Carlos Castán - Bad Light

I came away with the promise of a meeting the following day. A coffee. It’s astonishing how long it’s been since I last wondered what to wear tomorrow. That delightful problem — which shirt, which jacket, sunglasses or no sunglasses, what pair of shoes to carry me to wherever she might be.

Some of the mechanisms that Nadia’s voice, more than her conversation in and of itself, triggered inside me, together with the painstaking search I was conducting of my own apartment at that time, with all of the papers, forgotten objects, and old photos that turned up in drawers and folders and the most unlikely of nooks and crannies, made my thoughts turn more than might be desirable to the presence of love over the course of my life, in general terms, you might say, and to whether it might be possible to come up with some sort of story of that presence over time, whether there might be a sort of thread on which to pull that might, following a pattern, somehow bind together the collection of triumphs and wounds, or if it all came down, at most, to disjointed episodes, more or less blurry in the memory, like out-of-focus images or snatches of songs without an overriding melody that might bestow on them something akin to a meaning. I have a stack of letters in different handwriting bound together with one of those hair bands, a strip of photos from a photo booth, now all but faded to nothing, showing me and Laura horsing around and pulling faces before kissing each other solemnly for posterity, various hats at the top of my closet, single-use bottles of shampoo stolen from hotels with something scribbled on the label (those middle-of-the-night check-ins, trying to keep the stiff cock beneath your pants hidden from view behind the counter and the girl two paces behind, her eyes on the floor), scraps of paper bearing messages left for me over time on a host of bedside tables, from promises of eternity to notes saying “be right back,” a little box made from what I guess might be mother-of-pearl in which I keep two rings, a green plastic one that was given to me one night beneath a vast moon in Berlin Park when I was fifteen years old, and a gold wedding band with a name and a date engraved on the inside (if I look long and hard at that word and those numbers, there comes a point when their meaning all of a sudden evaporates and all I can see is the material, pure and simple, the grooves once etched onto the metal by a small machine). I have a ton of stuff that may or may not be connected in some way, I’m not sure, nor do I know if the pain it causes me to touch them is of the same kind. I think of the faces I have held in my hands, caressing a cheek with my thumb, and of how eyes and lips now blend into one, when my battered memory brings forth from parted lips the wrong taste or a tongue that should not be there.

On Sundays, a thousand years ago now, I had to attend mass with my siblings and parents. When we went in the morning, we’d head to the Church of the Salesian Brothers of Francisco Rodriguez, and if, as tended to be the case, we ended up putting it off until the evening, then we’d have to make our way, for scheduling reasons, to the parish of San Antonio on the Calle Bravo Murillo, up near the Alvarado subway stop. This was, above all in winter, the saddest moment of the entire week. Though I was still too young and what the grown-ups liked to call those awkward teenage years were still a long way off, throughout the entire ceremony, I could not stop staring at the women’s legs. I couldn’t tear my eyes away and took particular pleasure in observing them from behind. The stitching in their panty hose, the shape their high-heeled shoes gave their calves. Panty hose of the nude, black, and sheer varieties. I also liked it when they knelt down in unison at the sound of the bell that gave the command from the altar, and when they gently beat their cleavages, saying, “Through my most grievous fault,” there, flanked by rows of lit candles, the gloved hands, the shawls, the breviaries, that whole mixture of perfumes. I dreamt that they’d stand still for me, that they’d get to their knees at the urging of my command, too. And I fantasized, too, about a sort of magic spell that would pin them to the spot, while my parents were blinded and time came to a standstill. Everyone, myself excepted, as if frozen inside the church. Which was when I’d wander over to a few of them, the ones I’d picked out beforehand, undoing a button here and there, all very slowly, running the tips of my fingers over their lips. I’d touch their hair and, I think, their knees. But it was not long before such caresses struck me as lacking, too meager for a dream in which nothing is out of bounds, in which anything goes, with time stopped in its tracks and the whole world blind. I’d grab a large kitchen knife and plunge it into their calves, in a downward, almost vertical, motion. But they did not stir or fully awake in the mental performance I staged — it did not hurt them, they made no attempt to flee, they did not scream. I was frightened by such a powerful yearning to watch as the blood ran down their legs, becoming trapped in every angle of their mesh tights, all that softness stained with the red of painted lips or of the sign on a whorehouse. Perhaps love was not the word, but it sure seemed that way. There was no need to wonder whether all of that was sinful. It had to be, no two ways about it. Not a sin of word or deed or omission but rather, in this case, of thought, and a mortal one at that. I expected nothing less. Fear of burning in the eternal flames, or, more to the point, of deserving to burn in that fire, made me feel wretched and alive.

My uncle slaughtered lambs almost every evening, so that my grandmother would have plenty to slice and sell the following day at the butcher’s she ran. I never missed a single killing, my eyes opened wide in astonishment, nor did I bat an eyelid at the sight of that ritual replayed over and over again in silence beneath a naked bulb and dozens of flies hovering nearby. I was seven years old, then eight, then nine, and so on, summer after summer. My grandfather would tether their four legs firmly together with the string used to make bundles of hay, before sharpening his knife on a corner of the barnyard wall, now worn away, then slit their throats from one side to another, gripping them tight between his other hand and his left knee. In no time, the bucket he had set on the floor would fill to the brim with foamy blood. One of the high points was when, after slicing a lamb open down the middle, he would pluck out its digestive apparatus almost in one piece, removing the small intestine, which was sold separately to make guitar strings, before tossing it over the door to the pigsty, whereupon the pigs began to fight one another amid horrendous squeals to devour those still-throbbing guts that were giving off a small cloud of steam. I have always been wary of connecting all of this to the butchery I dreamt of at church during those endless masses, but there’s no denying that I had the first erection I can recall the day on which my uncle allowed me to pick out and seize the lamb to be slaughtered that night from a group of six or eight he had set aside beforehand in a section of the pen that was, for the sheep, a death row of sorts. This was less and less a laughing matter; I was God back then, in every sense of the word. The lambs piled into one corner, clambering on top of one another, each of them looking at me with eyes that have crept into my dreams a thousand times over. Though they would all meet the same deadly fate in a matter of days, the fact remains that that night, I handed down death sentences and pardons and understood in my own way what the catechists were getting at when they spoke of divine glory. And my spirits would soar. Then, I’d feel sad and yet at the same time proud at having been able to shoulder, my head held high, my share of the hangman’s burden. And I remember that getting any sleep that night was out of the question — for my thoughts turned constantly to that jet of blood streaming into the bucket, all of that red foam that was like the juice of my guilt — and that I could not for a moment stop thinking of the power and the glory. Wide awake, I leant over the balcony in the early hours of the morning and felt, for the very first time, that all of the stars were on my side.