Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  Exactly: the end of a historical era. Goodbye to the Renaissance or goodbye to the Baroque or goodbye to the Enlightenment or the Russian Revolution or the Civil War or the Romans or any civilization worthy of memory.

  An era was ending. A queen had died.

  There the queen was, her head on the pillow. She wasn’t talking anymore. Her new-fledged silence seemed like a miracle.

  The queen lived very much by herself, and my brother and I didn’t visit much. Especially not me—I went very little. My brother went a lot more. He knew how to take care of her. That’s why, in just recompense, I know my sons won’t come see me either, when I become an old man, a moribund monarch whose death will also bring an entire historical era to a close.

  For the past few years, my mother had slept in the bedroom that used to belong to my brother and me. I never asked her why she changed rooms. She decided not to sleep in the bedroom she’d shared with my father. I don’t know why she did that. And I’ll go to the grave without knowing. But there must have been a reason, and I’m sure it was an intense one.

  Because my mother was intense.

  Maybe my father was appearing to her at night, and my mother sensed that his apparition wouldn’t visit the room that had been ours, her children’s, because my father’s ghost would respect that space.

  That must have been the reason.

  I used to hear my parents from my room when they got home late and went to bed; they used to talk before they fell asleep. I’d hear them talking through the wall—already as a child I was suffering from insomnia, a childish insomnia full of terrors and fear of the dark. I would hear the elevator, the keys in the door, I’d hear what they were chatting about before falling asleep. They were relaxed. It soothed me to hear their voices. They would talk about the people they’d been out with. They were communicating, endeavoring to become a single self—that’s what they were doing. They were striving to progress, just like every married couple that’s ever been. Marriage is a mutual aid society. It is building a fortress made of kinship and economics. They used to talk about that, how they were becoming one, a patrimonial fusion. They talked tenderly, and I heard it all. They would describe and assess what they’d seen. They’d talk about what their friends had been wearing, how their friends’ lives were going, and how the meal had been, whether it had been a good one, about how much each couple had owed when the check arrived, the appropriateness or inappropriateness of somebody’s comment, the new car so-and-so was going to buy, what they were going to do next weekend.

  They talked.

  They were trying to understand and accept each other, and from that understanding and acceptance came marriage, a walking through life together.

  122

  In Barbastro my mother was a pioneer when it came to sunbathing. She sunbathed everywhere. She taught it. And she converted some of her female friends to that religion whose liturgy centered on a simple rite: sunbathing. When June arrived, she was already down by the river, sunbathing with her friends. She spent the entire summer sunbathing. She’d get really black, as if she were changing her race. And she liked it when people said that—“You’re so black.” They didn’t say “You’re tan”; back then, in Spain, you’d say “You’re so black”—because the past, too, is a ritual of words and a way of saying them. When fear arrives, people start speaking with another accent, another pronunciation.

  My nostalgia is nostalgia for a particular way of speaking Spanish. My nostalgia is nostalgia for a world without fear. My mother’s friends, too, are dead or about to die. Nobody’s asked me about my mother for a long time. I don’t hear her name said out loud. I don’t hear her voice. I don’t remember her voice. If I heard her voice again, maybe then I’d believe in the beauty of the world.

  Now I feel the old heat of 1969, and my mother sunbathing in the garden of the house of a friend of hers, younger than her, unmarried. Her name was Almudena, and she lived with her parents. They had a backyard with beautiful trees. There were plants and flowers. And there my mother and Almudena would sunbathe, and I’d be with them. Almudena was a teacher and graded tests while she sunbathed. That house and yard no longer exist; there was a large kitchen, and you walked out into the backyard from the kitchen, and the backyard was full of light, ample and calm, and protected by a wall—nobody could see you sunbathing. As far as I was concerned, it was paradise. My father bought me an Orbea bicycle and I learned how to balance on two wheels in that backyard. I would fall and scrape my legs. Almudena and my mother kept an eye on my progress with the Orbea. Once I crashed into a tree and broke a planter. Why do I remember that house so well? It was one story, with an old-fashioned living room, and the kitchen was large and emanated beauty and peace.

