by Manuel Vilas
Taking the bullet for another person without a second thought—that’s the greatest nobility life can offer you.
Taking the bullet for your child is the great mystery—there is no greater mystery on the face of the earth. The light of the sun dims in the face of that mystery. He will not feel the bullet enter his flesh, will not feel the loss of his future, the loss of the things he still had left to do; he will not think about himself, because he will no longer be himself but only a blessed fervor for his son, who will be alive, who will stay alive.
Giving your life for someone is not foreseen in any code of nature. It is a voluntary renunciation that upends the universe.
Fatherhood and motherhood are the only certainties.
Everything else barely exists.
98
I think it was in 1970 that the public pool opened and we stopped going down to the Vero River, the small river that flows through Barbastro.
I remember swimming in the Vero River and the Cinca River.
People swam in the rivers back then, which were full of mud and dragonflies and stones and branches in the water. And very little water.
When public pools arrived in Spain in the early 1970s, my mother was thrilled. She used to spend all day at the pool, a pool that had a dressing room, which was a cutting-edge thing, and also a soda machine, and you could watch the apparatus whir when you slotted in a five-peseta coin and retrieved refreshing beverages of the era, like Mirinda, which disappeared for some unknown reason; and it also had a guy at the door who would sternly verify that everybody entering the pool had their cards, and I remember the man’s face, his corpse brushing against me right this moment, an ugly, bald man, stooped, with black eyes, a sickly face, an old man back in the 1970s, who would peer at your photo on the membership card three times to make sure nobody was tricking him and he was doing his job right, who couldn’t believe that people went swimming, couldn’t believe that women would put on bikinis and sunbathe and drink a Mirinda, and most certainly couldn’t believe there was such a thing as the “song of the summer”—he didn’t even believe in the sun.
Those pools no longer exist; they disappeared in the mid-eighties. Apartment buildings have been erected on top of them, where the children of those who used to swim now live, the children of the dead swimmers, in service to Spanish prosperity, if the province of Huesca is in Spain at all.
My father served Spanish prosperity by making sure that some Spaniards in the 1960s had a tailored suit. To me, that’s heroism.
He wasn’t given the medal of valor in a ceremony presided over by the king of Spain and the prime minister and the president of the Aragonese government and the captain general of the Fourth Military Region and the archbishop of Zaragoza.
No, they didn’t give him that.
For whatever blessed reason, they didn’t give it to him.
And they won’t give it to me either, but for other reasons, different reasons, very different reasons—but also blessed.
My father and I are getting our revenge for that—him through his wife, and me through my mother.
My mother never knew that Barbastro was a town in an autonomous community called Aragon or that Aragon was a territory belonging to Spain or that Spain was a country in southern Europe.
And she failed to know it not out of ignorance, but out of divine indifference.
99
I don’t remember whether my father liked flags. And my mother didn’t even know Spain had a flag. My mother had no concept of political life on earth. It wasn’t for her. It was useless for fulfilling her desires. My mother was as primeval as a river, a mountain, or a tree. I don’t think my father ever used the word flag for anything. There are Spanish words that my parents never uttered. Yet it is impossible to conceive of my life without Spain because, in some sense, I love Spain. In reality, I love it because of my father, because he lived there, that’s all. Because I love anything that had to do with my father. If my father had been Portuguese, I would have loved Portugal. I don’t think he ever would have been lucky enough to be French or British or American.
My father always lived in Spain. He was always there, except during his military service, which he did in Africa, in the city of Melilla. When I visited Melilla a few years back, I heard the voice: “He was here when he was twenty years old, here, he was here, his whole life ahead of him; when he was here he didn’t know what death was, and he didn’t know you’d come to this city looking for him sixty years later; sixty years later and there are still traces of him in the air; you can still see him, smiling, with that kind smile he had that Brah has inherited and doesn’t know it; Brah doesn’t know and he doesn’t either, you’re the only one who knows and this may be the most important knowledge you’ve ever had, and now smile, smile because he was here.”
100
There are some dead people who die with the approval of the living, and others who don’t; some are deemed great men, and others are deemed depraved—but once they enter into death, any description or judgment or moral discernment is shunted aside, and only equality in the rotting of flesh remains, the rotting of flesh doesn’t care about the moral good or evil that resided in the dead body. But if the living love you, you will die more at peace, and that counts for something.
After that, there’s nothing.
The depraved person rots just the same as the magnanimous one does.
I don’t know if carrion insects can tell the difference between good and evil; it’s terrifying to think they don’t notice, terrifying to think that the yellow foam and the fat turned to soap of a magnanimous corpse are the same as those of a malign corpse; that there is no distinction between good and evil through varying forms of putrefaction; that good and evil end up in the same pestilence, in the same maggots and fungi.
So maybe I did the right thing cremating them, but I don’t think so.
