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  The dead don’t smoke.

  I once found a thirty-year-old Kent cigarette in a drawer. It had been hidden. I should have stuck it in an urn.

  I’m looking for meaning in the fact that there’s nothing left. Everyone loses their father and mother—that’s just biology. But I’m also obsessing over the dissolution of the past, and thus its ultimate inexpressiveness. I see a laceration in space and time. The past is the part of life that’s been handed over to darkness’s holy office. The past never leaves; it can always return. It returns, eternally returns. The past contains joy. It is a hurricane. It is everything in people’s lives. The past is love too. To live obsessed with the past prevents you from enjoying the present, but enjoying the present without the weight of the past pressing desolately upon it is not a pleasure but a form of alienation. There is no alienation in the past.

  7

  They seem alive. But they’re dead.

  The day they met comes to me. A Saturday afternoon in April 1958. The afternoon is alive. The presence of that afternoon conceals another, more distant presence.

  Death is real, and it is legal. It is legal to die. Has any government declared death illegal? It comforts me that our laws make room for death; dying is not a subversive act—even suicide is no longer subversive.

  But what are they doing, the two of them, my parents, evading lawful death? It’s clear they’re not entirely dead. I see them often. My father tends to come before I go to bed, as I’m brushing my teeth. He stands in front of me and looks at the kind of toothpaste I’m using, studies it with curiosity. I know he wants to ask about the brand, but he’s not allowed.

  And this isn’t about me remembering them, about the fact that they live on in my memory. This is about the place they’re in now, where their spirits are still suffering. It’s about ugly deaths and beautiful lives.

  There they are. And in some way they’re ghastly spirits.

  When my parents died, my memory became a cantankerous, frightened, and wrathful ghost. When your past is wiped off the face of the earth, the universe is erased and everything is sunk in indignity. There is nothing more undignified than the gray dullness of nonexistence. Extinguishing the past is heinous. Your parents’ death is heinous. It’s a declaration of war that shapes your reality.

  When as a child (because of my as-yet-unformed personality or my timidity) I was tormented by my inability to fit in with people, with my schoolmates, I always used to think of my father and mother, and I trusted that they must have an explanation for my social invisibility. They were my protectors, the people who guarded the secret of the reason for my existence, even if it eluded me.

  With my father’s death, the chaos began; the person who knew who I was, and who could, what’s more, take responsibility for my presence and my existence, was no longer in this world. This may be one of the most remarkable things in my life. The only true, accurate reason you’re in this world is contained in the will of your father and mother. You are that act of will. Will made flesh.

  The biological principle of will is not political in nature. That’s why I’m so interested in it, so moved by it. If it’s not political, that means it is something approximating truth. Nature is a vicious form of truth. Politics is the agreed-on order, sure, but it’s not truth. Truth is your father and your mother.

  They created you.

  You come from semen and ovule.

  Without semen and ovule, nothing exists.

  The fact that your identity and existence take place within a political order does not undermine the principle of will, which precedes the political order—and is, furthermore, a necessary principle, whereas although the political order may be perfectly fine and exactly what you want, it is not necessary.

  8

  I regretted having opted for cremation. My mother, my brother, and I wanted to forget everything. Get rid of the corpse. We were shaking with fear, but we pretended to be on top of the situation, tried to laugh at a few comical details to shield ourselves from terror. Humans invented tombs so that the memory of the living could seek refuge in them, and because bones are important, even if we never see them: knowing they’re there is enough. But in Spain our tombs are niches. Tombs are noble; niches are depressing, expensive, and ugly. Because everything is ugly and expensive for the Spanish lower middle class, more lower than middle. That combo term is a dastardly invention—and a lie.

  We were lower class, but my father always dressed well. He knew how to dress the part. But he was poor. He just didn’t look it. He didn’t look it, and in that sense he was a fugitive from Spain’s socioeconomic system in the 1970s and ’80s. They couldn’t throw you in prison for that, for having style even though you were poor. They couldn’t throw you in prison for dodging the visible stamp of poverty.

  My father was an artist. He had style.

  Before he was cremated, my father’s body lay on display at the funeral home for several hours. People came to see him. When funeral directors stage the little theater piece of putting death on display, they hide everything except a face caked with makeup. You can’t see the corpse’s hands or feet or shoulders. They glue the lips shut. I stared at my father, wondering whether it was an industrial-strength glue they used to seal lip against lip. Just imagine the glue fails and suddenly the corpse’s mouth falls open. A man came whom I recognized. He wasn’t a friend of my father, at most an acquaintance. The guy realized he had no business being there. He came up to me and said, “It’s just that we were the same age. I came to see what I’ll look like as a corpse.” The guy was serious. He took another look and then left.

  I later learned the guy died two months after my father did. I remember the expression on his face, even the tone of his voice. I remember how he stared at my father’s dead face through the glass of the case where the casket lay, trying, with an act of imagination, to replace my father’s face with his own, to see what he’d look like as a dead man.

