by Manuel Vilas
I can never get plastic grocery bags open. The cashier has to help.
I kept thinking the better of everything I was putting in the shopping cart. I put things in and then took them out, and Valdi saw the horrifying chaos that ruled his father’s actions. I abandoned an orange-flavored chocolate bar next to the cauliflower after suddenly second-guessing my selection of that unnecessary sweet. There were so many people in the store that we were running into one another with our carts. We were running into one another with our shopping carts. I sense the end of this civilization, that’s what I mean. I sense that this world is going to end. I was sliding into a fit of uncontrollable rage, and it felt good to run into other people’s carts. I was losing it.
I was agitated.
And then I was throwing things.
I picked up a hunk of cheese and hurled it at a frozen hake. I opened a box of frozen rolls and glared at them. That would be the entirety of my contribution to the revolution: creating a bit of private chaos in a supermarket—in other words, making life miserable for the poor kid earning six hundred euros a month whose job it is to keep the products in order.
My mother passed down impatience and superstition.
The ubiquitous background noise of my parents’ lives drives me crazy.
My mother was always breaking containers. She dropped things. Our clumsiness was the product of the newly developed hands and inept fingers of the first hominids. My mother had no patience in supermarkets. She didn’t understand checkout lines. She didn’t understand how the aisles were set up. She would be overcome by rebelliousness and blank fury. As am I.
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We headed back to Ranillas. Valdi stayed with me a while longer and then left. I took a shower. I came out of the shower and dried off with the red towel. And I recalled the bathroom in my mother’s house. We had a tiny bathtub in that old apartment—my mother never wanted or was able to remodel it. It was a built-in bathtub that was merely symbolic; it was impossible to wash in it. My mother used to bathe us once a week. The water heater never worked well, it didn’t heat enough water, so my mother would heat the water in pots on the stove.
The water heater had a brand name—Orbegozo.
They were basic baths, with very little water. It was almost ridiculous—the water didn’t even come up to your ankles. My mother would dry us off with a huge red towel. When she died, I found that towel in an armoire. It had survived almost fifty years. I was amazed that it still existed—I didn’t realize a towel could live so long. I took it with me. It was so well preserved. . . . Was it high quality at work? Or was it a miracle?
It was like my family’s Shroud of Turin.
Over the years, lime gradually clogged the hot water faucet. I no longer lived with my parents by then.
I don’t know how they got by. I never asked. I don’t know how they managed to shower. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe God himself anointed their weary bodies with the gift of clean smells, the smells of people who have entered the realm where there is no decay.
Now that towel is in my wet hands. I often stare at it, trying to ask it things, yes, ask the towel things. And it responds—the towel talks to me: “They’re the ones you should have asked, and you had the chance, but you didn’t know how to go about it, you didn’t know, you didn’t know what words to use.”
I dry myself with that towel.
It’s still soft; the fibers are just as fine as they were that very first day my mother used it on my body, the body of a six-year-old boy. We could never shower because of that tiny bathtub and the showerhead clogged by mineral deposits so only a slender trickle of water came out, drops that were tired of being water.
Nobody realized how deeply that can mark you.
My mother didn’t care. But what the hell was she thinking when she decided not to do anything about it?
My mother ruined the original design of her house, which was modern and pleasant and made sense. She made foolish changes. She designed a huge dining room that she never let anybody go into, so it always looked like something out of a magazine.
It was her dream.
And in the meantime, we couldn’t shower.
My mother nurtured a dining room and my father nurtured a car. She wanted to impress her friends with that room. Her friends, who all took off. By the end of her life my mother didn’t have many friends left. She changed friends all the time.
In the last years of her life, she had some bizarre friends.
I don’t know where in the world she found them. She sold things. She sold good furniture or gave it away. Hers was a colossal misrule, firmly exercised for fifty years. My mother was in power for fifty years, longer than Francisco Franco.
Francisco Franco and my mother—they could have danced a waltz.
My mother never knew who the hell Francisco Franco was. That thrills me—it makes me adore my mother.
That’s the punkest thing there is.
All my mother cared about was Julio Iglesias, Julio Iglesias’s wives and sons and daughters and father, and Julio Iglesias’s songs. When I hear Julio Iglesias’s voice, I think of her.
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She once introduced me to those final friends of hers. They were people on society’s margins. The affluent, bourgeois friends she’d had in the seventies abandoned her when things started going sideways for my father. She could have gotten rid of that disconcerting dining room then, since its only purpose was to be shown off to the rich friends who left, who disappeared when my father’s luck as a traveling salesman ran out and he became a poor man. The truth is that my father did well economically for only six or seven years—I don’t think it was even a decade. During that period, my parents became friends with well-to-do couples. I imagine they had the illusion that they were prospering, but they never reached the level of those people, because those people always had a lot of money and my parents did not.
