Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  And there we both were, in 2014, both world champions. I would end up being saved, though I didn’t know it at the time, but not him. He wasn’t going to be saved. He died not long after—I saw it in the papers.

  Men with family die just the same as men without family do, I thought.

  Maybe Perico realized that.

  80

  I saw apartments that were truly crappy. But I found one located on a large street whose name seemed like a sign. My father’s second surname had been Arnillas. And the apartment was on Avenida de Ranillas, along the Ebro River.

  I thought my father was talking to me, sending me a message. In that sense I was like Jesus Christ, whose father also sent him signs. I’m not sure what’s so remarkable about Jesus’s life, about the fact that he and his father chatted a lot. Generally speaking, all fathers talk to their children. Maybe Jesus of Nazareth’s father seemed more interesting, more devastating, more poetic, or Jesus knew how to make him more captivating, thanks to literature.

  So I ended up buying that apartment that sounded like my father’s second surname. Here, flaws become apparent when it gets dark. A screw is missing from the Persian blinds, and some sort of insulation (I know it has a specific name, I should look it up in the dictionary, because everything has a name but sometimes we don’t know it) has come loose from the window. Nothing was done well in this apartment. This apartment reminds me of my life.

  I’m waiting for Valdi to arrive. He’s gone out with friends.

  81

  My father was always uncomfortably hot in August. In the final years of his life he bought himself a portable air conditioner. It wasn’t a big thing, but it would cool down a room, maybe half a room, not even the whole room. It was noisy. You had to stick a tube out the window. So they called somebody to cut a hole in the glass of the living room window. I never asked who made them that neat hole for the air conditioner tube. The windowpane was original to the house, 1959 glass.

  When my mother died, somebody must have carried that obsolete appliance away. My brother called some guys who empty apartments for a living. I remember the refrigerator and the washing machine.

  I don’t remember the dishwasher because my mother never had a dishwasher. I took the plaque from the front door of the house that had my father’s name on it; it was one of those plaques that people used to put on their apartment doors, a postwar custom that lasted into the late sixties and early seventies, one inherited from the liberal professions, from doctors and lawyers, that was then adopted by professionals with a lot less clout, perhaps signaling the democracy to come, or maybe just imposture. It was easy to unscrew the plaque—I thought it would be more difficult. Maybe that effortlessness meant something; it was strange that nothing broke and I successfully performed a manual task, because normally I break things.

  That plaque must have been fifty years old. I’ve now put it on the door of my apartment on Ranillas, where it will survive the years of life that remain to me, since I have the same name as my father. The Ecuadorean super probably thought the plaque was new, that I’d just had it made. The idea that the super might think that was overwhelming. Even terrifying.

  82

  The plaque with my father’s name has a bit of a mortuary vibe to it, since it has a black background and is made of shatterproof glass, a revolutionary material back in the 1960s. It’s lasted many years. It didn’t signal prosperity; it hung stranded there, like a black whale, in the middle of a door. Plaques signaled success, achievement; they declared that the family that lived behind the door had made it, had attained prosperity. The plaque that was my father’s, and is now mine, didn’t signal anything. It was a calligraphy exercise on the wooden door. Hence my surprise, hence why I’m so unsettled by my father’s life.

  I stand staring at it when I get home. Seeing it, I feel fear and sorrow. And immense nostalgia, and immense benevolence. It’s the loneliest thing in the world. That plaque’s journey through time seems like a Homeric journey. We are incapable of imagining what will end up happening either with people or with objects. My father never would have imagined that the plaque he ordered from who knows where (I have no idea who makes them) would end up at the apartment of his divorced son on a street that almost shares one of his names. The plaque doesn’t make sense where it is now, but that senselessness is monumental.

  I surround myself with cheap monuments. They are cheap and yet they have supernatural power. As if the supernatural chose to manifest itself in humility. Or as if the supernatural and humility were the same thing.

  No aristocratic monuments, no VIP monuments, only ones born of the Spanish lower middle class of the 1960s, which are very beautiful, and are the mirror of my soul.

  83

  It will be Christmas soon. Back during my childhood, my father used to love Christmas. My father would buy a tree and turrón candies and lots of tickets for the Christmas lottery. He bought real trees, sold by a woodcutter in Barbastro’s Plaza del Mercado who had all different sizes. He always bought a fir that went all the way up to the ceiling. He was a huge fan of Christmas. On the morning of December 22, he would check to see whether his lottery tickets had been lucky. Starting at ten in the morning every December 22, my father would turn on the TV and, in his stylish, slanted cursive, write down the winning numbers, which were sung by students from Madrid’s San Ildefonso school.

  He never won anything except the occasional refund. But I was happy watching him write down the numbers in a notebook, those numbers so painstakingly traced. He would sculpt an ornamented 5 in which the upper bar turned into a cap slanted toward the sky. His 4s and 7s came out baroque and stylized too. I liked seeing my father so focused, so festive. And then he would whistle because he’d had a good meal. I think he was profoundly happy. He felt fortunate, joyous, full of purpose.