101
My father and I are walking hand in hand through the Barbastro cemetery. It’s November 1 in maybe 1968, or 1969, or 1970. My father stops in front of a wall of niches. He looks at the upper niches, which are deteriorated and have no names.
He speaks to me, says, “Your grandfather is in one of those up there.” I look, but all I see are a couple of nameless niches, chipped, cracked, split, broken, like a sandstone wall, gray, far away, impossible to identify—I see only wet, dirty sand. I look at my father and with my eyes I ask him to be more specific, to tell me which niche it is. He doesn’t know. He’s unbothered by not knowing.
It’s as if my father hadn’t had a father.
It’s strange.
I don’t think he ever talked about his father again. It was a mystical territory. A secret territory. My father was like a CIA agent.
I would have liked to know what year my paternal grandfather died. I think my father’s confession when showing me more or less the niche where my grandfather was buried was a gesture of weakness, a momentary indiscretion. Why did my father deny me any knowledge of my grandfather’s life? There wasn’t enough time for those revelations; we didn’t think everything would end so soon. My father forgot his father. I don’t know what was going on there, but something happened. Memory, I think, is a bourgeois art, and in that sense my father was profoundly antibourgeois. That’s the vanishing point of my father’s life. He dressed like the bourgeoisie, but he was brimming with subversion and some benign form of moral anarchy that led him to forget his parents. Or maybe he thought about his father every day and just didn’t tell me. He thought it was better if I didn’t know, because I wouldn’t understand. In reality, I never knew who my father was. He was the most timid, enigmatic, silent, and elegant person I ever met in my life. Who was he? By not telling me who he was, my father was creating this book.
The corpse’s stint in the tomb is not a static one. There is frenetic activity, an industrial reconversion of the matter inside the casket. The coffin is
a factory. An industrial warehouse in which matter rampages downward, into the depths, because everything happens under the surface in an effort to burrow deeper in, as if seeking the heart of the planet. It may not be visible, but I perceive all that activity: the joy of a corpse that, through revolting creatures, offers sparks of life. But life is never disgusting, even if it is born in a pigsty, because the stable in Bethlehem was a pigsty too.
There is solution as well as dissolution in the world of the coffin, there is consciousness and essence—and I thwarted all of that when I had my parents’ bodies cremated, thereby having myself cremated the same way, because the supreme form of life is the corpse of life, and I didn’t see it.
I didn’t see anything.
Skeletal remains are the mold, support, and crown of those of us who remain on earth, on its surface.
Because there is ambition and manifestation and sedition in skeletons. And I didn’t see it. And there is community, because skeletons are one another’s neighbors in cemeteries, and that neighborhood still fosters a kind of hope.
The hope of seeing you again, Dad, Mom.
I am nothing more than that: the hope of seeing you again.
102
It used to happen to my father too—he’d fall into these doldrums of energy. So do I. At a certain point it was no longer worth going out on his sales trips—he had to pay for gas, lodging, and meals, and he wasn’t selling much. There was no point. He didn’t sell much fabric and I don’t sell many books—we’re the same man. The obsessive notion that we’re the same man is a pain I’ve carried inside me since before his death.
My father wasn’t salaried—he had to pay his own expenses. And the commission he earned from his sales was less than what he had to shell out. His “why sell” has come down to me as “why write.”
In both, the energy to act flags.
And so he opted to put on his green robe and watch TV chefs. Everything that happened to my father reverberates in me with millimetric precision. We are living the same life—with different contexts, but it’s the same life. And a hidden message or irony might thrum in that communion of lives. Who is sending the message? The social and cultural trappings change, but we are the same. Sometimes that level of coincidence annihilates time, melts time and turns it liquid and unstable, and the two lives become equivalent. Nor do I want to end up being somebody other than my father—I’m terrified of having my own identity.
I’d rather be my father.
When I discover the huge, dynamic coincidences between my father’s life and my own, I am not just startled but also scared—yet at the same time I feel safe, believing that there is a greater order and a greater code.
A whole life spent writing, like my father. I write poems and novels; he wrote duplicates of orders from Spanish tailors.
My father was a traveler, a traveling salesman. As am I, more or less. I write, he wrote. It doesn’t matter what. We’re doing the same thing. He used to call his literary work “orders and invoices.” I can picture it now: he would sit at the dining room table and take out his Parker ballpoint (a gift from the company) and write everything down with almost childlike meticulousness, in his superb, ornate handwriting. My father was the one who taught me the word calligrapher. He told me what it meant. It was etched in my memory: calligrapher. The table was wonky and he had to put a shim under one leg so his handwriting didn’t get jostled. I don’t think my father ever had a proper table to write on.
Handwriting was important. The duplicates were yellow. Life grows yellow. Even daybreak is yellow.
103
My father never showed me how to love him. He used to hold my hand when I was a little boy and we went out into the world. Nobody ever asked him if he wanted to be a father either, if he’d really made the decision to become a father freely and without coercion.
