Copyright © Tomás González, 2015
English translation © Andrea Rosenberg, 2020
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: González, Tomás, 1950- author. | Rosenberg, Andrea, translator.
Title: Difficult light / Tomás González; translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg.
Other titles: Luz difícil. English
Description: First Archipelago Books edition. | Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020014356 | ISBN 9781939810601 (paperback) | ISBN 9781939810618 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ8180.17.O483 L8913 2020 | DDC 863/.64–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014356
Archipelago Books
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www.archipelagobooks.org
Distributed by Penguin Random House
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Cover art: Saul Leiter, Perry Street Cat, c. 1949
© Saul Leiter Foundation, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery
This work was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Funding for the translation of this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation.
Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Ebook ISBN 9781939810618
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.”
William Blake
“The world is unstable, like a house on fire.”
Linji
One
That night I spent a lot of time awake. Beside me, Sara wasn’t sleeping either. I looked at her brown shoulders, her back, still slender at fifty-nine, and found solace in her beauty. From time to time we held hands. In the apartment nobody was sleeping, nobody was talking. Occasionally someone coughed or got up to pee and then went back to bed. Our friends Debrah and James had come to keep us company and had settled down on a mattress in the living room. Venus, Jacobo’s girlfriend, had gone to his room to lie down. My sons Jacobo and Pablo had left two days earlier in a rented van, heading for Chicago. From there, they’d flown to Portland. At one point I thought I heard the faint sound of Arturo, my youngest son, strumming his guitar in his room. In the street I could hear the nighttime shouts of the Lower East Side, the familiar tinkle of breaking bottles. At about three in the morning, two or three Hells Angels thundered by on their motorcycles from their clubhouse two blocks away. I slept almost four hours straight, dreamlessly, until I was awakened at seven by the knot of grief in my belly at the death of my son Jacobo, which we’d scheduled for seven that night, Portland time, ten o’clock in New York.
Two
I kissed Sara, got up, made coffee. Unaware I was even doing it, I started looking at the painting I was working on. It was too early to call the boys, who’d spent the night in a motel near the Portland airport. The subject of the painting was the foam churned up by the propeller of the ferry as it leaves the dock, when the motor begins to roar in the seething green water. The emerald color of the painted water was pale, superficial, I thought, like a piece of spearmint-flavored candy. I hadn’t managed to render it so that, subtly, imperceptibly, you could feel the depth of the abyss, feel death. The foam looked beautiful, incomprehensible, chaotic, separate yet inseparable from the water. The foam was good.
I’d begun the painting a year earlier, in the summer of ’98. I used to spend entire days on the ferry while I was working on it, traveling back and forth between Manhattan and Staten Island again and again, sometimes drinking beer, always gazing at the water. I even made friends with some of the buskers on the ferries, and with Louis Larrota (whom I teasingly called Luis Bancarrota in reference to his empty wallet, though he spoke neither Spanish nor Italian and didn’t get the joke), the only person who still made a living shining shoes on the ferry. Even now I can hear him calling “Shoeshine! Shoeshine!” along the passageways of the ship. The number of his customers was dwindling, as most people had started wearing sneakers. Once the sunset blazing behind the cranes of New Jersey and crisscrossed by seagulls had burned out, I’d make my way back to the apartment.
I married Sara when we were both twenty-six years old. We lived together for another fifty, until she died of heart trouble a little over two years ago. It’s hard to explain, hard to understand, but the women I desired who were not her, both those I never had and the very few I did end up sleeping with – without Sara’s finding out, of course, as that would have been the end – they were all her. Those affairs took place only during our first two years together, when our relationship, still plagued by substantial gaps and misunderstandings, was not yet solid. After that, I was utterly and effortlessly faithful.
She had affairs of her own, I think, but those, if she had them, occurred many years later. One afternoon, after we’d already moved to New York, I saw her in a café holding hands with a woman from work. I asked her about it that night, and she neither denied nor admitted it; she said only that relationships between women would always be a mystery to men. I didn’t find that particularly reassuring, since there’s holding hands and then there’s holding hands, but as the years passed I gradually forgot about it. The second time was when she was in Jamaica with James and Debrah. For some reason, I couldn’t or hadn’t wanted to go on that trip, and James accidentally let slip an anecdote that implied that Sara had had a fling with a young man on the island. I asked her about that one too, but that time she told me I was crazy, how could I think such a thing. But even today something tells me that affair did happen. Sara wasn’t exactly inhibited, especially after a few drinks. True or not, in any case, I was torn up about it for a long time, but I ended up getting over that too.
Jealousy, maybe.
