Ordesa
Page 26
I don’t know which of the two died first. Oh yes, it was Maria Callas, right, and Wagner didn’t go to her funeral, just as I didn’t.
Neither of us went to Maria’s funeral.
I’m so much like my mother, I’m exactly the same.
154
There’s a sentence I expect to hear on the lips of my parents’ ghosts when I go to them. They’ll tell me, “We barely remember you.”
It’s the same sentence that hovers in Valdi’s and Brah’s thoughts when they look at me—“We barely remember you.”
A couple of years before her death, my mother was bloated; a couple of years before his death, my father was gaunt: a balloon and a walking stick.
I just got out of bed on Ranillas. Today I don’t have a thing to do the whole damn day. People who are alone neglect their hygiene. I didn’t inherit good hygienic habits from my parents; how the hell were we supposed to bathe in that tiny bathtub? And another disaster gradually befell us too: over time, less and less water came out of the faucets, till there was barely a trickle. The pipes were clogged by mineral deposits. They needed replacing. Since my mother was renting (she rented her whole life), that job and its cost were the landlady’s responsibility. The landlady flatly refused; she wanted my mother to leave because she was a longtime tenant and her rent was very low.
She’d been there since 1960.
The landlady wanted to make more money. She was the daughter of the original owner, who’d died young of a heart attack. My mother saw practically the whole family die over the years. First was the man who’d erected the building and rented out the apartments, whom she’d gotten along with and liked. Then she saw his widow die, who’d inherited the business. It’s a shame she didn’t see the daughter die. The daughter saw my mother die instead.
Either you see people die or they see you die.
My mother was retaining fluids and barely eating. She didn’t understand why she was getting fatter when she didn’t eat.
The diabolical child didn’t eat. The man the diabolical child became eats and eats to avoid hearing the noise of the world, the noise of living things. Living things make noise as they decay.
My father always ate fast, really fast; his was an atavistic desire to eat, passed down through the millennia, in memory of a time when hunger reigned across the planet, in memory of the Spanish Civil War, in memory of a principle of universal precariousness, a moral and existential principle. He ate fast, and the diabolical child refused to eat because he didn’t want to become another man who eats too fast, another man with an unhealthy relationship with food, the kind of man who derives from other organisms a satiety that does not satiate.
155
My father’s death was also the disappearance of a body language, a set of particular movements, an eye color, that I will never see again. A kind of expressivity in the hands, arms, eyes, lips, legs. And if I forget him, I forget those gestures. Death is more absolute and effective with people of whom we have no videos.
It’s a kind of energy that disappears. If there were videos of my father, I could remember his gestures, but there aren’t any, because he never wanted there to be, because he knew this moment would arrive, the moment to end all moments, the final day of his life, the moment when we realize that there is no evidence that a particular human being ever walked the earth.
It is the immensity of goodbye, the way it swells and expands. I will never see him again, I repeat as a mantra. And the immensity of goodbye is evident there. Faith, then, is natural; it’s impossible to accept the idea that you’re never going to see him again, for the simple reason that he’s right there. If I reach out my hand, I touch his light.
He doesn’t move.
He’s there, and he’s looking at me.
156
I used to run into my father in the elevator. He was neatly dressed, always in his suit. He seemed very clean despite not having a shower. I’m talking about 1978, 1979, somewhere in there. I never knew he was in the elevator. The elevator door would open and there he’d be. He’d smile at how startled I was when I opened the door, as if he’d been rehearsing his sudden apparition, as if he were Hamlet’s father.
My father looked great in the elevator. Those old elevators that were all wood and glass. He looked like a duke in a doored casket. I saw the elevators in that building change. It was the first building with an elevator in Barbastro, and in the sixties it was known as the “elevator building.” There was even a super, named Manuela—she didn’t last long. She and my mother didn’t get along at all. She had a small room, which disappeared when the elevator was remodeled. In that room was Manuela, who was pretty unfriendly. My mother used to say she was a witch. I was scared of her. One day she vanished into thin air, and the room where she used to lurk was swallowed by the machinery for the new elevator. But I can see her before me right this moment: she was an elderly lady with glasses and a bun, small, hunched, complaining about the trash, appearing as if by magic, bickering with my mother, but at the same time it makes me happy to remember her, because a superintendent always brings joy to a building—supers symbolize hope for a building, for the concrete, the pillars, the walls, the stairs, the façade, the landings, the lightbulbs, the plaques with the residents’ names. The building was all rental apartments, so there were always people passing through, people who were in Barbastro a few years for work and who then left for other cities. My parents made friends or acquaintances with their neighbors, but those neighbors would eventually disappear. Everybody left. They’d find a better job or get a promotion and move, transferring to larger cities. Only Wagner and Johann Sebastian remained, out of their whole section of the building, like survivors, composing music for nobody. As for Manuela, the superintendent, I have no idea where she came from or where she went, whether she had family or if maybe she was a ghost.
157
The two of them are young and they get ready to call me in the darkness. I am not there. I never have been. Yet I was foretold by everything millions of years ago. All of us have been foretold. I can travel back in time and see Johann Sebastian caressing Wagner and kissing her and I am there, waiting to be summoned.
My origin is in his pleasure; in his melancholy after love is the source of my insatiable spirit.
I see the room—it’s the fall of 1961, mid-November. The cold hasn’t descended yet, it’s nice out, and they’ve opened the door onto the bedroom balcony to let the moonlight in. They are so young, so enormously young, that they believe they’re immortal. There they are, naked, with the balcony door flung open.
It’s gotten a little chilly, says Johann Sebastian. And he gazes at Wagner’s nakedness and I am already there in her belly. Wagner lights an L&M. The bedside lamp gives off a dim glow. An immense happiness suffuses the room. The walls, the curtains, the sheets are singing; the night is singing. By the start of the new year they’ll have learned that Wagner is pregnant. But they have no inkling of the baby that’s on its way. Even I don’t know what kind of baby is on its way. Johann Sebastian, that November night, having invoked me inside of Wagner, steps out onto the tiny balcony of the apartment that will be my apartment and looks at the night. The air is full of incantations. He looks at the buildings across the street—they’ve just moved into this new building, with an elevator that still smells of varnish; the street is unpaved, everything new: the wooden blinds, the tile floors, the walls, the bedroom doors, which close perfectly, though fifty years from now not a single one will close, they’ll all be broken, crooked in their frames. I never saw that new apartment; I only saw its deterioration. But on the night I was conceived, the building was brand-new, recently built, pristine-smelling.
The dead cannot be awakened, because they are resting.
But that night in November 1961 existed and continues to exist. That night of love, that modern apartment, the freshly painted walls, the newly purchased furniture, the couple’s yo
ung hands, the kisses, the future that is only a thrilling fantasy, the power of bodies—all of that is still in me.
Glorious November night in 1961, tranquil, pleasant, sweet. You are still alive. Night that is still alive. You do not leave. You dance a dance of love with me.
About the Author and Translator
Manuel Vilas is one of Spain's most acclaimed poets and writers. Born in Barbastro, in the Huesca region of Spain, Vilas has published six novels, thirteen books of poetry, and has been widely published in newspapers and literary journals.
Andrea Rosenberg is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese. Her translations include novels and graphic narrative by Tomás González, Paco Roca, Inês Pedrosa, and Aura Xilonen.
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