Read Online Bad Light by Carlos Castán - Free Book Online

also landscapes with outlandish skies, fearsome storms, or Vettriano knockoffs, those women who emerge when night, sin, and silk entwine, who gaze off into the distance, a cigarette in their hand, fancying themselves the magnets of all desire. For me, one of life’s great pleasures has always been to look on as someone paints or sketches at my side, acting as if I weren’t there. It must, however, be someone who takes the matter seriously, not some half-hearted exercise that matters little one way or the other, for here the other person’s passion is even more key to the performance than the outcome itself; and Jacobo, even though he ended up tearing almost every canvas to shreds, threw himself headlong into the task as if his life depended on it, head tilted to one side, tongue poking out like a schoolboy endeavoring to write out his first letters by hand, holding his sketch pad out in search of the right distance from which to gauge the play of texture, light, and line. If everything falls into place, I can be sent into a trance of sorts by the smell of pencils, ink, and oil paint and the sound of lead pencils and erasers on the paper. I can sometimes feel a shudder of delight up around the ears that takes me back to those dingy, old shoe repair shops, tiny and cramped, that were a regular feature in the neighborhoods of my childhood. Outside, the heavens have opened and the air in the street carries the scent of waves and sardines; there’s a small glass-fronted den where a half-broken, staticky radio dripping with grease can be heard, along with the hammer blows of an old man struggling with a midsole, daubing it with glue, rummaging around for the exact size of nail through cluttered drawers in which finding anything seems an impossible task. Everything is awash with the penetrating aroma of those super-strength glues that, in turn, smell of a bygone industry, of Hernani and other northern factory towns in the seventies, and also, as if in passing, of a kid getting high, hunched over a plastic bag, seated on the edge of a sidewalk that lies on the other side of an Atlantic Ocean also perhaps battered into submission by the very same rain; and the perfume of leather and polish, of the yellowish light of the cozy hideout from which I hoped I would never be dragged away, praying to the heavens that the cobbler would take his time in seeing to the clients ahead of me, for some last-minute repair to be made on the spot, for some shoe that had slipped his mind and had to be returned without delay to the woman standing before me in line, or for some barefoot girl to enter, clutching a heel, pleading for assistance there and then, hopping on one leg, her tights soaked through, the nylon flecked with mud.
    Our conversations often turned to literature; his entire living room was strewn with books, most arranged on dusty shelves, many other piled up in various heaps: those he had just read, those he planned to read, and those that flitted between the two piles for one reason or other. Many of them were bookmarked, with yellow notes signaling the paragraphs that in recent days Jacobo had thought he might read out loud to me, sometimes whole passages and sometimes, more often than not, brief snippets of something pithy or that had, for whatever reason, taken his fancy, underlined in pencil, by way of aphorisms that we might discuss as he whipped up something to eat—in his underwear, as usual, wearing his battered slippers. After painstaking rereadings of nineteenth and early twentieth century novels, as if to take a break from the thousands of pages of Proust, Baroja, and Thomas Mann’s unbridled prose, he had recently decided to throw himself back into the poetry of Jabès and Celan, old acquaintances, and had even learned certain poems from
Poppy and Memory
and
No One’s Rose
by heart, seeking out different translations that he later liked for the two of us to compare, though neither of us spoke a word of German. He tended