Which begs the question: Why did a handful of photos and a voice on the other end of the line bring back a world now long gone? Perhaps it helps that I got my hands on the photos under cover of night, vaulting over the barriers, looking where I ought not to look, in the spirit of a spy betraying his fatherland unbeknownst even to his own family, or a mother trying not to make a sound as she masturbates in front of the computer screen while the children are sleeping. And perhaps the fact that Nadia called me in secret also has a part to play, that all but inaudible whisper that gave away her fear of being caught holding the phone, and the knowledge that I was speaking to an adulteress, and the word adulteress. Which begs the question: What role did her appearance on the scene also have to play in relation to a brutal crime, to an axe concealed behind a door, and a blood stain on the wall you cannot get out no matter how hard you scrub? And it begs the question, above all, of why the battle-scarred never learn, why they keep coming back for more after all that fighting.
If the business of living is above all a matter of betraying, one by one, the dreams that fuelled our childhood and younger years, then each person is the exact sum total of a good number of betrayals. Hundreds in some cases. The purest of dreams are betrayed, as are nightmares. By mistake, we flee from storms without ever realizing that they were such a part of who we are and were so ingrained in our very cores that without them we barely amount to a thing. Save me, we say, I no longer wish to plunge a knife into your legs, we say, I will not hurt you, I will not want to see your grimace of pain in the mirror, I will love you in another way, I will worship you from a being that does not exist, I will call my past a torment, an agony until I met you. I will tell you that you are as gentle as the sky I dream and that I do not mind closing my eyes to everything forevermore if I know that you will later kiss my eyelids. I will not be me. I will bury the monster beneath spadefuls and yet more spadefuls of earth. I will get as close to nothingness as it is possible to get, to a coffin without a dead man, to an empty cathedral. I will buy you flowers.
It cannot be all that hard, for nothing is what we are in essence, when the time comes to tear off the disguise — the list jotted down in a notebook of things left undone, the slew of countless arrows that never left the bow, together with those that were lost, somewhere further than the eye can see. A large bunch of beautiful betrayals, as big as suns. And that bunch and nothing more is all we ought to offer each other when making promises of love, if indeed love is the word. Everything else is untrue. That meager bouquet, and nothing more — look, Nadia, this faded poppy losing its color as fast as fear can strike is in fact, you might say, a life I never lived on the far side of the Atlantic, whether in the mining regions of Chile or the outskirts of Zipaquirá, in that bar with the corrugated roof that stood beside the highway; this intact daisy is a woman, one among many, barefoot beneath the pouring rain, from whom I once turned away and to whom I said nothing, though I could have when her eyes may well have been pointing me in the direction of a doorway in the Latin Quarter, a chambre de bonne, a pair of panty hose to be ripped apart once and for all before tossing them into the trash, a huge dry white towel with room enough for the both of us; this iris trembling in my fingers stands for a couple of languages I never learned, though I thought I might, and the infinite silence made up of all of the words I left unsaid in those languages; and this rose with entranced petals is the sum of the alleyways whose shadows cried out to me and down which, when push came to shove, I did not dare to venture. Look, in short, at these half-broken flowers, we should tell one another, instead of all that cringe-worthy baloney we spout in such circumstances, look at these flowers that come apart at the touch of a finger like a butterfly’s wings, together they go to make up who I am. The two of us are made of the things we never did, we are the rage and the foam of the countless renunciations that interlock with one another like links on a chain, the foul temper that remained after watching as things and trains passed us by, and the calm that came in its wake, the hours, the drowsiness, the grit beneath the eyelids upon waking. We are that dirty nothingness. And if we have learned anything from all that resentment, all that coming and going, all that sorrow of mistimed steps and almost always empty hands, we should, at most, offer each other something that amounts to little more than this: let us renounce together, let us share a dream of something we will never do, whatever it is, a house with a garden, a round-the-world trip, let us join together both nothingnesses, let us intertwine these two lives that were left behind unlived, the barely glimpsed stories of two creatures who held back when the time came to run and who beat a hasty retreat when they should have stayed put, let us daydream of landscape that will never envelop us, the ships, the cities, the forests seen from trains, the image of our feet dangling from atop a skyscraper overlooking Central Park or an Irish cliff top beneath which furious green waves roar. But no more promises spoken in earnest, the heart exposed, for promises in earnest are a lie, no more desire of the sort that turns to poison when it comes into contact with the skin. Never again, my love, never again this exhausting pursuit of delirium, of two becoming one, and that one standing happily in the center of the wind.
17 (intimacy)
Nadia arrived at our meeting ten minutes late. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed she’d turn up much later. I positioned myself in the bar next to one of the windows, so as to be able to see her as she appeared around the street corner. As I watched her approach, I wondered what it might be like to miss her. In other words, what it might be like to have loved her dearly, for a long time, only for her then to have left.
In the flesh, she looked slightly plumper than in her photos. Pretty, either way, with extremely close-cropped blonde hair, à la Jean Seberg, and very dark skin. It wasn’t until after talking to her for a few minutes, with her observing you from very close quarters, that you could truly appreciate her allure. She had that trait, such a hard one to come by, that can make a man lose his head and drive him to perdition in record time. By which I mean a sort of contrast, a contradiction even, between the eyes and the mouth. While the gaze is a gentle combination of innocence and melancholy, the lips, just a few inches further down, slightly parted, summon forth the wildest of desires. Not everyone can see it. I have rarely come across such a clear-cut case. Marilyn Monroe, perhaps, in certain photos. Not in every one, that’s for sure. But there are some in which, if you cover the entire image with your hands aside from the eyes, you are left with the gaze of someone pleading for protection and tenderness, perhaps even consolation. And if you then do the same, but this time leaving only the mouth in view, what you get is a fragment of a photograph with which any teenager could happily lock himself away in the bathroom to go about his business. When she spoke, depending on which phoneme she was uttering, you could see the tip of Nadia’s tongue. Without realizing it, she promised everything when she spoke.
I filled her in on how the past few days had been for me — the extent of Jacobo’s terror the last night I went to keep him company, his fear, for the first time, not of the waves of anguish to which he had more or less become accustomed, insofar as anyone can get used to such a thing, but rather of human beings to be fended off with knives and blunt objects. I explained how unhinged the whole business had left me, how, out of instinct, I had begun by searching his apartment and had ended up combing my own place, which I had been unable ever since to see as anything other than a dead man’s home. I told her how, in the wake of the murder, I had become a stranger among my own things, that sense of having outlived myself, transformed into a shadow, and how I had assumed the role of a nosy relative who prizes open drawers and breaks padlocks, who fingers sacred objects and ends up reading letters that were not meant for his eyes, looking at photos of himself as if they were showing him the face of a stranger, keenly studying the passages underlined in books, sorting through bills, train tickets, coasters, receipts of every kind, and programs for theaters that have long since ceased to exist.