by Manuel Vilas
Millions of fathers and sons parade through the streets of thousands of cities on the earth—it’s the great parade.
The clouds muffle your passage toward complete oblivion.
110
My apartment on Ranillas is the palace of a sun king—it revels in amazement at the existence of the sun. Never in my life have I contemplated the sun in all its grandeur the way I do on these Ranillas mornings. I’ve pondered this because it’s not just sun I see.
It’s light in a communicative state, light as if made of words.
There must have been, I intuit, a cult to the sun in these lands before the Romans came, people who had the same sense as me: that the sun was coming for them.
The sun comes to see me.
And the sun is generous.
It provides you what you ask of it.
The sun’s visit—the sun decides to visit some human beings, and it bares itself to them, shows them what light is. Light and the sun are a family, and their child is heat.
The friendship of the sun.
I ask the sun for my dead, that it illuminate their bodies again, and it does. The sun is God. The cult of the sun is my cult. Worship of the sun is worship of the visible. And the visible is life. If we are alive, it is because the sun floods our bodies with light, and only in light are we real and are we substantial.
The dizzying light bends into my bedroom, which has a simple bathroom. I take a shower. I’ve got shampoo and conditioner.
The effort of showering, that’s what I think about; with the passing years, the body’s effort to continue receiving the water, the awareness of everything in the damp of the shower, consuming water to wash a body that no longer deserves anything—but no body deserves anything.
There’s a small room set aside for Brahms and Vivaldi, but they never sleep there. It’s lovely, this little bedroom where they never sleep, where no musical genius ever sleeps. I go in and it’s empty, and that emptiness seems like a being, a brother.
Empty brother. Invisible music. Light is powerful, it is will. It gives visibility to the human emptiness of this room and turns that emptiness into a black tear shed for my sons who are not here.
Brah and Valdi are exiting my life because they’ve gotten older, because I don’t see much of them, because human beings get distracted. We get distracted.
All of this is untainted. You end up falling in love with light, just light, with the fact that light exists even if it is no longer pouring down on a loved one. That’s the kind of light that enters my apartment on Ranillas.
I never thought I would be granted the contemplation of light.
The death of all humans is contained within that light.
111
My refrigerator is very small, but it’s better that way. I don’t throw anything away. I don’t throw food away. Bach taught me not to throw food away. It was his most fervent political conviction: Never throw food away. And I inherited that concern. Bach used to talk about a war—that’s why you shouldn’t waste food. Bach was in that war, he was a little boy in that war, he’d just turned six when it started. Occasionally he’d tell me things, but not many—maybe he was interested in that war not as a historical event, but as something that simply happened.
I hang up the clean laundry to dry and then don’t take it down, don’t put it away in the armoire. I leave it on the rack for weeks, inside the house. I like seeing it hanging there, like those criminals who were gibbeted, strung up and left to rot, in the Middle Ages.
I tidy and clean my apartment with an adolescent moodiness that I refuse to understand, especially at over fifty. I mop the kitchen and run the dishwasher, which is called OK. That’s the brand.
It’s a good name: OK.
Yesterday I was in a shopping center looking at other appliances from this unknown brand. They’re the cheapest ones on the market, and they do the same thing as the most expensive ones on the market—that should pique people’s interest. A two-hundred-euro OK does the same job as a twelve-hundred-euro AEG.
I weigh myself almost every day—I have a good scale, very precise. For twenty euros you can buy an excellent scale.
A scale measures the accumulation of fat in the belly, torso, face, hands, veins.
Colon cancer transformed my father into a very skinny man—it showed us his essence.
He was scared of his essence.
By the end, Bach weighed one hundred fifty-five pounds. And he was five feet, eleven inches. In the good old days, he weighed as much as two hundred.
In those final weeks, he weighed less than one fifty-five.
He got down to one forty.
I wanted to weigh him, but I didn’t have anyone I could ask. I almost took my scale to the hospital to weigh him. Because of the cancer, he ended up weighing the same as he did at sixteen years old. He was moving backward in time.
He was going back to the year 1946. I looked at his emaciated frame and prayed to the fates that his thoughts and his hopes and his desires might also be those from 1946.
The devastation of illness guides you back to the origin; it sends you traveling to your adolescence.
112
Today I’ll be driving to Madrid.
I like driving in my car. Stopping at bars and restaurants along the highway, where everybody is nobody. There are waiters with hazy lives—focus on them.
Yes, focus on them.
I usually stop at a roadside restaurant that has a decent set menu for eight euros. I’m waited on by an obese server. I always wonder how he makes it through eight hours of work with that load.
Another person who needs a scale.
Four skyscrapers are visible long before you get to Madrid. It’s still more than forty miles to the Spanish capital, but the towers are already on the horizon. There are only four skyscrapers in Madrid—not many at all. The main beneficiaries of the proliferation of skyscrapers in cities are not the wealthy, as a large part of Spain’s traditionalist left innocently believes, but the working class: the complexity of capitalism is the complexity of the universe.
