Bad Light (2 page)

And that, more or less, was what life back then was like, before the move. Frozen, deserted streets, a newly rented apartment with someone else’s furniture, silence, hours spent beneath the naked bulb on the living room ceiling, the pointlessness that seemed to have come to rest on things, slowly, much as a layer of dust forms without our noticing, taking possession of them, cloaking everything in a sort of grimy, drab gauze. That’s what the days of my life were like back then. The evenings at home, stunned. I sometimes sit down at the table to eat, without the slightest hunger. I am my own mother; I am, at one and the same time, the downcast young boy and the voice that tells him to try and cheer up, to pull himself together already, to look after himself, to swallow, even if he doesn’t feel like it, a few spoonfuls of rice, one more, you’ll feel better, you’ll see, I’ll feel better, I’ll see. I remember the fear I once was, made flesh, a bundle of nerves, and how I sensed my own presence much as one might perceive a tremor, the juddering of a worn-out heart that seemed to be shifting position constantly inside its chest, without ever finding the right spot. I see myself seated in the armchair next to the glass door that looks onto the balcony, wearing a coat buttoned up to my neck. I’m not sure if I can’t move or don’t want to. It’s hard to say; I don’t move, that’s all. I give a start at the slightest noise from the street or the stairway, the buzzing of the intercom whenever it’s pressed over and over again by the mailman or the junk mail distributors. And I remember the dread at the thought of losing my mind, of being unable to return, and also the odd snatch of the disjointed ramblings running through my thoughts, shot through with static and barking and stinging music and hazy questions—who took me away, and where to, I cannot sense myself here, in this voice that’s apt to start talking alone in the middle of the evening, uttering the names of people long gone, or in the hand that, almost without realizing it, scribbles these marks in delirious ink (words in the universal and equally baffling language of the shakes) that cannot be deciphered later, nor can I spot myself in these wretched lines that seek me out, that enquire nervously on the pages of a notebook after my wellbeing, my whereabouts, what I could possibly be up to at this hour, and where in God’s world and down what roads. And while I know that I am both the escaped prisoner running nonstop on wounded feet and the search party, armed to the teeth, that’s hunting me down and setting the pack of hounds on my trail, I do not recognize as my own the footsteps looking for me in damp hotels, and ports, down solitary streets, in unmade beds, in secluded bars (of the sort you only ever visit once, of the sort never to be found again, as if, on your departure, they sank into a fog that is not of this world). Nor do I see myself in the anguish calling out to me because it’s getting late and I’m nowhere to be seen, shouting a name that’s mine, or at least it once was. It calls the name out louder and louder, with a voice increasingly hoarse, until it is little more than a straight-out moan, roaming the passageways of the labyrinth, the banks of the swamp, the forests of the night—the wailing of a monster that remembers me.

The telephone rings sometimes, not too often. Some calls I leave unanswered, I’m simply incapable of responding. Talking strikes me as a task as impossible as it is meaningless. Sometimes I do pick up the handset, silently praying it’s nothing, a wrong number, and that no one is really looking for me or wants anything of me. I’m afraid of what the voice, whoever it may be, might summon up from the other end of the line, of the people it might name and of the memories all those words might unearth. I’m afraid of being made to cry. There are no friendly voices now. They do not exist, nor can I conceive of them. There is no such thing right now. In one way or another, they all link directly to the world, to the anxious, insufferable drone the world has become on the other side of the window. I peer out every now and again. There is usually nothing more than a frozen void through which a car passes once in a while. The shades of gray change depending on the time of day. The worst of them coincides with the hour when all activity appears to have died down and yet it’s not altogether late. The stores are still open, lights can be seen in some windows, and silhouettes cast by people starting to lay the table, the clatter of dishes and cutlery; on the sidewalk across the street, a young boy is making his way home from some after-school class, a book bag on his back. Out there, where all that can now be seen is this gloomy, wind-battered watercolor, is where my life was until recently, a life from which I have stumbled like an elderly man on an ice-covered path. I’ve landed on the skull and crossbones, I don’t remember how many turns I have to skip before I can rejoin the game.