  I liked Almudena because she was very beautiful—I was attracted to her and had fantasies about her. She was gorgeous. It annoyed me when she treated me like a kid or ignored me. My wee vanity felt injured. And she must have been really young back then—I figure she would have been twenty-two or twenty-three at most. My mother had younger friends, which was a bonus for me. Almudena was my math teacher—she taught me division. I had no idea what division was, I just liked looking at her. I looked at her while she taught me at the Piarist school and I looked at her while she sunbathed in a bikini with my mother. Everybody said she was very beautiful. The boys in my class would comment on it: “The teacher is so pretty.” And I hid my secret, my privilege, the gift of being able to see her sunbathing almost naked. But I hated those strange mathematical operations. Division seemed impossibly complicated. There were rules, you had to learn the rules that governed the world: the rules of division, multiplication, addition, and subtraction.

  Almudena’s face is fixed in my memory. She doesn’t age, hasn’t changed at all—she remains immutable, halted in time, lit by the sun and my roaring blood.

  Almudena’s mother grew a lot of flowers. The three of them would start talking about flowers, and I didn’t get what there was to say about flowers. But mostly what they did was smear their bodies with sun lotions, which were a new thing, very modern, and drink beer with lemon soda, and smoke. And they’d drink an entire porrón of wine and laugh and were happy. Nivea, in a round blue tub, with its cold, white cream, featured prominently in our summers. And I’d be sitting there watching the sun set over the trees and the flowers and the bicycles. The sunset may have been the only thing that mattered. It was back then that I learned to love the month of June. My mother taught me to love that month, which is special; that garden was a celebration of the month of June, because June heralds summer—it’s sunny out, but the rot of summer has not yet begun. When July comes, the hemorrhage begins, still invisible. August is the month in which summer’s sepsis, its wound, its laborious transit through the atmosphere, becomes visible—on men’s faces, in the branches of the pitiless trees as it dies.

  The death of summer is appalling. My mother saw the end of summer as a tragic event, a sacrilege. Who would dare kill summer? She hated it when unpleasant weather arrived. She believed in the sun. She was heretical, living according to the rites of the sun. She was obsessed with light and sunbathing. As she saw it, the sun and being alive were one and the same. She loved summer. She loved how it got dark late, really late. The sun’s presence was the only thing she considered worthy of contemplation; though she wasn’t aware of it, her love for sunshine and summer was an ancient legacy passed down from Mediterranean culture. I’ve never met anybody as Mediterranean as my mother. In fact, she loved the Mediterranean Sea, whereas she didn’t like the Cantabrian or the Atlantic. I knew that the Mediterranean was a special sea because of my mother’s love for it.

  Being at the Mediterranean was her paradise.

  The Mediterranean was her only homeland.

  123

  I go back once more to that morning, the morning of May 24, 2014. I stood staring at the room where my brother and I slept as children. With my eyes I scanned the wa
lls and the armoire until I reached my mother’s dead face. The headboard of the bed was blue. My mother had all the headboards painted blue. The armoire was blue too.

  I opened the armoire and was unable to recall its interior. It had been mine during my childhood and early adolescence, but I didn’t remember keeping my clothing there. From the armoire I looked at the bed again. The woman who’d been taking care of my mother had come into the room. She was a woman of about forty-five. A good woman, with a big heart, from Bulgaria. She was crying over my mother. We never really found out what her name was. Her name was Bulgarian—we called her Ani. But I don’t think that was actually her name. We’d taken her Bulgarian name and Hispanicized it, and she was fine with it. She was blond, tall and stocky, with a serene, cheerful face. She still had some trouble with Spanish. My mother had loved her a lot. I was stunned to see her crying. Ani was upset, and her weeping was genuine. Why was she crying—it wasn’t her mother. Why was she crying—I was the one who was supposed to cry and wasn’t. Was my mother sending me a message through Ani’s tears—was she reminding me that I didn’t love her the way she’d wanted me to? That’s what I thought. I thought my mother would keep talking to me from beyond death. I thought we would talk now in a way we hadn’t before.

