Bad Light (3 page)

That idea of slipping between the sheets, fresh from showering with the most expensive body wash, one last time, is not without its charm. One can snuggle up to it, that idea, hugging it as a child might embrace his rag doll in bed or an insomniac might clamp a sleeping pill beneath his tongue, with that same desperation and tenderness, and sensing the gentleness with which, from within, slowly, death washes over you. To erase, much like Borges’s suicide, every thing and the sum of all things: “Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left.” To slowly forget it all, the blows, the slights, the most recent and the oldest scars, pink, hypertrophied. To sense the scent of Ruben Dario’s funeral wreaths drawing ever closer, the cold wax, the black velvet, and also Juan Ramón Jimenez’s birds, those that are going to stay, singing, beyond the window. And in the last instant to forgive God, to love the ruins for want of anything else, the waste left behind, the shards, the future like a treasure map burning in the bath, and to contemplate, with the indulgence that only weariness can give, with a gaze as tender as possible, the consummation of so much disaster.

Yet it is not unheard of in such circumstances to weigh up the possibility of replacing that sterile agony with something that packs a greater punch. Something weighty, something grand, sublime if possible. It’s only human and is a common occurrence; it’s not unusual for the trick question to emerge unbidden: If the hardest part has already been established—the refusal to carry on with life as we knew it—if we have already said farewell to it all and that goodbye was heartfelt, then why not make the most of that extremely rare, formidable freedom, that impossible detachment that lies out of reach by any other means, to do that which, out of fear, was left undone? The worst failure, death itself, is already a given. In fact, it was half an hour away just moments ago, with all the bottles of pills laid out on the bedside table, as if on display. In such thoughts lie the true and invincible strength of the kamikaze, the courage of the hero who lays down his life, and the fearless energy of he who understands that the new dawn now means nothing to him, that its dirty light is no longer any concern of his, that time now is a vast foreign land, and who takes up residence in borrowed time that leaves him well placed, should he so wish, to bellow with laughter at it all, even that which he most feared, to be without being, to open the floodgates and drain himself of caution and shame in a hemorrhage that takes with it plans and resentments, long-held dreams, dread and pride. Many doors open from here on in, a whole world of possibilities that nevertheless have in common the power of that bitter, untamed freedom, the triumphant detachment of a spirit newly freed from instinct who has just lifted the veil that concealed a heady world. There are less pitiful ways to toy with self-destruction that lying on a bed, valium coming out of your ears:
Leaving Las Vegas
-style, for example, spending every last dime on the most expensive drinks, surrounded by whores and neon lights; or jotting down in a notebook, like in
My Life Without Me
, a list of the things that were left undone, little whims and flights of fancy, such as watching the dawn break in such and such a place or contemplating the sunset on the opposite side of the world, breakfasting on champagne and oysters, say, diving in the Caribbean, or running barefoot through the snow under a full moon, whatever. All of which is to suppose that there is any point in doing that which cannot be repeated or remembered, much less told. Pure performance for no one’s eyes, like a poem written on a lost rock in a language mankind has long forgotten.

And then there is the option of being someone else, or at least pretending to be, of emigrating with the shirt on your back to anywhere on the far side of the ocean, to Mexico City, say, where fear roams the streets in green, panic-stricken taxis, at any time and heading who knows where, and everything is wild and speaks the truth. To touch down there one day, to put myself up again in the
Hotel Milán
, paying for a couple of nights at most to gather strength before setting out to beg on the streets until my heart bursts, collecting cardboard boxes, descending into the depths of hell, filling sheets of paper much like Jean Genet and good old Jean-Paul Clêbert, who, in his tiny, cramped handwriting, on any wrapper at all, even on crumpled cigarettes packs, scribbled down the exploits of the drifter’s life, its wretched poetry, all that naïf drivel about life beneath a star-studded canopy, but also the rush of refusing to contemplate anything other than life as it is lived in the moment, the heart beating now, the dinner and the roll in the hay that very night, the just stolen wine washing down the throat like a blessing, the company at once dangerous and endearing of those who barely question themselves underneath the world’s sewers. Changing continents is about as close as I can imagine coming to her never having been born.

