While the Women Are Sleeping

by Javier Marías

  The worst thing, though, was not the resemblance itself (after all, other people have learned to live with it). Until then, I had never seen myself. I mean, a photo immobilises us, and in the mirror we always see ourselves the other way round (for example, I always part my hair on the right, like Cary Grant, but in the mirror, I am someone who parts his hair on the left, like Clark Gable); and, since I am not famous and have never been interested in movie cameras, I had never seen myself on television or on video either. In Gualta, therefore, I saw myself for the first time, talking, moving, gesticulating, pausing, laughing, in profile, wiping my mouth with my napkin, and scratching my nose. It was my first real experience of myself as object, something which is normally enjoyed only by the famous or by those who play around with video cameras.

  And I hated myself. That is, I hated Gualta, who was identical to me. That smooth Catalan not only struck me as entirely lacking in charm (although my wife—who is gorgeous—said to me later at home, I imagine merely to flatter me, that she had found him attractive), he seemed affected, prissy, overbearing in his views, mannered in his gestures, full of his own charisma (commercial charisma, I mean), openly right-wing in his views (we both, of course, voted for the same party), pretentious in his choice of words and unscrupulous in matters of business. We were even official supporters of the most conservative soccer clubs in our respective cities: he of Espanol and I of Adético. I saw myself in Gualta and in Gualta I saw an utterly repellent individual, capable of anything, potential firing squad material. As I say, I unhesitatingly hated myself.

  And it was from that night, without even informing my wife of my intentions, that I began to change. Not only had I discovered that in the city of Barcelona there existed a being identical to myself whom I detested, I was afraid too that, in each and every sphere of life, at each and every moment of the day, that being would think, do and say everything exactly the same as me. I knew that we kept the same office hours, that he lived alone, without children, with his wife, exactly like me. There was nothing to stop him living my life. I thought: ‘Everything I do, every step I take, every hand I shake, every word I say, every letter I dictate, every thought I have, every kiss I give my wife, will be being done, taken, shaken, said, dictated, thought, given to his wife by Gualta. This can’t go on.’

  After that unfortunate encounter, I knew that we would meet again four months later, at the big party being given to celebrate the fifth anniversary of our company, American in origin, and now being set up in Spain. And during that time, I applied myself to the task of modifying my appearance: I cultivated a moustache, which took a long while to grow; sometimes, instead of a tie, I would wear an elegant cravat; I started smoking (English cigarettes); and I even tried to disguise my receding hairline with a discreet Japanese hair implant (the kind of self-conscious, effeminate thing that neither Gualta nor my former self would ever have allowed himself to do). As for my behaviour, I spoke more robustly, I avoided expressions such as ‘horizontal integration or ‘deal dynamics’ once so dear to Gualta and to myself; I stopped pouring wine for ladies during supper; I stopped helping them on with their coats; I would even occasionally swear.

  Four months later, at that Barcelona celebration, I met a Gualta who was sporting a stunted moustache and who appeared to have more hair than I remembered; he was chainsmoking John Players and instead of a tie, he was wearing a bow tie; he kept slapping his thighs when he laughed, digging people with his elbow, and exclaiming frequently: ‘fucking hell!’ I found him just as hateful as before. That night, I too was wearing a bow tie.

  From then on the process of change in my own abominable person really took off. I conscientiously sought out everything that an excessively suave, smooth, serious, sententious man like Gualta (he was also very devout) could never have brought himself to do, and at times and in places when it was most unlikely that Gualta, in Barcelona, would be devoting his time and space to committing the same excesses as me. I began arriving late at work and leaving early, making coarse remarks to the secretaries, I would fly into a rage at the slightest thing and frequently insult my staff and I would even make mistakes, never very serious ones, but which a man like Gualta, however—so punctilious, such a perfectionist—would never have made. And that was just at work. As for my wife, whom I always treated with extreme respect and veneration (until I turned thirty), I managed, gradually, subtly, to persuade her not only to have sex at odd times and in unsuitable places (’I bet Gualta is never this daring,’ I thought one night as we lay together, in some haste, on the roof of a newspaper kiosk in Calle Principe de Vergara), but also to engage in sexual deviations that only months before, in the unlikely event of our ever actually having heard of them (through someone else, of course), we would have described as humiliating or even as sexual atrocities. We committed unnatural acts, that beautiful woman and I.

