by Manuel Vilas
Only material things.
What I mean is that every time my mother’s ghost comes to my memory, I remember olive oil, which may have been the organic substance that had the most interaction with my mother’s body. My mother was always cooking. Given that she was always cooking, what was she thinking about? Flour? Bread? Eggs? Vegetables, meats, rice, sauces, fish?
No.
Olive oil.
My mother always lived her life surrounded by olive oil.
My mother passed down to me a secret worship of olive oil, never spoken aloud. I think olive oil is a wormhole, a plunging back through time that leads directly to my first ancestor, who looks at me and knows who I am. He knows that I need love. Love from somebody of my own lineage.
I don’t know why I’ve been so disdainful about the way human beings grow old.
When I’m a ruined old man, I’ll want to be loved, and then somebody will remember these words of mine. But words in a book are one thing, and the words of life are quite another, I’d argue.
They’re two different truths, but both are truths: that of the book and that of life.
And together they establish a lie.
37
My mother christened the world; anything that my mother didn’t name seems threatening to me.
My father created the world; anything that my father didn’t sanction seems unstable and hollow.
Since I will never hear their voices again, sometimes I refuse to understand Spanish, as if the Spanish language had perished along with its dead, and is now only a dead language, like Latin.
I don’t understand anybody else’s Spanish because my parents’ Spanish can no longer be heard in this world.
It is a kind of mourning.
38
I take an ibuprofen for my headache. Naturally, I’m convinced the headache is the symptom of a brain tumor that’s growing inside my body, a killer tumor that I’ll never be able to see, a tumor like a rock or a meteorite, one that encases my whole past and my whole life; a tumor that, once it’s examined, tested, and studied, will reveal specific scenes and events from my life; a tumor in which human faces are visible, the faces of family, friends, coworkers, enemies, anonymous people I’ve crossed paths with, of cities, of random things I’ve experienced; a tumor that contains this book I’m writing; a tumor that might be a great work of art created using your own spirit and flesh; a tumor that might, besides killing you, offer the happy surprise that it is in fact everything you’d been seeking, longing for, and writing about; a tumor that is the Iberian Peninsula reconstituted in another country not named Spain, as if it had been created by an alternative plane of history; a tumor worthy of admiration and love, and so here I am, waiting for the tumor to manifest itself and generate a whole realm of new stories about my life, including, of course, the story in which I knock on a white door, which is the door of the head of neurology in a Madrid hospital, and behind the door there’s a man seated at a table, his hands resting on the tabletop, and that man says come in and he tells me what is happening, and the man’s words are included in the tumor, words that talk about it, the tumor itself, words that give external life to that bacterial or viral (same difference) mass that is going to kill me, and that tumor contains the scene where I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, thinking about what the neurologist said about this black lump that includes this scene, and it also contains the scene in which the tumor remains latched on inside my head but no longer gets any nutrients, and now it’s the tumor that is forced to experience the horror of its own disappearance, since it is being kicked out of the home where it once fed.
There’s a beauty in hypochondria, because all human beings, once past the midway point in life, spend time (maybe before they fall asleep at night, or while taking the bus, or when sitting in the doctor’s office) fantasizing about what kind of illness will rip them from the world. Playing make-believe, they concoct stories about their demise that range from cancer to heart attack, from sudden death to endless old age.
None of us know how we’re going to die, and our squeamishness about this is melancholy. We need the tradition of melancholy to return to the world. It’s a word nobody uses anymore. Melancholy is called obsessive-compulsive disorder now. My mother was melancholic; she spent all her life bathing in the pinkish waters of melancholic syndrome.
My mother died without realizing that she was going to die. She doesn’t know she’s dead. Only I know it.
She doesn’t know anything.
39
When I drive, he sits right beside me. I hear the click of the passenger seat belt. I enjoy driving around Madrid. We were never in Madrid together. He would have loved being in Madrid with me, I know. I wish my father could rejoin the living so we could spend the day driving around Madrid.
My father liked Madrid. He talked about the city often—that’s why I love it too. Because of him.
We wouldn’t talk, if he came back and were my passenger.
At most, my father would say, “Careful, there’s a guy coming up on your left,” or “That’s a one-way street,” or “Did you see the way that maniac passed you on the right without using his turn signal,” or “You’re a great driver, it’s nice weather out,” or “I had a friend in Madrid, a tailor, but he must be dead by now, his name was Rufino.”
Rufino, yes, if only I knew where he lived. So I could go to his Madrid apartment and request political asylum against death, against vulnerability.
40
I was ironing my clothes. I ironed a couple of shirts. My father had a lot of suits—I don’t know where they ended up. He kept his suits in a red armoire, which probably made its way to the landfill. Why was that armoire red? I’m sure it was one of my mother’s wacky ideas; she was prone to decorative delirium. But the day she decided to paint it that color must have been a happy one.
