Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  72

  My father never called me on the phone and my mother called at all hours, but she was calling for reassurance. I would see their number, 974310439, on my cell phone screen. She was hounded by paranoias, the same paranoias that make me call Brah and Valdi, and they refuse to answer the phone. My sainted mother tended toward paranoia. In the late 1960s I remember how terrified she’d be whenever my father had to work, because working, in my father’s case, meant traveling. She was afraid he’d get into a highway accident. So the telephone became an instrument with oracular powers. Phone calls frightened her. My mother hated long trips, especially when my father had to go make sales in Teruel—that was the longest trip. He’d be away all week, sleeping in cheap hotels, selling Catalonian textiles to the tailors and seamstresses in the villages of Teruel. Maybe when he was off on those five-day trips my father became another man. I hope that was the case. I’ll never know, because he never told me anything, and he never told me “I love you.”

  He never told me anything that lasted longer than a minute.

  I wish I could do the same.

  73

  The day after my father’s death—that is, on December 18, 2005—the oncologist called me in. I walked into her office. She was sitting in a chair looking at her computer. It was a garlanded morning, with the Christmas holidays just around the corner. She apologized. She said she felt she’d been rude to me the day before my father’s passing. She used the word passing, a word I despise. I almost said “a word that death and I despise.” I listened to her apologies. She was talking, but it was as if she were talking from a great distance, as if she too were dead, or passed. The power of my father’s death was killing her, crushing her too, as if my father were a murderer.

  I think all I said was goodbye to that oncologist, who must be alive still and surely practicing in some provincial Spanish hospital, tied and bound now to a few dozen deceased, who will always be with her.

  And I have no idea what haunted gifts it occurred to us to buy for that Christmas of 2005. The TV commercials, the oncologist uttering soundless words, my dead father, my mother who wanted to buy an acorn-fed ham, because my mother was losing her mind, she was totally out of it, had no idea what had happened, wanted to go Christmas shopping as if nothing had changed, and in fact deep down nothing had changed; my mother didn’t understand why she suddenly had to give up the small number of inconsequential things that gave her a little bit of happiness, like doing Christmas shopping.

  The poorer you are in Spain, the more you love Christmas.

  74

  “Why the hell do you think we’re going to go buy a ham when my father is dead and we’re supposed to be in mourning?”

  “Your father liked acorn-fed ham,” my mother said—and that was true. My father loved it, and whenever I eat acorn-fed ham I remember him and how fond of it he was.

  “Poor man, he’ll never get to have it again,” my mother would say.

  Often afterward my mother would refer to my dead father that way: “the man” or “poor man.” For her, he had been reduced to his anthropological essence: a man. Not her husband, but “the man.” She never said “my husband.” I found it fascinating.

  There was a triviality to everything that was immensely difficult to explain: that doctor’s apology, my father fled from the world, the cheap Christmas decorations in the hospital corridors, the coffee machine, the interns moving old people from one place to another in a bedbound choreography, those old people’s frightened faces, those faces of deep sorrow, of slow fear, of powerlessness and loss of will. Maybe it’s better never to get there in the first place. The faces of the elderly are the face of a person begging younger men for mercy. And me drinking coffee that cost fifty cents. I was getting drunk on hospital-coffee-machine joe. I liked throwing the cheap little plastic cups into an enormous trash can. I liked polluting the world with garbage—it’s the one luxury poor people get to enjoy. That’s what poor people do: discard garbage.

  Our bodies are garbage.

  The entire end of my father’s life is tinged with hallucination and truth.

  75

  My cell phone rang at three in the morning. It was the medical examiner. He told me I hadn’t reported my father’s pacemaker. As if I needed to report such a thing. What a bastard, calling me like that—like a registrar of death. I didn’t know there was such a thing as death registration; I thought there was just property registration.

  Cremation wasn’t possible with a pacemaker, he told me, irritated.

