Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  The ritual of monarchy is exactly the same: a father and a son. The ritual of twenty-first-century society is exactly the same: fathers and sons. There’s nothing else. Everything vanishes except that mystery, which is the mystery of the will to be, the will for there to be someone apart from me: that mystery is the foundation of fatherhood and motherhood.

  30

  It may be that my parents weren’t real. There are fewer and fewer people who can testify that they were. Their corpses do not exist, because they were devoured by the fire of a modern Spanish crematorium; and so the idea of resurrection becomes tricky, as does the notion that angel wings will sprout from the skeleton’s shoulder blades. There are no takebacks with cremation; there is no possibility of exhuming the corpse.

  But there are still some people who knew them, people willing to offer testimony. A few months ago, a woman of about seventy told me, “Your parents were the most famous beautiful couple in Barbastro—they were legendary.” Yes, I’d sensed that. They were superstars back in the sixties. It’s true, they were both good-looking. My father was tall and handsome. My mother was a stunning blonde when she was young. When I was a little boy I knew it, I knew it for a fact. That’s why I always wanted them to take me out on walks. I wanted people to see that I was their son. When my aunt and uncle took me out instead, I was miffed because I knew they weren’t as good-looking. That must have been the first time I felt a twinge of social vanity, the vanity of showing off a coveted possession. I wanted other people to envy me, respect me, flatter me, because my parents were special. I think I’m calling up a feeling that was tucked deep away in my memory, because that preening desire for people to see me holding my parents’ hands disappeared a long time ago. Unearthing this memory has provoked astonishment and fear. It’s as if a geologist were to suddenly witness the spectacle of the earth forming millions of years ago and discover that the birth of the planet had no meaning. Not the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt had it, but the banality of material and memory.

  They were beautiful. They were both beautiful. That’s why I’m writing this book—because I’m seeing them.

  I saw them back then, when they were beautiful, and I see them now that they’re dead.

  My parents’ being so beautiful is the best thing that ever happened to me.

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  Every human being is happy at the start of life. It’s a happiness born of youth, the time in which we are most supremely ignorant of annihilation. I gaze at the man in the center of the photo, lost in thought, regarding his hands, elegant, with time stopped, existence itself frozen in an echoing moment of visual delight:

  It looks like he’s got a cigarette in his hand and is absorbed by it, aloof from the conversations around him. There are men and women milling around. Everybody in this photo is now gone; they were—one by one—the protagonists of some hospitalized agony or of sudden death and burial; they were all mourned, some more than others. But prior to that all of them knew my father. They were able to talk to him calmly, to become acquainted with a mystery that has always eluded me; they know the mystery, everybody who’s buried in this photo. They saw him, had dealings with him. I was able to know my father only once he was already my father. If I’d known him before that, I’d have realized how unnecessary I was; I would have known a world without me. You can enjoy the world more if you’re not in it. Is it on that pleasure that the angels feed?

  It’s a better death if nobody knows you’re alive; that way you don’t burden anybody with the weight of your death, with paperwork, weeping, and a funeral, with guilt and demons. The people who die best are those we never knew were alive. Life is either social or it is pure nature, and in nature there’s no such thing as death.

  Death is a frivolity thought up by culture and civilization.

  None of the people captured in this photo were aware they were going to die. Nobody who is alive before their death is aware of that. If they are, it’s only the living who see the dead who are aware of it.

  I don’t know what year this photo is from, I’d guess the late fifties. It came into my possession by chance; it’s from a private collection, it was never at my house. My brother gave it to me, having gotten it from the owner of that private collection. My father had no desire to preserve this photo—he never even remembered it. It’s a photo of the father before he is a father, the photo of a man who has no children or wife or roots; it is the photo of a man who has nothing to do with me; he didn’t arrange for me to see it, never said, “I’ll keep this photo for posterity, maybe for my children if I have them, which I doubt”; he’s a bachelor, free from any kinship. And so I don’t know who the man is, and nobody ever will.

  Ultimately, this photo eludes kinship and we are both free. Every father and every son always seek the end of kinship, the breaking of those chains; it is the quest for freedom, and ultimately it is death that dissolves all kinship, all the heavy bonds of blood, however much love there is in those ties. The photo of the father before he’s a father evokes a complete moment in which I am not present, and it gives me great joy not to be there. Because this man in the photo, lost in thought and staring at his hands, in a double-breasted suit with a pocket square, is not yet looking for me; his life is happening without mine.

  He looks like a loner in this photo, and yet he dominates the scene. And what is he doing? He knew only in that moment; he knew what he was doing only in that moment—and what did he want then? What was the thing that could give him absolute happiness in that moment?

  The father before fatherhood is a force in the world heralding a son’s arrival, heralding your arrival but you haven’t yet arrived, and that’s the amazing bit: you haven’t yet arrived and so, in this photo, there is the possibility that you never will. And that possibility is a lovely one, immensely beautiful.

  Can you imagine a world in which your father exists but you do not, and nobody is even wishing for you?

  A man’s greatest mystery is the life of that other man who brought him into the world.

