Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  There wasn’t a salon in the world that could help my mother.

  If she came back to life right now, she’d ask to go to the salon. Even if she came back as a corpse, as a skeleton without flesh or skin, she’d ask to go to the salon.

  But she’s at the final salon now, the one at the end of the world.

  144

  My father always liked to be neatly groomed. He didn’t even leave the house if it was windy, because it would mess up his hair.

  My father started gaining a little weight, and he was self-conscious about it. He often asked if he was fat. He was seeking our judgment. He liked to eat. It was a unique relationship with the world: taking it in through food.

  Either you eat or you screw, or both. Both things seek bodily combustion. Every human being is seeking satiety.

  He used to comb his hair—he took forever to comb his hair. A complex job that required great attention. He employed all his techniques to make sure his hair came out right. I would watch him as if he were a god or an ancient hero.

  I remember that comb, which gradually became covered with a dark substance, collecting layers of grease, and eventually turned white, then went from white to yellow; it stained the toiletry kit where it lived, it became a symbol of my father’s masculine identity, it let me know that my father was home, that he was back.

  My father was a category error in the Spanish society he inhabited; he verged on an imaginary dukedom when, having been keeping accounts in the inert whorls of his brain, he decided he had enough money to have the barber come to the house on Sundays to cut his hair.

  He refused to go to the barbershop.

  I took it for granted that it was normal, but in fact it was quite unusual. It would happen on Sundays. A barber would come to our house. It was a luxury my father indulged in. How much did he pay that traveling barber?

  I loved that: my father refused to go to the barber, while my mother visited every salon around.

  I thought it was weird that he made the barber do house calls. Why was that? He never set foot in a barbershop. My father never set foot in a barbershop, just as he never set foot in a church unless it was for a funeral. And in that case he’d arrive late, barely go inside, hover by the church door, by the baptismal font, near the cold water, to make sure the demented, incompetent God of men didn’t notice him.

  He won’t be at my funeral. My father won’t be able to come to my funeral; for me, that failure to appear symbolizes how the meaning of life has vanished, how we have stumbled into the end of everything. He should fight off the shadows, come out from among the dead, the way they say Jesus did, and show up at my funeral and say something. Say a few words, the way people do at American funerals.

  My head hurts so much right now. I’m hooked on ibuprofen, which takes away the pain, but not as much as it used to. Drugs lose their strength.

  My mother’s headaches were legendary at my house, as were her liver pains.

  She used to shriek with pain and beg for morphine.

  Along with my mother’s liver spasms, another awful memory comes to me: I’m walking next to my father, holding his hand—it must be 1968, or 1969, or 1970. That was my absolute favorite thing: walking down the street with my father. I was a seven-year-old boy showing off his father, because I knew he was a tall, handsome, elegant man. We went down the street and walked by a beautiful woman. We stopped. They looked at each other. There was a moment of tension. A smile slowly blooming on both faces, me staring up at them like somebody watching the clouds go by. My father didn’t say hi, and she didn’t either.

  Afterward my father looked at me. He gave a small smile and said, “If I hadn’t married your mother, that woman just now would have been your mother.”

  145

  We link different eras together. I knew people who lived until 1975 or 1976 or 1977, and then those people died; in the same way that they were linked to previous decades, and they knew and also didn’t know what to do with those people they knew and saw die in 1945 or 1946 or 1947, and those people who made it to 1945 were linked to people who passed on in 1912 or 1913 or 1914, and the chain keeps spooling out, and there will be somebody in 2051 or 2052 or 2053 who remembers me as a witness to an era, witness to 2014 or 2015. Connection is coupled with melancholy and uncertainty—the latter of which comes from realizing that you’ve failed to accumulate much knowledge about the nature of life. And so we have only matter, objects: houses, photos, stones, statues, streets, things like that. Spiritual ideas are poisonous melancholy, balls of burning antimatter. Matter, on the other hand, still retains some amount of knowledge.

