Carlos Castán - Bad Light

His father had been a survivor of the Mauthausen camp, and he spent the years that followed his release tirelessly delivering seminars and all manner of speeches on his experience, on the duty to remember, and on his strange sense of guilt at having emerged alive from a hell in which so many had perished in the flames. Much like Primo Levi, he came to understand that public opinion eventually grows weary of a message repeated a thousand times over, he discovered that the world no longer wished to hear that tale of atrocity, especially after the start of the Vietnam War, which, as if it were a new, exuberant fad, rendered all that had to do with the previous barbarity outmoded in a matter of days. The image of horror was now that of napalm setting the jungle alight and no longer that of naked corpses piled up on the snow. Overnight, the World War was old news, as were the walking skeletons, the wheelbarrows full of carcasses with faces, the forced labor, the incinerating rooms, and the gas chambers. And also like Primo Levi, he ended his days by throwing himself headlong down a stairwell, weary of empty lecture halls, of deaf ears, and of the dreadful echoes of his own silence. The legacy handed down to Jacobo by his father was, above all else, guilt. He found it hard to forgive himself for not having listened more and better when the time came, for having, from a young age, grown bored without bothering to feign interest in the same old stories that tended to lead to the same tear-drenched scene, which struck him as being just as pathetic as it was unbearable. One always grows weary of other people’s nightmares and of the late-night screams from the room next door, no matter who those screams come from. You can listen for a while, take their hand in yours, stay up all night, offer a sedative, a glass of water, but if what you truly want is to carry on living, you have no choice but to mount some sort of barricade against all that, to turn a deaf ear, and, one way or another, to distance yourself. To beat a retreat, leaving the one who’s screaming on their own. It’s like abandoning a wounded man in a ditch at a moment when the enemy is advancing at breakneck speed and it would be foolhardy to stay put and watch him bleed to death. Only after his father’s death did Jacobo take any real interest in the story told by that broken man who wept at the movies, even the most lighthearted, screwball comedies, who sank into the couch, who sometimes came to a halt, gaze lost in the distance, the soup spoon hovering midway between the bowl and his lips. Jacobo read everything he could find on the subject, did his best to spread the word, and tried to take possession of that vision of horror. He felt he owed his father the nightmares that followed, the sleepless nights, the fears, the shadowy executioners roaming all night long through rooms and hallways. I’d even say that in some strange way he grew to love that inherited suffering that, amid horror in spades, gave him back something of a father’s tenderness, a certain scent of home, the perfume of the old, bearable, just punishments. There are those who hoard, as if their lives depended on it, the pocket watch of a loved one, a portrait, an old fountain pen, or a lock of hair by way of a memento; Jacobo, meanwhile, had that fear. And he tended to it in his own way, he nourished it with photographs and memories and books. At first, when he spoke to me of the matter, I would feel somewhat uneasy and lower my gaze without knowing how to react, much like when as a child you have to offer your condolences to a classmate who’s buried his mother two days previously. You’re never sure whether it is best to meet the tragedy with silence or words, whether to embrace the person, offer them your sandwich, or simply leave them be. Jacobo, however, as if he had taken the lesson to heart, took pains not to endow the matter with any particular gravitas in our conversations. He preferred to dwell on more or less general questions that interested him, such as how humans react when pushed to a breaking point, survival, endurance, the power of a grudge. And it was astonishing how easily we skipped from that subject to others in our conversations; without realizing it, we’d again be discussing the idle gossip of the world around us, music and women, the trips we’d make one day, and all of the cards yet to be played.

All things considered, I think that in the end we never managed to be good for one another. Without wishing to, we dragged each other down into our respective pits, each drawn by the other’s darkness and the force of his eddies. We never truly knew how to help one another with what really mattered, instead we behaved like that pair of men drowning in the sea who, as they go under, cling so fiercely to their saviors, with arms and fingernails, that they end up dragging them down with them to the depths. Without saying a word, as if by instinct, we stopped seeing one another with such frequency, and tedium once again descended. This is how things stood in the months leading up to my departure from home, and so things remained thereafter, in the days of the apartment rented out in great haste, the brutal solitude, the lowered blinds, and the doors locked night and day, as if all those precautions served any purpose and shadows couldn’t pass through walls and pores.

And that, more or less, was what life back then was like, before the move. Frozen, deserted streets, a newly rented apartment with someone else’s furniture, silence, hours spent beneath the naked bulb on the living room ceiling, the pointlessness that seemed to have come to rest on things, slowly, much as a layer of dust forms without our noticing, taking possession of them, cloaking everything in a sort of grimy, drab gauze. That’s what the days of my life were like back then. The evenings at home, stunned. I sometimes sit down at the table to eat, without the slightest hunger. I am my own mother; I am, at one and the same time, the downcast young boy and the voice that tells him to try and cheer up, to pull himself together already, to look after himself, to swallow, even if he doesn’t feel like it, a few spoonfuls of rice, one more, you’ll feel better, you’ll see, I’ll feel better, I’ll see. I remember the fear I once was, made flesh, a bundle of nerves, and how I sensed my own presence much as one might perceive a tremor, the juddering of a worn-out heart that seemed to be shifting position constantly inside its chest, without ever finding the right spot. I see myself seated in the armchair next to the glass door that looks onto the balcony, wearing a coat buttoned up to my neck. I’m not sure if I can’t move or don’t want to. It’s hard to say; I don’t move, that’s all. I give a start at the slightest noise from the street or the stairway, the buzzing of the intercom whenever it’s pressed over and over again by the mailman or the junk mail distributors. And I remember the dread at the thought of losing my mind, of being unable to return, and also the odd snatch of the disjointed ramblings running through my thoughts, shot through with static and barking and stinging music and hazy questions — who took me away, and where to, I cannot sense myself here, in this voice that’s apt to start talking alone in the middle of the evening, uttering the names of people long gone, or in the hand that, almost without realizing it, scribbles these marks in delirious ink (words in the universal and equally baffling language of the shakes) that cannot be deciphered later, nor can I spot myself in these wretched lines that seek me out, that enquire nervously on the pages of a notebook after my wellbeing, my whereabouts, what I could possibly be up to at this hour, and where in God’s world and down what roads. And while I know that I am both the escaped prisoner running nonstop on wounded feet and the search party, armed to the teeth, that’s hunting me down and setting the pack of hounds on my trail, I do not recognize as my own the footsteps looking for me in damp hotels, and ports, down solitary streets, in unmade beds, in secluded bars (of the sort you only ever visit once, of the sort never to be found again, as if, on your departure, they sank into a fog that is not of this world). Nor do I see myself in the anguish calling out to me because it’s getting late and I’m nowhere to be seen, shouting a name that’s mine, or at least it once was. It calls the name out louder and louder, with a voice increasingly hoarse, until it is little more than a straight-out moan, roaming the passageways of the labyrinth, the banks of the swamp, the forests of the night — the wailing of a monster that remembers me.

Читать дальше