by Manuel Vilas
Barbastro is the town where I was born and raised. When I was born, it had ten thousand residents. Now it has seventeen thousand. With the passage of time, the town has acquired the power of a destiny that is at once cosmic and intimate in scope.
The ancients use the term allegory to denominate that desire to take formlessness and turn it into a character with form. For nearly every human being, the past is as precisely drawn as a character from a novel.
I recall a photo of my father taken in the 1950s, in his SEAT 600. You can barely make him out, but it’s him. It’s an odd photo, very much of its time, on a street that looks newly built. In the background is a Renault Ondine and a huddle of women—women with their backs turned, holding their purses, women who must be dead now, or very old. I can make out my father’s head inside the SEAT 600 with Barcelona plates. He never mentioned that, the fact that his first SEAT 600 had Barcelona plates. It doesn’t appear to be summer or winter. It may be late September or late May, to judge from the women’s clothing.
There isn’t much to say about the decay of all the things that have ever been. I can only note my personal fascination with that car, the SEAT 600, which was a source of joy for millions of Spaniards: a source of concrete, atheistic hope, a reason for faith in the future of personal machines, a reason for travel, a reason to see other places and other cities, a reason to ponder the labyrinths of geography and highways, a reason to visit rivers and beaches, a reason to shut yourself off inside a cubicle, away from the world.
It’s a Barcelona plate, and the number is long gone: 186025. Something of that plate must still exist somewhere, and believing that is a bit like having faith.
Class consciousness is the thing we must never lose. My father did what he could with what Spain provided: he found a job, worked, started a family, and died.
And there aren’t many alternatives to those options.
Family is a demonstrated form of happiness. People who decide to stay single and alone—statistics back me up on this—die sooner. And nobody wants to die before his time. There’s nothing fun about dying, plus it’s old-fashioned. The desire for death is an anachronism. We’ve only recently discovered this. Western civilization’s latest discovery: It’s better not to die.
Whatever you do, don’t die, especially since there’s no need. There’s no need to die. We used to think there was—we used to think it was necessary.
Life didn’t have as much value back then. It’s worth more now. The production of wealth and material abundance has meant that the outcasts of the past (those who in previous decades were indifferent to being dead or alive) now love being alive.
The Spanish middle class of the 1950s and 1960s passed down to their heirs more sophisticated aspirations.
My grandmother died in I don’t know what year. It might have been 1992 or 1993, or 1999 or 2001, or 1996 or 2000, somewhere in there. My aunt called us up to let us know my father’s mother had died. My father wasn’t on speaking terms with his sister. She left a message on the machine. I heard the message. It said that even if the two of them didn’t get along, they had the same mother. That was the thing: they had the same mother, which was reason enough for them to have a relationship. I pondered awhile when I heard that message. Bright light always poured into my parents’ house, making things lose their solidity, since light is more powerful than any human action.
My father sat down in his armchair. A yellow armchair. He wasn’t going to the funeral—that’s what he’d decided. She’d died in a far-off city, some three hundred miles from Barbastro, some three hundred miles from the place where my father had just received the news of his mother’s death. He took a pass, is what happened. He didn’t feel like it. All that driving. Or being on a bus for hours. And having to find the bus.
That decision led to a flood of further consequences. I’m not interested in judging the past, only in narrating it or describing it or celebrating it. The morality of any fact is always a cultural construction. In and of themselves, facts are certain. Facts are nature; interpreting them is politics.
My father didn’t attend my grandmother’s funeral. What kind of relationship did he have with his mother? None at all. Yes, sure, they had one at first, back in I don’t know, 1935 or 1940, but that relationship gradually disintegrated, disappeared. I think my father should have attended that funeral. Not for his dead mother, but for himself, and also for me. In washing his hands of it, he was deciding to wash his hands of life in general.
The biggest mystery is that my father loved his mother. He refused to attend her funeral because his unconscious rejected his mother’s dead body. And his conscious self was nourished by laziness.
A thousand stories are jumbled up in my head, stories about poverty and how poverty ends up poisoning you with the dream of affluence. Or how poverty leads to immobility, a lack of will to climb into a car and drive three hundred miles.
Capitalism went under in Spain in 2008—we were lost, no longer knowing what to aspire to. The arrival of economic recession set off a political firestorm.
The dead seemed almost enviable.
My father was burned in a gas furnace. He never gave any indication of what he wanted us to do with his corpse. We simply got rid of the deceased (the recumbent body, the thing that used to be someone and that now was unrecognizable to us), the way everyone does. The same way that will happen to me. When someone dies, we’re obsessed with erasing the corpse from the map. Extinguishing the body. But why the rush? Because of the decay of the flesh? No, now we’ve got these state-of-the-art fridges where we can store bodies. We’re afraid of corpses. We’re afraid of the future, of what we will become. We’re terrified to ponder the ties that bind us to the corpse. We’re frightened of the days we spent at the corpse’s side, the many things we did with it: going to the beach, eating lunch, traveling, having dinner, even sleeping beside it.
