Ordesa Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  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

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  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)

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  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 34

  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

  Chapter 157

  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.