While the Women Are Sleeping

by Javier Marías

  I got up and went over to the balcony to kill time until sleep came, and from there, leaning on the balustrade, I looked up at the sky and then down, and that was when I thought I saw the fat man sitting alone by the swimming pool, in darkness now, the water reflecting only the stars. I didn’t recognise him at first because he wasn’t sporting the moustache I’d become used to seeing every day, as I had that very morning, and because our eyes have to accommodate themselves to seeing, fully clothed, someone we have been used to seeing undressed. His clothes were as ugly and ill-coordinated as his two-tone swimsuits. He was wearing a baggy shirt, which looked black from my balcony (from a distance) but was probably patterned, and a pair of light-coloured slacks that appeared to be a very pale blue, possibly a reflection from the near-invisible water, so close it would have splashed him had there been any waves. On his feet he wore a pair of red moccasins, and his socks (imagine wearing socks on the island) seemed to be the same colour as his trousers, but again that might have been the effect of the moon on the water. He was resting his head on one hand and the corresponding elbow on the arm of a floral-patterned sun lounger—there were two models available at the poolside, striped and floral. He didn’t have his camera with him. I hadn’t realised they were staying at our hotel, since we had only ever seen them at the nearby beach, to the north of Fornells, in the mornings. He was alone, as motionless as Inès, although now and then he changed that drowsy, laid-back pose of head and elbow and adopted another apparently contrary position, his face buried in his hands, his feet drawn in, as if he were exhausted or tense or possibly laughing to himself. At one point, he took off one shoe or accidentally lost it, but he didn’t immediately reach out his foot to retrieve it, but stayed like that, his stockinged foot on the grass, which gave him a helpless look, at least from my fourth-floor viewpoint. Luisa was sleeping, and Inès would be sleeping too; she probably needed at least ten hours’ sleep to maintain her immutable beauty. I got dressed in the dark, taking care not to make any noise, and checked that Luisa was well wrapped up in her sheet-cum-toga. Unaware that I wasn’t in the bed, she had yet somehow sensed it in her sleep, for she was lying diagonally now, invading my space with her legs. I went down in the lift, not having looked to see what time it was, past the night porter sleeping uncomfortably, head on the counter, like a future decapitee; I had left my watch upstairs, and everything lay in silence, apart from the slight noise made by my black moccasins (I wasn’t wearing socks). I slid open the glass door that led to the swimming pool and closed it again, once I was outside on the grass. The fat man raised his head, glanced over at the door and immediately noticed my presence, although he couldn’t make me out, I mean, couldn’t identify me in the dim light. For that reason, because he had spotted me at once, I spoke to him as I walked towards him and as the reflections of the moon in the water began to reveal me and change my colours as I approached.

  ‘You’ve shaved off your moustache,’ I said, running my index finger over the place where a moustache usually grows and not quite sure that I should make such a comment. By the time he could reply, I had reached his side and sat down on another sun lounger, next to him, a striped one. He had sat up, his hands on the arms of his sun lounger and was looking at me slightly nonplussed, but only slightly, and without a hint of suspicion, as if he wasn’t in the least surprised to see me—or, indeed, anyone—there. I think that was the first time I had seen him face on—without a camera to his eye and without a hat to mine—or simply from close up, and my sight was already accustomed to the dim light after the brief time I’d spent gazing out from the balcony. He had an affable face, alert eyes, and his features weren’t ugly, simply fat, and he struck me as one of those handsome bald men, like the actor Michel Piccoli or the pianist Richter. He looked younger without his moustache, or perhaps it was the red moccasins, one of which lay upturned on the grass. Yet he must have been at least fifty.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. I didn’t recognise you at first with your clothes on, we usually only see each other in our beach-wear.’ He had said exactly what I had thought earlier, when I was upstairs. We had spent nearly three weeks seeing each other every day, and it was impossible that his busy eyes would not at some point have lingered, despite everything, on me or on Luisa. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The air-conditioning in the room doesn’t always help. You’re better off out here, I think. Do you mind if I join you for a while?’

  ‘No, of course not. My name’s Alberto Viana,’ and he shook my hand. ‘I’m from Barcelona.’

  ‘I’m from Madrid,’ I said and told him my name. Then there was a silence, and I wondered whether I should make some trivial remark about the island or about vacations or some other almost equally trivial remark about the activities we had observed on the beach. It was my curiosity about those activities that had led me to his side by the pool, well, that and my insomnia, although I could have continued to struggle with that upstairs or even woken Luisa, but I hadn’t. I was speaking almost in a whisper. It was unlikely anyone could hear us, but the sight of Luisa, and of the night porter, sound asleep, had given me the feeling that if I raised my voice I would disturb their slumbers, and my hushed tones had immediately infected or influenced the way Viana spoke.

