Bad Light

Bad Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Bad Light Read Online Free PDF
Author: Carlos Castán
direction, the homesick nights on Boy Scout camping trips (my city without me, far off, lit up in the middle of a plain, beyond those barren slopes, the interminable ranks of thickets and black hills under the moonlight), the sailor knots, the days that take their time, the bitter almonds. And also all that came in its wake: the insults, the vertigo and the nausea, the night as the realm of barking and eyes opened wide in the dark, behind every rock, hanging from the branches, watching from everywhere; the old, inevitable longing for every escape down endless highways or without moving from the spot, taking flight in the mind, throttling foes, smashing chains and locks in a rage, escaping from the fever, the aching bones, the shame; and the yearning, too, horribly insane, for all manner of poisons, hideouts, and underworlds, Bataille there, his verses borrowed one more time, one last time,
tu es l’horreur de la nuit, je t’aime comme on râle
, I love you as one might breathe one’s last. You are the immensity of the fear. To see reflected in the monster’s fangs the mouth you loved in times gone by, and in its claws the fingers of water that once sliced open your heart like a sweet blade. And
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi
. And the vague sensation, in the watered-down images of delirium, that that which is dreadful is losing its bite while beauty sprouts claws and it is all much of a muchness and nothing truly matters any more.
    That idea of slipping between the sheets, fresh from showering with the most expensive body wash, one last time, is not without its charm. One can snuggle up to it, that idea, hugging it as a child might embrace his rag doll in bed or an insomniac might clamp a sleeping pill beneath his tongue, with that same desperation and tenderness, and sensing the gentleness with which, from within, slowly, death washes over you. To erase, much like Borges’s suicide, every thing and the sum of all things: “Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left.” To slowly forget it all, the blows, the slights, the most recent and the oldest scars, pink, hypertrophied. To sense the scent of Ruben Dario’s funeral wreaths drawing ever closer, the cold wax, the black velvet, and also Juan Ramón Jimenez’s birds, those that are going to stay, singing, beyond the window. And in the last instant to forgive God, to love the ruins for want of anything else, the waste left behind, the shards, the future like a treasure map burning in the bath, and to contemplate, with the indulgence that only weariness can give, with a gaze as tender as possible, the consummation of so much disaster.
    Yet it is not unheard of in such circumstances to weigh up the possibility of replacing that sterile agony with something that packs a greater punch. Something weighty, something grand, sublime if possible. It’s only human and is a common occurrence; it’s not unusual for the trick question to emerge unbidden: If the hardest part has already been established—the refusal to carry on with life as we knew it—if we have already said farewell to it all and that goodbye was heartfelt, then why not make the most of that extremely rare, formidable freedom, that impossible detachment that lies out of reach by any other means, to do that which, out of fear, was left undone? The worst failure, death itself, is already a given. In fact, it was half an hour away just moments ago, with all the bottles of pills laid out on the bedside table, as if on display. In such thoughts lie the true and invincible strength of the kamikaze, the courage of the hero who lays down his life, and the fearless energy of he who understands that the new dawn now means nothing to him, that its dirty light is no longer any concern of his, that time now is a vast foreign land, and who takes up residence in borrowed time that leaves him well placed, should he so wish, to bellow with laughter at it all, even that which he most feared,
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