I could perhaps make my way to Zipaquirá, just as I’ve sometimes thought about doing. In that Colombian city, on my return from Vilha de Leiva, in the taxi taking us back to Bogota one Sunday evening, I saw myself. And with such clarity that I had no time to react or ask our driver to pull over a moment to the curb. In the slums of Zipaquirá, in a sort of makeshift roadside bar made from materials like tarpaulin, plywood, and tin, where liquor and bottles of beer were served on the edge of the highway, I spotted myself, utterly weather beaten, unsteady on my feet, clutching a drink in one hand. It was me. And for a moment I saw myself twice over—from my car seat, I saw that outcast with unkempt hair, drinking what might have been mescal by the side of the road, and, from that very same curb and with equal astonishment, I saw my reflection seated inside a taxi bound for the capital, its trunk laden with the bags of
longaniza
we had just bought in Zutamarchán. I’ve seen myself on other occasions, albeit more hazily and in static images—a snapshot of a group of prisoners in the barracks of Auschwitz taken by the allied soldiers, the camp newly liberated, among the figures in a painting by Ramón Casas—in which, with the passing of time, the likeness has slowly faded. I have never, however, stopped toying with the idea of going back to look for myself in that lost city in the region of Cundinamarca. No one will ever fully convince me that the drunkard in Zipaquirá, who was struck, just as I was, half-dead with astonishment on seeing me drive past, was not me.

But for the most part, such thoughts amount to little more than an excuse, almost always compelling, to tumble from your bed and crawl over to the phone, praying that it’s not too late to have your stomach pumped. The ambulances, the lights, the world hurtling back into view, tearing the black cobwebs to shreds. A niggling doubt will suffice, though we know full well that such globe-trotting plans to embark on part two of our lives, now free from meaning and our former concerns, are little more than a long line of unspent bullets, booby traps, phantasmagorias, pipe dreams that are the product of a mind that refuses to resign itself to mingling with the earth just yet. Out of self-interest and an instinct for survival, the unconscious tends to keep its lips sealed as tight as a whore’s even when it’s as clear as day how such adventures will end, the vengeance-seeking self-sacrifice that strikes us as laughable, if not worse, the following morning, the list in a notebook that will never even be bought, the flights never taken, the planes that take to the air without us on board, just as thousands do every day at every latitude and in every possible direction, a white trail in their wake, slicing across the sky at all hours of the day and bearing our empty seat, touching down beneath rain showers that will never drench us on the outskirts of cities filled with alleyways down which we will never lose our way and women with whom we will never exchange so much as a glance, let alone fluids or promises.

Greatness, true luxury, lies in that somewhat aristocratic disdain, not in the worst sense of the word, of always doing things by halves—the tumbler of brandy left partly undrunk on the terrace of a bar, the coins not fully gathered up from the dish on which the waiter has brought the change from your order, the last bits of sauce not mopped up, whole evenings of drowsiness and complacency, wasted without guilt for there is more than enough life to go around, because there’s plenty of time yet. This is the attitude that stands in contrast to that of the miserable wretch driven by the most visceral and tight-fisted need to see poetry in the idea of draining every last drop of what life has to offer. And so he throws nothing away, and saves for a rainy day, stingily hoarding the leftovers to be polished off later, much as a dog that has had its fill might bury bones next to a tree so as not to let a single ounce of food go to waste, and he dunks every last
churro
in his order of hot chocolate, no matter that he’s full to bursting, whether or not he has any room left in his belly. It’s a thousand times better to always leave a little something on the plate, to thumb your nose elegantly at part of the banquet, to dine, say, with a ravishing lady and gracefully allow her to escape with her life. And, in that same haughty vein, to abandon life at the midway point, to up and leave, just like that, as one might leave untouched what remains of an ice-cream cone now melted or a saucer bearing loose change.

Yet the mind is wont to erase such ideas at a stroke, much as it silences other questions that do perhaps matter when talk turns to escape: If you shatter all the crockery against the wall, how will you then blow off steam in future? If you sever all ties, what bonds will you then shrug off? If you abandon all point of reference, from where or from what can you now retreat? And the clincher, the central refrain of a woebegone song of destitution and abandonment that refuses to fade out altogether in your head: To what end your footsteps through the world, the new cities, the seas you cross, the paths you take, the horizons, the storms through which you pass and which pass through you, the fruits you grasp, your glory or your downfall, your wretched self lost in the desert of what lies ahead, if the eyes that once looked on your life are now closed?

