I walk away thinking of the number of worlds contained within the world, of how far and yet at the same time how close they are to one another, at once distant and huddled together. The combination of the tranquilizers and my afternoon stroll sometimes brings about a sort of reconciliation with the world that emerges in the form of a longing, a veritable thirst, for simple and gentle things. I think I’ve made a mess of almost everything in my life. In having gone too far, for instance, in the desire to fill my time, my head, my rooms, every wall, every shelf, spurred on by a strange horror vacui that in reality makes no sense. In short, I believe my past is overstuffed with things, and this is bad news as far as fear is concerned, for anxiety, by its very nature, is something that always returns, and because monsters rarely emerge from empty wells. Perhaps we set too much store by the urge, so symptomatic of the times we live in, to hoard experiences, a sort of Diogenes syndrome more of memories than of objects, and the trick to striking a certain degree of inner balance, if such a thing is possible without becoming a total cretin, may lie in blending in with the nothingness that surrounds us rather than rising up in rebellion and wishing to make of it a sort of giant, faceless foe against which to dig trenches and moats as if we ourselves were anything other than nothingness, as if we could ever truly amount to anything more than what remains, always what remains, what little remains, the almost nothing that remains after having traveled down a thousand roads, after having loved, after having lived between the devil and the deep blue sea, pinned against the sky and the rocks. As if we were anything other than skin that grows old, leaving a pile of ash and cold dregs sealed inside, next to our bones.
Our high school physics professor once told us that if an atom were the size of the Burgos cathedral, then its nucleus would be a pin on the floor, and its electrons, tiny specks of dust hovering beneath the domes. The rest would be empty. With this in mind, given that the world is made up of atoms, one might have said that everything was nothing. We ourselves were nothing. Though it might seem that objects bounce off one another, this is a simple matter of equilibriums and force fields, atomic orbitals, the hurly-burly of magnets in disarray. Any real contact is out of the question. Say, for the sake of argument, that I’m in love with a woman; what I actually love is a peculiar arrangement of nothing, a peculiar arrangement of nothing that bears her name, the form nothingness adopts in her, the way in which her millions of empty cathedrals interlock. I might think that I take her by the hand or caress her skin, but this can never be anything more than a sly trick played by a limited, sick perception. Truth be told, it is a game played only by air that is not even air. No matter how hard I clutch her to me, what I hold in my arms, what I fear losing, what is killing me, is a whole heap of nothing.
On these strolls, I sit down for long rests on benches and take everything in very slowly — the people, the light, the evening itself. I buy bread for dinner, cigarettes, coffee, and anything that can be cooked in a pan, a minute on each side. Often, on the slightest pretext, I enter the Chinese dollar store two streets up from my apartment. On the closed-circuit TV, they keep an eye on me to make sure I’m not shoplifting. The store is run by this bleary guy who spends his whole time there, Sundays included, with the radio turned on and a handful of comics at his side. For a moment, I feel I could be happy behind the counter of that store, that I could hang around there for hours on end, my head empty of thoughts. I’d like to hang out there, with the young Chinese woman minding the shop while snuggled up to the electric heater, sometimes sewing or watching cartoons on a tiny TV set. I’d love to stay there all day long. If ever I made a big sale, I’d impatiently wait for one of the owners to drop by so I could tell them all about it, down to the last detail. I’d draw tally marks in pencil on a scrap of paper whenever I sold anything. At around three in the afternoon, someone would bring me a plastic container filled with rice and another with hunks of meat swimming in a different color sauce every day, and almonds, bamboo, and sprouts of one sort or another. I think I’d like that. I’d also like it if at the end of each day, the young Chinese woman and I counted out the coins in the till, and what little there was would strike us as plenty. Then I’d fall asleep at her side on a mattress on the floor, the East in my arms, as if at last I held distance in my grasp, surrounded by plastic odds and ends, cats with moving arms, huge fish tanks, and pictures with lights and waterfalls.
Some days I see this mentally handicapped guy stroll by. He must be almost twenty, and he’s always accompanied by a woman who looks like she’s his grandmother and buys him an edition of AS sports magazine, soccer sticker-album packs, and superhero comics. The two of them are pretty fat, and the kid is always dressed in an outdated Real Zaragoza tracksuit, the official design from four or five seasons back, beaming with pride. I figure that the boy is in his grandmother’s care and that he barely sees his parents — it’s been a long time since his father was in the mood to take any crap, and the man now spends his afternoons playing cards in a gloomy corner of some bar in the neighborhood of Las Fuentes, a tumbler of cognac and anisette on the next table, for his own table is taken up entirely by the baize playmat; meanwhile, she — the mother — who met a gentleman that seemed like an upstanding sort, runs a roadside bar three provinces further south where they also sell cheese, mantecado shortbreads, and melons. No doubt the kid attended school for a while, until they gave up on him as a hopeless case. He’d have had no one to play with in the recess yard, but would sometimes take refuge in his cell phone so as not to appear so forlorn. He’d pretend to receive messages, and though his classmates suspected he was making it all up, they’d have to prove it, because if you don’t lose heart and you keep checking the screen again and again as if you hadn’t a care in the world, a slight lingering doubt always remains. Though I know the situation would be as foolish and as far-fetched as can be, I can’t help thinking for a moment that I might be happy if I could be that kid’s older brother or something, as ill-equipped as he is for life’s struggles, also in the care of his grandmother, who would cook us hearty, humble stews every day, pots of macaroni and ground beef, and huge bacon sandwiches whenever snack time rolled around. We could share a room, which would be filled with posters of athletes and a smell of sweat that would, in time, cease to turn my stomach. He would show me his collections, the dog-eared albums in which no one until now had ever shown the slightest interest, his magazines, his badges, and we would stay up all hours chatting about signing rumors and zombies.