Difficult Light

by Tomas Gonzalez

  The landline rang and I didn’t want to answer. The boys only called my cell phone, and I didn’t want to face anything to do with my profession right now. I preferred to wait for Sara to come out of the bathroom and take care of it. The telephone kept ringing, and just when she, exasperated, yelled at me from the bathroom to please answer it, the phone wasn’t going to bite, it stopped ringing. And when she came out in her robe with her curly hair damp, smelling of soap, it rang again.

  It was her eldest sister, who’d been unsettled by the earlier call. She seemed surprised that Sara answered, since she’d thought she’d be at work, and Sara told her she wasn’t feeling well and had decided not to go in. The flu, maybe. Yes, yes, yes. Of course Jacobo is fine, didn’t I tell you he was doing fine? No, no, David went out just a moment ago, she said, and gestured at me to keep quiet, because she knew I was a terrible liar and didn’t want to run the risk of passing me the phone. Headache, yes, she said, and a bit of nausea. I’m staying in bed. Okay, bye. I’ll call you. What? Everything’s fine, yes, haven’t I been saying everything’s fine? Okay, okay, tell everybody I said hi. What? Bye. Bye.

  Implacably, night fell. The cemetery was sunk in half-light below us, and the sky turned dark blue.

  Here in La Mesa, at that time of day, bats flit around the trees. The bats in this region are a small species with an innocent way of flying that reminds me of butterflies. They feed on bananas and tangerines. I go out on the back porch to watch them – or to know that they’re there, rather, since I can’t see much of them at this point – sitting in a director’s chair with a beer that Ángela brings me before she leaves, served in a beer glass she keeps in the freezer. Behind the trees is the sheer drop that the vultures soar above during the day. This has always been the hardest time of day for me, ever since I can remember. It was in New York, too, where I’d go out to have a drink in silence in an empty bar. Here I sense the beauty of this hour, of course, its half-tints, and I love the presence of the bats in the gloaming, but sometimes I am engulfed with melancholy. “You’ve gone autistic,” Sara would say when she saw me light my first Pielroja cigarette, pour myself the rum or beer I drink every day, and sit lost in thought for a long while here on the porch. And though I don’t consider myself particularly romantic or sentimental, it is true that it is at this time of day that I miss her most and am tormented by her absence.

  “Hang on, hang on. What do you mean you’re not romantic, David?” she might have teased me. “Sometimes you don’t even let me breathe!”

  The cemetery descended into total darkness, and in the sky the blue turned almost black.

  Fourteen

  I walked to a bar at one corner of Tompkins Square Park, at Seventh Street and Avenue B, where they filmed a famous movie scene in which a fat guy gets strangled with a cable.

  There weren’t too many people, and luckily the TV was off. I ordered a tequila and a beer. I sat down at a table in front of the bar where they strangled the fat guy, who thrashed around a lot, and next to the window, through which I could see the elms in the park, illuminated by the lamp posts, and a few people walking their dogs.

  I’ve always been struck by New York dogs, which are so neutered and well-mannered that they seem like walking dead. They don’t tug at their leashes, and it’s unusual for one to start barking at squirrels, or even look at them – much less kill them – or chase after pigeons. Sometimes the owners walk in front and they’re the ones who have to tug on the dog. I’d like someone to ask me about this subject in an interview so I could finally air my views on the difference between the Canis zombis familiaris of New York and the Canis lupus familiaris of Colombia or Latin America in general. But they never do. Instead, they drive me crazy with tedious, hard-to-answer questions about post-this and post-that or neo-this and neo-the other thing.

  I stopped watching the dogs and downed my tequila. With a start, I remembered what was going to happen to us, what was happening to us, and it was like splitting apart inside, like suddenly recalling that I had been splitting apart inside for a long, long time. I drank the beer. Life was a horrible dream. As I write this, I’m thinking about the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona and how beautiful its architect’s nightmare seemed to me; I’m thinking about The Garden of Earthly Delights. But none of that occurred to me then, in that bar. My horror was not aesthetic, or beautiful, or harmonious. In that moment, in that bar where they’d strangled the fat guy, the only thing I felt was an awful spike in my throat and a heavy weight behind my eyes, contained as if by a stone or concrete wall.

