Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  We remember only condemnation.

  Absolution has no memory—that’s how we human beings are.

  Still, my guilt is problematic. That is the great hole in all the lives of humans who dwelled in the borderlands, those of us who hovered between good and evil.

  I awoke with a sense of euphoria. I was grateful for having seen my parents again, but I saw them in a time to come, in the future, a future without me. I’d seen an illusory axis of time, an alternative plane, where my parents had started another family, to which I did not belong, in which I did not exist.

  I didn’t feel excluded; I didn’t feel bad.

  It all struck me as an inexpressible tenderness, as if I were witnessing a second chance at everything; they seemed happy, my parents did, with their other children, and I wasn’t there—my absence improved my parents’ lives and that made me happy. I wasn’t afraid of disappearing.

  I wasn’t afraid of disappearing, not even deep down.

  If I’d been a bad son, that stain was erased forever.

  Was I a bad son?

  If I was, it was out of incompetence, not intention.

  A man can be an incompetent son.

  Nobody is prepared to be a father, or to be a son.

  I could have done more recently, of course. My sons will eventually pay me with the same coin, so my debt will be settled. Nobody owes anything here. No debts—they’ll be paid with my own oblivion.

  As the dream faded, I started remembering what my parents’ bedroom was like in the past—that is, the bedroom where I actually was in reality.

  I will never see that bedroom again. I should list all of my parents’ things that I will never see again.

  I remember I felt great joy contemplating the real bedroom that existed in the past.

  So, I’d seen my parents living in the future in a dream.

  What will my death be like in three thousand years? The dead continue to exist, transform, endure.

  The death of a human being comes and goes in time. All dead people come and go. They do different things from what they did when they were alive.

  Inside death there is still a bustle of activity.

  105

  I was six years old and used to go to my parents’ bedroom. I thought it was a spaceship. I repeat to myself once more, like a kind of psalmody, that it is completely impossible that I will ever see that bedroom again: the pale painted walls, the curtains, the bed and linens, the nightstand, an armchair, a lamp, an armoire. I see my memory while my memory sees the past.

  The present that every human being inhabits turns the past into an enigma; the present is not a mystery, but as it turns into past, it will be invaded by enigma; that’s why I examine the present with a magnifying glass, under a microscope, trying to see how that transformation takes place: finishing a Sunday meal with Brah and Valdi, for example, makes me want to know how my sons will remember that meal thirty years from now. And so that meal lets me see its mysteries, its spiritual apoplexy, its yellow pancreas. How will they remember these Sunday meals when I am dead, transformed into distance?

  The past is furniture, hallways, houses, apartments, kitchens, beds, rugs, shirts. Shirts once worn by the dead. And afternoons—it’s afternoons, especially Sunday afternoons, that produce a lull in human activity; and elemental nature returns to our eyes, and we see the air, the breeze, the empty hours.

  Death thwarts the persistence of aging, and though it may seem like a foolish notion since the fantasy that a dead person can keep celebrating birthdays is absurd, the living tally up the anniversaries of the dead as if they were merely absent, so the bonds tighten and the accounting between living and dead intersects in bizarre ways, because death has no content and life without death has no end.

  But I was talking about the inglorious dead, the dead who in life were not renowned or distinguished people.

  Death gives an unexpected meaning to any human’s life. Any new development is irrevocably halted. Any possibility of movement is shut down. Death rewards those who failed in life, those who did not feature on the front pages of newspapers, on the TV news, in photos, in iconographic fame and celebrity.

  Those who were celebrated and famous in life are punished in death by outdated photos and moving images, which they can no longer escape—they are trapped inside them.

  They are trapped inside the lives they led.

  The anonymous dead elude the mockery of the passage of time. They were not the subject of well-remembered photographs. They’re nobody; they’re wind, and the wind doesn’t make a fool of itself.

  Don’t ever let anyone take your photo.

  106

  The light spills in through the windows of my apartment on Avenida de Ranillas, number 16, staircase 1, fifth floor, B for Barcelona. Inside it is the soul of my parents, who were named Bach, my father, and Wagner, my mother, since I’ve finally come up with names from music history for both of them. I’ve now turned them into music, because our deaths should be turned into music and beauty.

  I managed to purchase a dishwasher; it’s a no-name model, but it works. I no longer scrub dishes. It cost me two hundred fifty euros.

  Mother Wagner, you never had a dishwasher. That’s what the voice said when we went through your house: “Your mother didn’t have a dishwasher—how is it you never bought her one?” Everybody has a dishwasher now. You could have had one since the early or mid-nineties, which is about when—I’m doing the math in my head—dishwashers became common in Spain. Of course they existed before that, I imagine starting in the late seventies or early eighties, especially in bars and restaurants, but not in people’s homes. In people’s homes, in the nineties. But you spent almost twenty-five years washing dishes by hand for no reason.

