Bad Light (12 page)

I can only think back on the true loves of my life in the dark, and only when I am alone and feel I have the strength. I can still be left shaken by the sound of a handful of women’s names. For the time being, I have no wish to name them, so as not to hear the sound my heart makes down there when, instead of ageing at its normal rate, it races headlong toward death. I know I do so in my dreams—say their names, that is—for I have sometimes woken myself up calling out to them. One of them sleeps naked in my head, a lifeless arm hanging limply in the air like Jacques-Louis David’s
Marat
; another, the one who would squat down to take snapshots of all of the cats in the neighborhood of Lavapies peeking out from the patios or sleeping on sawdust in bars, is sobbing, though neither of us will ever know why; and I can see another girl returning from the bookshop in Cuatro Caminos holding a copy of the
Diary of Anaïs Nin
and a recently shoplifted anthology by Alejandra Pizarnik. The rain is beating down in the street, and she has buried the books deep inside her handbag so as not to ruin them. I remember the scent of the raindrops in her hair and the inscription she wrote me in one of those books: “May your sadness shatter into a thousand pieces in the air like the dandelion on which a small boy has blown with all his might, like a swan shot down in mid-flight, like a Civil Guard.” Her room is filled with photos of female writers who took their own lives, tacked onto the wall with pushpins, and self-penned sketches showing Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven, Virginia Woolf flailing in the middle of the current, and Alfonsina Storni advancing, vacant and zombie-like, toward the center of an ocean filled with black waves rearing up. She would like to have been Max Ernst’s lover, but she stayed by my side, sometimes curled up in a ball at my feet and sometimes pulling on me in her flight to the center of the storms. She was anyone’s match drinking gin, and when she was tipsy she could sing Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” all the way through, falling into a lengthy silence when she was done, somewhere between exhaustion and oblivion. I always remember her with her bangs plastered against her sweaty brow. The neighbors were no fans of her early morning singing or the noise she made when she bumped into the furniture when she got up to vomit, not to mention her outrageous orgasms, making many a night a veritable war of pounding back and forth on the walls, with fists, with the sole of a shoe, to see who might give in first, until everything settled down more or less at the hour when the subway opened and the streets, still in darkness, began filling up with sleepwalkers making their way to offices and factories.

Life back then was on a knife’s edge between hell and warmth, anguished silence and cries of joy. Somehow we knew, no matter how fiercely tedium struck, that a well-chosen song or a bottle of something or other would always end up coming to our rescue. It was a matter of bearing witness to our own collapse without losing heart altogether, the paradox of having to kill ourselves in order to carry on living, like insects that feed off limbs ripped from their own bodies with their own teeth. Our wound was the show, and its condition, the highlight of the day, a sort of regular report giving an account of the state of the rot that had set in there in the gut, like a gangrene advancing like hordes on horseback, the liver swelling millimeter by millimeter as it turns to cardboard, the ever-stranger dreams in which the lizard in the sake bottle sometimes danced with the worms in the mescal bottle, the candles at the mercy of the night’s winds, infinity all set to be conquered, the valium, the tears, the transaminases.

I see myself lying on the bed in the morning, forcing myself to smoke a cigarette without succumbing to a coughing fit that will, in turn, make my stomach churn even more. A girl is sleeping with her head on my chest, her hair is dirty, it smells of smoke, that hair, and of cold ash. There is a nausea inside my chest that gives occasional signs of life. My nerves dance around that nausea like stripped wires, like anemone writhing around on raw flesh. The minute hand barely advances, as if hauling a great weight behind it, the world is a slow-motion blur, out of focus, upside down at times; though I cannot see it from my bed, I picture a blue earth and trees hanging from a sky filled all of a sudden with puddles. I try to think back to what happened the night before but soon realize that I can’t bear to find out. When memory returns, it does so like a monster emerging from the mist and skewering my shame with the tip of its spear. The mind starts rowing full tilt in the opposite direction, toward the void, trying to blend in with the nothingness, to empty itself of thoughts as far as possible, conjuring up snowy expanses free, if possible, of horizons or footprints, and boreal skies, and calm oceans. To not think, to remember nothing, to make sure the floodgates hold firm, to do whatever it takes rather than come to terms with the unbearable, the images from the night before that begin to stir and take shape, making their presence felt against my wishes. Like a dog defending a farmyard to the death, my nausea growls at the memories that little by little dare to show their faces. It imagines machine guns opening fire at random in every direction. It unleashes a round in my face at point-blank range, it dreams of wiping me off the face of the earth and from history, it fantasizes about snatching me from the minds of others. The water’s surface in the green plastic jug that lives on my bedside table is covered with dust and the odd hair of a cat or God knows who. I drink from that water. All of a sudden I find it fresh and appetizing, and for a moment it tastes of the life I lost, as leafy as the paths I walked straight past or left behind me, one that followed the course of the river, for example, leading to an abandoned windmill at the bottom of the Añisclo canyon, near a small meadow in which I would sit to wolf down spoonfuls of all the honey I spurned and even the very flowers I laughed at, now that the refrigerator is empty but for the smell of wine now drunk and these dry parsley leaves stuck to the plastic walls.