  I would have to sign a form authorizing them to remove the pacemaker from my father’s body. Of course, they would need to perform an autopsy—in other words, another three hundred euros.

  In capitalism, when a business says two extra words to you, it means there’s a problem—and that means the bill is going up. The business of the dead is overwhelming, but the dead require work, and work must be paid for. The only question is the price. Capitalism’s ability to turn any event into an amount of money, a price, is astonishing. The conversion of all existence into a price is the presence of poetry, since poetry is precision, like capitalism. Poetry and capitalism are the same thing.

  The next day I signed the authorization. I asked if I could have the pacemaker, but everybody ignored me. They thought I was traumatized by grief. But I would have liked to keep something that had been inside my father’s body, ensconced in his flesh. I imagine they must have washed or purified or disinfected the pacemaker and popped it into somebody else. Or maybe they didn’t wash it and inserted it just as it was, with my father’s organic remains clinging to the plastic. That pacemaker is probably still making a pace for some other poor bastard who’s wandering around, happy and contented, with the device inside him.

  The device going from body to body in the twilight of the world.

  Since then I’ve felt my father’s presence everywhere, as if the electricity of that pacemaker were reactivating the blood that had disappeared. I can feel it right this moment.

  My father became electricity, and cloud, and bird, and song, and orange, and tangerine, and melon, and tree, and road, and soil, and water.

  And I see him whenever I try to see myself.

  His high laugh tumbling over the world.

  His desire to turn the world to smoke and ashes. That’s how ghosts are: they are forces and forms of the life that precedes ours, which is there, crowned, purified.

  My father is like a tower full of corpses. I often feel him behind me when I look in the mirror.

  This is you now, my father says, and then there is a deep silence.

  He says just four words.

  Now you are “the man,” or, rather, the “poor man.”

  This is you now.

  From his death I move on to mine, to waiting for mine. My father’s death evokes my own. And when my death arrives, I will be unable to see it. When I watched my father dying, I felt terror. His death throes sucked at me. I was being carried away. Was my father the one who was dying in that hospital?

  His body was falling apart.

  It was like he was another man.

  He was like a hero, a legend.

  He was like a god.

  76

  I’ve done my best, Dad. I know you’re always with me; look at this massive ruin of a house I live in, look at my apartment on Avenida de Ranillas. Papers are piling up, dust invades the tables, my clothing smells weird, the floors are dirty, the kitchen table is uncleared, the bed unmade—and therefore un-unmade; and the other bed, the one for my sons, who never spend the night (I wouldn’t either), is covered with a jumble of clothing and papers. The jumbled clothing and its musty smell, the dust getting in the clothing, the clothing always dirty even when it’s clean. I can’t find anything either, and I think back on your frantic fits, you pounding your forehead against the walls, accusing my mother of throwing out your carbon copie
s and invoices, and here is where I’d like to take a moment, because if I can’t find my belongings, it’s due to my own lack of organization, and I’ve been thinking that maybe the same thing was happening with you, that actually nobody was throwing anything away. You were the one burying papers under more papers, unable to let go of mail or anything else. We’ll never know now.

  Never.

  77

  After the divorce, I kept the armoire that had been in the back bedroom of the house that was once mine, and now my clothing smells like acrid damp. You don’t know how exasperating it is for your recently laundered clothing to end up smelling musty. It’s the fault of the armoire, which I found in a dumpster a dozen years back.

  Do you know what it’s like to go around smelling like fermented armoire all damn day? Not to be able to afford a new armoire, after spending twenty-three years shackled to a job where all you do is shout “Everybody settle down”?

  Twenty-three years teaching teenagers. And I don’t have an armoire. I don’t have a goddamn armoire to put my clothes in so they’ll smell decent.

  And my father says to me, “I told you not to get married, I told you to wait—you were too young, you had some living to do still. I told you that years ago, but you didn’t listen.”

  You’ve used a lot of words today, I tell my father.

