Bad Light (5 page)

Which is how things had almost always gone. However, the last time I heeded Jacobo’s summons, his nerves were shot to pieces. His fear had a more solid feel than on previous evenings. This time he was afraid that someone—a man, a real human being—would attack him at any moment. He took great pains to make sure every door was locked and showed me, hidden behind the door, next to the entrance to his apartment, a baseball bat and a couple of axes he had gotten ahold of from somewhere or other and kept hidden so as to be able to defend himself properly when the time came. When I questioned him, he said that this was just in case, that there were plenty of scumbags out there, and that he felt safer this way. For a moment, I thought he was about to offer a more concrete explanation for that fear and that makeshift arsenal. I watched him hesitate over whether or not he ought to fill me in on a story of hatred and persecution that must have struck even him as beyond belief. No doubt he was afraid that I might have taken real fright on learning further details and would have had no wish to keep him company that night, and so he preferred to keep his lips sealed in the hope that I’d put such changes down to a worsening of his state of mind. Which is precisely what happened. I didn’t wish to make any further comment, but at that moment it seemed to me that Jacobo was truly beginning to hit rock bottom. He couldn’t concentrate on any reading that night and had no desire to put on any music, so as not to muffle the sound of footsteps on the staircase or landing. He doubled his usual dose of tranquilizers and spent most of the time peering out the window, all of the lights in the living room switched off, alert to every movement in the street, struggling like a guard on sentry duty to keep sleep at bay.

The following day, on my evening stroll, I was struck out of the blue by a sudden thought: What if it turns out I’m seriously ill and the whole world is in on the secret except me? Just like that, as I cast my mind back over the previous weeks, I began to clearly see certain details that I had not fully grasped at the time: questions I had not quite understood, phone calls apropos of nothing, sideways glances as if of commiseration for no apparent reason. On the other hand, my shattered state was no great mystery to me—my pounding heart, my palpitations and, in general, the all-round toll that, for some time now, being alive had been taking on me. This became all too clear whenever I had to climb a few steps on any staircase. At the mere sight of an uphill slope in the distance, I’d begin to feel a shortness of breath, gasping for air like a fish on the sand. Meanwhile, the feeling that something inside of me was rotting away as I slept was a hard one to shake. I could sense my own skeleton as something increasingly green and watery, and the presence of a seaweed-like substance in my lungs. But the fact is I had spoken to no one. Might someone in my family have gotten their hands on the X-rays I leave lying around in envelopes here and there, or the test results that not even I could bring myself to look at? Had my siblings taken it upon themselves to consult one of my doctors? Had he informed them of something other than what he had told me? Did they phone one another every night to weigh up the options and debate the pros and cons of filling me in on the situation? Perhaps, right now, there are people agonizing over whether or not I ought to know, whether or not I would be plunged yet further into gloom, whether or not I would take the opportunity to settle some old score, or devote my days to squeezing every last drop from what little time I had left. Even I can’t answer that. The idea of disappearing has always made me think of the sea at night, of a silence filled with black vessels. At times I think I would have no objection to slipping away if I could be sure of feeling nothing more than the murmur of my strength as it ebbs away, while breath abandons my body and fatigue slowly comes to rest, like a deadweight, on my various organs—my eyelids, my guts, my worn out muscles. But at others I start to doubt whether the suffering will cease after death or there will ever be any real end to this time of nerves and debris. In other words, though on paper I know that it cannot be any other way, at the same time I find it hard to believe that all this darkness, already so dense, can be healed by yet more darkness.

