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Authors: Carlos Castán

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BOOK: Bad Light
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Nor was I left with any choice but to wonder whether or not
I
had any enemies; there has, needless to say, been no shortage of those who have wanted to kill me in the past, though I have always preferred to chalk that up to the madness of others or the uncontrollable outbursts that, in affairs of love and jealousy, I have always looked on as deserving a little leeway. Then there are those who come out with things such as
it’s not that I wish him any harm, but I don’t wish him well, either
. For the most part, those who make such statements would rub their hands in glee on learning of your death and would not hesitate an instant to cheerfully urinate on your corpse should the occasion present itself. Even so, I would not, strictly speaking, call them enemies. Having enemies is no simple matter, it’s almost a tragic luxury and, depending on how you look at it, a gift from life as far as meaning and intensity are concerned. Which explains why so many people invent, imagine, or long for one. On the other hand, if I am apt to view the world as, on the whole, a hostile place, it is not too bold to think that the world (or part of it) might also, as is only fair, view me as equally hostile. I think, for example, of those who tried to approach me when I was at my lowest ebb and to whom I refused to pay the slightest heed, people who, based on a handful of traits, perhaps credited me with an outlook akin to their own, a certain type of sensibility, and who thought that I ought to have been thankful from the bottom of my heart for their outstretched hand rather than fleeing from them as if from the plague, those who attempted to strike up a profound nineteenth-century correspondence with me only to be met with a curt, tardy reply; I think of those women who, on seeing in me the living image of neglect, wanted to come to my rescue, to drag me out of the dark pits in which they imagined I spent my hours, without, in truth, ever scaling the heights of my desire—my desire for light or my desire for them—with their warm flesh and their smell of home; and finally, I think of all those whose fellow traveler I had no wish to be, whose warlike manifestos I returned unsigned, all those who sought to win me over to their cause, lost or otherwise, and have me march beneath some flag to the beat of their drum and not my own, and those whom I stood up, sooner rather than later, without bothering to offer the slightest explanation. But an enemy worth his salt must be hated above all in secret, when no one is looking, and I’d swear that, for better or worse, my life has been free of them. Thankfully, no one on whom I might wish to practice voodoo, no one I might picture, my eyes closed, being tortured and screaming on the rack.

They don’t let you see the scene of the crime, but nobody takes the trouble to give the place a decent clean, either, and the bloodstains remain on the wall, untouched, a dreadful continent surrounded by brown islands on a vertical stucco sea. They must have scattered plenty of sawdust of the floor, for there were still lumps stuck to the baseboard on the day I decided to make use of the set of keys Jacobo had handed me some time previously and I made the decision to enter his apartment. About one week after the crime. At first glance, everything had been left more or less as I remembered it. His children and his ex-wife had dropped by no sooner had the police removed the seal from the door and business as usual had been declared on the landing. They took with them a couple of Pepe Cerdá paintings, said to be worth some cash, his old Underwood typewriter, which weighed half a ton and had been at one and the same time his emblem and his pride and joy (when this last fact dawned on me, I could not help but feel a twinge of resentment, for I had set my heart on that beauty, nor, at that precise moment, could I help but consider myself a wretched soul), as well as anything else of value they could find in the drawers following a quick skim through their contents: the gold watch he never wore, his collection of fountain pens, and not much else as far as I could tell, perhaps one or two of the bottles of wine left lying around, so temptingly, for all to see, though they didn’t even have the good taste to choose the finest among them. They had told me over the phone that they’d be back soon, as soon as they could all coordinate their schedules a little, to see what was to be done with the books and all the rest, so that they could strip the apartment as quickly as possible, since it was rented, the meter was still running, and it wouldn’t do to carry on paying month after month without rhyme or reason. In theory, the idea was to pack it all up in boxes and take it off to some temporary spot with enough room for it all, the house they owned in his hometown, no doubt, so as to sort through it all more calmly at some later date when they had the energy and some time on their hands. I pictured that heap of crates loaded on board a white van, heading for the country, before gathering dust in the woodshed of some ramshackle, cobweb-filled house, next to the farm tools, the rusty scythes, the foul-smelling clay pots, and the discarded wineskins, the tape sealing Jacobo’s watercolor prints, his books, his love letters, his toy soldiers, a whole life packed away inside cardboard boxes and sprinkled liberally with rat poison.

