I failed my driving test 7 times

What is left from failure once we made it?

It took me eight tries to pass my drivers test. I won’t even think about blaming these failures on bad luck nor on such extremities as my feet or fingers. Each and everyone were tumultuous and memorable: a bump against a container while parking on reverse on an inclined street at Poble Sec, a pedestrian that I did not see while diligently crossing through the sidewalk, a pair of trembling legs that stalled the car more than three times in a row one Monday morning in the middle of Francesc Macià Square. 

When the NON-SUITABLE became recurring, I decided to continue taking the test without letting anyone know, just to avoid the following embarrassment. I kept failing in silence. This memory no longer stirs anything in me. It has become talking material to use during dinners between friends but nothing more.

Perhaps it may interest you what was different on that eight attempt for my drivers test. I found myself during finals of my fourth year of law school. All semester long I had been trying to pass and time was running out: I had landed my first summer internship as a lawyer in a Big 4, whose offices were far from my home and I needed a car to get to work. After that internship I was going to move to China. I found myself within the last few opportunities before having to start the process anew, since my written test results were about to be void and I was moving out of the country. 

I decided to transfer my transcript to the town where I had spent my summers during my childhood. The owner of the driving school was also its only instructor. I don’t remember his name but I do remember that he was an honorable man, with calloused hands, an urban rancher on the cusp of retirement, with a sensibility that he tried to hide with practicality.

While I drove through those same roads that I had traversed hundreds of times in the backseat, the instructor would amend the bad habits that my first instructor had instilled. Within a few weeks I was easily driving through roads that crossed fields, highways, hills and through the bustling towns. 

Through our journeys in his red Seat León, the instructor would point at houses and would tell me that such a neighbor had been diagnosed with tongue cancer overnight, he would talk to me about his children, and he would name passing trees.

In contrast I didn't talk much. It was a period of a lot of stress. I set myself to a very high standard with my university assignments so that they would award me the study exchange in China, the furthest one in the map and in syllabus (not a single course was related to law). Soon I was going to work and I needed the car. Soon I was going to be living across the globe alone.

When I finally passed without a single mistake, the instructor hugged my father with an unusual closeness, since they had really only known each other in those moments in which my father would pick me up after my lessons. 

Driving alongside him gave me a sense of security that I was not aware that I was missing. During one of our lessons, probably while we chatted about how difficult it has been for me to pass this test and without further exceeding himself he blurted out: your father loves you very much. 

It had to come through a stranger for me to understand that my father loved me. My father is quite eccentric and so is his way to love. When he received a letter from the tax authorities his distressed grimaces assured me that he loved me. But, for instance, he did not call when I miscarried my first pregnancy.

I’m now recalling how obsessed he was with lighting when he would see us reading. He would say that reading with a low light was devastating for the sight. Often, when I glanced away from my book, I would find a lamp peering over me that had been placed there without me noticing.

My mother is the polar opposite. Ever since I became a mother myself, I’m overwhelmed with her capacity to make me believe that my universe was as interesting to her than it was to me. From the clothing that we used to dress up the dolls, to a period of time in which we both watched soccer together because I was in love with with a fanatic and I wanted to have something to talk about with him. Her way of loving is to meld herself with the other.  My father’s way of loving is wanting to fix the earthly problems of the other.