While the Women Are Sleeping

by Javier Marías

  In 1898, by which time he, the best friend’s father, was a lieutenant colonel and married with seven children, it was clear that Commodore Schley was sure to win and that Cuba was about to fall to a foreign power, and he could not bear the thought of seeing anything other than a Spanish flag flying over the port of Havana. He hurriedly sold off all his possessions, hardened himself to the idea of leaving his native land for good and, despite never having left the island before and despite suffering from Ménière’s disease, he embarked for Spain along with all his family. After only a week on board ship, a particularly virulent attack of said disease ended his life: he was leaning on the rail up on deck, thinking and wondering (even allowing himself a frisson of excitement): what would it be like, that country whose name he knew so well? Suddenly, doubtless after being assailed by terrible noises and then by silence—to judge by his brief frantic gestures, first, of pain and, then, of stupefaction—he dropped dead. A cannonball was attached to his corpse and he was thrown overboard. He was about to turn fifty.

  In Spain, the eldest son, also called Isaac Custardoy, continued the military career he had begun in Cuba under the auspices of his father. Possessed of a genuine vocation and great determination, he rose very swiftly to the rank of colonel and became aide-de-camp to General Fernandez Silvestre. He lived in Madrid and, having always felt responsible for his younger siblings, watched over them and rarely left the city. In 1921, however, he had no option but to accompany his friend and commanding officer to Morocco. In the midst of the disastrous battle of Annual, when the Spanish troops had been scattered and defeated by the berbers of Abd-el-Krim, the General, Custardoy, and the general’s son, victims of the prevailing mayhem, mass panic and confusion, found themselves helpless and cut off from the rest of the main group; they did, however, have a truck at their disposal. Silvestre refused to leave the field and Custardoy refused to leave his commanding officer; between them, though, they persuaded the general’s son to drive to safety in the truck. The two soldiers were left to face the rout alone and their bodies were never found. Of Custardoy they retrieved only his field glasses and his leather belt. The two men had presumably been impaled. Isaac Custardoy was forty-five years of age. He left only a wife.

  Isaac Custardoy’s best friend spent his whole life trying to resolve that enigma: why had the mulatto beggar’s prediction been so absolutely right on two counts, but not on the third? The eldest son had no eldest son. The idea of an illegitimate heir was simply too banal. If none of the curse had been fulfilled, or if all of it had, then he would have been able to rest easy. Instead, he devoted his whole life to resolving the enigma.

  When he was old and bored with doing nothing, he used to enjoy reading the Bible. And one day, rereading it for the nth time, he paused over the words: And Abraham was fourscore and six years old when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abraham. Further on, he paused again: And Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born unto him. Yahweh had announced the birth of Isaac long before Ishmael, the son of Hagar, had been born—indeed, he was already thirteen when Sarah gave birth. This gave him cause to reflect: ‘Where was Isaac all that time, from the moment when his birth was prophesied to the moment when he was born, from the moment when his existence was predicted to the actual moment of conception?’ Well, he must have been somewhere, because Yahweh knew about him, as did Abraham and Sarah. This led him still further on, to his problem; it led him to think: ‘The birth of Isaac Custardoy’s grandson had been prophesied too, but he was never born, neither born nor engendered. But the mulatto beggar and Custardoy himself had known about him since 1873. Where had he been since then? He must have been somewhere.’

  He continued to ponder this and devoted what remained of his life to resolving the enigma. And when he was close to death, he wrote his thoughts down on a piece of paper: ‘I sense that I am about to die, to set off on my final journey. What will become of me? Where will I go? Will I go anywhere? I can sense the approach of death because I have lived and was engendered, because I’m still alive; death, therefore, is not perfect or all-embracing, it cannot prevent something other than itself from existing; it has to put up with the fact that something waits for it and thinks about it. Someone who has not been born or, even more so, someone who has not even been engendered or conceived is the one thing that belongs to death entirely. The person who has not been conceived dies most. He or she has travelled unceasingly along that most tortuous and labyrinthine of paths: the path of contingency. He or she is the only one who will have neither homeland nor grave. That person is Isaac Custardoy. I, on the other hand, I am not.’