  I remember stacks of dishes at Christmas dinners, which you washed alone; I’m seeing those dishes now, when it’s too late, or the platters with bits of cannelloni stuck to them, which you had to scrub hard with the scouring pad to loosen; and those cannelloni that Johann Sebastian loved so much; and there were lots of dishes and recipes that disappeared with you; and the joy of those meals vanished too; I remember we never helped you wash, at most dried the dishes, we didn’t help you at all.

  We would keep sitting at the table, as if we were dukes. And now I know what that means.

  Now that I’m alone, I know what it means to have a spick-and-span kitchen: it’s an exhausting job, it’s an art, it’s something that never ends, because a kitchen is never completely clean.

  You can spend your whole life keeping your kitchen clean—that’s how it was for a lot of women. They lived in the kitchen; that’s why I look at my kitchen on Ranillas and use it to communicate with Wagner, my mother.

  If I touch my kitchen, I touch my mother’s soul. If I touch all the kitchens on earth, I touch the bondage of millions of women, whose names were erased and are now music. The music of my stupefied heart.

  107

  I do my grocery shopping at the chain called Dia. There’s a Dia next to my place on Ranillas.

  I go in and it’s full of people, people living in catastrophe, heirs to crisis and unemployment and nothingness. Hey, friends, buy house-brand yogurts, they don’t taste the same as Danone, but they’re way cheaper. I like shopping at Dia: everything is cheap and simple and obvious and edible, like my passage through this world. Everything is cheap because it’s all about to expire. If you check the expiration date on what you’re buying, you’re surprised to discover that a lot of the products are as cheap as they are because they’re almost expired. The cookies are almost expired, the fish is almost expired—that’s why they lower the prices, because the products are practically corpselike. Expired cookies are like a corpse. It’s unsettling to eat expired foods—it’s like tossing yourself into the crematorium of the food industry. The workers who were supposed to keep an eye on the expiration dates expired too. Peo
ple expire. Dying is expiring—by which I mean we’ve extended the concept of ending to everything around us. And ultimately the measure or transcendence of our death is not so far off from the measure and transcendence of an expired yogurt.

  The expiration date is a funeral date.

  Still, the dead don’t expire—but the living do. Death is the place where expiration no longer makes a difference.

  A one-liter bottle of Coke Zero is worth one euro: a symbolic equity that ties the measure of liquid units to monetary units. The people who shop at the Dia in my neighborhood at eleven a.m. or noon are the unemployed, the elderly, housewives, and the crazy or sick. Old women who carry the exact change in their hands and buy a can of orange soda and a bag of candy, and drop the coins on the counter, and the cashier has to count the dirty coins, damp with the sweat of the demented old lady, who’s wearing a diaper and smells to high heaven. If that old woman were speaking English, we’d get to enjoy a scene of American realism, full of steely poetry, but in Spain, and in Spanish, and in a Zaragozan accent no less, we end up without steely poetry, without transcendence, without epic, without anything at all; we are left merely with the exoticism of the inferior bloodlines. But that doesn’t matter. The most unsettling aspect is my tendency to relate to misfortune—not to alleviate it, but to make it mine, to place it in my heart. I place the old woman in my heart, and I love her. And I think about how that eighty-something-year-old woman was once a little girl beside a young mother. I think about that with all my might.

  I’ve been alone all week, in my apartment.

  Short trips to the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, strolls around the room I’m writing in, flipping on the TV. Staring at the kitchen, the dishes, the cutlery, the coffee maker. Staring at the unmade bed in the bedroom. Looking at my calendar. Lying on the sofa. I become one with my sadness as if it issued from somebody else—that’s another thing that unsettles me, crushes me, because I feel like I’m going crazy.

  It’s a union with everything that’s gone wrong—that’s what I become one with, with all misfortune, all suffering. But still I am able to become one with something infinitely superior to misfortune: I become one with the emptiness of men, of women, of trees, of streets, of dogs, of birds, of cars, of streetlamps.

  108

  In the wee hours I look out at the avenue and cars are no longer going by. Everybody is asleep. I have no schedule—I can go to bed whenever I feel like it, I can stay up all night, I can look out at the avenue at three in the morning; I can, if I want, go out walking along the Ebro in below-freezing temperatures at four in the morning, but I never do, because I think somebody might see me, and that thought scares me. I could walk along the river at five in the morning, but I’m afraid that might upset me, shatter my nerves. I could gaze at the waters of the Ebro at six in the morning, when the impending dawn is palpable.

  No cars are traveling down Avenida de Ranillas, Actur neighborhood, city of Zaragoza, northern Spain.

  People are asleep, but not me.

  I want to leave.

  I’ve bought a new mop.

  I love mopping, in particular that moment when the floor suddenly gleams, and you score a victory, a triumph over filth and dirt. You achieve a purification. I mop the floor as if I were purifying souls. If only I could wash my internal organs: take out my stomach and wash it, take out my guts and wash them.

  Yes, I want to get out of here.

  I’ll be in Madrid for a few days, and I’m looking forward to that.

