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  Or maybe that day your parents flipped their lids.

  Or maybe it was one of your grandparents who took care of your baptism, dear Cauliflower. And decided to name you Iván for some ludicrous and insignificant reason.

  Cauliflower took the reason for his name to the grave.

  Hey, Cauliflower, here’s something funny for you: the guy who taught you Spanish in 1991 later ended up sitting near—though not too near—the king of Spain. What do you think of that, Cauliflower? Not that it’s important, since nothing’s important when you are dead and were unlucky when you were alive.

  It isn’t important, but it is funny.

  It’s funny, and I figured it would make you laugh.

  Because to a certain extent you were a victim of an entire historical ordering of society, the construction of hierarchies, the confirmation that in fact biological determinism does exist, and I was the official bearer of Spanish state news, I was the delivery man, the notary. That’s why somebody placed me near the king many years later. It’s as if everything ended up making a sort of sense, if a terrible one.

  Hey, Cauliflower, your bones will have been buried in the common grave by now. I think it’s been five years, and I don’t think your parents, if they’re still alive, would pay for five more.

  Hey, Cauliflower, that Christmas of ’91 I told my father about you. My father took a liking to you. I described what you were like. He was curious about you. My father was a magnet for the unfortunates of this world. I remember how my father laughed about that time you got nabbed at El Corte Inglés and gave your friend’s name. It was my first serious job, and my father liked for me to tell him things. Cauliflower, you were in my father’s thoughts. You know something, Cauliflower? My father in Barbastro was beloved of the ill, the developmentally delayed, the poor, the mad, the wretched. He was a magnet for misery. Where did that rare gift of his come from? It was a gift that arose from the depths of the earth that saw him be born; it was from there, from that land, from the Somontano. My father was a rare bird—why were people always going up and talking to him? I think it was because my father was profoundly good.

  His goodness was legendary.

  “Tell me more about Cauliflower. What a kid,” my father said on Christmas Eve 1991, sitting before a chicken my mother had stewed.

  My father loved you, Cauliflower.

  I didn’t.

  I didn’t back then, Cauliflower, but now I do. Because your eyes, which I can picture right this moment, were good, and bad luck should never keep us from gazing up at the sky, giving thanks for having contemplated the sighs of all the men chained in the air.

  14

  I remember the year 1983, in August. Two friends and I traveled to the city of Zaragoza to look for a student apartment. I remember the apartments we were shown.

  I think the apartments were between twenty and twenty-five thousand pesetas a month. We were looking for one with three bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. There were also some that cost eighteen thousand, even fifteen, but farther out from the city center.

  An orgy of cheap apartments sprawled before me.

  We were three broke students with our scholarship funding in hand. We were good guys. Maybe the three of us were ugly. Maybe me not so much. All three of us were full of exuberant expectation about the future.

  We rented one that cost twenty-eight thousand pesetas. It was outside our budget, but we liked it, it was right downtown. It was on a street called Pamplona Escudero, really close to the university, close to everything. It was five minutes from the university.

  I later learned that that gentleman, Mr. Pamplona Escudero, had been the mayor of the city, and I’m sure he enjoyed being mayor enormously. I wondered what my mother would think about the apartment, whether she’d approve. I’m sure she wouldn’t have liked it. My mother rarely liked other people’s homes. I thought my mother wouldn’t understand what I was doing in that apartment, why I had to live in a place like that.

  It was 1983 and Guardia Civil officers were dying in Spain every day. A country where people were always dying. But having your own apartment was a reason for joy, and right now I’m dusting off all the reasons for joy I’ve had in my life.

  I was afraid of that apartment, of that city. Fear, always fear, like a plague upon me. Fear that seeks a bride in your brain, and if it doesn’t find one, it’ll make one for itself; and in the end fear is wedded to despair, which is a female spirit built on deterioration and madness. And that’s another fundamental part of who I am: all my life I’ve been dogged by the fear of going mad, fear of not being able to reason through the things that were happening to me, fear of being swept away by chaos. My mother was just like me, and my mother exasperated my father and my father would fly off the handle at my mother and I am heir to the throne of sound and fury, which is simply the desire to break things—to shatter windows, rip shirts, smash plates, break doors, kick furniture, and finally hurl yourself into the void.

  God, how I love the despairing. They’re the best.

  15

  My mother used to see the hand of the devil in everyday adversity. She often said, “The devil’s in this house,” when she was looking for something and couldn’t find it. She’d end up yelling, “There’s no way the devil’s not in this house.” She’d look for something that was sitting right in front of her without seeing it. I’ve inherited the same kind of dementia. I search for things that are right in front of me—a book or a letter or a sweater or a knife or a towel or a pair of briefs or a bank statement—without seeing them. My mother was convinced the devil was hiding things from her, that the devil was responsible for all her little setbacks. She experienced those domestic travails with a lunatic intensity. And I am her now, and the devil is just a hereditary neuronal degeneration that affects the optic nerve and produces waves of suppressed or unsteady chemical connections, and the bacteria of psychosis is incubated in that electrical deterioration of the transmission of reality, and the organic shape of intention rots in a mass of structures that are separate from the social world and I become a museum of scarcity, of silence, of solitude, of suicide, of seclusion, and of suffering.