In any case, only our advancing age could diminish the desire we always felt for each other. I’ve never been all that good
at distinguishing between love and desire, so I can say that we had a lot of love all our lives. And I was always happy to see her again, even if we’d been apart only a few hours. When I came home, back from the ferry, she would also be back from the hospital where she worked, and we would chat a while as we lay in bed; I would tell her about what I’d seen in the ocean, and then we’d go check in on Jacobo and the boys.
Three
We arrived in New York in 1986. In 1983 we’d left Bogotá for Miami, where we’d managed to spend three long years, years I don’t regret at all – they weren’t bad ones. I’d first been to Miami and the Keys on a previous trip and wanted to paint them. You could say I went to Miami looking for water and light. We both enjoyed the sea enormously for those three years, though we hated the city’s spiritual poverty at the time. And eventually we decided to take the three boys to New York.
In Miami I painted a series of oil landscapes, studies of light and water, fifteen canvases two meters square, which I used to put together a solo exhibition on Key West. Some were abstract seascapes as seen from the Overseas Highway; others depicted the turbulent seas of Miami: the lighthouse, Crandon Park, downtown. Soon after we arrived, Sara and the boys bought themselves a dilapidated little catamaran and sailed on the weekends, hugging the shore, almost touching sand, really, but enjoying it as much as if they were traversing the Atlantic.
I turned forty-three in Miami.
Later, our friends there – we made only a few friends, but they were good ones – told me that the city was changing a lot, becoming less provincial, that the rednecks had left and the influx of people from other countries had improved the atmosphere, that even the new generation of Cubans was a little less obtuse and suffocating. Maybe so. And yet neither Sara nor I would have gone back. The boys wouldn’t have wanted to return either. Actually, after two years in New York they weren’t really boys anymore: Jacobo was eighteen and was getting ready to study medicine at NYU; Pablo, sixteen, was in an alternative high school at 23rd and 8th, with kids who had rings in their noses and ears, and was poring over college recruitment materials; and Arturo was fourteen and had pushed to get into La Salle, at Second and Second, for the sole reason that it was half a block from the apartment we lived in after what happened, so he could have more time to sleep. Going to bed late, getting up early, playing guitar, and drawing constantly – that’s what he liked back then. Anyway. It was good while it lasted, the Florida period, but it was also enough. I managed to work a lot – Miami’s crude, unsophisticated atmosphere back then was even helpful, in a way: I was able to immerse myself deeply in the bubble that my work entails (or used to entail, rather, since over the past year and a half, now that I’m seventy-seven, my eyesight has gotten too bad, so I’ve stopped painting and started writing instead, with the aid of a magnifying glass).
Our first apartment in New York was a cramped place on West 101st, a block from Central Park. The park was the only thing good about the place, which was on the edge of a poor Latino neighborhood and was loud at night. Broken bottles, shouted insults in English and Spanish, a dense human fog that kept me awake, especially since I’d just arrived from Miami, a city that seemed to have been built entirely alongside golf courses. If sleep was elusive, painting was impossible. The first months in New York were tough, really tough, not for Sara and the boys but for me, with my need for light, space, silence, and other trivial things a person comes up with at that age to make life more complicated.
Back then, I didn’t want to be in Miami or in Bogotá or in Medellín or there on 101st Street or anywhere else. I’d go out early to wander through the park for hours and remind myself that I had to pull myself together, start working again, put on a cheerful face for Sara and the boys, who were happy in New York, though they were worried about the funk I was in. Sara had found a job as a counselor in a hospital – she’d studied sociology in Colombia – and realized that the neighborhood we lived in was what was bringing me down, maybe its ghetto vibe, and definitely the lack of space in the apartment. In the living room, the leg of my easel practically touched Arturo’s shoulder as he lay on the carpet with his blasted Nintendo; and when all three boys were home, they made so much noise that, in combination with the cacophony of the street, they drove me away from my easel and paints and out into the park to look at the trees.
I liked the trees in Central Park, though they made me nostalgic for the trees of my own country, for the jungles of Urabá, which I knew so well, since one of my brothers had had a farm in that area and ended up living out his last days there. These trees were beautiful, certainly – stately old elms or oaks, for example – but practically toy-sized compared with the kapoks and cashew trees of Urabá, and they made me a little sad. And when I wasn’t in the park, I would go to Coney Island, an hour or so by subway, which I’d discovered early on and which I found amazing, as everyone does. (There’s a photo of Freud – him amazed, too, I think – on the boardwalk.) Afterward, back in the apartment on Second Street, I started my series of seascapes of the New York harbor, including paintings of the ocean at Brighton Beach and at Coney Island.
Sara came home from work one day and said, “Want to take a look at an apartment that’s for rent? It’s downtown, near Houston. At Second Ave. and Second Street. It’s big. Rundown. Expensive. The windows look out over this gorgeous cemetery. Marble Cemetery, it’s called.”
