by Manuel Vilas
“I don’t know, maybe it’s a hidden cavity,” I said.
“Not a chance, I would have spotted it. There’s no cavity,” the dentist said.
I go back to my apartment on Ranillas, which isn’t called that anymore, and see a TV report about political corruption. A list of accusations directed at politicians: lying, fraud, bribery, money laundering, influence peddling, misappropriation of public funds, membership in criminal organizations, and so on.
Spanish politicians are sinking, becoming victims of absurdity—all they care about is buying themselves houses and cars and luxury trips and rooms in six-star hotels. They’re full of emptiness.
They’re obsessed with wealth, the accumulation of wealth. It’s impossible for them to spend all the money they’re accumulating. But that makes no difference—it’s the accumulation itself they’re after. They like sitting in armchairs and watching their bank accounts swell, mainly in Switzerland, which is what El Dorado is called these days.
It’s an arithmetic enjoyment, the pleasure of doing mathematical operations. And as such it resembles a childish game of addition and subtraction. It’s a battle against boredom: you’ve got to do something in life, something measurable. They don’t notice that they’re stealing. And then they’re found out and end up ensnared in lengthy trials from which they tend to emerge relatively unscathed, even if their reputations are in the toilet. They’re oblivious to their crimes, and that may be the most interesting aspect, that annihilation of insight, where reaching an elevated position in the social hierarchy inevitably also means becoming exempt from other people’s judgment, the covering over of all mirrors, the gift of impunity and silence.
And suddenly the silence is broken and the mirror is laid bare, and they’re accused of corruption, and in that accusation they see only injustice and ingratitude.
You hear the way their flesh is rotting. You sense how they will be transformed into cornered, broken, furious creatures once they end up in prison—though they’re never there for long, maybe a few days or a few months. Never very long, and then everything is forgotten. Forgetting works in favor of all human actions, good and bad alike.
Spanish political corruption makes me forget the corruption of my parents’ flesh and my own.
There’s a social function to political corruption, a cathartic function, which ought to count as a mitigating factor. People forget about their own miseries when they see an accused politician on TV. Politicians’ corruption distracts us from our own moral corruptions.
On the daily news, I see one of those politicians leaving prison, and his daughters are there to meet him.
Full of hope, his daughters have gone to meet him. Despite everything, his daughters are there. They love him all the same—he’s their father. Nothing and nobody can destroy that. There’s somebody waiting for him. They won’t rebuke him. They won’t frown. They won’t say, “We came because we had no choice.” They won’t complain. They’ll give him two kisses in greeting and smile. I envy that man. Nobody would wait for me.
My mother took me to the dentist when I was a kid: my canine was emerging above my first premolar; the canine had no space, it was perched on top of the premolar. The dentist gave me a retainer and said if I didn’t wear it, I’d look like Count Dracula when I was older. My father never went to the dentist. My father had a gold tooth. He got it when he was young.
I had forgotten about my father’s gold tooth. When I was a kid, my father’s mouth was full of light because of that tooth, which seemed mysterious to me and even a little scary. To little-boy me, my father was the man with the golden smile. My father’s luminous mouth was an enigma that accentuated his heroic, supernatural origins.
When my father’s body was cremated, did the gold tooth melt? At what temperature does gold melt? Should I check that out on Wikipedia, and what would I gain from finding the answer? Did the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on my father remove his pacemaker but keep the tooth for himself? Did he resell it afterward, and how much did he get? Did he offer a package deal: Gold tooth and pacemaker? Gold and heart?
My father had a golden heart.
117
I’m on a train and I have just opened my bag to see what’s inside. I have a toiletry kit, a comb, and some keys. I remember how my father’s kit aged. It never occurred to me to give him a new one during those last years. He carried a battered kit, practically falling apart, with his things inside it, with his mystery. It was an older style of toiletry kit, with a compartment for a bar of soap and another for a shaving brush. Who knows how many years he’d had it—his whole life, probably. My father was loyal to objects; it was his way of being respectful toward inanimate beings. He wouldn’t have been excited if I’d given him a new one. I got a whiff of what was in my travel bag: it was the smell of loneliness. I sniff my belongings to find out something more about myself and about the person who put me into the world.
Nothing outlines a human being’s loneliness better than his toiletry kit. I remember my mother’s handbags. How alone she must have felt in her final years. All together we build a rough road to solitude. My father used to say I was a lot like my mother. I never asked him why. What I wanted was to be like him. I think I’m not like either of them—therein lies the abyss of procreation, in the development of different selves.
No child is like anybody else, not the father or the mother, not aunts and uncles or grandparents, nobody; we never understood that.
A child is a new self.
And he is alone.
We tend to say a child is like the father, or an aunt, or a grandmother, to avoid grappling with the unavoidable: that the child will end up being a solitary man or an equally solitary woman.
That he’ll end up dying alone.
It’s our way of conjuring the future.
