by Manuel Vilas
What happened to Ramiro Cruz, the first person to call them on the phone in 1968? And what of Esteban Santos? Armando Cancer? José María Gabás? Ernesto Gil? One by one they died.
I memorized the names of my father’s friends because in my young mind they were all heroes. If they were friends of my father, that meant they were like him. Which meant they were the best men in the world.
They would call this number: 974310439. Back then there was no need to dial a prefix; that came later. He really liked getting calls from Ernesto Gil because he was the mayor of Barbastro. He liked it when the mayor called to wish him a happy new year and saint’s day.
I remember how my father used to pick up the phone, still in his robe. They always called early. I found the calls unsettling, solemn and mysterious.
My marriage joined me to my parents in a rational or social or deductive or coherent way, but after my divorce, which coincided with the death of my mother, the last remaining witness, I developed a new relationship with my parents’ lives. My divorce redirected my relationship with my dead parents. A ghostly relationship, full of enigmas and clairvoyance, emerged and settled in for good.
The spirits started coming. My father is the one who comes the most; he lies down next to me and touches my hand.
And there he is, charred.
“Why did you have me burned, son?”
I too, not long from now, will be a dead father and they’ll have me burned. And Valdi and Brah will see me as a dead man.
It’s a mistake to think that the dead are something sad or disheartening or depressing; no, the dead are the inclemency of the past that arrives in the present via a lovesick howl.
I believe in the dead because they loved me much more than the living do today.
They never said what had happened on January 1. They never said, “We got married that day.” When I found out by chance, from the family record book, I was fascinated. I understood everything then.
53
My father’s name still shows up on the internet, on an old web page for salesmen. Is there a single human being who consults that web page? Short-term total extinction is impossible; you have to wait decades, even centuries. Some company or individual might still call to retain his services. Ten years after his death, his services as an active salesman are on offer via the internet. The internet bets on immortality; it’s the safest bet on immortality that human beings have available.
I sometimes go to that web page and sit staring at my father’s name and the phone number next to it.
Somebody should delete it. Or better yet, somebody should add my cell phone number so that if nobody answers the landline listed, they’ll call me instead, and that call won’t be missed.
It must not be missed, that call expecting to find a living man where a dead one resides. That faith must not disappear. I call the number often: 974310439. That number is a liturgy.
I have often considered getting the number tattooed on my arm, and eventually I will.
I don’t want to die without that number tattooed on my arm, so that death can consume it.
That number: 974310439.
54
I don’t have a problem putting my father’s life on display. Even though in Spain nobody is open about anything. It would do us a lot of good to write about our families without any fiction creeping in, without storifying. Just recounting what happened, or what we think happened. People conceal their progenitors’ lives. When I meet somebody, I always ask about their parents—about the desire that brought that person into the world.
I love it when my friends tell me about their parents’ lives. Suddenly, I’m all ears. I can picture them. I can see those parents, fighting for their children.
That fight is the most beautiful thing in the world. God, how beautiful it is.
55
One summer day in 2003 the doctors asked to talk to my mother and me.
They didn’t want my father present.
The doctor gestured to two chairs so we would sit. He told us point-blank that my father had late-stage colon cancer and we needed to get used to the idea. He was an oncologist who’d clearly rehearsed for those moments, the moments when he was obliged to communicate the idea that death was drawing near, the moments of devastation. I was struck by his attitude, because in a way the man was enjoying it—not immorally, not because he got pleasure from describing death’s power or divulging disaster, but because he believed he was doing his job well. It was as if he were carrying a laboratory in his head full of words that were useful for disseminating vital news. And he’d done all kinds of tests, rehearsed all sorts of words. He carried in his head the verbal articulation of world-altering news, but he wasn’t a poet, he was just another madman in this world of inexhaustible beings wearing themselves out in vain.
My father died two years and some months after the doctor issued that stupid sentence. Actually, I believe my father died because he thought the oncologist’s prediction was an interesting one and he didn’t want to leave him with egg on his face; he died out of a sort of professional courtesy to the guy.
My father saw the oncologist’s prognosis as a convenient way to exit this world on somebody else’s invitation.
I don’t believe in doctors, but I do believe in words. I don’t think doctors know much about what we are because they are ignorant of the world of words. I do believe in drugs. Modern science has delegated to doctors the authority to catalog and prescribe drugs. Medicine is useful if it supplies drugs. That is, if it supplies what kills. Drugs are nature; they’ve always been there. We’re not allowed to take them on a whim.
There was a silence, and I looked at the oncologist again. As my mother asked him questions, I suddenly felt sorrier about the oncologist’s life than I did about my father’s.
His life seemed more depressing to me than the news of my father’s illness.
56
We never told my father anything, nor did he ask. My father decided to ignore his disease. His approach seemed to me a mystical one. He simply kept silent.
