by Manuel Vilas
Guilt is a powerful mechanism for activating material progress and civilization because guilt creates “moral fiber,” and morals and ethics are the bulwarks of reality. Without guilt, we wouldn’t have computers or space flight. Without guilt, Marxism wouldn’t have existed. Without guilt, our skulls would be empty. Without guilt, we’d be ants.
My mother used to give me cologne. I never forgot the bottles at her house. But deep down I didn’t want her to give me anything. She was obsessed with giving me expensive colognes she couldn’t afford. She was obsessed with my birthday. Maybe my sons left their gifts behind because deep down I didn’t want my mother to give me anything. The more parallels I discover, the more sacred life and memory seem.
I study the photos of my parents hanging in the frames I bought at Fotoprix. They’re the world’s cheapest frames. Fotoprix is putting up a good fight against the prices in the Chinese-owned shops. Those shops don’t have heating or air-conditioning and Fotoprix does. All the immigrants and the poor go there or to the Chinese-owned shops to buy frames to house the faces of their family members and loved ones.
The business of cheap frames for family photos is booming. When you frame your memories and your loved ones in two-euro frames, you turn your past into tenderness in miniature.
129
On Tuesday, March 24, 2015, a Germanwings jet crashed in the French Alps. A hundred fifty people died. All the world’s TV networks tried to be compassionate. Nobody knew how to be compassionate on TV. Tragedies last a couple of weeks, then gradually disappear. Within a few years, these lines I’m writing now will be distant history. Maybe that’s why I’m writing them, aware of the inexpressible flavor of all the things that happen to us. What perception of the end, of their bodies’ destruction, did the passengers on that Germanwings flight have?
How did they die, from the impact or in the blaze afterward?
Understanding death is as necessary as presenting all the technical details that we see in the media. Nobody talks about how the body of a fourteen-year-old boy shatters when it’s hurled against the sheet metal and fire and plastic and iron of an Airbus at 500 miles an hour. What is it like? Do the internal organs burn? How does the central nervous system perceive skin being seared by heat? How does a person’s emotional intelligence evaluate the destruction of the body?
What is suffering; how far does it go?
There were fourteen-year-olds on board.
And what does it feel like? Yeah, how does it feel? They must have thought about their mothers three seconds before the end, and they must have actually seen them, seen them in their essence, in what they are—mothers are love. They think about their mothers and their mothers don’t think about them because they won’t learn about the accident for a few hours still and in the moment of their children’s deaths they are working or grocery shopping or talking on the phone or driving a car. Because telepathic communication is a lie, it’s a fiction, that whole myth about how you can say a supernatural goodbye to your loved ones when death arrives unexpectedly, fatefully, tragically.
Love doesn’t exist in nature.
Is instantaneous death a real thing? Oh, the great metaphor of instant, painless death, the kind that proponents of the death penalty are after. Know this: Instantaneous death doesn’t exist. For a very simple reason: Because life is powerful, life is ever powerful and robust. Life never leaves peacefully. We always die with unspeakable, insurmountable, inhuman, indecent pain. Because life is the triumph of ancient resistance against the enemies of life.
When you’re a father, like me, you’re the father of all the children in the world, not just your own. That’s how this fatherhood business works.
Everything else is politics.
That’s how I love Brah and Valdi.
130
I buy things, things I think I need, but I return them afterward. Once I’ve returned them, I buy them again. I’ve done that with two small appliances: a scale and a toaster. The funny thing is I used the toaster. I’m alone in my apartment on Ranillas and I’m thinking about my mother. She was a chaotic shopper too—despair transferred to home appliances.
I remember once she bought an electric knife. It was when they first came on the market, in the mid-seventies. Electric knives never caught on and they stopped making them. My mother was possessive. She didn’t want me to get married. And a few months before her death, she made a fateful phone call to what was my house at the time. And I wasn’t there. And my mother told the woman who today is my ex-wife but wasn’t at the time, “He should have gotten back by now—he left here at five.” At most, I should have been back by seven.
And it was ten at night when I walked in the door.
But the worst part was that my mother made that call right as I was going up in the elevator—I even heard the parting words in the conversation between my mother and the woman who was then my wife. If I’d arrived three minutes earlier, my mother wouldn’t have set into motion what probably would have been set into motion anyway, but not right at that moment and not because of her.
Most especially, not because of her. That’s the crux of it, the whole thing.
I tried to see the complex handiwork of fate there, as if events weren’t governed by chance. I suppose we need to believe in magical thinking, because it is fundamentally human to imagine that intention and reason exist in events and that there is an art of fate. We don’t resign ourselves to chance. We want the terrible things that happen in our lives to have a supernatural dimension. Though now, after a certain amount of time has passed, we see only an irony of fate.
On the other hand, terrible events are decisive when it comes to recounting, narrating our lives.
Without terrible events, or events, period—actions, something that happens—our life has no story or plot, and so it doesn’t exist.