  For my mother and me, life had—has—no plot.

  Nothing was happening.

  16

  In the early 1980s, my father used to come to Zaragoza sometimes for work. We’d get together for dinner. He’d come with some friends of his, and I felt like an alien at those meals, didn’t know what to say. His friends were good people, but I didn’t want to spend time with them; I found them boring and distant. But the restaurants back then had charm. There was mystery. We always met up at old restaurants—I don’t know what it was about them, but they conveyed a pleasant image of Zaragoza. I later came to know the city well, but at the time I didn’t have a clue about Zaragoza. There was no Google back then. My father would call me on the neighbor’s phone and say, “I am your father.” Because we didn’t have a phone of our own in my student apartment.

  He always liked doing that, saying that: “I am your father,” in a theatrical voice. It was the only thing we had—that affirmation, universal in nature. And I do the same thing now with my boys when I call their cell phones: “I am your father.” That always unmans them. Nobody really knows what it means, but it’s unsettling, it’s powerful, it seems like a foundation, like a cloud that fills the sky of your consciousness with blood, like the origin of the world. And my father used to tell me where to come meet him. He’d be eating with his friends; we’d eat well. We once ate at a restaurant on Avenida de Madrid. I’d never been there. I walked in and there was my father, along with the then mayor of Barbastro and another guy. The three of them looked happy.

  They were smoking cigars and drinking carajillos. Laughing. Telling jokes. They’d had a good meal. Three happy men, sons of the same town, similar in age, children of the same life experience, product of the same streets, frui
t of the same tree—and so they emitted a fraternity that was ingrained. The three of them symbolized rootedness, and rootedness is what I have today. They were rooted in a town in Aragon’s highlands and in a particular way of being alive. And so they laughed and were happy, brimming with rootedness.

  I invited my father to see my apartment, but he didn’t come. My father never saw the places I lived in as a student. I don’t know where the hell he thought I lived. He never saw the beds where I slept during those years. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t push him. Maybe the need I now feel for my father to have seen the apartments I lived in back then is a present need, one I didn’t feel at the time. I didn’t tell him, for example, “Dad, I want you to see where I live.” Nor did he say, “I want to see your place.” Apparently we were made for each other—neither of us said anything.

  I make my father say it now: “I want to see your place, son.” I think he didn’t much care where I lived, but also, over time, he ended up not caring where he himself lived.

  He diminished the importance of things.

  My father was an artist of silence.

  Still, he brought me a robe. He gave me a bathrobe. When I took the robe to my apartment, I started crying. He hadn’t bought it, of course; my mother had. That navy blue cotton robe, thick for winter, embodied all of my mother’s affection. That robe was a symbol of rootedness. And yet I had to put that robe in a strange bedroom, in a hostile place.

  I cried.

  I tried to keep the robe in a spot where it wouldn’t physically touch anything in the room. Everything in that room was impure. I sat staring at the robe as if I were staring at absolute love, or a kingdom of love that was under threat.

  I knew that my mother and I were saying goodbye. A nonverbal goodbye, wordless. The time of our lives was splitting, starting to flow down different channels.

  We were moving apart.

  Never again will I feel that tenderness, and it doesn’t matter. I feel that now: that it doesn’t matter—and that is the greatness of life. There is no reason for weeping or condemnation. What bound me to my mother was and continues to be a mystery that I may finally manage to decode an instant before my death. Or perhaps not, as the monstrosity of dying may well be the only mystery.

  I’d like to stockpile that tenderness, the tenderness with which my mother helped me pack my suitcase when I was leaving Barbastro for Zaragoza back then, in the years 1980, 1981, 1982, the things that I put in the suitcase, the way she helped me with my clothes, how she packed food in glass jars, and then I stared at all of that and was overwhelmed by helplessness.

  In reality, all of this has to do with poverty. It was poverty—our own impoverishment—that made me shake with fear. And I ended up calling that fear tenderness.

  If we’d been rich, everything would have been better, and that’s true of everything.

  If my parents had had money, things would have gone better for me. But they had nothing, absolutely nothing. Admitting to poverty in Spain seems to be an immoral act, reprehensible, an affront. And yet poor is what almost all of us were.

  We were poor, but of the picturesque variety.

  17

  I was born there, in a Spanish town called Barbastro in 1962, or so I’ve been told. It must have been a great year, no question, though I harbor serious doubts as to whether I was actually born in 1962. It’s inevitable to have doubts about your birth date: it is the first inherited truth, not seen or felt or confirmed. You have to have faith that people are telling you the truth, that the numbers composing that date mean something.

  You did not witness your birth. You may have witnessed other things: Your wedding, if you got married. The births of your children too. But you will not witness your death.

  You won’t witness either your birth or your death.

  I’ve doubted my date of birth many times; maybe that doubt comes from my sense of the origin of my bodily and spiritual makeup, or from my sense of the way my body has collided with time, and that collision must have a date. In reality, a date is a name. The date is the name of that collision.