I asked if it had good light and she told me it did, and we went to see it with the boys. It didn’t seem too expensive to me, considering its size, but it was dilapidated. Filthy, even. It needed a good cleaning, some paint, and an exterminator. Large windows, excellent light. A spacious living room where we’d have no trouble fitting the boys and their electronic devices, a sofa, two armchairs, and my studio.
And things worked out really well. We fumigated the cockroaches and some died, but most of them stayed on with us. When you turned on the light at night, there they always were: small, abundant, swift, scurrying for crannies to hide in. We kept things squeaky clean and I fumigated again from time to time, put out borax, crushed them with my shoe, but nothing worked: when you turned on the light, there they all were. In old apartments these insects are as hard to snuff out as life itself. To get rid of them entirely, you’d have to tear down the building and douse the rubble with gasoline…or napalm.
I like plants and have a bit of a green thumb, so I got some ferns and palms, and soon the place started to take on a jungly atmosphere. We bought a parrot in a pet shop on Bleecker Street for two hundred dollars, and the boys named her Sparky. She screeched like crazy, never allowed herself to be tamed, and had the run of the apartment. Years later we got Cristóbal, the cat, who scared her one day, and Sparky flew out one of the windows that looked over the cemetery. The parrot stayed there a week, living in the trees and screeching loudly. She never wanted to come back, however much we called to her from the windows. Until one day she was gone.
“She probably went to South America,” I told the boys, hoping to cheer them up. “She’ll be eating chontaduros on the banks of the Chocó.”
“Chonta-who?” asked Arturo, who wasn’t familiar with the fruits of that palm tree and never missed an opportunity to joke around, even in difficult moments.
In the apartment on Second Street, my spirits started to rise again. I walked along the urban and semiurban shores of Brooklyn and New Jersey and took photos and made paintings of them. I painted a motorcycle I found half-buried on a beach and covered with seaweed. I liked the way the things man abandons deteriorate and start to become inhuman and beautiful once more. I like that dividing line. A sort of mangrove swamp. I did an eight-canvas series on horseshoe crabs, which wash up on the beaches of Coney Island, die there, and lie on the sand, becoming empty shells and then, quickly, dust, beside the flip-flops and shards of plastic containers that will last for centuries before they too finally turn to dust. The subject of those paintings, though I never said it, was obvious and ma
gnificent and in any case quite pretentious or ambitious or whatever you want to call it – they were about the shadowy abyss of Time. Horseshoe crabs aren’t beautiful in the least, and they haven’t evolved for millions of years, along with cockroaches and crocodiles. I once read on the Internet that they aren’t even crabs. They look like crustaceans, but they’re actually more closely related to spiders and scorpions. The oldest horseshoe crab fossils are from about 450 million years ago.
The paintings had only enough glimmers of light that you could just make out the shape of the poor crab’s carcass. And though they did sell, it was with great difficulty and for very little. Many years later they began to change hands for astonishing amounts of money. I still have one – the best one, in my view – hanging in my studio. It grows gradually more imprecise and abyssal as my eyesight declines and I, too, advance toward dust.
“Heading deeper and deeper into tenebrism, are you? Pretty soon the canvas will be solid black,” said Sara, teasing me. “Don’t listen to me,” she added hastily. “Of course I like them.”
I enjoyed nearly two years of artistic plenitude, a happiness that also brought with it pangs of anguish: I was finding treasures everywhere, like someone for whom the stones in the road were suddenly gemstones. How could I have known what was coming! Misfortune is always like the wind: natural, unforeseeable, effortless…I was painting better than ever, and at times I became so intensely involved in my work that I forgot to smoke and drink coffee. I painted the seaweed-draped motorcycle – also somewhat tenebrist, though now with some flecks of color. In New Jersey I found a rusted children’s tricycle in an empty lot at the edge of the water, and I also painted that, very large, but this time awash in so much light that you could hardly see the tricycle. (Two years ago I saw the painting in a museum in Rome, where they’d invited me for some sort of ceremony, but I had to look at it out of the corner of my eye, as the disease had started by then and the center of my vision was blurry. I liked it, that tricycle, when I saw it again all those years later, but I would have liked to go over certain parts of it that could have been done much better.) I’d also started taking photos of the abandoned roller coaster at Coney Island – the one they later tore down – overgrown with purple flowers. Morning glories, they’re called in English. I planned to paint a series of large paintings with close-up views of the structure and the flowers from angles that would upend the hierarchies of size and perspective and toss off the yoke of obligatorily looking either outward or inward. I prepared the canvases for the roller coaster. I’d have to paint the flowers real pretty, of course, so the paintings wouldn’t be too hard to sell. A person’s got to make a living.
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