by Manuel Vilas
My eyes are at the level of his cincture, staring at the cincture, trying to decipher its meaning. I didn’t know whether I should tell my parents, and I didn’t tell them because I thought it was my fault. I thought I was the one at fault. That they’d stop loving me. That I’d been bad. That I hadn’t loved them enough and that’s why it happened.
The problem with evil is that if it touches you, it makes you the guilty one. That is the great mystery of evil: The victims always end up guilty of something also called evil. The victims are always excremental. People feign compassion for the victims, but deep inside they feel only contempt.
The victims are always unredeemable.
That is to say, contemptible.
People love heroes, not victims.
21
It’s an afternoon in late April 2015, the twenty-ninth, and I decide to go see an exhibition about a Spanish female writer who is canonical in every sense. The exhibition is at the National Library in Madrid. I’m starving. I’ve barely eaten. I walk into the exhibition rooms. There are a ton of paintings that claim to be portraits of the saint. I notice that the paintings don’t show the same woman or the same face twice. It’s as if they portray a great many women and at the same time none at all. Nobody knows what she looked like, nobody remembers her features. All the artists who painted her were a bunch of fakers. Her features, her eyes, the shape of her nose, her cheeks are lost forever. We don’t know her face in an indisputable way. Therefore, she could have had any face, or none. Those who painted her did so based on hearsay.
There’s nothing here.
I stare at her manuscripts: a frenzy of delirious ink, handwriting from hell itself. Little has been said about the materiality of writing, though it’s a more relevant topic than literary influences and divine apparitions. For example, it’s not the same to write on one keyboard versus another, on a laptop screen versus a large monitor, on a rectangular screen versus a square one, on a tall table versus a low one, in a chair with wheels or one without them, and so on.
Because the materiality of writing is writing. In fact, Saint Teresa wrote the way she wrote because her hand got tired of dipping her quill into the inkwell so often, hence her scrawling and chaotic and ferocious and wrathful handwriting. If she’d had a Bic ballpoint, she’d have written differently.
So her visions of God were the material visions of her writing.
Writing is a hand moving across a sheet of paper, a parchment, or a keyboard.
A hand that grows weary.
A thing gets written depending on the paper, the hand, the ballpoint, the fountain pen, or the computer or typewriter. Because literature, like everything else, is material. Literature is words etched on paper. It is physical toil. It is sweat. It is not spirit. Enough with our disdain for materiality.
Moses wrote ten commandments because he got tired of chiseling stone. He was sweaty, exhausted. There could have been fifteen, or twenty-five, but there were only ten because of the strenuous, taxing material conditions of writing on stone. All of Western history is built on idealism; nobody has stopped to consider things from another angle, especially not the simplest angle, one that takes the material realm, vain realities, into account.
I am interested in this woman, this saint. Lots of people can call her “Mother” if they like. She could be everybody’s mother—what does that mean? Could she be my dead mother? Death is everywhere, and mothers too. People pray to Saint Teresa. She inspires devotion, and thus seems to be an everlasting ghost. Is her ghost better than the ghost of my mother? There are people praying to her at this very moment, confessing their grief, their misfortune, pleading for succor. And those people believe there’s somebody on the other side, that the saint is listening, and in fact there’s nobody listening, and that’s amazing: millions of words tossed into the black hole of our brains. Is talking to my dead mother the same thing? It’s not the same. My mother is here. Because I am her.
This woman who is now being remembered on the five-hundredth anniversary of her birth is dead. She is a dead woman with secular experience. Not all dead people are the same: the dead can be old too. This woman talked about love all the livelong day. She was in love, I think. And she lived in this country. I look at her biography: She was born on March 28, 1515, which is like never having been born at all. There’s no way for that year to have any meaning here in 2015. There are documents, and literary and artistic works, and churches and castles that suggest that those numbers—1515—must have had people in them. Five hundred years ago, in an inhospitable place called Gotarrendura, a baby was born who would be christened Teresa de Cepeda. A dumb thought occurs to me: Back then, in 1515, there was no such thing as Real Madrid and Barça, two systems of gravity, two gravitational masses in Spanish life. Maybe it’s not so dumb. She was a woman who founded convents. If she were alive today, she’d have recorded music and appeared on album covers. Or she would have founded soccer teams. I myself am Saint Teresa: we are linked by pain. And by an aspiration that she called “God” and I call “X.” She, at least, had a name for her aspiration, for her great desire. I have none.
Nobody knows what Saint Teresa’s real face looked like. Nobody was able to take her photo. And the faces of my dead father and mother have been photographed.
I should destroy those photos so my father and mother are the same as Saint Teresa.
If Real Madrid and Barça disappeared, Spain would turn into a black hole. Spain’s gravitational force is two soccer teams.
22
My mother always liked good colognes, as did my father; they passed on that partiality to me, which at bottom is merely a desire to fend off the avatar of the future rotting of our flesh. Foul odors horrify us not because they’re foul (since really there’s no such thing as a foul odor) but because that’s what we’ll produce when our flesh falls into decay’s clutches.