Sometimes, as the month neared its end, we’d steal food from the cat, spreading its Whiskas on slices of bread. But whenever we had a little money to spend, the neighborhood of Malasaña was ours for the taking. We’d always start out in Corripio, right across from the drugstore on the Calle Fuencarral, with Asturian chorizo pie and draft cider to help a few shots of neat absinthe slip down all the easier, before moving on to bottled beer in El Maragato, where we delighted in the foul tempers of the old couple who ran the place and who we knew would end up serving us Roquefort sandwiches on the house. Later, despite my protests (all my attempts to convince her to leave it be were to no avail), she’d insist on heading off in search of Leopoldo María Panero, with whom she had struck up something of a friendship one strange night on which it was I who ended up sleeping with him and one Alicia, the one who collected the corpse, according to the dedication in
Narciso
, and who stayed up till dawn, licking the poet’s toes the whole night through. If Leopoldo had been let out of the madhouse, he’d turn up sooner or later on one street or another. With his cohort of groupies and aspiring court jesters in tow, hoping some of his doomed-poet aura might rub off on them. He was always wandering around as if hoping to get his ass kicked, and on more than one occasion he got his wish in the end. I remember the floor in El Valle, covered in sawdust, mussel shells, and olive pits, and Leopoldo writhing around on that floor in his raincoat, unleashing an awful cackle straight out of a horror movie. He liked to urinate in the middle of the street, in every direction, spinning around, standing square in the center of the night beneath a witch’s moon, its dark side and visible side drenched in a beery sweat. His madness was legendary and beautiful. I remember his black corduroy pants, too, his long raincoat, his feet on the table, any table, occasionally knocking the glasses of rum and Coke to the floor while reciting unintelligible verses that spoke of ruins, of fly-eaten brains, and of the disaster that is living. He’d get in people’s faces on the slightest pretext, brandishing his fists at the drop of a hat and aping the poses boxers like to strike in the photos taken for the posters, accusing any waiter who dared take him to task for his behavior or throw him straight out of the bar of being a fascist, unaware as they were that he was the star of the disenchantment, the prince of the madcap night, the light shimmering at the bottom of all our wells.

I look back on that time as a tug-of-war between despair and ecstasy. It was at one and the same time yearning and regret, a banquet of intensity with its towers and its ruins, vomit and joy. Writing on napkins in bars, returning home with bloodied eyebrows, with my shirt in tatters, without knowing how or at what point it had happened. It was the almost daily police raids in and around the square, the vans filled with laughing, toothless whores, the early mornings at the precinct on the Calle Madera, and also the rush of knowing oneself to be alive while never ceasing to row in the opposite direction. I believe I once got laid in the very doorway on the Calle Espíritu Santo in which Enrique Urquijo’s dead body was found, I’d venture that I wrote the most beautiful and horrifying verses the world has ever known on scraps of paper I later lost, and I’d even swear that I was myself somehow beautiful, seated in the doorways of bars, missing the last subway home after lingering to listen to some street musicians before returning home on foot, my pockets empty, dizzy beneath the sky of two or three different neighborhoods, only to find a cat starving to death and a lukewarm bed that had a direct line to gaps in the memory down which I could fall.

And I cannot separate my idea of love from all that, from that lost state, and I identify it with the last-ditch, futile attempt of a fear to ally itself with another fear, as if the two could be one, and with permeable souls in place of that fortified citadel that cannot be breached no matter what side you’re on. Which is why love always has that air of chasing the impossible and is, by nature, tragic, or barely even exists. I can only conceive of it as a sort of shared bewilderment, two souls looking in the same direction, barely able to see a thing, without knowing where to turn, and transforming the world, behind the cobwebs that filter the gaze, into a labyrinth. It calls for two lost beings, two deviants who brush up against each other in the dark, then drift apart, before running into one another again. The interlocking hands must tremble in some way. Which explains Marta. Which explains the faltering steps that came later, the cocaine without restraint, the black seas, the ship in flames, and the wails in the night, the caresses that amounted to little more than our trembling hands, the bad trips, the messages of hate written in lipstick on the mirror, the broken glasses, the torn panties, the tracks left by fingernails on our backs, before, in the end, falling asleep in each other’s embrace like newborn puppies from the same litter, exhausted and skinny, scared stiff.

