Bad Light (8 page)

I returned home in something of a daze, without having gotten a single thing straight in my mind. I thought it would be best to go back another day when my thoughts were a little less cluttered and I had some idea of which way to turn or where to begin, anything other than turning up and grabbing some object, then caressing it awhile before putting it back where I’d found it, which was more or less all I’d done the entire afternoon. I opened the front door to find my apartment particularly silent, and as if tainted by a half-sickly light, of the sort that leaves everything tinged with ennui. In my listless state and as if spurred on by a strange inertia, as if the detective work I had undertaken in Jacobo’s apartment just moments before had somehow carried over, I began to see my own possessions as if they belonged to someone else, in other words, as if I were in some way dead, or worse, and someone had wandered in and begun to survey my things, the mess, the furniture, the books, in a bid to find something out about who I was and what my undoing had been, the ultimate reasons for the disaster, for my aimless drifting and my empty hands, for the shadows that cut through me, and all the rest besides. In one of those folders I hadn’t opened in decades, I came across a handful of letters sent to me a long time ago, most still inside their original envelopes, as well as the odd draft of others penned by me, which I must have set aside at the time in order to keep a copy, to what end I no longer know. I picked one at random, addressed to the first girl who ever truly got under my skin, back in my high school days. The first thing that struck me was how little I remembered of her. While I could clearly recall a pair of her dresses and could sketch the door to her apartment block on the Calle Costa Rica, her face was much harder to summon.

Dear Magdalena
,

They told me that I’d forget you, that all this pain would little by little ease and that a few years from now I’d again be able to stroll calmly down the streets I roamed with you and again enter the bars in which we got drunk together, and even sit down again in our usual corner at the end of the bar, under the same darkness as back then and that music that enveloped us, without panicking at the sudden emergence of a memory that might again bring back the taste of punch on your tongue or the image of my hands creeping up your thighs, of your raised skirt and your moist panties on the bar stool
.

They told me that’s what always happens. That the sorrow passes like a mountain storm and gives way to other suns and other skies, taking with it the pitch-black sea of clouds that roared before up on high like the sky of Golgotha over the wooden crosses on which flesh hung, now dead. They told me that my life would carry on and that things would happen in the future and that there would be more travel and women and also more desire, why not, and that one day, almost without my realizing it, a time would come when I would once again sleep the whole night through, I’d see, and that I’d again eat at mealtimes and would be able to get by without the hundreds of pills in my silver case, without having to drink on an empty stomach, without clawing at my skull, and that I’d no longer feel the desire to make bloody tracks on my arms and hands with a box cutter
.

They told me all of that. But time goes by and my love will not leave. I loved you so much, you bitch, that my love cannot leave. It’s here to stay. And it hurts. And it remains. And it will not leave. It has made its nest in me, like a snake holding out come hell or high water among the throbbing rubble of my ruin, and sometimes it rears its head with its forked tongue, with its bloodshot eyes, and it waits for you like before at the entrance to the movie theaters and looks for you in bars and down alleyways, and, asleep or awake, it dreams only of reaching you wherever you may be to bite your heart. And there it remains. It does not tire. And it hurts. And it will not leave
.

I don’t know what arbitrary, strange force it is that sometimes keeps me from tearing up this type of letter while other times it compels me to do so there and then, filled with rage. Shame comes into it, needless to say, that much I do know, but the underlying reasons are beyond me. My initial instinct, no sooner had I read the letter, was to destroy it, but even as I was thinking of doing so, my fingers, as if they had a life of their own, were neatly folding it in two and putting it back in its place. On other occasions, in similar situations, just the opposite had occurred: while my mind was all made up to safeguard some piece of paper as if my life depended on it, my hands were suddenly crumpling it into a ball before setting it on fire inside the sink. On this occasion I kept the letter, as if I might one day reread it or need it at some future point as documentary proof of something—quite what is anyone’s guess—on some sort of eventual day of reckoning. It’s as if everything in a man’s life is leading up to a settling of scores with himself, at the gates to oblivion, that in the end never actually takes place. When not thwarted by the surprise arrival of death, it is prevented by all the weariness that tends to precede it, ruling out any attempt at a reckoning or stock-taking with its
what does it matter now
and its
we tried our best
. Or by shame itself, for in truth there is no such thing as a life that when looked at in hindsight and with a little perspective is not, deep down, a source of shame, even the lives of heroes and martyrs. Starting with the life of Jesus Christ, then the rest of us from there on down. It’s enough to make you stick your head in a hole in the ground, ostrich-style, never to emerge again.

