Bad Light (13 page)

Nadia arrived at our meeting ten minutes late. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed she’d turn up much later. I positioned myself in the bar next to one of the windows, so as to be able to see her as she appeared around the street corner. As I watched her approach, I wondered what it might be like to miss her. In other words, what it might be like to have loved her dearly, for a long time, only for her then to have left.

In the flesh, she looked slightly plumper than in her photos. Pretty, either way, with extremely close-cropped blonde hair, à la Jean Seberg, and very dark skin. It wasn’t until after talking to her for a few minutes, with her observing you from very close quarters, that you could truly appreciate her allure. She had that trait, such a hard one to come by, that can make a man lose his head and drive him to perdition in record time. By which I mean a sort of contrast, a contradiction even, between the eyes and the mouth. While the gaze is a gentle combination of innocence and melancholy, the lips, just a few inches further down, slightly parted, summon forth the wildest of desires. Not everyone can see it. I have rarely come across such a clear-cut case. Marilyn Monroe, perhaps, in certain photos. Not in every one, that’s for sure. But there are some in which, if you cover the entire image with your hands aside from the eyes, you are left with the gaze of someone pleading for protection and tenderness, perhaps even consolation. And if you then do the same, but this time leaving only the mouth in view, what you get is a fragment of a photograph with which any teenager could happily lock himself away in the bathroom to go about his business. When she spoke, depending on which phoneme she was uttering, you could see the tip of Nadia’s tongue. Without realizing it, she promised everything when she spoke.

I filled her in on how the past few days had been for me—the extent of Jacobo’s terror the last night I went to keep him company, his fear, for the first time, not of the waves of anguish to which he had more or less become accustomed, insofar as anyone can get used to such a thing, but rather of human beings to be fended off with knives and blunt objects. I explained how unhinged the whole business had left me, how, out of instinct, I had begun by searching his apartment and had ended up combing my own place, which I had been unable ever since to see as anything other than a dead man’s home. I told her how, in the wake of the murder, I had become a stranger among my own things, that sense of having outlived myself, transformed into a shadow, and how I had assumed the role of a nosy relative who prizes open drawers and breaks padlocks, who fingers sacred objects and ends up reading letters that were not meant for his eyes, looking at photos of himself as if they were showing him the face of a stranger, keenly studying the passages underlined in books, sorting through bills, train tickets, coasters, receipts of every kind, and programs for theaters that have long since ceased to exist.

She told me she hadn’t been in Zaragoza for long. She said she’d gotten separated a couple of years back and had ever since been looking to make a clean break. She had, quite literally, had a makeover; she’d even chosen a new name. She also said that she’d been hoping to move but was not sure where to or when, she was still at that stage where you dream of impossible houses hugging the sea, with a porch and plants creeping up freshly whitewashed walls. She added that she wasn’t cut out for the single life. As for Jacobo, it was clear that she preferred not to go into too much detail. Truth be told, she didn’t wish to go into too much detail about anything. It was as if she were striving to make everything she said sound banal. The first time they met, Jacobo had insisted that she read
The War
by Marguerite Duras. They had arranged to meet so that he could lend her his copy then made another date to discuss the book. It puzzled Nadia how anyone could become so obsessed over a story that, as she saw it, was like so many others. “Like so many others,” that’s how she put it. They became lovers. It’s not as if they saw much of one another. Nor did they have a shared future mapped out or plans of any kind. They simply called each other from time to time whenever either of them felt loneliness beginning to bite, a feeling, as anyone will tell you, that tends to wax and wane. They cooked meals for each other, sampled new wines, and then went to bed, usually somewhat tipsy. At this point, Nadia’s gestures take on a coy air that I do not fully buy. There are no observations, no details. She averts her gaze, seeking refuge in a short pause in order to take another sip of her coffee, only her cup is already empty.

All of a sudden, she tells me she’d like to go to Jacobo’s apartment. She asks if I’ve got the keys on me.

“Well, no, I don’t have the keys on me.”

“I do. Here, in my bag.”

“Right, then you can go any time.”

“Not alone.”

“Perhaps you’ve already been.”

“No. I can’t bring myself to go alone, I told you. I’d like you to come with me now. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.”

