Carlos Castán - Bad Light

Back home, I couldn’t help wondering how an outside observer might describe my lifestyle, or how I might come across to a police officer seated on the other side of a gray metallic table. Would what he heard make him envious? Would he feel sorry for me? No doubt it all comes down to who is doing the telling and how the tale is told, to the words chosen for the portrait. There are those who might say that I’m like a shadow roaming certain streets, always at the same hour, give or take, his hair unkempt, a scarf slung carelessly around his neck, slipping into bars and ordering coffee, barely speaking a word to a soul, and sometimes scribbling things down in a notebook or on any old napkin, on the bar itself, scowling and looking downcast in general, as if hauling a great weight from some ancient place, and whose apartment is no doubt gloomy and whose phone probably hardly ever rings. But from the outside, from a distance, I could also look like a man strolling at his leisure, his evenings free and the city all to himself, sometimes in the company of women who are by no means hard on the eyes, who hang on his every word and giggle foolishly at his wisecracks, who work together to make sure he doesn’t let himself go altogether, forcing him out on the town and sitting him down in cafés, right in amongst them all, for a sort of therapy session, so they say half-jokingly. And, also half-jokingly, they chide him if they suspect he has returned to his old ways, shutting himself up in his apartment with his dreary books, without speaking to a soul even though the loneliness is killing him. “If I find out. .” they say. “You’ll have me to answer to. .” And the odd one among them even appears to dream now and then of rescuing him once and for all from the helplessness he seems hell-bent on drawing attention to, almost as if unintentionally, with his three-day stubble, that constant look of not having gotten a proper night’s sleep (if, that is, he ever actually made it to bed, which is taking a lot for granted), and his threadbare shirts, his long coats, and that way of walking of his, with a quick stride, just as soon gazing at the ground as at the tops of the plane trees, coming to an unexpected halt all of a sudden, absent-mindedly, in front of some store window, above all the windows of second-hand book stores, auction houses, and antique dealers, but also before the displays of furniture stores that project out onto the chilly street scenes of the life of warmth he always seems to be craving — lamps and pianos, porcelain dolls, toy racing cars, Japanese bedroom sets, reading corners with the light turned on, faded leather wing chairs that make you think of long winters, cups of coffee, trays of pastries, and piles of slightly dull books on the mantelpiece, next to the silver-framed portraits of ancestors. But all of that not just yet but rather thinking ahead to some vague future time, on the far side of the storm, after having lived just a little bit more, when he’s given up for good and has finished doing battle with the tempests that now swirl through his thoughts and his heart says, “Here and no further,” and he feels so weary, so sapped of strength, that he no longer wishes to hear of strolls or dingy dives or sneaking into buildings to probe the lives of others and dream awhile of other people’s stories and hideouts and wives. That seems to be what he’s playing at sometimes, at manufacturing that image of neglect and helplessness that leads — whether by design or otherwise, who knows? — the occasional female friend to be seized by the urge to take him out shopping on an afternoon of sales and to give him a few tips on styles and sizes, what suits him and what doesn’t, what’s still in and what’s out, and, in passing, to rearrange his closet a little, and even, while she’s at it, to teach him three or four easy-to-cook recipes, dishes that give proper nourishment and can be whipped up in a moment and barely cost a dime, so that he doesn’t carry on feeding himself any old way, as is his habit, with all that coffee, all that fried and refried bar fare, his routine in disarray. The neighbors would chip in with remarks along the lines of you never know with him, sometimes three or four days will go by when you can’t hear yourself think what with all the coming and going from his apartment at all hours, and other times a month will pass without hearing so much as a pin drop; sometimes you see him heading out, all dressed up in his blazer and expensive colognes, then that same evening you run into him on his way back in such a state that if you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was one of those bums who sneak into the building to go begging for change from door to door . More witnesses would then say their piece. The guy from the bar La Canción might add, He’d been looking down in the dumps recently. Before, not so long ago, he’d turn up with two or three books he’d just bought, tearing the cellophane off with something bordering on delight, as if his mouth were watering. Then he’d leaf through them slowly, the index, the prologue, all that stuff, reading out random paragraphs here and there, scribbling something on the opening pages, the date and his signature, no doubt. He looked sad, true enough, but it wasn’t the sort of sadness that debilitates you, rather it was as if he were somehow content there in his own world, immersed in his thoughts and those new books. A world away from the shadow that began to drop by later, his visits much fewer and further between, subdued and jittery at the same time, with a certain air of bitterness in his gestures . Meanwhile, when questioned, my colleagues would no doubt point to my attitude of “not giving a shit.” Not rude, mind you, never altogether unpleasant, it’s just that often you didn’t dare talk to him, because it was as if you were about to wrench him violently back from some place deep down where he was happily submerged. But if you did have something to tell him and you finally plucked up the courage to do so, you soon realized it was no big deal. He’d even try to smile and pay attention to you, more or less . One of them, the lovely Araceli, might have more to add: I don’t think he was as antisocial as he might seem, there were times when I even thought he was about to come on to me at any moment, to ask me to join him for happy hour, as they call it these days, to grab a coffee one evening or suggest we catch a movie or whatever other excuse. I saw how he looked at my legs, I caught him several times looking at me longingly, you can tell these things, as if inwardly weighing up the goods and the cost, in other words, the meat and the price tag: on one side of the scales, the desire to rip my panties clean off, I think that was obvious, although maybe it went beyond that to include daydreams of another sort, more romantically inclined, so to speak, going for a stroll and not always being so alone and being able to tell me things; and, on the other side, myself as a millstone for then on, a more or less unavoidable date almost every evening, forcing him to emerge from his cave on weekends, the idea of his cell phone coming to life and my name on the little screen, of me as a deadweight hanging from his arm on Sundays in line at some movie theater or, worse still, in bars with music where there is nothing to look for because supposedly he’s already found me. Though maybe this is all in my head, because the truth is he never actually said a word to me. It was just that way he had of looking at my legs, like I said, how he’d all of a sudden become lost in thought, and all those times he looked all set to say something only to bite his tongue .

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.