If you had had your way, I was going to have coal-black, lustrous hair and would almost always be sporting a crisply ironed white shirt, that much I do remember, though I’d also have another one of the type worn by explorers, perhaps bearing the odd badge of honor of the sort kings bestow on men of action. And a pair of thigh-high boots. And sunglasses. I was going to have a big, bright-red convertible and would forever be heading home, very tanned, from journeys to islands and jungles no one had ever heard of. There are a ton of postcards that in the end you and I never sent anyone from anywhere. I sometimes think of those postcards, of their astonishing skies. As things turned out, no one back in Spain ever fought to collect the exotic stamps they would bear with hard-to-remember names of countries, with Ws and Hs in them, and each one a different color and size. I guess nothing ever came of all that envy we hoped to arouse in the world, taking photos of ourselves grinning and sporting all manner of hats by West Indian ports and atop the peaks of Asia, of all the native languages we were going to learn to speak, the arts of fishing and war, of the mysterious ebony masks that were going to adorn the walls of our apartment, filled also with treasure chests found in temples buried beneath blankets of ivy, and amulets to ward off bad luck, and jewels, and daggers we would sometimes show to visitors, taking great care so as not to break them. I’m afraid that the white shirt was about as far as we got.
I can’t even ask you not to forget me, for, thankfully, a child cannot remember what will become of him. Which is why they — children — laugh and play, why they do not leap from the cliff tops. But I do ask that you take me at my word on a few things: it was not my wish to distance myself from you, I remember you on many days, almost every one; I would have liked for us to spend more time together.
12 (lion’s cage)
The first weekend after Jacobo’s death, it was my turn to be with my children. And it was by no means easy, first and foremost as I did not want them to notice the state I was in, and time and again I found myself with no choice but to head outdoors so as to be able to cry out of eyeshot. I’m taking out the trash, I’d tell them, or I’m off to buy a loaf of bread, I’m going for a stroll around the block to get a little air. Only to break down in sobs at the first corner I could find where I figured no one could see me. I looked for doorways left ajar, entrances to garages in which to weep. If I drifted too far from home, I’d have to race back, as, for no reason whatsoever, I’d get it into my head that something dreadful might have occurred in my absence, no matter how brief it had been — a cracked skull, a gas leak, another map of blood on the wall or the tiled floor. I’d picture one of my sons, his head resting on the chest of my other son’s dead body, weeping and calling out my name. Weeping of the sort I’d only ever seen in the movies, his mouth open, his entire face drenched with tears. Then they’d swap roles. If at first it was my eldest lying motionless on the floor, the figures then flipped around, just like in those old schoolyard scuffles in which, locked in an embrace, we would literally roll on top of one another across the earth, and this time the corpse was that of my younger son. My hands were shaking so much it was all I could do to fit the key inside the lock, and when at last I managed to get the door open, I would see before me the most domestic and peaceful of scenes. I’d sink into the couch to catch my breath, but my beating heart took hundreds of minutes to settle. Not that the infernal racket of the PlayStation did much to help, with its endless battles between Martians or zombies, its shrill music, and its planets in flames. I had to tell them I was sick to see if they might take a little pity on me and also so that they wouldn’t be altogether taken aback when I set a place only for them at mealtimes, while I sat at the other side of the room, without touching a morsel, or paced from one end of the apartment to the other like a caged beast.
Something had rotted away inside my head, thoughts that broke off from their course and began to fester on the shore. I couldn’t stop myself from penning letters in my head. The words flowed, sometimes out loud. I’d forget the beginning and start afresh. Dear Jacobo, for example, dear Jacobo, now you are dead, it’s all over, the books you left lying half-read on the bedside table and on the bookshelves and here, there, and everywhere, the romantic trysts you had set in motion or harbored in the filthy bedroom of your imagination, and also the unease on those nights when you could not bring yourself to be alone. You will never hold a grandchild in your arms, you will not return to Proust in that future, ideal winter you had in mind, with snow and vintage cognac and a lit fire next to the enormous window you sometimes sketched. Nor will you ever make good on that fantasy of yours of sending out, on some birthday or other, for a handful of whores of the most expensive sort, as you liked to put it, of the type that dress up as Parisian ladies at the drop of a hat and speak several languages and have a certain poise (and, indeed, savoir faire) wherever they might find themselves and who wear on their person the most authentic silk, brought from China or wherever, and who feign desire as only they know how and part their lips in that way they have and then it’s game over, for they have been trained to act as if they would drop dead there and then should anyone prize them away from your flesh. Dear Jacobo, now you are dead, and I am sitting in your apartment, in near darkness, while a few blocks from here, at my place, no one is waiting up for me. Dear Jacobo, now you are dead, I ought to be thinking about who killed you, and yet I think only about who might kill me. And that makes me feel like scum. That and the fact that I was unable to cry when they told me the news, not even the following day at the cemetery. Only now, somewhat too late in the day and perhaps thinking more of what the loss means to me than the end, in and of itself, of your being. It occurs to me to call you up and ask to borrow those axes, and also so that this time it might be you who comes to keep me company at my place at night, for I can feel how the fear is growing within me, and I don’t know which way to turn when the past returns, where to hide, because I turn off the lights and shut the doors but the blood will not rest or sleep or be silent. Then it dawns on me that you truly have gone, and it’s as if it were happening all over again, small aftershocks of your death in my head. I thought of you as the maddest of the mad when I discovered that primitive, makeshift arsenal half-hidden in the entrance to your apartment, I thought that you had already veered over the edge and were a prime candidate for the psychiatric ward, at which I’d have to visit you on Sunday afternoons bearing chocolates and cartons of cigarettes. And yet you have been proven, in the worst possible way, to have had good reason to stay up all night long, on guard and armed. It turns out that the threat was perfectly real and not the fantasy of a sick man with sweaty dreams of bloodstained blades, much as he might just as well have filled his thoughts with other, no less dreadful things, like the horror of the planets floating in the darkness of infinity and filling everything with a vertigo and a solitude too vast even for the universe to hold, or the possibility of dying at short notice without knowing any love other than that which has already come and gone, that recollection as sweet as it is hazy and that barely lives on in the memory as something that was ultimately tossed away with the trash, that was used up unwittingly in a time long since passed that was one of plenty, or at least appeared to be, when we would return from the supermarket laden with diapers and economy-sized packs of condoms and provisions too plentiful to fit inside the fridge and everything was as it should be and life was like the heavenward journey on a freshly painted swing in a garden dotted with olive trees. Before the light began to fade and the blood drained from everyone’s lips.