In Times of Fading Light

When he gets back, the square in front of the hotel is only moderately busy, it is not as bad as he feared, but there is enough of a crowd for his move to the smaller room to seem justified in retrospect. However, in the stuffy, windowless space he has no option but to switch on the air-conditioning, which now turns out to be fitted to a light shaft and sends old cigarette smoke wafting through the air. The unit also rattles, and it takes him a long time to realize what this rattling reminds him of—but then the memory is like a deja vu, and he has to put the light on to reassure himself that he is not back in the hospital.

In the morning he has a headache, feels unwell. He avoids feeling for his lymph nodes, he avoids anything that might irritate or upset him. He doesn’t take the cold shower that has been his habit in the morning for years, but goes downstairs feeling slightly dizzy. When he comes out into the square, the Mexican sky that has been blue every day until now is suddenly overcast. If he didn’t know that the rainy season in Mexico does not begin until May, he would say it looks like rain.

He soon finds a farmacia, and for a moment has no qualms about appreciating the omnipresence of multinational groups, since as a result he has only to breathe the word aspirin to get what he wants. However, it proves difficult to convey the idea of the other purchase he hopes to make to the pharmacist. He tries:

“Quiero algo para tapar las orejas.”

The pharmacist moves his head back and forth, with an air of great meaning, and then begins asking Alexander insistent but incomprehensible questions, until finally, although Alexander can hardly utter any articulate sounds, he has an inspiration that is expressed in the emphatic repetition of the word ferreteria, and now Alexander also has to stand and listen to a difficult account of the way he must go to get there, although by now he is sure he has been misunderstood. On no account does he want to put something made of iron in his ears.

He finds a large cafe on the square. There are a great many waiters in chocolate-brown outfits here, but because of the complex system putting them in charge of separate operations it takes him an eternity to order coffee, a glass of water, and a croissant, each from a different waiter, and then another eternity for all of those to arrive, and finally it takes him forever to identify the waiter responsible for taking his money, whereupon he can finally go to his table. His head is threatening to explode when he leaves the cafe. Out in the square, he already feels breathless. He walks on without thinking, without knowing where he is going, and a few minutes later finds himself on the harbor promenade again, where he now breathes the wind coming in from the sea deeply, through distended nostrils, although it still smells as heavy, as moist, as dangerous as yesterday.

He goes south, along the quay wall. The wind turns to squalls, swirling up sand. Almost in passing. Alexander notices that several Mexican boys of about twelve are bathing in the harbor. They jump in from the quay wall, shrieking, and it seems that the sharks are not bothered about them, nor is anyone else… A little farther on there is even a stretch of beach, although there is no one on it. But now it is beginning to drizzle, while the wind is still swirling up sand; there is a strange, turbulent atmosphere. Cars are driving much too fast, a fire engine sounds its siren. And suddenly there is no one left in the street whom Alexander could ask to tell him the way—the way to where, come to think of it?

After twenty minutes the rain has overcome the sand, as well as Alexander’s belief that it can’t rain seriously in Mexico at this time of year. His shirt and thighs are wet. Suddenly there are no available taxis around, and he realizes why when he has turned in the direction of the city center: no buses are running either, or not the one he would need. Detour, says a sign. But he waits for a bus in vain on the road that is supposed to be part of the detour. No taxi in sight. He is beginning to freeze, and decides to walk on.

On the way, coming to a pharmacy, he tries to solve the earplug problem again. But as soon as he walks in with his wet shoes and his dripping hat, he senses the reluctance of the pharmacist looking up from his cash book to serve him. A drowned rat, those are the words that run through his head, he looks like a drowned rat as he faces the old man and brings out his request—without any noticeable effect. For a few seconds he stands there, watching raindrops fall from the brim of his hat, while the old man immerses himself in his papers again—or is he thinking about the question that Alexander asked? Alexander leaves the pharmacy without waiting to find out.

He ventures into another pharmacy. This time he is served by a young woman who apparently even understands him, the word tampon is mentioned, that must be it: ear tampon, but the woman shakes her head.

