by Manuel Vilas
The sun leaves us blind to everything that is not the sun. We will look at the sun together again one day.
The truth is always in constant transformation—that’s why it’s so hard to tell it, to point to it. Or instead, it is always fleeing. The important thing is to reflect its endless movement, its irregular and uncomplicated metamorphosis.
No, Mom, we will never look at the sun together again. Millions of years will pass and we still won’t have seen each other.
That June sun you loved so much.
134
At long last somebody’s come to see me. It’s Brah. Full of optimism, I make him dinner: sausage, potatoes, and eggs. I bought a good sausage, with wild mushrooms in it, a fancy, expensive sausage. I peel potatoes. I fry potatoes, with fresh olive oil. I hate to reuse olive oil; my mother never did. Brah has just spent four days with his friends on vacation in the mountains; he hasn’t visited for two months. But whatever, it doesn’t matter.
He eats while watching TV.
We watch TV.
What would we do without TV.
I suggest we go to the movies once he’s finished. Tell him there’s a movie out that looks good. He says he doesn’t feel like it, he’s meeting up with his friends. When he leaves my house, I ask if I can go with him for a little while. I’ve been cooped up inside all day and I’d like to stretch my legs. The suggestion makes him uncomfortable.
He says no, he’s going alone.
And he leaves.
I gather up the dirty dishes, fill the dishwasher. I’m happy I was able to buy a new dishwasher and that it works well; I scrub the kitchen and sit down to watch TV. I discover bread crumbs on the floor of the TV room. I go back to the kitchen and stand staring at my OK-brand dishwasher.
And I think, Lucky thing I’ve got the dishwasher—it seems like it solves everything. It’s a sort of humble revelation from God himself.
Its noise keeps me company.
Wagner, in her final years, would have been kept company by the noise of the refrigerator, since she didn’t have a dishwasher.
Johann Sebastian, in his final years, was kept company by the noise of the television, because he never went to the movies. Why would he go to the movies, when he himself was the history of film? He was the screen and the actors’ faces, gnawed by time, on the yellowed screen.
My mother knew perfectly well that everything would be repeated. She made dinners and lunches. I make dinners and lunches. Mine aren’t as good, of course, because she knew how to cook. In that return, in that repetition of twin acts, there is a maddening ecstasy. And so she is coming, my mother, through her prediction. She’s not coming to tell me, “Your children treat you the way you treated me,” no, she’s not coming to tell me that; she’s found a road back to me. She’s coming to tell me this: “I’ll always love you, I’m still here.”
And that is the portent.
The portent is that she already knew, when she was alive, that the road back existed—she was already aware of it.
It’s the road of witchcraft, a primitive road.
When a few years ago she said to me, “Careful, if you don’t come to see me, your children will do the same thing to you,” what she was really saying was, “When I’m dead, I’ll come back to you down that road, a road lined with leafy trees and June light, with the murmur of the rivers nearby. When I’m dead I’ll still be with you through our solitudes, yours and mine. The road—see there, it’s a sunny road, the road of the dead.” Every time Brah and Valdi don’t come for dinner with me, Wagner returns to me down that road, all deceased, all decayed, all corpse, with the yellowing orchestra of the eternal return of the same thing.
My mother was Nietzschean to her core. That’s why she’s called Wagner.
Wagner tells me: You’ll use that road too, tell Brah and Valdi about it, it’s time for you to mention the road. It’s our family’s great road, the one that allows the dead to be with the living.
I’m not going to do it—it’s not yet time, I tell my mother, to show them the road I’ll travel to return to them after I’m dead.
Wagner tells me: It is so time, you don’t have any time left.
But Brah decides to sleep over, which makes me extremely happy, which ends quickly. He wakes up in a bad mood. I give him a kiss, which makes him uncomfortable or maybe just seems ridiculous to him.
Brah leaves for the other house, his mother’s house, which is also mine, even if I no longer have any right to that house, because he’s got a bigger bed there. I offer him coffee and cookies; he rejects them with a sour, scornful expression on his face. It says, Shut up, shut up already, I’ve done enough just spending the night in that awful bed of yours.
Wagner says: He’s building the road, it’s a wide, flowery road that you will use to return to be with him for good, just as you were building it every time you failed to kiss me or hold my hand or come to visit—it’s the same road, the same return.
The eternal return of crumbling motherhood and fatherhood, the same thing ever returning.
I sit staring at the rejected cookies. I stare at them like an idiot. I’d bought them with so much optimism. They’re the most defenseless cookies on the planet. My mother, too, must have optimistically bought things for me, things I didn’t see, which at the time seemed insignificant, and that insignificance glides through time and has been slumbering for forty years and now reappears and settles down by my side. That’s how my mother talks to me, that’s the form my mother’s ghost has chosen to talk to me: the Wagnerian road opens before me once more.
She dreamed it up.
My parents spent their lives planning and designing and inventing uneasy roads to reach me so that I wouldn’t be alone, roads that led from their death to their son’s life.
Ranillas and Arnillas was another road.