  This photo was taken when I was not necessary. That’s why I love this photo so much, because it contains my mystery: I do not exist, and my father there is a man who does not want to get married or have children. He isn’t even considering it. He gets teased about it, the usual jokes, “Let’s see who ends up reeling you in,” but he shrugs them off. He reigns in the bar. It is the bar of life, it’s in the center of things.

  I’m not there; I’m resting.

  I am trying to return to the peace of not being.

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  Years after the photo in the bar, he found himself a wife and I was born. My father must have known the reason for my existence, since I’m his son (I am still his son even though he is no longer alive), and he took it with him to the land of the dead. We both loved the mountains: those ruined villages in the Huescan Pyrenees of a backward, inhospitable Spain, where the ruin of those villages watched over our own ruin. The snow, the high rocks, the insatiable trees, the enigmatic sun, the rivers in the valleys, the immovable mountains, an imperturbable silence, the indifference of nature—we loved it. We loved how firmly rooted the mountains were. Their “being there.” In the moment. Mountains aren’t a matter of ser, but of estar. Our life, too, was estar. My father’s life was a reaffirmation of estar over ser.

  We were together—and everything else proceeds from that, from our being together. I was with my father for forty-three years of my life. He hasn’t been with me for a decade now, and that’s the greatest moral problem of my life: the decade I’ve been alive without my father contemplating me.

  Christ was constantly asking for his father to contemplate him. The fact that Jesus’s novel has been a bestseller does not undercut my own. Everything he did in life was watched over by his father. If his father didn’t contemplate his life, Christ’s life was false. A father gives meaning and direction to all the industrial parks, highways, airports, shopping c
enters, parking lots, beltways, avenues, neighborhoods, and hotel rooms that populate the false world we inhabit.

  It may be that the only human space is a Romanesque church or the family apartment—which are the same thing.

  Everything was encapsulated in a name, the name of a place: Ordesa, because my father was genuinely devoted to the Pyrenean valley of Ordesa and because in Ordesa there’s a beautiful and well-known mountain called Monte Perdido, the Lost Mountain.

  My father didn’t die—he got lost, took off. He became a lost mountain.

  What he did was disappear. It was a disappearing act. I remember it full well: He wanted to leave. To escape.

  He escaped from reality.

  He found a door and made his exit.

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  The table I’m writing at is covered with dust. Because it’s glass, the dust has a reflection, an image in the light. It’s as if the items in this house have married dust. There is dust visible on the gold edges of the toaster. There are some places the dust cannot obscure; there, I can get rid of it, destroy it, erase it from the face of my house. I don’t feel I have the ability or training to clean all that dust, and that makes me despair and provokes neurotic thoughts about squalor. There is even dust on the towel warmer in the bathroom, and heat and dust fuse together, like in a marriage of convenience, like those marriages of the sixteenth-century kings and queens who founded Western civilization.

  I will never get used to being poor. I’m calling it poverty, but it’s vulnerability. I’ve mixed up poverty and vulnerability; they look the same from the outside. But poverty is a moral condition, a sense of things, a sort of superfluous integrity. A refusal to participate in the plundering of the world—that’s what poverty is to me. Maybe not out of goodness or ethics or any noble ideal, but out of incompetence when it comes to plunder.

  Neither my father nor I plundered the world. We were, in that sense, monks in some unknown mendicant order.

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  It’s been ages since I’ve had a drink.

  I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand it, but I have. There are times when I’d really like a beer, a glass of very cold white wine. Drinking was killing me; I was doing it compulsively, pursuing the end. I was reacting. Things are still rough for me now, but I’m not drinking.

  I drank a lot. I ended up in the hospital twice. I’d collapse in the middle of the street and the police would come.

  Every alcoholic arrives at the moment when he must choose whether to imbibe or to stay alive. The two options may rhyme, but they’re completely different. And it turns out you end up loving your own life a lot, however bland and miserable it is. There are others who don’t, who don’t manage to get out, who die. There is death when you say yes to alcohol and death when you say no to alcohol. Anyone who’s drunk a lot knows that alcohol is a tool that pries open the padlock of the world. You end up seeing everything more clearly, as long as you’re able to get out of there afterward, of course.

  Drinking was more important than living—it was paradise.

  Drinking made the world better, and it always will.

  I remember after my divorce when a bank gave me the mortgage for my apartment. I remember they asked if I was healthy and I said I was. When I left the bank, with the mortgage in place, I went to a bar next door. It was one thirty or two in the afternoon. I drank in that bar nonstop. I drank wine. I got worked up, euphoric. I left the bar and walked behind the bank and passed out right there in the plaza. Unconscious next to my mortgage papers. The police came to collect me, because somebody always calls them. I woke up in the hospital. The first thing I thought when I came to, there in a bed in the emergency room, was whether they’d take away my mortgage, whether the bank people had seen me pass out, completely hammered. That was the final straw. The episode had a humorous quality, it bore my quirky stamp, my enduring comedy, my mother’s legacy—because my mother used to do things like that.