8
(condolences)

The wake prior to the incineration was held in the rooms of the Torrero cemetery. If Jacobo’s family had decided to bury his remains rather than burn them, they would have done so in his hometown. It matters not that he had made the decision some time ago to distance himself from that place and return to it as little as possible. This is a common state of affairs. As soon as someone has definitively lost any chance of making themselves heard or protesting, everyone else acts as they see fit. I’ve even seen sung masses, the choir packed with angelical children, to send off the most steadfast of nonbelievers, in the epicurean belief that death, like anything else, remains the preserve of the living. Perhaps it would not have been such a bad thing if Jacobo’s remains had come to rest in the place he had spent so many years, no matter how often he had bad-mouthed the lovely Provincia and all its kindhearted folk who had fashioned a whole sophisticated system for whiling away their time out of snooping on others, speaking ill of their fellow men, and leaping to conclusions. It was, when all is said and done, for better or for worse, where his home was. And a home, an abode in the broadest sense of the word, need not always as a matter of course be the place where one lives, it can also stand for just the opposite, the place from which one is determined to beat a retreat, the little flag with a pin for a mast stuck into a point on the map, signaling, on the one hand, the place where, by dint of centuries and fate, the exact makeup of your own blood, blend after blend, has slowly been concocted, and on the other, the reference point thanks to which one can make a getaway, letting, as is only right, a little air, the rivers, and even, if possible, the sea currents come between you and it, to flee and never to go back; for even if you are never to return, you need a place to which you never return, precise coordinates that mark the spot on which you have decided to set up the ghostly camp of your absence, the chair on which you do not sit, the walls you do not hide behind, the steps you do not take, and the thousands of eyes that do not pin you to the spot.

Quite a throng had gathered in the corresponding room of the funeral parlor, for the most part people whom I knew Jacobo had despised with all his heart. Yet there they were, sobbing occasionally, inventing exploits and memories, embracing one another as and when they arrived, heading outdoors in pairs for a smoke. Whenever someone dies, a sort of public battle over grief breaks out immediately. Among the deceased’s acquaintances, there are three or four who vie with one another to see who was his truest, closest friend and, by extension, who is most entitled to feel distraught and to be on the receiving end of the most heartfelt condolences. This contest is not always fought on the surface; one must follow it between the lines, in demeanors and conversations. The candidates focus their efforts on rebuffing and clamping down on any attempt to lighten the mood, frowning on all those feeble stabs at humor that are inevitably always made among those gathered together, as a way of letting off steam, seeking solace in the thought that the one who is no longer with us would have been a thousand times happier to see us laughing than to know we are this crestfallen, or something along those lines, or proposing a toast, sometimes even going so far as to perform the time-honored farce of filling a shot glass for him, amid nervous laughter and tears, before belting out his favorite song at the top of their lungs. The candidates refuse, under any circumstances, to play along, and will if they can prevent the rest from doing so, for it turns out that they, unlike the others, are grieving for real, and are in need of consoling, a little more attention, the heartfelt kisses of the others’ girlfriends, if possible, and even for one of those girlfriends to refuse to leave them alone when night falls—you guys go ahead if you like.

Without ever saying so in quite so many words, the candidates’ quarrel essentially comes down to two things, always the same two: how close they were to their lost friend and how recent and meaningful their last encounter was. This was what three of the frontrunners were squabbling over when I made my entrance in the room.

“It’s unbelievable, not a week has passed since I last spoke with him.”

“Four days, in my case.”

“Two in mine. In fact it was he who called me. He needed to talk. He seemed, how can I put this, strange, and believe me, I know him well.”

A civil war. The dead man being dead and therefore out of the running, for the spoils that go to the deceased are a prize that belongs to a different plane, the one singled out as his closest friend will for once take his place, before a far from sparse crowd, as the protagonist of something big, something serious and even solemn, and not without a certain degree of social cachet, no matter how fleeting. I’d have liked to wander over and tell them that their quarrels were unwarranted for I knew for a fact, based on plenty of conversations with Jacobo, that he had nothing but the deepest contempt for the three of them in equal measure, without further distinction, and that the absolute, utter indifference he felt toward each of them was matched only by that he felt for the other two.