“Are you sure? You might find it painful.”

“I need that pain. I feel like ice, right now, and I can’t stand it. I just want to be there for a moment, to take a quick look around, to remember the smells. Then tonight, when I go to bed, I’ll try to break down in tears. That’s the idea.”

Once inside the apartment, she began to make her way very slowly from room to room, peering out the window several times. She barely paused in the part of the entryway where the events had taken place, nor did she glance for more than a second or two at the stains of blood encrusted on the stippled wall. Then she lit a cigarette and sat down on one end of the couch. I guess that must have been her spot when they settled in to watch a movie or chat for a while. She wanted a drink. I fixed her a whisky with a couple of ice cubes that smelled a little, it seemed to me, of the hake fillets that had lain next to them in the freezer. Glass in hand, she got up again and headed, very slowly, for the bedroom. There was something robotic in her movements, her gaze did not settle on anything in particular, and yet at the same time it was as if she were scanning everything, before processing it all in the most neutral fashion. She came to a halt, standing before the bed that was now home only to one of the those standard-issue blue mattresses, without a bedspread, that bore, in the form of stains and patches, the traces of all of the apartment’s former tenants over time, circles of saliva, sweat, semen, piss, and blood, all the warmth of human intimacy. There, looking at that deformed, empty mattress, she began to cry softly. The statue came to life in its white dress. “Son of a bitch,” she said. I went to fetch a wad of toilet paper and handed it to her by way of a handkerchief. Then, finger by finger, I prized the glass from her grip to prevent it from shattering under the pressure, before placing it on the bedside table. I was just about to say something about how dreadful the moment was and how beautiful she looked, crying at the foot of that bed, wearing the very sandals she was buckling in the photo, without knowing where to tap the ash from the cigarette she held between her fingers or what to do with that sudden stab of pain or where to direct all the desire that sprang from her, perverse and unwelcome, as she looked at that furniture and that light. I was just about to ruin it all with words, but I held back. I simply walked over to where she stood and embraced her from behind, almost recklessly. I could tell that she was thankful, so I hugged her to me. She titled her head back, feeling for me. She also thrust her ass out, feeling for me yet more and without altogether stopping from crying. Snatches of a tango sung by good old Roberto Goyeneche—
qué me importa perderme mil veces la vida
—drifted through the inner patio from some distant radio. And we fell onto the unmade bed just as the first rumblings of a storm that threatened to take with it in a matter of seconds the little evening light that remained could be heard on the other side of the window, and everything was strange and bitter and stunningly beautiful, the white dress on the dried-out filth, my tongue amongst her tears, the pleasure, the anguish, the sobs. Afterward, we lay there a good long while, naked and in silence, very still, watching as the darkness took possession of the dead man’s room and listening to the sounds that drifted up from the street, the drip-drip of drainpipes and cornices, the motorcycles driving past, the noise of tires on wet asphalt. And then I think Nadia hit the right note. I will never know how she knew, or what dark magic moved her tongue, but she rested her head on my shoulder, and I’d swear she said
what is to become of us
? And I knew then that I would die calling out her name, and also that she would not come.

After showering, I dried myself off with a used towel of Jacobo’s that hung forgotten behind the bathroom door and which seemed to me to smell of a mixture of damp and of him. More specifically, of leaks sprung in the walls of patios and of a grinning Jacobo appearing in that patio, sweating a little, his fishing rod over one shoulder.

Marguerite Duras began an affair with Dionys Mascolo, with whom she had joined the Resistance. Meanwhile, her husband, and comrade to the two of them in that freedom-fighting movement, had been taken prisoner in the Dachau extermination camp. They had given him up for dead, more or less. When the camps were liberated, they searched for him high and low, they combed every office, they made phone calls to all and sundry, they despaired at the rumors, they listened to the tales told by the first survivors then reaching Paris in dribs and drabs. Antelme and Mascolo were good friends. The three of them were good friends, in fact. The love between Marguerite and Mascolo blossomed against the backdrop of an absence that neither could bear, which managed to turn their desire for each other into the worst of betrayals and an anguished uncertainty that would make them picture their friend almost always at death’s door, a mass of wounds lying on the ground, the final, weary beats of a heart against the mud of some road or other, a fever that shivers alone, its whereabouts unknown, or a shadow coming apart at the seams atop a cot on which the blood soaks through the mattress. The bond that united the new lovers was made from the same barbed wire that had crossed the continent from south to north along the entire length of the Maginot Line, that pointless scar measuring mile after endless mile.