A few days ago I was in Barbastro, the city where my parents lived and died. I thought about the interlinking actions and events, words and events, that led to my divorce. The objective fact that my mother never learned of my divorce is not a coincidence. It’s as if I felt the hand of some prehistoric Great Beast manipulating my days. A diplodocus. A tyrannosaurus. A velociraptor. A stegosaurus. A gallimimus. Tears in a human fabric that was always there. Acts of an apocryphal apostle, the impossibility of purifying those acts, which makes it impossible to live in peace.
My divorce took me to places in the human soul that I never dreamed existed. It led me to a rewriting of history, to new interpretations of the discovery of the Americas, new considerations of the Industrial Revolution; it charred the time that had passed or raised it until it became a guillotine that decapitated one memory each day.
I realized it was worth living even if it was just to sit in silence. I had a hard time talking to people who hadn’t known my parents—which was most of the people I encountered. People who hadn’t known my parents cast a pall over my spirit.
I saw joy in terror.
When life allows you to see the marriage between terror and joy, you are ready for abundance.
Terror is seeing the fuselage of the world.
23
At seventeen I often disregarded my father’s presence when I returned home; I had no idea whether my father was home or not. I had a lot to do, or so I thought, things that did not include silently contemplating my father. And now I regret not having contemplated my father’s life more. Looking at his life, just that, nothing more.
Looking at my father’s life—I should have spent a good long while doing that every day.
24
After my divorce, I bought a small apartment. Of course, the grim properties on offer in Spain aren’t really worthy of being called apartments. The word conveys a sophistication that’s alien to Spanish real estate culture. My father never saw the apartment I bought. He’d died nine years earlier—that’s a long time, a really long time
. He didn’t see the house of my solitude. Which is to say, he didn’t see my glorious present. Which is to say, he doesn’t know what I’ve become. Which is to say, his son—the son he knew—is dead and in his place is a man from who knows where, a stranger. What would he have thought of this apartment? He probably wouldn’t have understood. In the last years of his life he understood nothing at all. He wandered through life, waiting for who knows what. He complained very little, and when he did it was not about being ill but about small everyday adversities. He seemed not to remember things. As ever, he didn’t talk about his father or his mother. He didn’t talk about his life. My father seemed to have been born through spontaneous generation. My mother too. My mother had no past or present or future. It was as if they’d made a pact. When had they agreed to it? Had they spoken it aloud?
My mother never spoke of the past. She didn’t know the past existed. My mother didn’t understand time. She had no historical categories in her mind. That was a strange aesthetic creation of my mother’s, as if she were consumed by a sort of historical embarrassment. Was she ashamed of her parents? My mother never reflected on her life; she acted on instinct, on instincts that masked frustration. Sometimes, when referring to her mother, she’d say “Mama,” without the accent, instead of “Mamá.” That way of pronouncing the word was characteristic of the villages of the Somontano. In her youth, my mother had a joyous sense of the life she wanted to achieve. I remember that when I was very young my parents used to go out almost every weekend. I imagine they were going out to dinner with friends. I’m talking the mid- and late 1960s. They’d leave me with my aunt Reme. Sometimes, if I concentrate, I can visualize the restaurants they went to. I picture white tablecloths, flan for dessert, champagne served in wide glasses, the ones known as coupes that nobody uses anymore. Now people use champagne flutes. Why don’t they use those old shallow glasses to serve champagne anymore? Why do they use flutes? It probably has to do with the notion of “elegance,” which is fickle and ever-changing. Coupes are also known as Pompadour glasses. And there’s an intermediate glass, between the Pompadour and the flute, the so-called tulip glass. My parents used to drink champagne out of coupes in the seventh decade of the increasingly remote last century—the now-vanished coupe, which symbolized celebration and happiness.
I’ll always regret having them cremated.
25
Since I’ve stopped drinking alcohol, I’ve rediscovered a man who was a stranger to me. Sometimes I scratch my hands, or pick at my cuticles, as a way of coping with the boredom and emptiness. Things happen slowly if you don’t drink. Drinking was speed, and speed is the enemy of emptiness.
A divorce awakens guilt, because guilt is an exercise in high relief, it is a protruding contour on flat terrain. The life of a human being is a process of building contours that death and time will eventually smooth out. One of those contours is born of the discovery that no two human beings are alike. Thus, the desire for promiscuity. Every woman is different. And that is an assault on platonic love. At my age, I won’t say that sex isn’t important, but it’s as if you suddenly discovered in sex an aspect that is not physical in nature, not purely libidinous. It is Eros, yes, it is a reordering of the spirit based on the desire for specific details of your beloved. It is a trajectory that bears you toward beauty. You travel from lust to beauty along a path lined with leafy trees, and those trees are your years, the years you’ve lived.
