Chapter 1

Who knows why I come here? Shouldn’t I be at home, at the home they both left, in their differing ways? Why come here, when the house is just as silent, when I am just as alone? Why seek another place for the solitude that I have in such abundance just two blocks away?

He lost seven, I tell myself. Johann Sebastian Bach—the greatest composer of any age, including the ages to come—lost seven children and a beloved wife. He carried on—and I?

My days, diary. I wake, generally hungover, between 10 and 11 in the morning, having been up for several hours in the middle of the night. I try to get myself to go out, to take a walk. At times, I make it to the local beach, the Esccambrón, and I loll in the water for a bit—no longer than 15 minutes. I have to force myself to stay any longer: I’m too disciplined to enjoy wasting a day at the beach. I have things to do.

Or did. Because what am I doing now? I’m leaving one empty apartment to come to another empty apartment. Here, I get down to what has become my work—pacing the apartment, as I consider the life of a man dead over 250 years ago. I set myself the task—I will each day listen to one of the 199 sacred cantatas that Bach composed in his life. And at the end of the 199 days?

Will I have healed? Will the memory of the two deaths—one real, one figurative…. No, they were both real. Will they stop, those two deaths, ravaging my nights? For on most nights, I spend my time as Prometheus spent his days—with a giant eagle plucking out my liver.

I drink myself into the next stage of sleep, and lurch myself to the bed. The next day, I go to the apartment—the apartment I bought for rental income, since the interest is nothing nowadays. And then I begin—the pacing, the music, and finally, making the video. It will take my a couple of hours, during which my head will clear, my stomach re-establish itself, my hands stop from shaking.

I’ll go to the café, the place where I met her, and I’ll sit in my chair, with my coffee and with my memories. They know me here, and they know my story as well. So they’ll bring me the Kleenex as automatically as they bring the tuna sandwich I eat every day. And they’ll let me talk, too—about her and about him, and about how I never imagined loss, and how we both were astonished that it was being pulled away from us—our life together. For really, that’s what it was. We had attracted the notice of a vengeful God—a God who despised our happiness, the easiness of our life, the health and the happiness and the security.

Return to the apartment. Write the post. And then, find something for dinner, sit in the chair, divert my mind with Sudoku and rum.  

My day, diary. But is any man able to describe his nights?