Not long before, in that same room, he had been shocked by my theory that the difference between Auschwitz and military service of the sort that I did in Spain in the early eighties was merely quantitative and not qualitative. Immense, granted. Colossal, vast, there’s no arguing with that, but merely quantitative all the same. That was my headstrong stance. Auschwitz was military service multiplied by a certain number, pick one as high as you like, but not a drastically different matter. I remember telling him that when humans who sleep en masse in barracks begin to move at the sound of a whistle, you’re already halfway there. If I, at an intimate, almost physical level, can understand the testimonies of those who survived, even feeling an occasional, vague sense of déjà vu on reading the books of Antelme or Primo Levi, this is because I have on many a winter morning fallen into line in my underwear in front of the barracks and have mopped the floor of an immense building in which the bunk beds, the lice, and the boogers all blended into one. And because my head was all but shaven clean the minute I arrived, and because orders were barked at me to stand in the line for vaccinations and to stand in the line for the standard-issue attire and to stand in the line to have my bowl filled with soup and stewed meat, while all around me were watchtowers and spotlights trained on the tops of walls crowned with barbed wire and shards of jagged glass. Needless to say, I was not claiming that having lived through all of that automatically entitled me to put myself in the concentration camp prisoners’ shoes, but it did at least give me a firmer grasp on what they were talking about than could be said of someone who has never been ordered to place their thoughts and speech on hold, or paraded back and forth all morning long, or cleaned sardines and scrubbed toilets for hours on end. Without that experience of having been stripped of my dignity, I would have no way of knowing what it feels like to be on your knees in the mud, or to have your face trampled by a boot. Now, however, when I read those tales of the camps, I can picture the backdrop to all that ignominy, the guard’s faces, the smell of muck and dirty laundry, and the depths of the envy you can feel toward any old dog of the sort that come to feed off the scraps from the trash cans left outside the back door to the kitchen.
And I was also trying, clumsily, to get across that other idea of mine, as old as it is muddled, that every human life contains within it the story of its century. Not, it goes without saying, in chronological terms, or in the form of parallels that can in any sufficiently clear-cut way be drawn. But I understood that those months back then, devoid of any hope, had been my Auschwitz, with their farewell to poetry and their sky teeming with vultures, with death hovering over everything at all hours and the lost beliefs and the broken banners. I told him that I could recognize in my own past the Jaca uprising, the face, the flesh of the woman who made me head outside into the snow to join Fermín Galán’s men, singing, armed to the teeth, all the flags pointing straight toward defeat. And I also told him that on some good days, in the darkness of the barracks, I still held out hope of having my own Normandy landing, my May of ‘68, my time of burning cathedrals, and a Prague Spring that in my dreams took the form of a whitewashed patio filled with potted geraniums, not far from the sea.
Wearing his slippers, I lit one of his cigarettes and sat down to contemplate the living room from the position of his absence. On the other side of the window, at that hour of the afternoon, it seemed that the fears that had plagued him were still there, as if blind to the fact that their prey had already been struck down by another, more potent, force of nature. The clouds circled like crows as the natural light faded little by little from the room. This was for him the most dreaded moment of the day. The blinds shook gently in the breeze that at that time of day seems to come from the most bitterly cold nothingness. I turned on his stereo to listen to “Hurt,” which had for me in recent months become something of a theme song for Jacobo in this little theater of ours. It seemed to me that Johnny Cash’s voice was closer to tears than on previous occasions.
I then got down to the business of slowly searching his drawers, one by one. I was not looking for anything in particular, and at the same time I was looking for everything. I wanted to understand something. I wanted to let the objects shape my thoughts a little, guiding them, for otherwise, without the aid of those external prompts that at times conjured up precise instants, at others long stretches of time, my thoughts could not run freely. It’s strange what the silence of a dead man’s things has to say for itself and the way such objects have of keeping still. Some of them, a pair of glasses with an outdated prescription painstakingly preserved in their case, say, or an old wallet stuffed full of expired ID cards, appeared to have gotten a head start, surreptitiously and under their own steam, on their owner’s death, for they had for some years now lain in the gloomy recesses of a wooden drawer, locked away and forgotten. Most of our things die before us, they said their goodbyes some time ago without our noticing. Others, meanwhile, those that outlive us, make no bones about the sudden interruption of everything — items of clothing with his sweat on them in the laundry basket, drinking glasses bearing the outline of lips now forever sealed, reminders of doctor’s appointments he should have gone to the next week, prescriptions awaiting a trip to the pharmacy, tickets for a play that has yet to open in the city, an almanac on his writing desk with a whole ream of pages that now serve no purpose, and the hundreds of scraps of paper scattered here, there, and everywhere (Post-it notes on the refrigerator door, napkins from bars, dog-eared Moleskines) with snippets that could have amounted to something, who knows, perhaps poems or something of the sort, ideas for an article, fragments of letters that went nowhere.
I needed to understand something, to get some inkling of who might have killed him and why, and as things stood, I had nothing, other than the certainty that he had feared this attack and that the police had ruled out the motive of robbery. When I arrived at Jacobo’s apartment, I had Lorazepam coming out of my ears. Though that state of extreme sedation didn’t exactly help me get my thoughts in any proper order, I felt sure it was the only way to face the ordeal of entering his apartment alone, of seeing the blood stains on the wall, and of finding myself among his things once more. Even so, I gave a start at the slightest noise from the upstairs apartment or the inner patio. It’s impossible not to feel like an intruder when rooting though the pockets of a dead man’s coat, rummaging around in his nooks and crannies, reading all his papers.
10 (one day the investigators will come)
I returned home in something of a daze, without having gotten a single thing straight in my mind. I thought it would be best to go back another day when my thoughts were a little less cluttered and I had some idea of which way to turn or where to begin, anything other than turning up and grabbing some object, then caressing it awhile before putting it back where I’d found it, which was more or less all I’d done the entire afternoon. I opened the front door to find my apartment particularly silent, and as if tainted by a half-sickly light, of the sort that leaves everything tinged with ennui. In my listless state and as if spurred on by a strange inertia, as if the detective work I had undertaken in Jacobo’s apartment just moments before had somehow carried over, I began to see my own possessions as if they belonged to someone else, in other words, as if I were in some way dead, or worse, and someone had wandered in and begun to survey my things, the mess, the furniture, the books, in a bid to find something out about who I was and what my undoing had been, the ultimate reasons for the disaster, for my aimless drifting and my empty hands, for the shadows that cut through me, and all the rest besides. In one of those folders I hadn’t opened in decades, I came across a handful of letters sent to me a long time ago, most still inside their original envelopes, as well as the odd draft of others penned by me, which I must have set aside at the time in order to keep a copy, to what end I no longer know. I picked one at random, addressed to the first girl who ever truly got under my skin, back in my high school days. The first thing that struck me was how little I remembered of her. While I could clearly recall a pair of her dresses and could sketch the door to her apartment block on the Calle Costa Rica, her face was much harder to summon.