118
It’s the summer of 1970. We’re at the beach, in Cambrils. Late July. I’m a little kid, fascinated by European tourism. We’re staying at a hotel called the Don Juan. I’m obsessed with the cars of the Germans, the Swiss, the French. I ask my father what the letters CH that appear on some of the license plates mean. My father tells me, Confédération Helvétique. Years later I understood, when in high school I translated Julius Caesar and the Helvetians appeared in those pages.
Cambrils is a fishing village in the province of Tarragona. My father heard about the Don Juan from a taxi driver in Barbastro. I was afraid of that taxi driver, the perpetual cigar dangling from his mouth. He was a large man with a prominent belly and fat lips that stuck out like they’d been glued onto his face. Every time I saw him on the streets of Barbastro, I’d think, That’s the man who told my father about the Don Juan hotel.
It seemed like there was a fellowship of men who traveled for a living, a sort of association in which they swapped useful information. My father was a traveling salesman and that man was a taxi driver—they did basically the same thing.
The men who traveled the Spanish highways of the 1970s founded that association.
“You can eat well for fifty pesetas here,” they’d say.
“This one’s a good place to sleep, clean sheets and warm rooms for sixty pesetas, and they serve a good breakfast,” they’d say.
That’s what I thought.
A sort of booking.com (a mutual aid society) for people who earned their living in that world.
Johann Sebastian is happy at the beach. He’s made friends with the owner of a snack bar who cooks him a potato omelet at midmorning. I can see him eating that omelet, I can see him right now, forty-five years later, the yellow color of the egg mixed with the potato. There’s a kindly sun beaming down on all of Spain.
My father has a SEAT 1430. It’s in the shade, parked under an auspicious eucalyptus tree.
There are songs by the Dúo Dinámico playing, songs that extol the virtues of the Spanish summertime. My father is listening to t
hem in July 1970, on a beach in Cambrils.
119
I inherited that gift from Wagner. She had it too, but she didn’t cultivate it. She used to see the dead. Wagner saw the dead, but she completely ignored them. That’s how she was. Possessed of a divine indifference, which refused to contemplate anything that did not serve to fulfill her desires, however marvelous it might be.
I’m in my apartment on Ranillas, pondering my few possessions: a painting, some books, the TV, the curtains, the sofa. I’ve been conned over and over again, because that’s what life has become: one scam after another, scams that snatch away the time you’ve got to live.
If you get conned it’s because you’re alive; the day people stop conning you, it will mean not that the world has improved, but that you’ve croaked.
Wagner and Johann Sebastian never let themselves get conned. They got pissed. In the end, the two illustrious musicians became geezers who went against the grain: dodecaphonists, avant-garde musicians who were shocked by the prices in grocery stores, two secretive retirees who bought things on sale.
There is nobody behind these assaults on life—no businesses or corporations, not even the devil.
Nobody.
Just an enormous void, which we all serve.
Nobody is waiting for me anywhere, and that’s what my life has come to: I have to learn to walk down the street, through the cities, wherever I happen to be, knowing that nobody is waiting for me at the end of the journey.
Nobody is going to be worrying about whether I make it.
You walk differently when that’s the case.
You can tell by the way a person walks whether there’s somebody waiting for them.
All families take their leave of this earth.
Fathers, children, grandparents—families say goodbye.
Millions of family scenes disappear in that moment. I find young fathers who step up as parents immensely moving: they adore their children, but their children will forget them.
My heart is like a black tree full of yellow birds that screech and drill my martyred flesh. I understand martyrdom: martyrdom means ripping off one’s flesh to become more naked; martyrdom is a desire for catastrophic nakedness.
120
My father was an inveterate card player. For twenty years he played every day whenever he wasn’t traveling. He used to smile as he headed out to his games. They started at three in the afternoon, and he always arrived right on time. We had to eat lunch at two on the dot so he could make the three o’clock game, held in a popular club in Barbastro called the Peña Taurina, which had a mounted bull’s head on its main wall. As a kid I used to stare at that head with commingled fear and empathy. My father was an expert at two games; his favorite was take-two, and then tute. He used to play from three until seven in the evening. Sometimes, when I was really young, I would watch him play. He would get upset with his fellow players. He was strict and inflexible and always right. They played for coffee and a glass of cognac. A Torres 5—that was the cognac.
Cards were his paradise. He played for the pleasure of chance. Never for money.
I think playing take-two made him infinitely happy. That must have been in the summer of 1969 or 1970 or 1971. And at seven he would come home to fetch my mother and they’d go out to the bars to have something to eat and chat with people.
