Bad Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

toying with the idea of going back to look for myself in that lost city in the region of Cundinamarca. No one will ever fully convince me that the drunkard in Zipaquirá, who was struck, just as I was, half-dead with astonishment on seeing me drive past, was not me.
    But for the most part, such thoughts amount to little more than an excuse, almost always compelling, to tumble from your bed and crawl over to the phone, praying that it’s not too late to have your stomach pumped. The ambulances, the lights, the world hurtling back into view, tearing the black cobwebs to shreds. A niggling doubt will suffice, though we know full well that such globe-trotting plans to embark on part two of our lives, now free from meaning and our former concerns, are little more than a long line of unspent bullets, booby traps, phantasmagorias, pipe dreams that are the product of a mind that refuses to resign itself to mingling with the earth just yet. Out of self-interest and an instinct for survival, the unconscious tends to keep its lips sealed as tight as a whore’s even when it’s as clear as day how such adventures will end, the vengeance-seeking self-sacrifice that strikes us as laughable, if not worse, the following morning, the list in a notebook that will never even be bought, the flights never taken, the planes that take to the air without us on board, just as thousands do every day at every latitude and in every possible direction, a white trail in their wake, slicing across the sky at all hours of the day and bearing our empty seat, touching down beneath rain showers that will never drench us on the outskirts of cities filled with alleyways down which we will never lose our way and women with whom we will never exchange so much as a glance, let alone fluids or promises.
    Greatness, true luxury, lies in that somewhat aristocratic disdain, not in the worst sense of the word, of always doing things by halves—the tumbler of brandy left partly undrunk on the terrace of a bar, the coins not fully gathered up from the dish on which the waiter has brought the change from your order, the last bits of sauce not mopped up, whole evenings of drowsiness and complacency, wasted without guilt for there is more than enough life to go around, because there’s plenty of time yet. This is the attitude that stands in contrast to that of the miserable wretch driven by the most visceral and tight-fisted need to see poetry in the idea of draining every last drop of what life has to offer. And so he throws nothing away, and saves for a rainy day, stingily hoarding the leftovers to be polished off later, much as a dog that has had its fill might bury bones next to a tree so as not to let a single ounce of food go to waste, and he dunks every last
churro
in his order of hot chocolate, no matter that he’s full to bursting, whether or not he has any room left in his belly. It’s a thousand times better to always leave a little something on the plate, to thumb your nose elegantly at part of the banquet, to dine, say, with a ravishing lady and gracefully allow her to escape with her life. And, in that same haughty vein, to abandon life at the midway point, to up and leave, just like that, as one might leave untouched what remains of an ice-cream cone now melted or a saucer bearing loose change.
    Yet the mind is wont to erase such ideas at a stroke, much as it silences other questions that do perhaps matter when talk turns to escape: If you shatter all the crockery against the wall, how will you then blow off steam in future? If you sever all ties, what bonds will you then shrug off? If you abandon all point of reference, from where or from what can you now retreat? And the clincher, the central refrain of a woebegone song of destitution and abandonment that refuses to fade out altogether in your head: To what end your footsteps through the world, the new cities, the seas you cross, the paths you take, the horizons, the storms through which you pass and