Ordesa by Manuel Vilas

Author:Manuel Vilas [Vilas, Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Her look is full of suffering, of an internal malady akin to terror. In any case, the eyes of that woman prefigure my own and my mother’s. When this photo was taken, her husband had already committed suicide and her eldest son was dead. That’s why she’s terrified: she has no husband, has no firstborn. She thinks it’s her fault.

That woman saw one of her children die in a car accident that made her husband go mad and commit suicide, shooting himself with a hunting rifle in 1957. I’m not sure of the exact date, I’m just guessing. It could have been 1955 or 1951, I’m not sure. There were a lot of car accidents in the 1950s. I’ve reconstructed the facts the best I could because nobody talked and now they’re all dead. There’s no way to corroborate facts and dates; everybody has gone. It’s as if they’d told me, “Just make it all up, we’re out of here, do what you want with your past, it doesn’t matter, we’re no longer alive.”

My grandmother’s eyes contain centuries of Spanish peasantry, exhausted hands, the tang of sweat, stubbly beards, hellish summer heat, hot animal breath next to your mouth, priests saying mass, more priests saying mass, another seven hundred million priests saying mass. The great enemy of God in Spain was not the Communist Party but the Catholic Church.

Seven hundred million priests saying mass.

Her husband killed himself.

Her son died too, even earlier, and her eyes challenge the meaning of life, which is simply the meaning of the land, a nameless land, because only two cities in Spain have names and fame and prestige and wealth and success and honor and military might and economic power and universality: Madrid and Barcelona.

The other cities and towns were just abandoned hinterlands, empty places.

She, my unnamed grandmother (I’ll call her Cecilia, in honor of Saint Cecilia, named the patron saint of musicians by the sixteenth-century pope Gregory XIII), is the daughter of a forgotten land, the lands of the Somontano, and I can name those lands and those villages now because I went to university—which is to say, thanks to the dictator Francisco Franco Bahamonde, who laid the foundations for Cecilia’s grandchildren to learn to read and write, who laid the foundations of the Spanish middle class, who set Spain’s political modernization process back several decades and did so out of ignorance and stupidity.

I write because priests taught me to write.

Seven hundred million priests.

That is a great irony of the lives of the poor in Spain: I owe more to priests than I do to the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. Irony in Spain is ever a work of art.

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