No Matter How Much You Promise by Vega Edgardo

Author:Vega, Edgardo [Vega, Edgardo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2004-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Rebecca’s father, Paul Feliciano, first told her the story of her grandfather’s friendship with the young Spanish poet the evening they returned from their second Gay Pride Day parade down Fifth Avenue. The first time he’d marched with her in support, but the second time he was doing it for himself. They had bought Chinese food and returned to the house and that’s when he told her he’d marched for himself. “I thought so,” she said, and he laughed. That’s when he told her about her grandfather. Paul Feliciano said he had often asked his father-in-law, Ignacio Marginat, whether he was talking about Garcia Lorca. “Your grandfather said that was a secret, but admitted that his friend, the Spanish poet, had visited the house and written about his time spent in New York.

“Pick up Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York. I can’t be sure, but I’ve always believed they were lovers,” her father told her—this when he had already begun losing weight and there was no longer a doubt that the HIV virus was affecting his immune system.

“Grandpa was gay?”

“Yes. Closeted, I suppose.”

“Three generations?” she said. “That’s like a tradition.”

She was serious, but he laughed uproariously, his eyes suddenly blazing with health.

“I guess it is,” Paul Feliciano said. “There were times when I’d kid myself and think that I was bisexual, but of all my sexual and emotional experiences, my gay ones were the most intense.”

“That takes a lot of courage to admit,” she said, taking his hand. “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, too,” he said, and she hugged him.

He asked her if she wanted to go with him to Sevilla in the summer. They could go to Andalucia and see Córdoba and Granada and swim on the Costa del Sol. She said she would if Meredith could come along. He said he had no problem with it, if Meredith didn’t mind seeing him wasting away. A month later, after classes were over, they flew to Madrid, traveled by train to Sevilla, and then rented a car, which Rebecca and Meredith alternated driving, stopping often to examine the sights, the girls listening patiently as Paul Feliciano told them about the Moors and their conquest of Spain. “The Catholic kings were very foolish to kick the Moors and the Jews out of Spain in the fifteenth century,” he said on more than one occasion. Arranged ahead of time Paul Feliciano had rented a small, two-story house outside of Málaga with a spectacular view of the Mediterranean, and there Rebecca and Meredith took care of him as best they could. He had taken a leave of absence from his duties at the hospital six months prior and closed his private practice, certain that he wouldn’t survive too long. To all appearances, her father still seemed healthy. Thin, but in good health. Yet to Rebecca, who had known him as strong and decisive, it was obvious that the most minor exertion pained him now, the effort making him tentative, unsure of himself.

They returned to New York and no more than a month later he began dying in earnest.

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