Christmas is the hardest time of year to get some time to yourself. There are people who call you at all hours to make sure you’re OK and aren’t festering in gloom during the holidays. They will not leave you be. They sign you up for dinners, they insist on taking you out on the town. I felt the need for a quick trip, to get a little distance from it all, and so it was that my 2010 began in Paris, a plastic cup in my hand and party music boring into my brain under an Eiffel Tower lit up in dazzling, electric blue. Thousands of people taking snapshots of the metallic chill and the effect of the laser beams on the steel and the sky, while dozens of hooded, tattooed youths lined up against every wall in a large, cordoned-off radius to be patted down by the police, hands behind their heads, feet spread as far apart as possible. In the neighboring streets, cars burned amid the sound of sirens and puddles of champagne.

It was fiercely cold the following day. Beneath the snowflakes that fell as if in slow motion, I walked the two or three blocks that separated my hotel from Montparnasse Cemetery, then whiled away a couple of hours between its walls, pausing before the same graves that had drawn me to them the first time I had set foot there several years before—the graves of Duras, Cortázar, Vallejo, Baudelaire—this time adding to my brief itinerary a couple of tombstones to which I had before paid little heed, pausing also before the grave of Serge Gainsbourg, covered with flowers, rain-sodden cigarettes, handwritten notes, and miniature bottles of liquor, and that of Jean Seberg, the lone huntress, who finally secured her spot beneath the funereal earth at the eighth request. Squatting on my haunches in front of each one, running my fingertips over the damp slabs as if the marble might offer up something akin to an answer, musing vaguely on the way of things and again wondering why it is that even my deepest desires, even when they go hand in hand with urgency, fury, or maelstrom, always materialize with a question mark. Sensing the perfume of the black roses, of the giant petals I cannot recognize, all of the sorrow laid out there, in the true heart of the world, around the cypresses, beneath the snow, beneath the stone, beneath all of the footsteps, beneath everything.

Paris was nothing more than a boulevard of ashes, so whispered Moustaki to my adolescent self from a red plastic battery-powered cassette player as I lay on my bed, at a time when the world’s cities first began to take shape in my mind, with their bridges, their secret places, and their towers, based on three or four photos I had stumbled upon and music aplenty. And that, a boulevard of ashes, was precisely what the streets were to me until I reached the Mirabeau Bridge. I had no way of knowing which side Paul Celan had leapt from on the night of the 19
^th
to the 20
^th
of April, 1970, and so I picked one at random and stood there a good long while, gazing at the water. I have never set much store by the time-honored metaphor that holds that life is a river that carries us along. Rather it strikes me that if time is pushing us onward, it does so while at the same time passing through us, wearing us down, transforming us from head to toe. It is not a question of the current simply carrying us, just as we are, from one spot to another, closer to the sea or to death with each passing minute. If there is no escaping the hours and days, tomorrow or the past, this is because yesterday has warped us, that’s all there is to it; it has taken us from A to B, leaving within us traces of calamity and weariness. I’d be lying if I said that my footsteps had led me to that bridge purely by chance. Peering over those railings had been the main reason for my trip to Paris. In order to arrive at or manufacture that moment, I had crossed the Pyrenees two days previously, catching a high-speed train in Pau with the sole intention of standing there a good long while, watching the water enter the arch of the bridge only to disappear behind my back, bound for the ocean. It’s strange how we sometimes choose the places in which to find answers or a simple tonic to ease the sorrow that possesses us, or to which vanquished gods we beg for light, the baffling way in which we scour the world for altars to kneel before and sacred moments, dubious symbols, gazes that take naked snapshots of us from up on high in a broken sky. As I contemplated the current from that spot, imagining the thunderous sound made by a body dropping like a stone from the railings at an hour when the whole world is asleep, I was in fact seeking to find out whether or not, when push came to shove, I wished to carry on living. Or, more to the point, whether or not I would carry on living. This was what had brought me there, although I believe that I could never, at that point or ever, have put a finger on quite why.

