by Manuel Vilas
The seasons and the decades are put in order, the hand and the rotten tooth are put in order, the bones of the hanged man are jumbled together, and in the end one can only ponder the detestability of God.
A detestable God whose boredom gave rise to the odyssey of men.
A son should not be there to see his mother transformed into a little girl.
62
I think my mother started crying on that fateful Christmas Eve. My mother, who used to take refuge in the kitchen pantry whenever there was a storm. My mother, who was terrified of storms. You’d open the pantry, which was like a coffin, and there was my mother. If there’s a storm, where’s my mother? She would disappear. My mother would flee the world when thunder and lightning and pouring rain bore down on it.
She would hide in the kitchen pantry. That was her youth: fleeing from storms.
And I thought it was a game—I’d open the pantry door and there she’d be, rigid, girlish, statue-like, paralyzed. But her girlish face has faded from my memory, and I can remember only the decrepit old woman she became, more to her horror than to mine. She was a witness responsible for her own horror. That’s why I say she was angelic; only angels can refuse to forgive themselves for the horror of decrepitude.
Decrepitude cannot be forgiven. It is detestability and failure. The awareness of decrepitude—that’s what I’m talking about. The more aware you are of your decrepitude, the nearer you draw to the detestability of God.
My mother was an angel. She saw her decrepitude and rejected it, and then became a martyr, but in all of that there throbbed only her service to life. She couldn’t stand mirrors, and neither could I. Mirrors are for the young. If you respect beauty, it’s impossible to respect your own aging.
The kitchens of contemporary Spanish apartments don’t have pantries anymore. But I’ve been forgetting a vital room in my parents’ house, a windowless room they called “the wardrobe.” It was at the end of the hall. The door stuck, so it was always hard to open. Inside were stored my father’s work cases, the cases containing the samples of the textiles he sold to small businesses in the villages of Huesca, Teruel, and Lérida. And other things—there were also clothes and mysterious objects. My brother and I were forbidden to go in there. I know my mother hid artifacts of the past there, things she didn’t dare throw away, though over time she did gradually get rid of them all. I never learned what was in the wardrobe. Sometimes it would come up in conversations, in sentences like “If there’s space, we’ll store this in the wardrobe,” but it was an odd room, pointy and triangular, wallpapered with stars on a dark blue background. I think the wallpaper was the thing I found strangest. The room was wallpapered because once upon a time the entire house had been. My mother gradually changed the walls, opting for paint, for plaster, but she left the wardrobe as it had always been, since 1960. So the wardrobe was like going back in time. Wallpaper had gone out of style. The wardrobe retained its papered walls: stars in the firmament, and suitcases and clothing, and things unseen. And my huddled mother whenever storms came, either hiding in the wardrobe or hiding in the pantry; I think she preferred the pantry because the wardrobe was a dangerous place—there was a dark force in it. I loved the wardrobe; my parents’ gravitational pull was concentrated there. The wallpaper fad ended. They weren’t bad, those walls covered with patterned paper.
My mother became a little girl and hid whenever it stormed. Not just in the wardrobe and pantry—under the bed too. I was a little boy watching magic dissolve his mother’s bonds to space and time. Suddenly, my mother wasn’t there. And I’d search the house for her as summer storms swelled the sky, turned the heavens into a thousand bits of solid light. And then the two of us would be a little boy and a little girl with an undefinable, almost cursed kinship. Come, come hide here with Mom, hold Mom’s hand, the world is a wicked place.
63
Our misfortune was justified.
I have always believed that.
Our misfortune was avant-garde art.
It may have been a genetic misfortune, a sort of inability to live.
My father did have good moments. When he was elected town councilor under Spain’s first democratic administrations, that was a good moment. My father enjoyed that. It put him in a good mood. It was in the early eighties. I was living and studying in Zaragoza. Sometimes he’d come to Zaragoza to see me, but we were still poor. My father didn’t do well with money. We were always in bad shape with money. When I was twenty, I was awarded a literary prize. And my mother took the money from that prize and polished off the entire lot. It was twenty thousand pesetas in 1982—a fortune. She spent it, and she never told me on what. She was able to cash it because the prize people sent my winnings via money order to the family home instead of to Zaragoza.
I think she spent it on bingo. My mother was a big bingo player. I remember right after I’d turned eighteen, my mother used to take me to bingo.
Both of them, my father and my mother, played bingo. Sometimes they got lucky. They went every Saturday. In the late seventies, gambling was made legal in Spain. My mother went crazy with bingo. I remember her with just one number to go for bingo, waving the card superstitiously, praying to who knows what power, mumbling strange words, invocations of chance, calling the numbers things like “pretty girl,” and sometimes she’d actually win. But most of the time she lost. She’d say, “We’ll play five cards and leave,” and the five cards would turn into fifty.