  Your father’s handwriting is always important. There’s no other handwriting in the world that matters. I write almost the same as my father. Even my signature is his. I saw him sign so many times, and he’d sign with tall letters full of clouds, his name edged with curved lines, and as a whole it was the portrait of an angel’s identity.

  Why did he sign like that when he wasn’t rich?

  His signature looked like it belonged to one of Spain’s prominent men. It looked like the signature of a duke, a marquis.

  It was a Gothic signature, baroque. Mine is very similar, but it has fewer frills, it’s more austere, more impoverished.

  I fell in love with my father’s signature. His love for his own name was something to see. He saw himself full of pomp, of crowns, of pride. My father’s pride was cosmic in scale.

  84

  I’m a fan of Christmas too—I got that from him. So why did he flip out that night when he smashed the plates in a fit of fury? I guess that’s what it was—a fit of fury. Maybe he wanted to smash our faces and took it out on the plates instead. Maybe he was fed up with having a family and wanted to go back to being a handsome twenty-seven-year-old man in a double-breasted suit, free and unburdened by commitments, that man who was photographed at the ancient marble counter of a bar as he stood staring at his hands, lost in thought.

  My father bought a nativity scene when I was five or six years old, or younger. I don’t know how old. He bought it at a stationery shop in Barbastro whose owners are now dead and of whose business I am the only witness who still remembers. He was proud of that nativity scene. It cost a bundle. That would have been 1966. I remember how gingerly he would handle the figurines. They had a Valladolid Baroque feel to them. They weren’t small. They were at least a handspan tall, maybe a bit more. My favorites were the ox and the mule.

  One by one over the years the figurines broke.

  My mother stored them in the wardrobe, but carelessly, because my mother ended up breaking everything. I think my mother is the one who gradually broke them. First she broke the mule. Decapitated it. My mother was always dropp
ing things; she didn’t know how to hold a thing in her hand, so everything was at risk of falling, of shattering. My father stuck the mule’s head back on with superglue. But it was an injured mule. Then the ox broke. Then Saint Joseph. Saint Joseph’s hand broke off. Each Christmas that nativity scene was in worse and worse shape, in relentless deterioration. The page boys took a tumble. The camels too. The Virgin and the Baby Jesus held out. But a nativity scene with only two survivors made no sense; it was practically a satanic heresy. A confraternity of cripples.

  Eventually we had no nativity scene at all and my father didn’t buy another because his dreams had withered and because those were hard times and my brother and I were getting older. My mother could have been more careful with the nativity scene. But my mother didn’t understand the meaning of those figurines. That was the most stunning and also the most irritating thing about my mother: everything was superfluous to her, everything seemed insignificant, everything was a candidate for being discarded. For whatever reason, it didn’t suit her to take care of the nativity scene. She didn’t understand who the Baby Jesus was or what the Wise Men were doing there. To her, all of that was meaningless. It was a natural atheism. Her atheism was marvelous because it was inborn. She murdered that nativity scene. She murdered other things too—she murdered my comics, threw them all away. She didn’t leave me a single one.

  She was an exterminating hurricane.

  85

  I got a record player for my twelfth birthday; it was a suitcase record player, and I listened to my first records on it; I suspected that music would heal me. Back then, I felt the healing power of music—that’s why I’ve named my sons Vivaldi and Brahms. All the names should become musicians. Wow, I’m just realizing something: I haven’t given my parents names, prestigious names from music history. Maybe my father should be Gregorian and my mother Euterpe. I should find the name of a renowned composer for each person I loved, and thus fill my life story with music.

  I saw them buy me the record player. I’d asked for it as a Christmas present. I saw them go into the store—it was pure chance that I happened to be there, on that street where there was a home appliance shop. I figure it was in 1974. Maybe that image of them entering that store is a boundary of memory. My father was wearing a trench coat. Why were they going into that store? My heart leaped with joy: they were going for my gift. Why was he wearing a trench coat to buy a record player? Had I requested it as a Christmas present or for getting good grades? I don’t know. I only see an image: the two of them entering that store. But now I’m not sure about the trench coat.

  86

  My father died at seventy-five years old—will I live longer than he did? I’m convinced I’ll live less time, or maybe the exact same amount: seventy-five years. But I don’t think so, I think I’ll go earlier.

  It seems impolite to live longer than your father did. Disloyal. Blasphemous. A cosmic error. If you live longer than your father did, you stop being a son—that’s what I mean.

  And if you’re no longer a son, you’re nothing.

  My father realized he was going overboard with food; he was eating too much and gaining weight. His relationship with food was out of whack. He enjoyed eating and he enjoyed living. But a person who eats too much, even if it might not seem like it, has chosen to die; ultimately, he has chosen the destruction of organs, the abuse of the intestine, the overuse of the pancreas, the liver, the stomach, the rectum, the colon. Everybody is overweight. We’re used to seeing it as normal when people are fifteen pounds overweight, and we notice only when it’s fifty, or eighty, or a hundred thirty. We’ve forgotten the gifts of hunger.