  The Horseshoe Bar, it was – or is – called, like my dark, and now famous, tenebrist crabs.

  I went back to the apartment and we called the boys. Pablo told me that Jacobo had been uneasy since the doctor had postponed and was in intense pain. He had fallen asleep after a long massage and four pills strong enough to knock out a bull. Pablo was speaking to us from the reception desk at the Holiday Inn so as not to risk Jacobo’s waking up and hearing him. When I asked him if he thought his brother was having second thoughts, he told me he didn’t know. That it was possible, of course, because Jacobo had been very quiet after the last conversation with the doctor, and now he opened his mouth only to complain about the pain.

  “I can’t take it, Dad,” Pablo said. “But, well, it’s totally understandable, right? And whatever he decides, we’re going to respect it,” he added.

  At around nine Arturo arrived with Ámbar, his girlfriend at the time. Arturo and I are similar in many ways, except that one: it’s not that he’s a womanizer, because when he’s with a woman he’s faithful to her, but that he’s been with several. Not too many, really, no more than three, counting Ámbar, until he met the one he’s with now, Stella, almost eight years ago – but more women than me, in any event. Ámbar’s name was Maria, or something like that, and she’d changed it to something less bland. And she was gorgeous. More petite than Debrah, which was saying a lot, very lively and intelligent. She had nine little silver earrings in the perfect oval of each ear, one for each year of her age. She was always in blue-black lipstick, nails painted blue-black, blue eyelids, silver rings on every finger, fake snakeskin boots, white silk blouses, and leather jackets and vests and pants in winter; in summer, she’d wear silver chains around her ankles, black tank tops, black harem pants, and brightly colored sandals. All high-end stuff, as she was from a wealthy family. She lived with her parents in the West Village. A few months earlier, as soon as she’d turned eighteen and was old enough to do it, she’d gotten tattoos done on her shoulders, arms, and upper back: fifteen dark-red roses, the kind with tiny flowers that we call cecilias, about two centimeters in diameter, with a few leaves and thorns. Once, when she was there, I goofed and told Arturo in Spanish that Ámbar looked like a little piece of art to be put on a shelf, and the moron went and translated what I’d said for her!

  She didn’t get mad – I’d say she was amused or even flattered. I drew a lot of charcoal sketches of Ámbar and also did a series of etchings that I was really happy with. Especially because I greatly enjoyed doing them and could reflect all the admiration I felt for her audacity and creativity.

  I’ve always preferred to do my more figurative works as engravings or in charcoal. For years I copied Rembrandt’s engravings, which I’ve always found incredible. They turned out well, and Sara, to stroke my ego, would tell me they were going to throw me in jail for forgery. I still have a few of them, including the one of the sacrificing of Isaac, but I’ve torn the vast majority of them up. And I prefer oils for my large-format paintings, which at times are almost abstract, like the one of the ferry, or completely abstract, like the studies of light and water that I did in Key West, or in the New York harbor, and then in the peaks and chasms of La Mesa and its environs, and that are the bulk and perhaps the most significant part of my work.

  (Substantial, I mean, not significant.)

  “Hello, dear,” said Sara. “A
nd you, Arturo, weren’t you going to work?” she asked, and he said he hadn’t been able concentrate and had decided to come home to be with us instead. A friend had filled in for him.

  Arturo and Ámbar went into his room and closed the door, like they always did, but this time I didn’t hear the usual jokes or laughter, since they were always teasing each other and tickling each other like children, rather than anything serious or erotic, I always thought. That night Arturo played his guitar and she probably surfed or chatted on the Internet, or maybe slept, since I didn’t hear her.

