by Manuel Vilas
And the next day I stopped waking up early. I stopped teaching at night school. I no longer think of it as a decent job; back then, it was just yet another alienating job, even if the alienation was less obvious. Work alienation may be camouflaged, but it’s still there, as acutely as it was in the nineteenth century. Schools, hospitals, universities, jails, barracks, enormous office buildings, police stations, Congress, clinics, shopping malls, churches, parishes, convents, banks, embassies, headquarters of international organizations, newspaper offices, movie theaters, bull rings, soccer stadiums, all those places where the life of the nation plays out—what are they? They are places where reality is created, the sense of ourselves as a collective, the sense of history, the celebration of the myth that we are a civilization. All those boys and girls I taught—what will have happened to them? Some of them may be gone for good. And those coworkers will also gradually die off. Their faces are fading in my memory. They are all moving into the darkness. I vaguely remember a line from a T. S. Eliot poem in which great men enter the darkness of the vacant. Some coworkers died as soon as they retired. Chance punishes the calculators, the ones who carefully calculated their retirement. The schools harbor no memory of those bodies. Spanish middle schools are charmless buildings, shoddy constructions with narrow hallways and classrooms that are cold in winter and boiling even in spring. Chalk, blackboards, the teacher’s lounge, photocopies, the bell ringing at the end of class, coffee with coworkers, bad food, dirty cafeterias.
And all of it crumbling. There were no photos lining the school corridors to commemorate teachers who’d retired. There was no memory because there was nothing to remember. And those former coworkers of mine, mad with mediocrity and ordinariness, used to humiliate and disparage their students. The kids were humiliated and insulted by the teachers, mediocre people who were bitter about life. Not all of them were like that. There were teachers who loved life and tried to transmit that love to their students. That’s all a teacher needs to do: teach his students to love life and to understand it, to understand life through the mind, through a joyous mind; he should teach them the meaning of words—not the history of empty words, but instead what they mean, so they can learn to use words as if they were bullets, the bullets of a legendary gunslinger.
Lovesick bullets.
But I didn’t see that happening.
Teachers are much more alienated than their students. I heard the students being berated during evaluation meetings, punished for their personalities, held back in sadistic exertions of power. Oh, the sadism of teaching. The students are young kids, they’re new. Spanish teachers wail and moan because their students don’t know this thing or the other. I don’t know, like maybe they don’t know who Juan Ramón Jiménez was or how to solve integral equations or the formula for carbon dioxide and things like that. Teachers don’t realize that the things they believe are important are merely a convention, a cultural construction, a collective agreement in which their students have no interest. The kids aren’t insane under those drab conventions. They view those conventions the way an alien would. Nobody would criticize an alien for not knowing our clichés and superstitions about history, science, and art. Fifteen-year-olds are from another planet; they’re from another place.
From them I learned a sense of freedom.
And I remember pondering how those monstrous teachers destroyed adolescence. They annihilated those kids. They enjoyed failing them. I never failed anybody. I couldn’t fail anybody. Maybe at first I did fail a few kids for not knowing how to analyze sentences. Just in the beginning, of course, when you come out of university parroting the moronic things they taught you there, like relative clauses, which were my favorite: there was a flexibility in them, there were trees and flowers and skies in those subordinates. My students and I would stare at sentences with relative clauses. I recall this one:
I’ve read the book that you lent me yesterday.
But I almost preferred not to analyze them. We would stare at the sentence on the blackboard. Which book would that be? Who was the person who’d done the borrowing? Was the book worth reading? If you were going to borrow something, wouldn’t you choose something better than a book?
We used to crack up about the direct object in sentences like this:
Juan burned the car.
Who the hell was Juan? Was it a nice car? Why burn a car? The coup de grâce was when you shifted the sentence to passive voice, because that was how to confirm that car was the direct object.
The car was burned by Juan.
If the inverted sentence made sense, the car was the direct object. We’d sit pondering, my students and I, whose car it was that Juan had burned. I thought about my car, about how if Juan burned my car, I’d fucking kill Juan.
The direct object was the proletariat of grammar: it bore the burden of everything, it bore the burden of the action of the verb.
I myself have often been a direct object, always bearing the burden of the verb, the tyranny of the verb, which is the violence of history.
I used to set out a Marxist explanation of grammar. A comical Marxism, but at least we’d crack up laughing. I’m being unfair: in fact, the teaching profession is the only loyal ally of social redemption for underprivileged Spaniards. I had incredible friends there. I observed excellent teachers, but the education system is dying—that is what I actually wanted to say, that the education system no longer works, because it’s trapped in the past.
I remember all of this right now, and it’s nighttime, a night that’s hurtling toward dawn, and I feel a wash of euphoria and I think about the bottle of whiskey I’ve got stashed in the kitchen.
I can’t start drinking again.
49
My mother used to get up early in the summertime to eat fruit. I can see her now.
“Now is when it’s best,” she’d say.
She ate San Juan pears, apricots, cherries, and watermelon. She liked summer fruit.
