The telephone rings sometimes, not too often. Some calls I leave unanswered, I’m simply incapable of responding. Talking strikes me as a task as impossible as it is meaningless. Sometimes I do pick up the handset, silently praying it’s nothing, a wrong number, and that no one is really looking for me or wants anything of me. I’m afraid of what the voice, whoever it may be, might summon up from the other end of the line, of the people it might name and of the memories all those words might unearth. I’m afraid of being made to cry. There are no friendly voices now. They do not exist, nor can I conceive of them. There is no such thing right now. In one way or another, they all link directly to the world, to the anxious, insufferable drone the world has become on the other side of the window. I peer out every now and again. There is usually nothing more than a frozen void through which a car passes once in a while. The shades of gray change depending on the time of day. The worst of them coincides with the hour when all activity appears to have died down and yet it’s not altogether late. The stores are still open, lights can be seen in some windows, and silhouettes cast by people starting to lay the table, the clatter of dishes and cutlery; on the sidewalk across the street, a young boy is making his way home from some after-school class, a book bag on his back. Out there, where all that can now be seen is this gloomy, wind-battered watercolor, is where my life was until recently, a life from which I have stumbled like an elderly man on an ice-covered path. I’ve landed on the skull and crossbones, I don’t remember how many turns I have to skip before I can rejoin the game.
I get snagged on words. There are those that take root somewhere in the brain and, despite my best efforts, refuse to budge. I think of the word home while the radio relays news of the Siberian cold front that swept through the country overnight, while I tossed and turned in bed, in search of a position in which sleep would come — mountain passes closed, school classes canceled in some northern cities due to snow, warnings not to use the car save in cases of dire need. I ponder that expression, dire need, and I’m on the verge of tears again. Home is a child in pajamas racing down a hallway, his bedtime long since passed, and also the voice from the kitchen telling him not to go around barefoot or he’ll catch a cold, to drink up his milk, and to get into bed already. A bed with four little corners, a picture book on the bedside table. Dire need. Fear all of a sudden of the tenderness such an image conjures up. Panic, in truth, for I know that even in all its foolish simplicity, when tenderness strikes, it takes no prisoners; I don’t know what the hell kind of strings get tugged at with the mere sight of an abandoned toy in the corner, a colored pencil that turns up out of the blue where you least expect it, a sticker album card with some soccer player on it that emerges, covered in fluff, when sweeping under the bed. I don’t know what incendiary buttons all this pushes. Dire need — a soft cheek when the time comes to say goodnight, the raspberry toothpaste scent that enveloped that kiss now gone, never to return. On my afternoon stroll, at the new releases table, I paused to leaf through an album showcasing much of the work of the photographer Lewis Hine. Lying in wait on one of its pages, opened at random, was an image I was unable at that moment to endure (this often happens to me, I look at many things I should not): a young boy, a roving newspaper vendor in the years of America’s Great Depression, has fallen asleep, utterly spent, on the stoop of a building. He’s sitting on one of the steps, his head resting on a pile of unsold newspapers he’s placed a few stairs up as a pillow. There is nothing more dramatic in the photo than a young boy overcome by tiredness and hiding from his employer’s eyes in an attempt to replenish some of the strength he’s used up hawking papers in those neighborhoods of cracked sidewalks, at bus stops, and out in front of office blocks. The photo reveals no injuries or any trace of tears or torture. None of that was necessary for me to know for certain, at that moment, as I contemplated that snapshot, that if, by some twist of fate, that boy had been one of my own children, I would be unable to spend a single moment of my remaining days doing anything other than hurling rocks through windows, setting off bombs left, right, and center, assassinating chancellors, burning down palaces, until I was gunned down by a well-aimed shot from a crack sniper crouching behind the open door of a patrol car. The upshot of this bewildering mess of memories and ideas that act as if they had a life of their own and come to land on my brain like crows is that the things for which I’d lay down my life are things I no longer have. I’ve either lost them or I’ve lost myself, but either way, I reach out and touch nothing but thin air.
The radio says that the blizzard now battering my windowpanes swept through Moscow some twenty hours ago. It arrived at my door after turning the domes of the Kremlin white and sweeping through nighttime Europe, steam rising from millions of boilers working at full blast while men and women sleep. It’s mighty cold in this part of the planet. Save under this heap of blankets, where I lie motionless in a fetal position, all is night and frost, icicles hanging from eaves, water turning to ice in the pipes, whole litters frozen solid in their dens. Out there, everything hisses, everything roars.
It is all but impossible to keep the anguish at bay when it comes with a convoy of memories en masse, jumbled together, like a slew of arrows unleashed at once without taking proper aim, to see which one might pierce some flesh off in the distance, which one might tear through a nerve, which one might burst open an eye. In my dreams I am hunted by hounds and torches, my first name, my last name, called out endlessly, while I crouch shivering in the bushes, trying to keep my breathing in check, to keep stock still, to keep from coughing. I often wake up in the middle of the night, not always able to recall what I was dreaming when I sit bolt upright. I then have to get out of bed, switch on a lamp or two, rinse my face. My heart still racing. It only knows how to work toward one goal, the poor thing, and in its determination to pull in the direction of my survival, regardless of whether that’s reasonable or otherwise, it allies itself with the storms. It pumps blood nonstop, unable to do anything else, sending it to the farthest vessels, to the tips of my fingers and toes, to my trembling brain, and this is tantamount to fueling the endless flow of images through my mind, words and ghosts, memories roaming in packs, the faces of those I miss the most, some of whom have already left this world for good and others I wish had done so a long time ago, eyes that once looked on me with love. There are momentary truces every now and then, but there is nothing so fragile and slippery as that deceptive calm. Occasional buffers against the disquiet sometimes occur to me, hideouts that, no sooner have I tried them out, prove utterly ineffectual. In search of refuge, my natural proclivities lead me back to the books that in times gone by, in previous slumps, in now half-forgotten debacles, succeeded in restoring me to the land of the living. But my concentration span is now all but nonexistent. I have no use, therefore, for full-length stories in which to immerse myself, since they all spit me out whether I like it or not, but rather, if anything, an atmosphere, a mood, some piece of prose that’s halfway fit to live in, any context-free passage that might fleetingly conjure the illusion that I’m shaking off the sorrow into which my feet sink as I try to walk and managing, at least in part, to wrench free of myself. I seek in words an old familiarity, a homely air, so to speak, a warmth that, though it ultimately always proves ephemeral and elusive, achieves the momentary illusion of a temporary ceasefire in the midst of the never-ending battle my nerves are waging against themselves. Holding the remote, I look for channels showing classic movies or, at least, movies released in Spain no later than the seventies, just to hear the voiceover artists of the time. The sound is one I find particularly heartwarming. No matter what words come out of those lips that never appeared on screen and must now be dead, they take me back to my grandmother’s living room, to the stale chocolate and the can of condensed milk, to the cookies snatched without permission from an aluminum tin in the pantry, the drowsiness after Sunday dinner with the specter of Monday already lurking on the other side of a few hours of restless sleep, a green, imitation-leather couch coming apart at the seams, and the shootouts in black-and-white taking me gloriously out of the world, the sweet talk, the skyscrapers, the blondes, the car chases.