  Everybody should doubt their birthday. The date contains no lived truth, it idiotically defines you, and you tend to grant it an importance generated not from your own intention but from social pacts that predate you. Pacts that were sealed while you weren’t yet in the world or were in it without yet being born, without having collided.

  I could be the victim of a mistake; my mother had a terrible memory. I remember very little about the 1960s. My first memories are from the 1970s, except for one, which must have taken place in 1966. It’s the memory of my mother pregnant with my brother. It’s suffused with a sense of unreality, not a faithful recollection. We’re in the kitchen and my mother is sitting in a chair, and she’s dressed in this almost ethereal white, and she tells me, “Your brother is in here,” and points to her belly, and she guides my hand to her belly, and I’m startled, and then I see a light that’s streaming in through the utility room off the kitchen. A light that comes from the stars. Looking out the window, I see an immensity full of sweetness. This is my first memory and I don’t understand it. I don’t know what it is. It’s a memory I’m always going back to, and what I go back to is a feeling of peace. When I’m about to die, I bet I’ll feel that again.

  18

  I’m in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, and behind me I sense somebody tracking my footsteps. It’s the remains of my dead father and mother; they cling to my loneliness, entwine themselves in my hair, their tiny ghostly molecules follow the movements of my hands and feet around the bathroom; they hold the toothbrush beside me, watch me brush my teeth, read the label on the toothpaste tube, examine the towel, touch my reflection in the mirror. When I get into bed, they linger beside me, and when I turn out the light I hear them murmuring. It’s not always them, sometimes they come with sick ghosts, dirty ghosts, horrible ghosts, furious ghosts, malign or benevolent ghosts, it makes no difference—being a ghost transcends good and evil.

  Ghosts of the history of Spain, which is also a ghost.

  They stroke my hair as I sleep.

  19

  Though my parents no longer exist, I exist, and I’ll be heading out in five minutes. I often repeat this verbal gem to myself: “I’ll be heading out in five minutes.” It’s ambiguous; those five minutes stand in for a quantity of time that only I know. They could be five decades or five thousand years or, in fact, five minutes—or even five seconds. It’s as if I were announcing my will to die whenever I choose. Since I don’t care about dying, I can seize death right now or maybe fifty years from now: I’m the master of the time I have left. It ends up being a way of playing around with something that shouldn’t be played with, but what else can you do with death, with something that is devoid of content and is the end of everything? And so people who are approaching death begin to incorporate it into their games, into their thoughts; they end up giving it meaning, and it doesn’t mean anything—the idea of peace, of rest, may be the greatest fortune I’ve had. Everybody wants to rest. Everybody needs sleep. What people who are going to die worry about are those who will be left behind: doing them the least harm possible, leaving everything in order for them. Making sure everything is in order for their children and then departing, taking off. If you leave everything in order for your children, you serenely fade away—that’s what it means to die at peace.

  20

  I’m afraid of old people. They are what I will one day be.

  I’ll be just another zombie in a random room in the geriatric ward of a hospital that has no name, just a number. Hospital number 7, for example. Yes, I think about aging a lot now, about how I’ll no longer have value in and of myself and will be at the mercy of the rage or charity of some caretaker whose entire life will be visible to me in that moment. The gift of seeing lives—that’s something I’ve had.

  I studied with the Piarists up until seventh
grade. I went to Catholic school because it was the only one around. One day in 1971 a priest called to me. He wanted me to join the school choir. I was eight years old. His name was G. Yes, there are probably still people who remember him, but not many. I went into the classroom. The sun was beaming in through the windows. I remember the cassock. A cassock over a bulging paunch. All of those priests were fat. He spoke to me fondly. Francoism was full of fucked-up priests. He started stroking my hair. Then he started to press his hands into mine. I didn’t understand at all. I didn’t know what was happening.

  Thirty years later, I saw G.’s obituary in the town newspaper. He was dead. He used to smoke Ducados. I wasn’t happy he’d died, I was pensive. I don’t think he did it in the end, but I don’t remember. If anything rescued me, it was the sunlight pouring into that room—it illuminated that bastard’s actions and made him afraid. Maybe my brain erased everything. I’m not sure. I’m not sure how far it went. I don’t remember. I can’t remember. All I know is that I sometimes walk down a corridor and go into a classroom and there he is, wrapped in his cassock, and he smiles at me and the touches begin. I stare at the cassock, its garish blackness, its symbolic darkness—what does it mean to go around dressed like that? I stare at the cincture, unable to figure out its purpose; I associate it with a belt, but it’s not a belt, it doesn’t have a buckle or holes, it’s like a decoration, but what is it decorating, and why decorate something there—maybe it has something to do with Christmas, with the birth of the son of God. Am I the son of God and that’s why this man with decorations on his belly has called me in? My mind shatters, my memory screeches to a halt. I didn’t know what that was, whether it was good or bad. No child knows until some time has passed. I go back to that memory again and again, trying to figure out what happened, but there’s a blank. After the touches, there’s a blank.