  (1978)

  what the butler said

  For Domitilla Cavalletti

  ‘ON A RECENT brief stay in New York, one of the two things that Europeans most dread happening to them happened: I was trapped for half an hour in a lift between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth floors of a skyscraper. I don’t, however, want to talk about the fear I felt nor the more than justified claustrophobia that made me shout out (yes, I admit it) every few minutes, but about the man who was riding with me when the lift stopped and with whom I shared that half-hour of confidences and terror. He was immaculately dressed and extremely circumspect (in that difficult situation, he only shouted once and stopped when he realised that we had been heard and located). He looked exactly like the butlers you see in films and, as it turned out, he was a butler in real life. In exchange for a little incoherent, disparate information about my country, he gave me the following account of his life while we waited in that large vertical coffin: he was working for a wealthy young couple comprising the president of one of the largest and most famous American cosmetic companies and his recently acquired European wife. They lived in a five-storey mansion; they travelled around the city in an eight-door limousine with smoked-glass windows (like the one belonging to the late President Kennedy, he added), and he, the butler, was one of their four servants (all of them white, he said). The butler’s hobby was black magic, and he had already managed to obtain a lock of his young mistress’s hair, having cut it off while she was taking a nap in an armchair one very hot, very sleepy afternoon. He told me all this quite calmly and despite my own panic, I managed to listen to him relatively calmly. I asked him why he had so cruelly cut off that lock of hair. Had she perhaps mistreated him?

  ‘”Not yet,” he replied, “but sooner or later she will. It’s a precautionary measure. Besides, if something does happen, how else could I exact my revenge? How can a man avenge himself these days? Besides, the practice of black magic is very fashionable in America. Isn’t it in Europe?” I told him that, with the possible exception of Turin, it was not and asked if he couldn’t use his black magic to get us out of that lift. “The kind of magic I practice can only be used for acts of revenge. Who do you want us to take our revenge on, the lift company the architect, Mayor Koch? We might succeed, but that wouldn’t get us out of here. Besides, it won’t be long now. “It wasn’t long in fact, and once the lift was moving again and we had reached the ground floor, the butler wished me a pleasant stay in his city and vanished as if our half hour together had never existed.’

  Thus began an article which, under the heading ‘Vengeance and the Butler’, I published in the Spanish newspaper El País on Monday; 21 December 1987. Then the article lost sight of the butler and turned its attentions to the subject of revenge. It was not, therefore, the right place in which to transcribe in detail everything that my travelling companion had told me, indeed, on that occasion, I altered one fact completely and said nothing about the rest. Perhaps I did this because the queen of the cosmetics company was also Spanish. She might, I thought, be a reader of El País, or perhaps, if I stuck too closely to the facts, some acquaintance of hers in Spain might recognise her and pass on the article. I confess that I was guided more by the desire not to get the butler into trouble than by any desire to alert the queen to some hypothetical danger. This is perhaps the moment though, now that my gratitude towards the form
er has somewhat faded and the chances of the latter ever reading this story are infinitely fewer. Not that I have any other means of alerting her, not at least discreetly. While she may read newspapers, I doubt very much that she reads books, certainly not stories written by a compatriot. But that won’t be my fault: the books we don’t read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late. Anyway, my conscience will be clearer if I give her the possibility, however remote, of taking precautions, but without my feeling that I have also betrayed the butler who so kindly reassured me and helped make that wait in the lift more bearable. The one fact I had changed in my article was that the marriage was not so very recent and so the butler was not, as I had him say, awaiting any possible future affronts from his mistress: he was in fact, according to him, already a constant victim of such affronts. What follows are his words, insofar as I can now remember and set them down, although not in any very orderly fashion, since I no longer feel able to reproduce that conversation accurately, and can only recall a few of the things he said.

  THE BUTLER SAID:

  ‘I don’t know if all Spanish women are the same, but the one example I’ve known is truly horrible. She’s vain, rather dim, and very rude and cruel, and I hope you’ll forgive me speaking like this about a woman from your country.’

  ‘That’s fine, feel free, say anything you like,’ I replied generously, although without paying much attention.