I don’t know where old furniture ends up. Nor do I know what happened to my father’s suits. My father loved his suits. They were his life’s work. I sometimes used to open the red armoire and peer inside. The suits looked like a procession of powerful men, all on their hangers, all impeccably ironed. I would give a year of the life I’ve got left to see those suits again; they were the visual distillation of my father; they were my father’s form of social visibility; they were the way my father showed himself to the world; they were the glory of my father’s life—his youth, his maturity, his indifference; his dominion over all things, over all species; his refinement amid raw nature.
My father used to review his suits parsimoniously, meticulously—I’m talking the 1960s and ’70s here. In the Franco era, the lower middle class rose high enough to possess a suit—a white shirt and a tie, polyester pants, and a blazer.
41
In the late sixties, my father used to take us on vacation to an inn in a mountain town. The town was Jaca. He knew the inn because of his work as a traveling salesman. He said it had great food. He was eager to take us there. To be there with his family, with his loved ones in the place where he was usually alone. To bestow his discovery on us.
That’s what he was doing: offering us a discovery, a victory.
It was true the inn had great food—they made an exquisite, mysterious French omelet with a flavor I’ve never encountered again in any other omelet. I was seven years old back then, so this happened in about 1970. The image I have of those years suggests an incorporeal distortion: I see things that shimmer, I see yellow dust, large old pieces of furniture in a liquid state, unreal bodies, smells that are healthy but dead. The smells were better in the old days, I think—not better, maybe more natural. The dining room at the inn had a nineteenth-century vibe, or that’s how I remember it. The tablecloths were made of good-quality fabric, very white. The stairs leading up to the rooms were made of wood. The doors of those rooms were tall. The beds scared me. At dinner, they served a delectable flan. They used to let me go into the kitchen.
I’d never been in a restaurant kitchen, and I was amazed by how big it was and how many pots and frying pans it had and how many people working. We walked around Jaca, which I thought was a beautiful place, but it didn’t have a beach. I didn’t understand why there wasn’t a beach, since we were on vacation. My mother would take me to the public pool. There I learned to swim, swallowing a lot of water along the way. That was the golden age of the public pool. Towns with more than ten thousand residents were emancipated from their rivers.
Spain became a nation of city governments building public pools. We forgot about the rivers, which ended up serving as drainpipes instead.
That inn closed many years ago. I don’t know what happened to those bright white tablecloths or the frying pans or the beds or the furniture or the cutlery or the bed linens.
Things die too.
The death of objects is important. It is the disappearance of matter, the humble matter that accompanied us and was at our side while life was happening.
42
I’m always breaking things when I try to open them. I’m convinced the devil himself creates all this packaging that’s so hard to open.
So I try to avoid the whole business by throwing things straight in the garbage can. That way I don’t see them. My ongoing battle is to remove things from my sight. And the garbage can is my ally in the struggle. That’s why I like mine to be large. Wastebaskets are great too—they’re places where you can get rid of anything that prevents you from surveying air and space without interference.
I like to fill the garbage can right up to the top.
I like getting rid of things—jars, cans, plastic, it all goes in.
I always look when there’s a sale on garbage cans. I like tying the knot in the garbage bag, tightening the knot so the trash—the cast-offs—doesn’t escape.
43
Irons are enigmatic. I’m staring at the iron again. My father always ironed because he wanted his suits to look a certain way. Most people don’t know the value of an iron, especially not men. I learned to iron late in life. Now that I know how to use it, I like destroying the wrinkles in shirts and pants. I don’t iron underwear, because nobody sees it. We don’t take care of things that live in darkness. I don’t iron my briefs. Not everybody irons their clothes. These days I’m always asking people whether they iron. People are perplexed by the question. Ironing is hard, especially with shirts. Jeans, on the other hand, are pretty easy to iron.
And ironing is relaxing.
You sculpt the clothing. You observe the clothing lying there inert, receiving the heat and taking on a form, a visibility, an order; you take the chaos of vicious wrinkles that the clothing has when it emerges from the washer, and you turn them into flat spaces, wide plains, a truth. You think about how your body will be enfolded in those clothes and enjoy well-being there, and there will be meaning, and even love.
I never saw my father in a wrinkled shirt. Never. Never in his life did he wear jeans. Everything was neatly ironed, always.
44
I try to get there quickly. I drive from Madrid to Zaragoza. I know the road already. It passes through a part of Spain that has a ruddy, desertlike landscape. There are large bridges, anonymous works of engineering. Who made all this? This highway, these bridges. It takes me three hours to get from Madrid to Zaragoza. I go grocery shopping at Hipercor first thing—I need to feed my kids. I choose high-quality food, but I’m nervous, nerves as wide and anonymous as the bridges I drove across.
I stand in line at the butcher counter; I buy expensive things. An old lady buys ten ounces of acorn-fed ham, and I stand studying her inexpressive face.