  ‘I’ve noticed that you’re very keen on video cameras,’ I said after that pause, that hesitation.

  ‘Video cameras?’ he said, slightly surprised or as if to gain time. ‘Ah, I see. No, not really, I’m not a collector. It isn’t the camera itself that interests me, although I do use it a lot, it’s my girlfriend, whom you’ve seen, I’m sure. I only film her, nothing else, I don’t experiment with it at all. That’s fairly obvious, I suppose. You’ve probably noticed.’ And he gave a short laugh, half-amused, half-embarrassed.

  ‘Yes, of course, my wife and I have both noticed. I think she feels slightly envious of the attention you lavish on your girlfriend. It’s very unusual. I don’t even have a regular camera. But then we’ve been married for some time.’

  ‘You don’t own a camera? Don’t you like being able to remember things?’ Viana asked me this with genuine bemusement. As I had imagined, his shirt did have a pattern, a multicoloured blend of palm trees and anchors and dolphins and ships’ prows, but nevertheless the predominant colour was the black I had seen from above; his trousers and socks still appeared to be pale blue, bluer than my white trousers, which, like his, were exposed now not just to the moonlight, but to the moon’s faint reflection in the water.

  ‘Yes, of course I do, but you can remember things in other ways, don’t you think? We all have our own camera in our memory, except that we don’t always remember what we want to remember or forget what we would prefer to forget.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ said Viana. He was a frank fellow, not at all the cautious type, and he could say things without offending the person he was talking to. He gave another short laugh. ‘How can you compare what you can remember with what you can see, with what you can see again, just as it happened? With what you can see again over and over, ad infinitum, and even hit the pause button, which you couldn’t do when you saw whatever it was for real? What nonsense,’ he said again.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ I agreed. ‘But you’re not telling me that you film your girlfriend all the time so that you can remember her later, by watching her on the screen. Or perhaps she’s an actress. She wouldn’t have time really, given that you appear to film her every day. And if you film her every day, there isn’t time for what you’ve taped even to begin to resemble forgetting and for you to feel the need to recall her in that faithful manner by watching her again on video. Unless you’re keeping it for when you’re both old and want to relive your stay here in Minorca hour by hour.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t keep all my footage, no, only a few brief fragments, maybe amounting to one tape every three or four months. But they’re all filed away in Barcelona. And, no, she isn’t an actress, she’s still very young. What I do here (and at home too) is wait for
a day before I erase the previous day’s tape, if you see what I mean. In all this time, I’ve only used two tapes, always the same ones. I record one today and keep it, then record another one tomorrow and keep that, and then, the day after, I record over the first one, erasing it that way. And so on and so forth, if you see what I mean. Mind you, I shouldn’t think I’ll have time to record much tomorrow because we’re going back to Barcelona, my holiday’s over.’

  ‘Oh, I see. But then, once you’re home, what will you do, make a montage of everything you’ve filmed?’

  ‘No, you don’t see. Artistic videos are one thing, made in order to be filed away. They get put to one side, one tape every four months or so. But the daily recordings are a separate matter. Those get erased every other day.’

  It may have been the lateness of the hour (I had left my watch upstairs), but I had the feeling that I still didn’t entirely understand, especially the second part of his explanation. Also I wasn’t that interested in the direction the conversation had taken, about artistic videos (that’s what he’d said, I heard him) and erased tapes, the day-to-day ones. I considered saying goodnight and going back up to my room, but I still wasn’t feeling sleepy and I thought that, if I did go back, I would probably end up waking Luisa just so she’d talk to me. That wouldn’t be fair, and it seemed best to talk to someone who was already awake.

  ‘But,’ I said, why do you film her every day if you erase it afterwards?’

  ‘I film her because she’s going to die,’ said Viana. He had stretched out his stockinged foot and dipped his big toe into the water, moving it slowly back and forth, his leg stretched right out, for he could only just reach, just far enough to touch the surface. I fell silent for a few seconds, and then, as I watched him slowly stirring the water, I asked:

  ‘Is she ill?’

  Viana pursed his lips and ran his hand over his bald head, as if he still had hair and was smoothing it, a gesture from the past. He was thinking. I let him think, but he was taking an awfully long time. I let him think. Finally, he spoke again, not to answer my last question, but my previous one.

  ‘I film her every day because she’s going to die, and I want to have a record of her last day, of what might be her last day, so that I can really remember it, so that when she’s dead, I can see it again in the future as often as I wish, along with the artistic videos. Because I do like to remember things.’

  ‘But is she ill?’ I asked again.