My father copied out his duplicates, writing down everything he’d sold to the tailors in the provinces of Huesca, Lérida, and Teruel: tailors who made custom suits for men who are now dead and who may have been buried in those suits; the tailors died too and none of their children inherited the business because there was no longer a business to inherit.
He was never able to show me how to love him, but how do you do that anyway?
A number of times he was awarded certificates for being the traveler with the most sales. I’m awarded honorary degrees for my sorry stint at university in Zaragoza, the outcome of which was that I absorbed three or four facts about Lope de Vega and acquired a few skills for analyzing relative clauses: a real slam dunk of a university career. It was the same thing—what my father did and what I did. The poverty persisted; it had camouflaged itself a bit, but it was still there.
The wealthy were still other people.
Never us.
There was no way to climb aboard the gravy train. That’s what Spain is for all of us, for forty-four million Spaniards: watching a million Spaniards ride the gravy train as it passes you by.
104
Yellow is a visual state of the soul. Yellow is the color that speaks of the past, of the disappearance of two families, of penury, which is the moral realm that poverty pushes you toward, of the sadness of never seeing your children, of Spain’s fall into Spanish miasmas, of cars, of highways, of memories, of the cities I lived in, of the hotels I slept in—yellow speaks of all of that.
Yellow—amarillo—is a resonant word in Spanish.
Penury—penuria—is another important word.
Penuria and amarillo are two words that dwell together, conjoined.
I had a dream: I was going to my parents’ house, and I was doing it in the future. It was the world to come. My parents’ age was indeterminate, but they were definitely old. In my dream they were both alive, but in a future time, maybe 2030, or 2050, some far-off year.
The last time I saw them they were dead, not dead at the same time, but dead separated by time—my father was dead for nine years while my mother was still alive.
I’ve often thought about that growth, that vital progression as a dead man that my father undertook alone, his experience as a fugitive from life, his residence among the dead, his work among the dead, while my mother was among the living. It’s as if he’d emigrated to the New World and was busy amassing a fortune or building a future there.
I know the things my mother did while my father was dead, but I don’t know the things my father did while my mother was alive.
Nine years with each of them doing their own thing.
Never calling each other.
Nine years is a long time.
They’ll have had to do a lot of catching up now. Most human beings have contact with something truly enriching, some material good offered at no cost, only once, and that’s on the day they die, even if it looks like the death of a loved one.
Death, at bottom, is almost an economic boon, because nature finally sets you free. There is no longer action, or work, or effort, or salary, or success or failure; you don’t have to pay rent or review bank statements or look at the electricity bill. As such, death represents the utopia of anarchism.
I entered a house with large rooms. I remember that in the dream I didn’t really understand how the house was laid out; I was getting lost with all the rooms. I saw my father in the kitchen making fish soup. When I knew him in real life, in the past of that real life, my father did in fact know how to cook a delicious fish soup. It was a bouillabaisse; he was really good at making it. I stared at him the way we study someone who seems familiar. He looked up at me a few seconds, then went back to preparing the soup. Light was flooding in through the large windows of that strange house where my parents now lived. I wasn’t sure whether he’d seen me. It was as if I were a shadow—and I’m alive. And as if he were real—when he’s dead. I went over and saw he was putting a lot of care into preparing the soup. I was fascinated by how meticulously he was cooking i
t, as if he’d finally become one of those TV chefs whose programs he so enjoyed.
I noticed that my father, in the future, was hardworking, just as he had been in the past, but in the future his hard work was free of desperation and worry—that was the difference, which stunned and delighted me.
I came across another room, a bedroom. I expected to find my parents’ bedroom, with a double bed; instead, there were several twin beds. My mother appeared on the scene and she had other children, but I didn’t feel hurt. I couldn’t see the faces of those other children, those people, those siblings who inhabited that decaying future. Nor could I see my mother clearly, but her presence was stable, as if it were diffused throughout the room, her spirit scattered or dispersed in the air. I couldn’t grasp the room’s size, though I could visualize the beds clearly. A lot of people were living there. Why were so many people living at my parents’ house in the future when only my brother and I lived in my parents’ house in the past?
It was a dream, yes, but it wasn’t entirely a dream. It was a balm, a consolation, because our minds are wise, as if inside our minds there were somebody greater than us; I’ve sometimes had the sense that there was another person behind me, another person who will leave me on the day I die. I’ve thought about that person many times and even given him a name: “the engine driver.”
They’re dreams that seek absolution, so your body can stay alive feeling cleansed of guilt. The engine driver knows I feel guilty—he knows my unconscious condemns me for not having been around when they got old, for having moved away from Barbastro, so he presents me with merciful dreams in which my parents are still alive and I do not exist. My own nonexistence in that dream was a symbol of my condemnation, but I enjoy not existing; when I go to be judged, my fondness for nonexistence is going to exasperate the judges tasked with condemning me, as condemnation is the inevitable product of any judgment with a pedigree. Absolution is insubstantial and forgettable.