The woman behind the counter slices the ham and I stand staring at the leg’s black hoof.
45
They’re strangers now.
I’ve made dinner for the two of them. I tried hugging them, but everything’s become an awkward ritual. I don’t know where to put my face, my arms. They’ve gotten older, that’s all.
Hugs aren’t necessary—my father and I never hugged. But I keep pushing, I push to create a habit of hugging and kissing. And I’ll succeed. I’m already succeeding. When my oldest was born, he had to have an operation for pyloric stenosis. He’d been in the world for fifteen days. He vomited up everything he ate. He was turning to skin and bones. I spent the whole night in anguish. His mother, my ex-wife, wept; her weeping provoked a mournful tenderness in me because I understood it. She was saying “my poor son,” and it was as if those three words were being said not by her but by a whirlwind of ancestors speaking through her mouth. I thought about Pergolesi, about his Stabat Mater. Those three words, “my poor son,” were born of the night of time, the night of motherhood. I don’t know which hurt more, a mother’s tenderness or the danger my son was in, or if the two things amplified each other, creating a deep river of love and tenderness and fear. But my father didn’t call me the next day. I don’t say this as a rebuke—I know very well that he loved his grandson. It’s not a rebuke, it’s a mystery.
I never get the hugs right; it’s as if our bodies are unable to come together in space.
Maybe my father knew that. He knew the impossibility of embraces. That’s why he didn’t call to ask if his grandson was still alive. Everything turned out okay, the surgery went well, and two days later they let us take him home.
46
I grill the meat. I’ve spent a fortune on this sirloin; I’m scared of how much money it cost and scared they won’t like it. The house is dirty and messy. The printer is on the fritz.
Vivaldi, the younger one, is very thin, but I like his slimness. Brahms, the older one, is already talking politics and doesn’t tolerate much disagreement. As if I were going to waste energy arguing politics with him, when all I want is to take care of him and for him to be happy. I’ve decided to use these names for my boys. Noble names from the history of music. All my loved ones will be christened with the names of great composers.
Since I had my father’s body burned, I don’t have a place where I can go to be with him, so I’ve created one: this computer screen.
Burning the dead is a mistake. Not burning them is also a mistake.
This screen is the place where the body is now. The monitor is getting old; I’ll have to buy another computer soon. Things don’t hold up the way they used to, when a refrigerator or a television or an iron or an oven would last thirty years, and this is a secret of matter: we don’t bury old appliances, but there are people in this world who’ve spent more time with a television or a refrigerator than they have with a human being.
There was beauty in everything.
47
Vivaldi hardly tells me anything about his life. I try to talk about school. Valdi, for short, has finished the first year of his baccalaureate. Valdi is of the opinion that public education in Spain is absurd or pointless.
I toast the bread. I’ve bought an excellent olive oil that reminds me of my mother, whose blood and body and soul were olive oil.
What is Valdi thinking? He is fundamentally enigmatic; so few elements of his personality bloom to the surface. He’s working to fashion himself an identity; he’s seventeen years old and just starting to live. Brah, Valdi, and I don’t talk much. In practical terms, my role is to cook meals. The lawyer who handled my divorce said the boys were going to be great people. Good boys—and it’s true.
They are good boys. They don’t listen to me much, about as much as I listened to my parents. Good boys, yes—and what’s more, good musicians. They are music history. Great composers of their own lives. Which composer was I to my father? My father wasn’t too fond of music. My mother was, though. She loved Julio Iglesias. When Julio sang on TV, my mother would run to listen. His songs touched her heart. I was pleased when Julio Iglesias became an international sensation, because he was my mother’s favorite singer.
I think that deep down she was in love with
Julio Iglesias, who for her was a symbol of the kind of successful, luxurious life that she’d never enjoy.
That she never did end up enjoying.
48
I was addicted to paychecks for a long time. A very long time: more than two decades. I remember I woke up at seven thirty in the morning on September 10, 2014. I had a meeting set with my bosses at eight thirty. I was going to resign—I was getting out. I’d been teaching at secondary schools for twenty-three years, and I was through.
I didn’t know how many years of life might remain to me, but I wanted to live them without that bondage. I figured it wasn’t many, and I wanted to spend the few I had left contemplating my dead, doing something else, even if it was panhandling.
I’d be living off the wind now, as they say. Living off the wind—I like that expression, it’s very Spanish. I remember my coworkers stared at me, convinced I was demented and possibly suicidal. Ta-ta to the paycheck. And life was reborn. I realized I’d never been free in terms of work. I felt a surge of euphoria. I was immensely proud.
I went back to my apartment and gazed out the window for a long while: Life was returning, a life that wasn’t always spent being transformed into a salary, a contribution to my retirement. My hours were no longer worth anything. They were just life, life without workers’ rights.
Walking, looking at the clouds, reading, sitting, being with myself in deep silence—those were my wages.