  I like Madrid. It’s full of millions of streets and bypasses and highways and neighborhoods I don’t know. I have to go to bed now. I put off going to bed too long. Years ago I had a friend in my hometown, Barbastro, who didn’t go to bed until five or six in the morning.

  I could call him Giuseppe Verdi.

  He was twice my age—actually almost three times. He would spend his nights watching movies, immersed in an indescribable happiness, immersed in an exaltation of his private pleasures that fascinated me; I remember him in this moment, remember his long winter nights in Barbastro in the seventies and eighties, nights that Verdi spent reading and, once videos became available, watching movies till dawn. How I’d love to see him again and tell him I always admired him and that he is in my heart, that I carry him in my heart. Actually, he was a friend of my father’s, a borrowed friend, an assigned instructor. A friend of my father’s who ended up being my friend too.

  He was a free man, one who lived for tranquil pleasures. My father appreciated and loved him, though they were very different. I found it surprising that my father and I had a friend in common. Once, when I was a boy, Verdi gave me an envelope that contained a hundred fifty pesetas. We never talked about it in the years after, when I grew up and we became fast friends. I never told Verdi how that time when I was a kid and he gave me that gift, that abstract gift, it threw me off balance because I think it was the first time anybody gave me money. Verdi was unmarried, and he died very alone and far too soon. He had an unhappy death, or at least I didn’t like the way he died. He ended up running out of reasons to live. An unmarried person’s time is short. When the body loses its youth and its faculties, unmarried people are abandoned. Especially men. And especially that generation of men who were not trained in domestic life, men who didn’t even know how to make a bed. Ultimately they were the victims of an upbringing that had, in theory, been preparing them for a life of privilege.

  My friendship with Verdi was special because it was built on Verdi’s friendship with my father; it was as if our friendship had a guarantee, a fail-safe, an indisputable collateral, and I felt secure.

  I spent hundreds of hours talking to Verdi when I was sixteen or seventeen. I didn’t have any friends my age, just Verdi. Later, over time, once I left for Zaragoza, we grew apart, and in the end Verdi died. And as usual, I didn’t go to his funeral. I’ve never gone to the funerals of the people I cared about, though maybe I’ve never cared about anybody in this life. I can’t dismiss that possibility.

  Verdi is fading in my memory now. He’s become as anonymous as death. There are no photos of him on the internet. I did a couple of Google searches—not a trace. Nothing. There are still a couple of entries for my father.

  Bach, two entries on the internet.

  Verdi, zero.

  Verdi’s death had a big impact on me—I didn’t understand his death. I’ve never understood anybody’s death. Verdi seemed so sure of life; he was so fiercely alive that his death turned him into a fake, a traitor in my eyes. I say this not to criticize him but to laud him. If only I could blot out the disparity between being alive and being dead, their instability and disproportionality. That is the issue: the senseless, guilty shift that goes from living movement to rigor mortis. I am flagellating my soul because I do not understand the cunning movement that goes from that which stirs and speaks to that which is immobile and mute.

  If you had met Verdi, you’d understand. His death actually ends up revealing the empty fist of God smiting things. Nobody remembers him in Barbastro now. Johann Sebastian sometimes used to invite him to eat at our house.

  And Wagner would make cannelloni.

  There was peace and affection at those meals. Barbastro was a radiant town because of the humans who lived there, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. They were extraordinarily luminous men and women.

  I talked to Verdi for hundreds of hours. We used to watch movies together. When that was happening, neither of us suspected this future from which I am writing.

  If we had, we would have shot ourselves or overthrown a government—not just one, every government on earth.

  Verdi was a great man, and he was happy. And the times we spent together will never come back—that’s my problem. It was the seventies, when life moved more slowly so you could actually see it. The summers were endless, the evenings infinite, and the rivers unpolluted.

  June w
ould arrive in Barbastro like a god illuminating people’s lives.

  It was paradise. It was my paradise. They were my paradise, my father and my mother—how I loved them, how happy we were together, and how brutally we fell apart. How beautiful our life was together, and now it has all been lost. And it seems impossible.

  109

  I never see anybody, I never meet up with anybody for lunch or dinner, not even for coffee, when I’m here in this city, in my apartment on Ranillas. It’s as if I were trying to devote myself to myself, as part of an urgent need, the need for myself, which is also their need, that of my loved ones. Who are my loved ones? There’s no such thing as life’s complexity—that’s a trick, mere vanity. Only loved ones exist. Only love.

  I don’t want to meet up with anybody, because I’m with myself; I’ve met up with myself, my own company keeps me very busy. I’m addicted to my own company.

  I see only my children, and they don’t see me. I see people who don’t see me. I see a photo of a little boy with half of his father’s body. It’s Johann Sebastian Bach and me. My open mouth and Johann Sebastian’s key chain, and his shoes. I remember I liked that polo shirt—I was a flirt from a young age. I’m still in this world, but Bach left. He was already leaving when somebody took this odd and at the same time joyous photo. And allegorized that departure by visually eliminating half of his body.