There was no way to make money. I think that’s hereditary. I’m poor too. I don’t have a pot to piss in—luckily, nobody’s got a pot to piss in these days. And that can be liberating. If they’re smart, young people will pursue a wandering life, chaos, job insecurity, and freedom. And skilled poverty, morally deactivated poverty—that is, group poverty. It’s a good solution: poverty as a collective phenomenon, pooled having-not.
The problem with poverty is that it ends up becoming destitution, and that’s a moral condition.
My mother couldn’t stand the tedium of life. That’s why she went to swimming pools and rivers, that’s why she played bingo, that’s why she sunbathed, that’s why she smoked.
She and the sun, practically the same thing.
64
I spoke to the oncologist who took care of my father in his final days of life. It was an irritating, agonizing conversation. She was a young doctor, very stressed. I figured she was probably in a precarious employment situation. She likely didn’t earn much. Oncologists have to take care of a bunch of dying people and probably earn the same as obstetricians, who have the cheerier professional mission of bringing babies into the world. Leaving the world and coming into it, and the same salary for both.
I told the doctor to make sure my father didn’t suffer in his final moments. She didn’t really understand what I was saying. She thought I was suggesting euthanasia or something like that, a sort of murder. Everything was a wash of confusion. She got angry at me; I didn’t care about that anger—it was as if I were living a fiction, a delirium, a theater piece not of this world. But I made sure my father didn’t suffer. I hope somebody will do the same for me: make sure I get drugged, thoroughly drugged. He spent an entire day dying. I watched him dying. I could hear breathing that sounded like a storm, a gale of long, mysterious moans. His body was consumed. But it made music. His toes had a religious look to them, like a martyred Christ, like a seventeenth-century Spanish painting, feet that were deformed but expectant. Everything was an effort to breathe. And an intelligent one. My father made booming, tragic, catastrophic noises. His throat sounded like a nest full of millions of yellow birds, shattering the walls of the air. My father became the Spanish Baroque. I understood the Spanish Baroque then, a severe art that worships death because death is the most fully achieved expression of the mystery of life.
65
Once I hit puberty, with its terrible tribulations, I rejected any physical contact with either m
y father or my mother. I didn’t like touching them. It’s not that I didn’t like it—it wasn’t that. The trouble was, we hadn’t created that tradition. We hadn’t established that ritual. I barely gave them the obligatory pecks on the cheek in greeting. And I certainly wasn’t about to touch my father when he was dying. I’ve already noted we were a strange family—“dysfunctional,” people would say now. I don’t think that was either good or bad.
My father didn’t even go to his mother’s—my grandmother’s—funeral; he didn’t even phone. And my mother took care of blowing up my father’s relationship with his siblings, but it doesn’t matter. My father used to accuse my mother of hiding his papers. The way my mother did the housekeeping was to throw out every paper she ran across.
I remember my father banging his head against a bookcase because he couldn’t find the duplicate invoice for a sale he’d made. They often shouted, but they never insulted each other. My father never insulted my mother, never ever. He would just get furious and frantic and hit things, objects—that was his rage. Whenever I walked by the bookcase after that, I’d stare at it intently: the bookcase my father banged his head against. And of course the day I emptied out the apartment, when my mother died, I stood staring at the side panel of the bookcase and stroked it for the last time. It wasn’t even made of real wood. It must have been veneer or vinyl. I always thought it was wood, but no, it wasn’t.
I’d forgotten the shouting. I was small, very small, almost tiny, but my puny mind leaped into action and formulated a wee question: Why didn’t my mother leave my father’s papers alone?
My mother was blind—that’s the only reason. But it was a wounded blindness. My mother didn’t understand the papers’ importance. She threw everything away. She didn’t keep anything. She used to throw away my comic books. My father’s papers. I’d buy a comic book and the next week she’d have made it disappear. “But you already read it, what do you need it for?” she’d say. She wanted to throw away the books too, but she found that she didn’t have enough figurines and other knickknacks to fill the bookcases and decided to give them a chance. And so the books were saved.
But this isn’t a criticism. People are who they are, full stop. And once everybody’s dead, none of it matters, because all of the dead were great men and women; death has given them a worthy and fortunate final meaning.
Social and family life and work life and romantic life don’t matter either—they’re an artifice that is laid bare upon death. That’s why I write this way. Because in any life there are a million mistakes added up to form that life. The mistakes are repeated again and again. Infidelity is repeated. Betrayal is repeated. Deception is repeated. And no record of the repetitions appears anywhere. Recounting what happened is fine—it’s good work. Attempting to recount what happened, I mean. Maybe that’s why it sears my insides to look at family photos: because photographs depict what we saw in the sunlight, what was lit by the sun and, like light, shaped the lives of men and women; that’s why photos are so unsettling, the most unsettling thing there is: we managed to infuse light into a piece of paper; my parents were lit by the light of the sun, and that light still persists on those faded rectangles of photographic paper, in those worn portraits.
Light, which was doomed to tumble down from the sun and ended up clashing against human bodies here in life.
