And if so much time hadn’t gone by, if I had a little more energy and a youthful set of white teeth, I’d also like to be the boyfriend of some neighborhood hairdresser — let’s call her Puri. Or Nati, Nati would do. I’d pick her up from work on afternoons of heavy rain, lingering awhile to chat with the other girls who are always chewing gum and discussing the articles in their magazines while they finish tidying everything to close up the shop, forming piles of hair of every color with their brooms. Perhaps one of them wouldn’t mind giving me a quick shampoo while I wait. I’d like, moving the dream on a little, to have gotten married to her, to Nati, that is, to have acquitted myself well in the waltz in a restaurant in some industrial estate, filled with decorations and flowers and red drapes, and for the whole thing to have been caught on videotape, which we’d watch from time to time, when nothing on TV took our fancy — me cutting the cake, me teasing my new mother-in-law, fat and happy in her dress festooned with ribbons, the waiters refilling our glasses, Nati looking like a princess, her cleavage covered in glitter, or rather a fairy who’s made all sorrow vanish without a trace, and the chanting crowd calling on me to kiss her, on the two of us to climb onto the table, to kiss each other again. Right now, this very afternoon, I’d get home, flake out on the couch, and rub my eyes so that she might ask me if I’m tired. Today, I think I’d tell her I’ve had a tough day. Yes, I’d tell her I’ve had a real tough day.
7 (they tell me he’s dead)
The police called to tell me that Jacobo had been murdered. That night, his neighbors had heard strange cries and noises, and the next morning his buzzer and phone had gone unanswered. When the locksmith accompanying the police officers opened his door, they discovered his body lying prone in the hallway — in his underwear, which is the way he liked to wander around his apartment both summer and winter — riddled with knife wounds. When I hung up, I screwed my eyes tight to summon the tears, but it was no use. In the darkness of my heart, however, at that very moment, Celan again leapt into the river with a deafening noise, and everything was drenched by the water of the night. I thought back to the axes Jacobo had hidden next to the door the last night I went to keep him company, and I confirmed the suspicions I had harbored at the time that he was not then afraid simply of memories or nightmares but rather that he truly feared that a flesh-and-blood human being might attack him, as had sadly come to pass. This was not some worsening of the panicked state he had recently been struggling to keep at bay. Rather, as had now become clear, he had had more than sound reason to fear that a murderer might break into his apartment. According to the statements from the handful of witnesses who thought they had heard something odd, all this must have happened around about dinner time, at nine in the evening or thereabouts.
It would seem that my name took pride of place in the address book on his cell phone, next to those familiar words in case of emergency, which explains why the police called me ahead of anyone closer to him (on paper at least) so that I might put them in contact with his family, while gleaning the first clues as to his identity. I was touched by this tribute of sorts that Jacobo had paid me, now from the other side, by choosing me as the person to be notified should anything happen to him. On the one hand, he saw me as a guy who had his wits about him, someone capable, when the time came, of making decisions that might have been of a clinical nature and of vital importance, as if by singling me out he were announcing to the world, This guy will know, when the chips are down, what has to be done. At the same time, I couldn’t help but take it as a humble, secret declaration of friendship, something along the lines of I know that you care. Yet I felt somehow guilty, for no sooner had I heard the news, right at that very instant, my thoughts were not for him, but rather for myself. Something like great, just what I needed—just what I needed. I don’t know how far it’s possible to mourn someone’s death from any perspective other than one’s own, by which I mean, the perspective of the gap left behind in my life and among my things. I’d have liked to have been able to mourn him, above all else, for his own sake, for the days he would now miss out on rather than for his absence from my days. I wanted to believe that he had lived his life to the full, that dreams, much like books, also count for something, and that fear itself, when all is said and done, is also life, that there is no need to travel down all the world’s roads, to cram your life story full of incident and travel and love and persecution when the abyss forms part of your blood and your heart has been buffeted by every storm.
I believe they made the call from his apartment, their eyes perhaps on the corpse as they spoke to me, but I was not summoned to the precinct downtown until that evening. It’s awkward having to field questions when your gaze has been obliterated, and it’s all but impossible to keep a sufficiently clear head to be of any use to a detective at such times, when your hatred is directed at the whole world, indiscriminately, and at the turn events have taken — at that whole intricate, tangled mess of cause and effect that, to cut a long story short, we call fate. They wanted to know if he might have any debts. I didn’t think so, I said. No, for sure, I said, and much less to the point of having to turn to some low-life loan shark or anything like that. They wanted to know if he might have any enemies. I told them that this struck me as impossible, for I was at that moment incapable of remembering anything other than his compassion, his home as if it were my home, that way he had of taking you in and hearing you out. On hearing the word enemies, my thoughts turned to those intangible creatures that inhabited the furrows of his brain’s circumvolutions, the ghosts that ruthlessly hunted him down in packs, night after night, and against which he had so often sought the assistance of my mere presence. But an enemy of that sort does not plunge a knife though the thorax. It does not kill like this. They wanted to hear about his way of life. Or style, perhaps they said lifestyle. You know, sir: customs, hobbies, habits, any detail might help. They looked at me as if I’d lost my senses when I told them he was a big fan of Samuel Beckett. I had no wish to make light of things at such a time, but my thoughts weren’t flowing with any normality, either. Tripping over my tongue, I sketched a skin-deep, rough portrait of how I saw his life at that point: a retired man who devours books and DVD movies, something of a homebody, though he shops for his own groceries and goes out for strolls every now and then, as well as for the occasional evening meal, albeit much less since the ban on smoking in restaurants and bars had come in, forcing him to seek refuge in his apartment more often than not. He liked to complain that the disappearance of the smell of smoke in bars had only served to bring the smell of sweat, humanity, and armpits to the fore, and ever since, he had preferred to hole himself up with his wounded freedom beneath the reading lamp or in front of the plasma screen on which he liked to watch classic American movies from the forties and fifties, smoking to his heart’s content, drinking whisky, going to bed when the mood took him, and getting up as and when he pleased. He would appear in the living room, yawning and stretching his limbs, rubbing his eyes but with a book already beneath one arm. A woman came by to help clean his apartment three mornings a week. I don’t know if she had a key. Enemies? No idea. As for what he was up to, he told me plenty, but I don’t know if he told me everything. I don’t believe there’s a person alive who doesn’t keep a few things to themselves. Perhaps he was more apt to recount memories from long ago or events that took place only in his thoughts and less of what happened to him in the outside world or over the course of his day, but the fact is he was one of those people who live more in their memories than their own apartments. I know he had his sorrows, and also that he sometimes roared with laughter, that he was content dining on eggs and fried pork sausage and wine aplenty, or over post-prandial drinks with friends at the dinner parties they still throw once in a blue moon, wolfing down the cream on his Irish coffee by the spoonful; I know that he never entirely lost interest in the world or in women, though he was mindful that he was now surviving in the margins, off the path, albeit next to the path. The window next to his writing desk was like a watchtower from which to observe time as it set about grinding down the world, the passing of life, the clouds, the tedium. In a way, he was a little like old Cioran, whose adolescent readers took their own lives year after year while he, deep down a secret, shameful lover of life, jogged through the parks of Paris in his shiny track suit.