Those days, my inner devastation was complete, and I was bogged down in a state of uselessness that was dragging on longer than was desirable. My finances had run aground, everyday work had become a hellish affair, and my former excesses and the anxiety of that time, with its poor sleep and even worse diet, with all of its despair and pharmacopoeia, had started—prone to dying as I’ve always been—to take its toll on my body. I spent my time in the hotel reading. I had taken plenty of books but couldn’t settle on a single one, flitting from one to another, on edge, as one might when hunting for an urgent piece of information. I underlined the following passage in my copy of Sándor Márai’s
Diaries
: “Did I love her? I don’t know. Can one love one’s legs, one’s thoughts? Quite simply, everything is meaningless without legs or thoughts. Without her, everything is meaningless—I do not know if I loved her. It was something else. I don’t love my kidneys or my pancreas, either. They simply form part of me, just as she formed part of me.” I thought about calling Jacobo to ask him a question or two about the urban backdrop to Celan’s last days, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so, for he would no doubt have picked up on the alarm signals in my tone of voice, and I figured him capable of putting together a rescue sortie in a matter of hours to come to my aid if he pictured me wandering aimlessly through those streets, alone, my gaze obliterated, heading from bar to bar, in such dangerous proximity to the bridges.

There are dreams that simply tear you asunder, a thousand times worse than any insomnia, no matter how sweat drenched or heart stopping, no matter how fiercely the temples throb. As a reader or observer of life, I have always been a sucker for the lure I spoke of earlier of situations in which someone has no choice but to start from scratch: tales of prisoners released back into the outside world with little but the shirts on their backs; exiles who return to their former neighborhoods after years of absence in search of any old job with which to get by and a temporary room in which to hang their hat; foreign widowers who appear out of nowhere; people who, overnight, for whatever reason, change their habits and their passport. I had always seen a whirlwind of light there, the irresistible rush of wiping the slate clean, of turning what had until then been a remote possibility into something that lives and breathes, of calmly pulling up a chair to ponder, without haste of any kind, in any old bar in the recently unveiled world, who one will be from that moment on, the battles to be waged once more, and even, by extension, the fears that will from now on quicken the pulse in the midst of a ravaged landscape that is, at one and the same time, the cradle of all that is to come. Now that it was I, however, who found myself in such a fix, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had fallen by the wayside, sick and sapped of strength for any further adventures for the time being. All the same, the old urge to take flight was triggered, the same one that had led me to drive hour after hour down Spain’s highways every summer, aimless and heading nowhere in particular, listening to country records, stopping to rest at gas stations, and jotting down vague musings in a small notepad. Only this time it was triggered in a much more scattershot, painful way, for this now had nothing to do with that old affectation of scribbling on maps or looking for hotels as desolate and cinematographic as possible in which to spend the night, with a broken down ice machine, tattered blinds, and desolation in the form of damp patches on the wallpaper if possible. All that had before amounted to little more than a gentle gloom had now become spiderwebs and trembling. Those thousand-mile getaways bore about as much resemblance to this flight that had now begun as a child pretending to be killed by a shot to the chest does to one dying for real on the sidewalk, the whites of his eyes showing.

Yet there is a dark pleasure to be had in setting fire to ships and watching as any hope of return goes up in flames on the water, a mile from the shore. Once the thought has crossed your mind, it’s hard to resist the temptation to make a clean break, the longing to give in to the black vortex that seeks to swallow you whole from inside an abyss, like a giant claw grabbing you by the ankles and dragging you in; it’s tough to give up on the idea of cutting the ropes and turning off the lights, unplugging everything so that all that remains is to toss portraits, bouquets, and ashes overboard. You know you shouldn’t yet are powerless to do otherwise. Just like when, as a child, you strike a younger brother just because you feel like it, or dump the girl of your dreams for no reason she or anyone else can grasp, leaving her, just like that, weeping on a park bench.

