Carlos Castán - Bad Light

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.