  The butler said:

  ‘I realise that what I say will have little authority or value, and could simply be interpreted as my getting something off my chest. I wish the world was made in such a way that there could be some direct confrontation between us—between my accusations and hers, or between my accusations and her defence—without grave consequences for me, by which I mean dismissal. There aren’t that many families who can take on a butler, not even in New York—there aren’t a lot of jobs out there—very few people can afford one servant, let alone four, as my employers can. Things were pretty much perfect until she arrived, for my boss is very pleasant and hardly ever at home, and he was single when I started working for him five years ago. Well, he was divorced actually, and that’s my one hope really, that he’ll end up divorcing her too, sooner or later. But it might be later, and it’s best to be prepared. I’ve finished my course in black magic now. Most of it was by correspondence initially, and then I had a few practical lessons. I have my diploma. Not that I’ve done much with it. We get together occasionally to kill a chicken, very unpleasant, as you can imagine—you get covered in feathers, the bird puts up quite a fight, you know, but we have to sacrifice something now and then, because, if we didn’t, our organisation would lose all credibility.’

  I remember that this last comment worried me briefly and made me listen much more closely, and that’s why, hoping my fear might be dissipated by another greater fear, I banged on the lift door again, pressing the alarm button and the buttons for all the other floors and shouting out several times: ‘Hey! Listen! We’re still trapped in here! We’re still in here!’

  The butler said:

  ‘Take it easy, nothing’s going to happen to us. It’s a big lift, there’s plenty of air, and they know we’re here. People may be pretty callous these days, but they’re not likely to forget two people trapped in a lift, and besides, they need to get it working again. Now, my mistress, your compatriot, she really is callous, she mistreats everyone, or, worse, ignores them. She has the ability, which is perhaps more common in Europe than in the United States, to talk to us as if we weren’t there, without looking at us, without noticing us, she speaks to us without actually addressing us, exactly as if she were talking about us to a friend. A little while ago, an Italian girlfriend of hers came to stay, and although they were talking in one of their languages, neither of which I understand, I could tell that a lot of their conversations were about us, and about me in particular, because I’ve been there the longest, so I suppose in a way I’m in charge of the other servants. She can make a remark about me in my presence without giving the slightest hint that she’s talking about me, but her friend, lacking that talent, couldn’t help shooting me the occasional furtive glance with her green eyes as they chatted away in their Latin languages, whichever one it was. On the other hand, during the weeks that her friend was in the house, she did, at least, have other things to think about and took less notice of me. Let me explain, she’s been here for three years now, but she still speaks English really badly, with a very strong accent, so much so that sometimes I find it hard to understand her, and this irritates her of course, because she thinks I do it on purpose to offend her, which is partly true, but I can assure you that most of the time it’s simply because I don’t always make the necessary effort to understand her, that effort of comprehension and listening, or sometimes guessing. The truth is that after three years, even a city like New York can become wearisome and tedious if you have nothing to do. My boss goes to work every morning and doesn’t get back until late, until the Spanish time for supper, which she has imposed on him. You may not realise it, but cosmetics are a complicated business: like pharmaceuticals, you constantly have to research and perfect them, you can’t just settle for a fixed range of products. According to him, there are incredible advances made every year, every month, and you have to keep up to date, just like with drugs. Anyway, he works for twelve hours or more, and is only home at night and on the weekends, and that’s about it. Naturally, she gets pretty bored, because she’s bought just about everything she can buy for the house, although she still keeps an eye out for any novelties: any new product or gadget or invention, any new fashion, any new Broadway show or exhibition or film, she immediately homes in on them, more quickly than even a city like this can cope with.’

  By this point, I was sitting on the lift floor. He, on the other hand, immaculate and circumspect, remained standing, still in coat and gloves, one hand resting on the wall and one foot elegantly crossed over the other. His shoes were unnaturally shiny.

  The butler said:

  ‘So generally speaking, she’s at home, with nothing to do, apart from watching television and making long-distance calls to her friends in Spain, inviting them to visit, not that they often do, which is hardly surprising. When she can’t talk any more, when she’s tired from so much talking and her eyes hurt from watching so much TV, then the only thing she can think of is to fixate on me, because I’m always home, or almost always, I’m the one who knows where everything is or where to find things if we have to send out for something. She fixates on me, you see, and there’s nothing worse than being someone’s sole source of distraction. Sometimes she betrays herself, or, rather, betrays her usual disdainful self: without realising it, she’ll find that for some minutes she hasn’t been giving me orders or asking me pointless questions, but has actually been talking to me—imagine that, conversing.’

