Carlos Castán - Bad Light

After showering, I dried myself off with a used towel of Jacobo’s that hung forgotten behind the bathroom door and which seemed to me to smell of a mixture of damp and of him. More specifically, of leaks sprung in the walls of patios and of a grinning Jacobo appearing in that patio, sweating a little, his fishing rod over one shoulder.

Marguerite Duras began an affair with Dionys Mascolo, with whom she had joined the Resistance. Meanwhile, her husband, and comrade to the two of them in that freedom-fighting movement, had been taken prisoner in the Dachau extermination camp. They had given him up for dead, more or less. When the camps were liberated, they searched for him high and low, they combed every office, they made phone calls to all and sundry, they despaired at the rumors, they listened to the tales told by the first survivors then reaching Paris in dribs and drabs. Antelme and Mascolo were good friends. The three of them were good friends, in fact. The love between Marguerite and Mascolo blossomed against the backdrop of an absence that neither could bear, which managed to turn their desire for each other into the worst of betrayals and an anguished uncertainty that would make them picture their friend almost always at death’s door, a mass of wounds lying on the ground, the final, weary beats of a heart against the mud of some road or other, a fever that shivers alone, its whereabouts unknown, or a shadow coming apart at the seams atop a cot on which the blood soaks through the mattress. The bond that united the new lovers was made from the same barbed wire that had crossed the continent from south to north along the entire length of the Maginot Line, that pointless scar measuring mile after endless mile.

One day the telephone rang, bringing them the news that Antelme was alive. Still alive, miraculously — weighing in at just under seventy pounds in a far-flung infirmary. Mascolo did not think twice. He managed to get his hands on a beat-up old vehicle and went off in search of his friend across a Europe that was little more than a vast expanse of ruins and ashes and cripples and prisoners filing past in every direction, columns of trucks, ghostly convoys on the gravel roads; everywhere you looked there were orphans lining up to beg for soup, flags trampled underfoot, border crossings, their turrets now fallen, newly abandoned casemates, trenches of mist. He brought his friend back as best he could in the back seat of the car, shivering beneath a heap of blankets. Antelme was a bag of bones, eaten away by typhus, who had to be fed spoonfuls of water nonstop and who would break down in sobs without knowing where he was or scarcely even who he was with. They put him to bed, they looked after him for days on end, the two of them, Marguerite and Mascolo, for they both loved him. For he was their friend. They whiled away the hours with him, they spoon-fed him his medicines, they took pains to listen to all of the disjointed horror of his memories, the scream of his ever-present nightmare, the words now devoid of any feeling that might contain a glimmer of hope. They did this for him, for what he had meant and continued to mean to them, in what went to make up their innermost selves. But also, darkly, to make amends for a love too redolent of a stab in the back. In The War , Duras writes, “He stopped asking questions about what had happened while he was away. He stopped seeing us. A great, silent pain spread over his face because he was still being refused food, because it was still as it had been in the concentration camp. And, as in the camp, he accepted it in silence. He didn’t see that we were weeping. Nor did he see that we could scarcely look at him or respond to what he said.”

Antelme could no doubt hear them fucking in the room next door. A lot of fucking goes on in wartime, when you’ve seen so many comrades fallen in the dirt and death assails you from all sides; a time of fear is also a time of love. Perhaps, at least at first, his mind was unable to pinpoint the exact meaning of that panting that reached him through the partition wall, the rhythmic squeaking of the bedsprings in the early morning hours. Those sounds probably mingled in his delirium with some sort of torture he had lived through or imagined weeks previously — snapped limbs, torn flesh. As he gathers his strength little by little and his eyes once again open to the world and he starts to grasp, as best he can, a little of what is going on around him, he will continue to hear them fucking behind the partition wall of his bedroom and will be unable to move, there will be nowhere to hide from that horror. But then the sun will come up and the two of them will come in together to wish him a good morning, they will feed him the vitamins and tonics procured for a king’s ransom on the black market, they will shave him, wash his hair, spoon-feed him soup, with all the patience in the world, as well as his syrup and painkillers — he has no right to protest, much less can he hate them, for even hatred calls for a degree of strength. Marguerite loves him with all her heart, but love is not enough. It hardly ever is. Sometimes all that love, that immense feeling, is no match for a miserable fuck. Another person’s desire, with all of its ebb and flow, is the most precise expression of hell.

I have been Robert Antelme on many a night. I have felt his nightmare dampen my brow. The wall is not always a wall. It might be the other side of the street, or several neighborhoods of a city, but that won’t silence the bedsprings. The weaker the heart, the better it imitates that sound and the more moans and words it adds in for good measure. I have also on the odd occasion assumed the role of Dionys Mascolo, throwing myself into the task without a care for my surroundings or for what might lie on the other side of a partition wall. Once, my teenage years not far behind me, I screwed the girl my brother had set his heart on, while he lay sleeping in the room next door. I remember tiptoeing into his room in the middle of the night to see if I might find more condoms on his bedside table or in the pockets of his pants, only to find him awake, his eyes moist, and he looked at me as if to say it’s not your fault , and ever since, pain has always reminded me of that look, in near darkness, offering me forgiveness. When the heart is broken, all the love spills out.

Those days with Nadia were the best thing that had happened to me in an awful long time. There were even evenings on which she busied herself knitting while I lay on her sofa, reading peacefully, my feet resting on the cushion she had placed on the coffee table and the two of us covered by the same blanket, which we grew to see as a metaphor for tedium of the sweetest sort. We had for the most part succumbed to a state of gentle melancholy, broken only by the intermittent stabs of savage desire to which we fell prey in the most unlikely moments. We were forever looking at each other, we spoke little, and the silence that enveloped us stood in stark contrast to the frenzied fits of passion that came hot on its heels, the buttons torn off in haste, her tennis player’s moans, pinned against the kitchen counter. We ourselves were frightened by that contrast and by our own inability to do anything by halves. Later, barely saying a word, we’d console each other for all the guilt writhing beneath the surface. We asked for each other’s forgiveness and never withheld it. She was the mistress of my sorrow, and all of the storms, all of the waves of fear ended up breaking between her legs.

We resolved to head outdoors to see how what we had between us might fare in the open air. The idea was to walk among people, to position ourselves among the rest of the world’s things to see how it went, and that aroma, so otherworldly, of pleasure and nightmare, slipped from our skin. We went to see a film at the Eliseo movie theater. Staring straight ahead at the screen, she started fondling me, before resting her head on my shoulder — I could tell she was crying — and, finally, falling asleep. One day, a fierce wind blowing, we took a trip to the old town of Belchite and strolled among the ruins, barely exchanging a word. A plane (one from this century, I think) cut across the sky at one point and made us shiver. Wearing a white headscarf, she sat atop the rubble so that I might photograph her. In those pictures she looks like a frightened Italian refugee amid the ruins of an air raid that’s escaped from time. We were forced to beat a hasty retreat when the tower and the walls looked all set to crumble above our heads under the northern wind.