How long does it take for a man to die, lying on the bed without another thought in his head, staring at the ceiling, determined not to budge an inch, not to eat, to let buzzers and phones go unanswered? How long before the tears on his face dry up? At what precise moment do the relevant ducts run dry and cease flowing? There is a type of madness akin to a black nausea that tends to spread upward to the brain. Sometimes this happens at such speed that it takes on the unmistakable air of a fit of insanity. This is what happens to the occasional somewhat half-heartedly suicidal individual, as well as certain murderers of the sort that repent straight away, no sooner has the deed been done, who ask themselves what they’ve done and call the police themselves, covering the corpse laid out on the floor with kisses, drenching it with snot and words. In my case, the froth of that retching takes somewhat longer to rise. It starts in the gut and advances in slow waves like a thick foam before taking up residence among the folds of my brain, flooding that uncharted viscosity with images of skulls, and memories, and loathing, inserting the word death into every thought, with a shoe horn if need be, not as a crystal-clear concept but rather as the hazy outline of a rusty scythe or a cross driven into the earth in the midst of the trembling. And it’s hard then to pull yourself together, for the vantage point from which you survey the world retreats from the present moment and takes up position somewhere so dark that time becomes a murderous, nimble entity and death, or signs that relentlessly bring it to mind, is everywhere you look; for example, try as I might, I couldn’t stop myself from seeing some of my female friends who often dropped by the apartment in those days not as they were there and then but rather how I imagined they might be on reaching old age, and myself as a more or less banal episode from their past. Beneath their current flesh, I could already see an old woman beginning to emerge, sighing wearily while waiting in line at some market or other, for whom someone, perhaps I myself, had laid out their medicines on the bedside table. The beginnings of the odd wrinkle here and there foreshadowed a face that was not yet a reality but that I was powerless to ward off, also affecting their breath, the way they carried themselves, and the way they fell silent. In the case of Julia, it didn’t stop there; I found it impossible to be by her side without picturing her naked skull and the tomb that would sooner or later house all those bones, the pubis that ground itself against me in a frenzy, the spread-eagled femurs, the wornout shinbones that circled my waist, the jawbone that set upon my mouth in the darkness. I feel that the idea of death is like a giant crow, or any other carrion bird with huge wings like oily capes that’s able to smell sorrow from a long way off, as if it were incense dissolved in the air, and draws near whenever someone looks weak, in order to lurk close by and, depending on the conviction with which the wounded man blindly flails, to peck timidly or tear into flesh for which no one yearns.
The lifeless body of Paul Celan was fished out from a quiet spot on the Seine six miles downstream. I felt I was already halfway down a similar route. All that remained was to wait and see which riverside branch might snag my legs. A shoe would no doubt detach itself to continue its journey oceanward, like a small grave boat. I thought of someone gathering up the body and of the possibility that a breath of air might bring me back to life. But I did not, in the end, jump from any bridge. Not that time.
I took to my bed early that night in my room at the Hôtel du Nord, as the sleet continued to fall in the interior courtyard onto which my window looked, and the TV news kept replaying the same images of cars set ablaze the night before, seats burnt to a cinder, puddles of gasoline, warped scrap metal. I remember closing my eyes, then running my fingers though my own hair, imagining that my hand belonged to someone else, anyone, someone who knows that my heart is filled with bitter wells into which they do not entirely want to peer, nor look the other way, either, and who tells me, as sleep slowly comes, that there are cities in the world in which day has already broken, where people are beginning to head outdoors, fresh from the shower, to buy some bread and the morning papers and grab a freshly roasted coffee and buttered toast with marmalade on the terraces of the corner bars, and who speaks to me of the sun breaking through the most wayward of clouds and the treetops, reassuring me, in barely more than a murmur, that little by little, without my realizing, I will gather together the pieces and reassemble, with what little remains, something resembling a human being. You’ll see. I’ll see. And I doze off a few blocks from a vast river, beneath a cracked sky, in the room of a two-bit hotel where no one who knows me is aware I’m staying, hidden by the shadows of a boulevard not too far from the ranks of burnt-out cars, not so many yards from my lost footsteps. Resting means that no one can see me.