  Fifteen

  I started brushing Cristóbal. His favorite thing in the world, besides sleeping and eating, was being brushed. The fur that was left in the brush was so soft, clean, and white that I always told Sara we should save it and use it to fill cushions. This time I didn’t make the familiar joke. There were jokes and stories that I repeated too often, and it was a miracle she hadn’t left me, claiming spousal abuse. Sometimes I used the repetitions to entertain her:

  “Did I ever tell you how happy I always was a child when my family went to the Gulf of Morrosquillo?”

  “Only five hundred thousand times.”

  “Okay. So my dad had bought a fisherman’s hut in Tolú, right on the beach, and every vacation the whole family…”

  Sara would cover her ears and sing “lalalala” to drown me out. If one of the boys was around, she’d say almost severely, “You kids are crazy.”

  I would be quiet and wait patiently for her to stop singing and uncover her ears.

  “…and I’ve never been so happy anywhere else as I was there. I was about seven when we started going. When I woke up the first morning, I could hear the sound of the sea on the sand and I felt so happy that…”

  Sara would shout, “Ay, no, no” and start lalalala-ing again.

  She went to the kitchen to heat up the pieces of chicken left over from lunch and toast bread for sandwiches. She knocked on the kids’ door and asked them if they wanted to eat.

  “No thanks, Mom. We went to McDonald’s on our way here,” Arturo responded. In other circumstances he would have added, “That fucking garbage!” to mock me, as I’d turned my personal boycott of McDonald’s into a matter of principle.

  An insidious, subterranean silence had fallen over the house, a silence that didn’t lift even when we spoke or made noise. Two years later I would hear that same silence, but on a massive scale, when the Twin Towers fell. From the balcony, Sara, the boys, and I watched them crumble and disappear. After they turned to dust and smoke and the smell of char, that silence pervaded the squeal of the subway cars when they took a curve, the voices of people in restaurants, the heavy traffic on Canal Street, the cacophony of trains and cars on the bridges, and even the sirens; that silence took hold of everything, and you would have thought that the noise of New York, as fundamental as that of the mountains of Urabá, had been conquered from within and vanquished forever. That wasn’t the case, of course. It never has been.

  I never thought I’d end up singing the praises of noise.

  “You have to eat, even if you don’t feel like it,” Sara told me when she brought me sandwiches and salad. “Your cheekbones are starting to stick out.”

  I ate the sandwich and salad listlessly; I drank the puffed wheat shake that Sara had learned to make from some Cubans in Miami. Ten o’clock. James and Debrah arrived. Michael O’Neal called, “just to say hi.” He didn’t even ask about Jacobo. “Everything okay over there, Mr. David?” he asked, and I told him that everything was okay, thank you, Michael. He said goodbye and hung up.

  Today I read back over these pages with my magnifying glass, at the risk of ruining the little eyesight I have left. I was struck by how sentimental I’ve grown in my old age. When I talk about Sara and me, for example, I tend unwittingly to select the best moments, to smooth over times that were sometimes quite rough. Our years in Bogotá, in particular, were complicated, thanks to the merciless self-absorption of young people who want to make what they grandiloquently call “works of art.” Sara had to take care of the house, with three children, for almost three years, while I shut myself in to do battle with canvases that I sold once a millennium or so and for very little. Then they began to sell more often and for higher prices, but even if they hadn’t – that is, if I hadn’t sold anything at all – I would have stayed wrapped up in my own world and let other people starve or find jobs or whatever else.

  The night that had fallen was going to be even longer than the one before. Sara had been talking to Pablo and Jacobo a long time, more than an hour. She hung up and then called them back a few minutes later. Sometimes I’d go to the phone for a bit, and soon say goodbye. She spoke to them in a quiet voice, not to keep me from hearing, of course, but because that’s the tone mothers use to comfort their children. Sometimes it almost seemed like she was singing to them to soothe them or like her voice had taken on the cadence of a lullaby. “Don’t pay any attention to ghosts, boys, there’s no such thing. Don’t be frightened by figments of the imagination. Death doesn’t exist, boys. Jacobo will always be here with us. Don’t be afraid, don’t let yourselves be confused or frightened” – she must have said something like that, I imagine, because what else could a mother say? While I, who have always thought that life is all there is and that to lose it, as a poet says, is to lose everything, shut myself in the darkness of the bedroom so as not to hear or see anything for a few minutes.