  After three months, I awaited with impatience my next encounter with Gualta, confident that now he would be very different from me. However, the occasion did not arise and, finally, one weekend, I decided to go to Barcelona myself with the intention of watching his house in order to discover, albeit from afar, any possible changes in his person or in his personality. Or, rather, to confirm the efficacy of the alterations I had made to myself.

  For eighteen hours (spread over Saturday and Sunday) I took refuge in a café from which I could watch Gualta’s building and wait for him to come out. He did not appear, however, and, just when I was wondering whether I should return defeated to Madrid or go up to his apartment, even if I risked possibly bumping into him, I suddenly saw his nonentity of a wife come out of the front door. She was rather carelessly dressed, as if her spouse’s success were no longer sufficient to embellish her artificially or as if its effect did not extend to weekends. On the other hand, though, it seemed to me, as she walked past the darkened glass concealing me, that she was somehow more provocative than the woman I had seen at the supper in Madrid and at the party in Barcelona. The reason was very simple and it was enough to make me realise that I had not been as original as I thought nor had the measures I’d taken been wise: the look on her face was that of a salacious, sexually dissolute woman. Though very different, she had the same slight (and very attractive) squint, the same troubling, clouded gaze as my own stunner of a wife.

  I returned to Madrid convinced that the reason Gualta had not left his apartment all weekend was because that same weekend he had travelled to Madrid and had spent hours sitting in La Orotava, the café opposite our building, waiting for me to leave, which I had not done because I was in Barcelona watching his house which he had not left because he was in Madrid watching mine. There was no escape.

  I made a few further, but by now rather half-hearted, attempts. Minor details to complete the transformation: like becoming an official supporter of Real Madrid, in the belief that no supporter of Espanol would ever be allowed into Barça; or else I would order anisette or aniseed liqueur—drinks I find repugnant—in some dingy bar on the outskirts, sure that a man of Gualta’s refined tastes would not be prepared to make such sacrifices; I also started insulting the Pope in public, certain that my rival, a fervent Catholic, would never go that far. In fact, I wasn’t sure of anything and I think that now I never will be. A year and a half after I first met Gualta, my fast-track career in the company for which I still work has come to an abrupt halt, and I expect to be fired (with severance pay, of course) any day now. A little while ago, without any explanation, my wife left me, either because she had grown weary of perversion or else, on the contrary, because my fantasies no longer sufficed and she needed to go in search of fresh dissipations. Will Gualta’s nonentity of a wife have done the same? Is his position in the company as precarious as mine? I will never know, because I prefer not to.

  For the moment has arrived when, if I did arrange to meet Gualta, two things could happen, both equally terrifying, or at least, more terrifying than uncertainty: I could find a man utterly different from the one I first met and id
entical to the current me (scruffy, demoralised, shiftless, boorish, a blasphemer and a pervert) whom I will, however, possibly find just as awful as the Xavier de Gualta I met the first time. As regards the other possibility, that’s even worse: I might find the Gualta I first met, unchanged: impassive, courteous, boastful, elegant, devout and successful. And if that were the case, I would have to ask myself, with a bitterness I could not bear, why, of the two of us, had I been the one to abandon and renounce my own biography?

  (1986)

  one night of love

  My sex life with my wife, Marta, is most unsatisfactory. My wife is neither very lascivious nor very imaginative, she never whispers sweet nothings and usually yawns whenever I happen to be in the mood. That’s why I occasionally go to prostitutes, but even they have grown increasingly nervous as well as increasingly expensive, and monotonous too, not to mention unenthusiastic. I would much prefer it if my wife, Marta, were more lascivious and imaginative and that I could be satisfied with her alone. I was happy on the one night when she did satisfy me.