My mother never found out. I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell her that her phone call had turned my life upside down. Her phone call exposed an infidelity. Obviously it was only a matter of time, because I was stuck in an endless series of marital infidelities, which destroyed me and drowned me in alcohol. And my marriage was dying, though I refused to accept it because I was scared, terrified of being left to fend for myself.
After my mother’s call, I went down to the bar, devastated, decapitated, and ordered a gin and tonic, and by the time the second gin and tonic came, I was gradually feeling calmer. That’s what alcohol does when it hits the bloodstream: everything starts to shine again. In the hands of the waitress at the bar downstairs from our old home who was serving me gin and tonics, I saw my mother’s fingers. And the third gin and tonic produced in me a poisonous, unproductive joy.
I was entering the labyrinth of fate, which uses people’s faces as a transfiguration of its own strength, which swaps their faces for entertainment, which scrambles reality a bit. I thought how I would never be young again. I had to leave what had up to that point been my home, because of a phone call from my mother. A furious comedy, and Brah came down to the bar and said, “Dad, I’m going to live with you,” but later he changed his mind. I was touched by Brah’s words. That “Dad, I’m going to live with you” is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I’ll always remember it. It contained an infinite tenderness. I think I’ll die still hearing those words, which were never followed by corresponding events, which is for the best. Events aren’t clear either. The past doesn’t exist, though I still recall with eyes raised to heaven the energy that the third gin and tonic delivered to my bloodstream. I see beauty everywhere now. It wasn’t such a big deal anyway. It was a common story. The story of thousands of Spaniards, thousands of human beings. Though there are Spaniards (many more men than women) who decide not to get divorced so they won’t lose their library, or the beach condo, or the TV set, or the clean change of clothes in the drawer, things like that. Because distress has the strangest faces you can imagine. As it happens, I did end up losing my libra
ry, and I really miss it. But they were just books. And books aren’t life, only a decoration for it, and little more than that.
131
I would have liked my mother to know that she was the one who kicked off my divorce with her phone call. It’s a strange enigma that she died without knowing it. As a result, she knew me in only two mental states: single, under her control; and married, under the control of another woman, who was also her. She missed the third: divorced, without control. Which is to say, without her. Whereas I was the center of her entire life, and at the same time she was the one who gave my existence bulk and heft, this third state is akin to the final truth of my existence, a state of raucous freedom, of trembling vulnerability, because I can’t live without the instructive presence of that woman, who was a goddess, who generated my flesh in her womb—and she can learn about this state only as a ghost, which she’s doing.
A Stone Age goddess reincarnated over and over—that was my mother.
And in the end she’s no longer around. Not even her transformations live on. Maybe that’s what she was doing—showing me her complete death, not just that of her body but also the death of all its ramifications, leaving me exposed to inclement freedom, thus telling me, “At last you are alone, because only my death could have given you the freedom you desired and feared so much—let’s see how many years you manage to live or survive in this world without me and my metaphors, without me and my intricate bifurcations, my expansions, my perpetuations in your wife, your work, your kids, your house, your library, and the air you breathe.”
Because my whole life had been an outsize image of my mother. She had reigned over me. My whole life was Freudian, matriarchal feudalism. If something went wrong when I was a child, it was my mother’s fault. If something went wrong when I was forty, it was the fault of my ex-wife—my mother’s proxy. Maybe that’s why my adulteries and infidelities affected not my ex-wife, but my mother.
My mother ruled my life, and she ruled it well. None of it matters. The remit of my mother’s rule was not my happiness but my survival. Matriarchy’s remit is that the progeny endure. That was what her good rule consisted of. I could have been happy thanks to her rule but then died at forty. No, she chose to make sure my life lasted, she chose my preservation as a living self: I know this now, where I didn’t before; when the phone call came, I didn’t know this yet. I realized it later.
Ancient witch who pondered her son’s prattling at night, who plotted against oxidation, entropy, the fraying of her son’s flesh, and who destroyed her son’s spirit under the sweet light of matriarchy, more ancient than Greece, more ancient than history, forged in prehistory, which was where my mother’s spirit came from.
It was ironic, terribly ironic: a phone call to make sure I was all right, and it was that call that turned my life into a living hell.
She called for my own good and her call brought me ill.
If we could see each other again, what would we say? I’d have to tell her everything that’s happened since she left, and I wouldn’t know where to start. If she came back, I’d have to explain that her house no longer exists, and neither does her son.
132
My mother’s final years were awful, but they also contained an unexpected illumination of our lives. Her final years taught me many things. And sometimes we almost managed to be together. We had the occasional moment of peace, where we could be mother and son, without any other task. Maybe we managed to be mother and son without her actually being a widow and me a man without a father. Maybe we never overcame the gravitational pull of my father’s death, the darkness his departure subsumed us in. Maybe his departure weakened the bond between mother and son. Maybe he was the greatest force in our lives.
She didn’t know how to be alone and used to call on the phone constantly, the way I now call Valdi and Brah, and they pay about as much attention to me as I did to her, or so it seems to me, perhaps moved by guilt or by my eagerness to receive messages from the dead.