She’d get up at dawn to feel the cool of morning in that apartment in Barbastro, which was very hot in summer and very cold in winter because it was poorly insulated, because they’d done a bad job. Where are the builders who made it? They must be dead. And yet I can still hear them, hear their voices as they work, as they put up walls, slap down concrete, hang from the scaffolds, smoke a cigarette.
For forty summers she got up early to enjoy the cool of morning. She and those summer mornings understood each other. Seven fifteen in the morning—that was the very best time. She symbolized the joy of summer, of those mornings when I was just eleven or twelve and unfamiliar with the devastations of insomnia and could get up with her at seven in the morning and then go back to bed until nine.
And the voice returns, and it says, “Let’s make a deal—do you want to keep seeing her? Do you want to see her from the present where you are? Oh, buddy, those vast currents of time, everything that leaves—you’re now an expert on things that become lost, you spend your life thinking about your dead mother and your dead father, as if you were reluctant to move on to another area of the human experience, you don’t want to move on, because it is among the dead that the truth dwells, and it does so luminously, not in a way that is sad or lamentable or pathetic, but with a deliberate joy even, like a jubilant conclusion that is bursting with hymns, suns, trees, and summer fruit, lots of fruit in summer that your mother is nibbling right this moment, look at her, there she is, it’s June 24, 1971, and she’s biting into a slice of watermelon and it’s seven fifteen in the morning and you’re convinced that death doesn’t exist, that only immortality and the song of the summer exist, you’re living the tumult of the fleetingness of everything, because everything is transitory, and you can’t stand that.”
Yes, the song of the summer—since the late sixties, it’s clung to my skin.
My mother loved packaged potato chips and whatever song had officially been declared the song of the summer. We
were so happy back then.
Matutano potato chips don’t exist anymore—I think they’ve got another name now. My father always asked for that brand when we were at a bar.
“Make sure they’re Matutano chips,” he’d tell the waiter with a serene smile.
50
I come across a photo from the mid-seventies. We were little kids in the snow, listening to a ski instructor’s directions, trying to learn how to sail down the slope, ringed by the inert mountains, with the cold in our faces. In our ski gear, which was cheap stuff. I was wearing a raincoat.
The raincoat was yellow. The rich people had parkas; raincoats were poor-people clothing. I was furious that I didn’t have a parka like rich people did.
A kid in the snow in his yellow raincoat.
Of all the people who were around to witness the birth of an alpine ski resort called Cerler in 1972, some number of us have grown old, and many others are already dead.
The Cerler ski resort was built in the town of the same name, located in the Pyrenees in Huesca, a province that is unknown in Spain, let alone across the world. We were amazed by those green chairlifts soaring across the mountains above the tall pines, above the cliffs of dark rock. And the powerful snow, drifting down onto the industrial pilings, the power lines, the skiers with their modern gear, the latest fiberglass skis, the automatic bindings, the hotels, the nascent tourism, the cars parked at the foot of the mountains, the newly invented ski racks on the car roofs.
Everything was a budding industry.
Everything in the world was improving; the idea of improvement is an engine of history, it is universal joy. Improvement descended on the last quarter of the twentieth century as a path toward happiness and abundance. And it was true, everything was improving: cars, communications, social justice, teaching, medicine, higher education, central heating was being extended to everybody’s homes, the nightclubs and bars were getting better, and so was Spanish wine, and ski technology.
There would be no more bone fractures, the ski instructors preached, but there continued to be broken legs. The invention of automatic bindings is not celebrated in any church, yet I remember that amazing event, that advance.
Yes, and even today, with the most technologically advanced bindings on earth, there are still fractures, because the price of snow and mountains is broken bones. Those legendary names of the fledgling ski-binding industry in the 1960s—Marker, Look, Tyrolia, Salomon. In downhill skiing, the binding has a key task: it is responsible for keeping the skier’s foot joined to the ski. Ski bindings contained a mystical combustion: they didn’t let you fall, they kept you joined to the mountains, alongside the mountains, in a dance with the mountains.
They tied you down, that’s what bindings did. They gave you gravity, rootedness. They kept you on your feet, prevented you from falling into the abyss.
For a while I kept going up to Cerler to ski, but I haven’t been in a long time. I can’t afford such indulgences. I left skiing to the wealthy.
I look in the bathroom mirror in the restaurants at the Cerler ski resort, six thousand feet above sea level, and I see my father.
“Hi, Dad, I’m still skiing, just like when I was a kid.”
On Christmas Eve in Cerler, the sun is shining. We’d drive up in your SEAT 1430 to go skiing.
You put a ski rack on top. How much did that cost you?
Before long, a luxury hotel sprouted at the foot of the slopes. It was called the Monte Alba, but we never stayed there.
Then things went downhill for you, and we stopped going up to Cerler to ski.
Catching the snow in my hand, I catch your ashes. And that’s how it will always be, until everything melts and the mountains languish.