  I’ve always felt guilty about my inability to console others, especially when those others have been my children.

  Time is strange stuff. Only a few hours stretched before us – less than eleven now – which would be full of more sorrow than everything that had happened to my horseshoe crabs in their millions of years of existence. And at the same time they were dead, empty hours.

  Sixteen

  I went to Bogotá for an eye exam. Sara and I had bought an automatic station wagon with dual-clutch transmission and comfortable seats, totally luxurious. She was the one who drove it, and she’d wanted a big car since she often had to transport bags of manure and other things for the garden. I also saw her load stones and bricks into that glorious car.

  The only place I drove was in Miami, since there was no other way to get around that city: it has almost no public transport, and I was always going to the Keys to paint and take photos. A terrible driver. I learned at the age of forty-five, so I drove as if I were ninety: slow and gripping the wheel with both hands, just in case. In New York I traveled by train with all my gear, or, if I had to, I took a taxi.

  After the accident, Pablo bought a pickup truck to help drive Jacobo around. In a way, he started living for his brother. I don’t mean that he stopped having a life of his own, but he took Jacobo into account in every decision he made. For example, he turned down the scholarship offered to him by a university in Massachusetts, rejecting out of hand any possible separation, and instead studied film and photography at an excellent, but less prestigious, university in New York. Because he’s so talented, the genius of the family, it ultimately led to the same place, and he’s had a fair bit of success in his work.

  When Sara passed away, I hired Ángela’s eldest son as a driver, and when I have to go to Bogotá or want to take a trip to Girardot – a somewhat dilapidated but charming city that swelters on the banks of the Magdalena River about two hours from La Mesa – I go with him and Ángela. We always stay in a five-star hotel there; Ángela and her son each have their own room and I have another. I’m very fond of the two of them, and I love seeing their admiring and slightly awed response to such luxury. Money has to be good for something, since in most of its other manifestations, like fame, it is unpleasant, aesthetically hideous or even revolting.

  Like most doctors, my doctor in Bogotá didn’t tell me anything new. He didn’t know why my blindness was progressing so rapidly, since my macular degeneration wasn’t the worst type. And when I asked h
ow long I would at least be able to write, he told me he didn’t know, that when I couldn’t write anymore it would be because I couldn’t write anymore, and that I should always make sure I had plenty of light when I wrote. As if I were doing it in the dark! In short, as I said earlier: I don’t know anything, you don’t know anything, nobody knows anything. The world is only cadence and form.

  After the exam, which was both thorough and thoroughly useless, we had lunch in a restaurant in the historic area of town and took a drive through other sections of downtown. Bogotá is intense, and not particularly beautiful. It’s vibrant, yes, but it’s hard on its inhabitants, like a poorly oiled machine. I can’t see the mountains that rise above it anymore, but once upon a time I used to explore and admire the detail of their shapes, their stones and trees, their massive verticality so close by, their vegetation that so often turns a marvelous dark blue, almost metallic, and its ever-changing skies. As is happening to me with so many things these days, all of that now quivers, turns to liquid, eludes me…

  I have three people on call who work for me: Ángela, the housekeeper, who is not my woman but is Woman incarnate (without Whom nothing has ever functioned); her son, a voluble and loquacious driver of twenty-five who studied agricultural administration at a technical college and was never able to find a job in his field; and Ángela’s husband, a gardener, quiet and courteous, who also takes care of all my household repairs, since his hands work miracles. I pay them well and they’re good people, so I can count on them to keep me company and help me when blindness blurs all forms and I am left with only light, and to call my sons to let them know, and then everybody will take me to the La Mesa de Juan Díaz cemetery and bury me next to Sara beside one of those palm trees (most of which are already dead and whose tall trunks, thanks to municipal indifference, rise stark and bare of plumes, like the columns of ancient ruins) when the eternal light shines for me.