They operated on him several times, and he kept silent. It was as if he didn’t care that they were invading his body to perform vague, routine, apathetic tasks. He didn’t care that the surgeons were probing his internal organs as a way of filling their workdays, which had been meticulously agreed upon and circumscribed by the unions and the hospital administration.
While the doctors were earning their monthly paychecks, my father was dying. There was less alienation in my father’s death than in the paychecks of those insubstantial individuals.
57
He used to like watching TV. I think he whiled away millions of hours in front of the television set. I’ve seen how television technology has evolved. Buying a TV in the sixties and seventies of the last century was a transcendental act that brought on a swell of joy and fear.
I remember the first TV that came into my house. I remember my father obsessively watching a seventies-era game show called One, Two, Three . . . Try Again. My father was addicted to the program, in which the contestants had to answer unexpected questions, with the mantra “One, two, three . . . try again.”
My father would respond along with the contestants, and he tended to win.
He could have competed on that game show.
He never did.
He must have thought about how he’d have to take a bus; he didn’t like buses, or trains either. He liked only his car, because his car was a manifestation of himself. His car was him. That’s why he always parked it in the shade during the scorching summers, because my father didn’t like being in the sun.
I loathed that game show, but it aired on Fridays, when we were all hanging around. We didn’t have school the next day.
I don’t know why you liked that program—it was awful. You must know I hated it, all those dumb questions. My only consolation is t
hat all the contestants and all the hosts and all the beautiful girls who were there as eye candy on that massive turd of a program are gradually dying off; you can’t imagine how I suffered watching that tacky crap on TV, and you sitting there, answering questions, with those human beings reduced to a yellow smile. As I saw it, they were symbols of Spain’s backwardness. Well, your son had already moved on to another realm of Spanish history. Luckily it’s all a ghost now. The hosts have died, almost everybody has died. The relief and purification of death for those whose faces the television captured: comics, singers, presenters, all those stubbornly Spanish faces. Because the only way to surmount vulgarity in Spain is through death. I can imagine photos, housed in cheap, ostentatious frames, of those contestants on the walls of their homes, photos passed down from parents to children—it’s Mom and Dad on One, Two, Three . . . Try Again, Mom and Dad were contestants in 1977 with Kiko Ledgard. Remember Kiko Ledgard?
Where is Kiko Ledgard buried, the legendary TV host from the mid-1970s? Did he have children? Do you remember his children? My father and I watched him every Friday. Well, actually, I watched my father watching him. I remember that out of superstition, Kiko Ledgard wore several watches on each wrist.
Those watches are somewhere out there—they were nice.
All the same, Dad, I go to this thing called YouTube now and search for those Spanish TV programs from the seventies and I watch them with inexpressible love and nostalgia because they were your programs. It’s not true that I hated those programs; I only wished you’d have taken my hand and we could have gone out for a walk, that you’d spent time with me instead of spending time with them, the Spanish TV hosts, with whom I’m now spending time, on a computer screen, addicted to nostalgia, addicted to you, addicted to YouTube. Addicted to the past.
I dream that you, Mom, and I are all dressed up in brand-name clothes with gleaming shoes, and they’re expecting us at the best restaurant in Paris, with views of the Seine.
I dream that we laugh and drink champagne and eat caviar and snails and Mom lights a cigarette with a gold Dupont lighter you just gave her. I dream we’re rich.
I dream that you tell jokes in French; I dream that it’s 1974 and the world is ours.
I dream that we never watched TV.
I dream that we were always traveling: one night in Paris, another in New York, a few days in Moscow, a few more in Buenos Aires, or Rome, or Lisbon.
I dream of world domination.
I dream that the three of us are dining in the world’s finest restaurants. And we tell jokes in every language: Russian, English, Italian, Portuguese.
I dream that you buy a mansion near Lisbon. I dream that the three of us gaze out at the Atlantic together. Because I know how much you loved life.
58
The years passed, and by the late nineties my father had become addicted to cooking shows. He spent hours watching chefs making fritters or codfish or paellas on television. He’d wear this really nice green silk robe he had, put on his glasses, and sit in front of the TV to watch cooking shows.
He looked like an angel, my father did—a cheerful angel, contemplating the gastronomical organization of reality.
He was like an envoy charged with sanctifying food through the sense of sight.
There was no plot to those shows, or the plot was simply how to cook hake in the Majorcan style. I think what really fascinated him was the geographical attributions for the Spanish recipes. That each dish was cooked in accordance to custom in some particular place. Maybe deep down he imagined himself living in Majorca or Bilbao or Madrid and eating hake, codfish, or stew. He knew how to cook and he knew how to prepare those dishes himself; what he liked was seeing how other people did it.
