Carlos Castán - Bad Light

We saw each other almost every day, Nadia and I. Almost always at her apartment, a spotless, one-room hideout where everything was an immaculate white — the walls, the furniture, the sheets. Though she claimed to live there, it did not take me long to realize she wasn’t telling the truth. Late one night, after she had convinced me to sleep back at my place, I waited awhile inside my car, just to see how long it would take her to switch off the lights, and I saw her heading out the front door just minutes after I had left, before hopping on board a waiting cab and disappearing up the street. I repeated the same routine on the following nights and discovered that she always left, she never slept the night there. I, meanwhile, had some trouble sleeping, and on the very few occasions on which we ever spent the whole night together, after she had dozed off, I’d get out of bed and begin exploring the barely more than five hundred square feet, not including the bedroom, of her cramped apartment. If I’d spent the afternoon compulsively searching my own place, I’d find it hard to stop myself from opening the drawers in Nadia’s apartment, or, I believe, any other place in which I might find myself. There was something robotic and machine-like in those gestures of a wannabee spy. It took some effort to resist, and in the darkness of the night, my efforts were sometimes to no avail. One of the first things that struck me was the total absence in the apartment of the sort of objects that build up with the simple passing of time, objects that seem to have a life of their own, like insects, and that surreptitiously take possession of rooms and furniture. There was no sign, for instance, of the usual drawer containing bunches of keys for who knows what doors, batteries for the radio, random passport-sized photos, a small sewing kit, plugs that serve no purpose any more, nail clippers, the papers and documents that everyone keeps somewhere or other, spare bulbs, and that sort of thing. There was none of that. Nothing that might make one think of that apartment as somewhere truly lived in. It struck me instead as one of those places that are rented out fully furnished and with all the trimmings, tableware, towels, and kitchen rags included. During my first search, I found a bunch of red flowers, now dried, inside the trash can, cellophane wrapping and all. Days later, the gold-rimmed card that had no doubt accompanied those flowers turned up, one corner peeking out from beneath the television stand: “My darling Mantis: fresh blood, my own love.” It was signed with the initial I , and the date coincided exactly with the day on which Jacobo’s dead body had been found.

From then on, it was all cars on my tail, long-range telescopes watching over my apartment from hundreds of windows. I went to Jacobo’s apartment to fetch his axe and baseball bat and hid them within easy reach, right next to the front door. I tried to stay awake, the lights turned off, I brewed pots of coffee in the near dark and spent my time scrutinizing everything, the noises behind the partition walls, the sliver of light beneath the door. One evening, it seemed to me that the scaffolding of gallows earmarked for me was being built in the next-door apartment. I could hear the sound of a hammer on nails, of timber being hoisted.

I wanted to call on a friend to keep me company, but he was dead. Aside from Nadia, I couldn’t think who to turn to. When I called her, she told me I was freaking out, that I was losing my mind for real, and that the best thing I could do was take a strong sedative and go to bed. Everything would look different in the morning light, I’d see. I had to sob down the line to convince her to catch a cab and turn up at my door to help me get through what seemed a terrible ordeal. And that night, I killed her. Her legs seemed to me more beautiful than ever, jerking in the air, thrashing about this way and that as I suffocated her with my pillow until it was all over. Before the final trickle of life abandoned her body, I begged her to love me, in the darkness, from whatever well into which her soul might fall. Needless to say, I’d never have thought myself capable of such a thing. I harbored serious doubts as to my ability to see it through. I had to summon up the redskin I sometimes sense within me, I thought of white lambs, I thought of a cathedral filled with women and burning candles. Killing a human being is by no means easy, but sometimes there is nothing for it but to pluck up the courage and show some mettle. And, as they say around these parts, you can’t learn how to castrate without chopping off a few balls.

One day the investigators will come, and they will know what I knew. They will know that Nadia was not innocent, nor did she really live in an apartment in which everything was white. They will perhaps find more cards, from other, previous, bunches of flowers, now rotten, decaying throughout the garbage dumps of the world. And in those words they will spot the clues to a game of love. One day the investigators will come, and they will know, just as I knew, that Nadia spent most nights with her husband in a house in Montecanal, from which she often escaped to redeem men, to caress brains trembling in fear. And they will know that I knew she was followed, night and day, by a few hired thugs who snapped her lovers’ legs in two or left their faces scarred. They will discover that one day, at Jacobo’s apartment, those thugs were met with resistance and that things got out of hand. No one expects, in the darkness of a hallway, in the middle of the night, to chance upon a madman defending himself brandishing an axe in both hands. They will search her little pampered wife’s pad, the hideout for her mischief, the matching cushions and blinds. They will read the reports written up by the mercenaries, to be read by her husband while sitting in his office — what the eye sees through the semi-transparent curtains, the obscene poses struck by a couple of silhouettes, out-of-focus snapshots taken with a telephoto lens from the balcony across the street, recordings of moans behind doors, shot through with static but not so much so that he cannot make out, if he pricks up his ears, the echoes of a passion he has long forgotten and that cannot be rekindled except with the threat of a blade and the hounding of blood shivering invisibly in the air from the very first moment.

The investigators will turn up one day, and they will know that her husband loved her. And that he masturbated as he looked over the reports, observing those black smudges copulating behind the net curtains, shadows of flesh devouring each other. And that for her he risked jail, ruin, his whole life, only so that she might see how far, to what lengths. He would hold out his madness as proof of love and would make it up to her later with flowers and jewels whenever he broke a new toy of hers — here is my superhuman love, here are my wild eyes, my hands dirtied for you. The investigators will come, and it will take little effort for them to understand the dark pleasure Nadia took, in spite of herself and of her moments of doubt and of rage, in that game that could on no account be named, in that gift of danger galore, of pure intensity offered up to her on a plate for her days of tedium.

The investigators will turn up one day, and they will reach into the drawer containing her panties and hold them up to their noses when no one is looking. They will sniff the sheets, they will read every paper, and even when all of the evidence is staring them in the face, they will not wish to hear that she was a bitch or that she deserved to die. They will take with them only the fact that she was still young, poor thing, and that she leaves behind a teenage son and an unfinished woolen scarf she had been knitting for him. They will clutch at that so as to follow me over land and sea and hunt me down with their hounds.