Bad Light (10 page)

Things being as they were, and with the growing sense that everything around me was coming apart at the seams, I headed off to visit my mother at the old folks’ home in a bid to cross at least one item off the burgeoning list of minor regrets and unfinished business that has a habit of getting in the way of thought and even life when it grows too long for comfort. I’m not always able to visit my mother, and sometimes the simple fact is that I cannot summon up the energy. I’m not sure the extent to which she knows who I am any more, but there’s no doubt she’s pleased to see me. At least she looks proud whenever it’s her name, and not that of any of her fellow residents, that blares out on the megaphone that announces visitors from the scores of loudspeakers distributed along the hallways, and everyone, residents and nurses alike, the crazy and the sound of mind, busies themselves trying to find her in the rooms or among the hedges lining the garden paths. She feels important, which is why she always makes her appearance beaming triumphantly at all of her fellow inmates to whom no one has paid a visit that day as she makes her way to the room in which we sit. She proudly shows off her box of chocolates, her bottle of perfume. She shows me off. Some of the women remark on how tall I am, what a fine specimen I am. They ask my mother how many children I have, if I’m the eldest, if I live in Barcelona, questions she cannot answer. She answers yes to each one in turn and laughs happily, clinging tightly to my arm. For that alone, my visit is worthwhile.

I sit there watching her. It’s true, as everyone says, that we look alike, but even more so when she’s frightened. Then, we’re all but identical. The large bags under her eyes are the same ones I contemplate every morning in the bathroom mirror, a little more wrinkled, perhaps, but just as deep. It’s like a reflection of my own ruin, only grotesquely amplified, a bit like a verdict that this whole debacle of mine could be a lot worse than it already is and that the particular process of demolition in which I’m immersed continues unabated. It’s enough to let time go unhurriedly about its business. For the moment, I recognize the anguish in which she loses herself as my own, I can sometimes feel myself tumbling down slopes that are in her head, into wells that belong to her. With her walking stick, she roams these corridors that always smell of stale soup and used diapers, and she does so with my own weariness, much as I stagger through my days under the weight of hers on the other side of the ivy-covered walls. In my bones I can feel the weight she bears on her back, and I even sometimes walk on her aching legs, almost always rummaging around, just like her, among sunken memories. I think of my current confused state and these nerves writhing on top of one another within me as the small outpost of a dementia that belongs to her.

I know she’s going to tell me the same old stories. There hasn’t been much variety to her repertoire lately. Things from way back, from a time long since passed. I take a deep breath and resolve to be patient and to try and listen to those tales as if I were hearing them for the very first time. Sometimes she recounts them as a memory, and sometimes it’s as if we were still in the midst of that time. She takes me back to the streets of her childhood, which smell of wood and soapy water trickling down the gutters along the edge of the sidewalk, and once again tells me how she and her friends, in the games they played back then, liked to sneak into the houses in which a wake was being held, spurred on by a morbid dare. In the entrance to every house there stood a table covered in a black cloth, a book of condolences, and a silver platter bearing cards, one corner folded over as a token of mourning. The girls would climb the stairs, trembling on the inside, acting prim and proper and truly downcast until they reached the right floor. The door was always ajar. They might grab a cookie or two as they passed through the room, or a handful of sugar cubes, and as soon as they’d seen the body, they would sprint down the stairs, half-hysterical, doubled up with a laughter that was anything but light-hearted. They would never let a chance pass them by, and whenever they spotted the macabre signs in a doorway, a new game would begin in which none of the girls could be left behind. The game was cut short once and for all one winter afternoon on the Calle Padre Huesca when they discovered that the dead body lying on the bed belonged to a child their age. She still describes the scene as if she were seeing it now, the boy’s face so pale it was almost white, how dry his lips looked, the short trousers, the rosary beads in the clutches of stiff fingers with the cleanest, most neatly trimmed fingernails she had seen in her life. I think that what she’s getting at when she tells me all this is that, quite simply, one day her childhood came to an end for good, and it might well have been precisely that day.

