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to be without being, to open the floodgates and drain himself of caution and shame in a hemorrhage that takes with it plans and resentments, long-held dreams, dread and pride. Many doors open from here on in, a whole world of possibilities that nevertheless have in common the power of that bitter, untamed freedom, the triumphant detachment of a spirit newly freed from instinct who has just lifted the veil that concealed a heady world. There are less pitiful ways to toy with self-destruction that lying on a bed, valium coming out of your ears:
Leaving Las Vegas
-style, for example, spending every last dime on the most expensive drinks, surrounded by whores and neon lights; or jotting down in a notebook, like in
My Life Without Me
, a list of the things that were left undone, little whims and flights of fancy, such as watching the dawn break in such and such a place or contemplating the sunset on the opposite side of the world, breakfasting on champagne and oysters, say, diving in the Caribbean, or running barefoot through the snow under a full moon, whatever. All of which is to suppose that there is any point in doing that which cannot be repeated or remembered, much less told. Pure performance for no one’s eyes, like a poem written on a lost rock in a language mankind has long forgotten.
    And then there is the option of being someone else, or at least pretending to be, of emigrating with the shirt on your back to anywhere on the far side of the ocean, to Mexico City, say, where fear roams the streets in green, panic-stricken taxis, at any time and heading who knows where, and everything is wild and speaks the truth. To touch down there one day, to put myself up again in the
Hotel Milán
, paying for a couple of nights at most to gather strength before setting out to beg on the streets until my heart bursts, collecting cardboard boxes, descending into the depths of hell, filling sheets of paper much like Jean Genet and good old Jean-Paul Clêbert, who, in his tiny, cramped handwriting, on any wrapper at all, even on crumpled cigarettes packs, scribbled down the exploits of the drifter’s life, its wretched poetry, all that naïf drivel about life beneath a star-studded canopy, but also the rush of refusing to contemplate anything other than life as it is lived in the moment, the heart beating now, the dinner and the roll in the hay that very night, the just stolen wine washing down the throat like a blessing, the company at once dangerous and endearing of those who barely question themselves underneath the world’s sewers. Changing continents is about as close as I can imagine coming to her never having been born.
    I could perhaps make my way to Zipaquirá, just as I’ve sometimes thought about doing. In that Colombian city, on my return from Vilha de Leiva, in the taxi taking us back to Bogota one Sunday evening, I saw myself. And with such clarity that I had no time to react or ask our driver to pull over a moment to the curb. In the slums of Zipaquirá, in a sort of makeshift roadside bar made from materials like tarpaulin, plywood, and tin, where liquor and bottles of beer were served on the edge of the highway, I spotted myself, utterly weather beaten, unsteady on my feet, clutching a drink in one hand. It was me. And for a moment I saw myself twice over—from my car seat, I saw that outcast with unkempt hair, drinking what might have been mescal by the side of the road, and, from that very same curb and with equal astonishment, I saw my reflection seated inside a taxi bound for the capital, its trunk laden with the bags of
longaniza
we had just bought in Zutamarchán. I’ve seen myself on other occasions, albeit more hazily and in static images—a snapshot of a group of prisoners in the barracks of Auschwitz taken by the allied soldiers, the camp newly liberated, among the figures in a painting by Ramón Casas—in which, with the passing of time, the likeness has slowly faded. I have never, however, stopped