Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  Monte thought Handel should have helped him out in life, that’s what a big brother is supposed to do. Handel had a tough life too—I think he had a terrible loneliness he carried around with him. I remember his mustache and his large head, perched atop a rail-thin body. He smoked a lot, three packs a day. Dark tobacco. I don’t know where he came from. I think we were and are a breed close to the missing link, but there’s a triumph of the life force in that too.

  Handel looked like a demon, with very close-cropped hair, like a soldier, and he was an eccentric man. His favorite thing was killing wild boar. He was a consummate hunter. I went hunting with him once. Or rather we went waiting. We had to wait for the boar to show up. When one appeared, he shot it between the eyes with a slug. He got it in the head. He had a smoke while he watched it in its death throes. He left it there for the rats to eat, because it was old, it was an old, sick boar, with tough, sinewy meat, and we took off in the car, down roads that were windy and parched and cold that November night.

  And the moon up above illuminated the boar’s body and Handel sank into an arid silence, and he started smoking and staring off into the distance, that distance you see in the Somontano, a mix of emptiness and a foretaste of the blackness and ugliness of the night we will all become.

  I tried to turn on the car radio, but I couldn’t find a station. All we heard was static.

  126

  Monteverdi looked like a demon too, except he let his hair grow out, and he was also an eccentric man.

  The two were brothers by blood, but above all they were brothers in eccentricity: one with his hair buzzed off, the other with a mane.

  Now that I remember, they both had a mustache. Handel had a tiny one, and Monteverdi’s was lush.

  The old Barbastro knew Monteverdi well. The new generations, though, not so much.

  But the old Barbastro respected him and understood him and loved him. It understood him because, deep down, Monteverdi was a natural product of that land, those streets, those plazas, that way of being in the world.

  Monteverdi talked a lot, all in a rush. He always said hi the same way: “How’s it going, young man?” The way he intoned the question was odd, picturesque, as if in uttering it he were revealing a secret cult of madness, of distraction. Yes, distraction was Monte’s crowning feature. He’d start chattering away in disconnected sentences, sentences piled one on top of the other—it was a verbal display that contained something alien to the domain of the living. Recently I’ve begun talking a lot too: both of us yammering on to make sure the other person doesn’t have time to judge us, to keep their thoughts occupied and prevent them from seeing us through the lens of silence and realizing that we’re totally nuts and past our prime. That we’ve been through so much that all we have left is the tic of syllables.

  The camouflage of the battered man, yes, but also the camouflage of the man in love.

  A few years back I ran into him on the street and he showed me the cell phone he’d bought. We exchanged numbers.

  We looked at each other’s cell phones sadly.

  I never called him—why would I.

  His appearance was utter catastrophe: he wore old suits with flowery ties, and he smelled bad. At the end of his life, he stank. It was an innovative catastrophe, though, one with artistic intention.

  You couldn’t get within ten feet of him.

  He never showered.

  He smelled foul. Pure avant-garde art. His stench was renowned. All of Barbastro knew the trail of his nauseating odor.

  He lived together peacefully with his premature stench of death.

  The infernal odor of his body was his Beatrice. It was a way of distinguishing himself from other people. And it was a way of erecting a fortress around his body, an unbreachable wall behind which solitude was hermetically shielded, as a mother would protect her baby.

  His solitude was his baby, his sole and beloved child.

  He protected his baby with fetor, the way animals do, like skunks, whose stink can reach up to ten feet. Exactly the distance that Alberto Vidal’s stench reached, ten feet. That stench also had a certain political impertinence—it was a political force, the apotheosis of the rejection of any social decorum. It was an exaltation of sterility.

  He lived with his sister Reme and his brother-in-law Herminio, a good man. Anyone else would have complained.

  They wouldn’t have agreed to it.

  Living with his wife’s brother his whole life—Herminio did that.

  A room set aside for Monteverdi, always.

  The three of them settled down in an old house on Calle de San Hipólito. And they loved one another. Sure, they argued from time to time, but they loved one another a lot. Herminio’s goodness was biblical in scale. He may have been the best man I ever knew in my life. Herminio loved my aunt Reme. He put her up on a pedestal. They were in love, and they stayed in love the whole time. I was oblivious to that miracle. I’m oblivious to all the wonderful things I saw in my family. I should have paid attention to that love. Herminio adored his wife.

  Then my cousin was born. So there were four of them: a husband and a wife and a daughter and a brother-in-law, living together for decades. A mystery. Because there was beauty in that unforeseen mutuality of four human beings. If I think about it now, I can’t understand it. I can’t wrap my head around how two men lived together for fifty years with their only bond being by marriage. Who would Herminio be in the history of music? Pergolesi perhaps; who less than the composer of Stabat Mater?

  My uncle Alberto’s bedroom was cold and damp and always had to be aired out a lot, but it had its charm. I never set foot inside it—I wasn’t allowed. I caught a glimpse sometimes when it was being aired out. There was an armoire and a simple bed. There was a table. I think the best part was the window. The square shape of the room gave it a religious heft. What I wouldn’t give right now to return to that forbidden room. It must have been a room of vulnerability, in that trance in which vulnerability turns liquid and permeates the walls, the ground, the furniture, the air. That solitude must persist there, muffled within those four walls, if they still exist.