Hell, she could have dismantled the dining room and installed a shower so we could bathe properly. She lived her life confused, tormented, and she didn’t know it; she was a monumental hooligan. She was a woman governed by impulses, utterly lacking in foresight. So we lived in shambles, but we had a splendid dining room to sit in. Because we were waiting for her petit-bourgeois friends who no longer visited, who would never visit again. It was only when I left that house at eighteen that I learned what a proper shower was.
They stopped visiting in the late seventies, those glamorous friends of hers. My mother’s social capital collapsed. During the few years my father was doing well, my mother managed to cloak herself in a social class that ended up expelling her from its bosom. And the bathroom went unremodeled. My mother was pursuing social esteem, which was fleeting, and I am pursuing literary esteem, which is also fleeting. That’s why I say there’s no difference between my mother’s fantasies and mine.
We are both victims of Spain, of the desire for prosperity—material prosperity and intellectual prosperity are the same thing. She screwed things up, and I’m screwing things up too.
But it’s beautiful that we’re so alike. And if we’ve both failed, that’s even more beautiful. It is love. We’re together again. Maybe she planned it this way. So my failure has been worth it: it guides me to her, and with her is where I want to be forever.
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I first saw those coiffed women draped with jewels when I was ten or twelve. They were about forty or so. There was a gorgeous blonde who became a widow and then disappeared. She was voluptuous and set off erotic longings in me. She was a little younger than my mother, maybe four or five years younger. I once had to go to her house for my mother and she appeared at the door in a towel, freshly showered. I remember that my parents went to her husband’s funeral after he died suddenly. I can see him now. He was shorter than his wife, and that seemed incredible to me.
The history of my parents’ friends is tangled and labyrinthine. They all
seem like ghosts now. They died over the years, gradually.
One would be gone one day, another the following year.
They’re all dead.
My father is dead and so are his friends.
I don’t know if they were friends.
I don’t think any friends came to see my father on his deathbed. That seems to me an unorthodox sort of freedom. And as I’ve said before, at the end of her life my mother had unusual friends—I don’t know what happened to them. They were poor women, widows or never married. I have no idea where they came from; they were straight out of a fantastical history of Spain. Badly dressed and unkempt. Seventy-year-old punks, that’s what they were. My mother had strange pacts with things. She had dark regions, cellars that only she entered. And my father, at the end of his life, achieved a level of idleness that was next to saintliness—not a religious sainthood but the kind born of the suppleness that the morning breeze gave his freshly shaven face, the superfluity of silence, and the sun’s echoes reverberating in his wrinkled eyes; the saintliness or bliss of a man who has renounced memory, his mother, his son, and any sort of permanence; the exemplarity of his remote indifference; an indifference like that of the universe, which exists, but in silence, in secret; or like that of the sea, which has existed for millennia, an existence that was always sunk in darkness and invisibility, until humans brought it to light, looked at it, but to no avail.
My father knew instinctively that people grant you the gift of being looked at, but it’s flawed, illusory, tending toward vanity. Yes, that’s where my father went: to a place where any form of vanity is indeterminate or insolent or improper.
He shed all vanity.
That is true freedom—and beggardom.
I remember my father’s friends. I’d love to phone the ones who are still alive. I don’t know what they’d say. It’s amazing how at the end of life there’s nothing to say. People don’t even want to make the effort to remember. Because remembering means burning brain cells in vain.
Because remembering is malignant.
No famous musician friend came to visit when Johann Sebastian left this world. It was as if he never had friends in his life. How immensely alone he departed. No old friends came to say goodbye. That’s how Johann Sebastian wanted it. He didn’t feel like thinking about that. He was preparing for something that had no sound.
He didn’t want to see anybody, that’s the truth. He didn’t want to waste time on the illusion of friendship. He didn’t want to recite ceremonious words, words that were social and polite and amicable. He had quashed the myth of social esteem as the only confirmation of existence, the only confirmation that a person is alive.
He didn’t want to be with anyone but himself.
There was only solitude in him.
There was only me, his son, whom he loved so much and still loves, even in death.
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It’s a July morning in 1969. I’m almost seven. The whole family is riding in a four-door SEAT 850. We’re on a short summer vacation, and we’re in the mountains. We just passed through the town of Broto. There were tourists and hikers along the road—hikers with backpacks, eating sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, which is a novelty, having just been introduced to the Spanish market. Everything is joy and jubilation, because going to the mountains when it’s hot during the summer is a viceless bacchanal. My father is driving the SEAT 850 and talking about a wonderful place. He’s been talking about it since we left Barbastro. And he talked about it before we left too. The place is called Ordesa, and it’s a mountain valley.
It’s got to be around here, I tell Valdi and Brah. Right here. I’ve stopped the car and am looking for the exact spot where, forty-six years ago, my father got a flat tire in the SEAT 850 as we were entering the Ordesa Valley. I think how I need to ask my mother where it happened. But I can’t ask her anymore. She’ll settle the question. But she’s dead. It hits me once more. That’s how it always is.