Which begs the question: Why did a handful of photos and a voice on the other end of the line bring back a world now long gone? Perhaps it helps that I got my hands on the photos under cover of night, vaulting over the barriers, looking where I ought not to look, in the spirit of a spy betraying his fatherland unbeknownst even to his own family, or a mother trying not to make a sound as she masturbates in front of the computer screen while the children are sleeping. And perhaps the fact that Nadia called me in secret also has a part to play, that all but inaudible whisper that gave away her fear of being caught holding the phone, and the knowledge that I was speaking to an adulteress, and the word
adulteress
. Which begs the question: What role did her appearance on the scene also have to play in relation to a brutal crime, to an axe concealed behind a door, and a blood stain on the wall you cannot get out no matter how hard you scrub? And it begs the question, above all, of why the battle-scarred never learn, why they keep coming back for more after all that fighting.

If the business of living is above all a matter of betraying, one by one, the dreams that fuelled our childhood and younger years, then each person is the exact sum total of a good number of betrayals. Hundreds in some cases. The purest of dreams are betrayed, as are nightmares. By mistake, we flee from storms without ever realizing that they were such a part of who we are and were so ingrained in our very cores that without them we barely amount to a thing. Save me, we say, I no longer wish to plunge a knife into your legs, we say, I will not hurt you, I will not want to see your grimace of pain in the mirror, I will love you in another way, I will worship you from a being that does not exist, I will call my past a torment, an agony until I met you. I will tell you that you are as gentle as the sky I dream and that I do not mind closing my eyes to everything forevermore if I know that you will later kiss my eyelids. I will not be me. I will bury the monster beneath spadefuls and yet more spadefuls of earth. I will get as close to nothingness as it is possible to get, to a coffin without a dead man, to an empty cathedral. I will buy you flowers.

It cannot be all that hard, for nothing is what we are in essence, when the time comes to tear off the disguise—the list jotted down in a notebook of things left undone, the slew of countless arrows that never left the bow, together with those that were lost, somewhere further than the eye can see. A large bunch of beautiful betrayals, as big as suns. And that bunch and nothing more is all we ought to offer each other when making promises of love, if indeed love is the word. Everything else is untrue. That meager bouquet, and nothing more—look, Nadia, this faded poppy losing its color as fast as fear can strike is in fact, you might say, a life I never lived on the far side of the Atlantic, whether in the mining regions of Chile or the outskirts of Zipaquirá, in that bar with the corrugated roof that stood beside the highway; this intact daisy is a woman, one among many, barefoot beneath the pouring rain, from whom I once turned away and to whom I said nothing, though I could have when her eyes may well have been pointing me in the direction of a doorway in the Latin Quarter, a
chambre de bonne
, a pair of panty hose to be ripped apart once and for all before tossing them into the trash, a huge dry white towel with room enough for the both of us; this iris trembling in my fingers stands for a couple of languages I never learned, though I thought I might, and the infinite silence made up of all of the words I left unsaid in those languages; and this rose with entranced petals is the sum of the alleyways whose shadows cried out to me and down which, when push came to shove, I did not dare to venture. Look, in short, at these half-broken flowers, we should tell one another, instead of all that cringe-worthy baloney we spout in such circumstances, look at these flowers that come apart at the touch of a finger like a butterfly’s wings, together they go to make up who I am. The two of us are made of the things we never did, we are the rage and the foam of the countless renunciations that interlock with one another like links on a chain, the foul temper that remained after watching as things and trains passed us by, and the calm that came in its wake, the hours, the drowsiness, the grit beneath the eyelids upon waking. We are that dirty nothingness. And if we have learned anything from all that resentment, all that coming and going, all that sorrow of mistimed steps and almost always empty hands, we should, at most, offer each other something that amounts to little more than this: let us renounce together, let us share a dream of something we will never do, whatever it is, a house with a garden, a round-the-world trip, let us join together both nothingnesses, let us intertwine these two lives that were left behind unlived, the barely glimpsed stories of two creatures who held back when the time came to run and who beat a hasty retreat when they should have stayed put, let us daydream of landscape that will never envelop us, the ships, the cities, the forests seen from trains, the image of our feet dangling from atop a skyscraper overlooking Central Park or an Irish cliff top beneath which furious green waves roar. But no more promises spoken in earnest, the heart exposed, for promises in earnest are a lie, no more desire of the sort that turns to poison when it comes into contact with the skin. Never again, my love, never again this exhausting pursuit of delirium, of two becoming one, and that one standing happily in the center of the wind.