Ordesa

by Manuel Vilas

  My grandfather was a niche adrift. I don’t even know where my grandmother is buried. Not in the cemetery, but in the city. What did my grandfather think of his sons? Was he proud of them? Did he kiss them? Did they make his heart swell the way Brah and Valdi do mine? Will my love for Brah and Valdi be lost the same way my grandfather’s love for Bach and Rachma was? I can’t rescue my paternal grandfather from anywhere; I can’t even make him up. I don’t even know what year he died. Who was he? Would he have loved me? Would he have held my hand when I was small? He didn’t see my birth—he didn’t even get to imagine it. Any part of my family that didn’t touch me or intuit me or guess at me seems supernaturally pure. Because the memory I have of Bach and Wagner and Monte and Rachma has become something superhuman. I carry that memory inside me like a pulse of dark joy. There’s nothing left: not a watch, or a ring, or a pen, or a photo.

  I don’t know where Rachma is buried either. My cousin called one day to let me know. Rachma passed at seventy-four, a year younger than Johann Sebastian. They went more than thirty years without seeing each other, but they loved each other. Rachma thought Bach had a rigid personality. And it’s true, my father tended toward moral inflexibility, but that helped him live—that inflexibility was like an automatic pilot. It oriented his life. Rachma was different, and his voice soon took on a Galician accent.

  They loved each other without seeing each other. They were brothers. My father carried him within, in his heart. He carried Rachma within, his little brother, whom he never talked about. I know he loved him a lot, but he never said it.

  Rachma became Galician. It was as if he’d been born in Galicia, but he was born in Barbastro. Rachma was very different from Johann Sebastian. For starters, Johann Sebastian was taller. Rachma was slender and charismatic. And to top things off, Rachma got divorced. That was surprising. My father never said anything about Rachma’s divorce. He passed no judgment. It seemed like Rachma’s life was full of emotions. He also won the lottery. I think it was three million pesetas in the mid-seventies. He got a new car—dumped the Simca 1200 and bought a Chrysler 180, a car that was a major step up. But something happened between them. I’ll never know what it was—nobody will. Maybe absolutely nothing and they just decided to celebrate their birthdays on their own. Or something like that. Later, through acquaintances, we heard Rachma was drinking. I imagined his life as a divorcé. I imagined him living alone in an apartment in Lugo, on a narrow street, and going down to the bar below his house at night to have a cognac and talk to the bartender awhile. I don’t know why I invented that life for him. I think it was in the mid-eighties when I came up with it. The odd thing is I envied him that life. I don’t think human nature’s cut out for long-term marriage. I’m glad Rachma was able to realize that. I imagine that’s what happened. Men accept long-term marriages because they stop believing in youth.

  I think after his divorce he must have become another man. Rachma must have said no to the symbolic ordering of reality that undergirds long-term marriage, which is a nightmare, which is captivity. Sure, the people in those marriages smile and the smiles even look real. I don’t think marriages are worth it; I know it’s an exaggerated claim, but renouncing one’s passions is an exaggerated version of reasonable sacrifice. Some anthropologists say monogamy isn’t natural. The endless parade of infidelities between men and women, of painful misunderstandings, is the by-product of imposed monogamy.

  Long-term marriages were invented, perhaps, by ecclesiastical capitalism.

  There are no certainties.

  I just woke up on Ranillas, and light, life’s stepsister, is here. Light seems like a character, like someone saying to me, “I’m light, you’re the child of light, see how I give things materiality, because things exist through light.”

  I stare up at the sky.

  So Rachma is paving the way for me. It’s as if God himself were sending me messages through my parents’ brothers.

  Monteverdi said, “Catastrophe and solitude and failure.”

  Rachmaninoff said, “Divorce and Chrysler 180 and Galicia.”

  Both messages are good because life, which we serve, burns in both of them. The only sin a man can commit is to stop serving life. And it’s not a major sin, more of a minor failing.