  The ghost of poverty stands before me.

  Smelling clean was never easy.

  Historically, I mean.

  If you smell clean, it’s because other people are dirty—never forget that.

  78

  After a lot of dithering, I’ve bought an office chair at Hipercor, and Brah has put it together. I’m hopeless at putting things together. I never understand the instructions. I get frustrated and angry, and end up hurling it all out the window. I tried to have a conversation with the great Vivaldi. I talked to him about the future, about how he’ll have to make decisions. He has a future, and I don’t.

  I remember when I had a future.

  It’s the most beautiful feeling in life, when nothing has yet begun. When the curtain has not yet risen.

  I know there are people I will never see again, people who were once important in my life, and whom I’ll never see again not because they’re dead but because life has social rules, cultural rules, whatever—in actuality, they’re political rules, atavistic laws that help to organize this thing we call civilization.

  That’s how humans work: there are people with whom, even though they’re alive, we will never interact again, and so they attain the same status as the dead.

  There is also a still greater degree of pain: realizing that you are thinking about a living person as if they were dead. That happened to me with my aunt Reme: I never went to visit her. I couldn’t go visit her—I felt guilty. If I went to see her, I’d feel guilty; if I didn’t go see her, I felt guilty then too, but it was more comfortable not to go see her. When she died, I was just starting a fling in Madrid. I could have gone to the funeral—I had time. I could have taken a train. But I had a date with a woman that day, and I liked that woman a lot, I was wild about her, and that night was going to be pivotal. In my head, I told my aunt Reme that. I said I wasn’t going to her funeral because of lust, and that a dead person had to respect lust. I think she understood. She doesn’t visit me in the night or reproach me for not attending her funeral. I think she understood how I felt. I think she understood I was in a hole and it was going to take me a while to get out, and it did take me a while to get out.

  Today I would have gone to her funeral.

  Human beings evolve; what was important yesterday no longer is today. I didn’t go to that funeral, and when I was with that woman I was thinking about my aunt Reme’s funeral, and so I pushed our relationship and our night together hard so we’d end up in bed—because if we ended up in bed, the fact that I’d skipped my aunt’s funeral would make sense. All of these thoughts were happening in my head quite pragmatically, like impeccable bits of reasoning, with irrefutable logic. They were erroneous, I know that now, and stingy. It didn’t seem that way at the time.

  Yes, I was nuts, though on second thought maybe I wasn’t so nuts. I was drinking back then, of course. I drank a lot and spent hours wandering the gleaming dunes of the paradise that drunks inhabit. To a drunk, sex is only an accessory, an embellishment to the alcohol, maybe its finest embellishment but an embellishment nevertheless. Travel, gazing at the sea, laughter, eating, entering the naked bodies of women—these are mere complements to the main event. Which is alcohol, the perfect dimension, the golden hand grasping a cup.

  And now, quite simply, I find no use in the things I did back then.

  When I was with that woman, I was thinking about my aunt’s corpse; it was awful because I had to fake it, so I felt guilty; my brain was bleeding. If the woman had known my aunt, I wouldn’t have felt so guilty. The guilt was born of strangeness. My lover was a stranger to my family, and therein lay the problem. That kind of regret has often been my companion in life. I needed my mother’s approval for everything. Then I shifted that responsibility to my ex-wife. It would have been over-the-top to call my mother or my ex-wife to ask permission. But if they’d granted it to me, I would have felt better.

  I sought my mother’s presence everywhere. There was no escaping childhood: I was very frightened. Whose presence? I am using the term mother for the general mystery of life. Mother is living death. When I say “mother” I mean Being. I’m a primitive soul. Without my mother around, the world was a hostile place. That’s why I drank so much and engaged in reckless and promiscuous sexual behavior. Even today I don’t know what I was looking for. I’d need a panel of psychotherapists to figure out what I was after.