The truth is, she hardly remembered anything. She didn’t even remember her husband. She focused her attention on things she considered to be profoundly alive. She concentrated on Valdi and Brah that way. She saw them as kings of life and time, perched on that untouchable throne where my brother and I once sat. She went from adoring her husband to adoring her sons, and from adoring her sons to adoring her grandsons, always attentive to anything that prolonged and extended her own existence in the undefined realm of life on earth. That’s how she was—a fierce instinct that it was impossible to blame. My mother was pure nature—that’s why she had no memory, she had only present, the way nature does. Wherever she is, she will adore Brah’s and Valdi’s children, and she will be with them, like a huge tree that is also invisible. In the perpetuity of her blood she will persist, because I knew her, and I know full well that she had no end. My mother was infinite. My mother was the present. The power of her instincts guides her to my presence. Her presence in my presence becomes presence in my present children, and in becoming present in my present children, she heralds her presence in my children’s children once they someday become present.
The person I should have asked where the SEAT 850 got a flat, where exactly on that stretch it took place, was my father, since he was driving.
I’d opted not to inform Valdi and Brah that my objective in choosing Ordesa as the destination for our three-day summer holiday was to recall the spot where a tire went flat forty-six years earlier, so they must have been caught off guard when I stopped the car on a straight stretch of road that climbs up toward Ordesa from the village of Torla and started looking for it. That stretch is steadfast. The road hasn’t been widened or redone, it’s exactly the same; it may have been paved nine or ten times in fifty years, but that’s all. It’s narrow and lined with tall trees. Beside the road is an old hotel. I tried to reserve a room there, but it was full. It doesn’t have many rooms, I’d guess maybe twenty or twenty-five at most; no wonder it’s full, given that it’s summer, high season. And even if the hotel is full, that doesn’t mar the landscape, which remains intact.
The hotel is in a prime spot; its location may explain why the road is unchanged from fifty years ago. I remember that after staring at the deflated tire crumpled against the ground, its vigor gone, I looked straight ahead with my child eyes and saw the hotel rising up like a mirage, as if it had come out of nowhere, and then I saw my father’s obstinate face as he stared at the tire and opened the trunk, getting ready to change it.
I was conscious of my life. For the first time I was conscious that time was beginning.
I remember the flat only hazily; I don’t know exactly how things ended up shaking out. I remember the white SEAT 850 well, and I remember the spot. My father loved Ordesa. Because in Ordesa suddenly all of life’s alienations fade away beside the splendor of the mountains, the trees, and the river. I search for the spot with the flashlight of memory. Valdi and Brah have no idea what I’m doing. Cars whiz by. I sniff the road like a hunting dog. I examine the stones.
It’s Ordesa.
Here is where he got a flat, around here. And I feel his presence. He pulled out a spare from the trunk. He is with me. He was young—whistling, smiling, despite the flat tire. It was his kingdom, his valley and his mountain, his homeland. I got out of the car and stood gazing at the mountains, and that hotel appeared, the one I called a few days back for a room and found that there wasn’t a vacancy.
But everything has disappeared.
That’s how I know God doesn’t exist; if he did, he’d have given me a triple room in that hotel, for my two boys and me, and I would have had all the time in the world to search for a flat tire. But there weren’t any rooms—they were all full.
Everything was future back then, when the flat happened.
Everything is past now, when I search for the flat, the most fantastical or absurd search in the world. But life is absurd, which is why it’s so beautiful.
The Ordesa Valley is still there—it doesn’t change, hasn’t changed in the past fifty million years. It’s exactly the same, just as it was created during the Tertiary Period. After fifty million years of being alone, it was declared a national park on August 16, 1918, and mountain climbers began arriving to ascend Monte Perdido’s 11,007-foot height.
There’s nobody up there.
143
They didn’t always love me. They loved me to death when I was a boy, but after I left home they started growing apart from me, and once I got married they might have stopped loving me, stopped loving me in that way I’d never find again.
I’ve called Brah and Valdi, but they aren’t answering the phone. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and see that my hair has gotten shaggy. I’m seized with the urge to cut it. It’s the same urge my mother used to get when she handed herself over to the hairdressers—my mother was always wanting to go to the salon. She was never satisfied with the hairstyles they gave her. As a boy, I accompanied her. She went to a salon on the second floor of a building on a narrow street in Barbastro. I was surprised by that, my childish brain unable to process such a transformation—I didn’t understand how an apartment could turn into a hair salon. The salon even had a kitchen with an old sink, kitchen implements, a table, and cupboards. While she got her hair cut, I’d be left in a room with used toys that I found unsettling—as toys I’d never played with before, they were alluring, but I was also repelled by them since other children had already played with them.
My mother, whenever she was depressed and sad, would start messing with her hair. She would stare into the mirror and say she hated her hair. Then she’d go to the salon. She was never happy with the result. She was looking for absolution at the hair salon, an elevation of the self; she was looking for lost joy. She changed hairdressers a million times. She was looking for salon utopia. She spent her life looking for the salon, the great truth of her hair. But her hair was aging, that’s all.