  149

  A man may eventually end up falling in love with his own life. That’s what’s happening to me; it’s been happening for a few months now. My soul is returning to the intoxicated zones of infatuation. Intoxication is something you have from birth. The part I couldn’t imagine was this reconciliation with myself. Maybe that’s what Rachma discovered: that he was much better off alone than with a family. Because maybe in the end the thing that ends up being destroyed is loneliness. And maybe in the end you find that the only human being who isn’t a total asshole is yourself.

  Maybe that is the pinnacle of identity: oneself being sufficient in all things. If you throw a party, an immensely important guest shows up, and that guest is you; if you get married, you’re madly in love with your spouse because your spouse is you; if you die and come back to life and see God, you’re immensely perplexed because you’re seeing your own face. And it’s funny that I’m the one saying this fantastical thing—me, who can’t even be alone for fifteen minutes, for the length of a fifteen-minute taxi ride.

  150

  I just drove from Ranillas to Madrid. I traveled by night. It’s Good Friday. I started driving at eight in the evening, when all the Holy Week processions begin throughout Spain. I’d never spent a Good Friday driving before. I feel something akin to liberation. It’s as if I’ve gone AWOL from the history of Spain. While all of Spain is praying, I’m traveling in my car from Zaragoza to Madrid. I accelerate. And there’s nobody on the road.

  I’ve always had a fantasy that I’ll fulfill at some point: heading out on the road one Christmas Eve at nine p.m., just as the TV is rebroadcasting the king’s speech. And driving down Spain’s national highways and byways until midnight or one. Those three hours of glorious silence, of leaving Spanish territory and reentering nature.

  I was thinking about Rachma as I drove. When Bach died, my cousin sent flowers to the funeral. When Rachma died, I didn’t send flowers. I don’t attend burials and I don’t even send flowers: Always shirking my obligations, always failing my family. Always guilty.

  Rachma talked with me when Johann Sebastian died. Johann Sebastian was his older brother. It was a conversation of little substance. He asked about a ghost from his youth and I told him how the most important person in my life had become a ghost. He kept calling me Manolito.

  That was beautiful. Except that Manolito was dead too.

  But we no longer had anything to say to each other, because there comes a time when we all pay. We pay for having been disloyal to the idea of family, which gives substance to man on earth.

  Without family, you’re a dog without a pack. Solitary dogs get abused, strung up on abandoned walls by the roadside; dogs get strung up on any crumbling wall with rebar sticking out, because their solitude sets a bad example.

  I’m no longer satisfied by the company of humans. I love humans, but I have no desire to be with them. It’s like I’ve discovered the Rachma constellation. It’s like having understood that solitude is a law of physics and matter, a law that infatuates. It’s the law of the mountains. The law of Ordesa. The fog swaddling the peaks. The mountains.

  151

  It’s a summer morning in 1970: Rachma and Bach are walking down the Galician beach of La Lanzada, near Combarro. There’s wind, there’s sun, an enormous expanse of sea and sand. It is paradise, but it is only my memory. The sea looks at the siblings. The sea is my grandfather—he looks at them, sending them waves, sending them wind, silence, solitude, gratitude, sending them fervor.

  The two brothers are close, scions of the lands of northern Spain, despite how different they are. And that beach at La Lanzada, five miles long, now f
lows into my heart.

  I’ve got that image in my head: the two of them strolling down the beach, beside the too-blue sea, beside the too-high sun.

  Even the least favored classes of history demand a legendary destiny—they want fine words, a bit of poetry.

  Later the brothers go to a fishermen’s bar and eat king crab and velvet crab and scampi and drink Galician wine. Rachma has met a gorgeous woman. He’s married a very beautiful woman. He went to Galicia to work and married a local woman there. And she’s an exotic beauty, with red hair. I never heard anything about their engagement, but I assume that my father did know, and whatever he knew is now lost. Nor do I know anything about what Bach, Rachma, and their wives did when they were young: I imagine dinners with friends, laughter, youth, a trip here or there, parties, dances, and now nothing.

