Sagrada My father chooses a table for us by the window. We are in a cafĂŠ just across the street from the Escoles de GaudĂ in Barcelona, Spain. It is a wintry December day, coming off the festivities of Christmas but still before the excitement of the New Year has had the chance to settle in. Our matching indigo and maroon down coats hang over the backs of our chairs. Like my father and me, our coats assume the form of people in contact with one another and do not say a word. Sipping my glass of Coke, I watch my father as he stares out the window. The slowmoving traffic in the street runs across the lenses of his thick glasses, and he takes a moment to zip his black puffer vest to the top before resting his elbows once again on the table and clasping his hands around his bottle of beer. It is in this moment that I realize just how old my old man has gotten. Of course, over the years I had noticed his hair growing grayer and grayer, until his former sweep of pure black hair has become speckled with flecks of white, as if covered in a field of cigarette ash. But looking at him now, there is even more to see. His eyes are a cloudier sort of brown, resembling the glassy eyes of the fish for sale at the marketplace staring up from beds of ice. As he takes a sip from his beer, I detect a faint tremor in his hands that was not there before, which causes the bottle to clank against the surface of the table as he sets it down again. The wrinkles in his hands and in his face are deeper chasms now, thin valleys in the seafloor of his leathery skin. If I had asked my father about it just then, he would have said that it was my sister and I who had given them to him, as if we had carved each and every one of them with a knife. The waiter appears with our food. I had asked for a seafood paella for one, whereas my father had ordered the PadrĂłn peppers tapa. Shriveled and salted and a deep shade of green, these mild peppers are his favorite, ever since we first visited Barcelona over eight years ago, and now he orders it wherever we go without any desire to try anything new. He plucks each pepper up with his fingers and pops it into his mouth, discarding the thin stems in a neat pile at the edge of his plate. He holds a pepper out to me across the table, but I shake my head and dig into my paella. My spoon unearths a mussel beneath a mound of golden rice, and a wisp of steam floats up into the air. This scene of us eating without speaking is not an uncommon one. The family used to have a weekly tradition of eating out together, but with my sister working in California and my mother having passed away when I was 22, it has since fallen on the shoulders of my father and me to uphold the tradition as a silent but stalwart duo. For four years now, we have dined together once a week without fail; when I was finishing my undergrad in Princeton, he would drive down an hour every weekend,
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