A few days after having officially left, I had to return to my former apartment to fetch a few of my belongings when I spotted a pair of my shoes—dirty, somewhat the worse for wear, in need of a lick of polish—lying forlornly on the bedroom floor. For some obscure reason, a pair of shoes always makes my thoughts turn to death. At some point in my childhood, perhaps not as hazy in my nightmares as I might like to think in my waking hours, I must have been taken aback on entering the room of a dead relative, one of those distant family members who would pass away in provinces as lost as they themselves were, forcing me to travel all night long and miss a day of school among the cypresses, the black-clad women brewing endless pots of coffee, and all manner of friends and in-laws trying on the deceased man’s overcoats for size, almost out of eyeshot. And I’d swear that after the funeral, I spotted a pair of black shoes on the floor and understood death on sensing, for the very first time, the absence of any legs rising up toward the bedroom ceiling, forming a human being along the way, with his gestures and his white shirt; the void left behind by the dead man was right there, in the air above the shoes. And, stricken with horror, I also sensed the prospect of widowed footsteps roaming the hallways in the nights to come. The shoes lay a few short yards from the bed that, though it might now smell only of fever, and though pictures of the Virgin Mary had been pinned to the headboard, had no doubt in the not too distant past been privy to laughter and desire—the door locked from the inside entirely by design and the children horsing around on the other side of it, hovering dangerously close, the sweet fear of being caught in the act, the mischief of urgent lovemaking. I knew, as soon as I clapped eyes on those discarded shoes of mine, that I was a dead man in that house. In other words, it was as if between those four walls there languished a ghost whose facelessness was precisely my facelessness. The sight of that footwear tipped the balance more than the sight of empty closets with bare coat hangers, barren drawers, or bookshelves covered in nothing but dust. In Auschwitz, so Jacobo had taught me, shoes were piled up at the entrance and can still be seen in the camp quarters that now house a museum. A huge heap of loafers, boots of all types and sizes, children’s sandals. Contemplating that colossal pile, you think of the barbarity, of numbers and facts and the horror of history, of the pajama-clad skeletons filing past in black and white that we’ve seen in so many documentaries, all those trains screeching to a halt at the gates to hell; but if you pause awhile to observe one single item of footwear, one shoe in particular or a pair tethered together by a knot, then you see the dead child. You see a boy struggling to tie the laces in order to keep the boot from falling off with every step he takes or from swallowing up his socks. You picture him seated on the ground, tugging firmly on the tongue of his shoe, you see his snot, you hear his breathing, the sound of his lungs compressing the frozen air of a Polish winter. Just as I saw myself in that apartment. When I closed the door behind me, the shoes stayed where they were, empty forevermore, foolish, bereft, filled with air getting staler with each passing minute. My life, from that moment onward, was something else, something hard to pin down, the exploits of a being who moved outside of myself, and barefoot. At that moment, my mood was abject. The streets, the world, any room in which I might find myself, had become pure exposed terrain.

I’ve had that same sense of my own death on returning to cities or neighborhoods from my past, any of the places from which I’d vanished without a trace and which have carried on regardless, the everyday hustle and bustle, bars that change owners, stores that shut down, streets that are widened, neon signs where before there was nothing. It’s no stretch to see yourself as a ghost among neighbors who no longer recognize you, the handful of storekeepers who remain behind their counters, affable and grown old as if by magic, the groups of kids who appear out of nowhere, making their way home from school amid a clamor of shouts and snacks wrapped in tinfoil and soccer balls and schoolbooks with homework for the following day, the clusters of women chatting on the sidewalk, and the pitiful cries of the lottery vendors. That pair of shoes lying on the floor brought home the fact that, for all intents and purposes, I had just died for many people. Without the grieving of others, without the slightest ritual, but with the exact same outcome of dark solitude and absence stretching out as far as the eye could see. My thoughts turned to the names of all those I would never again see, save some freak occurrence, all those individuals who, without my ever having been truly close to them, had nevertheless formed the human backdrop against which my days unfolded. Without the spotlight of their gaze on me, everything took on a nightmarish air. What becomes of a life when no one is watching anymore, aside from a nonentity who comes and goes, eats dinner or doesn’t, squirms or laughs? If, when all is said and done, every life is a story, then every story needs a reader. Otherwise, the world around us runs the risk of fading to nothing, leaving behind nothing more than disjointed perceptions, moments like islands, brief snatches. True destitution arises when we exit the stage and the eyes that followed our movements vanish or explode or simply take to the air like tiny balloons fleeing to the skies of other worlds. Certain parallels can be drawn between the newly abandoned and that classmate orphaned in primary school with whom we all wished to share part of our sandwiches during recess, trying to make sure he was not left all alone with his thoughts in the corner: the un-ironed shirt, the gaze perpetually lost in the distance, and that almost imperceptible dampness pooled in the corners of the eyes. But at least he had a star on which to gaze at night from his bedroom, or so he said, and that same star watched over his footsteps and sometimes even quizzed him on the lesson of the following day. For the one who’s been jilted, instead, the blackness of the sky is filled only with closed eyelids. A vast drawn curtain. When the mannequin is moved from the shop window to the storeroom in the far end of the basement, it matters little what clothes it’s wearing, whether or not it’s broken, whether or not it still trembles.