My divorce, yet another.
My hopelessness, the sunniest one of all.
It’s as if a yellow circle—always yellow—were being completed. And my son’s son will fail to appreciate the things my son lovingly gives him. It’s a labyrinth where we communicate beyond disappearance, through misunderstanding. As if misunderstanding were a mathematical equation that destroys the physics of death.
And Brah leaves.
He hasn’t even made his bed.
He left it all rumpled.
I start making the bed.
The bed, too, is defenseless.
135
I live next to the river, since Ranillas runs along the Ebro. People who live next to a river live longer. I get in the elevator and head down to the garage. The elevator has a distinctive smell—it’s not a bad smell, it’s hygienic, it smells like industrial cleaner, but it’s a foreign smell, unnatural, it smells like nobody, humanity’s degree zero. The garage is below river level. It makes me feel like I’m scuba diving. My garage is underwater; it’s a submarine.
When I came to live on Ranillas I was the only human being living in the building, a hulking thing with sixteen apartments; it was one of the great real-estate luxuries I’ve enjoyed in my life. I found it amazing that the elevator was always on my floor, and amazing to know that nobody was around for three floors above and four below. I also found it a little terrifying.
I never had to wait for the elevator. People waste so much of their lives waiting for elevators. So much of their lives. Months, if you add it all up.
I felt like a prince, like a government minister. When I went to bed, I was aware of doing so in an empty building, as if I were an astronaut reposing in deep space, as if I were Christopher Columbus in the New World. I think it was my father who arranged all of this—he set it up. He wanted my life to fuse with the empty building. My father arranged it; it had to have been him, through the coincidence of names, who told me to choose this street, because this street was him.
It had to have been him, I tell m
yself. It had to have been him, stepping out from among the dead and blowing me a kiss.
I think very few people in this world will ever get to enjoy not having to wait for the elevator—they’ll never know what it feels like, but I did for several months.
It was always there, on my floor.
That immediacy of ascent and descent opened up a mystical path in my perception of my new home. Because if I went out into the street, when I came back the elevator would always be on the ground floor. I was the only one who used it. And it knew it. There wasn’t any noise either. I could blast my music at three in the morning. And I did. I would turn up the volume on my Pioneer stereo as loud as my ears could bear.
The building’s beauty lay in its abstract solitude, which was a concrete symbol of my parents’ departure. They left so elegantly, saying goodbye without saying it. I can see them so well in death, and on Ranillas, their lives conjured up by the electronics industry: the Siemens elevator, the Pioneer stereo.
136
Then, gradually, neighbors appeared as the apartments were sold one by one, after the developer was forced to adjust the asking price to match the market. The price dropped by more than forty percent, which was how I was able to buy one—I was the first person to take the plunge. And it was completely by chance. That price cut coincided with my own urgent need to find a new home after my divorce. The apartments needed to be remodeled, since they were unfinished inside. All I did was put down flooring and create a bathroom. I installed an AC4-grade floor that somebody recommended; I learned about the different categories of laminate. And some Romanian workers made me a bathroom. I was concerned the shower partition was too low, that the water would spray out, but it turned out fine. I spent several days researching the height of shower partitions. I discussed the ideal height of a partition with the Romanian workers. We stood staring at the partition as if contemplating a riddle. For me the Romanian workers were a riddle too, but they enjoyed an easy camaraderie that I admired, since I was feeling very lonely. One of them smoked and would toss the butts in the toilet; I had to say something to him. He stopped doing it, but the rebuke rubbed him the wrong way. They ate enormous sandwiches.
And so within four days I’d moved in and started living in my apartment on Ranillas. The other neighbors did extensive renovations and put in fancy new kitchens. In any case, the wonderful part was living alone in an apartment building for more than three months. It was as if nobody wanted to live there. I felt as if I’d moved into a spaceship that was orbiting in deep space. But if you live in an eight-story building all by yourself for three months, you learn the language of that building, and you realize that houses are alive. The history of the building was also a history of loneliness. Construction had been completed in 2008, right as the Spanish real estate bubble burst, so the apartments remained unsold until they decided to lower the prices in 2014. The apartments, the staircases, the walls, the elevator went six years without anybody around. The elevator was sad. I think that elevator was grateful for my presence. I fantasized about that sort of thing a lot. I remember nothing worked except the washing machine. It was a new washing machine, an intact Corberó, but it had been out on a balcony for six years, exposed to the elements, without anyone ever hooking it up. That virgin washing machine had never washed anything in its life, and that seemed like a great mystery to me. The first time I hooked it up I assumed it wouldn’t work. The person who’d sold me the apartment said he doubted it worked. But it did. The washing machine worked—it was like I was bringing it back to life. How many years can an appliance’s machinery last without being used?
The last washing machines my mother had were cheap brands. My mother had faith in those no-name washing machines, as did I. If she’d been alive, we could have talked on the phone about washing machines, but it was too late. We could have even lived together. If God had given her another year of life, we would have lived together.
The past cannot be remodeled, or maybe it can.
