RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Originally published in Spain by Alfaguara, an imprint of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, Barcelona, in 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Manuel Vilas.
First American edition published by Riverhead Books, 2020.
English translation copyright © 2020 by Andrea Rosenberg
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Photographs courtesy of the author
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vilas, Manuel, 1962– author. | Rosenberg, Andrea, translator.
Title: Ordesa / Manuel Vilas ; translated by Andrea Rosenberg.
Other titles: Ordesa. English
Description: First American edition. | New York : Riverhead Books, 2020. | “Originally published in Spain by Alfaguara, an imprint of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, Barcelona, in 2018”—Title page verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020014200 (print) | LCCN 2020014201 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593084045 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593084069 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Vilas, Manuel, 1962– —Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ6672.I473 O74413 2020 (print) | LCC PQ6672.I473 (ebook) | DDC 861/.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014200
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014201
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Lauren Peters-Collaer
Cover photograph: Detail of Chez Mondrian, Paris / André Kertész / © RMN - Grand Palais (Photo reproduction © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images)
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
About the Author and Translator
Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto . . .
—Violeta Parra
1
If only human pain could be measured with precise numbers, not vague words. If only there were some way to assess how much we’ve suffered, to confirm that pain has mass and measure. Sooner or later, every man must confront the insubstantiality of his own passage through this world. Some human beings can stomach that.
Not me—not ever.
I used to look at the city of Madrid, and the unreality of its streets and houses and humans felt like nails through my flesh.
I’ve been a man of sorrows.
I’ve failed to understand life.
Conversations with o
ther humans seemed dull, slow, destructive.
It pained me to talk to others; I could see the pointlessness of every human conversation that has been and will be. Even as they were happening, I knew they’d be forgotten.
The fall before the fall.
The futility of conversations—the futility of the speaker, the futility of the spoken-to. Futilities we’ve agreed to so the world can exist.
At that point I’d start thinking about my father again. The conversations I used to have with him seemed like the only thing that was worth a damn. I’d go back to those conversations, hoping for respite from the universal deterioration of things.
It felt like my brain was fossilized; I couldn’t perform simple mental operations. I would add up cars’ license plate numbers, and the activity plunged me into a deep sadness. I stumbled over my words. It took me a long time to get a sentence out; when I went silent, the person I was talking to would look at me with pity or scorn and end up finishing it for me.
I used to stammer, repeating the same thing over and over. Maybe there was beauty in my stuttering emotions. I called my father to account. I was constantly thinking about my father’s life. Seeking an explanation for my own life in his. I became racked by fear and delusions.
When I looked in the mirror, I saw not my own self growing old but someone else who’d already been here in this world. I saw my father growing old. It made it easy to remember him in meticulous detail; all I had to do was look in the mirror and he’d appear, like in some unfamiliar liturgy, a shamanic ceremony, an inverted theological order.
There was no joy or happiness in this reunion with my father in the mirror—only another turn of the screw of grief, a further descent, the hypothermic pall of two corpses in conversation.
I see what was not intended to be visible; I see death in the breadth and basis of matter; I see the universal weightlessness of all things. I was reading Saint Teresa of Ávila, and she had similar sorts of thoughts. She called them one thing, and I call them something else.
I started writing—only writing offered an outlet for all those dark messages flooding in from human bodies, from the streets, the cities, from politics, the media, from what we are.
The great ghost of what we are—a construction bearing little resemblance to nature. And the great ghost is effective: humanity is convinced it actually exists. That’s where my problems start.
In 2015 there was a sadness that stalked the planet, invading human societies like a virus.
I got a brain scan. I went to see a neurologist. He was a bald, burly man with neatly trimmed fingernails and a necktie under his white coat. He ran some tests. He said there wasn’t anything funny in my head. That everything was fine.
And I started writing this book.
It seemed to me the state of my soul was a blurry memory of something that had occurred in a place in northern Spain called Ordesa, a place full of mountains. And that memory was yellow, the color yellow spreading through the name Ordesa, and behind Ordesa was the figure of my father in the summer of 1969.
A state of mind that is a place: Ordesa. And also a color: yellow.
Everything turned yellow. When things and people turn yellow, it means they’ve become insubstantial—or bitter.
Pain is yellow, is what I’m saying.
I’m writing these words on May 9, 2015. Seventy years ago, Germany had just signed its unconditional surrender. Within a couple of days, photos of Hitler would be swapped out for photos of Stalin.
History, too, is a body with regrets. I am fifty-two years old and I am the history of myself.
My two boys are coming in the front door, back from a game of paddle tennis. It’s scorching out already. Insistent heat, its unrelenting assault on people, on the planet.
And the way that heat on humanity is increasing. It isn’t just climate change—it’s a sort of reminder of history, a vengeance taken by the old myths on the new. Climate change is simply an updated version of the apocalypse. We like apocalypse. We carry it in our DNA.
The apartment where I live is dirty, full of dust. I’ve tried a few times to clean it, but it’s no use. I’ve never been good at cleaning, and not because I don’t put in the effort. Maybe there is some aristocratic residue in my blood. Though it hardly seems likely.