  Today it’s not the least bit hot. It’s a perfect day for a simple question. For contemplating how much my father and mother ended up loving me.

  That kind of love doesn’t leave this world.

  Why did you love me so much?

  Is it true that you loved me, or am I making it up?

  If I’m making up your love, it’s a beautiful invention. If it was real, that’s beautiful too. Because to bring that love out from the shadows, I have to go on a journey. The slowest journey in the world, and the most monumental.

  87

  A few days ago the famous actor and comedian Robin Williams died at sixty-three. Which means my father lived twelve years longer than him. Robin hanged himself with a belt. That wasn’t necessary, buddy, there was no need for you to kill yourself. My father, who had nothing, lived twelve years longer than you. Twelve years is an eternity. You were rich, Robin, and you chose to die. My father was poor, and death came looking for him.

  It isn’t fair.

  You could have left us your money—my father would have been able to find oncologists on the cutting edge of research who would have saved his life, the life you didn’t want. And my father would be with me now. He would be eighty-four. There are eighty-four-year-olds who are perfectly healthy. If my father had had your money, he would have been saved.

  Death is never necessary.

  Because death always comes to us as a bonus or by default. There’s no need to go looking for it. It makes house calls. You don’t have to go anywhere to check that box. It comes to you. It’s convenient. It’s a good service they offer. I mean that seriously, it really is.

  We pass through the world, and then we leave. We leave the world to others, who come and do what they can. Cities last much longer than we do, though of course they are refounded, transformed, or even disappear. My maternal grandfather committed suicide too, like Robin Williams just did. The despair and emptiness and spiritual nausea that lead to suicide may be the worst disease on earth.

  This is the face of my grandmother, with one of her children, who’s holding a cake.

  Her look is full of suffering, of an internal malady akin to terror. In any case, the eyes of that woman prefigure my own and my mother’s. When this photo was taken, her husband had already committed suicide and her eldest son was dead. That’s why she’s terrified: she has no husband, has no firstborn. She thinks it’s her fault.

  That woman saw one of her children die in a car accident that made her husband go mad and commit suicide, shooting himself with a hunting rifle in 1957. I’m not sure of the exact date, I’m just guessing. It could have been 1955 or 1951, I’m not sure. There were a lot of car accidents in the 1950s. I’ve reconstructed the facts the best I could because nobody talked and now they’re all dead. There’s no way to corroborate facts and dates; everybody has gone. It’s as if they’d told me, “Just make it all up, we’re out of here, do what you want with your past, it doesn’t matter, we’re no longer alive.”

  My grandmother’s eyes contain centuries of Spanish peasantry, exhausted hands, the tang of sweat, stubbly beards, hellish summer heat, hot animal breath next to your mouth, priests saying mass, more priests saying mass, another seven hundred million priests saying mass. The great enemy of God in Spain was not the Communist Party but the Catholic Church.

  Seven hundred million priests saying mass.

  Her husband killed himself.

  Her son died too, even earlier, and her eyes challenge the meaning of life, which is simply the meaning of the land, a nameless land, because only two cities in Spain have names and fame and prestige and wealth and success and honor and military might and economic power and universality: Madrid and Barcelona.

  The other cities and towns were just abandoned hinterlands, empty places.

  She, my unnamed grandmother (I’ll call her Cecilia, in honor of Saint Cecilia, named the patron saint of musicians by the sixteenth-century pope Gregory XIII), is the daughter of a forgotten land, the lands of the Somontano, and I can name those lands and those villages now because I went to university—which is to say, thanks to the dictator Francisco Franco Bahamonde, who laid the foundations for Cecilia’s grandchildren to learn to read and write, who laid the foundations of the Spanish middle class, who set Spain’s po
litical modernization process back several decades and did so out of ignorance and stupidity.

  I write because priests taught me to write.

  Seven hundred million priests.

  That is a great irony of the lives of the poor in Spain: I owe more to priests than I do to the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. Irony in Spain is ever a work of art.

  88

  Cecilia was diagnosed with cancer. My mother started avoiding her because she thought cancer might be contagious. So to me my grandmother was a total stranger. I don’t remember much about her, except the photo, but her eyes are mine today. “Don’t touch her,” my mother told me. And if you tell that to a little boy, he’ll believe his grandmother is an infectious mass of tissue, a disease-ridden rodent, a high cliff with black rocks at the bottom. But there was no ill will in my mother, only desperation. That is what has always dwelled in my mother’s heart and in mine; she wanted to keep me safe from cancer because I was the thing she loved most desperately in the world. She was horrified by the mere idea that something might happen to me. It was a prehistoric, grief-stricken, claustrophobic, absorbing, and exasperated love.