  I remember that, at this point, I got up and pounded on the door again with the flat of my hand. I was about to shout out again too, but decided to follow the example of the butler, who spoke very calmly, as if we were, in fact, outside the lift, waiting for it to arrive. I remained standing, like him, and asked:

  ‘What do you talk about?’

  The butler said:

  ‘Oh, she makes some remark about something she’s read in a magazine or about some contest she’s seen on TV. There’s one particular show that’s on every evening at half past seven, just before my boss gets home, Family Feud, she’s crazy about it and everything has to stop at half past seven so that she can give it her full attention. She turns out the lights, leaves the phone off the hook, and during the half-hour that Family Feud lasts, we could do absolutely anything, even set the house on fire, and she wouldn’t notice; we could go into her bedroom, where she watches TV, and burn the bed, and she wouldn’t notice. During that time, the only thing that exists is the TV screen. I’ve only seen that capacity for total concentration in children, but then she is rather like a child. While she�
�s watching Family Feud, I could commit murder, I could slit the throat of one of our chickens behind her back and scatter its blood and feathers over her sheets, and she wouldn’t notice. When the half-hour was up, she’d get to her feet, look around her and scream: “Where has all this blood and feathers come from? What’s happened?” But she wouldn’t have noticed me slitting the chicken’s throat. We could steal paintings, furniture, jewellery, we could bring our friends over and have an orgy on her bed while she’s watching Family Feud. We don’t, of course, because it’s also our boss’s bed, and we like and respect him. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that we could even rape her while she’s watching Family Feud, and she wouldn’t notice. Before I realised this, I always had to find an opportune moment, as I explained, to snip off a lock of her hair or steal an item of clothing, underwear or whatever, a handkerchief or some stockings. But now, if I wanted to steal some personal possession of hers, I’d just wait until half past seven from Monday to Friday and take what I wanted while she watched her show. I’ll tell you something, just so you can see that I’m not exaggerating. I conducted an experiment once, which is why I say that we could rape her and she wouldn’t notice. On one occasion, I went up behind her while she was watching Family Feud. She sits very close to the screen, very upright on a kind of low stool, probably thinking that the discomfort will help her to concentrate. One evening, I approached her from behind and touched her shoulder with my gloved hand, as if I wanted to get her attention. She insists that I always wear gloves, you see, I only have to put on full livery when there are guests for supper, but she likes me to wear my white silk gloves all the time, in the belief that a butler should be constantly running his finger over every surface, over the furniture and along the banisters, to check for dust, because if there is any dust, the gloves will pick it up immediately. Anyway, I always wear them, but they’re so fine that it’s almost like not wearing gloves at all. So, I touched her shoulder with my sensitive fingers, and when she took no notice, I left my hand there for a few seconds and gradually increased the pressure. So far, nothing very out of the ordinary. She didn’t turn round, didn’t move, nothing. Then I moved my hand—I was still standing up—stroking rather than squeezing her shoulders and collarbone, and she remained utterly impassive. I began to wonder if perhaps she was inviting me to go further, and I have to admit that I’m still not sure; but I don’t think so, I still believe she was just so absorbed in watching Family Feud that she didn’t notice anything. And so I slid my gloved hand towards her cleavage, she always wears very low-cut tops, too low-cut for my taste, but my boss, on the other hand, likes it, I’ve heard him say so. I touched her bra, which was a bit rough to the touch to be honest, and it was that, rather than any desire on my part, that persuaded me to avoid the bra or, shall we say, arrange things so that its fabric only rubbed against the back of my hand, which is less sensitive than the palm, even though I was wearing my gloves. I’m not much for the ladies, I barely have anything to do with them, but skin is skin, flesh is flesh. And so for several long minutes I stroked one breast and then the other, left and right, breast and nipple, it was very pleasant, and she didn’t move or say anything, didn’t even change position while she was watching her show. I think I could have carried on if Family Feud lasted longer, but then I saw that the host was about to say goodnight and I withdrew my hand. I was able to tiptoe backwards out of the room before she emerged from her trance. My boss got home that night at eight o’clock on the dot—and the theme tune was still playing on the TV.’