Dear Jacobo, you’ve been murdered and I’m thinking about my life. And this hurts, for it has not escaped my attention that it is selfish, when all is said and done, much like when you would try to get things off your chest and I’d simply bide my time, waiting for the chance to butt in and get things off mine. The thing is, even seeing it so clearly, I cannot stop myself so easily. You went mad, and with your soundness of mind, hand in hand, mine, too, evaporated. You are dead, and what I feel, at every turn, as clear as daylight, under my skin and in all of the air that surrounds me, is my own death. I am powerless to stop it; if my thoughts were not so free, so elusive to my own will, I would no doubt have been a different person, I’d have been happy. And it so happens that these days I’ve also been thinking back to the words Robert Antelme wrote his friend Mascolo in a letter: “Dionys, I should like to say to you that I don’t think of friendship as a positive thing, I mean as a value; much more than this, I think of it as a state, an identification, therefore as a multiplication of death, a multiplication of questioning.” I remember that you made me read The War and all that we spoke of back then. And though, out of modesty, we were unable to meet one another’s gaze when uttering certain words, I believe we were well aware of the space that anguish occupies in every love. Now you have gone and in some way you’re dragging me behind you, you take with you on your departure the meaning of things, as a lure so that I might race behind you, so that, sniffing after that bait in tireless pursuit, I might end up lying by your side on the same drab beach on which one breathes one’s last, seagulls shriek, and songs fade out. Yet there is nothing to reproach or even lament — with due conviction I shoulder the weight of a single cross that is mine to bear.
Allow me also to say one more thing. Some years ago, your death would have been a thousand times better, when you still lived with a woman who loved you. There was a time when you’d have said your goodbyes to the world with the sense of taking your leave filled with love. I’ve seen it elsewhere, in relatives or friends accompanied to the very end by wives who fight with the doctors, who move heaven and earth to get one more test, a painkiller, or a bed next to a window overlooking the pine forest, ones who stay in the hospital all night long, night after night, without so much as opening a book, simply saying goodbye to you with their eyes, making you feel that the journey that is coming to an end was a thing of wonder and that, somehow, it was all worth it. Setting metaphysical or biological considerations to one side, death is something that has to do with absence, an absence that must be noticed by someone. Those of us who live as alone as lepers cannot die in this sense, for we have in a way already been dead for some time. To truly die, you must leave a gap behind, the place at the table where you sat down to have breakfast with the others and where no one now pulls up a chair. Death is that bit of the table on which a cup of coffee is missing. You must leave behind an empty chair if you wish to die a proper death or for anyone to remember you some day; and, Jacobo, the empty chairs you leave behind you go unseen, they stand in a lonely, locked apartment. Which is perhaps why I feel that your death belongs to me, that you died only for me, much as I, had things happened the other way around, would have died for you alone. And if any light is to be shed by your end, if any lesson might be drawn from all this, there can be no pupil other than myself in the empty classroom at whose lectern you all of a sudden fall silent as I watch you for the last time from the only desk.
I return from searching your apartment in the early hours of morning and then continue with the search of mine without pausing, throwing myself yet further into the task, as if among my things, as outlandish at it might seem, some of the answers to all of this might be found. And I forget about you. And I search my own bookshelves, the backs of my own drawers. I open dusty folders filled with old papers, with one corner folded down, that I can no longer identify. My military service ID and high school diploma even appeared from somewhere or other. I take another long hard look, one by one, at the photos I have for so long been reluctant to face, in search this time of some clue, retracing the steps of a life I have for some time now been unable to understand. Or that I have perhaps never truly understood but that now, for some reason that has to do with a padded coffin, absurdly upholstered in tulles and velvet, in which you lie, stitched up from head to toe like a rag doll, I need to understand in one way or another. It may not always be the case, but sometimes death (and I believe its imminence, proximity, or even a simple hint of it may suffice) illuminates everything. And it is precisely beneath that light when it becomes clear that there is nothing to see.
Cotton buds were placed in your nostrils and earholes, and some elderly women, aunts of yours if I understood correctly, drifted away from the window in which you were on display, commenting to one another that you were more handsome now than the last time they dropped by your apartment some months back to make sure you were coping. Less bloated, they say, what a difference, and as if more at peace, as different as night and day, without those wrinkled bags under the eyes that could make one shudder. Look, Jacobo, I don’t know much about detectives or police investigations. That’s never been my strong point. Even as a reader of fiction, as you well know, I’ve always had more of a French, melancholic bent, just as you liked to tease me about; I’ve always preferred an interior monologue over convoluted stories that unfold amid revolvers, bona fide clues and red herrings, enigmas and alibis. I almost always lose my bearings. I never fully understood The Big Sleep or L.A. Confidential, whether in book or movie form, to cite just a couple of examples of the ones we’ve discussed a thousand times. But one thing I will say despite it all, right now, here, in the midst of the silence spreading out from your casket and now strangling my throat: I am going to use every last living drop of what little remains hidden among the debris of my intelligence, no matter how ill it may seem, no matter how feeble, to make sure that it simply doesn’t end like this.
13 (still waters)
Things being as they were, and with the growing sense that everything around me was coming apart at the seams, I headed off to visit my mother at the old folks’ home in a bid to cross at least one item off the burgeoning list of minor regrets and unfinished business that has a habit of getting in the way of thought and even life when it grows too long for comfort. I’m not always able to visit my mother, and sometimes the simple fact is that I cannot summon up the energy. I’m not sure the extent to which she knows who I am any more, but there’s no doubt she’s pleased to see me. At least she looks proud whenever it’s her name, and not that of any of her fellow residents, that blares out on the megaphone that announces visitors from the scores of loudspeakers distributed along the hallways, and everyone, residents and nurses alike, the crazy and the sound of mind, busies themselves trying to find her in the rooms or among the hedges lining the garden paths. She feels important, which is why she always makes her appearance beaming triumphantly at all of her fellow inmates to whom no one has paid a visit that day as she makes her way to the room in which we sit. She proudly shows off her box of chocolates, her bottle of perfume. She shows me off. Some of the women remark on how tall I am, what a fine specimen I am. They ask my mother how many children I have, if I’m the eldest, if I live in Barcelona, questions she cannot answer. She answers yes to each one in turn and laughs happily, clinging tightly to my arm. For that alone, my visit is worthwhile.