No Holds Barred: On Manuel Vilas

The poems of Spanish writer Manuel Vilas invite you into his hotel room. You sit on the edge of his bed while he tells you about his drinking, his despondency, his sexual escapades. He tells you what he’s been pondering lately: tourism, Catholicism, Nietzsche, money, Spain, favorite song lyrics, his car, his dog, his brand-new switchblade. He is by turns tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic, comical, rueful, outrageous, ironic, melancholic, and soul-baring. And you realize something: you want to hear it all.

Thanks to British poet and translator James Womack, you can. With an ear finely tuned to colloquial speech and a knack for deadpan delivery, Womack gives Vilas’ poems a thoroughly convincing new life in English.

The poem “Storm in the Air” begins with a series of statements that summarize a decade in the speaker’s life. Guessing at the truth or fiction of particular statements in relation to an “I” that could be the poet seems irrelevant: the important thing is going along for the ride:

For ten years I have slept by day and by night.
I have come to the coast  to try to wake up. I was left alone;
my wife left me for another woman, and I knew nothing until it happened;
I was left with my dog Trajan, another sleeping beauty;
as for my uncle’s inheritance, I spent Uncle Valero’s
money on hookers: Valencian, Catalan,
Andalucian, Basque, and African, and then I started on the French,
the Chinese, the Peruvian…

What starts off sounding like a common enough account of a couple splitting up quickly becomes extravagant with the speaker’s account of sleeping with hookers from all over Spain as well as other countries and continents. At this point he undergoes a further transformation. Likening himself to a traveling storm, he is suddenly, magically, capable of  “throwing off water and black clouds, rain and hail,/destroying harvests/and soaking the lovers who sit kissing in parks or suburban streets.” It’s a fitting revenge for his own romantic disillusionment.

The poem’s third stanza continues to summarize, but a more reflective tone replaces the speaker’s earlier bravado:

I have been the most innocent, the best travelled, the quietest.
I used to take photos of the hotel rooms where I slept:
the bed, the desk, the window, the rug, the shower…
and then I stopped: I had so many photos I didn’t know
where to keep them—a strongbox in the Swiss Embassy, perhaps.
I asked for a key to my room, 224, and a concierge treated me with
great ceremony; I went up in the lift, opened the door
and was alone: I put on the TV and spent the night watching
French TV, deeply alone,
and then a TV movie, and then a proper film, The Accidental Tourist.
No one knew where I was; by now nobody knew me at all.

That “strongbox in the Swiss Embassy, perhaps” shows the speaker’s inventiveness in dreaming up the perfect repository for his hotel photos, but the lines that follow reveal the loneliness beneath the sense of play, and the poem ends with,

I sought refuge in museums, and spent whole hours
in front of paintings by Delacroix, or else went to graveyards
where last century’s poets were buried,
and I always went alone, always wishing to be more alone,
dreaming of a harder loneliness, a greater loneliness,
and an impossible perfection.

Men were ungrateful to me,
and I guess women were as well.

“Storm in the Air” comes from the volume Heaven, published by Carcanet in 2020. Heaven comprises two books of Vilas’ poetry in translation: Heaven itself, which appeared in the original Spanish in 2000, and Heat, which appeared in 2008. It’s worth noting that Heaven bears an epigraph from the poet Antonio Machado (b. 1875, d. 1939) : “Tus ojos me recuerdan/las noches de verano.” (Your eyes remind me/of summer nights). Heat has a rock ‘n’ roll epigraph in English, attributed to The Who: “I ain’t gone away yet.” The two epigraphs capture, in a few strokes, both the lyricism and the humorous endurance that the poems embody.

The poems in Heaven often portray religious reflexes in a material world. I imagine that it would be impossible to have grown up in Spain, at that time a Catholic country under a fascist regime, without seeing both the sacred and the profane—and the links between them—everywhere.

In Vilas’ poem “Rosaries, Flick-Knives” (“flick-knives” being a British version of the American English “switch-blades”), the sacred and the profane are like the warp and woof of one piece of cloth. The poem centers on travel in a particular year, a particular month:

I took a trip to Lourdes in France, in July ’98;
that radiant time, days of cold beer and wretched lovers
on the Paris highway.
                                    There are no casinos in Lourdes,
but there are a hundred hotels for the pilgrims who come to pray and beg,
like me, for a long life, bullish health, and for the Virgin
to make a mistake and allow the irreverent sinner
the cure of his soul, or his body, or of both at once,
together in their platonic marriage.