  Among the things my father left me when he died is a packet of letters that still gives off a faint whiff of cologne. I don’t believe the sender actually perfumed the letter herself, but rather, I assume that, at some point in his life, my father kept the letters near a bottle of cologne that one day spilled onto them. You can still see the stain, and so the smell is clearly that of the cologne my father both used and didn’t use (given that the contents were spilled), and not that of the woman who sent him the letters. Moreover, the smell is characteristic of him, a smell I knew very well, that never changed and which I’ve never forgotten, the same throughout my childhood and adolescence and a good part of my youth, an age in which I am still installed or have not yet abandoned. That is why, before age diminished my interest in things amorous or passionate, I decided to read the letters he bequeathed to me and about which, up until then, I had felt no curiosity at all.

  The letters were written by a woman who was and still is called Mercedes. She wrote in black ink on blue paper. Her handwriting is large and maternal, made with rapid strokes of the pen, as if she no longer aspired to making an impression, doubtless aware that she had already caused an impression that would last forever. It’s as if the letters had been written by someone who had already died when she wrote them, like letters from beyond the grave. I can’t help thinking that it was some kind of game, one of those games of which children and lovers are so fond, and that consist basically in pretending to be what you’re not, or, put another way, in giving each other fictitious names and creating fictitious lives, afraid perhaps (this applies to lovers, not children) that their overpowering feelings will destroy them if they admit that they, with their real lives and names, are the people having those feelings. It’s a way of blunting the most passionate and most intense of emotions, pretending that the whole thing is happening to someone else; it’s also the best way of observing it, of being an aware spectator. Yes, experiencing it and, at the same time, being aware of it.

  The woman who signed herself Mercedes had opted for the fiction of sending her love to my father after she had already died, and so convinced was she of the eternal place and time she occupied while writing them (or so sure that the addressee would accept this convention) that she appeared entirely unconcerned by the fact that she had to entrust her envelopes to the post-box or that they bore the normal stamps and postmarks of the city of Gijón. They were all dated, and the only thing missing was a return address, but that is more or less obligatory in any semi-clandestine affair (the letters all belong to the period of my father’s widowhood, but he never spoke to me of this late passion). Nor is there anything unusual about the existence of this correspondence—though I have no idea whether my father replied in the usual way—for there is nothing more commonplace than widowers in sexual thrall to bold, fiery (or disillusioned) women. The declarations, promises, demands, reminiscences, outbursts, protests, exclamations and obscenities (especially obscenities) that fill these letters are conventional enough and remarkable less for their style than for their audacity. None of this would be of any interest if, only a few days after deciding to open the packet and peruse the blue sheets with rather more equanimity than shock, I myself had not received a letter from that woman called Mercedes, of whom I couldn’t say: She’s still alive, because she seems to have been dead from the start.

  Her letter was very proper, and she didn’t presume a relationship with me simply because she had once been on intimate terms with my father, nor was she so vulgar as to translate her love for the father, now that he was dead, into an unhealthy love for his son, who was and is still alive and was and is still me. Seemingly completely unembarrassed that I should know about their relationship, she restricted herself to setting before me an anxiety, a complaint and a demand for the presence of her lover, who, despite his repeated promises, had still not joined her six months after his death: he had failed to meet her in the place or perhaps I should say time agreed. This, in her view, could be put down to one of two reasons: to a sudden, last-minute cooling of his affections at the moment of death that would have caused the deceased to break his promise, or to his having been buried and not cremated (as he had requested), and which—according to Mercedes, who spoke of this as if it were the most natural thing in the world—could prevent or obstruct their eschatological meeting or reunion.