Seated at the terrace of a bar I tend to frequent most evenings, I linger awhile to eavesdrop on the group of women who were sitting at the next table when I arrived. This is by no means difficult, since they all but bellow at one another and act as if they were completely alone. The women are pushing fifty. Though a couple of them are a few years younger, their ugliness evens things out somewhat, otherwise they would have no right, or indeed any great desire, to be there. Most of them are wearing burgundy-colored tights, as if they had arranged it beforehand—out of a group of seven, four are sporting identical pairs. Others, the more daring members of this almost kamikaze commando unit, have opted for a leopard-skin design, their unruly thighs bulging out over the top of knee-high boots, the unmistakable, albeit unofficial, uniform of the divorcée venturing out on a Saturday night this Autumn/Winter season, broadcasting her right to revelry and proclaiming that she is still good enough to eat. They are waiting for the tardiest of their number to arrive. Typical, they say, who else? They criticize the woman with a certain amount of affection. They’re on edge. For a moment they fear that she will ruin everything, and it would not, by all accounts, be the first time. They have a dinner date with “men,” and this means that they are all aflutter, taking little mirrors out of their handbags every other minute, smoothing their eyebrows with their pinkies, or painstakingly touching up their eye shadow. They may well be cutthroat rivals a few minutes from now, but for the time being they still come to one another’s aid, fussing with bangs and constantly telling one another how pretty they look. When they spy the group of men approaching from a distance, they rush to gather up their cosmetics cases, leaving only their cell phones, dry martinis, mojitos, and packs of Winstons on the table. It’s been a long time since they last spoke of
boys
, and the very word
men
carries with it a vague hint of seriousness, dirtiness, and menace that attracts and repels them in equal measure. Men. Men always pick up the tab, they undress you with their eyes and see a body free of flab or scars, they drop you off at home in a car with white upholstered seats. By the looks of things, these guys are executives, men of a certain standing, not like the last night out. Much as the women have put their efforts into looking ravishing, the men strive to look sporty and laidback; ties are out this evening, they throttle the men quite enough as it is Monday through Friday. The most seasoned and forward of the women seize the opportunity to mark out their territory just seconds before the game gets underway for real. They let it be known at the last minute, leaving no time for any replies, for the men are now too close, that they have set their sights on this one or that one, on the tall, balding one, on the one in the deck shoes, though later—they know the drill—it will all depend on how things play out and any on-the-spot changes of plan will have to be duly relayed in front of the restroom mirror, where, as the dinner nears its end, when dessert is just about to be served, they will form a line and touch up their makeup. Another one, meanwhile, announces that she is here to eat dinner and that’s that. She wants to make this quite clear, she insists, and she won’t be dragged into anything this time. She knows full well what they’re like, and, until she says otherwise, she’s having none of it. She’ll let them know if she has a change of heart; until then she’ll hold firm to her intention of going home just as she came, all by her lonesome. Before you know it, another woman has allied herself with this wary stance—she’s here for a fun evening out, end of story. That’s the plan. Even so, just in case, they have each carefully picked out their underwear, they’re freshly waxed, and they’re even carrying little tubes of vaginal lubricant tucked away in their handbags. The scent of the heady mix of colognes with which they have daubed their wrists, necks, asses, groins, and even every last fleshy fold of what was once their waistline drifts over to my table. I feel the urge to make a quick getaway, for the whole thing is starting to make me feel a little queasy. I’m not sure quite why, but the scene also makes my heart sink. I think of the hours they’ve each spent at the hairdresser’s that very morning, wearing a blue gown of the sort handed out in hospitals, seated beneath the hairdryer, their hair covered in pins, clips, and rollers. I picture them counting out the money left in their purses after settling the bill for it all—shampoo and set, eyebrows, highlights, fingernails and toenails—and I find the image oddly touching. I imagine them returning home in the early hours of morning, their feet aching, tired of forced grins. Their heads are swimming, and they’ve missed their favorite TV show. They have a run in their panty hose and a longing to break down in a flood of tears that, in the end, will not come, for the lure of tiredness is stronger still, and they fall asleep on the couch without fully removing their makeup, a bottle of fresh water and the ibuprofen within reach. That or worse still: waking up pinned under the weight of a hairy leg, sensing ragged breathing on the napes of their necks, and spotting on the bedside table, inches from their noses, a glass containing the false teeth of a stranger who a few short hours ago was dancing salsa like a maniac in the middle of the dance floor, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, and telling an endless stream of jokes about black people and whores.

In a nearby park, I pause awhile to watch the old men who play boules every evening. I don’t know if it’s me or them, but it strikes me that they are bent double under the weight of a grief that should perhaps no longer be theirs to bear. As a general rule, a person now lives such a long time that he ends up shouldering much more than his fair share of sorrow, and this ends up taking its toll on his face. One consequence of the increased life span of those who live in the developed world, and one, moreover, to which little thought is given, is that unlike what tended to happen just decades ago, today’s elderly are still around to witness the devastation wrought on the lives of their offspring, watching as they practically grow old, as they fail, as they lose the will to fight. Before, when death took these men, their sons were still strong, they had plans, beautiful wives, and a seemingly sunny future. These days, it is not uncommon for a grandfather to contemplate, before dying, the divorce of his grandson (he watches as the man pulls up a chair at the dining table in the family home on Sunday, penniless, his shirt wrinkled), whereas in times gone by that same grandson, for reasons of time, would never grow beyond the child who had to be picked up from school occasionally, his hand held on the way home, and who needed help with searching the street markets to find the soccer stickers missing from his collection. Nowadays, dying old men do not leave behind a world in motion brimming with plans and promise, as was once the case, but rather, more than ever, a valley of tears. That said, there is nevertheless a happy upside to this pitiful state of affairs: it is never so hard to turn your back on a desolate landscape as it is on one filled with the birds that Juan Ramón Jimenez claimed would stay, singing. What now lies ahead, more than the earth covering the coffin, is an endless Sunday evening, a haze of tedium and defeat. And it’s easier to take your leave like that, for nothing lulls you to sleep quite like tiredness. It’s no great sacrifice to leave the party when girls, drink, music, and strength are all long-gone.