My hands behind my back, as if sleepwalking, I scanned the shelves—the spines of the books, the objects that keep them partially hidden from view, little boxes, figures, framed photographs, and the wooden shelves themselves, all with their very fine coating of dust. For some strange reason, it seemed wrong to move anything, as if I were standing before a museum exhibit or the scene of a crime. It was as if the final whistle had been blown on some game and to touch anything, much less move it from where it stood, would now be cheating. I knew that my life was there, or at least the keys to my life, if indeed my life has ever had any keys, coordinates in the shadows, or has ever obeyed anything other than chaos, improvisation, or happenstance of the purest sort.

Written on the opening pages of each book is the date on which I bought it. Many also feature the name of the city, while a few also contain an additional note on some circumstance or other of that day: who I was with, if the book had been bought as a gift, if I had stolen it and how, if it was raining heavily. And some, albeit the exceptions, even contain within their covers the occasional surprise of some sort that also speaks to the time in which they were read: a dedication from an ex-girlfriend in that sweet handwriting that ex-girlfriends have, a faded movie ticket, a subway pass, some dried petals flattened between the pages. Assuming that anyone might ever have the necessary curiosity and time and were willing to take the trouble, all my books could be arranged in the precise order in which I had purchased them, almost down to the day, and based on that sequence, it would no doubt be possible to come up with a theory about rather more than my changing interests and taste in books: my urges to take flight, my obsessions, my soul, in short, or at least my soul as I liked to see it at each stage of my life. And if, to stretch the point a little further, that timeline was then set against the events of my life, a parallel biography, as if beneath the surface, would then emerge and might perhaps explain a great deal about the events that unfurled up above and shed some sort of light on my actions, my getaways, my terrors, my infatuations, my moves, and all that followed in their wake. Which book lay on my bedside table the night I felt sure I was dying of love for the very first time, aged sixteen, the night I covered my pillow in snot and scraps of poetry? What was I reading when I was abandoned in an interior apartment on the Calle Bravo Murillo, whose hallways then filled up with deathly music, cat shit, and beer bottle tops lined up on the floor along the baseboard of the entire length of the hallway? What book did I have on me when death gorged itself on what I held most dear and turned the whole world, with its streets and its seas, into an endless tomb beneath the cover of a sky that became for me like the inside of the lid, upholstered in blue, of a giant coffin? The contents of each and every book mingles with those of my thoughts at each moment, and it might not be too bold to claim that they must have influenced my decisions somehow, or at least the moods that inspired such decisions. My mind has been filled with those words, tangled up amongst them, tainted by that ink whose marks formed, deep down, mental images, sometimes hazy and sometimes crystal clear, distant worlds, outlandish characters, lies and battles, women as if glimpsed through a trellis of blackened wood, prodigious tales, hospitals and jungles, wonder and bile, the human heart with all of its ravages, and the blood that seeps out, boiling or ice cold. It’s impossible not to see those books as part of who I have been, allies and culprits in equal measure, for better or for worse.

I’ve arranged the volumes of fiction by their original language, then in more or less chronological order. Works of philosophy and non-fiction have their own bookcases and rooms. A library spreads out like an infection or a monster unfurling ever more numerous, longer tentacles. Then there are a series of special shelves in favored spots that at some point I began to call altars, devoted to a particular author or subject matter, with their corresponding ornaments and illustrative photos. These tributes have changed over the years. Now, for instance, there is an altar to Marguerite Duras, with the various editions of her books, besides which I decided to place those of Robert Antelme and Yann Andréa (who else?), so that she’s not altogether on her lonesome, as well as a bottle of Bordeaux that must be vinegar by now, deluxe editions of her movies
Hiroshima Mon Amour
and
India Song
, a bookmark bearing a picture of her seated,
Emmanuelle
-style, on a rocking chair, and a collection of postcards, with their black cardboard case and red ribbon, published by Les Éditions de Minuit and featuring the photographs that Hélène Bamberger took of her and her things, and of Yann, and of the sea, in the outskirts of Trouville in the early eighties, her face so lined with wrinkles, her terrifying thirst for peace of mind, her thirst, period. This is but one small example. The books by Mexicans are joined on the shelves by bottles of tequila, of the half-sized sort usually picked up at the airport right before boarding the flight home, and small potted cacti that call to mind a scorpion-filled desert, while the most tropical part of the library has been set aside for those by Rudyard Kipling, right where the leaves of the pothos cascade from on high like a green waterfall. It’s impossible to take out one of his books without first having to brush the branches to one side like the native guides of explorers. Sometimes, as can be seen, the combinations of books and objects reflect the most hackneyed of clichés (scenes of
milonga
and the
mate
with its corresponding
bombilla
straw next to the Argentine stories, miniature ships and antique compasses flanking Stevenson and Conrad, a leather-bound hip flask next to those of Malcolm Lowry), but sometimes they can be put down to more secret, intimate associations of ideas that would leave any casual observer utterly baffled. Things of mine, objects that only I know belong there and there alone. That’s where I should focus my attention. If there is some key that might help shed a little light on things, it is no doubt to be found there, mixed up in amongst the secret threads that bind the furthest recesses of my mind to that section of the library.

