Dear Magdalena,
They told me that I’d forget you, that all this pain would little by little ease and that a few years from now I’d again be able to stroll calmly down the streets I roamed with you and again enter the bars in which we got drunk together, and even sit down again in our usual corner at the end of the bar, under the same darkness as back then and that music that enveloped us, without panicking at the sudden emergence of a memory that might again bring back the taste of punch on your tongue or the image of my hands creeping up your thighs, of your raised skirt and your moist panties on the bar stool.
They told me that’s what always happens. That the sorrow passes like a mountain storm and gives way to other suns and other skies, taking with it the pitch-black sea of clouds that roared before up on high like the sky of Golgotha over the wooden crosses on which flesh hung, now dead. They told me that my life would carry on and that things would happen in the future and that there would be more travel and women and also more desire, why not, and that one day, almost without my realizing it, a time would come when I would once again sleep the whole night through, I’d see, and that I’d again eat at mealtimes and would be able to get by without the hundreds of pills in my silver case, without having to drink on an empty stomach, without clawing at my skull, and that I’d no longer feel the desire to make bloody tracks on my arms and hands with a box cutter.
They told me all of that. But time goes by and my love will not leave. I loved you so much, you bitch, that my love cannot leave. It’s here to stay. And it hurts. And it remains. And it will not leave. It has made its nest in me, like a snake holding out come hell or high water among the throbbing rubble of my ruin, and sometimes it rears its head with its forked tongue, with its bloodshot eyes, and it waits for you like before at the entrance to the movie theaters and looks for you in bars and down alleyways, and, asleep or awake, it dreams only of reaching you wherever you may be to bite your heart. And there it remains. It does not tire. And it hurts. And it will not leave.
I don’t know what arbitrary, strange force it is that sometimes keeps me from tearing up this type of letter while other times it compels me to do so there and then, filled with rage. Shame comes into it, needless to say, that much I do know, but the underlying reasons are beyond me. My initial instinct, no sooner had I read the letter, was to destroy it, but even as I was thinking of doing so, my fingers, as if they had a life of their own, were neatly folding it in two and putting it back in its place. On other occasions, in similar situations, just the opposite had occurred: while my mind was all made up to safeguard some piece of paper as if my life depended on it, my hands were suddenly crumpling it into a ball before setting it on fire inside the sink. On this occasion I kept the letter, as if I might one day reread it or need it at some future point as documentary proof of something — quite what is anyone’s guess — on some sort of eventual day of reckoning. It’s as if everything in a man’s life is leading up to a settling of scores with himself, at the gates to oblivion, that in the end never actually takes place. When not thwarted by the surprise arrival of death, it is prevented by all the weariness that tends to precede it, ruling out any attempt at a reckoning or stock-taking with its what does it matter now and its we tried our best. Or by shame itself, for in truth there is no such thing as a life that when looked at in hindsight and with a little perspective is not, deep down, a source of shame, even the lives of heroes and martyrs. Starting with the life of Jesus Christ, then the rest of us from there on down. It’s enough to make you stick your head in a hole in the ground, ostrich-style, never to emerge again.
My hands behind my back, as if sleepwalking, I scanned the shelves — the spines of the books, the objects that keep them partially hidden from view, little boxes, figures, framed photographs, and the wooden shelves themselves, all with their very fine coating of dust. For some strange reason, it seemed wrong to move anything, as if I were standing before a museum exhibit or the scene of a crime. It was as if the final whistle had been blown on some game and to touch anything, much less move it from where it stood, would now be cheating. I knew that my life was there, or at least the keys to my life, if indeed my life has ever had any keys, coordinates in the shadows, or has ever obeyed anything other than chaos, improvisation, or happenstance of the purest sort.
Written on the opening pages of each book is the date on which I bought it. Many also feature the name of the city, while a few also contain an additional note on some circumstance or other of that day: who I was with, if the book had been bought as a gift, if I had stolen it and how, if it was raining heavily. And some, albeit the exceptions, even contain within their covers the occasional surprise of some sort that also speaks to the time in which they were read: a dedication from an ex-girlfriend in that sweet handwriting that ex-girlfriends have, a faded movie ticket, a subway pass, some dried petals flattened between the pages. Assuming that anyone might ever have the necessary curiosity and time and were willing to take the trouble, all my books could be arranged in the precise order in which I had purchased them, almost down to the day, and based on that sequence, it would no doubt be possible to come up with a theory about rather more than my changing interests and taste in books: my urges to take flight, my obsessions, my soul, in short, or at least my soul as I liked to see it at each stage of my life. And if, to stretch the point a little further, that timeline was then set against the events of my life, a parallel biography, as if beneath the surface, would then emerge and might perhaps explain a great deal about the events that unfurled up above and shed some sort of light on my actions, my getaways, my terrors, my infatuations, my moves, and all that followed in their wake. Which book lay on my bedside table the night I felt sure I was dying of love for the very first time, aged sixteen, the night I covered my pillow in snot and scraps of poetry? What was I reading when I was abandoned in an interior apartment on the Calle Bravo Murillo, whose hallways then filled up with deathly music, cat shit, and beer bottle tops lined up on the floor along the baseboard of the entire length of the hallway? What book did I have on me when death gorged itself on what I held most dear and turned the whole world, with its streets and its seas, into an endless tomb beneath the cover of a sky that became for me like the inside of the lid, upholstered in blue, of a giant coffin? The contents of each and every book mingles with those of my thoughts at each moment, and it might not be too bold to claim that they must have influenced my decisions somehow, or at least the moods that inspired such decisions. My mind has been filled with those words, tangled up amongst them, tainted by that ink whose marks formed, deep down, mental images, sometimes hazy and sometimes crystal clear, distant worlds, outlandish characters, lies and battles, women as if glimpsed through a trellis of blackened wood, prodigious tales, hospitals and jungles, wonder and bile, the human heart with all of its ravages, and the blood that seeps out, boiling or ice cold. It’s impossible not to see those books as part of who I have been, allies and culprits in equal measure, for better or for worse.