Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

My mother used to talk to her sister Reme and my father about Cecilia’s inevitable death; I overheard those conversations; they were making preparations; they were studying the situation—and all of that created an atmosphere that I experienced in an odd way, because I was the king of everything and that was the joy that made up for Cecilia’s imminent disappearance. I was hope and the future, and Cecilia was goodbye. We made up for each other, we were counterbalanced; my future was necessary so that her goodbye would make sense, and vice versa.

  And forty-five years after all of that, the memory of those conversations held behind Cecilia’s back rouses visions I didn’t know my brain contained: the borders of memory are fluid. I see new things, I’m always seeing old scenes as if they were new. The gold-colored faucets with the exposed copper pipes in my aunt Reme’s old house, and Cecilia, very ill, drinking a glass of water.

  89

  I try to think about happy moments in Cecilia’s life. Maybe the day her children were born. What was her voice like? There are no recordings of that voice. What was she like as a young woman? In train or bus stations, or in airport terminals, you could walk right past your grandparents and there would be no recognition. Authentication isn’t possible with the dead; our dead are anonymous beings, without iconography, without renown. If your dead rose from their graves, they would be strangers. Identification would happen only with famous dead figures—your Elvis Presleys, your Adolf Hitlers, your Marilyn Monroes and Che Guevaras—if they were resuscitated.

  I wouldn’t recognize my grandfathers if they came back to life, because I never saw them while they were alive, plus I don’t have a single photo and no one ever told me about them. I search for them now among the dead, and my hand fills with ash and excrement, and those are the symbols and heraldic crest of the global working class: ashes and excrement. And oblivion.

  That kinship does not exist.

  Family does not exist.

  There is nothing there—the vanity of saying “my grandfathers.” I don’t know who they were. I don’t know what kind of life they led, whether they were tall or short, whether they were blond or dark-haired—I know nothing, not even their names. I don’t know who my paternal grandfather was. And I know even less about my maternal grandfather. And now I’ll never know because there’s nobody to ask.

  Why am I here, in the night of the world, when I cannot even grasp the first night of my world?

  90

  My mother used to tell me, “Don’t touch her, don’t touch her.” Cecilia had a cancer under her black clothing, on her side. I imagined the cancer to be something white hidden in Cecilia’s black clothing, the cancer like a white rat gnawing people’s arms. We never talked about Cecilia’s cancer. She is dead, but maybe her pilgrimage toward purification won’t end until my death. I can also think about my death.

  How long do I have left?

  People don’t think about that, because it can’t be thought—there’s no content there, nothing at all, and there’s certainly no social courtesy.

  Even so, there’s a lurking number: five years, three days, six months, thirty years, three hours.

  There’s a number there, waiting to be fulfilled.

  And that number will be fulfilled. We all carry that number with us. It’s like one of God’s bloody jokes. His fondness for numbers. My father lived seventy-five years. Numbers symbolize lives well. People make calculations when they ask the age of someone who just died.

  Dying younger than twenty almost isn’t dying at all—there’s barely been life.

  Dying younger than fifty is sad.

  My father chose a mysterious number: seventy-five.

  It’s not very old, but it’s not young either. It’s like a borderland. It seems like a good number. An esoteric number. It’s like a boundary. Taking one’s leave before decrepitude hits, just before. But only just.

  The night he died I sat thinking about that number, trying to figure out whether my father was trying to communicate something to me through that number.

  All of my passwords contain 75.

  There’s a perfection there. He could have easily lived ten years longer, even fifteen.

  Or he could have died at sixty-five, at sixty-eight, at seventy-three.

  He chose a hermetic number, one full of messages, torrents of messages, a symphony of symbols.

  91

  Cecilia and I are walking down the street. She is completely covered, draped in veils. We walk toward a church. We go inside. There are lit candles and Cecilia tells me, “I am your grandmother.” I want to remember that she said that to me, but in fact she didn’t say anything. She didn’t say a single word. Her confession of love is a dream in my present. And I look at her, and I see only iron veils, prisons that contain walls, funeral caskets, the dead whose living children do not speak of them.

  When she was buried, on the day of her funeral, her children got together—it must have been 1967 or 1968. Maybe it was 1969, or 1970, or 1966, I’m not sure. I can only take a stab at it—nobody told me the dates, since nobody ever uttered her death date out loud again. They got together to talk about divvying up the few possessions that remained. I imagine she would have liked seeing them all together on the day she was buried. I see her children seated at a long table; there was background noise, so they had to speak up. And then, once the funeral was over, they forgot her.

  My mother barely talked about her. Though I imagine she carried her in her heart. I don’t know. If she carried her in her heart, she did so silently.

  Oh, ghostly Cecilia, it’s not that your children didn’t love you—it’s just that you became a wrathful or uncomfortable memory. They weren’t ready to think about the dead rationally. Nobody was ready, because you lived in a Spain so poor it couldn’t even keep memories warm. It was a backward country, but no historian can say why that was.

  No historian has the least idea.

  The Spanish enigma, they call it.