  Parties and dances and dinners and the four of them together.

  My devotion to Rachma is specific and dates back to 1972, when he showed up in Barbastro in his Simca 1200. He was ebullient, happy to see his hometown again. He insisted that he wanted to give his nephew a gift. I don’t know how many times Rachma had seen me in his life; it can’t have been many, seven or eight, maybe ten at most. So it was an important occasion. Rachma and I went to a store that was—still is—in downtown Barbastro. It was called Almacenes Roberto. Rachma wanted to buy me a nice toy. I felt excited and confused at the same time, because it wasn’t Christmas but somebody was giving me a present the way the Wise Men did.

  There was an employee at the toy store, a guy in his early twenties, who offered to show me all the toys. Rachma left me in the employee’s care while he went off to say hi to an old friend and let him know he was in Barbastro, so I took my time choosing the toy I liked best.

  The employee was a tall, sweaty man, quiet, fat, pale. He led me by the hand down to the basement, where there were a lot of toys in storage. He showed me a number of them.

  And here again things go black, just like with Father G.

  His sweaty hands touch my body and try to caress me. He touches me. Fondles me. He tries to kiss me on the mouth. I feel shame, an irrational shame. And guilt.

  But this time is different. What I hadn’t been able to tell my father, I told Rachma. It was easy to tell Rachma, or rather he was able to see it, he was able to guess, and all I had to do was confirm it. And Rachma flew into a rage. Rachma looked for that guy, he was ready to punch him in the face.

  Rachma wanted to kill that guy.

  I never felt so protected.

  I invoke that protection now in the face of the mystery of death.

  That guy was a bastard.

  Rachma defended me and took away my guilt. It wasn’t my fault. That certainty that I wasn’t to blame served me later in life—it was useful many times. Rachma asserted it in his actions. They were defending me, in the end. I remember how forceful he seemed, talking with the owner of the establishment, unafraid of any power on earth, unafraid of the consequences, unafraid because he was defending me. Before you can defend somebody, you have to be sure of yourself. Bach lacked Rachma’s confidence. That confidence is the most valuable treasure our bodies and minds can possess. I hope Brah and Valdi inherit it—it is in our blood, because Rachma had it.

  Thank you, Rachmaninoff, your music is playing once more in my weary heart.

  Your defense of my life comes back to me tonight on this Good Friday forty-five years later. In the end, it wasn’t my fault.

  152

  I’m in Barbastro, taking out money from an ATM. The machine spits out brand-new bills, smooth, unwrinkled, sharp-edged, just off the press, recently emerged from the mint. My father loved new bills. I wish my father could know right now that I remember, I remember that detail. Whenever he went to take out money from the bank—years before ATMs appeared—he’d ask the teller for new bills. The teller would always be surprised by the request. The voice tells me, “He’s trying to communicate with you, he’s talking to you through those bills, you remember his smile—he’d get one-hundred- or five-hundred-peseta bills, brand-new, and he liked it when they weren’t wrinkled, they were worth more if they were new. His smile, his smile is contained in those bills.” Just like him, I like for my bills to be new. It’s as if somebody made them just for you, somebody thought about you, somebody made sure you were carrying these marvelous postcards in your wallet with drawings and the faces of eminent people, not the debased artifact known as money—that’s why my father wanted new bills.

  He didn’t want money.

  He wanted pristine postcards.

  And that’s why I want new bills too. I’m not looking to spend them; I want to experience the sensation of having Spain itself writing to me. Sending me greetings, a love telegram.

  Bills freshly emerged from a nineteenth-century mint.

  They’re not yet infected with the epidemic of misery. Nobody has touched them with pain. They haven’t humiliated anybody. They haven’t been flaunted at anybody as a weapon. They haven’t bought anything yet. The hand of the miserable, the corrupt, the murderous, the poor, the defeated, the finished, the abominable has not touched them.