I get snagged on words. There are those that take root somewhere in the brain and, despite my best efforts, refuse to budge. I think of the word
home
while the radio relays news of the Siberian cold front that swept through the country overnight, while I tossed and turned in bed, in search of a position in which sleep would come—mountain passes closed, school classes canceled in some northern cities due to snow, warnings not to use the car save in cases of dire need. I ponder that expression,
dire need
, and I’m on the verge of tears again. Home is a child in pajamas racing down a hallway, his bedtime long since passed, and also the voice from the kitchen telling him not to go around barefoot or he’ll catch a cold, to drink up his milk, and to get into bed already. A bed with four little corners, a picture book on the bedside table. Dire need. Fear all of a sudden of the tenderness such an image conjures up. Panic, in truth, for I know that even in all its foolish simplicity, when tenderness strikes, it takes no prisoners; I don’t know what the hell kind of strings get tugged at with the mere sight of an abandoned toy in the corner, a colored pencil that turns up out of the blue where you least expect it, a sticker album card with some soccer player on it that emerges, covered in fluff, when sweeping under the bed. I don’t know what incendiary buttons all this pushes. Dire need—a soft cheek when the time comes to say goodnight, the raspberry toothpaste scent that enveloped that kiss now gone, never to return. On my afternoon stroll, at the new releases table, I paused to leaf through an album showcasing much of the work of the photographer Lewis Hine. Lying in wait on one of its pages, opened at random, was an image I was unable at that moment to endure (this often happens to me, I look at many things I should not): a young boy, a roving newspaper vendor in the years of America’s Great Depression, has fallen asleep, utterly spent, on the stoop of a building. He’s sitting on one of the steps, his head resting on a pile of unsold newspapers he’s placed a few stairs up as a pillow. There is nothing more dramatic in the photo than a young boy overcome by tiredness and hiding from his employer’s eyes in an attempt to replenish some of the strength he’s used up hawking papers in those neighborhoods of cracked sidewalks, at bus stops, and out in front of office blocks. The photo reveals no injuries or any trace of tears or torture. None of that was necessary for me to know for certain, at that moment, as I contemplated that snapshot, that if, by some twist of fate, that boy had been one of my own children, I would be unable to spend a single moment of my remaining days doing anything other than hurling rocks through windows, setting off bombs left, right, and center, assassinating chancellors, burning down palaces, until I was gunned down by a well-aimed shot from a crack sniper crouching behind the open door of a patrol car. The upshot of this bewildering mess of memories and ideas that act as if they had a life of their own and come to land on my brain like crows is that the things for which I’d lay down my life are things I no longer have. I’ve either lost them or I’ve lost myself, but either way, I reach out and touch nothing but thin air.

The radio says that the blizzard now battering my windowpanes swept through Moscow some twenty hours ago. It arrived at my door after turning the domes of the Kremlin white and sweeping through nighttime Europe, steam rising from millions of boilers working at full blast while men and women sleep. It’s mighty cold in this part of the planet. Save under this heap of blankets, where I lie motionless in a fetal position, all is night and frost, icicles hanging from eaves, water turning to ice in the pipes, whole litters frozen solid in their dens. Out there, everything hisses, everything roars.

It is all but impossible to keep the anguish at bay when it comes with a convoy of memories en masse, jumbled together, like a slew of arrows unleashed at once without taking proper aim, to see which one might pierce some flesh off in the distance, which one might tear through a nerve, which one might burst open an eye. In my dreams I am hunted by hounds and torches, my first name, my last name, called out endlessly, while I crouch shivering in the bushes, trying to keep my breathing in check, to keep stock still, to keep from coughing. I often wake up in the middle of the night, not always able to recall what I was dreaming when I sit bolt upright. I then have to get out of bed, switch on a lamp or two, rinse my face. My heart still racing. It only knows how to work toward one goal, the poor thing, and in its determination to pull in the direction of my survival, regardless of whether that’s reasonable or otherwise, it allies itself with the storms. It pumps blood nonstop, unable to do anything else, sending it to the farthest vessels, to the tips of my fingers and toes, to my trembling brain, and this is tantamount to fueling the endless flow of images through my mind, words and ghosts, memories roaming in packs, the faces of those I miss the most, some of whom have already left this world for good and others I wish had done so a long time ago, eyes that once looked on me with love. There are momentary truces every now and then, but there is nothing so fragile and slippery as that deceptive calm. Occasional buffers against the disquiet sometimes occur to me, hideouts that, no sooner have I tried them out, prove utterly ineffectual. In search of refuge, my natural proclivities lead me back to the books that in times gone by, in previous slumps, in now half-forgotten debacles, succeeded in restoring me to the land of the living. But my concentration span is now all but nonexistent. I have no use, therefore, for full-length stories in which to immerse myself, since they all spit me out whether I like it or not, but rather, if anything, an atmosphere, a mood, some piece of prose that’s halfway fit to live in, any context-free passage that might fleetingly conjure the illusion that I’m shaking off the sorrow into which my feet sink as I try to walk and managing, at least in part, to wrench free of myself. I seek in words an old familiarity, a homely air, so to speak, a warmth that, though it ultimately always proves ephemeral and elusive, achieves the momentary illusion of a temporary ceasefire in the midst of the never-ending battle my nerves are waging against themselves. Holding the remote, I look for channels showing classic movies or, at least, movies released in Spain no later than the seventies, just to hear the voiceover artists of the time. The sound is one I find particularly heartwarming. No matter what words come out of those lips that never appeared on screen and must now be dead, they take me back to my grandmother’s living room, to the stale chocolate and the can of condensed milk, to the cookies snatched without permission from an aluminum tin in the pantry, the drowsiness after Sunday dinner with the specter of Monday already lurking on the other side of a few hours of restless sleep, a green, imitation-leather couch coming apart at the seams, and the shootouts in black-and-white taking me gloriously out of the world, the sweet talk, the skyscrapers, the blondes, the car chases.