  I envied Ani’s ability to cry for somebody who wasn’t her mother. I can’t cry, not a single tear, but if my capacity for suffering could be measured in tears, all of Spain would be submerged and its citizens would irretrievably drown. The Iberian Peninsula would be flooded, and Madrid’s four skyscrapers would be buried beneath the waters.

  So, goodness did exist. There it was, telling me how far from it I dwelled.

  Ani was holding my mother’s hand. I stared at the two hands, one living and the other dead. And the dead hand seemed like it was now at peace, and the living hand, touching the dead hand with its goodness, assailed death. As if death didn’t exist.

  I looked at the room again. So my mother had died in the bedroom where her two sons grew up, where the two vital elements that shaped her existence hadn’t slept for a long time. I looked at the space of that room, trying to find a door in the air. She’d had it painted blue because she thought her two sons were blue. She died in our bedroom, and there was another powerful message in that. She took shelter there, in our room, which was turning before my eyes into a sacred space, a tomb.

  We were blue for many years. Until their eighteenth birthdays, children are blue. With time, though, everything turns yellow.

  Blue children become yellow children.

  The blue was still there. The blue came back for a few seconds and overwhelmed the color yellow. The two old beds where her children once slept looked like two boats sailing from life to death, beds that had seemed indestructible to me as a boy—and that color blue at the foot of the bed, on the legs and headboard, acquired a purity that seared my eyes.

  I stared at how well painted they were. How that paint had held up for fifty years. It was strange, that endurance. There wasn’t a scratch, a single tiny bare spot. Why did everything look freshly painted when those beds were half a century old?

  I opened the blue armoire again, knowing it was the last time I’d open it, knowing I’d never see that armoire again. And the troops and artillery and cavalry and light of the old days came rushing out, and I saw myself choosing a shirt when I was thirteen, studying myself in the mirror, wondering whether I’d impress the girl I liked. And I looked toward where my dead mother lay and found a tempest of time and annihilation—I wasn’t prepared for that contrast.

  Dying is practically the least of one’s worries.

  It was the last time I saw you, Mom, and I knew that from then on I would be completely alone in life, the way you were, when I didn’t notice or didn’t want to notice.

  You were leaving me just as I had left you.

  I was turning into you, and in that way you would endure and conquer death.

  I should have taken dozens of photos of that room. I should have photographed the whole house so nothing would ever be lost. One day I will no longer clearly remember that house where we loved one another so much, and once I can’t remember it, I’ll go mad. I believe in your passions. Your passions are mine now. And your passions were worth it. I wish I had those photos, though. Your passions, Mom, your obsession with life—you passed them down to me. I have them seething here in my heart.

  124

  The brother of my dead mother, my uncle Alberto Vidal, dies on March 11, 2014, at the age of seventy-three.

  In this book, I’ve been calling my uncle Alberto Monteverdi.

  Monteverdi had a bit of a reputation in Barbastro, our town, his and mine, though he’d been born in a much smaller one, called Ponzano, where my mother was also born, practically a village.

  They’re burying him there, in Ponzano. I can’t go to the funeral, of course. I never go to funerals. That’s been my life: avoiding funerals. And so I don’t know what his grave looks like, or his niche. I don’t know if there are flowers. I don’t know anything.

  As a teenager, back in the fifties, Monteverdi was diagnosed with tuberculosis. They sent him to a hospital in Logroño, a postwar structure. There they sawed out one of his lungs, and shipped him back to Barbastro. That’s what I heard as a kid, that “they sawed out one of his lungs.” The word saw is what I heard. A carpenter’s word.

