Carlos Castán - Bad Light

I look back on that time as a tug-of-war between despair and ecstasy. It was at one and the same time yearning and regret, a banquet of intensity with its towers and its ruins, vomit and joy. Writing on napkins in bars, returning home with bloodied eyebrows, with my shirt in tatters, without knowing how or at what point it had happened. It was the almost daily police raids in and around the square, the vans filled with laughing, toothless whores, the early mornings at the precinct on the Calle Madera, and also the rush of knowing oneself to be alive while never ceasing to row in the opposite direction. I believe I once got laid in the very doorway on the Calle Espíritu Santo in which Enrique Urquijo’s dead body was found, I’d venture that I wrote the most beautiful and horrifying verses the world has ever known on scraps of paper I later lost, and I’d even swear that I was myself somehow beautiful, seated in the doorways of bars, missing the last subway home after lingering to listen to some street musicians before returning home on foot, my pockets empty, dizzy beneath the sky of two or three different neighborhoods, only to find a cat starving to death and a lukewarm bed that had a direct line to gaps in the memory down which I could fall.

And I cannot separate my idea of love from all that, from that lost state, and I identify it with the last-ditch, futile attempt of a fear to ally itself with another fear, as if the two could be one, and with permeable souls in place of that fortified citadel that cannot be breached no matter what side you’re on. Which is why love always has that air of chasing the impossible and is, by nature, tragic, or barely even exists. I can only conceive of it as a sort of shared bewilderment, two souls looking in the same direction, barely able to see a thing, without knowing where to turn, and transforming the world, behind the cobwebs that filter the gaze, into a labyrinth. It calls for two lost beings, two deviants who brush up against each other in the dark, then drift apart, before running into one another again. The interlocking hands must tremble in some way. Which explains Marta. Which explains the faltering steps that came later, the cocaine without restraint, the black seas, the ship in flames, and the wails in the night, the caresses that amounted to little more than our trembling hands, the bad trips, the messages of hate written in lipstick on the mirror, the broken glasses, the torn panties, the tracks left by fingernails on our backs, before, in the end, falling asleep in each other’s embrace like newborn puppies from the same litter, exhausted and skinny, scared stiff.

Which begs the question: Why did a handful of photos and a voice on the other end of the line bring back a world now long gone? Perhaps it helps that I got my hands on the photos under cover of night, vaulting over the barriers, looking where I ought not to look, in the spirit of a spy betraying his fatherland unbeknownst even to his own family, or a mother trying not to make a sound as she masturbates in front of the computer screen while the children are sleeping. And perhaps the fact that Nadia called me in secret also has a part to play, that all but inaudible whisper that gave away her fear of being caught holding the phone, and the knowledge that I was speaking to an adulteress, and the word adulteress . Which begs the question: What role did her appearance on the scene also have to play in relation to a brutal crime, to an axe concealed behind a door, and a blood stain on the wall you cannot get out no matter how hard you scrub? And it begs the question, above all, of why the battle-scarred never learn, why they keep coming back for more after all that fighting.

If the business of living is above all a matter of betraying, one by one, the dreams that fuelled our childhood and younger years, then each person is the exact sum total of a good number of betrayals. Hundreds in some cases. The purest of dreams are betrayed, as are nightmares. By mistake, we flee from storms without ever realizing that they were such a part of who we are and were so ingrained in our very cores that without them we barely amount to a thing. Save me, we say, I no longer wish to plunge a knife into your legs, we say, I will not hurt you, I will not want to see your grimace of pain in the mirror, I will love you in another way, I will worship you from a being that does not exist, I will call my past a torment, an agony until I met you. I will tell you that you are as gentle as the sky I dream and that I do not mind closing my eyes to everything forevermore if I know that you will later kiss my eyelids. I will not be me. I will bury the monster beneath spadefuls and yet more spadefuls of earth. I will get as close to nothingness as it is possible to get, to a coffin without a dead man, to an empty cathedral. I will buy you flowers.

It cannot be all that hard, for nothing is what we are in essence, when the time comes to tear off the disguise — the list jotted down in a notebook of things left undone, the slew of countless arrows that never left the bow, together with those that were lost, somewhere further than the eye can see. A large bunch of beautiful betrayals, as big as suns. And that bunch and nothing more is all we ought to offer each other when making promises of love, if indeed love is the word. Everything else is untrue. That meager bouquet, and nothing more — look, Nadia, this faded poppy losing its color as fast as fear can strike is in fact, you might say, a life I never lived on the far side of the Atlantic, whether in the mining regions of Chile or the outskirts of Zipaquirá, in that bar with the corrugated roof that stood beside the highway; this intact daisy is a woman, one among many, barefoot beneath the pouring rain, from whom I once turned away and to whom I said nothing, though I could have when her eyes may well have been pointing me in the direction of a doorway in the Latin Quarter, a chambre de bonne , a pair of panty hose to be ripped apart once and for all before tossing them into the trash, a huge dry white towel with room enough for the both of us; this iris trembling in my fingers stands for a couple of languages I never learned, though I thought I might, and the infinite silence made up of all of the words I left unsaid in those languages; and this rose with entranced petals is the sum of the alleyways whose shadows cried out to me and down which, when push came to shove, I did not dare to venture. Look, in short, at these half-broken flowers, we should tell one another, instead of all that cringe-worthy baloney we spout in such circumstances, look at these flowers that come apart at the touch of a finger like a butterfly’s wings, together they go to make up who I am. The two of us are made of the things we never did, we are the rage and the foam of the countless renunciations that interlock with one another like links on a chain, the foul temper that remained after watching as things and trains passed us by, and the calm that came in its wake, the hours, the drowsiness, the grit beneath the eyelids upon waking. We are that dirty nothingness. And if we have learned anything from all that resentment, all that coming and going, all that sorrow of mistimed steps and almost always empty hands, we should, at most, offer each other something that amounts to little more than this: let us renounce together, let us share a dream of something we will never do, whatever it is, a house with a garden, a round-the-world trip, let us join together both nothingnesses, let us intertwine these two lives that were left behind unlived, the barely glimpsed stories of two creatures who held back when the time came to run and who beat a hasty retreat when they should have stayed put, let us daydream of landscape that will never envelop us, the ships, the cities, the forests seen from trains, the image of our feet dangling from atop a skyscraper overlooking Central Park or an Irish cliff top beneath which furious green waves roar. But no more promises spoken in earnest, the heart exposed, for promises in earnest are a lie, no more desire of the sort that turns to poison when it comes into contact with the skin. Never again, my love, never again this exhausting pursuit of delirium, of two becoming one, and that one standing happily in the center of the wind.