One day the telephone rang, bringing them the news that Antelme was alive. Still alive, miraculously—weighing in at just under seventy pounds in a far-flung infirmary. Mascolo did not think twice. He managed to get his hands on a beat-up old vehicle and went off in search of his friend across a Europe that was little more than a vast expanse of ruins and ashes and cripples and prisoners filing past in every direction, columns of trucks, ghostly convoys on the gravel roads; everywhere you looked there were orphans lining up to beg for soup, flags trampled underfoot, border crossings, their turrets now fallen, newly abandoned casemates, trenches of mist. He brought his friend back as best he could in the back seat of the car, shivering beneath a heap of blankets. Antelme was a bag of bones, eaten away by typhus, who had to be fed spoonfuls of water nonstop and who would break down in sobs without knowing where he was or scarcely even who he was with. They put him to bed, they looked after him for days on end, the two of them, Marguerite and Mascolo, for they both loved him. For he was their friend. They whiled away the hours with him, they spoon-fed him his medicines, they took pains to listen to all of the disjointed horror of his memories, the scream of his ever-present nightmare, the words now devoid of any feeling that might contain a glimmer of hope. They did this for him, for what he had meant and continued to mean to them, in what went to make up their innermost selves. But also, darkly, to make amends for a love too redolent of a stab in the back. In
The War
, Duras writes, “He stopped asking questions about what had happened while he was away. He stopped seeing us. A great, silent pain spread over his face because he was still being refused food, because it was still as it had been in the concentration camp. And, as in the camp, he accepted it in silence. He didn’t see that we were weeping. Nor did he see that we could scarcely look at him or respond to what he said.”

Antelme could no doubt hear them fucking in the room next door. A lot of fucking goes on in wartime, when you’ve seen so many comrades fallen in the dirt and death assails you from all sides; a time of fear is also a time of love. Perhaps, at least at first, his mind was unable to pinpoint the exact meaning of that panting that reached him through the partition wall, the rhythmic squeaking of the bedsprings in the early morning hours. Those sounds probably mingled in his delirium with some sort of torture he had lived through or imagined weeks previously—snapped limbs, torn flesh. As he gathers his strength little by little and his eyes once again open to the world and he starts to grasp, as best he can, a little of what is going on around him, he will continue to hear them fucking behind the partition wall of his bedroom and will be unable to move, there will be nowhere to hide from that horror. But then the sun will come up and the two of them will come in together to wish him a good morning, they will feed him the vitamins and tonics procured for a king’s ransom on the black market, they will shave him, wash his hair, spoon-feed him soup, with all the patience in the world, as well as his syrup and painkillers—he has no right to protest, much less can he hate them, for even hatred calls for a degree of strength. Marguerite loves him with all her heart, but love is not enough. It hardly ever is. Sometimes all that love, that immense feeling, is no match for a miserable fuck. Another person’s desire, with all of its ebb and flow, is the most precise expression of hell.

I have been Robert Antelme on many a night. I have felt his nightmare dampen my brow. The wall is not always a wall. It might be the other side of the street, or several neighborhoods of a city, but that won’t silence the bedsprings. The weaker the heart, the better it imitates that sound and the more moans and words it adds in for good measure. I have also on the odd occasion assumed the role of Dionys Mascolo, throwing myself into the task without a care for my surroundings or for what might lie on the other side of a partition wall. Once, my teenage years not far behind me, I screwed the girl my brother had set his heart on, while he lay sleeping in the room next door. I remember tiptoeing into his room in the middle of the night to see if I might find more condoms on his bedside table or in the pockets of his pants, only to find him awake, his eyes moist, and he looked at me as if to say
it’s not your fault
, and ever since, pain has always reminded me of that look, in near darkness, offering me forgiveness. When the heart is broken, all the love spills out.