One thing then leads to another, and she inevitably moves on to another of her old favorites: the Easter procession the year in which one of her classmates headed out with the brotherhood performing the Seven Words while brandishing a banner bearing the words
I’m thirsty
, and how that same classmate, just days later, drowned in the river, and what folks said, wavering between terror and jest, and the fear of laughter, and sorrow, for back then the incense that filled the air was still a smoke that arrived dense from the world of shadows, sent forth by a wrathful God who, though it might appear otherwise, took note of everything and sometime forgave and sometimes did not. This was during the same period when she was banned from taking to the streets to join the Procession of the Holy Burial during Holy Week, owing to the public disorder caused by the scenes of terror and the bloodcurdling screams from the balconies, the uproar and the charging throngs on the sidewalks, born of the popular belief, very firmly entrenched, that wherever the sinister float came to a halt to let the bearers catch their breath, someone would die that year. And she described to me the blade of that rusty scythe in the clutches of the skeleton vanquished and trampled underfoot by the angel, the scent of melted wax, the sparks that flew when the Romans’ spears scraped against the cobbled streets, the wailing of children, and the bare feet of the hooded penitents, their eyes deep behind the slits in the cloth like hidden, menacing animals, their black leather gloves, their bloodied ankles, the chains they dragged behind them as they walked. And the fear. Though she spoke to me of a time in which I had yet to be born, it was as if she were refreshing memories of my own, for the fact is I, too, have seen all of that, except for the famed Procession of the Angel of Death. My mother would not have us miss the Easter processions for anything in the world, which leads me to think that she considered that all that cowering, that fear she felt as a young girl perched on the edge of the Calle del Coso with her little bag of lupini beans, would in the long run do her children some good, almost as if she wished to offer us her very own nightmares, something about which she could later console us, thus making us more alike, bringing us closer together and causing us to need, just as she had begun to some years previously, to leave the light on in the hallway in order to be able to sleep. What she was looking to give us was a certain idea of intensity, much as when she told us bedtime tales of terror and abandonment. She was equipping us with all of the darkness we were unable to see with our own eyes and which, by contrast, made us appreciate all the more the daylight, the everyday household objects, the hours of tedium, the bowls of soup, the homework notebooks, the scent of soap on sheets and pillows, her own scent as she leant over our beds, just before switching off the light, to wish us goodnight, one by one, and sketch an invisible cross with her thumb on our foreheads. One cannot truly love a safe haven unless there are dark forces lurking outside, a world brimful of orphanages and tombs and beasts, of children who have gone hungry that night and a wind that howls as it whips around the corners in neighborhoods in which we had never set foot.

I listen to my mother talk, seated in front of her coffee, with those girlish gestures and her gaze lost in the distance, and I picture her mind as existing within a ravaged landscape—fallen trees, dried-up ravines, houses torn down. I think of those twin panoramic images on the news showing the same view of a city before and after an air raid: on the left, a cathedral tower topped with bells and storks, and on the right, the heap of rubble that lay in its place; on one side, the sturdy bridges over some river anywhere on the map of Europe, and on the other, the solitary pillars protruding from the water’s surface like concrete stumps. Then I turn my gaze on myself and wonder if, after a certain age, the mind can be anything other than a ravaged stage—raised floorboards, nails jutting out here, there, and everywhere, stripped wires, spotlights that shine no more—and if there is nothing for it but to place there, half in darkness, everything we see or that happens to us, so that it might blend in with our existing memories, the desolation of before, the ancient fear. Once you have a few years on the clock, this new form of a priori sensitivity to the outside world emerges sooner or later—the broken stage of a twobit theater in ruins on which the world unfolds, now moth-eaten, with no show to premiere, poorly lit. That’s where everything must go, good and bad. Outside those borders lies the dark realm of the noumenon where, owing to its sheer vastness, there is room for nothing, nothing happens, and nothing has a name.

She asks me to take her to the cemetery. She makes the same request of everyone who happens by, including visiting strangers, the waitresses from the cafeteria, and the other residents. Without much success, but this does nothing to stop her trying. I lie to her once again: I don’t have my car, I took it to the garage to be fixed, I had to come to see her by bus. She tells me that when no one is looking, neither the old women nor the nurses, she pulls up flowers from the garden to leave on my father’s grave, but they always wilt, hidden at the back of the closet, since no one wants to take her to the cemetery.

