Free Bad Light by Carlos Castán Page A

underwear, they’re freshly waxed, and they’re even carrying little tubes of vaginal lubricant tucked away in their handbags. The scent of the heady mix of colognes with which they have daubed their wrists, necks, asses, groins, and even every last fleshy fold of what was once their waistline drifts over to my table. I feel the urge to make a quick getaway, for the whole thing is starting to make me feel a little queasy. I’m not sure quite why, but the scene also makes my heart sink. I think of the hours they’ve each spent at the hairdresser’s that very morning, wearing a blue gown of the sort handed out in hospitals, seated beneath the hairdryer, their hair covered in pins, clips, and rollers. I picture them counting out the money left in their purses after settling the bill for it all—shampoo and set, eyebrows, highlights, fingernails and toenails—and I find the image oddly touching. I imagine them returning home in the early hours of morning, their feet aching, tired of forced grins. Their heads are swimming, and they’ve missed their favorite TV show. They have a run in their panty hose and a longing to break down in a flood of tears that, in the end, will not come, for the lure of tiredness is stronger still, and they fall asleep on the couch without fully removing their makeup, a bottle of fresh water and the ibuprofen within reach. That or worse still: waking up pinned under the weight of a hairy leg, sensing ragged breathing on the napes of their necks, and spotting on the bedside table, inches from their noses, a glass containing the false teeth of a stranger who a few short hours ago was dancing salsa like a maniac in the middle of the dance floor, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, and telling an endless stream of jokes about black people and whores.
    In a nearby park, I pause awhile to watch the old men who play boules every evening. I don’t know if it’s me or them, but it strikes me that they are bent double under the weight of a grief that should perhaps no longer be theirs to bear. As a general rule, a person now lives such a long time that he ends up shouldering much more than his fair share of sorrow, and this ends up taking its toll on his face. One consequence of the increased life span of those who live in the developed world, and one, moreover, to which little thought is given, is that unlike what tended to happen just decades ago, today’s elderly are still around to witness the devastation wrought on the lives of their offspring, watching as they practically grow old, as they fail, as they lose the will to fight. Before, when death took these men, their sons were still strong, they had plans, beautiful wives, and a seemingly sunny future. These days, it is not uncommon for a grandfather to contemplate, before dying, the divorce of his grandson (he watches as the man pulls up a chair at the dining table in the family home on Sunday, penniless, his shirt wrinkled), whereas in times gone by that same grandson, for reasons of time, would never grow beyond the child who had to be picked up from school occasionally, his hand held on the way home, and who needed help with searching the street markets to find the soccer stickers missing from his collection. Nowadays, dying old men do not leave behind a world in motion brimming with plans and promise, as was once the case, but rather, more than ever, a valley of tears. That said, there is nevertheless a happy upside to this pitiful state of affairs: it is never so hard to turn your back on a desolate landscape as it is on one filled with the birds that Juan Ramón Jimenez claimed would stay, singing. What now lies ahead, more than the earth covering the coffin, is an endless Sunday evening, a haze of tedium and defeat. And it’s easier to take your leave like that, for nothing lulls you to sleep quite like tiredness. It’s no great sacrifice to leave the party when girls, drink, music, and strength are all long-gone.

    I walk away thinking of