  He was missing a lung.

  He was the youngest of seven siblings.

  My aunt Reme took him in. He lived with her and her husband for more than fifty years. It’s a story of personal sacrifice, of my aunt’s love for her brother. It’s a story of goodness. And he experienced all of it with one lung missing, with less air in his throat, with that frailty of insufficient air within the body.

  After my aunt Reme died, he lived on a couple years longer.

  Living without one lung is a legendary thing, a revolutionary thing.

  My mother, when I was a boy, used to leave me at my aunt Reme’s house on the weekends, and there I got to know the bizarre and unpleasant personality of my uncle Alberto, the great Monteverdi. I would have been seven or eight when he threatened to stab me with a knife. It was a good knife. I can see it now, forty-five years later, with a clarity that is diabolical and yet not devoid of sweetness. I can see it right in front of my eyes, the way Michael Strogoff saw his. I can remember all the important knives in my life. That one had been sharpened so many times that the blade edge was no longer straight, it was very rusty, and the handle was cracked. It was a praiseworthy knife. We talked glowingly about how well it cut. It had been passed down by my uncle’s family—it was a patrimonial knife, forged in the late nineteenth century. It was completely black, though not a dirty blackness, but an honorable, noble one. They would trace a sign of the cross on the bread and then that knife would cut it into slices, a spongy bread, with a fat crumb, a festive, late-sixties bread.

  He chased me with the knife through my aunt’s apartment, an apartment with a very long hallway and a window that looked out into an air shaft halfway down the hall. An apartment that whenever I remember it makes me want to cry, because I realize now that I was happy in that apartment. I could reconstruct it inch by inch. I could make a meticulous blueprint. It was charming but a little gloomy, and I loved how old it was. It was built during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, with materials gathered from the rubble after the bombings. But previously there had been a farmhouse. The spirits of the unsaved Spanish peasantry seemed to dwell in the place—there were spirits everywhere, and those spirits seized possession of my uncle’s heart.

  “I’m going to cut your throat,” he yelled.

  It was my aunt Reme’s husband who stopped my uncle Alberto. He grabbed him by the arm, twisted it, and forced him to drop the knife to the floor. I know other things happened. Madness has flourished wherever I’ve gone. My uncle Monteverdi was pretty nuts. And I’m pretty nuts too. I know he cha
sed me with the knife, and he was cursing. I shit on God, he said. Johann Sebastian never cursed. Monteverdi did, often and with gusto. Johann Sebastian never did. There are two types of men: those who curse and those who don’t. Those who curse are generally hopeless, and they suffer as if condemned to it. So do those who don’t curse.

  There are also two types of music: the kind that sings and the kind that condemns.

  The same thing happens to me with Monteverdi that happens with G., the priest who fondled me: there’s a short circuit in my memory. There’s a blank imposed by my will to survive. I know he tried to stab me with that knife. I don’t remember exactly what set him off—I must have repeated something that someone else had said about him, something about his being helpless or useless. I said aloud cruel words I’d heard about him. Because words matter in families, unlike in society at large. And he went crazy, and he tried to kill me, when actually he should have killed one of his siblings. My uncle Mauricio, the oldest (I’ll call him Handel), used to say Monteverdi was good for nothing. He expressed no compassion for him. He didn’t care that he was missing a lung. There was primeval resentment and calamity in those Huesca towns.

  Those towns I fell in love with.

  125

  Handel took his leave too, before seventy-three, I’m pretty sure—I think he was sixty-nine, suggesting that life continues to employ comedy as a medium for self-expression. I think I repeated out loud things that Handel had whispered about Monteverdi. I’d heard Handel say that Monteverdi was a disaster, something like that, and I divulged it. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t understand anything. I was the typical little kid who sticks his foot in it by uttering some family shame or secret in public. A despairing man tried to stab me with a knife.

  Monteverdi didn’t speak to Handel.

  They didn’t get along.