  We link eras, as if our bodies were the message.

  Our body is the message, and it is also the unifying thread that moves from one era to the next.

  Matter still retains a space, it keeps old time captive within a space. Thus, again, for the umpteenth time, how wrong I was in deciding to cremate my parents. Graves are a place where we can commemorate something that no longer has time but does have space, even if it’s just a space for bones.

  Bones are important because they’re a type of matter that lasts.

  That old Spanish expression comes to mind just now, the one that says, No tiene donde caerse muerto, which is equivalent to “He doesn’t have a pot to piss in” but literally means “He doesn’t have a place to drop dead in.” It’s a genius expression, and it defines an era: my era, the great era of real estate speculation. Because of this era, historians will be studying us in another hundred years.

  It’s important to find oneself a space, a place to drop dead in. My father used to watch TV from one corner of the aging couch at home; it was a complicated corner, constructed through lots of letting go of the things of this world.

  He sat not in the middle of the couch but in one corner, as if seeking a refuge, a hideout. Something akin to desertion, and the TV in front of him. He would perch on the edge of the couch, where the couch ends, on the cliff of the couch, waiting to fall, because the fall would give him invisibility.

  Why didn’t he sit in the middle of the couch?

  I never saw my father lying sprawled on the floor, the way my kids saw me. They saw me lying on the floor, on the doormat. I managed to make it to the doormat, and that’s where I fell. I almost made it. I was in a stupor, and I’d pissed myself. A little farther and I’d have been spared the shame, but I fell outside the front door. I almost made it—only a few feet to go.

  I’m there now too: in one corner of a seat, a chair, a sofa, pressed against the armrest as if it were a protective barrier. A couch in front of a TV set, and the TV offered a look at other people’s lives, people who’d opted for movement, for activity. They were humans who were changing the world, or at least trying: they were on TV. I don’t think my father envied the people he saw on television in the least; I don’t think he coveted their lives or their jobs or their popularity. He’d deserted from the world’s army of coveters, and I’d like to desert too. But he watched them with curiosity, as if all the things on TV were distracting him from terrible things.

  He was a deserter—my father was a deserter. He spent his final years contemplating his desertion and trying to figure out what he’d deserted. That’s happening to me now: I don’t know what I’ve deserted. All of Kafka’s oeuvre is seeking the same thing: What have I deserted? Where did I start out from? Where am I going now?

  Through television, he was trying to figure out what he’d deserted. As my father saw it, the people on TV weren’t deserters. If he managed to figure out who they served, maybe then he’d understand the origin of his desertion. He scrutinized, lurked, descried some message on the TV. He gazed at the TV the way a priest gazes at the altar. He saw the devilish complexity of life on TV.

  He saw the world go dim on TV.

  Sometimes I get the feeling, in the solitude of Ranillas, in the wee hours of morning, that my father is about to
appear on the screen of my TV, a small, cheap twenty-one-inch LG, that I’m going to see my father’s old age, that he’s going to assert himself on-screen.

  The green robe, the glasses, on the corner of the couch, taking up as little space as possible. And not actually there at all. He didn’t hear anything when he watched TV. He didn’t hear us, of course, but he didn’t hear what they said on TV either. I never knew who he was hearing.

  Who was he hearing, if he wasn’t hearing us or the people on TV?

  He never wanted to go to bed. He never wanted to stop watching TV. If he was watching TV, that meant life was continuing.

  I liked watching TV with him. We watched TV together for more than forty years.

  It’s the best thing you can do with a loved one: watch TV together. It’s like watching the universe. Contemplating the universe through television is what life has given us. It might not be much of a gift. Trifling though it is, we milk it for all it’s worth. We could have held hands, but that would have interfered with our concentrating on the images.

  Hundreds of programs went by: series, movies, newscasts, documentaries, game shows, debates, bulletins; years went by, lustrums, decades.

  Everything was there, on TV.