I walk away thinking of the number of worlds contained within the world, of how far and yet at the same time how close they are to one another, at once distant and huddled together. The combination of the tranquilizers and my afternoon stroll sometimes brings about a sort of reconciliation with the world that emerges in the form of a longing, a veritable thirst, for simple and gentle things. I think I’ve made a mess of almost everything in my life. In having gone too far, for instance, in the desire to fill my time, my head, my rooms, every wall, every shelf, spurred on by a strange
horror vacui
that in reality makes no sense. In short, I believe my past is overstuffed with things, and this is bad news as far as fear is concerned, for anxiety, by its very nature, is something that always returns, and because monsters rarely emerge from empty wells. Perhaps we set too much store by the urge, so symptomatic of the times we live in, to hoard experiences, a sort of Diogenes syndrome more of memories than of objects, and the trick to striking a certain degree of inner balance, if such a thing is possible without becoming a total cretin, may lie in blending in with the nothingness that surrounds us rather than rising up in rebellion and wishing to make of it a sort of giant, faceless foe against which to dig trenches and moats as if we ourselves were anything other than nothingness, as if we could ever truly amount to anything more than what remains, always what remains, what little remains, the almost nothing that remains after having traveled down a thousand roads, after having loved, after having lived between the devil and the deep blue sea, pinned against the sky and the rocks. As if we were anything other than skin that grows old, leaving a pile of ash and cold dregs sealed inside, next to our bones.

Our high school physics professor once told us that if an atom were the size of the Burgos cathedral, then its nucleus would be a pin on the floor, and its electrons, tiny specks of dust hovering beneath the domes. The rest would be empty. With this in mind, given that the world is made up of atoms, one might have said that everything was nothing. We ourselves were nothing. Though it might seem that objects bounce off one another, this is a simple matter of equilibriums and force fields, atomic orbitals, the hurly-burly of magnets in disarray. Any real contact is out of the question. Say, for the sake of argument, that I’m in love with a woman; what I actually love is a peculiar arrangement of nothing, a peculiar arrangement of nothing that bears her name, the form nothingness adopts in her, the way in which her millions of empty cathedrals interlock. I might think that I take her by the hand or caress her skin, but this can never be anything more than a sly trick played by a limited, sick perception. Truth be told, it is a game played only by air that is not even air. No matter how hard I clutch her to me, what I hold in my arms, what I fear losing, what is killing me, is a whole heap of nothing.

On these strolls, I sit down for long rests on benches and take everything in very slowly—the people, the light, the evening itself. I buy bread for dinner, cigarettes, coffee, and anything that can be cooked in a pan, a minute on each side. Often, on the slightest pretext, I enter the Chinese dollar store two streets up from my apartment. On the closed-circuit TV, they keep an eye on me to make sure I’m not shoplifting. The store is run by this bleary guy who spends his whole time there, Sundays included, with the radio turned on and a handful of comics at his side. For a moment, I feel I could be happy behind the counter of that store, that I could hang around there for hours on end, my head empty of thoughts. I’d like to hang out there, with the young Chinese woman minding the shop while snuggled up to the electric heater, sometimes sewing or watching cartoons on a tiny TV set. I’d love to stay there all day long. If ever I made a big sale, I’d impatiently wait for one of the owners to drop by so I could tell them all about it, down to the last detail. I’d draw tally marks in pencil on a scrap of paper whenever I sold anything. At around three in the afternoon, someone would bring me a plastic container filled with rice and another with hunks of meat swimming in a different color sauce every day, and almonds, bamboo, and sprouts of one sort or another. I think I’d like that. I’d also like it if at the end of each day, the young Chinese woman and I counted out the coins in the till, and what little there was would strike us as plenty. Then I’d fall asleep at her side on a mattress on the floor, the East in my arms, as if at last I held distance in my grasp, surrounded by plastic odds and ends, cats with moving arms, huge fish tanks, and pictures with lights and waterfalls.