From the Shadows

the ability to act from the shadows.

Because it’s got its own particular smell. All houses do. It depends on the personality of the family living in them.”

felt as though he were dissolving in it, like a bar of soap under a tap.

the kind where the famous person could remain absent.

Why could he not have an internal monologue with himself, as other people presumably did? Why always the necessity for some intermediary when talking to himself about the questions that mattered? Gabilondo now appeared unbidden, asking whether this tendency to talk to himself always via some other person was a kind of depersonalization.

he suddenly felt very ashamed?

What would it be like to wait for your period to come? As he wondered about this, a picture came to him of the teenage girl: she was standing, legs braced, eyes possibly closed, and listening to the blood circulating in her veins and arteries, its rhythmic, recurrent motion, like a train passing through a tunnel.

Then Damián had a sudden vision that seemed to him all too real: He was presented with an image of an unexceptional apartment block, but one allowing a view into each of the homes inside it. It was like a cross section of an ants’ nest, the kind that gave you a window into the creatures’ behavior. The behavior of human beings in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the living room. A woman changing her tampon, a man lifting weights, a teenage boy masturbating in the mirror….

And the universe had become glasslike, everything transparent to him, for all that it was rooted in a world he found opaque, a place where he had often felt compelled to doubt his own intelligence.

Paradoxically, it was only now, with so much of his life spent curled up inside the wardrobe, that he felt free.