During that period my father’s life was marked by intense happiness. I remember his shirts. I remember the key ring he carried and his watch. It was a Citizen, purchased in a watch shop called La Isla de Cuba, run by a mother and son. My parents were friends with this mother and her son. Mother and son were mysterious, as mysterious as the name of their watch shop, and I don’t think they sold very many watches, though I couldn’t swear to it. One day they disappeared from Barbastro, as if by magic. And their watch shop disappeared along with them, its time among the living come to an end. Now there’s another business there, and there were many others before this one and after La Isla de Cuba closed, which must have been in about 1980, I figure. Businesses come and go—some last a year, others a hundred, others three months, others six years, nobody knows, and where there once was a watch shop there is now a bar or a shoe store or a bakery or just an empty storefront. I loved and respected my father’s watch. It was like the watch of a god—that’s where my devotion to watches came from, from the love I felt for my father’s Citizen. I would see its steel chain, the face, the hands, the clasp, and it all seemed marvelous, unattainable. My father was unattainable—he always was unattainable for me.
As a boy, I could never understand why he liked take-two so much, why he spent so much time playing cards—I thought he owed me that time. He was a famous player around town. Much feared, since he always won and if he didn’t win it was everybody else’s fault.
It was everybody else’s fault—that was a recurring theme in my childhood. In the face of any obstacle or adversity, my father would blame other people, especially my mother. I don’t know where the hell that attitude came from. My father would blame my mother for any misfortune, and my mother gradually learned to manipulate the facts on her own behalf, and as a result we would all be dragged into an emotional labyrinth that led to sadness and despair.
My father used to fly into rages in his forties; the decade between forty and fifty was his furious period. After that he calmed down. He calmed down the most after seventy. Something happened to him at the casino where he used to hang out, the Peña Taurina. He must have gotten pissed off at somebody, and stopped going. Instead he started going to the small bar attached to the Argensola movie theater. That seemed like a bad sign. It was the beginning of his decline as a take-two player. In the mid-1980s he stopped playing cards and started watching TV. He never said why he stopped playing cards. Another mystery I’ll never solve. They make my heart ache, these mysteries of the past that I’ll never be able to figure out. It seems to me that there are wonders contained within them that will remain concealed forever.
He reigned supreme as a take-two player from 1968 to 1974. Then everything changed; the golden age ended.
He used to sit placidly, looking intently at his cards, making mathematical calculations about the game’s odds, and he’d sit near the Peña Taurina’s open balcony, and the June-afternoon breeze would tickle his face, the breezes of 1970, when the world was still good and there was peace in his heart and joy in mine. And he’d study his opponents’ faces and analyze their weaknesses and keep an eye out for teammates’ possible mistakes. He was after perfection—he was always seeking it in that thing he did well, and he did it his way.
I don’t think any of the players from back then are still alive, the ones who sat and played against my father in the Peña Taurina, a casino that also held dances. There was a small stage for the band. My father would order me a Coke and I’d sit down to watch him dance with my mother and later they’d buy me a croquette, but I never liked them.
One day the Peña Taurina acquired a pinball machine. And my father became obsessed with that machine. As did I—I would have been just eight.
It was a ritual of ours.
We’d show up at the Peña Taurina on Saturdays around noon. My father would order me a Coke and the two of us would start playing pinball.
We were very happy. My father tended to jostle the machine hard whenever he was on the controls, and that would cause the machine to short out and shut down automatically, and you’d lose the ball.
Those silvery balls—my father would yank on the controls to fire them into the highest regions of the machine, the highest regions of the world and of life, and he’d watch the ball fly up and I’d be standing on a chair because I was still really short.
Those chairs are etched in my memory. It’s like I can still see them right now, 1970 chairs.
God, my father loved playing pinball. We were both enthralled by the silvery ball’s descent, the colors, the lights, the s
ounds—waiting for it to arrive, with our finger on the button. My father loved getting an extra ball.
So did I.
We both loved playing. Whenever we spotted a pinball machine in a bar, my father and I would head inside. We’d play in silence, communicating through gestures. It was a ritual. A forty-year-old man in wordless complicity with his eight-year-old son.
I think those were the moments of greatest communion we shared, when we played pinball.
We were father and son back then, in a way we would never be again.
We played really well.
We formed a single being, fusing together.
We were love.
But we never talked about it, we never said it.
Never.
121
I’d been drinking the night before. I woke up when the telephone on my nightstand rang; I was in a bed in the Gran Hotel in Barbastro. They were calling up from reception because my cell phone was turned off. It was my brother. And it was ten in the morning on May 24, 2014, a Saturday.
“Your mom is dead.”
He didn’t say, “Mom is dead.” And as a matter of fact I think he was quite accurate in saying “Your mom is dead” and not “Mom is dead.”
What a strange family we were. I got out of bed, stunned, scared, with the aftermath of alcohol terrorizing the erratic circulation of my blood. I stood staring vaguely around the room. I got dressed and skipped breakfast. I headed to my mother’s house, where my brother was.
I went into the bedroom and there she was, dead. She was in bed—she’d died in her sleep, or that’s what someone said.
The collapse of a historical era. With her, everything was disappearing, including me. I saw myself saying goodbye to myself.