  I stared at my dead father too. The watchman, the caretaker, the commander on duty of my childhood, was taking his leave of the world. I contemplated the disintegration of humanity. The arrival of the corpse. The birth of insubstantiality. Madness. Magnificence. The corpse in all of its mystery.

  9

  I awoke with a start, coming out of an intense dream. I’d taken an antianxiety pill to sleep. Once upon a time I used to take them in alarming quantities, and I’d combine them with alcohol. The first time I mixed the two aggressively was in 2006. My marriage was in crisis because I had a lover. She wasn’t just any lover, she was special, or that’s what I felt at the time; maybe the infatuation was completely one-sided, since a partial confession isn’t enough to confirm love—you’d have to get a second opinion from the other person. The will to live is always confounding: it starts with an explosion of joy and ends in a spectacle of vulgarity. We are vulgar creatures, and most vulgar of all is anyone who fails to recognize his own vulgarity. Recognizing it is the first gesture of emancipation toward the extraordinary. All of the crises in my marriage since then have combined alcohol and anxiolytics. As the effects of the alcohol dissipate, you go into a state of panic, and that’s when you take a stiff dose of anxiolytics.

  At bottom, drugs are capitalism’s greatest enemy.

  It had been an intense dream, and I came out of it with a sensation of drained or exhausted terror. I’d dreamed about a bedroom, the bedroom of a house that had been mine not so long ago.

  I had a lot to do that day. I drank some coffee, took a shower. I’m never sure which to do first: have coffee and then shower, or shower first and then have coffee. I was nervous, excited. I was supposed to put on a suit and go to an official banquet with the king and queen of Spain. The idea of meeting the king of Spain while I was on drugs was an appealing one, but you’ve got to have a revolutionary courage for that sort of thing. It had been many years since I’d worn a suit, maybe not since my wedding. You don’t ne
ed a suit for a divorce.

  Since I don’t know how to tie a necktie, my brother had pre-knotted mine. I put on a navy blue suit. It didn’t look bad on me. I maybe even looked handsome with my white shirt. I’d slimmed down a bit—I’ve been locked in combat with food all my life. Food gladdens the heart, but so does being slim. It had gotten late, or that’s what I thought, but when I checked the clock I saw that it wasn’t too late.

  Then I sat down in a chair and thought about the suffering of the necktie’s fabric—the knot had been there for several days. I remembered my father. He definitely knew how to tie a necktie. He could do it in a flash with his eyes closed.

  A man in a tie is automatically older.

  I headed to the royal banquet in my car. A few days earlier, I’d given the palace authorities the license plate number.

  I had trouble finding the entrance to the Plaza de Armas.

  My nervousness increased.

  Then, when my brain was about to burst, I heard a voice: “Relax, buddy, it’s all good, you’re just going to a banquet, your suit looks nice. Your parents are dead. You seem to be alive. You’ve got a decent car, and you still look young. What difference is one meal going to make in your life?”

  It always does me good to hear that voice. It’s a voice that comes from inside me, but it seems like it’s someone else. My internal someone else.

  I drive through Madrid. The wheels of my car touch the city of Madrid. I touch the knot of my tie. I consult the GPS. There’s a lot of traffic. The GPS isn’t working well because it’s old; I didn’t want to get a new one because it cost fifty euros. People have money in Madrid, you can tell.

  10

  Madrid is beautiful.

  Madrid has been everything in this country; it’s got everything. My father came to Madrid a number of times. All Spaniards from the provinces traveled to Madrid at some point. In that sense, Madrid was cruel. People from the provinces were frightened by how big Madrid was.

  But it wasn’t so big, really. Not as big as London or Paris, for example. Maybe it’s catching up. It was a disparaging term, “the provinces.” And it was absurd. Madrid’s aristocratic elevation over the provinces was the invention, initially, of the monarchy, and later of Franco, but it doesn’t matter.

  In fact, nothing matters: history is dead and people have realized that the things history describes don’t exist in the present, and people no longer wish to inherit the phantasmagoric burdens of times past, of times fictitious.

  A guard points out where I should park. Then another guard gives me further instructions. They’re elegant, the guards of the royal palace in Madrid.

  A wide staircase stretches up before me, flanked by soldiers in their dress uniforms, with gleaming but harmless spears. Their tips probably haven’t been sharpened in more than a century. Castrated spears, spears with historic value at best, but useless when it comes to piercing a body.

  I climb the stairs. I observe the guards, look them in the eyes.

  I feel as if the guards know my past, as if they recognize me as an impostor, as if they realize that, in fact, I should properly be there with them, wearing a showy outfit and holding a spear. How much do they earn? I figure about 1,450 euros a month, maybe, 1,629 euros if they’re lucky. I doubt they make as much as 1,700. We hide our salaries, but it’s the only thing about ourselves we can actually confess. Finding out someone’s salary means seeing them naked.

  The large windows of the royal palace are still there, seeing things, filtering the light of days that have accrued in the form of centuries.

  The guests are smiling.

  Madrid is like the heart of a wild animal.