  He never got a job. He never got married. He never had a girlfriend. Nobody knew him to have female friends, but he must have had them. He must have fallen in love at some point. If I knew the name of a woman he’d been in love with and if I knew she was still alive, I’d call her to talk about him. That would be a miracle.

  Since he’d had tuberculosis, he always used his own plate and glass and cutlery. I was a little kid, and I would stare at his plate and his glass and his cutlery as if they were something forbidden, filthy, malign, dangerous.

  I was scared of his plate.

  Terrified of his glass.

  They were the unknown, the abyss.

  His own napkin too, always with a funereal ribbon around it.

  My father used to give him his old suits.

  And so there went my uncle Monteverdi, in Johann Sebastian’s old suits, strolling through Barbastro. They were big on him, because Johann Sebastian was tall, but my uncle didn’t care. He looked like Cantinflas. Lower-class Spaniards in suits—such a cliché. Monteverdi loved imitating the way Cantinflas talked.

  After my father’s death, Monteverdi kept wearing my father’s oversize suits around Barbastro.

  Whenever I ran into him on the street, I was reminded of my father in the seventies, because the suits were from that period, long out of style, the double-breasted suits that people wore back then and absolutely nobody wears now.

  Alberto Vidal walked the length and breadth of Barbastro, garbed in a double-breasted suit à la Al Capone. He was always everywhere. Always walked, in a town where nobody walked. He seemed ubiquitous.

  He invented the stroll.

  My uncle Alberto Vidal had odd friends who died or disappeared or were wiped out or never existed at all. I met a fe
w of those friends, and I would have liked to know what those friendships were like—they were so inconsistent, I think, that out of necessity they must have been pure and good, simple, elemental. Elemental friendships—that’s how I think of them. I never knew where those friends lived. I remember the face of one of them—his face reminded me of the cab of a Pegaso truck. Such nonexistence can’t be described.

  In the early eighties, my uncle Herminio scrimped and scraped and managed to purchase a small apartment in a co-op building on the edge of town. And so they moved there, now down to three again, because my cousin went off to make her own way in life. Monteverdi had his room in the new place. They gave him a small job managing the co-op apartments, and people always said how well he did his job and how happy the neighbors were.

  He still wore old suits with outlandish ties, like a gangster. You can be very poor and wear a suit. A poor man with style—we had a lot of those in my family. Monteverdi extended the life of my father’s suits and brought them to the brink of eternity. My father was dead, but his seventies-era suits were alive and well on the streets of Barbastro. I found that beautiful. Epic, even.

  My aunt died and the two of them kept living there on their own in that apartment, two old men with no real family relationship. There they stayed, Pergolesi and Monteverdi, talking about the music of their lives, keenly feeling the absence of the link that bound them together for fifty years: my aunt Reme, whom I’d like to call Maria Callas, since unfortunately there aren’t any towering women in classical music history. I think it was more than fifty years. Maybe sixty. Pergolesi and Monteverdi had a civil bond, named Maria Callas, but the source of that bond had disappeared. Somebody should write an anthropological treatise examining that kind of civil bond, where it comes from, in what dark abode of history it was forged.

  And now Alberto Vidal is dead.

  The great Monteverdi is dead.

  Once more I remember that time he chased me through that apartment on Calle de San Hipólito, brandishing a knife to cut my throat, the throat of an eight-year-old kid, that old knife, with its wooden handle gnawed by the ghosts of war and famine.

  Don’t worry, Alberto Vidal, you set a trend during the seventies and eighties in Barbastro. A trend that only I noticed, but that doesn’t matter.

  And you will rise from among the dead.

  I wish you had stabbed me in the throat with that knife. We would have ended with me in the ground and you in the garrote.

  And though the laws of men condemn and denigrate those sorts of endings, they’re not so bad: the grave and the severed neck.

  Those are our origins, and this new historic opportunity that the modern era offers us, this opportunity to become something or somebody, this opportunity to have a job and a pension and social security—we will always fail to take advantage of it. We come from the trees, the rivers, the fields, the cliffs.

  Our world has always been barns, poverty, stink, alienation, disease, catastrophe.

  We are composers of the music of oblivion.

  It makes no difference to us whether God exists or not.

  If God or whoever offered us paradise, within four days, with you and me in there, we’d turn it into a pigsty.

  And if God gets mad at us for turning his paradise into a sewer, what is he going to do? Kill us again? Send us back to hell?

  Oh, believe me, Alberto Vidal, we are God’s punishment. God is back, by the way, since humanity hasn’t managed to find anything better. So laugh from your grave, now that spring is coming, because you died just before spring, which is the great season of those of us who were always here, previously, long before history existed.

  Laugh, Alberto Vidal, and wash your hair and dab on cologne.

  Remember that you were dirty, remember you had style.

  Remember you were alone—you were the man who was most alone in the universe.