At the end of people’s lives, the only real problem that presents itself is what to do with the corpses. In Spain there are two possibilities: interment or cremation. Two beautiful words whose roots stretch down into Latin: to become earth or to become fire.
The Latin tongue ennobles our death.
My father was cremated on December 19, 2005. I regret it now—it may have been a hasty decision. On the other hand, the fact that my father didn’t attend his mother’s—my grandmother’s—funeral influenced our decision to burn him. Which is more relevant, referring to my relationship and saying “my grandmother,” or referring to my father’s by saying “his mother”? I’m not sure which point of view to choose. My grandmother or his mother—everything is encapsulated within that choice. My father didn’t attend my grandmother’s funeral, and that influenced what we did with my father’s body; it influenced our decision to burn him, cremate him. It had nothing to do with love, but with the cascade of events. Events that produced other events: the cascade of life, water endlessly flowing while we go mad.
I am also aware, at this precise moment, that my life has not been marked by momentous things, and yet I carry a deep suffering within me. Grief is in no way an impediment to joy, as I understand grief, since for me it’s connected to the intensification of consciousness. Grief is an expanded consciousness that encompasses all the things that have ever been and ever will be. It’s a sort of secret benevolence toward all things. Courtesy toward everything that ever was. And benevolence and courtesy always produce grace.
It’s a sort of overarching conscience. Suffering is an outstretched hand. It is kindness to others. We smile while crumbling on the inside. If we choose to smile rather than falling down dead in the middle of the street, it’s out of grace, affection, courtesy, love for others, and respect for them.
I don’t know how to structure time, how to define it. I return to this afternoon in May 2015 that I’m experiencing right this moment and I see a bunch of medications strewn chaotically across my bed. There are all kinds:
antibiotics, antihistamines, anxiolytics, antidepressants.
Still, I celebrate being alive and I always will. Time continues to pile up atop my father’s death, and I often have trouble remembering him. But this doesn’t make me sad. I find it extraordinarily beautiful that my father is heading toward complete dissolution now that I, along with my brother, am the only one who remembers him.
My mother died a year ago. When she was alive, I sometimes tried to talk about my father, but she always dodged the conversation. I can’t talk about my father with my brother much either. This isn’t a criticism, not at all. I understand the discomfort, the discretion. Because talking about the dead, in some cultural traditions, or at least in the one that happens to be mine, entails a powerful, pungent degree of indiscretion.
And so I’m alone with my father. I’m the only person in the world—I don’t know about my brother—who remembers him daily. Who daily contemplates how he’s fading, becoming purity. It’s not that I recall him daily, it’s that he’s permanently within me, it’s that I’ve pulled away from myself to make room for him.
It’s as if my father didn’t want to be alive to me, meaning he didn’t want to reveal his life, the sense of it, to me—no father wants to be a man to his son. My whole past caved in when my mother did what my father had done: she died.
3
My mother died in her sleep. She was tired of dragging herself around, since she could no longer walk. I never found out what specific illnesses she had. My mother was a chaotic narrator. As am I. I inherited narrative chaos from my mother. I didn’t inherit a literary tradition, either classical or avant-garde. A mental degeneracy provoked by political degeneracy.
In my family we were never precise in our narrations. This is where I get my difficulty putting into words the things that happen to me. My mother had a multitude of maladies that overlapped and crashed into one another in her stories. There was no way to organize what was happening to her. She was trying, or so I’ve inferred, to incorporate her own disquiet into her narratives and also seeking to find meaning in the events she narrated; she was interpreting, and in the end it all led to silence; she started leaving out certain details she’d already relayed, details she felt didn’t put her in a good light.
She manipulated the facts. She was afraid of facts. She was afraid that the reality of what had happened might go against her interests. But she was never quite clear on what her interests were either, beyond what instinct told her.
My mother always left out anything she thought worked against her. This is something I have inherited in my storytelling. It’s not lying. It’s just the fear of making a mistake, fear of putting your foot in it, dread of other people’s atavistic judgment of your failure to live up to society’s incomprehensible code of conduct. We didn’t understand, my mother and I, what a person is supposed to do. But the doctors and geriatricians who treated her were never able to impose their medical narratives over her chaotic, wandering descriptions. My mother cornered medicine’s logic and drove it off the cliff. She asked her doctors remarkable questions. She once managed to get a doctor to admit that in fact he didn’t know the difference between a bacterial infection and a viral one. In her moral chaos and her desire to be healthy, my mother’s intuitive, visionary observations were more compelling than the doctors’ explanations. She saw the human body as a hostile, cruel serpent. She believed in the cruelty of blood running through veins.
She was a one-woman show. Her melodramatic tendencies bested doctors’ patience. They didn’t know what to do with her. The bones in one of her legs were in really bad shape. She had a hip replacement that got infected. It was installed around the same time the then king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, got his. People talked about it on TV. We used to make jokes about it. When the prosthesis got infected, it couldn’t be removed because that would have required an operation and my mother had cardiovascular conditions too.
She suffered from a long list of illnesses. She used to list her aches and pains, some of them amazingly original.
In the end she was alone. She would sit there in her apartment, totally alone, listing maladies.
