to turn to poetry only when he was at his lowest ebb and could barely concentrate or even sit down to read without having to get up from his chair every other minute to pace up and down the hallway or fix himself something from the fridge or the drinks cabinet. He brought me up to speed on Celan’s life story and his addictive verse. Indeed, thanks to him, I ended up drenched in the work of Celan, whom I began to picture always in the midst of a snowy landscape, a lump in his throat, the proprietor of an inhuman sadness and a feeling of guilt that never, not a single day in his life, allowed him to banish from his thoughts the image of his dead parents lying on the cold ground, in the Mikhailovka camp, on the banks of the Bug. The bullet hole in the back of his mother’s head, the knowledge that he could have saved them, everything half-shrouded in a blanket of white. Jacobo managed to inject me with the poison of that delicacy. There are works that take you over like a virus. We carry them with us for a while, much like someone who has come down with an illness, then they slowly disappear, albeit leaving in their wake traces of what was once their way of gazing upon the world and things, and a handful of verses with all the flavor of what has seemingly been forgotten.
Aside from all the talk of books and reading, I hoped he might also tell me how things were on the female front, in part because that sort of conversation had always, in the past at least, ended up lifting his spirits, and also partly so that I myself might enjoy the women in his telling, beautiful as only they were, and who, in Jacobo’s words, took dainty little steps, word by word, as if down the carpeted, hushed corridor of a ghostly hotel, toward glorious sin. He led me to believe that there was little to report in that regard, although certain aspects of his appearance—the frequency with which he shaved and the new wardrobe he had recently acquired—inclined me to think he was lying.
At the usual hour of my arrival at his apartment, the city outside was for Jacobo little more than an indeterminate threat that slowly waned as people at last holed themselves up in their lairs, a sort of fleeting false alarm or slumbering monster before which it would on no account do to lower one’s guard, above all once you have learned that the night lays down cables that connect directly to dangerous gaps in the memory, cables along which fear travels like electricity. But the battles and the turmoil often lay below the surface, and a casual onlooker might have observed calm above all on those nights of standing guard against panic. Almost, you might say, peace of mind. A teapot on the stove, two men chatting in their slippers against a backdrop of gentle music, Satie’s piano on
Après la Pluie
, say, or one of Brahms’s violin or violoncello concertos, the books on the table, a glass holding paintbrushes and murky water, yawns after a certain hour, the record coming to an end, the smoke getting everywhere, the ice melting inside the tumbler to mark the passing of time and all its clinging drowsiness, the brimming ashtrays strategically placed within reach of our four hands, the cushions, the checkered blankets that clash with the upholstery on the couch, and finally, as if by magic, almost when you least expect it, the cleansing miracle of daybreak, the light dissolving the cobwebs of sleep in the nick of time, at the last gasp, not long before they were to begin their perilous transformation into something yet darker and denser.
Which is how things had almost always gone. However, the last time I heeded Jacobo’s summons, his nerves were shot to pieces. His fear had a more solid feel than on previous evenings. This time he was afraid that someone—a man, a real human being—would attack him at any moment. He took great pains to make sure every door was locked and showed me, hidden behind the door, next to the entrance to his apartment, a baseball bat and
Aside from all the talk of books and reading, I hoped he might also tell me how things were on the female front, in part because that sort of conversation had always, in the past at least, ended up lifting his spirits, and also partly so that I myself might enjoy the women in his telling, beautiful as only they were, and who, in Jacobo’s words, took dainty little steps, word by word, as if down the carpeted, hushed corridor of a ghostly hotel, toward glorious sin. He led me to believe that there was little to report in that regard, although certain aspects of his appearance—the frequency with which he shaved and the new wardrobe he had recently acquired—inclined me to think he was lying.
At the usual hour of my arrival at his apartment, the city outside was for Jacobo little more than an indeterminate threat that slowly waned as people at last holed themselves up in their lairs, a sort of fleeting false alarm or slumbering monster before which it would on no account do to lower one’s guard, above all once you have learned that the night lays down cables that connect directly to dangerous gaps in the memory, cables along which fear travels like electricity. But the battles and the turmoil often lay below the surface, and a casual onlooker might have observed calm above all on those nights of standing guard against panic. Almost, you might say, peace of mind. A teapot on the stove, two men chatting in their slippers against a backdrop of gentle music, Satie’s piano on
Après la Pluie
, say, or one of Brahms’s violin or violoncello concertos, the books on the table, a glass holding paintbrushes and murky water, yawns after a certain hour, the record coming to an end, the smoke getting everywhere, the ice melting inside the tumbler to mark the passing of time and all its clinging drowsiness, the brimming ashtrays strategically placed within reach of our four hands, the cushions, the checkered blankets that clash with the upholstery on the couch, and finally, as if by magic, almost when you least expect it, the cleansing miracle of daybreak, the light dissolving the cobwebs of sleep in the nick of time, at the last gasp, not long before they were to begin their perilous transformation into something yet darker and denser.
Which is how things had almost always gone. However, the last time I heeded Jacobo’s summons, his nerves were shot to pieces. His fear had a more solid feel than on previous evenings. This time he was afraid that someone—a man, a real human being—would attack him at any moment. He took great pains to make sure every door was locked and showed me, hidden behind the door, next to the entrance to his apartment, a baseball bat and
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