We think we know a lot about capitalism, but we don’t know anything. Capitalism is built on the multiplicity of our coveting. Human coveting is relentless. We’ve been describing our coveting for centuries, and we never manage to get a handle on it. Primeval capitalism ends up being a form of communism.
Our hearts are covetous. People want to have large apartments in the best cities, and they want second homes at the seaside, and they want full lives, and capitalism embraces us. It embraces leftists and conservatives, and they are thus united in covetousness, which drives the world forward and drives this book forward.
The R-2 is a ghost freeway; there are hardly ever any cars on it. There’s no traffic because it’s a toll road. It was built to ease congestion on the way into Madrid.
The R-2 is gorgeous because its solitude bears down on you; it is surrounded by desert and nameless, hopeless lands. People opt not to pay for the R-2—they take the regular highway instead, which is slow and full of on-ramps and off-ramps from secondary roads and full of speed limit signs. I hate the ones that say 80 kilometers an hour. A circle and the number 80 inside it. Or even worse: 60, because the monopoly on speed belongs to the state—which is to say, the king of Spain, which is to say, Beethoven.
In this book, Felipe VI could well be Beethoven, the king of music history. The Spanish monarchy, and Francoism before it, regulated my parents’ lives and they responded with frugal indifference, with an indifference born of nature: nature in the face of history.
Spain never gave my parents anything. Not monarchist Spain or Francoist Spain.
Not a thing.
At least they were young under Franco—at least there’s that. I don’t like what Spain did to my parents. Spanish conservatism, always there, immovable.
More everlasting than the
Burgos cathedral.
I don’t like what Spain did to my parents, nor what it’s doing to me. I can’t do anything about my parents’ alienation now—it can’t be helped. All I can do is make sure it doesn’t take hold of me, but it’s already almost taken hold. I hope it doesn’t take hold in Brah and Valdi, but it will take hold in them too. An alienation that, because my parents experienced it, becomes one with me and I end up embracing it, and I want to take off with it, in love with it.
Fall in love with the one who humiliates you.
Touching that alienation, I touch them. Their lives. Their sweet lives.
The people working the tollbooths on the R-2—who are they? Musicians from the orchestra of some small city in the former Soviet Union. I like it when our hands touch as I pay, touching human flesh. The R-2 is pretty cheap; it costs six euros, and it’s not so long anyway. I’d like to work in one of those little booths. Live an honorable life like the people who grow old inside them. The R-2 workers build a whole world in those booths: they’ve got their Coca-Cola, their space heater, their cell phone, their sandwich, their comfy clothes. They’re good people. Unpretentious. They’ve got husbands or wives and kids waiting for them when they get off work.
To have somebody waiting for you somewhere is the only meaning in life, the only success.
Since I’ve stopped drinking, everyone seems like a good person.
Since I’ve stopped drinking, I am stripped of pretensions.
One of these days, Beethoven will lose political control and the Republic will return to Spain, because Spain is a nation of contrasts—it’s unpredictable. And every forty or fifty years Spain splits up with itself.
One of these days the first story on the evening news will be Beethoven’s head on a pike.
Watch out, my friend—even if you’re the composer of the Ninth Symphony, nothing is safe in Spain.
113
I’m forced to survive in a world that requires a person to know how to do something, when I don’t know how to do anything. I imagine you didn’t know how to do anything either, Dad. But I think we have our reasons. When Brah and Valdi use the same word to name me that I used to name you, I see the solution to the origin of life—the problem that has vexed science forever. If we look at Christianity another way, a way that’s simpler and more fundamental, not religious or solemn, we see the innocent relationship between a father and a child.
Our complete inability to attain a place in this world, Dad, to earn money, to have people take notice of us, is a kind of goodness.
You didn’t want anything, and I didn’t either.
When you were almost out of work, in the mid-seventies, I remember that a friend of yours who ran a bank said you deserved a good job like his. And he put you forward as a potential hire.
I was just a kid at the time, but when I heard the story that you were going to work at a bank, I knew immediately that it would never happen.
It would have been the solution to our problems.
People saw you looking so dapper, with your suit, your tie, your manners, your style, that they immediately wanted to do something for you.
You were Johann Sebastian Bach, a giant of music.
But that didn’t work out for you.
Mom fantasized that you’d end up being named head of a bank.
“You’re really good at dealing with people, and that’s essential for being a director. You carry yourself well. I’m going to talk to the regional director right now,” your friend said, downing another glass of anisette.
Maybe he did talk to somebody, sure. But I knew it was never going to happen. I was just a kid, but I had insights into the world of adults.
The notion that you were going to be named bank director stuck around for a few months of unfounded familial euphoria. You weren’t named director of anything. I was never named director of anything either. That was in 1974 or 1975. The expectation that you would become bank director suffused our home, and Wagner was already wanting to buy new furniture, a new car. Wagner would have been so happy if we’d had more money. May God deliver a large helping of misery to all those cheesy people who say money doesn’t buy happiness.