  It was as if we were watching over the world through the screen. A pair of watchmen. My father was the master, I the disciple. We watched over life: the sea, the stars, the hills, the waterfalls, the whales, the elephants, the high peaks, the snow, the winds.

  Ordesa.

  146

  At the moment I’m watching over the apartment on Ranillas. I’m contemplating the layer of dust that’s accumulated on the house telephone I took from my mother’s place when she died. When I picked up the receiver, I got dust all over my hand. The buttons are covered with dust. I never use this phone. I use a cordless one I bought at MediaMarkt; its instruction booklet is covered with dust and lying under a bookcase, which is also covered with dust. I keep this telephone as if it were a sculpture, a memento of my mother. It’s the phone she used to call me on. She knew a ton of phone numbers by heart. We used to joke about that. My father would test her; he’d ask her for phone numbers and she knew them all. She would memorize the phone numbers and dial them on this instrument sitting in front of me, covered with dust. It’s strange to inherit a telephone. It occurs to me that I’m building a chapel. The voice is telling me that now: “Ranillas is a chapel—you’ve hung photos and papers on the walls, the paintings your uncle did, that uncle you haven’t talked about, your father’s brother, whereas you have talked about Monteverdi, your mother’s brother. Now talk about your father’s brother, call him Rachmaninoff, call him Rachma.”

  Rachma was the younger brother of Johann Sebastian, my father. He was a painter, and I’ve got two paintings of his in the chapel on Ranillas, painted in the late 1950s. Rachma painted a ballerina in 1958.

  The date is at the bottom of the painting. I always stare at that date, painted in red below Rachma’s signature. A date when I wasn’t in the world or even expected, nor had my father met the woman who would be my mother. I imagine my father and his brother in 1958. My father was twenty-eight, and Rachma twenty-four. There was no sign of the future to come when Rachma painted this painting. They lived together at home with their mother, my grandmother. Nobody ever talked to me about that house or that period. But it must have been a good one. I know which house it was—somebody told me. Not them. Not my father. But I can picture it. I can picture the two brothers’ beds.

  I rescued the 1958 ballerina when I cleaned out my dead mother’s apartment. When I die, Rachma’s ballerina will begin another journey. She will end up in an antique shop somewhere, and maybe somebody will buy her. Rachma’s ballerina has started moving now, after being motionless for almost sixty years, hanging on the same wall. When I leave this world, she’ll have no value to Valdi and Brah.

  Rachmaninoff’s ballerina has value only to me. I saw very little of Rachmaninoff in life. He lived in Galicia. He’d been sent to Galicia. He did the same work as my father, traveling salesman. They both worked for the same Catalonian company.

  They had the same job and represented that Catalonian company in different regions. Bach was a salesman in Aragon; Rachma, a salesman in Galicia. The Catalonian bourgeoisie got rich while the two of them went from town to town (Aragonese towns for my father, Galician towns for my uncle) peddling fabrics from Sabadell and Barcelona, where the wealthy lived, the privileged classes for whom Bach and Rachma worked on commission, a paltry commission. There was no industry in either Aragon or Galicia. All the industry was in Barcelona. Their bosses will be dead now, and their bosses’ bosses. Bach’s and Rachma’s names will no longer appear in any file—everything will have been shredded. Sometimes a secretary from the textile company my father worked for would call. That secretary must be dead too. And her grandchildren won’t have any idea what work their grandmother did or which people she used to call from the company offices.

  We don’t know which of the dead our own dead knew.

  The two brothers never saw each other again. And Wagner didn’t do much to make sure they did. I made a trip to Galicia in about 2002, and I phoned him. He called me Manolito, as if I were a child. I was forty years old. I didn’t understand much of that conversation with Rachma; the rushed way he talked reminded me of Monteverdi.

