This was not the first time someone had made such a request of me. I have had relatives who were afraid of dying alone, in the middle of the night, and I have turned up on their doorsteps carrying a similar backpack, with the same satisfaction at being of use without having to lift barely a finger, for in reality they are content just to hear your breathing, to sense the mild heat a human body gives off, the occasional household noise close by, anything will do — the coffee pot on the stove, the click of a lighter — and to know that you’re on hand and will call the on-duty doctor, the ambulance, or whoever, should it come to that, or will at least squeeze their hand when the time comes to drift inevitably off to what they have occasionally glimpsed as a clinging darkness with no hope of return, when a sticky silence begins to pull them by the feet, dragging them with irresistible force from the other side of a sudden vertigo or the very sound of their galloping pulse. There ought to be some sort of protection for the mind, somehow, like a kind of sheepdog that, whenever one such venomous thought is about to venture into the swampy regions of the memory or project new forms of shadow or cobwebs, would herd it back together with the rest of the flock into some quiet enclosure bathed in light; it would tear the circle of obsession apart with its teeth, round up the stampeding ghosts, hunt them down through the labyrinths, sink its fangs into them until their veins of black juice burst once and for all or they were imprisoned in silence inside the pen.
In times gone by, many years ago now, I’ve also found myself on the other side. In other words, I was the one in dire need of a nearby presence so as not to succumb to panic. This was back in the toxic, hectic Madrid of the eighties, when my brain was a giant, raw wound inside my head. I remember my little mat laid out on the floor, at the foot of my friend Andrés’s bed, when we shared an apartment in the Estrecho district, and how his steady breathing somehow helped me keep time with my own in an attempt to sleep. Truth is, there is little more that can be done. It is at such times that I have caught the clearest glimpse of the fundamental loneliness of a human being, any human being, and the impossibility of any real communication. There is no transplant of nerves or blood, no way of releasing that fear from its cage. Two people can even hold each other tight, clutching hands, yet one will never truly be able to penetrate the other’s hell, or even remotely understand it. It’s impossible. Beyond a rudimentary sense of empathy that all but ends with the certainty that the other is suffering — but this is just abstract — there is nothing that can be done to penetrate the other’s thoughts, the other’s fear, and to fight tooth and nail, as one might so often wish, against the ghosts and the storms that are gathering in there. There is a profound, painful truth to that vision of Goethe’s whereby one’s inner life is akin to a sort of fortified citadel that no one can ever truly breach or, for that matter, leave, though linguistic sleight of hand may conjure an illusion to the contrary. In the middle of the night, two friends embrace in their pajamas, they ruffle each other’s hair, exchanging words of loyalty and encouragement, but only one is torn asunder, trembling inside, only one breaks out in an icy sweat.
Jacobo would sometimes try his hand at watercolor, usually vases of flowers, or fruit bowls, or candelabras, but also landscapes with outlandish skies, fearsome storms, or Vettriano knockoffs, those women who emerge when night, sin, and silk entwine, who gaze off into the distance, a cigarette in their hand, fancying themselves the magnets of all desire. For me, one of life’s great pleasures has always been to look on as someone paints or sketches at my side, acting as if I weren’t there. It must, however, be someone who takes the matter seriously, not some half-hearted exercise that matters little one way or the other, for here the other person’s passion is even more key to the performance than the outcome itself; and Jacobo, even though he ended up tearing almost every canvas to shreds, threw himself headlong into the task as if his life depended on it, head tilted to one side, tongue poking out like a schoolboy endeavoring to write out his first letters by hand, holding his sketch pad out in search of the right distance from which to gauge the play of texture, light, and line. If everything falls into place, I can be sent into a trance of sorts by the smell of pencils, ink, and oil paint and the sound of lead pencils and erasers on the paper. I can sometimes feel a shudder of delight up around the ears that takes me back to those dingy, old shoe repair shops, tiny and cramped, that were a regular feature in the neighborhoods of my childhood. Outside, the heavens have opened and the air in the street carries the scent of waves and sardines; there’s a small glass-fronted den where a half-broken, staticky radio dripping with grease can be heard, along with the hammer blows of an old man struggling with a midsole, daubing it with glue, rummaging around for the exact size of nail through cluttered drawers in which finding anything seems an impossible task. Everything is awash with the penetrating aroma of those super-strength glues that, in turn, smell of a bygone industry, of Hernani and other northern factory towns in the seventies, and also, as if in passing, of a kid getting high, hunched over a plastic bag, seated on the edge of a sidewalk that lies on the other side of an Atlantic Ocean also perhaps battered into submission by the very same rain; and the perfume of leather and polish, of the yellowish light of the cozy hideout from which I hoped I would never be dragged away, praying to the heavens that the cobbler would take his time in seeing to the clients ahead of me, for some last-minute repair to be made on the spot, for some shoe that had slipped his mind and had to be returned without delay to the woman standing before me in line, or for some barefoot girl to enter, clutching a heel, pleading for assistance there and then, hopping on one leg, her tights soaked through, the nylon flecked with mud.