Ordesa

Manuel Vilas

Description

'A book of deep reckoning' New York Times'Becomes a way of looking honestly at what mourning really feels like' GuardianA man in tumult returns to Ordesa, the small mountain town where he was born, and where his parents have recently died. He sits down to write. Newly sober, his career on the wane, his relationship with his own children strained, what he produces is a dizzying chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life's trials, failures and triumphs. He reckons with the ghosts of his parents, the pain of loss and, as the pages fill with words, he tries to piece together the bits of himself. What is a person without a family? What is a person when faced with memories alone?An autobiographical novel by a Spanish literary icon, written with the intimacy of a diary, Ordesa is a beautiful, redemptive meditation on identity, grief and the passing of time.

Sujets

• Spain
• Pyrenees
• Spain (groupe)

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786897336
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Manuel Vilas was born in Spain in 1962. He is an award-winning poet and novelist. Ordesa has sold over 100,000 copies in Spain and has gone on to become a phenomenon across Europe, being translated into fifteen languages. Ordesa is the first of his works to be translated into English and was the winner of the Prix Femina étranger 2019. He currently resides in Madrid. Andrea Rosenberg is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese. Her full-length translations include novels and graphic narratives by Tomás González, Inês Pedrosa, Aura Xilonen, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Paco Roca and Marcelo D’Salete. Two of her translations have won Eisner Awards, and she has been the recipient of awards and grants from the Fulbright Program, the American Literary Translators Association and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.

 
 
 
The paperback edition published in 2021 by Canongate Books First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Manuel Vilas, 2018
English translation copyright © Andrea Rosenberg, 2020
Originally published in 2018 in Spain by Alfaguara, an imprint of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, Barcelona
First published in the United States by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2020
Photographs courtesy of the author
Text design by Lucia Bernard
The right of Manuel Vilas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 734 3 eISBN 978 1 78689 733 6
Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto . . .
— VIOLETA PARRA
Contents
Ordesa
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
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15
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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 other 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 fina