  ‘No, she’s not ill,’ he said, this time without pausing to think. ‘At least not as far as I know. But she’ll die one day. You know that, everyone knows that, everyone is going to die, you and me included, and I want to preserve her image. The last day in anyone’s life is important.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, looking at his foot. ‘You’re just being cautious; she might have an accident, for example.’ And I thought (but only briefly) that if Luisa were to die in an accident, I wouldn’t have many images to remember her by, hardly any pictures at all. There was the odd photo around the house—ordinary photos, of course, not artistic ones—but only a few. I certainly didn’t have any videos of her. Without thinking, I glanced up at the balcony from which I had observed Viana. There were no lights on in any of the balconies or rooms. Nor, therefore, in the room belonging to Inès and Viana. I wasn’t there on our balcony now, no one was.

  Viana was again immersed in thought, although now he had removed his foot from the water and placed it again—with the tip of the sock wet and dark—on the grass. I began to think that perhaps he didn’t like the direction the conversation had taken, and again I considered saying goodnight and going up to my room, yes, I suddenly wanted to go up and see again the image of Luisa asleep—not dead—wrapped in her sheet; one shoulder might have come uncovered. But once begun, conversations can’t be abandoned just like that. They can’t be left hanging, by taking advantage of a distraction or a silence, unless one of the two people involved is angry. Viana didn’t seem angry, although his alert eyes did seem even more alert and more intense; it was hard to tell what colour they were in the light cast by the moon on the water: I think they were brown. No, he didn’t seem angry, just slightly self-absorbed. He was saying something, not in a whisper now, but as if muttering.

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it’s not that I think she’ll have an accident,’ he replied, his voice suddenly too loud, as if he had miscalculated the shift in tone between talking to himself and talking to someone else.

  ‘Lower your voice,’ I said, alarmed, although there was no reason to feel alarmed, it was unlikely anyone would hear us. I again glanced at the balconies, but they all still lay in darkness; no one had woken up.

  Startled by my order, Viana immediately lowered his voice, but he wasn’t startled enough not to continue what he had begun to say so loudly. ‘I said it’s not that I think she might have an accident. But she’ll definitely die before me, if you see what I mean.’

  I looked at Viana’s face, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was gazing up at the sky, at the moon, avoiding my eye. We were on an island.

  ‘Why are you so sure of that if she isn’t ill? You’re much older than her. The normal thing would be for you to die before her.’

  Viana laughed again and, stretching his leg out still further, dipped his whole stockinged foot into the water this time and began to move it slowly, heavily around, more heavily than before because now his whole foot—that fat, obese foot—was submerged.

  ‘Normal,’ he said, laughing. ‘Normal,’ he repeated. ‘Nothing is normal between her and me. Or rather, nothing is normal as regards my relationship with her, and never has been. I’ve known her since she was a child. Don’t you see, I adore her.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. It’s obvious that you adore her. I adore my wife, Luisa, as well,’ I added, in order to counter what he clearly considered to be the extraordinary nature of his adoration of Inès. ‘But we’re more or less the same age, and so it’s difficult to know which of us will die first.’

  ‘You adore her? Don’t make me laugh. You don’t even own a camera. You’re not even much interested in remembering her exactly as she was—were you to lose her—in being able to see her again when it will no longer be possible for you to look at her.’

  This time, fat Viana’s remark did bother me a little, I found it impertinent. I noticed this because there was something wounded and involuntary about my ensuing silence, and something fearful too, as if suddenly I no longer dared to ask him anything and as if, from that moment, I had no option but to listen to whatever he chose to tell me. It was as if that abrupt, indelicate remark had taken over the conversation entirely. And I realised that my fear came also from his use of the past tense. He had said ‘exactly as she was’ when referring to Luisa, when he should have said ‘exactly as she is’. I decided to leave him and go back up to our room. I wanted to see Luisa and to sleep by her side, to lie down and reclaim my space in the double bed that would doubtless be identical to the one shared by Inès and Viana, modern hotel rooms being all the same. I could simply bring the conversation to a close. I was feeling rather angry. However, the silence lasted only a few seconds because Viana continued talking, without this pause I have made, writing, and it was too late then not to continue listening to him.

  ‘What you say is very true, but it hardly takes a genius to work that out. It’s actually quite hard to know who will die first, it’s tantamount to wanting to know the order of our dying. And to know that, you have to be a part of that order, if you know what I mean. Not to disrupt it, that would be impossible, but to be a part of it. Listen, when I said that I adore Inès, I meant it literally. I adore her. It’s not just a turn of phrase, a meaningless, common-or-garden expression that you and I can share, for example. What you call “adore” has nothing whatever to do with what I mean by “adore”, we share the word because there is no other, but not the thing described. I adore her and have adored her ever since I first met her, and I
know that I’ll continue to adore her for many years to come. That’s why it can’t last much longer, because that feeling has been the same inside me for too many years now, without variation or attenuation. There will be no variation on my part, it will become unbearable, it already is, and because, one day, it will all become unbearable to me, she will have to die before me, when I can no longer stand my adoration of her. One day, I’ll have to kill her, don’t you see?’

