Bad Light by Carlos Castán Read Free Book Online Page B

the three of us, before fleeing, had spotted her dead body peeking out from among the ruins, her white lips stuck to the earth, her hair matted with lime scale, a hazy cloud of flies and dust. I asked myself what right I had to make them breathe the air of that tormented world of mine, the silence, the books strewn on the floor, the grime in the corners, whether I had anything other than sorrow to offer them. And I wondered if a dead father might not be preferable to a downtrodden father falling to pieces before your eyes while you’re powerless to do anything, unable to understand a thing. We would go out for a stroll every now and then, swaddled in scarves and without quite knowing where we were heading. The two of them always trailing behind, following mother duck, bursting with questions but never daring to articulate a single one. Sometimes I would take the little one’s hand and squeeze it tight. Rather than affection or the sense of security he no doubt needed, I feel that this gesture served only to convey the unwanted lesson that there is no such thing, when all is said and done, as love without weeping, time without emptiness, or flesh without tearing, and that the defeated man he now saw before him is how things always turn out when you set your heart with sufficient fervor on something, whatever it may be. In his eyes, the figure of a protective father had no doubt vanished for good, his place taken by another creature, familiar and unknown in equal measure, as lost as he was and cornered by a sorrow that mirrored his own. The scene reminded me of a fairly well-known photograph by Manuel Ferrol that has for some reason been etched in my memory ever since I first saw it and somehow sums up the mood of those first weekends in the company of my children, one called
Émigrés’ Farewell
, taken in La Coruña in ’56. It’s not clear whether father and son are about to go their separate ways any minute or are saying goodbye to a third person just out of shot. A rough hand attempts to embrace the child with tenderness, although it does so with great awkwardness. The two of them are crying and looking straight ahead, perhaps at the gangway of a ship. Though in our case there were no ships, or sea, or anything in sight, everything that surrounded us was shot through with that air of a dockside farewell and the certainty that someone or something was stealing, from under our very noses, a huge shipment of things we would never see again. Perhaps my son, even as I embraced him, saw his father leaving.
    How long does it take for a man to die, lying on the bed without another thought in his head, staring at the ceiling, determined not to budge an inch, not to eat, to let buzzers and phones go unanswered? How long before the tears on his face dry up? At what precise moment do the relevant ducts run dry and cease flowing? There is a type of madness akin to a black nausea that tends to spread upward to the brain. Sometimes this happens at such speed that it takes on the unmistakable air of a fit of insanity. This is what happens to the occasional somewhat half-heartedly suicidal individual, as well as certain murderers of the sort that repent straight away, no sooner has the deed been done, who ask themselves what they’ve done and call the police themselves, covering the corpse laid out on the floor with kisses, drenching it with snot and words. In my case, the froth of that retching takes somewhat longer to rise. It starts in the gut and advances in slow waves like a thick foam before taking up residence among the folds of my brain, flooding that uncharted viscosity with images of skulls, and memories, and loathing, inserting the word
death
into every thought, with a shoe horn if need be, not as a crystal-clear concept but rather as the hazy outline of a rusty scythe or a cross driven into the earth in the midst of the trembling. And it’s hard then to pull yourself together, for the vantage point from which you survey