  As an adult, nobody loved you. Not even me, your nephew. As a boy, you were loved by Cecilia, your mother, whom you called upon unheeded. And I do see it as a supernatural experience, the experience of those who wander this world without anybody loving them. There is a tough, poisonous sort of freedom in it. There is an invocation of the power of chaotic matter, prior to the human order, because matter is alone. Having lived without having been loved is not a failure.

  It is a gift.

  The bloody gift.

  There’s more that’s visible—you can see the meaning of unconstrained matter. Human beings have to seek a culmination, we need things not to happen by chance. We look for an underlying intention. We want to be here for a reason. For our lives to accomplish at least one goal. But the existence of God is as much a falsehood as the existence of goodness in humans.

  Many people today think that if they’ve been useful and honest with their fellow humans, they’ve found meaning. It helps you die with a certain tranquility. But there’s an emptiness there as well. Honesty, too, is an ontological fraud.

  It doesn’t matter if you have no idea what the word ontological means, because it isn’t anything.

  That dense emptiness is amazing. Seeing it, the way I see it. The way you saw it, Monte.

  And believe me, Monteverdi, your path is the heroes’ path.

  “How’s it going, young man?”

  127

  In my apartment on Ranillas again. Well, the street’s called José Atarés now, not Ranillas anymore, but I’ll always call it that because of my father.

  When I’m away, when I’m traveling, Brah and Valdi come to this apartment and use it as if it were the home of someone who’s disappeared. Being disappeared isn’t so bad, though.

  When I’m around, they hardly ever visit.

  Their lives are still marked by the disruption of divorce, the moral iconography of which requires victims and villains. They don’t remember my parents, their grandparents. They don’t realize that their grandparents are here in this apartment. They don’t see them, but they’re here. They don’t know what it means to be hopeless and alone. Many people will leave this world without knowing what it means to be hopeless. Most of the people I’ve met in my life don’t know it and never will.

  In a kind of exaltation of my despair, I bought cheap frames at Fotoprix and hung them on my walls with photos of my parents and me and Brah and Valdi. It was really cheesy, but I liked it. My mother used to do the same thing. She’d buy cheap frames and put in photos of Brah and Valdi, never of herself.

  Since I had more photos than I did frames, I just stuck the rest on the wall with colored tape—it didn’t look bad. I was trying to build my new home. When I got divorced, I lost my home. When my parents died, I lost my home. Now I rebuild homes through the chaos of photography, papering Ranillas with photos, some of them printed out from my computer in black-and-white.

  I’m going to change the locks, I tell myself in a fit of fury that fades within ten minutes. It would be a way to remind them that the house matters, that the house is alive. But I don’t do it—deep down I like it that they come by, even if they do it when I’m not around.

  Lonelier every day, childless too, and nothing happens. It must be the law of life. I wish I didn’t care so much. If they’re okay, if my sons are okay, it doesn’t make a difference. Life is this dark room. It makes no difference. But it bugs me when they leave the lights on, like they did last time, because I’m the one who pays the electric bill. Me: The father who in abandoning was abandoned. The disappeared father. The father beneath the waters. I never left the lights on at my parents’ house.

  No, I didn’t leave the lights on.

  I forget it all within ten minutes.

  And so it goes. Occasionally we eat together in this bare-bones apartment. Life is waiting for them, and forty years from now they’ll start looking for me. I hope they find my love. If only I could protect them till the final instant of eternity. I think I can do it. I’ll
always be beside them. I’ll always love them. Like I was always loved by my father. They will look for those twenty-minute lunches, and this apartment; they will look for my face.

  And they won’t find it, because I’ll be dead. But I’ll be watching over them all the same.

  128

  I brought Brah and Valdi presents from my last trip. They saw them, said they loved them, and left them behind at my place.

  I’ve got them right here: inert, unvalued, pathetic. They symbolize the disappearance of a home. And thus, the disappearance of love. We never tell the whole truth, because if we did we’d shatter the universe, which functions on the back of what is reasonable, bearable.

  What are those gifts doing on the bed in the little room where nobody ever sleeps?

  I lie down on the bed in the big room. I get up from the bed and go back to the little room, and I stare at the presents I brought my sons, which are there, on top of the little bed, abandoned, the abandonment of the gifts melding with the abandonment of the little bed, their solitudes melding into a single vast solitude that splits your heart and your life in two.

  I’m not sad they forgot the gifts, just surprised, maybe because I’ve moved beyond sadness, or traded sadness for surprise, and because I love my kids I don’t care what they do with me or my gifts. But a father also has a survival instinct, because he’s human. The low esteem for my gifts could even produce panic; I’ve felt more panic in my life than I have sadness. After all, panic comes from guilt, whereas sadness comes from itself. Which is to say, if they left the gifts behind, it’s because it’s my fault. Sometimes it seems to me that my guilt is vaster than the universe. It could compete in size with the abyss of the heavens. Guilt is one of the golden enigmas. Obviously I’m not talking about the guilt fostered by religion, particularly Catholicism, but about primordial guilt, guilt as a symptom of gravity and as an alliance with the earth and with existence, Kafka’s guilt—that kind.