, up and down, up and down. I was an ungrateful child, I knew it, an ungrateful child with plugged ears and a runny nose rubbing against my knee, full of tears that had waited years to come out.

I felt a grab on my wrist, in a grip firmer than my own, and heard my name called. My back raised itself up and crashed against the seat, and my body began to wriggle uncontrollably, in the throes of screams, sobs, and tears that streaked down my face along with the stuff that came out of my nose. The sobs were still shaking me, in a rhythm similar to convulsions, but it was just my suffering that could no longer stand being locked in that body and in the silence in which I had forced it all that time. In that moment it was trying to get out of my bones, expressing itself by breaking the silence and tearing through the air, breaking free from my grip.

It was only a caress that managed to contain it, to let her express itself only with its voice, leaving my body alone. The sobs stopped being so convulsive, my hand tightened into another in a grip as pressing as the grip that was clinging me at that moment.

Gradually I loosened my grip, and the sobs turned into heartfelt crying as my face was lulled by the caresses and my name repeated firmly and warmly, and I wondered how such a thing was possible, how I could feel so much affection in saying my name, a name I hated.

I began to distinguish my breath next to my mother’s, to recognize that caress as her own, that invocation of me so similarto the way she cradled me when I was a child. She wiped away a tear that came out of my swollen eyes, looking down at the indistinct patch I had left on my pants.

“Listen to me for a moment. This is something I want to tell you, because I think you now have the maturity to understand it.”

I shifted my eyes first to the air vents, and then to her. In her face I read the wisdom of her years and saw reflected the immaturity of mine. I looked away and blushed.

“You are young, Nathan, and you are free. You can choose to do anything, and the only one who will suffer the consequences will be you. But you see, I’m not so young anymore and I’m not so free. And when you find yourself in a situation like mine, sometimes you have to make hard choices. You have to figure out what’s the best compromise to make everyone suffer as little as possible.”

She paused.

“And I was the most expendable one?”

She shook her head. “See, that’s what you don’t understand. It wasn’t just you on the line. Try to think about it for a moment: if I had chosen to divorce, what would have happened to Jimmy and me? We would have had to find another apartment, much more modest, perhaps far from the city or in another state. I would have had to separate Jimmy from his home and his family, because I know you would not be there for him.”

I felt pierced by a thousand needles, another truth that caused me to wince.

“What do you mean?”

“Would you have ever come to live with me and your brother, whom you detest so much? You never would have, and I would have been alone with him, leaving him at the mercy of strangers all day long, without you.”

She was right. Maybe I would never have gone with them, because I couldn’t bear to see that five-year-old brat ready to take all my mother’s attention.

“I would have broken up a family for what? I would have had to take care of Jimmy before you anyway, and you wouldn’t have accepted that. You don’t even accept it now.”

Somewhere, I had read about the older brother’s jealousy of the newcomer, only usually the envious child was at most five years old. I was twenty-one, and everything she was saying was true. I wanted to break up my family for reasons that did not exist. What had I really wanted to achieve all those years?

“So, I made a choice. I stayed with your father and allowed you to come back when you most preferred, to be with me and to try to get you to build a relationship with Jimmy. And remember, you’re the one who chooses to leave when your father’s there, I’m not the one who dictates it.”

I felt closer to the five-year-old than to the twenty-one-year-old boy. My mother was right: I couldn’t understand it all the way, but I could empathize to some extent. I had done it all by myself. I had been so self-absorbed, so fickle that I had not understood that had always been the best solution for everyone.

Not to mention the fact that if we really moved, I would have been away from my father. And the truth was that I didn’t want to be away from him - because I was living to try to please him. Yes, it was like that. I was looking for any pretext to get his attention. How many times had I left home, basically wishing that he would ask me to come back? How many times had I hoped for a greeting from him, for a speech from him that was different from the usual, for his paltry acceptance? I could never bear to be away from him, just as I really did not want my parents to divorce.

I just wanted attention.

“Besides, there’s something else I haven’t told you.”

How many times had I been told that the world did not revolve around me? And how many times had I snubbed those guys by labeling them jerks?

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