And then there are the shelves housing movies and music, which also endeavor, more or less intentionally, to tell a life story. Almost every movie I ever saw in the art-house theaters on Sundays back in an age that now looks golden from my current decrepit state is there. Whether or not I actually liked those movies at the time, whether or not I ever even understood them, is neither here nor there; pick up a program from Cinestudio Griffith or El Regio from the early eighties, scan the titles, and you’ll discover that every movie, every single one, is on my shelves, see for yourself. And the same can be said for the singers who left their mark on moments of my life, the concerts that truly set my pulse racing, the songs that for a time became private anthems, for they seemed to speak about me or to understand me in a way that was beyond the humans that surrounded me. It’s all there, albeit jumbled in amongst other records I’ve barely listened to, though I thought I would when I bought them, perhaps because I harbored the secret intention of beginning, one day, to be someone else.

Surveying my shelves now, it seems to me that they bear witness to the story of a fraud and that they might at most bear witness to the depths of a being who doesn’t actually exist. I think that those crammed shelves speak less to who I am than to who I wanted to be. It strikes me that every collector, be they a consummate bibliophile or a teenager looking to assemble the complete output of their favorite band, has in mind, albeit in an ill-defined, generic, or prototypical sense, the idea of a visit that will one day be paid by an individual they have not yet met, someone to whom they will reveal that treasure trove of items gathered together over the years, not without a great deal of hardship and penny-pinching, (or, better still, who will see it for themselves, without the need to have it pointed out to them, and who will spring up from the couch in one single bound to take a closer look), and who will know how to appreciate it and will be able to spot there and then, thanks to all that stuff, the sense of a whole life, the identity of a man. Every library, no matter how personal, is arranged as if on display. It seeks out the other, it craves admiration, the simple recognition of a like-minded soul or a polar opposite. This is not altogether uncalculating, for it is, when all is said and done, a language. And as such, it may be heartfelt or duplicitous. One would first of all have to know, in each case, who is being addressed, who, for each of us, that blurry silhouette might be, that mysterious caller, always as unexpected as death itself, who will turn up one day and take final stock of our things, and will know who we are by tallying up what is here and what is missing, volumes and gaps, treasures and absences. For if not, then how come it’s impossible to get a wink of sleep if but a single volume is not where it should be and, in an enormous living room, crammed full of belongings, furniture, and volumes, the first thing that leaps out is the gap left behind by the book that isn’t there, the one, say, that was lent out and has yet to be returned? And there’s no need for a physical space to actually exist, since books have a way of huddling up next to one another, and doubling up, and lying sideways, filling the space up to the next shelf; the simple knowledge that that missing spine, with its color, its exact words, ought to be standing between another two books is enough to ensure your gaze is always drawn to that spot. The fraud I spoke of earlier lies in the fact that my library might not, as I have always thought, be the map of my soul. Yet it remains to be seen who I was hoping to fool, whether more or less mindful of this fact, over the course of so many years. Sometimes, when I give the matter some thought, I picture a woman, well into the early hours of morning, a glass in her hand, browsing my shelves. She wears her hair tied up and removes her raincoat to reveal a black dress that leaves her bare shoulders on display. She takes out a book now and then, leafs through it, then puts it back where she found it. She has her back to me and pays me no heed directly, though I wander over to her every now and then and softly kiss her back or the nape of her neck. I make the occasional remark on what she is looking at, but she doesn’t listen, she has no interest in anything I might now have to tell her. She searches for me among the spines of the books she lightly brushes with her fingers. She searches for me there and there alone. Which might explain why, without fully realizing it, I have spent my whole life working up to this future moment or this delirium of which I occasionally glimpse a faint image, with piano music and the rain beating down on the other side of the window. Other times, however, I think that the one who’s been duped is none other than myself, a more innocent, trusting side of me that revels in it all and takes comfort in the belief that he has managed to make something of his life, that he has built something.