She told me that once: “I hope your boys pay as much attention to you as you do to me.” I knew what she meant, you bet I knew what she meant. She had the gift of the most secret certainties.
Well, she was right. She predicted things. That’s how she was. She had the gift of divination, but she didn’t care. My mother knew she was right, because she ended up knowing everything, though I don’t think she was ever consciously aware that she knew everything. People strive their whole lives to manage to know something, with sacrifice and hard work, and my mother knew everything by divine whisper.
But it doesn’t matter. I think I’ve improved the species a little. My father, for his part, never called me. My father never phoned because he was too busy watching TV, watching his moribund chefs with their recipes for cadaverous retirees, the kind of people who sit down to watch TV at ten in the morning, as I’ve started doing myself in recent months.
At the end of her life, nobody could stand my mother. Not even her. She would grind anything that crossed her path to bits.
The great grinder—that was her. A special woman. Full of a wild love for life, too much love.
She would get mixed up.
She’d be disappointed.
She’d get her hopes up again.
And then she made that crucial call. She thought her calls were harmless. I could die laughing.
Dear Mother, with your unhealthy obsession with calling me on the phone at all hours, you wrecked or transformed my life: I’m still not sure whether it was a wrecking or a transformation, and the funny thing is that I’ve gradually stopped caring which it was. What would you have thought if you’d known? Maybe you did know. Maybe your hand, picking up the telephone, was compelled by an unknown power. Maybe you wanted to do that. Maybe it was your last memorable act on this earth.
My existence marches toward intrigue, which seems to have a sort of gravity. People need to realize that life contains intrigue, machinations, conspiracies. There are actions whose meaning is unknown. My mother died along with my marriage, and so the deaths of my mother and my marriage are fused into a single death. There’s an intrigue there that I can ponder. There is a blind intentionality in those plots; there is manipulation and resolve.
But who is behind the scheme?
Doubtless God himself.
Who else?
Chance?
No.
Neither God nor chance.
Time is behind it.
133
My mother was a punk. She flummoxed her doctors. She used to change her birth date at will. She even changed it at the civil registry office. I have my mother’s documents with altered dates. Her national ID card gives 1933 as her birth year. But the family record book says 1932, and a birth certificate says 1934. The days change too: in one document she was born on April 7, in another on December 2, in another on October 22. A similar thing happens with her second surname. She would change it. She created phonic variations. I never knew what my mother’s second surname was. Sometimes it was Rin, or Ris, or Ríu, or Ríun.
My mother didn’t like to be called anything. She didn’t believe in having a name. She didn’t want to be subject to a name. This resistance wasn’t ideological—it was instinctive.
She was pure instinct, that atavistic gift. And that’s what I inherited from her: instinct, a sort of resonance that allows you to see the origin of things.
Having no choice about the matter, she accepted the officialness of her first surname, but she did whatever she wanted with the second. She mangled her second surname. Her mind rejected the names of things. She had trouble saying certain words, but it wasn’t because she lacked a basic education—she’d gone to school, at least until she was fourteen. To her, words weren’t important in and of themselves; what she cared about were the things that words disguised. Real things mattered to her. The phonic costumes of real things were flimsy and overly complicated.
When the Spanish legislature passed the Law of Dependence, aimed at helping my mother and other elderly people unable to take care of themselves—my mother needed a caregiver because of severe mobility issues—she changed its name and started calling it the Law of Independence. It was a funny mix-up, ironically evoking the nineteenth century, when Spain managed to expel Napoleon in what we call the War of Independence. That confusion of names contained an irony about the totality of our knowledge; it reminded me of when my students used to confuse Quevedo with Góngora, or Lope de Vega with Galdós, and I would be amazed—far from tearing my hair out, I saw there a new place from which things could be contemplated, the unexpected emptiness of culture and words and human reality.
No, I will never condemn those mistakes, because they’re not mistakes, just indifference, lack of motivation, another form of intelligence. So whenever I was asked, during some bureaucratic process, for my mother’s full name, I would do what she did: I’d say Ríu or Rin, and I’d leave it up to the understanding of the person asking, as she used to.
The dead must be sick of my mother already. They’ll be hoping she’s the first one resurrected.
People don’t realize how fun it is to change your birth date or your last name. It’s not a game, not some sort of whim; it’s a defiance of human laws. It is also a way of seeking out vulnerability, of exposing oneself to the elements. Ultimately, it was her disaffection with the laws of social reality that shaped my mother’s outlook.
I’ve inherited that disaffection. Meticulous human laws are—as they were to my mother—irrelevant to me. Everything that civilization has built is irrelevant to me. This isn’t arrogance, quite the contrary; nor is it a disdainful apathy; rather, it is pain. You reach indifference via pain, emptiness, a lack of gravity.
Like my mother, I’ve been left here alone to worship the sun, that sun that enters my apartment on Ranillas each morning and shatters my eyes.