CHAPTER 8

Without Heirs

There is a conversation I should never have overheard, and yet I remember it with a precision I grant to almost no other moment of my adolescence.

I was eighteen. There were barely two weeks left before the trip to Paris, my suitcases already half packed in a corner of my room, and that night I couldn’t sleep.

I went down to the kitchen for a glass of water, careful not to make noise on the stairs.

The door of my father’s study was ajar, and the light inside spilled in a thin line across the hallway floor.

I heard his voice before I saw him, and something in the tone made me stop there, pressed against the wall, instead of walking on.

“All of Daniel’s friends already have girlfriends, Mariana. Some even talk about getting married as soon as they finish university. And mine? Shut in his room with those books, or who knows what, but with no girl, that’s for sure.”

“He’s eighteen, Jorge. Not everyone matures at the same pace.”

“It’s not a question of pace,” he said, and I heard him set the glass down on the table, a dry sound that cut through the wall. “It’s a question of a man, at that age, already having his eyes set somewhere. At eighteen I already had my sights set on you.”

“That was thirty years ago, things aren’t the same anymore.”

“The things that matter don’t change as much as you people think.”

There was a silence. I stayed still, the empty glass still in my hand, not daring to breathe too loudly.

“I want to see him married someday,” my father continued, in a lower voice, almost as if he were a little ashamed of what he was about to say.

“I want grandchildren, Mariana. I want to hold a child of his before my time to enjoy it runs out. And with that attitude of his, so turned inward, so alone all the time, I don’t know if that will ever happen. ”

I didn’t quite know how to respond to that, standing in the hallway, barefoot, eighteen years old, with a glass of water I could no longer even remember why I’d come down to get.

I did feel, with a clarity that needed no vocabulary to understand, the weight with which that sentence fell on me without my having done anything yet, for or against, to deserve it.

I went back to my room without the glass of water.

I got under the covers and felt, for the first time so concretely, a sensation that over the years I would learn to recognize very well: that of being in debt to something I didn’t yet know how to name, simply for having been born the only child of a man who needed, more than anything in the world, the certainty that his surname would go on existing after him.

The truth is that I already knew. Not “knew” in the sense of words, because at eighteen I still didn’t dare to think it all the way through, in one piece, without cutting it off halfway as soon as it began to form.

But I knew it with my body, the way you know things before you have permission to say them.

I knew it wasn’t girls who kept me awake at night.

I knew, though it cost me to admit even then, alone in the darkness of my room, that what I had once felt for a classmate, for a singer I listened to in secret, for an actor in some movie I watched at dawn with the volume almost at zero, was nothing passing or a teenage confusion, as I myself tried to convince myself.

And I was afraid. A fear I still didn’t know how to give a full name to, but which that night, hearing my father talk about grandchildren on the other side of a half-open door, finally found the exact shape it would hold for the next fifteen years of my life.

And it wasn’t just any fear. My father wasn’t only a senator; he was a senator from a conservative party, the kind that defended “the traditional family” in every interview and voted, without fail, against any bill that came near marriage equality or any other right of someone like me.

I had heard him say it in those exact words, “the traditional family,” so many times on television that for me they had stopped sounding like a political position and had begun to sound, simply, like the voice of my own father.

Telling him the truth wasn’t just disappointing him.

It was, in a way, asking him to betray twenty years of a political career built, in part, on speeches I had myself seen applauded on their feet at more than one event.

That’s why, when I finally arrived in Paris two weeks later, I decided, almost without planning it, that this was the moment.

New city, new country, no surname to protect on every corner, no half-open door behind which someone might be talking about me.

I decided to live there, for the first time, exactly as I was.

I met other guys. I walked, without hiding, hand in hand with whoever I wanted down the street.

I was, in short, openly gay at my university, in my circles of friends, in my whole life there, in a way I would never have dared to be two blocks from my parents’ house.

My father was never cruel to me, I want that to be clear.

In all the years we lived together there wasn’t a single blow, not even a shout that crossed the line.

But my father’s love came with an invoice attached, one that was never fully made explicit, except that night, but which I learned to feel in every achievement of mine that he celebrated a little more than necessary.

I understand now, writing this, why it was so hard for me, years later, to tell him what I truly felt.

It wasn’t only fear of scandal, or of his political career, or of what people would say.

It was, first of all, the much older and much simpler fear of an eighteen-year-old boy hearing, behind a half-open door, that the only thing his father was truly asking of him in life was something I, by my nature, would never be able to give him in the way he imagined.