Bad Light by Carlos Castán Read Free Book Online Page A

was not left all alone with his thoughts in the corner: the un-ironed shirt, the gaze perpetually lost in the distance, and that almost imperceptible dampness pooled in the corners of the eyes. But at least he had a star on which to gaze at night from his bedroom, or so he said, and that same star watched over his footsteps and sometimes even quizzed him on the lesson of the following day. For the one who’s been jilted, instead, the blackness of the sky is filled only with closed eyelids. A vast drawn curtain. When the mannequin is moved from the shop window to the storeroom in the far end of the basement, it matters little what clothes it’s wearing, whether or not it’s broken, whether or not it still trembles.
    From Paris, at a distance of so many miles, I was seeking to get a clear view, from another vantage point, of the recent events in my life and the state of mind in which I found myself, while trying, as far as possible, to put things back in some sort of order. I had just moved into a tenthfloor apartment from which I could see the towers on the Cathedral of Our Lady of Pilar and one or two other high-rises that gave the city skyline a Mudejar air. A welcoming spot, with plenty of wood, just as I’ve always liked, plaster bas-reliefs even in the bathroom, and festooned with Japanese ornaments, prints, and plates with painted birds hanging on the walls. The street was on a slope, and the city buses hurtled by, heading downhill to the center of town or skidding alarmingly to a halt in front of the bus shelter that stood on the opposite sidewalk. Sometimes, at night, the noise got mixed up in my slumbers with the sound of a cliff top suddenly crumbling. The bedding and the table linen were the most characterful items in that apartment, everything as if from a bygone age, as if stolen from an imaginary museum dedicated to my childhood. A female friend who dropped by from time to time back then to spice up my siestas a little bought me a new set of bedsheets—“I sleep in this bed of yours and I feel like my own mother or something. I can’t fuck like this.” Though I began using the sheets she had brought, in deference to her, the others were more to my liking. I explained to her that even in Barcelona, most apartments are like this on the inside, I’d seen them. Later, you’d spot their occupants out and about, sporting their designer gear, wearing those gray shirts or riding their bikes, a Nike backpack or a leather bag slung over their shoulders. Which is all well and good, but their apartments are just like this on the inside. Most are, anyway. Flick any switch, and desolation lights up on the ceiling. On the six-bulb chandeliers, two or three bulbs at most work, and they give off a light so yellowish and washed out it’s almost enough to make you wish you were dead, if only so as not to belong, as though you were just one more item among all the others, to the collection of things surrounding you, all taking up a certain volume of air, just like you—everything: crochet circles, porcelain objects, faded towels folded in two in the top drawer of a closet that doesn’t quite close right.
    The children would sometimes come by on Fridays. They’d arrive bearing a ton of luggage to spend the weekend. The refrigerator empty. Me barely able to get a word out. They took in their surroundings and exchanged glances before finally turning to face me. I guess the question that hung in the air was something like
now what do we do
? Not in terms of that particular moment, but rather from now on,
what are we going to do, how are we going to manage now that everything we once were has come apart at the seams
? With all the suitcases lying around, the travel bags stuffed with changes of clothes, pajamas, and small toys, the backpacks with homework for school, the overcoats lying in a heap, we looked like the surviving members of a family in a refugee camp. It was as if their mother had been killed in an air raid and