Nor was I left with any choice but to wonder whether or not I had any enemies; there has, needless to say, been no shortage of those who have wanted to kill me in the past, though I have always preferred to chalk that up to the madness of others or the uncontrollable outbursts that, in affairs of love and jealousy, I have always looked on as deserving a little leeway. Then there are those who come out with things such as it’s not that I wish him any harm, but I don’t wish him well, either. For the most part, those who make such statements would rub their hands in glee on learning of your death and would not hesitate an instant to cheerfully urinate on your corpse should the occasion present itself. Even so, I would not, strictly speaking, call them enemies. Having enemies is no simple matter, it’s almost a tragic luxury and, depending on how you look at it, a gift from life as far as meaning and intensity are concerned. Which explains why so many people invent, imagine, or long for one. On the other hand, if I am apt to view the world as, on the whole, a hostile place, it is not too bold to think that the world (or part of it) might also, as is only fair, view me as equally hostile. I think, for example, of those who tried to approach me when I was at my lowest ebb and to whom I refused to pay the slightest heed, people who, based on a handful of traits, perhaps credited me with an outlook akin to their own, a certain type of sensibility, and who thought that I ought to have been thankful from the bottom of my heart for their outstretched hand rather than fleeing from them as if from the plague, those who attempted to strike up a profound nineteenth-century correspondence with me only to be met with a curt, tardy reply; I think of those women who, on seeing in me the living image of neglect, wanted to come to my rescue, to drag me out of the dark pits in which they imagined I spent my hours, without, in truth, ever scaling the heights of my desire — my desire for light or my desire for them — with their warm flesh and their smell of home; and finally, I think of all those whose fellow traveler I had no wish to be, whose warlike manifestos I returned unsigned, all those who sought to win me over to their cause, lost or otherwise, and have me march beneath some flag to the beat of their drum and not my own, and those whom I stood up, sooner rather than later, without bothering to offer the slightest explanation. But an enemy worth his salt must be hated above all in secret, when no one is looking, and I’d swear that, for better or worse, my life has been free of them. Thankfully, no one on whom I might wish to practice voodoo, no one I might picture, my eyes closed, being tortured and screaming on the rack.
They don’t let you see the scene of the crime, but nobody takes the trouble to give the place a decent clean, either, and the bloodstains remain on the wall, untouched, a dreadful continent surrounded by brown islands on a vertical stucco sea. They must have scattered plenty of sawdust of the floor, for there were still lumps stuck to the baseboard on the day I decided to make use of the set of keys Jacobo had handed me some time previously and I made the decision to enter his apartment. About one week after the crime. At first glance, everything had been left more or less as I remembered it. His children and his ex-wife had dropped by no sooner had the police removed the seal from the door and business as usual had been declared on the landing. They took with them a couple of Pepe Cerdá paintings, said to be worth some cash, his old Underwood typewriter, which weighed half a ton and had been at one and the same time his emblem and his pride and joy (when this last fact dawned on me, I could not help but feel a twinge of resentment, for I had set my heart on that beauty, nor, at that precise moment, could I help but consider myself a wretched soul), as well as anything else of value they could find in the drawers following a quick skim through their contents: the gold watch he never wore, his collection of fountain pens, and not much else as far as I could tell, perhaps one or two of the bottles of wine left lying around, so temptingly, for all to see, though they didn’t even have the good taste to choose the finest among them. They had told me over the phone that they’d be back soon, as soon as they could all coordinate their schedules a little, to see what was to be done with the books and all the rest, so that they could strip the apartment as quickly as possible, since it was rented, the meter was still running, and it wouldn’t do to carry on paying month after month without rhyme or reason. In theory, the idea was to pack it all up in boxes and take it off to some temporary spot with enough room for it all, the house they owned in his hometown, no doubt, so as to sort through it all more calmly at some later date when they had the energy and some time on their hands. I pictured that heap of crates loaded on board a white van, heading for the country, before gathering dust in the woodshed of some ramshackle, cobweb-filled house, next to the farm tools, the rusty scythes, the foul-smelling clay pots, and the discarded wineskins, the tape sealing Jacobo’s watercolor prints, his books, his love letters, his toy soldiers, a whole life packed away inside cardboard boxes and sprinkled liberally with rat poison.
8 (condolences)
The wake prior to the incineration was held in the rooms of the Torrero cemetery. If Jacobo’s family had decided to bury his remains rather than burn them, they would have done so in his hometown. It matters not that he had made the decision some time ago to distance himself from that place and return to it as little as possible. This is a common state of affairs. As soon as someone has definitively lost any chance of making themselves heard or protesting, everyone else acts as they see fit. I’ve even seen sung masses, the choir packed with angelical children, to send off the most steadfast of nonbelievers, in the epicurean belief that death, like anything else, remains the preserve of the living. Perhaps it would not have been such a bad thing if Jacobo’s remains had come to rest in the place he had spent so many years, no matter how often he had bad-mouthed the lovely Provincia and all its kindhearted folk who had fashioned a whole sophisticated system for whiling away their time out of snooping on others, speaking ill of their fellow men, and leaping to conclusions. It was, when all is said and done, for better or for worse, where his home was. And a home, an abode in the broadest sense of the word, need not always as a matter of course be the place where one lives, it can also stand for just the opposite, the place from which one is determined to beat a retreat, the little flag with a pin for a mast stuck into a point on the map, signaling, on the one hand, the place where, by dint of centuries and fate, the exact makeup of your own blood, blend after blend, has slowly been concocted, and on the other, the reference point thanks to which one can make a getaway, letting, as is only right, a little air, the rivers, and even, if possible, the sea currents come between you and it, to flee and never to go back; for even if you are never to return, you need a place to which you never return, precise coordinates that mark the spot on which you have decided to set up the ghostly camp of your absence, the chair on which you do not sit, the walls you do not hide behind, the steps you do not take, and the thousands of eyes that do not pin you to the spot.