It dawns on me that everything we’ve discussed has to do with death. Dead children laid out for viewings on postwar afternoons, drownings in the river, Dad, people fleeing amid screams from the shadow cast by a plaster angel. When I take my leave, I make the sign of the cross on her forehead just as she used to when saying goodnight. She smiles.

All of a sudden she is a child loved by someone. I think that when she dies and her brains mingle with the earth, all that most belongs to her, that is most hers—in other words, the damp crevices of her brain, say, or the wells of anguish, the entire labyrinth of blood vessels through which her fears stumble without reason—will live on in me. I know such things will stay here. Easy now, Mom, I tell her, soon you’ll be dead but you’ll be able to breathe. And we’ll carry on sharing whatever is left, the nothingness of us both—the air I drink in up on the surface, its tedium and sorrow, will be for the two of us, as will the darkness in which you lie.

Deep down, though I had no wish to stop and think about it, I knew from the beginning that all that searching inside Jacobo’s apartment, rummaging through his things and his papers, listening to his records, and looking over and over again at the half dozen photos found at the back of a drawer, had less to do with efficiency than it did with poetry, and that these days the keys to untangling a person’s comings and goings, as not only investigators but also any child with his wits halfway about him will tell you, are in fact to be found on his computer. It is there, together with his cell phone records, that all traces remain.

When the police handed back those devices, the corresponding card was missing from Jacobo’s cell phone, now little more than an empty shell without any data to comb through other than the date and the time. His computer, however, appeared to have come to no harm and was largely untouched. I imagine they’d have kept ahold of a copy of the hard drive in order to search for any strange goings-on using his browser history, but the fact remains that they returned it in one piece, leaving me free to spend a good few hours snooping around in the folders and checking out the websites he had clicked on recently—plenty of Wikipedia, plenty of articles on art, literary blogs, and that sort of thing, but nothing that caught my eye in particular in terms of finding out if he had gotten himself mixed up in any funny business. He had not, in recent months at least, visited any hookup or marketplace sites. Nor did he frequent gambling sites. He didn’t even have online banking. Compared to my computer, not that I get much use out of it, you could say that his laptop was all but empty. Absolutely nothing of what he had saved on that appliance held any interest whatsoever, save, perhaps, for a few photos he had of a woman I had never seen before who had gleaming, golden thighs, the color of roast chicken. The photos were stored in a folder he’d named “N.” In one of them, she was striking a pose, squatting on her haunches as she buckled her sandals and smiled for the camera. In another she had her back fully turned as she whipped up something in the kitchen, while in the rest, all taken on the same day, judging from her clothes and hairstyle, she was facing the camera in various spots of what looked to be a neighborhood park like any other. In each one she appeared alone. Entirely domestic images, not cropped or retouched, and somewhat poorly framed. It did not look remotely as if they had been downloaded from anywhere or belonged to an actress or anything of the sort. One look at those photos was enough to know that something powerful had existed between that woman and my friend. It was one of those things you pick up on at a glance, in barely an instant, without anyone being able to put their finger on quite why. Something so powerful, moreover, that it could perfectly well be confused with a distant recollection of love, or worse besides, and which might explain why Jacobo had had no wish to talk about her to me, as he had spoken of so many others he had thought of as passing fancies, in order to shield her name from the onslaught of my fantasies.

I looked long and hard at that woman. She struck me as foreign in many ways. Foreign to the country, sure, but also to time, to morals, to the world of things and gray streets I had lately been calling home, to the point where it seemed almost inconceivable that the two of us were breathing the same air. I zoomed in as close as possible on the image. Looking at her eyes, I thought that I would like one day to see a sorrow for me reflected in them. I pictured her seated on my deathbed, taking care of me, raising a glass of water to my lips. For an instant, albeit a split, almost imperceptible second, I was glad that Jacobo was dead.

I had to do whatever it took to get my hands on the password to Jacobo’s email account. If there was anything that might shed a little light on things, it would no doubt be found there. For starters, I tried out one he had typed in my presence some time previously and that I had unwittingly committed to memory, but that one no longer worked. I knew, for he had told me himself, that because of his forgetfulness, he liked to have a short password he could use for everything. Among the dozens of items lying on his desk, all stained with ash, I spotted a yellow Post-it note, its adhesive strip now faded, on which he had written the word
barcarole
in his small handwriting. As soon as I set eyes on that random word written down there, without looking as if it belonged to a medicine or anything like that, and uncapitalized, I knew I had just found what I was looking for.