I preferred to say nothing and to leave them there, cheerful in that crestfallen huddle, now all set to broach the time-honored chapter—which could well take the name “But How In God’s Name Did We Fail To Notice”—in which their remarks had already moved on to the subject of how guilty each of them felt deep down, for perhaps they should never have allowed him to take off alone to Zaragoza under such circumstances, as despondent as he seemed, drinking more than ever (they lowered their voices at this point), his nerves shot to pieces, at war with the world. As if their opinions had ever counted for anything, as if there were ever the remotest possibility that Jacobo might at any stage have paid them the slightest heed. They say that, by all accounts, it was dreadful. They say that the whole house was filled with blood, that it must’ve been one of those gangs. They say he was a regular at the strip clubs, that he rubbed shoulders with underworld types, that he had racked up debts in almost every store on his street. They say that there’s some bleached-blond Russian girl who’s young enough to be his daughter. They say that that friend of his who came here with him did him no favors; we all know his sort, a dismal character if ever there was one, a regular ray of sunshine. They say that aside from the blood and all that, his apartment was a shithole—dust everywhere, the dirty dishes untouched, that goes without saying, the bucket where he put his dirty laundry filled to the brim and overflowing, smelling like a pirate’s lair. Filth and rum. They say that he lived like an animal, the poor guy, that that’s no way to live, although by all accounts he had his moments and he clearly sometimes realized the error of his ways, for he’d call people up in the early hours of morning, even his in-laws once in a while, only to fall silent, all you could hear was his heavy breathing on the other end of the line, before hanging up all of a sudden, without even bothering to pick up if his call was returned. They say that pride is a very bad thing, that no good can come of all that pride, that it was in fact that pride, more than anything else, that was his undoing, They say he took his medicine however he damn well pleased. They say all of that. They say he didn’t even own an iron.

9
(alone on stage)

I’m not quite sure why I went to Jacobo’s apartment or what I was looking for when I began to search his shelves and open all of the drawers, one by one. I pulled the door firmly shut behind me, donned his slippers, brewed some coffee, and got ready to stay there all afternoon long, taking my time, in the very place we had so often stayed up till dawn, discussing this, that, and the other. On my last visit, we had gotten bogged down in a conversation about the meaninglessness of it all, and he had asked me to change the subject, when, apropos of nothing in particular, we began riffing on the idea of the black infinity in which our planet floats, like a rudderless ship sailing on an ocean of anguish. He preferred more earthbound subjects and had lately been harking back to the past more than was usual in him, recounting the odd episode from his rural childhood—part picaresque, part nostalgia, and part horror—and his years spent at a Salesian boarding school, and his first brushes with love, which arrived without prior warning with all that hitherto unknown trembling, the first panic attack, an aching as incomprehensible as it was real, your skin torn off in strips by the love that has just savaged you minutes after the girl of your dreams first appeared on the scene like a carnivorous plant. The trap sprung by the pink dress, the ribbon in the hair, the gentleness that, when you least expect it, leaves your heart fraying at the edges and bearing tooth marks. Desire like a whiplash, the prie-dieu in the darkest corner of the chapel. The knees red and raw from all that kneeling and praying. The knees red and raw also from all those falls, from the thorny bushes on the flatland that looked from afar like a garden. We were discussing all this, somewhat in the abstract and without getting down to the specifics, the girls who plucked us from our childhoods without the slightest compassion, and the fear that hovered in the air, though always left unspoken, when the time came to take her hand in yours under an almond tree in bloom, and all that innocence that cuts through you like a rusty sword, the pale hands that daintily place in your chest, forevermore, a sorrow that is there to stay.

There was the battered leather armchair in which he liked to lounge and read and from which, just four days previously, he had held forth on Proust, waving airily with his glasses in one hand, and the yellow- and orange-hued checked blanket with which he covered his knees, and, on the side table, next to the ashtray still containing a fair few butts of his that no one had so far taken the trouble to empty, the pile of books he had been reading at the time: the two volumes published by Trotta of the complete works of Celan,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton, the copy of Márai’s
Diaries
that I had just returned to him and which had not yet been put back in its place,
L’espèce humaine
by Robert Antelme, and a few notebooks containing his observations, sketches, and all manner of scribblings. He liked the two of us to read the same books more or less at the same time, for then he had someone with whom to discuss passages and exchange points of view.

Not long before, in that same room, he had been shocked by my theory that the difference between Auschwitz and military service of the sort that I did in Spain in the early eighties was merely quantitative and not qualitative. Immense, granted. Colossal, vast, there’s no arguing with that, but merely quantitative all the same. That was my headstrong stance. Auschwitz was military service multiplied by a certain number, pick one as high as you like, but not a drastically different matter. I remember telling him that when humans who sleep en masse in barracks begin to move at the sound of a whistle, you’re already halfway there. If I, at an intimate, almost physical level, can understand the testimonies of those who survived, even feeling an occasional, vague sense of déjà vu on reading the books of Antelme or Primo Levi, this is because I have on many a winter morning fallen into line in my underwear in front of the barracks and have mopped the floor of an immense building in which the bunk beds, the lice, and the boogers all blended into one. And because my head was all but shaven clean the minute I arrived, and because orders were barked at me to stand in the line for vaccinations and to stand in the line for the standard-issue attire and to stand in the line to have my bowl filled with soup and stewed meat, while all around me were watchtowers and spotlights trained on the tops of walls crowned with barbed wire and shards of jagged glass. Needless to say, I was not claiming that having lived through all of that automatically entitled me to put myself in the concentration camp prisoners’ shoes, but it did at least give me a firmer grasp on what they were talking about than could be said of someone who has never been ordered to place their thoughts and speech on hold, or paraded back and forth all morning long, or cleaned sardines and scrubbed toilets for hours on end. Without that experience of having been stripped of my dignity, I would have no way of knowing what it feels like to be on your knees in the mud, or to have your face trampled by a boot. Now, however, when I read those tales of the camps, I can picture the backdrop to all that ignominy, the guard’s faces, the smell of muck and dirty laundry, and the depths of the envy you can feel toward any old dog of the sort that come to feed off the scraps from the trash cans left outside the back door to the kitchen.