That was around the time of the spectacular accident in the Chilean mine. Thirty-three workers trapped almost half a mile beneath the earth. In real time, heart in mouth, the world followed the tragic events that, for seventy days, TV news bulletins the length and breadth of the planet led with. As did the press, and the radio. It was practically the only talking point. First, a tunnel was opened up through which the rescue teams could introduce the medicines and provisions from the outside world that were deemed most urgent. Direct, fluid communication was then established with those trapped below, their fears probed, their hopes of making it out alive broadcast, their attempts to say farewell in the darkest hours, their messages of love, their ham-handed poetry, filled with a candor that was chilling in its simplicity—pure naïf horror. People wondered what it might feel like to be trapped beneath a hillside, with tons of earth above and all that uncertainty as to whether one might ever again see the sunlight and all that it normally bathes. Little by little we learned of each individual case, the names and circumstances of the miners imprisoned down there below, hell almost within touching distance. The images on TV revealed the desperation of the relatives who followed operations as closely as they were allowed, night and day pressed up against the wire fence that marked the security perimeter. Both inside and outside the collapsed underground passageway, the slogan the whole world clung to was “get back home”. Like the wounded soldiers in Vietnam field hospitals who, in their fevered state, dreamt of streetlights on a Saturday night, the smell of hamburgers, and of music, and of sex. Getting back home.

I felt sure that those thirty-odd men must include at least one who, after the obligatory homecoming in front of the cameras and the official celebrations, having shaken off the hordes of dignitaries and special correspondents, the well-wishers, the throng of microphones thrust before him, would return home alone to find everything precisely as he had left it, a glass of water filled with specks of dust on the bedside table, in the exact same spot he had placed it, no doubt a dirty dish with the remains of a meal from over two months before on the kitchen table, now infested with mold and ants. Everything precisely as it had been when he left for work that morning, the blinds lowered to the same height, the half-open doors, the unmade bed, a towel on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t help but identify with that miner who, on his return, no sooner having set foot in the door, would be engulfed by the silence of his own home, a couple of dingy rooms in, say, the city of Copiapó. I wondered what would have gone through his mind those two long months buried down there below, while the others spoke of getting back home, of almost Christmassy scenes, and of the collective desire to make up for lost time if they ever made it out alive, of what truly matters: the fair, ponies, Sunday picnics in the country with the whole family, a hearty barbecue, everyone helping to wash the car in the stream; no more
pisco
ever again, no more anything ever again, just tucking the children in to sleep, taking them for a Sunday stroll to El Pretil or Schneider Park, thanking God for each new morning, each breath of fresh air, and the light, above all the light, enjoying whatever scarcity, whatever abundance. He would dream, perhaps, that some former girlfriend had heard news of his confinement, or some old friend from his school days he cannot now recall, but who knows, or some former drinking buddy, waiting for him up there on the surface of oxygen and stars to crack open a bottle in celebration. He would lie to his fellow inmates, telling them that someone was waiting for him, that whether he lived or died was not entirely inconsequential, that someone somewhere cared about the fate that awaited his bone-dry, malnourished hide all flecked with dirt and copper dust. I thought of him at night, of that Chilean brother. He appeared to me in dreams more than once, and we waxed shyly philosophical in short phrases and lengthy silences, much as certain wise men do when the day is done, by the fireside, and all the cattle have been rounded up in their pens. Life goes on as long as someone is waiting for you, the rest is just survival, he would say, though survival plain and simple is not without its charm and its thrills. Although I knew it was a copper rather than a coal mine, he would always appear with his face blackened, like a guerilla readying an ambush in the darkness of the jungle. I also always pictured him with filthy hands and black fingernails. I’m not sure he was right, my Chilean brother, about the waiting and the survival, but I grew somewhat fond of that coal-stained shadow who smoked while gazing at the floor and swigging bitter
mate
in my dreams.