  They’re like babes in paradise, those bills.

  That’s what my father was after.

  That’s why he wanted them new.

  See, I even remember that. Everything you did for me is sacred now. Everything I saw you do for me is the very blood of life. I remember everything. It’s all stored in my heart. The forty-three years we were together have to live somewhere. What happened during those forty-three years?

  153

  My mother used to ask for morphine when she had liver pain, back in the seventies, but we never knew what was causing it. The family is a clamor of never-explained illnesses.

  Did she drink? No, not at all. But I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I orient myself by love. By the loss of love.

  The pain abated after she turned fifty, and she stopped asking for morphine.

  We could legalize drugs once and for all. But the government insists that its citizens experience the agony of solitude, insists that they live and die alone.

  My father died alone.

  My mother died alone.

  It is nature’s greatest revenge, showing up in hospital rooms and destroying all human pacts—it destroys the pact of love and the pact of family and the pact of medicine and the pact of human dignity—and it calls up the laughter of the other dead, the dead long gone, who mock the newly arrived corpse.

  My parents never had a camera. My father never took a photo. And my mother hated having her picture taken. She thought she always looked awful in photos. She hated photography. I don’t like being in photos either. My mother and I don’t want to leave any evidence we ever existed. Sometimes I would try to take a photo of her—either she wouldn’t let me or she’d rip them up if I managed it.

  The handful of photos I inherited are untidy, bent, some torn. She didn’t dare destroy them completely—she just hid them in deteriorating neglect, hoping they would vanish on their own. But I found this one.

  I imagine she couldn’t bring herself to rip this one up. Somebody must have snapped it and given it to her as a memento. The photo of the boy allows us to date it. It was taken outside an old movie theater in Barbastro that no longer exists. It was called Cine Argensola. The building was demolished more than ten years ago because the concrete had started to disintegrate. But that’s not how we can date the photograph. We can date it through the poster behind the figure of the diabolical child. It’s a poster for a Spanish movie called Los Palomos, from 1964, starring Gracita Morales and José Luis López Vázquez, both of them dead now, of course.

  The hand that’s not holding the palm frond looks like a copper prosthesis. My mother hated mementos; that hatred was instinctive for her, and also somewhat cultivated. She despised mementos—for her, they provoked disgust and shame.
r />   Wickedly, she knew that nothing should be remembered. That would mean having power over death.

  What did the diabolical doll in the photo come into this world to do? He came to make a go of it in a country called Spain.

  I eat a cookie while studying the photo of the diabolical doll. I think about hunger, fits of hunger. My mother always said I was a nightmare to feed when I was a kid. Yes, it seems that was true. My aunt Maria Callas said so too. I refused to eat. They had to fight to get me to eat. I nearly starved to death. If only I’d kept at it, fully embraced malnutrition—I wouldn’t be harvesting corpses right now, listening to the music of the dead. I knew what I was doing; I didn’t want anything to enter my body, didn’t want anything external to intrude, to contaminate my organs, my blood, my unblemished flesh. I didn’t want my stomach, liver, kidneys to be touched by life. I wanted to return to where I’d been; I wanted to return to my mother.

  I had to be taken to the hospital when I was just three years old because I wasn’t eating. Now, ironically, I eat out of anxiety. I spend my days tallying what I eat, counting calories. In eating, a person is seeking the regeneration of life; food keeps the machines of life in order, but machines age, and fuel is wasted on bodies that are no longer useful. Hungry old people have bodies that no longer function, that only waste food the way cars burn oil—high-consumption, low-production cars.

  That’s what old people are, high consumption coupled with low production—that’s aging.

  The relationship between the two sisters, Maria Callas and Wagner, was special, quite unspoken and quite deep. Maria Callas was goodness personified, but that goodness didn’t appeal to Wagner. Maria was eight years older than Wagner. They grew up together and knew each other well.