“No hay. No tenemos.”

We don’t have it. Don’t stock it. And why would they? What use would a nation of the noisy and the deaf have for earplugs? People who will sit through pink-rabbit films without complaining. People who will chain two dogs up on a roof where there’s no shade for the sole purpose of disturbing the sleep of insomniacs with their barking…

He gives up avoiding puddles and jumping over the little streams running over the sidewalk. His feet are wet anyway. Everything is wet, he is wet to the skin, to under the skin. Everything, it seems to him, is drenched with the sorrow that keeps blowing in from the ocean, flooding everything here in the city, sending people out of their minds, making new arrivals jump overboard and sink in the sea without trace. He buys two bottles of water in a supermercado, and suddenly suspects that even the mineral water sold here in the supermarkets of Veracruz might be contaminated by sorrow.

Then he lies in his windowless room. Feels his temperature rising. Takes tablets, drinks from the contaminated bottles. The air-conditioning rattles in his unprotected ears. He gets up and switches the air- conditioning off, but before long he feels that he is stifling. The headache gets worse. He hears voices in the hotel bar. He forces himself to get up again, switches the air-conditioning back on, puts scraps of toilet paper in his ears. Takes another tablet. Pulls the blanket over his head.

He lies on his right side, curling up small. Now shivers begin running through his body, only on one side at first, he follows them in the darkness of his cave under the covers. Coming from his kidneys, they make first for the left side of his pelvis, the side on top, from there they move to the area of his heart, crawl on over his back, and peter out on their way to the nape of his neck. Suppose his weakened immune system won’t stand up to an attack by some unknown infection? The oxygen device rattles in his head—and all of a sudden it is his own oxygen apparatus. All of a sudden he himself is the dying old man whose oxygen apparatus rattles. All of a sudden it seems only logical for him to die here, in this bunker in Veracruz, all by himself, with toilet paper in his ears. This is the way he wanted it. It is the logical, the inevitable outcome of his life.

He has to turn on his other side to shake off that idea. To rid himself of the images passing through his head. He looks for other images. He tries to remember something, anything. In the intervals between the shivers breaking against him like waves, he tries to conjure up something pleasant, but all he sees is one thing: he sees himself wandering through strange cities, and nothing but that, as if there were nothing else in his life, nothing but streets, nothing but buildings, faces dissolving when he tries to touch them, this is the film of my life, he thinks as his teeth chatter, although in a pitifully abbreviated version, he adds to himself, trying to suppress the chattering of his teeth so as not to make any more buildings fall. He will demand another version, he thinks, and damn it all, he’ll have the right to make the director’s cut himself, he thinks, gritting his teeth until his jaw hurts, and then it gets hot, he runs, everyone leaves the city, he runs through the desert, the air burning his throat, he runs, his heart beats at an incredible rate, it is trembling rather than beating, it is going steeply uphill, uphill all the time, and no peak ever comes into sight, the desert is on the skew, Alexander realizes, it goes uphill all the way to the horizon, it’s impossible to climb it in this heat and with his defective heart, inoperable, he knows that, he ought to stop, but the landscape behind him breaks away, falls in pieces into the chasm, or rather into the sky, the sky is everywhere, above and below, and through this omnipresent sky a crumbling crust barely a meter thick extends— the world; an amazing discovery. Then his parents are with him, holding both his hands, the hands of their son with the defective heart. They are wearing their Sunday best, his father in pants with turned-up cuffs like those worn in the fifties, his mother in high heels and the full skirt under which he always liked to hide, but they are taking no notice of their clothes, they are running, climbing, crawling up the thin crust of the earth rising at a slant into the omnipresent sky, they slip, fall, scramble up again, and haul him and his heart defect along after them, urging him to hurry, composed but unyielding, urging him in a tone as if he were late for kindergarten, telling him to go on, not keep looking around to see piece after piece breaking away but to look ahead, look up to where, in the heights at the end of the world, a little group of indios bedecked with feathers are trying to dance a new world into being: five or six men, small of stature with incipient paunches, stepping in time