137
I’m trying to improve this apartment, where everything is of questionable quality. Things break. The kitchen faucet is poorly installed, and the sink too, so it splashes, and I have to go around with a rag wiping up drops of water everywhere. I bought an aerator for the faucet, but it barely made a difference.
What other neighbors did was change out the kitchen completely, and the bathroom and the front door, and buy high-quality appliances. That’s why they took so long to move in. What the neighbors did became a mantra reminding me that I always screw things up.
They moved forward with their improvements objectively, confidently, and I did not. And in that mistake, which is stunning and shameful when compared with my neighbors’ good judgment, is a confirmation of my lineage and my fate. My brain was of inferior moral fiber, I figured.
Putting in a new kitchen and throwing out the one that came with the apartment—that’s what I should have done. But unfortunately I didn’t, because I didn’t have the money.
That’s why I went for the aerator instead, which cost four euros and ninety cents.
I now see, through my kitchen, my mother’s kitchen in the apartment in Barbastro; I realize now that she was always cleaning, and I know significant events took place in that kitchen, events I don’t really dare to see, I don’t want to see them, but my memory dredges up a scene in which my mother is lying on the kitchen floor and crying, I can’t see anything else. I just want it to end. For her to stop crying and get back up. And my mother writhes on the floor. And my father isn’t around. It happened in the kitchen, maybe in 1967. They’d argued. My father slammed out of the apartment. I don’t know what they were arguing about. I get the feeling they assumed I was too young to record the scene in my memory, but they were wrong.
I remember my mother barely rinsed the dishes, while I hold them under the faucet a long time, trying to wash away the soap for good.
138
I just went grocery shopping at Carrefour with my son Valdi. It was after a long holiday weekend, so the store was full of people—full of zombies, really. I was looking for something to do with Valdi—something to do together, I mean—and all I came up with was grocery shopping. Whenever I run an errand with Valdi or Brah, it feels like an earlier time is returning, an era prior to the collapse of the family we used to be, and it feels like that to them too, but we know it’s just an illusion, the illusion that the past is coming back. The time before the divorce can never return. Valdi, Brah, and I are aware of that impossibility, yet it contains a scenery that is both terrifying and revelatory. We are full of revelations; I notice them more than my sons do.
In everything the three of us do together, there are reverberations of the things we used to do when there were four of us.
It isn’t nostalgia or remorse or guilt. It’s something I cannot name. It’s inspiration. It’s melancholy. Good melancholy.
I thought it would be nice to go shopping together, but that crowd of zombies made me fume. I would have liked to have held his hand, Valdi’s hand. I remember how, some eight years ago now, he was taking guitar lessons. And the guitar was bigger than he was. I remember how, six years ago, he was taking Ping-Pong lessons. He even competed in national Ping-Pong championships. Valdi was a total genius with a Ping-Pong paddle in his hand. Valdi doesn’t know it, but he carries within him an ancient goodness, a gift that precedes history, and the best mysteries of things gleam within that gift. Valdi’s goodness is like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001.
I adore Valdi. I always have, ever since he was born. Johann Sebastian was smitten with Valdi too, even if he hadn’t been excited about becoming a grandfather. Johann Sebastian didn’t pay much attention when Brah and Valdi arrived. He didn’t act like a grandfather. He didn’t like being called that. Deep down, he didn’t like being called a father either.
He never found a family category he felt comfortable in. Johann Sebastian stared at ba
by Valdi with skeptical astonishment: Who’s this? Where’d he come from? And baby Valdi made lots of creative noises with his tongue, which Johann Sebastian praised loudly. He was amused by those sonic metaphors.
They’re like the undersea wrecks of World War II battleships: baby Valdi and grandfather Johann Sebastian.
My hands shook as I grabbed things: a container of milk, a tray with a piece of chicken, a sponge cake. You can learn everything about a person from the food he buys at the grocery store. There were bulk lentils. I break things when I try to take them out of their containers. My mother always did too. She had no patience. I don’t either. She broke things. I break things. We try to open the container and are unable to, and for us that is a frightening and exasperating and infuriating injustice. My mother used to talk about failure as the devil’s work, whereas I talk about impatience and how primitive man never should have left the cave.
“The devil must be here in this house,” my mother would shout.
I would have been about twelve or thirteen when I grabbed a dictionary of my father’s and hurled it to the floor. I was looking for the meaning of a word and couldn’t find it. I got angry. I didn’t understand how that dictionary worked. As it lay on the floor, I gave the book a fierce kick that cracked its spine. After a while, when my rage subsided, I opened the volume again and realized that it was a Spanish-French/French-Spanish dictionary. At that, I felt a huge wave of tenderness for the book. Plus, it was my father’s book. I tried to mend the injury to the poor dictionary’s spine.
I inherited that blindness from my mother.
We both had erratic moods.
Neither of us could open bags. We broke everything. Everything tumbled from our hands. My mother used to hack open containers of milk with a big knife. We didn’t understand the mechanical laws that govern things.