It struck me that my dead friend’s apartment had made me look afresh at my own home. As if I had already begun leaving everything at the sole mercy of absence. The door firmly locked, the electricity cut off at the mains, the dust spreading out at its own pace, so like that of eternity, over all the silence of lifeless objects.
One day the investigators will come. They will search the apartment, suddenly emptying out the contents of upturned drawers on a table. They will unfold papers, poring over every photograph, every letter, newspaper clippings and bank statements and receipts for my most recent purchases. They will hold in their hands the objects that were first ours, back when you still dusted them down from time to time with a feather duster (your headscarf, your song. .), and then belonged to me and me alone, so mournfully, while all of a sudden becoming smaller and a little older, and that will from here on in belong to no one, fodder destined for the trash can or trinkets sold by the pound in the best case scenario — the multicolored dragon souvenir we bought in the Park Güell, the teapot from Fez, the half-rusted box of quince jelly from Puente Genil in which you kept the postcards we still received from time to time in those days, the sailboat with cracked masts, the miniature Chicago taxi cab. In their notebooks, they will jot down the words they deem important, almost everything, in fact, just in case; things turn up when you least expect it — what I thought on one day only, what I wrote without realizing, the date scribbled on the back of some theater program or movie ticket, the clues to a life, the half-erased traces of footsteps heading straight for an abyss without anyone yet being able to understand why.
One day the investigators will come. They will rush through the letters I took such time to write, the unfinished stories, the poems still full of crossings-out and minced words, cringe-worthy verses, coy observations. Their eyes will flit at great speed over the adjectives I pondered with care, their clumsy, latex-gloved fingers will in the end cause the ink to smudge, small blue clouds with traces of fingerprints slowly forming in the middle of the sheet of paper. One day the investigators will come, and they will discover what I never knew, the hidden reasons for my fears, the source of the storms, the night’s motives, they will know why I did what I did when I did it and will train their microscopes on the ice that at other times brought me to a standstill; they will barge their way into the forests I had no wish to roam and upturn the sacred, the delicate, the half-broken, everything that held itself upright as if by miracle. One day the investigators will come, and they will know who I loved.
11 (the boy among the pigeons)
In a cardboard box, I come across a black-and-white snapshot of myself cutting through some pigeons in a square, probably the Plaza del Pilar in Zaragoza, though it’s such a close-up image it might well be the Plaza Cataluña, in Barcelona. Whatever. I must be around four or five; I’ve never been much good at gauging children’s ages. It’s winter, judging from the coat I’m wearing buttoned up to the neck, though my legs, as was customary at that time, in my family, at least, were exposed to the elements no matter how cold it got. Either way, I can clearly recall that coat, which was in fact red, with its Eskimo hood, while the argyle socks and the badly buckled shoes also strike me as oddly familiar. Yet I cannot fully get my head around the fact that that boy is me. The word me blurs in and out of focus, I’m not sure I understand it. The sight of that boy arouses in me a tenderness I find hard to sustain. I look at that boy and my heart goes out to him.
Child, forgive me for all the harm I’ve inflicted on you, for what I have ended up making of your life. Forgive me for not having listened to you more, little Rocamadour of my own novel, little cardboard horse, for not having spent more time with you. I look at this photo, and for the first time in my life, I feel I can truly see you. You are not only me, by which I mean, you are me, but you depart from within me, you slip free of the filthy jail cell of my limited identity and become a child, pure and simple, out there, deserving of every tenderness, lots of love, even this love of mine that is now poor and a little drab and has a way of sometimes tainting things whether I like it or not. If I could see you entirely from the outside, I would want to protect you, to kiss you; no harm could come to you while I was nearby. I’m not sure why good sense tells me I cannot harbor such feelings simply because you are me when I was small, I cannot fathom today this strange shyness I ought to feel when loving you and all of a sudden no longer feel, perhaps because I am already sliding down a ramp that leads who knows where, to the middle of some stormy sea or dreadful silence. I look at you and I know I could learn to love you like no other. For no other living soul could I have done as much as I could have for you, living as I have lived within your skin, my hand on the tiller, on paper at least, guiding the steps you take in those patent-leather shoes with a buckle on one side that now seem somewhat comical. I could have watched over you like a Guardian Angel, defending your laughter and your innocence and the four corners of every bed you ever had; and yet I have ruined the life of no other creature as I have yours. You look a lot like one of my sons when he was your age. You are all but identical. I would have laid down my life for him and still would, yet to you I have left barely a thing: these black lungs, if anything, wretched loves and nights of terror, a liver on its last legs, a few friends, but always the same noose slung hovering so closely over your throat and all this weight with which I saddled you. I look at my knees today, my hands, and it takes some effort to believe they are the same as the ones in the photo, the same eyes, the same legs that once held you upright. I can barely believe I’m still alive. In other words, I know that I’m still alive but don’t understand it.
I feel the need today to tell you that I loved you in my own way, even without knowing how to. That I like the fact that you’re my past, and that I’m proud of your high school diplomas and the things you sketched with a few strokes of a pen on any old scrap of paper, some of which I still keep in an old folder at the back of a closet, monsters and mountains with clouds up on high, ice-cream vans, racing cars of every color, soccer players poised to strike, revolvers, and princes on horseback.
I don’t know the point at which I let you die. In truth, I’m not even sure you’re really dead, altogether dead, I mean, but even so, allow me to say how truly sorry I am if that’s how it was, if I was unable to hold you tight enough when you left, when you slipped away from me to who knows where. Your skin was so smooth, your dreams so crystal clear. Now that I can no longer hear you, now that it’s been quite some time since I last felt your heart beating within me, in the darkness in me, I want you to know that the place in my insides where you once slept clutching tightly to your plastic truck, with your toy elephant, your hand-me-down pajamas, your longing to get to know me just as you thought I’d turn out to be and in the end did not know how to be, aches from the sheer cold.