  11

  The monarchy inspires fascination, a fascination that doesn’t preclude condemnation. There they were, Felipe VI and his wife, Doña Letizia, king and queen of Spain without anyone asking them, though of course they both know such a request is unnecessary because history is a succession of horrifying political maneuvers, and it’s best not to delve into that abyss because they, Felipe and Letizia, are a solid, dependable solution given that everything that could replace them is uncertain, unstable, and very likely to end in devastation, death, and destitution. They know that the service they’re providing to Spain is objective and measurable—it can be tallied and weighed, it is money. They facilitate international agreements, persuade foreign governments and companies to invest in Spain. Thanks to them, yes. It’s true. They inspire confidence in international investors. Confidence is money; it is people coming off the unemployment rolls.

  Still, people end up organizing, so you’ve got to be on the alert—that’s why there’s a glint of shadow on Felipe VI’s face, and a whisper of whips in his wife. They have to be careful. She is creating a moral space, a sort of political temple where “irreproachable” majesty takes place.

  They are husband and wife, and so I feel some compassion for them. It’s normal to feel compassion for married couples, especially as their years of conjugal bondage pile up. We all know that marriage is the most terrible of all human institutions, since it requires sacrifice, renunciation, going against one’s instincts, and lies upon lies—all in exchange for social stability and economic prosperity.

  Doña Letizia takes a step away from her husband and situates herself in a more comfortable historical realm, closer to absolution. She is thinking about that illuminating idea, thinking this: “Nobody will ever be able to reproach me for anything.” They are silent. I stand motionless, observing their silence, which is occasionally broken by affirmative-sounding monosyllables.

  Somebody has told them, “Always say yes.”

  The monarchs are presiding over the official lunch to celebrate the awarding of the Cervantes Prize to an elderly writer named Juan Goytisolo, a genius who has written brilliant books, the best books of his generation, books written in Spanish. He is, therefore, a Spanish writer. It’s not actually self-evident to note his nationality. Spain is a country perpetually on the verge of saying no—that’s why Doña Letizia has been instructed to always, if she can, say yes.

  It is April 23, 2015, a spring morning in Madrid, with an outside temperature of sixty degrees. The guests gather in circles to chat with some measure of enjoyment; the conversations are polite, relaxed. They are also reserved. All of the guests know they are part of a common framework, a family photo, a sociological reality that could be labeled “Spanish culture, literary sphere, in the year 2015.”

  A photo at which time can now hurl the merciless cavalry of the dead. I think of myself, right this moment, as the man with the necktie whose knot was tied by another man. It’s like a courtly sobriquet from a chivalric novel: he whose necktie was knotted by another man.

  Relatively easily, I join several circles; I even move from one circle to another and greet illustrious writers with courteous affability. I feel sophisticated in my suit. Even though fear prevails deep down in my psyche.

  I am afraid. I’m afraid of power and the state, I’m afraid of the king—I can’t help it.

  There is fear everywhere. Even in those who seemingly have nothing to fear, such as Their Majesties the king and queen of Spain, there may also be fear. In other guests, in frequent guests, fear may have been displaced by habit and routine.

  Those veteran guests seem to be in their element. There is an obvious recent development: Juan Carlos I is no longer king; his son is. Still, the protocols remain identical.

  On the inside, I become someone else, and I give myself a nickname: the man with the fake necktie.

  I see myself, ultimately, as someone else.

  The specter emerges. I am now the specter.

  The man with the fake necktie is a rookie—it’s his first time eating with the king and queen.

  He’s afraid he won’t be up to the demands of protocol. Nor is he part of the elite hierarchy of Spanish literature. He toils in a middlingly obscure mi
ddle class. He thinks now about that middle class, about the kind of writer who reeks as swiftly of failure as he once did of “This kid is good,” except this kid is now over fifty. But it doesn’t matter, because everybody, across the entire globe, is headed toward places where hierarchies are fickle and wretched and disintegrating, and stink of old age, where in the end nothing means anything anymore, and that’s new.

  Hierarchies are breaking down. The ancien régime is breaking down. History, like water, flows on where you least expect it.

  Things and people are ceasing to have a clear meaning, and that is subversive, liberating.

  Many of those present are over fifty, even over sixty and seventy. The average age at this banquet may be about sixty-five. Indeed, the youngest people here are the king and queen of Spain.

  Once upon a time, royal protocols sagely laid out the method by which two people can greet more than a hundred people, or two hundred, in an orderly and coherent manner. It was a revolutionary, democratic notion: nobody should go without being acknowledged.

  All guests should be greeted by the hosts.

  It seems like a masterly idea.

  An idea that is itself a masterpiece.

  So the king and queen of Spain settle in an adjoining room, at an unexpected angle. They look like they’re coming out of the dark or descending from heaven. All the guests are going to have their photos taken with the king and queen; they will each have exactly six seconds of visibility in their audience with royalty.

  There dawns on the man with the tie knotted to his vulgar neck a method for creating historical unease. He occasionally gets ideas that are above his social station. It’s an uneven distribution of genius, a phenomenon that history indulges in from time to time—when people with irrelevant ancestors conceive some relevant thought.