Contrary to what tended to happen to me, the affliction I experienced at that time was a sorrow that emerged almost wordlessly, a naked ache that couldn’t find the right expression, something akin to an animal-like tearing, with all its bafflement and its momentous howl, like a dog waking up from the anesthesia under which its kidney has been clumsily extracted. In my mind, only objects, pure and simple, as if their sheen of connotation or memory had been wiped clean, the boredom of passersby on the other side of the window. It’s a liquid ache that drenches language, that deluges all thought like a dirty wave, dissolving concepts, soaking my knot of cables and rotting my connections. There can be no relief until words can once more breathe as before and again make their presence felt, until sounds and ink marks recover something of their meaning. It’s getting late. I don’t want to think about her. Somewhere, right now, her hands are moving, her facial muscles, her little feet. Somewhere real, I mean, out there, as well as in these ailing heartbeats where they’re never absent. As for the rest, a lobotomy as the supreme goal, the television, the cell phone switched off, and the doors locked in a rage, slammed shut, the bolt slid all the way in. Locking the door from the inside like never before in my life. If anything’s ailing me, it’s my brain. I beg the memories to leave me be, in vain I call on the howls from the basement to fall silent once and for all. To no avail. I imagine that it might be possible to caress a living brain, to massage it gently, aside, I mean, from the way music or whispers sometimes do, metaphorically speaking, and I picture a hand with painted nails lightly touching my brain as I sit here, eyes closed, motionless, like when a stranger shaves you with a straight razor. The hand anoints me with oils, aromas, and ointments, daubing everything with fresh pomades, running its fingertips over my exhausted, wounded brain, very slowly, its folds, its darkest nooks and crannies, one by one, the blood vessels, taking care so as not to burst them and leave everything more blood-soaked than it already is.

Days, too, of pills to summon sleep if nothing else will work when the time comes to assuage that stubborn sorrow that festers within. No oriental poetry, or vanilla-scented candles, or listening to the music from before this whole disaster was unleashed, when everything was as it should be and the anxiety amounted to nothing more than what was basically feigned vulnerability, a way of being in the world, chosen freely, that had to do with the aesthetics of pessimism, the echoes of a half-understood Schopenhauer resounding in the background, like a cello hidden in the shadows, and that gorgeous, dark universe, brimful of poisons and solitary passersby, Brassaï’s whores, the solitary drinkers of Picasso or Degas, fiery liquor, rain falling in back alleys, a blues sending a sudden shiver down the spine on the iciest of nights. Until, little by little, I dozed off, while I caressed my arms and shoulders, whispering Cavafy’s “Body, Remember” to myself, that ravishing prayer of world-weary lovers, of those who sleep alone, now too late, come a certain age, but always accompanied by the memory of a bygone age crammed full of battles of love on long-gone nights, on hundreds of fitted sheets of all sizes and colors that bore in the form of a silhouette the traces of our most devoted sweat, and in the graffiti-filled restrooms of seedy dives and in cars parked beneath the trees, and in haylofts broken into with a kick to the door, atop piles of hay, and once or twice under silvery canopies, the ice bucket within reach and candles lit until dawn. Puzzling remnants of a memory that sometimes returns, albeit unbidden, powerful and stubborn, in the darkness of poorly ventilated bedrooms that now smell only of a very different sort of sweat and of cough syrups and viruses and an evening gown stored inside a trunk.

Either way, the dejection into which that breakup had plunged me was due not so much to my perception of the present, which, truth be told, concerned me little at that point, but rather to the image it offered up of my own past, of every faltering step up to that point, in one fell swoop stripping them bare of any hope of meaning. There is a fairly universal, recurring childhood nightmare in which the child calls out to those dearest to him, his mother, his father, who nevertheless act as if they hadn’t seen him, talking to one another, going about their business, walking straight past him. This was quite similar, the feeling of shouting “it’s me, don’t you recognize me? I’m him, the same as ever, can’t you see me?” but having the eyes you’re seeking pierce straight through you without a second glance, like an unseeing sword, and your words sound just like those of a madman who dreamt the whole thing up, who made up a life no one can recall, one that rings false to the whole world, although your wrinkles are proof that, much to your regret, time has indeed passed. The dreadful part was not the sudden discovery that what I had for so long held to be the most important piece in the jigsaw of my life story had been plucked from my grasp, just like that, overnight, with such wounding ease, but rather the dawning realization that when something or someone truly ruins your life, it does so for good; we tend to think of our lost years in terms of the time left behind, but what is truly awful are the lost years that lie ahead. All that is to come will arrive more pallid and watered down, if not stillborn. I could now clearly see the enormous fragility of everything that had until recently appeared indestructible to my eyes. It was not being alone that pained me but rather the certainty that, one way or another, I now always would be, for I would be unable to see any woman who might at some point wish to approach me, no matter how naked, no matter how transparent her gaze, as anything other than the indifferent, absent-minded stranger she would sooner or later no doubt become, a stranger affecting to pretend that nothing really matters, that I never meant a thing, walking on different sidewalks in this city of mine, going in and out, at different times, of shops and bars I frequent, walking straight past my front door without even noticing, someone for whom I will one day have died without having died, much as I am now dead, without a funeral, without a homeland, barely a thing to call my own, in an asymmetrical parting of ways in which the burden of mourning lies only with the one who leaves—all of the tears are inside the casket, none are shed outside the coffin, out there springtime growls like a panther in heat and the time that remains calls to mind a party just about to begin.