5 (other people’s fear)
Around about the date of my return from that trip came the period when Jacobo began to feel afraid at night. Very afraid, I mean, like a sort of extra helping on top of what he had felt, as a matter of course, his entire life. He could not bring himself to be alone. Sometimes he feared he would once again dream of the ghosts of Gestapo officers, hustling him from office to office before forcing him on board a train that crossed snow-covered forests, but for the most part he was afraid of more voracious, vaguer horrors. He would call me as the afternoon neared its end and summon me to his side. And so, without much of a fuss, I would toss my pajamas, a transistor radio with headphones, a toiletry bag, and a couple of books I had into a small backpack, and before long, I’d turn up at his door. It was easy, I barely had to lift a finger, and that’s the sort of job that’s always been right up my alley. Truth be told, he didn’t need looking after, and his mental state was seemingly normal most of the time. Indeed, on some nights you could say he was in particularly good spirits, and it was not therefore a matter for urgency or alarm. All that was asked of me was that I remain there, in his apartment, chatting idly about this, that, and the other, or each to his own, reading opposite one another, each man seated in his armchair, until we succumbed to sleep. It was by no means an unattractive proposition. Sometimes I’d sit there observing him, engrossed in his book and unaware that I was staring at him so openly — his close-cropped, graying hair, his air of a Reserve Marine, well into his sixties, equal parts affectionate and gruff, forever torn between those bottomless wells into which he would sink with increasing frequency and a certain joie de vivre that had to do above all with a love of art and fine wine, and a worship of women that might be described as not of this world; he even took pleasure in watching as they passed him by.
It’s strange to stand guard over something you cannot see. My enemy there, on that house-bound mission, was supposedly the legion of ghosts that were filing through his head, something intangible, dark, slippery to the touch, creatures that roamed unchecked on a plane to which I had no direct access (nor did he, that was the problem) and that would all of a sudden make him suspect the presence, on the other side of the window, of snout-like things all set to explode in a snarling fury or gleaming blades that made him think of an artery sliced in half, although for the time being they were content simply to bide their time out there, behind the poplars gently rocking in the nighttime breeze or submerged in the pools of asphalt lit up in amber by the traffic lights flashing throughout the early hours of morning. A force without name or measure. I would have been of little use in the event of an attack. I felt in a way as if I formed part of the sentry of a medieval king, facing the possible arrival of an alien invasion that would descend from the skies at supersonic speed, unleashing laser beams left, right, and center from a flying saucer. Eyes watchful, bow string and muscles pulled taut, a fierce gesture, and nothing more. That’s about it, little more than a token gesture of pointless loyalty, like the chanting of a crew as their ship goes inexorably under. I guess my presence was about as much use as a few drops of a placebo slipped slyly into his after-dinner glass of milk. But I realize that Jacobo did not call me so that I might air my opinion as to whether or not my dropping by was necessary or useful, but rather in order that I might heed his call, pure and simple; that’s how it goes when anxiety begins to squirm in the guts or the trembling of a memory, which all of a sudden, deep down, takes on a monstrous form, setting off alarms for good reason or otherwise. “You have to come, my thoughts are aquiver again,” he’d say, or, “I feel like I’m dying tonight.” This was his way of putting a name to the fear that everything would fade to black with no one on hand to whom he might say goodbye, or of spending another night sitting on the edge of the mattress, clawing at his scalp, as had happened before. When push came to shove, matters rarely came to a head when I was around. At times the anxiety was a little shriller and brandished shadowy claws that were never actually put to use, while at others it was simply the gentle perception of a heart slowing down, a sadness like a faded afternoon, when tedium cloaks objects and memories, without distinction, in the same invisible fog in which desire cannot breathe.