Lourdes is the mall of every temple, the place
where they sell rosaries, flick-knives, unhappy
souvenirs, blue virgins, two-way mirrors which pretend
to show the incarnation of the Holy Ghost—in classic
bad taste and with a mysticism proper to a Spanish
raffle—
cloaks, prayers, speeches, holy water and the whole range
of famous La main couronnée-brand knives,
as well as a horrible Tour de France bumper sticker.

The speaker is in Lourdes for something, perhaps just to see it, perhaps with another, deeper search in mind. What he finds there is a profane “mall” full of knick-knacks that aim for religious significance but really just pander to our material side, our need to shop, to possess. He buys a “cheap and jazzy rosary” and a knife. But shopping is not the whole story. Later in the poem, he describes the believers who gather in Lourdes, hoping for a miracle:

And at seven on the dot the procession of wheelchairs:
Canadians, English, Italians, French, Poles, Russians;
a whole rich, thoughtful and crippled world, searching here
for the last fount of hope and fantasy.
Baseless hope is the true structure of our lives.

The speaker’s acknowledgment of “baseless hope” as a fundamental structure in human life causes a shift in perspective. Lourdes is what it is, and suddenly he seems open to its contradictions, finding absurdity but also a joyful abundance in the city’s merging of the material and the religious, the past and the present:

In my hotel room, with its view of the river of greenish water
that smells of incense—everything in Lourdes smells of incense,
of cruellest illness, of conservative romanticism,
of the nineteenth century, of the works of Chateaubriand,
of sacristies with their golden shadows,
of sin and ecstasy,
of plus-sized girdles designed specifically for nuns,
of sackcloth bras for the novices,
of sweaty cassocks, of friars’
sandals, of omelettes and boiled
cod,
of beds which when their sheets are turned back smell of death,
of all souls, of all saints—

Though we might laugh at those plus-sized girdles, sackcloth bras, and sweaty cassocks, “the cruelest illness” that led so many sufferers to Lourdes in hopes of a cure strikes a different note. Whatever the speaker’s doubts, and our own, we’ve accompanied him to a place too layered to shrug off. The lyricism of a phrase like the “sacristies with their golden shadows” is an important strand in Vilas’ poetry. It’s there in “The Last Swimmers,” which hearkens back to the Machado epigraph, celebrating both the gaze and the summer:

 These children are now become the last swimmers
of the August afternoon.
                                    Parents’ voices call them back
with a false severity. The last swimmers
want to enjoy the water just one more time,
in endless jubilation.

The August twilight loves these prepubescent swimmers,
the essence of summer, noble ragamuffins of fine weather
and innocent joy.

Swim on, jump,
keep on with your acrobatics,
until the sun no longer warms
the water and you are proud and cold.

The poem ends by focusing, in a prayer-like moment, on the sole last swimmer among the last swimmers:

Oh, serenity, grant this kid what you granted
every foolish man: zeal and few questions,
zeal and a rich body,
floating on a sketch drawn from life.

Directly following “The Last Swimmers” is a poem titled “Thirty-Six Years Old.” It also chooses a summer day as its setting, but this time, the speaker turns his attention to his own body’s aches and pains in order to glimpse his future:

The whole of life steps forward one morning at the end of July,
I am reading a book and at my side there’s a glass
of white wine, yesterday’s newspaper on the table,
and I’m listening to Lou Reed who is singing something like
what I am writing. My joints ache:
it must be the bloody mattress that is getting old and that I 
should change: Jesus, how much is a new mattress?
My back hurts, my eyes, my left foot;
when I tell my mother I’m a bitter old man she gets scared;
when I tell one of my made-up friends—
like Florencio, who appears in some of my novels—
that I’m a shriveled old mummy, he says no, I’m just on edge,
it’s my imagination, my thought getting hard payback
from my body…

The immediacy and clarity of these lines give the impression that the poet is telling us exactly what’s happening, exactly what he thinks—but elsewhere we do so at our own peril. The speaker’s claims must be taken with a giant portion of salt, as in the prose poem “Brotherhood,” from the volume’s 2008 collection, Heat:

I used to love Communist women swimmers because they won 
all the gold medals at the Olympic games and didn’t speak English
and lived in grey little flats and their cars were made out of wood. I
adored their swimming costumes, their bathing caps, the way they greeted
the Communist fatherland from the victor’s podium. I was mad about
the former Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. I adored
General Jaruzelski, his big old-fashioned spectacles.