  You didn’t come up in conversation. I don’t know anything about you because nobody told me anything. They quite wretchedly forgot you. You must have been alive once, no doubt, and things must have happened to you. When you were mentioned, on one of a very few occasions, you were like a distant shadow, wavering and insubstantial. But one of your children loved you very much.

  Alberto, the youngest.

  He did talk about you, his voice defenseless.

  I’ll call Alberto “Monteverdi” because he deserves it and that can be his good name, he who has not yet bloomed on the mountain, he who got lost on a forgotten peak and never grew up, never blossomed.

  92

  Monteverdi remembered you.

  He would bring you up in the middle of a conversation with your children, his siblings, and would end up alone, left behind—nobody ever pursued your evocation. I would stare with a seven-year-old child’s uncomprehending gaze and notice only the vehemence with which Monteverdi always said “Mama,” because he never stressed the second syllable, pronouncing the word in a disconsolate monotone, and my ear registered that strangeness, which came from a primordial abandonment and emphasized how far away you were, because your name was not Mamá, the way my mother’s was.

  Monteverdi continued to look for you among those who were absent—he was the only one of the siblings who did so.

  The others had become parents themselves, and they’d left you in peace among the departed.

  But Monteverdi would say, “Do you guys remember what Mama always used to say?” And I see you now, Cecilia, looking after your children, looking after the one who needs you most, Monteverdi.

  I didn’t see your family, I never saw them.

  I see them now, among the dead. It’s enough to know that family once existed. It’s enough to know I’m not making it up. That family must have existed once, and it must have been full, noble, united, robust, happy.

  Because the dif
ference between living and dead is tied to the swift, liquid movements of the rising and setting of the sun; it has to do with light and its transit over men’s heads.

  Monteverdi knew you were the only person who loved him. And he turned to you like a child hounded by men who never loved him. But you exited this world and left Monteverdi alone. I don’t even know how old you were when you left—I don’t know if you were ninety or seventy. Nor do I know how old your husband, my grandfather, was when he killed himself.

  Cecilia, I never knew anything about you, not even your name—that’s why I’ve named you after the patroness of music. Because nobody ever said your first name.

  Biologically you were my grandmother, and now you may be my best ghost.

  93

  Nobody said your name except my uncle Monteverdi.

  But there is somebody else who surpassed even you in terms of nonexistence, somebody whose name was never spoken. He was practically the Holy Spirit. It’s as if Cecilia produced her seven children through divine intervention and not that of her husband. You, Cecilia, you were famous and I saw you in life. Whereas he was a black hole. My mother was the daughter of the Holy Spirit and you, Cecilia. My mother’s five living siblings also had Nobody for a father.

  He was unnameable, but why?

  Who was that man? Because he did exist, yes—he trod the earth in sunlight, as I do now.

  He produced children, so he must have existed.

  I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit as a sperm donor.

  My grandfather was he who has no living face, and no dead face either. He who was never seen in life, and so could never die. How can you think of somebody as dead when you never saw them alive?

  We lost access to that memory because you all chose shame instead, the feeling of shame. You were ashamed that your husband and the father of your children had committed suicide. And instead of understanding and acceptance, you opted for radical forgetting. Goodbye to memory, cheap as it is. Memory, which is maintained only with the embers of the blood. Memory, which is free. There are no taxes on memory. The government doesn’t charge its citizens for remembering—or maybe it does.

  Because memory can be deadly. Many, many years later, I saw how people chose to erase uncomfortable people. We recall only what suits us, except me—I want to remember everything. Or we recall what has been conventionally established to be remembered, except me. I have no intention of dropping the “except me,” even if it does sound vain and pompous. My memory constructs a catastrophic vision of the world, I know, but it’s the one that feels true to me. You can’t renounce catastrophe—it’s the great superstructure of literature, the engine of evil and the engine of everything that has ever existed.

  94

  In that one photo of Cecilia that came down to me there’s an adolescent boy, practically a child, and he’s holding a cake. You can see a little of the cake in the photo, just a corner—who was going to eat that barely visible cake? What did cake taste like back then?

  The boy was Alberto, my Monteverdi.

  Life hadn’t tackled him yet. It would go after him soon. A few years later, Monteverdi was diagnosed with tuberculosis—that was in the late fifties, maybe ’57 or ’58, somewhere around there.

  Now, as I write, Monteverdi, too, is dead.

  Predictably, I didn’t go to Monteverdi’s funeral. It’s hard to describe Monteverdi’s steep decline in his final years. Monteverdi died in 2014. I think he was born in 1940. Nobody knows. Nobody cared.

  For example, Monteverdi didn’t shower. He didn’t wash. He was an erratic creature who wandered the city of Barbastro, every inch of it, with complete aimlessness. You would see him in the bars, in the shops, in the plazas. Monteverdi was always ebullient, enveloped in an illusory elation. There’s a scene from my childhood in which Monteverdi chases after me with a knife. It was real and he was about to kill me. Monteverdi chased after me with a knife. He used to have fits of rage, or of madness. Monteverdi’s sex life was a mystery too. We were all crazy, a family of lunatics. I don’t know if Monteverdi suffered—I imagine he did. His life was simple. He didn’t have a job. His tuberculosis forced him out of the labor market back then, in the mid-1960s.