  It was true that despite my fathers request to be cremated, although he had not insisted on it (perhaps because he made this request only at the end, when his willpower was weakened), he had nevertheless been buried alongside my mother, because there was space for him in the family vault, and Marta and I felt it was the appropriate, sensible, convenient thing to do. Mercedes’ letter seemed to me a joke in the very worst taste. I threw it in the rubbish bin and was even tempted to do the same with the old letters too. Like them, the new envelope bore fresh stamps and was postmarked in Gijón. It didn’t smell of anything though. I wasn’t prepared to disinter my father’s remains merely in order to set fire to them.

  The next letter arrived soon afterwards, and in it, Mercedes, as if she could read my thoughts, begged me to cremate my father because she could not go on living (that’s what she said, go on living) in that state of uncertainty. Rather than continue waiting for him for all eternity, possibly in vain, she would prefer to know that my father had decided not to rejoin her. In this letter, she still addressed me with the formal usted. I can’t deny that I was fleetingly moved (that is, while I was reading the letter, not afterwards), but the conspicuous Asturias postmark was too prosaic for me to be able to see it as anything but a macabre joke. The second letter took its place in the rubbish bin as well. My wife, Marta, saw me tearing it up and asked:

  ‘What is it that’s annoyed you so much?’ My gestures must have been somewhat violent. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said and carefully gathered up the pieces so that she wouldn’t be able to put them back together again.

  I waited for a third letter, which, precisely because I did wait for it, took longer than expected to arrive or perhaps time spent waiting just seems longer. It was quite different from the previous letters and resembled those my father used to receive. Mercedes addressed me now with the familiar tu, and offered me her body, if not her soul. ‘You can do what you like with me,’ she said, ‘whatever you can imagine or wouldn’t even dare to imagine doing to someone else. If you grant my plea to disinter and cremate your father and allow him to rejoin me, you will never forget me for as long as you live, not even when you die, because I will gobble you up, and you will gobble me up.’ I believe I blushed when I read this for the first time, and for a fraction of a second I toyed with the idea of going straight to Gijón to offer myself to her (I’m drawn to the weird and the dirty in sex). But then I immediately thought: ‘How absurd. I don’t even know her last name.’ That third letter, however, did not end up in the rubbish bin. I still have it hidden away.

  It was about then that Marta underwent a chan
ge of attitude. I don’t mean that, from one day to the next, she stopped yawning and became a woman of unbridled passion, but she did begin to show a greater interest in and curiosity about me and my no longer very young body, as if she sensed an infidelity on my part and was on the alert, or as if she herself had been unfaithful and wanted to find out if some newly discovered technique might be possible with me as well.

  ‘Come here,’ she would say sometimes, and she had never made such overtures to me before. Or she would utter a few words, for example: ‘Yes, yes, now.’

  The third letter that had promised so much had left me waiting for a fourth letter even more anxiously than the second irritating letter had left me waiting for the third. But no fourth letter arrived, and I realised that I was beginning to wait for the post each day with growing impatience. I noticed that my heart turned over whenever an envelope arrived bearing no return address, and then my eyes would glance rapidly at the postmark, to see if it was from Gijón. But no one ever writes from Gijón.

  Months passed, and on All Souls’ Day, Marta and I took flowers to my parents’ grave, in which my grandparents and my sister are also buried.

  ‘What will happen to us, do you think?’ I said to Marta, as we breathed in the clean cemetery air from a bench close to our family vault. I was smoking a cigarette, and she was studying her nails, holding her spread fingers some distance from her, like someone urging a crowd to remain calm. ‘I mean, when we die. There’s no room here now.’

  ‘The things you think about.’

  I gazed off into the distance in order to give myself an appropriately dreamy air that would justify what I was about to say, and I said:

  ‘I’d like to be buried. Burial is more suggestive of repose than cremation. My father wanted to be cremated, do you remember, and we didn’t do what he wanted. We should have, I think. It would bother me to think that my wish to be buried were ignored. What do you think? I’m thinking we ought to disinter him. That way, there’d be room for me when I die. You could go to your parents’ vault.’