  In any case, I didn’t go to my aunt’s funeral, one more failure to appear on my list of absences or desertions from my family members’ funerals. If you don’t attend the funeral of somebody who was important to you as a child, the child you once were claws at the cerebral veins of the adult you now are and stands before you with a distraught look on his face and demands an explanation; he tells you he can’t sleep, can’t close the damn circle of human experience.

  I hope everybody’s okay.

  79

  When I started looking for my own place during my divorce, I couldn’t find anything. What I encountered were total nutjobs selling impractical apartments, completely beyond all architectural logic, totally uninhabitable. I needed to find something urgently. At the time I’d been living in a hotel for several weeks. I spent my days drinking and was completely oblivious to everything else. It was a pretty nice hotel—it cost thirty-five euros a night. They gave me a room with a balcony in the historic quarter of Zaragoza. I would take a bottle of gin and a couple of beers up to the room, and as the bottles emptied I’d start calling people on the phone. I’d call up friends, male and female alike, people in general. The next day I wouldn’t remember anything. I felt deeply ashamed. I was losing everything. And my mother was already dead. We never shared a desire to talk on the phone; when she wanted to, I didn’t, and once I was in the mood, she was no longer in this world. It sucks that my mother never saw the phone-addict version of me, the me who was always wanting to talk on the phone.

  It’s funny—the telephone is the one thing my mother and I never matched up on. Now, we would have talked for hours and hours. Our only mismatch was our desire to talk on the phone, and I say that almost completely seriously.

  When she wanted to talk, I was absent. When I wanted to talk, she was dead.

  The hotel was in an area full of grungy watering holes and underground clubs, so I used to go out at around one in the morning and wander the streets of San Pablo, Predicadores, Casta Álvarez, and I’d pop into some dive, almost always packed with foreigners. There would be prostitutes and partiers. I just wanted to have a few beers. We were all there completely alone; there was an overwhelming sense of unreality. One of t
hose nights, I met the former world light welterweight boxing champion Perico Fernández, who used to roam from bar to bar along those narrow, dark, and dirty streets, there where Zaragoza is like a city from the past, as if it’s been mummified. We chatted a little and I bought him a beer. I was drunk, obviously. But seeing him so wasted away, so worn-out, with his brain battered by fists and Alzheimer’s, provoked a pang of sorrow and also tenderness. Sorrow and tenderness at the same time. Perico was another abandoned man, with no family, defeated, going from bar to bar, a leaden silence gathering around him. There he was at the bar; it was a filthy dive with old beer glasses. We took a photo together. I still have it. We look like a couple of angels in that photo. I was without a family, but Perico Fernández had three wives and five children. Where were his five children and three wives that night? They’d left him, of course. A smile still hung on his ruined face, a sweet, serene, indolent smile. Perico grew up in an orphanage. One thing he’d said became famous: “If my mother didn’t want me, why did she have me?” He never met his mother. He was born in 1952 from a stranger’s womb. That is a great mystery.

  I saw him again on another night in another seedy dive that reeked of kebabs and French fries, the bar smeared with old food. He was more animated that time. The story of his life was legible in his eyes. He was so unguarded and vulnerable that he seemed like a lost little boy. He was in that place where loss has become searing plenitude. He told me he’d been world champion, and I told him, in a drunken outburst, that I was a world champion too. He laughed—he thought that was funny. A good smile, because there was goodness in his heart, that rare goodness of plain people, people who were dumped into the world and did the best they could. Perico was a village kid, with a typical Aragonese accent that in his voice became a sonorous filigree and reflected an ancient, essential, and deeply sardonic intelligence. A true son of the villages of Aragon, like no other. It was hilarious listening to him tell his life story. I remembered how in 1974 he’d won the title of world champion—I remember because I’d heard my father talking about it excitedly. Perico was a king back then. All of Spain was his betrothed. In the early seventies, Perico was universally adored. And during that period I had my father, who adored me. Both of us were on top of the world back then.