“Your father is so brilliant,” “A true Renaissance man,” “You are so lucky,” people would say without exception. I often wished he were a little less brilliant and spent a bit more time watching football matches on television like other fathers. When you are a child, you do not want to be different. You do not want to have a family who stands out or parents whom your friends talk about. I already had an impossibly beautiful mother, the kind of beautiful that people would stop in the street and stare at. People spoke about her beauty, and that was bad enough.
Then there was my father.
People consistently spoke about my father in hushed tones. Twenty years older than my mother, he was almost fifty when I was born and utterly unlike the fathers of my friends. He seemed so much busier, so much more complicated. As I grew older, I had to call his secretary to ask for a meeting if I wanted to have a proper chat during the week. He was so much more serious than my friends’ parents. So much more wrinkled, with that pale skin and those deep circles under his eyes. And then there was that day when he picked me up from school and all the other girls in my fourth-grade class sniggered when one announced, “Ariana—your grandfather is here.”
I remember my disappointment when people said I looked like him. I desperately wanted to be petite with a turned-up nose, to be delicately exquisite, like my mother. I did not want the pallor, the under-eye circles, and the round, enormous green eyes.
It was clear that there were things that my father could not talk about. This was evident from the nightmares, the reticence. These boundaries made him even less accessible. His Spanish was thickly accented. Whenever he addressed his brother, Lotar, his first wife, Míla, or my half brother Miguel, who was twenty-three years my senior, my father would inevitably speak in effortless Czech. Languages came easily to me and I wanted to learn it. I coveted both the challenge and the bond it might forge between us. “No, no. It would be a waste of time. Czech is a useless language,” he said the only time I asked, in a tone so firm and hostile that it was obvious that I should not ask again.
Yet there were moments when, speaking Spanish, he was endearing and vulnerable. He repeatedly used the wrong word. Sometimes he would say a phrase that would make sense but sound odd. I remember him apologizing once when he had a cold: “My nose is jogging,” he said, his expression stern as he produced his handkerchief.
My father in 1993, with his portrait by Colombian artist Fernando Botero
6.
The last time I saw my father, then very frail and infirm, he had a runny nose. “It’s that jogging nose of yours again,” I mumbled through tears, his and mine. I had locked my green eyes on his, and with the hand he could still use, he squeezed mine because he could not speak clearly. Despite everything, we both laughed. I was living in London and was five months pregnant with my first child. I had answered a late-night call from his doctor in Caracas saying that I must come at once. My husband and I boarded a plane that same day.
In 1996, Corimon, the international conglomerate that had grown from my father and his brother’s paint factory, Montana, almost completely disintegrated. My father had retired from the business five years earlier but had kept all his shares as a vote of confidence in the management. After the collapse, caused by economic headwinds and strategic errors, only a shell was left, which had been taken over by banks. My father had worked for four decades to build an empire that encompassed many industries across the Americas. He felt immensely proud of the publicly traded company and personally responsible to its hundreds of employees and shareholders. The distress at watching his life’s work disappear was enormous but it had not stopped him. His spirit remained undaunted though the blow on his body was severe; the stress probably brought on his first massive stroke a few months after the debacle. My father had then defied all odds by living for a further five years. Although wheelchair-bound, he stayed active enough to continue to work, write, marry for a third time, divorce again, and establish a new daily newspaper in opposition to the Chavez regime. Regardless of the initial dire prognosis and for the years that followed, every morning at six forty-five my father ground through vocal exercises, swam laps aided with a float, and then traipsed up and down the checkered corridor with a walking frame three times a day.
In 2001, my father suffered a series of further strokes that weakened him and paralyzed his legs completely. Despite the setback, after we arrived in Caracas following the late-night summons, he rallied once more. We spent a week together in June that year at Perros Furibundos mostly chatting about politics and technology. We watched spy films as well as Cabaret on DVDs. I remember his nurse, a stern and spindly woman, poking her head through the door, bewildered as the three of us sang along to “Willkommen.” It was not until my husband and I were back in London a few months later, on the morning of Sunday, September 9, three weeks before I was due to give birth to my first child, that I received another call. Through the crackly static I heard the voice of Alba, my father’s trusted assistant of over twenty years.
“He had more strokes last night. We brought him to the hospital, he is alive, but there is nothing to be done. The doctor wants to speak to you.”
I remember being struck by the doctor’s firm and unfussy tone. As next of kin, I had to decide when to disconnect the machines. He explained that the strokes had been so damaging that the doctors were keeping my father’s heart beating artificially. The scans showed there was no brain stem function left. Total brain death, he called it. He used the medical terminology, unvarnished and brutal, that flows easily from those for whom the cessation of life is commonplace. The doctor knew I could not travel. He explained that he wanted me to take some time to think and let him know when I had reached my decision. Aware that I was absorbing few of his words, I agreed to call him back.
I dialed my mother in New York, who had remained close to my father even though they had divorced decades before. She reminded me that my father had never wanted to be dependent on machines. Losing the use of his arm and legs six years before had been arduous enough. Yet, with his capacity to think intact, he had battled on. If he could not use his brain, he would not want to go on. I had just needed to hear my mother say it. I made the call to the doctor in Caracas. “It might not be immediate,” he warned. “His instinct throughout has been to survive.”
Half an hour later came a sobbing phone call from Alba to say that he was gone.
My father was cremated on September 11, 2001. As I watched the tragedy of the attacks unfold, I grieved more privately too. I could not attend my father’s funeral. My pregnancy meant that I had to wait until my son was born before flying. It was some months later that I traveled to our house in Caracas.
We held a memorial service late one January morning under the shade of the ceiba tree. My husband addressed the gathered group and read Dylan Thomas’s famous poem that ends with the stanza:
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
That afternoon, when friends, family, and colleagues had left, I walked into my father’s study. Everything looked immaculate, exactly as it had months before. My father’s computer was on his desk, and to its left, still on its stand, was his pipe.