  Our family madness was also a Christmas mass. A liturgy of brotherhood.

  We were very happy in the cellars of the world. Because Monteverdi always had a carnivorous smile on his face. His simplicity ended in a spear, a sharp point; that happens with beings whose basic nature has not been transformed into innocence, but instead hurtles toward deformation, anomaly, or moral convulsion. Monteverdi was anomalous, basic, but there was no goodness in his heart. There was only darkness, simple darkness, basic darkness.

  The great Monteverdi never did anything in life. He got by, in the end, on a monthly pension of what would be two hundred euros today. Back in the seventies, my father used to give him his old suits. And so those suits perambulated around Barbastro on two different bodies. My father used to wear suits because he was a traveling salesman. You put a suit on anybody and he looks like somebody—that’s the equalizing mystery of suits, especially back then.

  Now that mystery is disappearing.

  Monteverdi wore gaudy, colorful ties. To top things off, Monteverdi let his hair grow long. He looked like Jesus Christ Superstar in a necktie and glasses. Because Monte wore glasses too, the kind Paul Newman wore in The Color of Money. Knockoff aviators purchased at the ends of the earth.

  He spoke all in a rush, full of colloquialisms that were seeking affability or approval; his speech went from delirium to tenderness, and from tenderness to the abyss.

  Monte was in the abyss.

  95

  I haven’t had a drink in a long time.

  In Spain, the only help a recovering alcoholic ever receives is the kind that gets him started drinking again. In Spain, I think, there’s no such thing as forgiveness for one’s sins.

  Ultimately, then, nobody can get away from alcohol in Spain, hence the buzz of anticipation that a Spanish recovering alcoholic rouses: Let’s see how long he holds out, let’s see when he starts drinking again.

  It will be fun to see him fall back down.

  And this time he won’t get up.

  And we’ll cheer. We’ll say, “You could see it coming.”

  That’s the mystery of Spain that historians and men of goodwill and brilliant writers and honest intellectuals all muse about: seeing people fall down gets us hot.

  We are not good to one another. When we’re out and about, we seem like good people, but we stab one another when we’re alone. It’s something primeval: the Spaniard wants all Spaniards to die so he can possess the Iberian Peninsula alone, so he can go to Madrid and there won’t be anybody there, so he can go to Seville and there won’t be anybody there, so he can go to Barcelona and there won’t be anybody there.

  And I get it, because I’m Spanish too.

  Once all his countrymen are dead, the last Spaniard will finally be happy.

  96

  As a little boy, I used to fantasize that my parents weren’t my parents, that I was adopted. It’s a sad notion—it shatters the bond, pushes you into the mechanical limbo of the stars visible in the heavens at night, into a sort of stasis of will. Being adopted was a perversion, it was a criminal reorganization of one’s origin, it was a castle of corpses rotting in full view of everyone. When I was young, being adopted was stigmatized; my mother used to supply me with information about adopted kids in Barbastro; there was a moral infirmity vibrating in sentences like “That boy in your class is adopted,” and that boy would become involuntary flesh with a serendipitous soul, but it was beautiful, because there was a secret there.

  If you’re adopted, that means your real parents didn’t love you for even five minutes. You were loved by others, by parents invented by society, not by nature, which is the only truth.

  I would pay astronomi
cal sums to feel that innocence again. I used to feel an immense compassion for adopted children—they broke my heart. I would have taken them in if I could. Given them to my parents. They were the most brutal image of helplessness. Of course, all of that was happening in my head, because in reality those kids were perfectly happy.

  97

  My mother always bought free-range chickens back in the 1960s and ’70s. A woman from a nearby village would bring them around. She brought them alive. My mother would kill them, aided by her sister Reme, who had a lot of experience and skill. Reme would come to the house to kill chickens. She’d take out the knife and slit their necks; I would watch with a certain sense of disgust, but not fear. Then they’d boil the corpse—I recall vignettes in the kitchen with billows of steam, with feathers and blood and knives. I remember the chicken’s neck, slit down the throat, and the smoke.

  Disgust, yes, discomfort because it smelled like blood and feathers and the kitchen was full of steam. And at what point did the other disgust arise, disgust at being in the bathroom with my father; at what point do taboos begin? A small child wants to be with his father all the time, even when his father is perched on a toilet bowl. He doesn’t feel disgust. He doesn’t feel revulsion. He doesn’t feel any physical or emotional discomfort. Because disgust is a taboo of civilization. Disgust at one’s father’s excrement comes about socially in the moment of independence, of the child’s social emancipation. Revulsion at their fathers’ odors is necessary so that children will be able to leave. I remember seeing my father urinate and being fascinated and frightened by his penis. These are scenes from the past, and the past has less and less cachet all the time.

  I remember when I was a boy somebody told me the story of a father, during the Spanish Civil War, who turned himself in to save his son’s life. His son was freed and the father was shot. That’s why fatherhood is so important, because it eliminates doubt—you never doubt again. You’ll always give your life for your child. Everything else in the world is confusion, waffling, perplexity, selfishness, indecision, uncertainty, no nobility. That father was executed, but his son went free.