She also suffered from asthma. And anxiety. She was a compendium of all named illnesses. Ultimately, her own awareness of life became a minor ailment in and of itself. Her illnesses weren’t fatal—they were little everyday torments. They were suffering, that’s all.
She lived in a rented apartment: fifty-four years old and living in a rented apartment. She smoked a lot when she was young. She must have smoked till she turned sixty. I’m not sure exactly when she quit.
I can try to calculate when she quit smoking in an approximate sort of way. It would have been 1995 or thereabouts. So she would have been about sixty-two.
There was a fashionableness about the way she smoked, and her smoking also made her different from the other women of her generation. I remember my childhood as being full of tobacco brands that I found fantastic and mysterious.
For example, Kent cigarettes, which I always loved because of their pretty white packaging. My mother smoked Winstons and L&Ms. My father didn’t smoke much, but when he did, he smoked Larks.
All the packs of cigarettes lying on the tables and nightstands in my house are connected to my parents’ youth. There was joy in my house back then, because my parents were young and they smoked. Young parents smoked. And it’s amazing how precisely I remember that joy, a joy from the early 1970s: 1970, 1971, 1972, maybe even 1973.
They would puff away and I’d watch the smoke, and so the years passed.
Neither my father nor my mother ever smoked dark tobacco.
They never smoked Ducados, no dark tobacco at all. That’s how I took a dislike to that brand, to Ducados, which I thought was sordid, nasty stuff. My parents didn’t smoke it. I associated dark tobacco with grime and poverty. I did notice that some rich people smoked Ducados, but I continued to view dark tobacco with disdain or fear. With fear, really. Fear, at least in personalities like mine, is linked to the spirit of survival. The more fears you have, the longer you survive. I’ve always had fears. But fear hasn’t really kept me out of trouble.
I now sense an enormous gap between us. By evoking the brands of tobacco my parents smoked, it seems, I’m discovering an unexpected joy in my parents’ lives.
By that I mean that I think they were happier than I. Even though at the end they were disappointed by life. Or maybe they were disappointed by the deterioration of their bodies.
They weren’t normal parents. They were historically unique. In every way. They were original—they did bizarre things, they weren’t like everybody else. The reason for their eccentricity, or whatever of that eccentricity ended up affecting me as their son, seems to me a fond enigma. My father was born in 1930. My mother—it’s a guess, since she was always changing her birth date—in 1932. I think he was two years older than her, maybe three. Sometimes six, because occasionally my mother insisted she’d been born in 1936; it struck her as a famous date because she’d heard it mentioned so many times for whatever reason.
In reality, she was born in 1932.
4
My mother was born into a peasant family and grew up in a tiny village near Barbastro. My paternal grandfather was a storekeeper, but after the Civil War he was accused of being a red, a republican, and was sentenced to ten years in prison, which he didn’t end up finishing because of his health. He spent six years in a Salamanca prison. I don’t really know the details; my father sometimes used to mention a history of friendship between my grandfather and the militants. It seems he had friends in the Popular Front. Somebody denounced him when the nationalists occupied Barbastro. My father knew who had denounced him. But the man is dead now. My father didn’t inherit any hate. What he inherited was silence. I’m not sure what sort of silence it was—I think it wasn’t a political silence but a kind of renunciation of words. As if my grandfather didn’t want to talk,
and my father was fine with wordlessness.
I’m going to die not knowing whether my father and grandfather ever talked. Maybe they never did. They were enveloped in an Adamic idleness. I’m going to die not knowing whether my father ever kissed my grandfather. I don’t think so, I don’t think they were affectionate. My ancestors’ idleness is beautiful. I never met either of my grandfathers, not on my mother’s side or my father’s. No photos of them exist. They left this world before I arrived, and they left without leaving a photo. Not a single portrait. So I don’t know why I’m here in the world. My mother didn’t talk about her father, and my father didn’t talk about his. It was silence as a form of sedition. Nobody deserves to be named, and this way we will not cease to talk about that nobody once that nobody has died.
5
My parents never went to mass like my schoolmates’ parents did; this always seemed weird to me and made me uncomfortable around my friends. My parents didn’t know who God was. It’s not that they were agnostic or atheist. They weren’t anything. They didn’t think about those things. They never talked about religion at home. And now that I’m writing this memory, I’m fascinated. Maybe my parents were aliens. They didn’t even curse. They never mentioned God at all. They lived as if there were no such thing as Catholicism, and that is remarkable, admirable, in the Spain they were born into. For my parents, religion was something invisible. It didn’t exist. Their moral universe proceeded without a fetishization of good and evil.
In the Spain of the 1960s and ’70s, they would have done well to go to mass. In Spain, people have always done well to go to mass.
6
My mother smoked, so I started smoking too. In the end, smoking together was what we did. My mother baptized me into addiction, unaware of what she was doing. She always misjudged the importance of things: she attributed relevance to trivial things and neglected what was actually vital. Her entire life was spent smoking, until they told us we were rotting our insides. She used to send me down to the shop to buy cigarettes. I ended up getting to know all the tobacco shops in Barbastro.