And so, in my life, as in so many other lives, Platonism and promiscuity were locked in battle. And that always does damage. But a divorce, under capitalism, ends up being reduced to a fight over the distribution of money. Because money is more powerful than life and death and love.
Money is the language of God.
Money is the poetry of history.
Money is the humor of the gods.
Truth is the most interesting element of literature. Recounting everything that has happened to us while we’ve been alive. Not as narration but as truth. Truth is a point of view that shines on its own immediately. Most people live and die without having witnessed the truth. The comical thing about the human condition is that it doesn’t need truth. Truth is an adornment, a moral bauble.
A person can live without truth: truth is a prestigious form of vanity.
26
Sometimes I imagine I’m a widower instead of a divorcé. Being a widower, I think, would be worse. When you get divorced, your past becomes something that’s difficult to remember or pin down or possess; in the aftermath, you have to go to the documents, photos, letters, testimonies, papers, to rebuild the past. It’s like the end of a historical era. To rescue memory, you have to summon the historians. And historians are idlers, they’re napping, they don’t feel like working. They want to lounge in the sun.
Maybe guilt is a form of permanence. Maybe the enormously guilty end up, through their guilt, discerning a sort of persistence.
I once hoped that God or chance might make it possible for my death to come before my ex-wife’s. In divorce, the time you’ve spent living together is final. A divorce after two years living together, for example, could be inconsequential. A divorce after thirty years is an entire historical era. It’s like the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or Romanticism. The writer Alejandro Gándara told me a little while back that it takes five years to cauterize the wound of a divorce. I think he was right: five years.
I was especially wounded by the way affection crumbled. Things she used to say, full of loving kindness, float through my head. I discovered that the death of a relationship is actually the death of a secret language. A relationship that dies results in a dead language. That’s what the writer Jordi Carrión said in a Facebook post: “Each couple, as they fall in love and spend time together and live together and love each other, creates a language that belongs just to the two of them. That private language, full of neologisms, inflections, semantic fields that are implicitly understood, has only two speakers. It starts to die when they split up. It dies altogether when they both find new partners, invent new languages, move past the grief that survives any death. There are millions of them, these dead languages.”
My parents had a language too. I barely remember my father saying my mother’s name. The way he pronounced her name, how the way he said it evolved. I do remember something wonderful: my father invented a way of whistling. That whistle was a secret sound that only my father and mother knew. A password. I can reproduce that sound; I don’t remember when or how I learned it or where my father got it. They used that whistle to communicate when they were looking for each other around town, or in a store, or in a crowd, and especially in early September, when Barbastro held its town fair and people swarmed the streets, when the giant puppets and carriages and musical troupes came out. I was terrified of the puppets. When my father lost sight of my mother, he’d let out that whistle, and my mother would know he was nearby. They were young then. And that sound brought them back to each other.
27
I remember when I was six or seven years old, I often had night terrors and couldn’t sleep, and I’d start to cry. My mother would come to my bed and sleep next to me, or she’d stay in my bed and I’d go sleep with my father. The real mystery is that I used to pray before I went to sleep. It must have been a combination of superstition, childish fears, and the influence of my religious education. But now I know those prayers frightened off the spirits of the dead who coveted the innocent heart of a helpless little boy. I also know I’ve always been a little boy, and that I possess a little boy’s selfishness. Little boys forced to be men will always be innocent. When I got into bed, if I knew that my father was beside me, I felt protected and my whole self relaxed. Full of peace, tranquility, and happiness, I’d fall asleep.
I was seven or eight years old and I would fall asleep by my father’s side. Which is to say, by a dead man’s side. Now I’m over fifty and when I go to bed, that dead man is still there.
; He doesn’t leave.
The past lived by any man or woman over fifty becomes an enigma. It’s impossible to solve it. All you can do is fall in love with the enigma.
28
My dead father sleeps next to me and says, “Come on, come now.” The dead are all alone; they want you to go with them. But where to? The place where they are doesn’t exist. The dead don’t know where they are. They can’t name the place. But my father’s corpse is all that I still hold and possess in this world. It is here, next to me. His corpse directs the great devastations of my life; his corpse governs my own; in the darkness of my corpse, his corpse’s darkness urges me on; his corpse controls my corpse’s light; his corpse is a teacher that shows my corpse the disconcerting joy of continuing to exist in corpse form—the Olympic realm, the Champions League, the realm of emotions that are now without time or history, dead emotions that nevertheless aimlessly persist.
I’ll be doing something and suddenly my father appears through a smell, an image, through an object.
He holds out his hand to me, as though I were a lost little boy.
29
Maybe my parents were angels, or else their deaths turned them into angels in front of me. Afterward, all the things I saw them do while they were alive came to seem miraculous. That didn’t happen until my mother’s death, which closed the circle.
Christianity is based on a never-ending conversation between a father and his son. The only form of enduring truth we’ve discovered is that one: the relationship between a father and a son. The father summons his offspring, and that is how life moves forward.