  I barely got a word in during that jumbled conversation. Rachma didn’t let me. But he didn’t say anything important either. He talked about things that didn’t matter. He hadn’t seen me in thirty years. Who the hell was calling him? It was the oldest son of his older brother, who was also the oldest.

  Birthright founded the things of this world, in a blaze of light.

  Over time, I’ve discovered that my entire family was made of air. There wasn’t anybody there. Go visit your cousin, Rachma told me. I was calling Rachma from Pontevedra and he was in Lugo. My cousin, for her part, was in Combarro.

  There was a time when my father used to talk about Combarro, and lovely memories of that little seaside town stack up in my mind, memories from when I was six or seven years old: the narrow streets, the pile granaries, the sea, the Ría de Pontevedra, the smell, the intense ocean smell of the Galician rías.

  My father was happy there, in Combarro, with Rachma. The two of them used to go out for beer in the bars of Combarro. Late seventies, with the future still bright. Because Rachma had the virtue of popularity. Rachma’s Galician friends. But also his friends from Barbastro, who still remember him, even though it’s been more than fifty years since he left Barbastro, and three or four since he died.

  Rachma’s memory has faded in Barbastro, sure, but people still remember him. A few, very few, remember him. Because everybody leaves.

  But in that summer of 2002, I spoke to him on the telephone.

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  “There were many things he couldn’t say,” the voice says, “because your call was made of sadness itself. Yes, Rachma faked it well, and I’m not saying it didn’t make sense for you to call him; you wanted to find out about your uncle, whom you hadn’t seen in thirty years—it was 2002 when you phoned him. You hadn’t spoken to him since 1972. Jesus, you hadn’t seen him in thirty years. Did he remember he hadn’t seen you since 1972? The bad thing is, you didn’t see him again after that call either. But that was because by then your father’s brother no longer existed on the earth; that’s how Rachma found out you were asking about a dead man. You have a thing for asking about the dead. You’re always asking the same question: Why are you dead? You basically ask that question of everything that exists and is going to die or has already died. You like speaking Spanish, speaking in Spanish, because Spanish is useful for talking to the dead. You pronounce the syllables, shout the Spanish syllables so they’ll clutch at the human beings they represent. Why are you dead, why are you no longer with us, why can’t I call you anywhere? Those are your questions. So Rachma seemed only vagu
ely pleased by your call, and you were disappointed by that—but it was Rachma’s voice, a voice from your childhood, and in your childhood there lurked a dark incident, and a never-expressed gratitude, and that was the real and profound reason you’d wanted to talk to Rachma.”

  148

  Rachma came from Lugo to Barbastro around 1972 or so. He wanted to see his hometown again. He’d left in the early sixties. He showed up in a brand-new car. He’d bought a Simca 1200. The two brothers had made it.

  Johann Sebastian had a SEAT 124 purchased in 1970. And Rachma had bought a Simca 1200. The engines had the same number of cylinders. The two brothers had big dreams, the vigor of youth. They decided to race. I think Rachma won. Yes, they raced from Barbastro to the little town of Castejón. That’s nine miles. That road doesn’t exist anymore—a new highway was built many years ago, and it no longer goes through Castejón. Rachma wanted to show his older brother that the Simca went faster than the SEAT. My father embraced Spain through the SEATs he bought over his entire life. He was loyal to Spain via the SEAT. I am moved by that loyalty. When I saw the movie Gran Torino, in which Clint Eastwood’s loyalty to the Ford is a form of loyalty to the United States, I felt gratified—I felt that my father hadn’t been mistaken with the SEAT. He wouldn’t have dreamed of buying a Renault or a Simca. In fact, I think SEAT was synonymous with cars for him. That’s why he didn’t really understand Rachma’s race, or Rachma’s car. As he saw it, Rachma, by not owning a SEAT, was declining to be Spanish.

  I don’t know who my grandfather was or what his name was, when he was born or died, but he would have liked seeing the two brothers with their big dreams. But he was dead, buried in an anonymous niche in the Barbastro cemetery.