In Times of Fading Light

comforting to think of your thick black hair. Of the smell of the nape of your neck when I lie against your back. Or of the way you whimper with contentment when you’re half asleep.

Around seven thirty he will get up and ask the Mexican girl who is the only one scurrying around the kitchen at this time of day for coffee. He will sit on the terrace for a while, with the rather too hot cup in his hands, looking out at the new day and listening to his own breath, whispering back at him out of the hollow of the cup.

Or of the rustle of your underclothes when you are changing behind the wardrobe door. Or the way your mouth opens when you are excited.

A hummingbird will hover among the hibiscus flowers for a while, like a large insect. And farther up, in the morning sky, the black birds like vultures will circle.

Or of your muscles (which put mine to shame at first). Or of your stomach. Or of the palms of your hands, always slightly roughened from your work.

Then the first fishermen will appear on the huge, concrete surface of the landing stage, and for a moment Alexander’s mind will dwell on the question of why no one ever lands on that landing stage. As if, he will think, the little place wanted to defy its nickname of Puerto with this structure. As if it had hoped to lure the oceangoing ships with that grand name.

Or to think of fetching you from work. You in dungarees among the knee-high greenery, mopping the sweat from your brow with the back of your hand. Or your slow way of moving—did I ever tell you that?

Or the way you wrinkle your nose, going “Hmm.”

Or that sly gleam in your eyes.

Or—is it all right to say a thing like this?—or your face when you cry.

For a moment he will be tempted to write down what he is thinking—just in case he ever really writes that letter. But even going to find a pen and paper, even less than that, he will fear, might drive the mood away.

Yes, it’s comforting to be able to think of you like this, and sometimes I ask myself: is that, perhaps, enough? On the one hand it hurts to think that when you were close enough for me to touch, I neglected all of this. On the other hand I am making the strange discovery that one does not necessarily have to possess what one loves. On the one hand I am drawn to you to make up for what I failed to give. On the other hand, I am afraid that—after all I learn from medicine about my prognosis—I would still be only the taker, even more so than before. On the one hand I would like to write and tell you all this. On the other hand, I am afraid you will take it as a kind of proposal of marriage—and so it is.

When he has drunk his coffee, he will put on his running shoes and run a couple of kilometers. He bought the running shoes in Pochutla. At first he tried walking: like Kurt—he laughed when he caught himself thinking that his sickness might, like Kurt’s, become operable if he imitated Kurt’s lifestyle. But it soon turned out that this was not a great place for walking. The hinterland, as he had already seen from the taxi, was not alluring. Only the beach would have invited people to walk on it, if the separate bays were not divided from one another by impassable rocks. You can go from bay to bay only by road, and the road is boring. So he runs.

Today, as always, he will jog northward along the narrow, winding asphalt road, will take the rises at a leisurely pace so as not to drive his pulse too high, just enough to give him a feeling that he could run on like this forever.

Now and then cars will drive past. People sharing taxis will turn their heads to look at him. There are few pedestrians around here, and when he sees two men in the distance, coming toward him, he will instinctively wonder how, if they try mugging him, he can make them understand that he carries no more than twenty pesos on him.

They are, it soon turns out, two middle-aged men, sinewy, dark-complexioned creatures, looking just like the laborers who assembled outside the Puerto Angel municipal offices a few days ago to complain of the poor quality of the drinking water. They will give him a silent but friendly greeting, in the way that only men can greet other men, and he doesn’t know why, but Alexander will be moved to tears by their greeting.

Then Zipolite comes in sight. The owner of the kiosk there will signal to him from afar by means of exaggerated (and in fact totally incomprehensible) gestures that he has water ready: with time, Alexander has fallen into the habit of buying water here on the way back, rather than running through the area with a half-liter bottle in his hand. But first, on the outward run, he will turn left before the kiosk and down to the sea.

After a few hundred meters, he will reach the bay of Zipolite. This is where the hippies go. It is about two kilometers long, and unlike the smaller bay of Puerto Angel, where the local people bathe, it is almost entirely populated by young foreign tourists who really could pass as hippies, with their hairstyles and the chains around their necks—if they weren’t all a little too well formed, a little too elegant.

Around now they are still lying in their hammocks; they sleep out on the beach under structures on posts covered with palm leaves and called palapas, which the many small bars and beach hotels—so he assumes—rent out cheap. One of them, however, a well-formed and elegant young man, will suddenly join him, and in spite of all his good resolutions, Alexander will almost imperceptibly lengthen his stride.

“Hi,” the well-formed young man will say. “Where’re you just coming from?”

“Puerto Angel,” Alexander will reply, and the well-formed young man will say:

“Wow, great!”

After a few hundred meters, the well-formed young man will begin panting. He will give up even before they reach the end of the bay.

“Wow, great,” he will repeat, raising a hand in farewell, and Alexander will feel so elated by this unexpectedly easy knockout victory that he decides to run to Mazunte.

He has been in Mazunte before in a shared taxi. He visited the turtle center. Turtles do not interest him in the slightest, but the biker recommended the museum to him so strongly that it would be tantamount to an insult not to take his advice. Once, so the biker told him, there was a factory in Mazunte where the sea turtles who come up at the same time every year to lay their eggs on Mazunte beach—and only there—were brutally slaughtered and made into canned soup. Now the slaughter has finally been forbidden, said the biker, and instead the place devotes itself to the breeding and conservation of turtles. Alexander did indeed spend an hour studying the developmental cycle of the water turtles, looked at the specimens large and small in the tanks at the center, and was touched by the careful way the keepers look after the turtles, cure them when they are sick, and then let them go again, even collecting their eggs if one of the creatures has failed to bury them properly on the beach, and bringing them back to the center to hatch them. He decided to classify this place as one of the few experiences he has had to suggest, in defiance of the many indicating the opposite, that mankind is gradually improving.

The sun will be a good hand’s breadth above the horizon when he runs into Mazunte, the houses of Mazunte will cast dark, angular shadows, and as Alexander passes over the broad beach he will feel, even through his shoes, the heat of the sand where the turtles bury their eggs. The bay of Mazunte is broader than the bay of Zipolite, broader and wilder and emptier. And the sky is higher—unless that is because of the small dose of endorphins that his body gives him after he has run over ten kilometers. A smile will appear on his face. His legs will run as if of their own accord, and his feet will find the firm part of the sloping beach for themselves, the narrow line between sand that is too wet and sand that is too dry, between water and land. The sea will lick in toward him. The sea will intoxicate him. He will rejoice, inaudibly but aloud in the sound of the sea. He will run playfully and with precisely measured steps around the waves as they break higher on the shore. He will be fascinated by the precision of his movements. He will feel as if he were not steering himself at all, as if his body were taking control, as if he were gradually removing himself from whatever controls him—and at that moment, at the moment of stasis, a thought will cross his mind: that all this, with his presence here, will be utterly and irrevocably extinguished, and the thought will hit him with such force that he will have difficulty staying on his feet.

When he gets back to Puerto Angel today, he will have run twenty-four kilometers. He will climb the steps with that typical little tugging sensation in his Achilles tendons, he will clearly feel the muscles at the back of his thighs, and the dull pressure in his joints from the strain put on them hundreds and thousands of times. He will patiently go through the obligatory stretching exercises at the wall beside his room, will raise and then hollow his back, until the stiffness gives way with a liberating click, and without going to too much trouble about it he will fend