I live on Avenida de Ranillas, in a northern Spanish city whose name currently escapes me. There’s nothing here but dust, heat, and ants. A while back there was an ant invasion, and I killed them with the vacuum cleaner. Hundreds of ants sucked into the canister—I felt like an honest-to-God mass murderer. I look at the frying pan in the kitchen. The grease stuck to the pan. I need to give it a scrub. I have no idea what I’m going to feed my kids. The banality of food. Through the window I can see a Catholic church impassively receiving the light of the sun, its atheistic fire. The fire of the sun that God hurls at the earth as if it were a black ball, filthy and wretched, as if it were rot, garbage. Can’t you people see the garbage of the sun?
There’s nobody on the street. Where I live, there are no streets, just empty sidewalks covered with dirt and dead grasshoppers. Everybody’s gone on vacation. They’re at the beach enjoying the sea. The dead grasshoppers, too, once started families and celebrated holidays, Christmases and birthdays. We’re all poor souls thrust into the tunnel of existence. Existence is a moral category. Existing obliges us to do, to do something, anything at all.
If I’ve realized one thing in life, it’s that men and women share one single existence. One day, that existence will gain political representation, and that will mean we’ve taken a major step forward. I won’t be around to see it. There are so many things I won’t be around to see, so many I am seeing right now.
I’ve always seen things.
The dead have always talked to me.
I’ve seen so many things, the future ended up talking to me as if we were neighbors or even friends.
I’m talking about those beings, about ghosts, about the dead, my dead parents, the love I had for them, how that love doesn’t leave.
Nobody knows what love is.
2
After my divorce (a year ago now, though time’s a tricky thing in this case, since a divorce isn’t really a date but a process, even if officially speaking it’s a date, even if in legal terms it may be a specific day; at any rate, there are a lot of significant dates to keep in mind: the first time you consider it, then the second time, the accumulation of times, the piling up of moments full of disagreements and arguments and sadnesses that eventually end up pointing toward that thing you’ve been considering, and finally the moment you leave your home, and the leaving is what sets off the cascade of events that culminate in a particular judicial proceeding, which is the end of the road from a legal point of view, since the legal point of view is essentially a compass on the precipice, a kind of science, because we need a science that provides rationality, the illusion of certainty), I became the man I used to be many years earlier; by which I mean that I had to buy a mop and a scrub brush, and cleaning products, lots of cleaning products.
The superintendent of the apartment building was in the lobby. We’d chatted a bit. Something about a soccer game. About people’s lives too, I think. The super is Asian of some sort, though he’s from Ecuador. He’s been in Spain a long time, so long now he can’t remember Ecuador. I know deep down he’s envious of my apartment. However bad you’ve got it in life, there’s always somebody who envies you. The cosmos has a twisted sense of humor.
My son helped me clean the house. There were piles of mail covered in a layer of dust. You could pick up an envelope and feel the grimy sensation that the dust, so thick it was almost dirt, left on your fingertips.
There were faded letters of old love, innocent and tender letters of youth from my son’s mother, the woman who was once my wife. I told my son to put those in the memory drawer. We also put photos of my father in
there, and one of my mother’s purses. A cemetery of memory. I didn’t want to, or couldn’t, let my eyes linger on those objects. I touched them with love—and with pain.
You have no idea what to do with all these things, do you? my son said.
And there’s more, I told him. Receipts and papers that seem important, like insurance documents and letters from the bank.
Banks flood your mailbox with depressing messages. Loads of statements. Letters from the bank make me nervous. They aim to tell you exactly what you are. They force you to reflect on your lack of significance in the world. I started leafing through bank statements.
Why do you like having the AC cranked up? he asked.
I can’t stand the heat—my father couldn’t either. Do you remember your grandfather?
It’s an uncomfortable question, since my son thinks that in asking it, I’m seeking some sort of advantage, some kindness on his part.
My son has a knack for diligence and hard work. He was very thorough in helping me clean my apartment.
Of late, it’s started to seem like the place isn’t worth the money I’m paying for it. That realization, I imagine, is the most obvious evidence of a human mind’s maturity under the tyranny of capitalism. But thanks to capitalism, I have a home.
I thought, as always, about financial ruin. A man’s life is, at bottom, an extended effort not to fall into financial ruin. No matter what your profession, that’s the great failure. If you can’t feed your kids, you don’t have any reason to exist in society.
Nobody knows if life outside society is even possible. Other people’s esteem ends up being the only record of your existence. Esteem is a moral system; it entails values and other people’s assessment of you, and your position in the world is derived from that assessment. It’s a battle between the body, your body, where life resides, and your body’s value to others. If people seek you, if they seek your presence, you’ll do well.
But death—that sociopathic madwoman—equalizes all social and moral assessments through the active corruption of the flesh. There’s a lot of talk about political corruption and moral corruption, and very little about the corruption of the body once death gets her hands on it: the swelling, the explosion of foul gases, the corpse turning to stench.
My father never talked much about his mother. He only recalled what a wonderful cook she’d been. My grandmother left Barbastro in the late sixties and never went back. It must have been around 1969. She took her daughter with her.