Once again, I imagine being in a hotel room with the poet as he entertains and provokes, bent on getting a rise out of his listener. Another prose poem in Heat, “The Tree of Life,” is a send-up of cynicism and cruelty. The speaker spins out a fantasy that includes earning thirty million Euros a year and feeling happy when he thinks about “Spanish widows with their pensions of 400 Euros a month.” The poem continues,

I spend Christmas Eve in a Manhattan apartment: three hundred and eight-nine square metres not counting the balconies, those mysterious balconies under an indifferent moon. I give a party for elegant Jews and we talk about Faulkner and Dante. Then I throw one of these Jews through a window, from the ninetieth floor…
…
I’m never in Spain over the festive period: it’s too depressing. Although I do speak to the Spanish King on New Year’s Day. ‘You should declare yourself emperor as soon as possible, like our dear friend Hirohito: these people really don’t deserve anything else.’ I’m sad I can’t speak with Stalin anymore; I miss him so much.

Like audience members reacting to a standup comedian who revels in being outrageous, some readers will buy into such moments. Others might find themselves bristling, insulted. In any case, the intent to shock is clear. Less clear to me is the tone in certain portions of the prose poem, “The Kids Are Alright,” a nod to The Who’s album of that name. I find myself stumbling over characterizations that veer toward stereotype, as if everyone in a group matched everyone else of the same background:

…I myself am innocence. I’m lucky. My kids are lucky. My kids are blessed.
My black kids are alright, they eat and make love every day and don’t vote
every four years because they don’t believe in it. They breathe and live and die 
and that’s all.

Later in the poem, after a riff based on another reference to the lyrics in “The Kids Are Alright,” there’s this:

My Chinese kids are alright too. They work hard and smile for no reason. They ride their red motorbikes all round the city, with egg-fried rice in plastic pots. They earn nothing, a pittance, but they’re alright because life is like that. Life is good. Life was always OK. I like those motorbikes, all the noise they make.

At the core of the speaker’s approval of the black kids and the Chinese kids seems to be the idea that others can be easily summed up, at least in the context of a rock ‘n’ roll-inspired poem.

Vilas is not a poet who shies away from controversial topics—or any topics—as even a quick scan of the titles in Heat makes clear, with poems such as “Cocaine,” “AIDS,” “Blood Alcohol,” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” this last set in Iraq in April of 2003. The irresistible energy in so many of his poems carries the reader along, as does his willingness to hold a mirror to himself, or to a third-person persona called Manuel Vilas. His poem “Mazda 6” begins with that staple of the well-known writer’s life, a visit to a high school:

Manuel Vilas went out of his house one morning.
He was expected at a high school somewhere in Zaragoza.
He was going to speak
to the students, who had all read his poems.
A high school on the outskirts of town, as it always was.

…

A girl asked him why there was so much sex in his poems.

A boy asked him who the protagonist of his poems was.

Another girl asked him why he wrote about New York in his poems.

Another boy asked him why he wrote about money in his poems.

Manuel Vilas looked at these boys and girls with a fascination worthy
of the first microsecond after the creation of the earth,
the creation of the sky and the wind.

These are my children, he thought, the world is theirs, and so is
                        blood, the oceans, the moon, all the sand on all the beaches, the
                         boats, the secret trees, the dance-halls and dark rooms, all
                         the beds and all the wicked flowers.

This passage of the poem is strangely moving. Vilas demands no piety, either from himself or from us, but as he looks out at the students, the younger generation, he is overtaken by a feeling of wonder at how the world creates itself anew.

A state of wonder can open us up. So, too, can witnessing another’s vulnerability. In Vilas’ first-person poem “The Crematorium,” we follow a son who has gone to collect his father’s ashes. He manages to insult the crematorium worker, who says, more than once, “Take your father’s ashes and get out of here.” The poem ends with lines that show both irreverence and reverence. The son calls his father joke-insult names even as he intensely experiences the loss of him:

I am so alone now, Dad.
Dad, what am I going to do now.
If I can’t see you again I can’t see anything.
Where are you, are you with the Lord?
I am so alone here, here on earth.
I am so alone, Dad.
Don’t make me laugh, you dickhead.
Oh, you son of a bitch, you’ve been with me,
wherever I was, without leaving the flames.
I’ve travelled a lot this year, a huge amount.
In all the cities of the earth, in its memorable hotels,
in its dirty and unmemorable hotels as well,
in all the streets, the boats and the planes,
in my laughter, you were there, as round
as an eternal memory, ecumenical and luminous,
round as mercy, compassion and joy,
round as the sun and the moon,
round as glory, as power, round as life. 

Palpable loneliness is followed by the presence of “eternal memory, ecumenical and luminous” and “round as life”: I can think of no better reason for reading the inventive, wide-ranging, desolate, and celebratory poetry of Manuel Vilas.