Up until four days ago, I thought the Spain I was born into was better than yours, but now I no longer believe history progresses all that much. Sure, we’ve got computers and cell phones, but Brah and Valdi hardly ever answer, and when they do we talk for thirty seconds or even less.
You grew old in a Spanish labyrinth identical to the Spanish labyrinth I’m growing old in. The values are the same. We’ve also added something that inhered in you and was passed down to me, something like a demoralizing diffidence when it comes to finding a place in the world, when it comes to saying, “Here I am.”
The year 1980 is exactly the same as the year 2015.
Everybody wants to achieve—that’s the same. Success and money—they’re the same. In the end, you spent your time watching TV. I spend mine surfing the internet, which is the same.
Our ways of sleeping and dying evolve technologically.
Neither of us had access to happiness—there was and is some phenomenon that distorts everything; of course, that inaccessibility proceeded and proceeds from a kind of sympathy with the world, with all the poor and wretched of the earth. That’s why we could not, why I cannot, be happy. It would require abandoning our courtesy toward all the misfortunes on this planet and in the universe.
Have you ever noticed, Dad, the immense ruin of the universe, that loneliness as vast as our human dead, and the light you have become?
It’s no coincidence that in my imagination you have assumed the mythical name of Johann Sebastian Bach, because that’s the music that sketches you there among the heavenly bodies. Because you were a spirit, you started a family; and family is the presence of the immovable. You were God, music of God. You were the music of that which endures. Every man and woman wants to start a family.
It’s what human beings do.
114
It’s summer, and I’m at Ranillas, and bugs are drawn to the light of the computer. No matter how many I kill, I can’t finish them off. They are coming for the light of my lamp, which illuminates my writing. They are disgusting creatures. Comical. When I smash them on the table, they leave a sticky but insignificant residue. They’re just dirt with tiny wings. They have the great fortune that their existence is neither life nor death, but instead something that appears to be simply automatic. They flit around like dust motes with wings. None of them are alike. I look at the carcasses. Some are green, others brown, others almost black. Different sizes.
They have no family.
They aren’t a family. Family is a kind of wealth. Spain is a finite set of families, and France too. None of the insects I murder is sibling to another. They are not husbands or wives, not children or parents.
They have no social structure.
They’re just flying shit.
115
My apartment on Ranillas is full of dust. The grime is never-ending. Valdi complains there’s no overhead light. Valdi comes by when he feels like it. He doesn’t smile. The great composers of music history don’t smile. This is a disaster. But the disaster is taking place only inside me. Valdi doesn’t see it, because teenagers don’t see anybody, not even themselves. They have a good relationship with life, actually. They don’t even realize they’re alive; they’re being carried along.
I found out a couple of days ago that the city government changed the name of my street—it’s no longer Avenida de Ranillas.
Is that you, Johann Sebastian, sending me a message from among the dead? Does this change mean I need to leave Zaragoza for good? Your second surname was Arnillas. That’s why I came to live on this street, because it was your name with two letters switched around. I think you’re trying to tell me something.
When I learned about the name change,
I felt powerless. I cursed whoever had made that decision. I could have beaten him to death—it was an insult to my father. I flopped onto the bed on Ranillas and tried to weep with rage, but I couldn’t squeeze out a single tear—it’s an inability to cry that destroys men over fifty. We can’t cry anymore, we’re deficient in potassium and manganese, the tear ducts are parched. Instead of crying, we drown in grief. The name of my street had been changed, your last name, and you yourself were fading once more.
You weren’t sending me a message. They’d just changed a street name, the same way they change sidewalks, streetlights, buses, benches, statues.
There was never any message.
It was all happening inside my head.
Only in my head.
116
I have to put my tongue between my teeth to keep them from grinding together. My tongue between my upper jaw and my lower jaw. I went to the dentist because one of my molars was aching.
“It’s not a cavity,” the dentist said, “it’s trauma. You have to make sure not to clench your teeth. It’s nerves—it’s a psychological issue, stress, anxiety. It probably happens when you’re asleep. You grind your jaws against each other.”
He made a face. Clenched his teeth.
So I put my tongue between my teeth. I paid the dentist two hundred euros.
Two hundred euros’ worth of nerves. I focus too much on money for the simple reason that I don’t have much of it. I wonder whether I’d focus on it so much if I had a lot. In any case, people internalize the idea of the value of money without realizing that money ends up being destructive or turning you into a crazy person. We all fall into the money trap. And we all end up seeing money as the definitive and accurate way to measure things. It’s like the ultimate step toward objectivity. Money comes from our zeal for objectivity. Zeal for knowing for certain. Money is solidity; losing it drives us nuts; not earning it makes us morons; money is supreme truthfulness, and it’s where our species attains its greatest weightiness, its gravity.