I kept going up to ski, but things weren’t like they’d been in my childhood. I went up less and less, and it cost more and more every time. I had to save for six months to ski for two days. Besides, my body can’t take that kind of physical exertion anymore.
51
They got married on January 1, 1960.
I have very few material objects of theirs, few gravitations of matter, such as photos. Very few photos. One of them erased any trace, any future reach of their lives, maybe not intentionally. Neither of them thought about my future, in which I am now remembering them, in which I am alone.
I ran across this photo.
I’d never seen it before. My mother had hidden it away. What’s funny is I thought I knew every nook and cranny of my mother’s apartment, which was my home too. I thought I knew every drawer, but clearly that wasn’t the case. My mother was hiding photos that not even my father knew existed. The level of my parents’ obliviousness to their own lives is an enigma to me. An even greater enigma is that I’m the one, after their deaths, who is trying to find out who they were. The extent to which they obliterated their lives is a kind of art.
My parents were a couple of Rimbauds: they rejected memory, they didn’t think about themselves. Though the two of them went unnoticed, they did produce me, and they sent me to school and I learned to write, and now I’m writing their lives. That’s where they went wrong—they should have left me to wallow in the most radical and complete and irremediable illiteracy.
The fact that I can never talk to them again seems to me the most outrageous phenomenon in the universe, an incomprehensible fact, a mystery as enormous as the origin of intelligent life. The idea that they’re gone keeps me up at night. Everything is unreal or inexact or blurry or misty since they left.
Photos always present the exactitude of reality; photos are the devil’s art. All of Christendom would kill to have a photo of Jesus Christ. If we had a photo of Christ, we’d start believing in resurrection again.
They hid their wedding—I don’t know why and now I never will. From the family record book, which was also squirreled away, I know they got married on January 1, 1960. I don’t know what people were like back then, in 1960. I could watch documentaries or movies from the period. I don’t see any relationship between my current person and this photo of my parents dancing.
It must have been a wonderful night.
There isn’t a single photo on the face of the earth of my parents’ wedding on January 1, 1960. Were any photos taken? Everybody has a photo of their wedding. Not my parents. If there was a photo, my mother destroyed it. Why? Because of style, because they both had style.
There won’t be anybody who was at that wedding left; they’re all under the ground.
For their honeymoon they went to the French town of Lourdes. They never told me much about that trip. My father already had his SEAT 600. I imagine the trip all the time. They had to cross the border; they would have done that at Portalet, though because it was winter—the winter of 1960—the pass was snowed over. I don’t know how my father made it through that pass in a SEAT 600. Whenever I drive the French mountain roads that lead to Lourdes, I remember.
“They were here,” I say.
I say it to nobody.
I’m never able to touch those shadows. Those ghosts. Where did they stay? I was going to ask my father and I can’t. It seems ridiculous. You say, “Oh, I’ve got to ask my father about this, he’ll know,” and then it turns out your father’s been dead for nine years. So I’ll never know where they stayed in the remarkable city of Lourdes. It’s a city full of handicaps, miracles, virgins, and saints, and it is also a city with lush vegetation, everything lushly green and leafy.
Why did they go there for their honeymoon?
They could have gone to Barcelona. Or Madrid. Or San Sebastián. Paris wasn’t an option—they couldn’t afford it. What an odd choice, one that nobody can explain to me now. Anyone who’s been there will recognize that Lourdes is unforgettable, messianic, liturgical, esoteric, insane. How is it that I never asked, while I still could, why they chose to honeymoon in the place where the Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times to the s
hepherdess Bernadette Soubirous? The answer is obvious: I didn’t ask while I could because I figured I’d ask one of these days, as if they would always be around. Maybe I was reluctant to ask them about that trip—it seems awfully personal. Anyway, one thing’s clear: If you need to ask somebody something, do it now.
Don’t wait for tomorrow; tomorrow is for the dead.
If I got another chance, I still wouldn’t be able to ask them about their honeymoon. I didn’t ask then because I knew they didn’t want to talk about it.
I can imagine why they didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t like the word marriage—that’s what was really going on. Something purely instinctive.
52
January 1 was an important date in our house during my childhood, but my parents never actually told us why. My father said, “It’s our saint’s day,” and that was the only explanation given. On January 1 we would celebrate Saint Manuel, since the two of us shared that name. Oversaturating the date even further, Valdi, my youngest, ended up being born on January 1. The calendar has three hundred sixty-five days, yet Valdi was born the same day his grandparents were married. Was it a coincidence? If the coincidence is love, then yes, it was.
Friends of my parents used to come over every January 1 from around 1965, 1966, 1967 till the mid- or late seventies. Then things changed. They changed friends. So in the eighties a different kind of friend came. I sensed the changes weren’t good ones. In the early nineties, people stopped coming altogether, and the celebration shrank to the family sphere.
I was very happy that day, even if I didn’t really know what was being commemorated. My father was always happy on January 1. I wonder about the friends who came to see him for thirty years.
And then stopped coming.
And the crooked walls of that apartment, which hopefully have been remodeled, are the only witnesses.