  My dead mother is watching my mortal theater piece, my comic play. I don’t know if my two sons will love me as much as I’ve loved my parents. Let there be a record of this fleeting, absurd doubt, which I’m feeling right this moment as I wander around Zaragoza. My mother loved this city because back then I was living near a shopping mall. And my mother, like me, was a shopping fiend. She adored cosmetics stores. We had more than one heated argument about it. She’d go to a cosmetics store in the mall and buy three-hundred-euro creams, which my brother and I then had to pay for. My mother couldn’t understand it. What had been the point of giving her children a better life if she couldn’t buy herself those creams? And deep down she was right. We hadn’t managed to escape the lower middle class; at best, we might have moved from the lower class to the middle class.

  Sometimes I think it would be preferable to be utterly destitute. Because if you’re just lower class, you still have hope. Being a beggar means shutting the door in hope’s face. And there is something compelling about that.

  I came to, still drunk, in the emergency room at Quirón Hospital, which was where the police had taken me. I was down in the dumps, and to top it off there were some gaps in my memory. I didn’t know what had happened; my only worry was whether the bank manager who’d just given me a thirty-year mortgage had seen me pass out drunk in the middle of the street two hours after the closing. I figured most likely not. I think I signed the loan a little before two in the afternoon, and I passed out around four or four something, after the bank was closed. But people in banks work hard, and they could have stayed late that day. I got tangled up in conjectures about what time the bankers had left work. The doctor who was running the emergency room treated me with contempt. I wasn’t a sick patient, I was a disgusting drunk. She wanted me to leave immediately, but I couldn’t stand. I was still vomiting. I looked at my vomit and it was pure wine. The nurse told me I’d vomited up a liter of wine. I thought about drinking it again, since it was resuscitated wine, real wine, perfectly good, reusable wine, as if it had come out of a bottle, not a stomach. The head doctor got angry with me because I refused to leave. She said I was making a ruckus and disturbing the other patients—there were a bunch of old people next to me. I told her that the World Health Organization classed alcoholism as a disease, and that she therefore needed to treat me the way one does a sick person, not a degenerate, a “sorry-ass drunk.” She told me to leave, said there was nothing wrong with me, I wasn’t sick.

  I tried to stand up, but another wave of nausea hit me and this time I threw up not in the basin but on an old lady next to me. The doctor yelled at me. I told her it was her fault. I demanded to submit a formal complaint. I became the pariah of the emergency room. Everybody glared at me. I guess that’s the kind of treatment alcoholics get in Spain. I apologized to the old lady and suddenly realized I was talking to myself. The old lady was dead. “Don’t worry, she can’t hear you,” the nurse said. “Go on, you can leave now.”

  I went home and took three sedatives; I was distressed, desperate, scared, dead inside, and I fell asleep. I woke up three hours later having an indescribable panic attack, and took three more sedatives and went back to sleep.

  On June 9, 2014, I stopped drinking.

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  If you’re looking to stop drinking, change your location. Good and evil are the best-established fictions of our civilization. Good doesn’t exist, and evil doesn’t either. I thought about the anarchism of the heart, there where good and evil disappear and bare life returns. So I got into my car and went to the mountains. I crossed into France through the pass at Somport. French towns are stranded in time. Anyone who has driven through the villages of Urdos, Bedous, and Lescun and traveled those roads knows that those places are just the same as they were fifty years ago. There, in those Pyrenean valleys, I found an obliteration of social life, and I saw the rivers completely free of ice.

  I went into a bar in Lescun and saw people drinking beer.

  I went into my
hotel in Canfranc and saw people drinking wine.

  And I drank coffee with milk, or sparkling water. I stared at the sparkling water, the bubbles in the glass. When you don’t drink, the days are longer, your thoughts are heavier, places stick in your mind, you don’t forget things in hotel rooms, you don’t scratch the car, you don’t break the sideview mirrors when you park, you don’t drop your cell phone into the toilet, you don’t mix up people’s faces.

  I went deep into the forests. I touched life again. I traveled to Ordesa and sat contemplating the mountains. I saw clearly the mistakes I’d made in my life and I forgave myself as much as I could, but not entirely. I needed more time.

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  Growing old is our future. We disguise it with words like dignity, serenity, integrity, wisdom, but any elderly person would happily give up those words if in exchange you lopped off five years, or even five months. My mother never accepted aging. I don’t know what kind of old man I’ll be, and I don’t really care. The best option would be to die before I become decrepit. People always die—we all end up dying. Thus do all the losers of the earth, all of the poor and illiterate, get their revenge on those who accumulated success, power, knowledge, sophistication, and wisdom.

  Aging is the great equalizer.

  And it’s amusing to watch that spectacle. It has no moral content, much less religious; it’s just an unexpected spectacle, stimulating and fascinating. Nature eliminates the predators it has haphazardly created. We are immersed in the present, with its feverish ability to make us believe that life is consistent. You have to appreciate the effort the present makes, its great civilizing zeal. It’s all we have. Well, we’ve got other things too: almonds, I love almonds. And another even more remarkable thing: olive oil. Olive oil makes me inclined to exalt the present.