Those days, my inner devastation was complete, and I was bogged down in a state of uselessness that was dragging on longer than was desirable. My finances had run aground, everyday work had become a hellish affair, and my former excesses and the anxiety of that time, with its poor sleep and even worse diet, with all of its despair and pharmacopoeia, had started — prone to dying as I’ve always been — to take its toll on my body. I spent my time in the hotel reading. I had taken plenty of books but couldn’t settle on a single one, flitting from one to another, on edge, as one might when hunting for an urgent piece of information. I underlined the following passage in my copy of Sándor Márai’s Diaries: “Did I love her? I don’t know. Can one love one’s legs, one’s thoughts? Quite simply, everything is meaningless without legs or thoughts. Without her, everything is meaningless — I do not know if I loved her. It was something else. I don’t love my kidneys or my pancreas, either. They simply form part of me, just as she formed part of me.” I thought about calling Jacobo to ask him a question or two about the urban backdrop to Celan’s last days, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so, for he would no doubt have picked up on the alarm signals in my tone of voice, and I figured him capable of putting together a rescue sortie in a matter of hours to come to my aid if he pictured me wandering aimlessly through those streets, alone, my gaze obliterated, heading from bar to bar, in such dangerous proximity to the bridges.
There are dreams that simply tear you asunder, a thousand times worse than any insomnia, no matter how sweat drenched or heart stopping, no matter how fiercely the temples throb. As a reader or observer of life, I have always been a sucker for the lure I spoke of earlier of situations in which someone has no choice but to start from scratch: tales of prisoners released back into the outside world with little but the shirts on their backs; exiles who return to their former neighborhoods after years of absence in search of any old job with which to get by and a temporary room in which to hang their hat; foreign widowers who appear out of nowhere; people who, overnight, for whatever reason, change their habits and their passport. I had always seen a whirlwind of light there, the irresistible rush of wiping the slate clean, of turning what had until then been a remote possibility into something that lives and breathes, of calmly pulling up a chair to ponder, without haste of any kind, in any old bar in the recently unveiled world, who one will be from that moment on, the battles to be waged once more, and even, by extension, the fears that will from now on quicken the pulse in the midst of a ravaged landscape that is, at one and the same time, the cradle of all that is to come. Now that it was I, however, who found myself in such a fix, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had fallen by the wayside, sick and sapped of strength for any further adventures for the time being. All the same, the old urge to take flight was triggered, the same one that had led me to drive hour after hour down Spain’s highways every summer, aimless and heading nowhere in particular, listening to country records, stopping to rest at gas stations, and jotting down vague musings in a small notepad. Only this time it was triggered in a much more scattershot, painful way, for this now had nothing to do with that old affectation of scribbling on maps or looking for hotels as desolate and cinematographic as possible in which to spend the night, with a broken down ice machine, tattered blinds, and desolation in the form of damp patches on the wallpaper if possible. All that had before amounted to little more than a gentle gloom had now become spiderwebs and trembling. Those thousand-mile getaways bore about as much resemblance to this flight that had now begun as a child pretending to be killed by a shot to the chest does to one dying for real on the sidewalk, the whites of his eyes showing.
Yet there is a dark pleasure to be had in setting fire to ships and watching as any hope of return goes up in flames on the water, a mile from the shore. Once the thought has crossed your mind, it’s hard to resist the temptation to make a clean break, the longing to give in to the black vortex that seeks to swallow you whole from inside an abyss, like a giant claw grabbing you by the ankles and dragging you in; it’s tough to give up on the idea of cutting the ropes and turning off the lights, unplugging everything so that all that remains is to toss portraits, bouquets, and ashes overboard. You know you shouldn’t yet are powerless to do otherwise. Just like when, as a child, you strike a younger brother just because you feel like it, or dump the girl of your dreams for no reason she or anyone else can grasp, leaving her, just like that, weeping on a park bench.
A few days after having officially left, I had to return to my former apartment to fetch a few of my belongings when I spotted a pair of my shoes — dirty, somewhat the worse for wear, in need of a lick of polish — lying forlornly on the bedroom floor. For some obscure reason, a pair of shoes always makes my thoughts turn to death. At some point in my childhood, perhaps not as hazy in my nightmares as I might like to think in my waking hours, I must have been taken aback on entering the room of a dead relative, one of those distant family members who would pass away in provinces as lost as they themselves were, forcing me to travel all night long and miss a day of school among the cypresses, the black-clad women brewing endless pots of coffee, and all manner of friends and in-laws trying on the deceased man’s overcoats for size, almost out of eyeshot. And I’d swear that after the funeral, I spotted a pair of black shoes on the floor and understood death on sensing, for the very first time, the absence of any legs rising up toward the bedroom ceiling, forming a human being along the way, with his gestures and his white shirt; the void left behind by the dead man was right there, in the air above the shoes. And, stricken with horror, I also sensed the prospect of widowed footsteps roaming the hallways in the nights to come. The shoes lay a few short yards from the bed that, though it might now smell only of fever, and though pictures of the Virgin Mary had been pinned to the headboard, had no doubt in the not too distant past been privy to laughter and desire — the door locked from the inside entirely by design and the children horsing around on the other side of it, hovering dangerously close, the sweet fear of being caught in the act, the mischief of urgent lovemaking. I knew, as soon as I clapped eyes on those discarded shoes of mine, that I was a dead man in that house. In other words, it was as if between those four walls there languished a ghost whose facelessness was precisely my facelessness. The sight of that footwear tipped the balance more than the sight of empty closets with bare coat hangers, barren drawers, or bookshelves covered in nothing but dust. In Auschwitz, so Jacobo had taught me, shoes were piled up at the entrance and can still be seen in the camp quarters that now house a museum. A huge heap of loafers, boots of all types and sizes, children’s sandals. Contemplating that colossal pile, you think of the barbarity, of numbers and facts and the horror of history, of the pajama-clad skeletons filing past in black and white that we’ve seen in so many documentaries, all those trains screeching to a halt at the gates to hell; but if you pause awhile to observe one single item of footwear, one shoe in particular or a pair tethered together by a knot, then you see the dead child. You see a boy struggling to tie the laces in order to keep the boot from falling off with every step he takes or from swallowing up his socks. You picture him seated on the ground, tugging firmly on the tongue of his shoe, you see his snot, you hear his breathing, the sound of his lungs compressing the frozen air of a Polish winter. Just as I saw myself in that apartment. When I closed the door behind me, the shoes stayed where they were, empty forevermore, foolish, bereft, filled with air getting staler with each passing minute. My life, from that moment onward, was something else, something hard to pin down, the exploits of a being who moved outside of myself, and barefoot. At that moment, my mood was abject. The streets, the world, any room in which I might find myself, had become pure exposed terrain.