He loved watching the joy that cooking creates. Because cooking implies future. Everything is yet to be; everything is being prepared for posterity, even if posterity is only fifteen minutes from now.
59
One day he stopped caring about his car, an old SEAT Málaga. He had always been obsessive about his car, taking care of it, keeping it in perfect condition. Then he abandoned it in a garage and stopped driving. I went to see the car, and it was covered in dust.
I told him, “Dad, the car is covered in dust.”
He looked at me, and it seemed like that had gotten his attention.
“It was a good car. Do whatever you want with it,” he said.
When he washed his hands of his car, I knew my father was going to die soon; I knew that was final.
It was one of the saddest moments of my life. My father was telling me goodbye by proxy, through a machine.
Instead of telling me, “We need to talk, this is over,” he said, “It was a good car.” My God, how beautiful. Wherever my father’s spirit came from, it was graced with the gift of elegance, the gift of the unexpected, of artless originality.
Of style.
I sat down in a kitchen chair and stared at him. I got really anxious. I got really upset. In the whole universe, only I knew what those words—“Do whatever you want with it”—meant. He was telling me something devastating: “Do whatever you want with me. I am oblivious to your love.”
I am oblivious to your love.
I didn’t love you enough, nor you me.
We were exactly the damn same.
60
I went to see his car. My father’s spirit was gusting through the entire car. His large hands on the wheel, his glasses, the empty trunk, the blanket inside the trunk to protect the trunk from who knows what (and of course my own car also has a blanket inside the trunk to protect the trunk from who knows what), the glove box with the papers all in order. My father clearly saw the mystical fusion of the Spanish lower middle class with the cars the lower middle class came to possess.
It was an industrial and political mysticism, an ancestral pairing of steel and paint with flesh and blood.
The way he left this world seems to me a superior art. He left with admirable discretion.
He was indifferent to death; he didn’t think about it. He was sad about the car. It must have scared him to find that the thing that had been the object of his constant preoccupation throughout his life—and thus the foundation and meaning of that life—no longer mattered to him. It was a radical change.
They were going to die at the same time, he and his car.
The day he abandoned his car, my heart turned over.
I knew what the car meant to him. It was a bit of material rootedness in the world, a possession. My father’s soul came from very far away in time, from the ancient planetary night, soul belonging to unrooted men—men living or dead, same difference—that’s where my father’s soul came from: souls that did not take root, that were extremely beautiful and extremely volatile.
We became invisible to my father.
My mother had panic attacks.
She was afraid of the final stages of the disease.
We were a catastrophic family, and at the same time unique.
We were constantly in and out of hospitals.
We didn’t talk.
I don’t understand what happened. I think a lot of the responsibility was mine. There was a dissatisfaction in me that prevented me from taking all of that on. I used to experience fits of depression in hospitals. I couldn’t stand it.
My life was going badly and my father’s life was simply going.
We all blamed one another. My father blamed my mother. My mother blamed me. I blamed my father. My father blamed me. My mother blamed me. Et cetera. We were a jumble of dissatisfaction and blame.
We never got a moment of rest.
61
In fact, there was something weird about my family: nobody ever said, “We’re a family.” We didn’t know what we were. I’m thinking back now on one terrifying Christmas Eve half a century ago—it must have been ’67 or ’68. My father go
t really angry about something to do with dinner, something that wasn’t to his liking.
He smashed the dishes.
He flew into a rage, hurled the plates against the wall, the floor, like they do in the movies.
We went to bed.
There was no Christmas Eve or anything. That was all my family could think about, enveloped in an atmosphere of unconfessable sadness.
He chose Christmas Eve to smash those plates to bits.
I didn’t know what was happening. I just saw the plates flying through the air. Suddenly, the plates were no longer on the table.
It was supposed to be Christmas Eve, damn it, when families were at their most respectable. I never asked about that scene, and I should have; maybe I would have understood something about my family and, thus, about my future.
How could I have asked about it? How, when it hurtled toward the unnameable, the phantasmagorical, when I wished to erase it, to discount it, when I nearly succeeded in diluting it with a thousand drops of falsehood, the drops of my tears, my distress, like that other stiff and sordid distress that Father G. caused me when I entered a light-filled classroom.
As we well know, the things we witness as children shape our later lives. Nevertheless, and this is my own view, they do so not according to any sociological or political structure, but through an atavistic spilling of blood—and in my case, they do so through the weighty science of the blessing of our destiny, since having a destiny is a blessing.
Most men have no destiny.
And it’s fascinating how the past constructs a destiny in the mechanical hollows of my breathing. Because most men and women have no history. They possess lives without history. And that is beautiful too. Planet Earth is a potter’s field of millions of human beings who were here but had no history, and if you have no history, it’s worth wondering then whether you were ever alive.