I see myself lying on the bed in the morning, forcing myself to smoke a cigarette without succumbing to a coughing fit that will, in turn, make my stomach churn even more. A girl is sleeping with her head on my chest, her hair is dirty, it smells of smoke, that hair, and of cold ash. There is a nausea inside my chest that gives occasional signs of life. My nerves dance around that nausea like stripped wires, like anemone writhing around on raw flesh. The minute hand barely advances, as if hauling a great weight behind it, the world is a slow-motion blur, out of focus, upside down at times; though I cannot see it from my bed, I picture a blue earth and trees hanging from a sky filled all of a sudden with puddles. I try to think back to what happened the night before but soon realize that I can’t bear to find out. When memory returns, it does so like a monster emerging from the mist and skewering my shame with the tip of its spear. The mind starts rowing full tilt in the opposite direction, toward the void, trying to blend in with the nothingness, to empty itself of thoughts as far as possible, conjuring up snowy expanses free, if possible, of horizons or footprints, and boreal skies, and calm oceans. To not think, to remember nothing, to make sure the floodgates hold firm, to do whatever it takes rather than come to terms with the unbearable, the images from the night before that begin to stir and take shape, making their presence felt against my wishes. Like a dog defending a farmyard to the death, my nausea growls at the memories that little by little dare to show their faces. It imagines machine guns opening fire at random in every direction. It unleashes a round in my face at point-blank range, it dreams of wiping me off the face of the earth and from history, it fantasizes about snatching me from the minds of others. The water’s surface in the green plastic jug that lives on my bedside table is covered with dust and the odd hair of a cat or God knows who. I drink from that water. All of a sudden I find it fresh and appetizing, and for a moment it tastes of the life I lost, as leafy as the paths I walked straight past or left behind me, one that followed the course of the river, for example, leading to an abandoned windmill at the bottom of the Añisclo canyon, near a small meadow in which I would sit to wolf down spoonfuls of all the honey I spurned and even the very flowers I laughed at, now that the refrigerator is empty but for the smell of wine now drunk and these dry parsley leaves stuck to the plastic walls.
Sometimes, as the month neared its end, we’d steal food from the cat, spreading its Whiskas on slices of bread. But whenever we had a little money to spend, the neighborhood of Malasaña was ours for the taking. We’d always start out in Corripio, right across from the drugstore on the Calle Fuencarral, with Asturian chorizo pie and draft cider to help a few shots of neat absinthe slip down all the easier, before moving on to bottled beer in El Maragato, where we delighted in the foul tempers of the old couple who ran the place and who we knew would end up serving us Roquefort sandwiches on the house. Later, despite my protests (all my attempts to convince her to leave it be were to no avail), she’d insist on heading off in search of Leopoldo María Panero, with whom she had struck up something of a friendship one strange night on which it was I who ended up sleeping with him and one Alicia, the one who collected the corpse, according to the dedication in Narciso, and who stayed up till dawn, licking the poet’s toes the whole night through. If Leopoldo had been let out of the madhouse, he’d turn up sooner or later on one street or another. With his cohort of groupies and aspiring court jesters in tow, hoping some of his doomed-poet aura might rub off on them. He was always wandering around as if hoping to get his ass kicked, and on more than one occasion he got his wish in the end. I remember the floor in El Valle, covered in sawdust, mussel shells, and olive pits, and Leopoldo writhing around on that floor in his raincoat, unleashing an awful cackle straight out of a horror movie. He liked to urinate in the middle of the street, in every direction, spinning around, standing square in the center of the night beneath a witch’s moon, its dark side and visible side drenched in a beery sweat. His madness was legendary and beautiful. I remember his black corduroy pants, too, his long raincoat, his feet on the table, any table, occasionally knocking the glasses of rum and Coke to the floor while reciting unintelligible verses that spoke of ruins, of fly-eaten brains, and of the disaster that is living. He’d get in people’s faces on the slightest pretext, brandishing his fists at the drop of a hat and aping the poses boxers like to strike in the photos taken for the posters, accusing any waiter who dared take him to task for his behavior or throw him straight out of the bar of being a fascist, unaware as they were that he was the star of the disenchantment, the prince of the madcap night, the light shimmering at the bottom of all our wells.
I look back on that time as a tug-of-war between despair and ecstasy. It was at one and the same time yearning and regret, a banquet of intensity with its towers and its ruins, vomit and joy. Writing on napkins in bars, returning home with bloodied eyebrows, with my shirt in tatters, without knowing how or at what point it had happened. It was the almost daily police raids in and around the square, the vans filled with laughing, toothless whores, the early mornings at the precinct on the Calle Madera, and also the rush of knowing oneself to be alive while never ceasing to row in the opposite direction. I believe I once got laid in the very doorway on the Calle Espíritu Santo in which Enrique Urquijo’s dead body was found, I’d venture that I wrote the most beautiful and horrifying verses the world has ever known on scraps of paper I later lost, and I’d even swear that I was myself somehow beautiful, seated in the doorways of bars, missing the last subway home after lingering to listen to some street musicians before returning home on foot, my pockets empty, dizzy beneath the sky of two or three different neighborhoods, only to find a cat starving to death and a lukewarm bed that had a direct line to gaps in the memory down which I could fall.
And I cannot separate my idea of love from all that, from that lost state, and I identify it with the last-ditch, futile attempt of a fear to ally itself with another fear, as if the two could be one, and with permeable souls in place of that fortified citadel that cannot be breached no matter what side you’re on. Which is why love always has that air of chasing the impossible and is, by nature, tragic, or barely even exists. I can only conceive of it as a sort of shared bewilderment, two souls looking in the same direction, barely able to see a thing, without knowing where to turn, and transforming the world, behind the cobwebs that filter the gaze, into a labyrinth. It calls for two lost beings, two deviants who brush up against each other in the dark, then drift apart, before running into one another again. The interlocking hands must tremble in some way. Which explains Marta. Which explains the faltering steps that came later, the cocaine without restraint, the black seas, the ship in flames, and the wails in the night, the caresses that amounted to little more than our trembling hands, the bad trips, the messages of hate written in lipstick on the mirror, the broken glasses, the torn panties, the tracks left by fingernails on our backs, before, in the end, falling asleep in each other’s embrace like newborn puppies from the same litter, exhausted and skinny, scared stiff.