Our conversations often turned to literature; his entire living room was strewn with books, most arranged on dusty shelves, many other piled up in various heaps: those he had just read, those he planned to read, and those that flitted between the two piles for one reason or other. Many of them were bookmarked, with yellow notes signaling the paragraphs that in recent days Jacobo had thought he might read out loud to me, sometimes whole passages and sometimes, more often than not, brief snippets of something pithy or that had, for whatever reason, taken his fancy, underlined in pencil, by way of aphorisms that we might discuss as he whipped up something to eat — in his underwear, as usual, wearing his battered slippers. After painstaking rereadings of nineteenth and early twentieth century novels, as if to take a break from the thousands of pages of Proust, Baroja, and Thomas Mann’s unbridled prose, he had recently decided to throw himself back into the poetry of Jabès and Celan, old acquaintances, and had even learned certain poems from Poppy and Memory and No One’s Rose by heart, seeking out different translations that he later liked for the two of us to compare, though neither of us spoke a word of German. He tended to turn to poetry only when he was at his lowest ebb and could barely concentrate or even sit down to read without having to get up from his chair every other minute to pace up and down the hallway or fix himself something from the fridge or the drinks cabinet. He brought me up to speed on Celan’s life story and his addictive verse. Indeed, thanks to him, I ended up drenched in the work of Celan, whom I began to picture always in the midst of a snowy landscape, a lump in his throat, the proprietor of an inhuman sadness and a feeling of guilt that never, not a single day in his life, allowed him to banish from his thoughts the image of his dead parents lying on the cold ground, in the Mikhailovka camp, on the banks of the Bug. The bullet hole in the back of his mother’s head, the knowledge that he could have saved them, everything half-shrouded in a blanket of white. Jacobo managed to inject me with the poison of that delicacy. There are works that take you over like a virus. We carry them with us for a while, much like someone who has come down with an illness, then they slowly disappear, albeit leaving in their wake traces of what was once their way of gazing upon the world and things, and a handful of verses with all the flavor of what has seemingly been forgotten.
Aside from all the talk of books and reading, I hoped he might also tell me how things were on the female front, in part because that sort of conversation had always, in the past at least, ended up lifting his spirits, and also partly so that I myself might enjoy the women in his telling, beautiful as only they were, and who, in Jacobo’s words, took dainty little steps, word by word, as if down the carpeted, hushed corridor of a ghostly hotel, toward glorious sin. He led me to believe that there was little to report in that regard, although certain aspects of his appearance — the frequency with which he shaved and the new wardrobe he had recently acquired — inclined me to think he was lying.
At the usual hour of my arrival at his apartment, the city outside was for Jacobo little more than an indeterminate threat that slowly waned as people at last holed themselves up in their lairs, a sort of fleeting false alarm or slumbering monster before which it would on no account do to lower one’s guard, above all once you have learned that the night lays down cables that connect directly to dangerous gaps in the memory, cables along which fear travels like electricity. But the battles and the turmoil often lay below the surface, and a casual onlooker might have observed calm above all on those nights of standing guard against panic. Almost, you might say, peace of mind. A teapot on the stove, two men chatting in their slippers against a backdrop of gentle music, Satie’s piano on Après la Pluie, say, or one of Brahms’s violin or violoncello concertos, the books on the table, a glass holding paintbrushes and murky water, yawns after a certain hour, the record coming to an end, the smoke getting everywhere, the ice melting inside the tumbler to mark the passing of time and all its clinging drowsiness, the brimming ashtrays strategically placed within reach of our four hands, the cushions, the checkered blankets that clash with the upholstery on the couch, and finally, as if by magic, almost when you least expect it, the cleansing miracle of daybreak, the light dissolving the cobwebs of sleep in the nick of time, at the last gasp, not long before they were to begin their perilous transformation into something yet darker and denser.
Which is how things had almost always gone. However, the last time I heeded Jacobo’s summons, his nerves were shot to pieces. His fear had a more solid feel than on previous evenings. This time he was afraid that someone — a man, a real human being — would attack him at any moment. He took great pains to make sure every door was locked and showed me, hidden behind the door, next to the entrance to his apartment, a baseball bat and a couple of axes he had gotten ahold of from somewhere or other and kept hidden so as to be able to defend himself properly when the time came. When I questioned him, he said that this was just in case, that there were plenty of scumbags out there, and that he felt safer this way. For a moment, I thought he was about to offer a more concrete explanation for that fear and that makeshift arsenal. I watched him hesitate over whether or not he ought to fill me in on a story of hatred and persecution that must have struck even him as beyond belief. No doubt he was afraid that I might have taken real fright on learning further details and would have had no wish to keep him company that night, and so he preferred to keep his lips sealed in the hope that I’d put such changes down to a worsening of his state of mind. Which is precisely what happened. I didn’t wish to make any further comment, but at that moment it seemed to me that Jacobo was truly beginning to hit rock bottom. He couldn’t concentrate on any reading that night and had no desire to put on any music, so as not to muffle the sound of footsteps on the staircase or landing. He doubled his usual dose of tranquilizers and spent most of the time peering out the window, all of the lights in the living room switched off, alert to every movement in the street, struggling like a guard on sentry duty to keep sleep at bay.
6 (a stroll)
The following day, on my evening stroll, I was struck out of the blue by a sudden thought: What if it turns out I’m seriously ill and the whole world is in on the secret except me? Just like that, as I cast my mind back over the previous weeks, I began to clearly see certain details that I had not fully grasped at the time: questions I had not quite understood, phone calls apropos of nothing, sideways glances as if of commiseration for no apparent reason. On the other hand, my shattered state was no great mystery to me — my pounding heart, my palpitations and, in general, the all-round toll that, for some time now, being alive had been taking on me. This became all too clear whenever I had to climb a few steps on any staircase. At the mere sight of an uphill slope in the distance, I’d begin to feel a shortness of breath, gasping for air like a fish on the sand. Meanwhile, the feeling that something inside of me was rotting away as I slept was a hard one to shake. I could sense my own skeleton as something increasingly green and watery, and the presence of a seaweed-like substance in my lungs. But the fact is I had spoken to no one. Might someone in my family have gotten their hands on the X-rays I leave lying around in envelopes here and there, or the test results that not even I could bring myself to look at? Had my siblings taken it upon themselves to consult one of my doctors? Had he informed them of something other than what he had told me? Did they phone one another every night to weigh up the options and debate the pros and cons of filling me in on the situation? Perhaps, right now, there are people agonizing over whether or not I ought to know, whether or not I would be plunged yet further into gloom, whether or not I would take the opportunity to settle some old score, or devote my days to squeezing every last drop from what little time I had left. Even I can’t answer that. The idea of disappearing has always made me think of the sea at night, of a silence filled with black vessels. At times I think I would have no objection to slipping away if I could be sure of feeling nothing more than the murmur of my strength as it ebbs away, while breath abandons my body and fatigue slowly comes to rest, like a deadweight, on my various organs — my eyelids, my guts, my worn out muscles. But at others I start to doubt whether the suffering will cease after death or there will ever be any real end to this time of nerves and debris. In other words, though on paper I know that it cannot be any other way, at the same time I find it hard to believe that all this darkness, already so dense, can be healed by yet more darkness.