And it’s hard to die sometimes, especially when beyond that dark frontier, on the other side of the barbed wire laid out in the shadows, in place of respite what lies in wait are once again the days and the weariness, the work, the air aching inside the chest. To leave and to remain, that’s the unbearable thing, to remain but to have left. As Celan put it in “Memory of France”: “We were dead and we could breathe.” Dead behind the gaze, which has not yet dimmed, behind eyes that continue to survey the stage, even when it now appears as barren as a snow-bound plain, a labyrinth in the form of an esplanade, or a ghost town with its dried-up water pipes, its abandoned train stations, the clumps of grass growing between the tracks, temples filled with cobwebs as if in a post-nuclear age, air of unwanted extra time, a handful of pages added slapdash to a worn-out tale. Dead, we sometimes run into others, perhaps also unsteady on their feet, groping their way in the dark, in a daze, as they roam their own invisible passageways in the midst of the fog, but we don’t even see them, we can’t see them, for this strange death, like the old Aristotelian god, is thought thinking itself, nothing but a feverish, obsessive loop.

Even so, there is something comforting in the idea of giving in to death, of relaxing one’s muscles at last after long days of titanic struggle and simply giving up the fight. Taking to bed to die is a splendid thing. Before you know it, the mind has sketched in the details of a hotel room, a receiver resting precariously atop a telephone on the bedside table, the scent of Chanel Nº5 on naked flesh. A crueler than cruel world on the other side of the window pane, a beautiful wound, a fragility that at long last gives in and succumbs to whatever may come, a gentle being that can take it no longer. In the adjacent bathroom, on the other side of a half-open door with white frames and golden doorknobs, stands a foam-filled tub, some of the candles on its rim still burning. When that mound of foam has finally gone completely cold, death will have arrived. In the meantime, only the pillow smelling of glycerin soap or the softener sold wholesale to the hotel chain. The watch still on the strap, the thin gold chain still slung around the neck, the breathing getting steadily deeper, dreams already flying over childhood streets, the escape attempts back then, a dilapidated grammar school in the neighborhood of Tetuán, the margarine and chorizo sandwiches made with yesterday’s bread, the waste ground where on Saturday mornings I would transform into striker José Eulogio Gárate, the thirst, the fruit trees in summer, the waterholes, the brambles, the scent of fig trees, their sap as thick as an ogre’s semen, the thorns of blackberry and rose bushes, knees stained with the red of Mercurochrome, the stones hurled in my direction, the homesick nights on Boy Scout camping trips (my city without me, far off, lit up in the middle of a plain, beyond those barren slopes, the interminable ranks of thickets and black hills under the moonlight), the sailor knots, the days that take their time, the bitter almonds. And also all that came in its wake: the insults, the vertigo and the nausea, the night as the realm of barking and eyes opened wide in the dark, behind every rock, hanging from the branches, watching from everywhere; the old, inevitable longing for every escape down endless highways or without moving from the spot, taking flight in the mind, throttling foes, smashing chains and locks in a rage, escaping from the fever, the aching bones, the shame; and the yearning, too, horribly insane, for all manner of poisons, hideouts, and underworlds, Bataille there, his verses borrowed one more time, one last time,
tu es l’horreur de la nuit, je t’aime comme on râle
, I love you as one might breathe one’s last. You are the immensity of the fear. To see reflected in the monster’s fangs the mouth you loved in times gone by, and in its claws the fingers of water that once sliced open your heart like a sweet blade. And
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi
. And the vague sensation, in the watered-down images of delirium, that that which is dreadful is losing its bite while beauty sprouts claws and it is all much of a muchness and nothing truly matters any more.