In the folders containing sent and received messages, it turned out that N stood for Nadia. They had not exchanged many letters. Right from the start, they must have switched to the telephone as their standard means of communication, perhaps so as not to leave behind any traces of the sort I was sniffing after. In any event, it was clear that, quite unlike Jacobo, Nadia was a woman of few words and did not feel entirely at home setting her thoughts down in writing. The first message, from him to her, dated back some eight months previously:

Nadia, you’ll have noticed the clumsy, last-minute way in which I asked you for your telephone number and this email address to which I’m writing, and the foolishness of my excuse will not have escaped your attention: we both know that there are a thousand different ways to get your hands on the books I agreed to lend you. They’re everywhere. Everyone has a copy. Perhaps they’ve even formed part of your collection for years now, and at this very moment you can see their spines from your chair as you read my email, and it may also be, in fact it would not surprise me in the slightest, that it is I who does not have them, or indeed ever did. I couldn’t take my eyes off you at dinner, but you know that already. At this point I can only hope that our fellow diners, your friends in particular, didn’t pick up on the fact that I didn’t give a damn about the others or their conversations. No doubt you noticed that I’ve been around the block a few times. I’m a guy with a past, as the saying goes, not that that makes it any easier to write a letter of this sort. For this is a letter, is it not? Much as it might reach you across mysterious airwaves and through all that jumble of cables and sockets. I always tremble when faced with love. Do not be afraid of the word I use. It’s for want of a better one with which to understand each other, though it might not be altogether inappropriate when I think of how you’ve occupied my thoughts since the night of the dinner, of how I made my way home whistling in happiness and terror at one and the same time. But fear not, though I might now offer you my entire life, without a thought for how appealing or not such a gift might be, there’s no denying that it doesn’t amount to much in terms of quantity. At a certain age, to offer one’s life barely amounts to a thing. Let me rephrase, if I may: I always tremble when faced with a story that is beginning, as much when I was a schoolboy knee-high to a grasshopper as tonight while writing to you, now old, with hairy knuckles and glasses without which I’d barely be able to see beyond the tip of my nose, operated on a thousand times, half-rotten on the inside. I tremble above all when, as now, the matter is at that stage in which, on paper at least, it could still be all or nothing, when I might end up handing you what remains of my desire and my time from here on in until the curtail falls, or I might never see you again. Without, naturally, turning my nose up at any of the marvelous alternatives that lie somewhere in between, which involve you dropping by my apartment once in a while to listen to music, just like that, lying down on this very couch on which your presence is now missed, letting me undress you. But the fact is that there is a coin in midair, it’s been falling in slow motion for days now, and that’s what makes me tremble and implore who knows what gods not to let it fall on the side that condemns me to simply dreaming of you
.

I have seen Jacobo put a great deal more effort into letters of this sort. There was a time when he’d show me almost every one, and there’s no doubt that, in comparison, this one was a slovenly, half-hearted attempt. It struck me as odd that he made no mention of the inner world that could sometimes be glimpsed in her gaze, a golden oldie if ever there was one, or of how he believed he had caught sight in those stormy depths of the reasons he needed to carry on breathing, of the challenge of making up for a past brimful of hurt and of scheming. It took Nadia four days to reply, and she finally did so in a handful of lines that I reread several times between glances at her photo.

You’re crazy, completely crazy. The thing is, I’ve been giving this whole matter some thought for a few days now, and I think I want to see you. Placing the dreadful fear I feel and that you cannot understand right now on one side of the scales, and, on the other side, the disgust I feel toward my life the way it is right now, I think I do, I want to see you. But do me a favor and forget all of that bullshit about love right now, that much I can tell you. I think we could be happy with just paying lip service to it, rolling around nearby it. Don’t even think about calling me. Let me call you. I’ll call when I can find the words. More words, I mean, apart from these ones that are just to tell you to wait for me
.

The following messages came in the wake of a first meeting between the two of them that must have been a beautiful, heady encounter. I realize we are talking about a perfect stranger. I realize we are talking about a friend who had died just days before, his body still warm in its grave, as the saying goes. It matters little; though there’s no accounting for any of this, what I felt was a lot like jealousy.