She asks me to take her to the cemetery. She makes the same request of everyone who happens by, including visiting strangers, the waitresses from the cafeteria, and the other residents. Without much success, but this does nothing to stop her trying. I lie to her once again: I don’t have my car, I took it to the garage to be fixed, I had to come to see her by bus. She tells me that when no one is looking, neither the old women nor the nurses, she pulls up flowers from the garden to leave on my father’s grave, but they always wilt, hidden at the back of the closet, since no one wants to take her to the cemetery.
It dawns on me that everything we’ve discussed has to do with death. Dead children laid out for viewings on postwar afternoons, drownings in the river, Dad, people fleeing amid screams from the shadow cast by a plaster angel. When I take my leave, I make the sign of the cross on her forehead just as she used to when saying goodnight. She smiles.
All of a sudden she is a child loved by someone. I think that when she dies and her brains mingle with the earth, all that most belongs to her, that is most hers — in other words, the damp crevices of her brain, say, or the wells of anguish, the entire labyrinth of blood vessels through which her fears stumble without reason — will live on in me. I know such things will stay here. Easy now, Mom, I tell her, soon you’ll be dead but you’ll be able to breathe. And we’ll carry on sharing whatever is left, the nothingness of us both — the air I drink in up on the surface, its tedium and sorrow, will be for the two of us, as will the darkness in which you lie.
14 (password)
Deep down, though I had no wish to stop and think about it, I knew from the beginning that all that searching inside Jacobo’s apartment, rummaging through his things and his papers, listening to his records, and looking over and over again at the half dozen photos found at the back of a drawer, had less to do with efficiency than it did with poetry, and that these days the keys to untangling a person’s comings and goings, as not only investigators but also any child with his wits halfway about him will tell you, are in fact to be found on his computer. It is there, together with his cell phone records, that all traces remain.
When the police handed back those devices, the corresponding card was missing from Jacobo’s cell phone, now little more than an empty shell without any data to comb through other than the date and the time. His computer, however, appeared to have come to no harm and was largely untouched. I imagine they’d have kept ahold of a copy of the hard drive in order to search for any strange goings-on using his browser history, but the fact remains that they returned it in one piece, leaving me free to spend a good few hours snooping around in the folders and checking out the websites he had clicked on recently — plenty of Wikipedia, plenty of articles on art, literary blogs, and that sort of thing, but nothing that caught my eye in particular in terms of finding out if he had gotten himself mixed up in any funny business. He had not, in recent months at least, visited any hookup or marketplace sites. Nor did he frequent gambling sites. He didn’t even have online banking. Compared to my computer, not that I get much use out of it, you could say that his laptop was all but empty. Absolutely nothing of what he had saved on that appliance held any interest whatsoever, save, perhaps, for a few photos he had of a woman I had never seen before who had gleaming, golden thighs, the color of roast chicken. The photos were stored in a folder he’d named “N.” In one of them, she was striking a pose, squatting on her haunches as she buckled her sandals and smiled for the camera. In another she had her back fully turned as she whipped up something in the kitchen, while in the rest, all taken on the same day, judging from her clothes and hairstyle, she was facing the camera in various spots of what looked to be a neighborhood park like any other. In each one she appeared alone. Entirely domestic images, not cropped or retouched, and somewhat poorly framed. It did not look remotely as if they had been downloaded from anywhere or belonged to an actress or anything of the sort. One look at those photos was enough to know that something powerful had existed between that woman and my friend. It was one of those things you pick up on at a glance, in barely an instant, without anyone being able to put their finger on quite why. Something so powerful, moreover, that it could perfectly well be confused with a distant recollection of love, or worse besides, and which might explain why Jacobo had had no wish to talk about her to me, as he had spoken of so many others he had thought of as passing fancies, in order to shield her name from the onslaught of my fantasies.
I looked long and hard at that woman. She struck me as foreign in many ways. Foreign to the country, sure, but also to time, to morals, to the world of things and gray streets I had lately been calling home, to the point where it seemed almost inconceivable that the two of us were breathing the same air. I zoomed in as close as possible on the image. Looking at her eyes, I thought that I would like one day to see a sorrow for me reflected in them. I pictured her seated on my deathbed, taking care of me, raising a glass of water to my lips. For an instant, albeit a split, almost imperceptible second, I was glad that Jacobo was dead.
I had to do whatever it took to get my hands on the password to Jacobo’s email account. If there was anything that might shed a little light on things, it would no doubt be found there. For starters, I tried out one he had typed in my presence some time previously and that I had unwittingly committed to memory, but that one no longer worked. I knew, for he had told me himself, that because of his forgetfulness, he liked to have a short password he could use for everything. Among the dozens of items lying on his desk, all stained with ash, I spotted a yellow Post-it note, its adhesive strip now faded, on which he had written the word barcarole in his small handwriting. As soon as I set eyes on that random word written down there, without looking as if it belonged to a medicine or anything like that, and uncapitalized, I knew I had just found what I was looking for.
In the folders containing sent and received messages, it turned out that N stood for Nadia. They had not exchanged many letters. Right from the start, they must have switched to the telephone as their standard means of communication, perhaps so as not to leave behind any traces of the sort I was sniffing after. In any event, it was clear that, quite unlike Jacobo, Nadia was a woman of few words and did not feel entirely at home setting her thoughts down in writing. The first message, from him to her, dated back some eight months previously:
Nadia, you’ll have noticed the clumsy, last-minute way in which I asked you for your telephone number and this email address to which I’m writing, and the foolishness of my excuse will not have escaped your attention: we both know that there are a thousand different ways to get your hands on the books I agreed to lend you. They’re everywhere. Everyone has a copy. Perhaps they’ve even formed part of your collection for years now, and at this very moment you can see their spines from your chair as you read my email, and it may also be, in fact it would not surprise me in the slightest, that it is I who does not have them, or indeed ever did. I couldn’t take my eyes off you at dinner, but you know that already. At this point I can only hope that our fellow diners, your friends in particular, didn’t pick up on the fact that I didn’t give a damn about the others or their conversations. No doubt you noticed that I’ve been around the block a few times. I’m a guy with a past, as the saying goes, not that that makes it any easier to write a letter of this sort. For this is a letter, is it not? Much as it might reach you across mysterious airwaves and through all that jumble of cables and sockets. I always tremble when faced with love. Do not be afraid of the word I use. It’s for want of a better one with which to understand each other, though it might not be altogether inappropriate when I think of how you’ve occupied my thoughts since the night of the dinner, of how I made my way home whistling in happiness and terror at one and the same time. But fear not, though I might now offer you my entire life, without a thought for how appealing or not such a gift might be, there’s no denying that it doesn’t amount to much in terms of quantity. At a certain age, to offer one’s life barely amounts to a thing. Let me rephrase, if I may: I always tremble when faced with a story that is beginning, as much when I was a schoolboy knee-high to a grasshopper as tonight while writing to you, now old, with hairy knuckles and glasses without which I’d barely be able to see beyond the tip of my nose, operated on a thousand times, half-rotten on the inside. I tremble above all when, as now, the matter is at that stage in which, on paper at least, it could still be all or nothing, when I might end up handing you what remains of my desire and my time from here on in until the curtail falls, or I might never see you again. Without, naturally, turning my nose up at any of the marvelous alternatives that lie somewhere in between, which involve you dropping by my apartment once in a while to listen to music, just like that, lying down on this very couch on which your presence is now missed, letting me undress you. But the fact is that there is a coin in midair, it’s been falling in slow motion for days now, and that’s what makes me tremble and implore who knows what gods not to let it fall on the side that condemns me to simply dreaming of you.