Stubbornly, the photos of my parents assert that they were once alive. That distant memory of them is more important than contemporary capitalism, than the production of universal wealth.
66
My mother never liked giving kisses in greeting or shaking hands. She didn’t like to touch people. I think I inherited that. Which, when you think about it, might be a genetic mandate to protect you from the infections other people carry.
When my father died, some of his friends and relatives—not many—kissed his forehead.
I did not.
Neither did my mother.
In that moment I realized that my children won’t kiss mine either. That chain of frigid refusal when it comes to touching our forebears’ bodies—where does it come from? There is in that frigidity, that asepsis, a high degree of inhumanity, or fear, or cowardice, or selfishness. It is a genetic proclivity. My parents dealt atrociously with the deaths of their parents—my grandparents—just as my children will deal atrociously with my death. And that seems extraordinary.
There is something there that elevates us.
A sort of aristocracy of alienation.
I did not touch my dead father’s body.
I never saw his tumor—they never showed it to me, never offered to let me see the hunk of tissue that was bound to kill him.
I would have liked to hold it in my hand, hold that tumor in my hand.
What is a cancerous tumor?
It is tired wind, a general history of polluted air, crap in the diet—meaning other more unusual tumors, from processed cows and pigs and chickens and hake and lamb and swordfish and rabbits and oxen.
As an adult I didn’t get close, I never touched my parents’ bodies, except for the nervous formulaic cheek kisses we gave each other. They were kisses in which the devil whale splashed, a kind of awkwardness more ancient than the oceans.
At what age do you stop holding your mother’s and father’s hands?
67
I fondly remember how much effort my mother put, shortly before her death, into wearing red nail polish; I found it touching.
I would sit staring at her elderly hand, which still radiated a sense of beauty and memory, with those beauty-salon fingernails. My elderly mother’s coquetry seemed fragile, lovable. She wanted to look nice for other people, and I found that incredible. Going around with painted nails was a gift. But even so, I never took her hand of my own free will, except when I had to help her walk—then I would take her hand.
I was grateful for that obligation, because it allowed me to hold her hand without letting go of reserve, distance, remoteness. I would hold her hand out of medical obligation, not spontaneously.
And I didn’t hold my dying father’s hand. Nobody showed me how. It freaked me out to do it; it scared me, with a fear that gradually reinforced my solitude. Fear of a hand, which ended up making way for the vast solitude I inhabit.
68
Cancer devoured him, but he never uttered the name of his disease. He never talked about cancer or death. We never heard the word cancer pass his lips. It’s incredible to me that he never said that word.
He didn’t ask and he didn’t say it.
He was deeply anarchistic.
He never told me what or whom he thought about as he was dying.
He took that mystery with him.
He didn’t even say good night.
69
He gradually disappeared—his life disappeared and his conversation disappeared, and he was silence. A man can become silence. My father, who is now silence, was already silence before—as if, knowing that he was going to be silence, he decided to be silence before silence arrived, thus teaching silence a lesson from which silence emerged infused with music.
He’d made a secret languid pact with his body, from which music was born.
The music of Johann Sebastian Bach—that was my father.
70
I know that the medicine of the future will allow the dying to carry on lengthy, complex conversations with the tumors that are going to kill them, once medicine takes a vital step that is unimaginable today: when medicine realizes that the body is a temple, a spiritual construction of the origin of the universe, when medicine is intelligent at last. Medicine is not intelligent yet; it’s still merely rote, a simple verification of facts. It must yet discover the beauty and immaterial chaos of a cancerous tumor, because a cancerous tumor also contains the life drive of the body of the man who carries it inside him.
That’s why my father chose silence. There was noth
ing to say. Medicine was empty, religion never existed, and he’d already given up his car. Human beings were already invisible; he had nothing to say to us.
He didn’t say anything to me.
He didn’t tell me “Goodbye.”
He didn’t tell me “I love you.”
He didn’t tell me “I loved you.”
So he stayed silent.
And in that silence were all the words. Like a metaphysical boomerang, his silence contained the burning stars from the wardrobe’s walls. And so I was the one who, beside the hospital bed where my father lay, sought a place to hide, and that place was the wardrobe with its walls papered with stars.
The wardrobe was our aleph, the aleph of the Spanish lower middle class that emerged in the postwar period. Wardrobes were our speculative hideout.
71
My father never told me he loved me. My mother didn’t either. And I see beauty in that. I always did, as long as I was forced to pretend that my parents loved me.
Maybe they didn’t love me and this book is the fiction of a wounded man. More than wounded, frightened. It isn’t sad not to be loved—rather, it’s terrifying.
You end up thinking that if they don’t love you, it’s because there’s some powerful reason that justifies their lack of love.
If they don’t love you, the failure is yours.
After I got married and started another family, they stopped loving me like they used to. They loved me less and less all the time. We were no longer fighting for life on the same team.