And I was also trying, clumsily, to get across that other idea of mine, as old as it is muddled, that every human life contains within it the story of its century. Not, it goes without saying, in chronological terms, or in the form of parallels that can in any sufficiently clear-cut way be drawn. But I understood that those months back then, devoid of any hope, had been my Auschwitz, with their farewell to poetry and their sky teeming with vultures, with death hovering over everything at all hours and the lost beliefs and the broken banners. I told him that I could recognize in my own past the Jaca uprising, the face, the flesh of the woman who made me head outside into the snow to join Fermín Galán’s men, singing, armed to the teeth, all the flags pointing straight toward defeat. And I also told him that on some good days, in the darkness of the barracks, I still held out hope of having my own Normandy landing, my May of ‘68, my time of burning cathedrals, and a Prague Spring that in my dreams took the form of a whitewashed patio filled with potted geraniums, not far from the sea.

Wearing his slippers, I lit one of his cigarettes and sat down to contemplate the living room from the position of his absence. On the other side of the window, at that hour of the afternoon, it seemed that the fears that had plagued him were still there, as if blind to the fact that their prey had already been struck down by another, more potent, force of nature. The clouds circled like crows as the natural light faded little by little from the room. This was for him the most dreaded moment of the day. The blinds shook gently in the breeze that at that time of day seems to come from the most bitterly cold nothingness. I turned on his stereo to listen to “Hurt,” which had for me in recent months become something of a theme song for Jacobo in this little theater of ours. It seemed to me that Johnny Cash’s voice was closer to tears than on previous occasions.

I then got down to the business of slowly searching his drawers, one by one. I was not looking for anything in particular, and at the same time I was looking for everything. I wanted to understand something. I wanted to let the objects shape my thoughts a little, guiding them, for otherwise, without the aid of those external prompts that at times conjured up precise instants, at others long stretches of time, my thoughts could not run freely. It’s strange what the silence of a dead man’s things has to say for itself and the way such objects have of keeping still. Some of them, a pair of glasses with an outdated prescription painstakingly preserved in their case, say, or an old wallet stuffed full of expired ID cards, appeared to have gotten a head start, surreptitiously and under their own steam, on their owner’s death, for they had for some years now lain in the gloomy recesses of a wooden drawer, locked away and forgotten. Most of our things die before us, they said their goodbyes some time ago without our noticing. Others, meanwhile, those that outlive us, make no bones about the sudden interruption of everything—items of clothing with his sweat on them in the laundry basket, drinking glasses bearing the outline of lips now forever sealed, reminders of doctor’s appointments he should have gone to the next week, prescriptions awaiting a trip to the pharmacy, tickets for a play that has yet to open in the city, an almanac on his writing desk with a whole ream of pages that now serve no purpose, and the hundreds of scraps of paper scattered here, there, and everywhere (Post-it notes on the refrigerator door, napkins from bars, dog-eared Moleskines) with snippets that could have amounted to something, who knows, perhaps poems or something of the sort, ideas for an article, fragments of letters that went nowhere.

I needed to understand something, to get some inkling of who might have killed him and why, and as things stood, I had nothing, other than the certainty that he had feared this attack and that the police had ruled out the motive of robbery. When I arrived at Jacobo’s apartment, I had Lorazepam coming out of my ears. Though that state of extreme sedation didn’t exactly help me get my thoughts in any proper order, I felt sure it was the only way to face the ordeal of entering his apartment alone, of seeing the blood stains on the wall, and of finding myself among his things once more. Even so, I gave a start at the slightest noise from the upstairs apartment or the inner patio. It’s impossible not to feel like an intruder when rooting though the pockets of a dead man’s coat, rummaging around in his nooks and crannies, reading all his papers.

BOOK: Bad Light
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