  Having said that, Viana lifted his dripping foot out of the water and rested it carefully and distastefully on the grass, the sodden silk sock out of the water.

  ‘You’ll catch cold,’ I said. ‘You’d better take off your sock.’

  Viana did as I suggested and immediately removed the drenched sock, mechanically, indifferently. For a few seconds, he held it, still distastefully, between two fingers and then draped it over the back of his lounger, where it began to drip (the smell of wet cloth). Now he had one bare foot: the other was still covered by a pale blue sock and a rabidly red moccasin. The bare foot was wet and the covered foot very dry. I found it hard to look away from the former, but I think that fixing my gaze on something was a way of deceiving my ears, of pretending that what mattered were Viana’s feet and not what he had said, that one day he would have to kill Inès. I preferred to think he hadn’t said that.

  ‘What are you saying?’ I didn’t want to continue the conversation, but I said precisely the words that obliged him to do so: ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Crazy? What I’m going to tell you now is, in my view, totally logical,’ replied Viana and he again smoothed his non-existent hair. ‘I’ve known Inès since she was a child, since she was seven years old. Now she’s twenty-three. She’s the daughter of a couple who were great friends of mine until five years ago, but who no longer are—it’s perfectly normal, they’re furious that their eighteen-year-old daughter went off to live with a friend of theirs whom they’d always liked and respected, and now they want nothing more to do with me, and not even, almost, with her. I often used to go to their house and I’d see Inès, and I adored her. She adored me, too, but in a different way, of course. She couldn’t know at the time, but I knew at once, and I decided to prepare myself, to wait eleven years until she came of age, I didn’t want to act in haste and ruin everything, and during the last few months of that period, I was the one who had to hold her back. It’s what people call “fixation”, and what I call “adoration”. Not that it was easy, mind, even girls of twelve or thirteen have boys chasing after them, absurd boys who want to play at being adults from early on. They lack all self-control and can cause the girls great harm. I worked out that by the time she was eighteen, I would be nearly fifty, and so I took good care of myself, for her sake, I took enormous care of myself, although I couldn’t do anything about my weight—your metabolism changes as you get older—nor about my baldness, there’s still no satisfactory remedy for that, and as I’m sure you’ll agree, a toupee is too undignified, so I had to rule that out. But I spent eleven years going to gyms and eating healthily and having check-ups every three months—because I have an absolute horror of operations; avoiding other women, avoiding diseases; and, of course, preparing myself mentally: listening to the same records she listened to, learning games, watching loads of TV, children’s programmes and years of ads, I know all the jingles by heart. As for reading matter, well, you can imagine, first I read comics, then adventure books, a few romantic novels, Spanish literature when she was studying that at school, as well as Catalan literature, Manelic and the wolf and all that, and I still read whatever she happens to be reading, American writers mainly, there are hundreds of them. I’ve played a lot of tennis and squash, done a bit of skiing and, on weekends, I’ve often had to travel to Madrid or San Sebastián just so that she could go to the races, and here we’ve been to all the fiestas in all the villages to see the horses and their riders. You may also have noticed my motorcycle. When I had to, I learned the names and heights of every basketball player, although now she’s lost interest in the game. And you’ve seen how I dress, although, of course, in summer, anything goes.’ And Viana made an eloquent gesture with his right hand, as if taking in his whole outfit. ‘Do you see what I’m saying: all these years, I’ve led a parallel existence to my own (I’m a lawyer, by the way, specialising in divorce), first a childhood existence then an adolescent one—I was the king of video games—and since I couldn’t go to the cinema with her, I’d go on my own to see all those teenage films about thugs and extraterrestrials. I’ve led a parallel existence, but one that lacks all continuity, because it’s incredibly hard to keep up to date, young people’s fads change all the time. You can’t imagine what it’s like. You said that you and your wife are about the same age, so your field of reference will be the same or very similar. You’ll have listened to the same songs at the same time, you’ll have seen the same films and read the same books, followed the same fashions, you’ll remember the same events and have experienced them with the same intensity and in the same years. It’s easy for you. Just imagine if it wasn’t like that, imagine the long silences in your conversations. And the worst thing would be having to explain everything, every reference, every allusion, every joke about your own past or your own age, your own time. You might as well not bother. I’ve had a long wait and, what’s more, I’ve had to reject my own past and create—as far as possible—another one that coincides with hers, with what will become her past.’