One summer night, while we were sitting outside a café in Rosales, drinking and not talking (initially, we still found it hard to sustain a conversation), a fight broke out that had nothing to do with us, except that we happened to be sitting quite close to the two men arguing and exchanging insults and blows and generally getting worked up, to the extent that one of them smashed a beer bottle and, wielding the bottle as a weapon, hurled himself on the other man. For a second, I saw fear in Tomás’s eyes, as if he imagined that the man with the bottle was about to slit his throat rather than the man’s opponent, who, meanwhile, had snatched up a wicker chair as a somewhat flimsy shield. Once that second had passed, though, the look in Tomás’s eyes hardened and, without further thought, he sprang to his feet, went over to the attacker and, before the latter was even aware of his presence, grabbed the arm holding the weapon and, with his other hand, punched the man, delivered one short, sharp punch; I didn’t see where exactly he punched him, but the man slumped to the ground. He fell like a sack suspended from a beam when someone suddenly cuts the rope. He lay there crumpled and unconscious, as if felled by that single blow. I sensed that Tomás must have done this or something similar before. Then, in 1994 (I’m rereading and revising and recalling these notes after two decades or more, notes I stopped taking ages ago), such altercations could still be resolved with no need for formal complaints, without even getting the police involved. Tomás himself helped revive the man a little, making sure he hadn’t sustained any serious injury, and handed him over to the care of the other drunks accompanying him (although the shock had instantly sobered them all up), and then we left. I was slightly alarmed by his violent reaction, but also felt glad to know that he could, if necessary, defend himself and, therefore, us.
Yet now, a year and a half later, I see that he’s shrugged off that continual state of tension and alert. On the contrary, he often seems melancholy and passive. When he comes to our apartment, and I’m busy and the children are out, he spends ages standing on one of the balconies, his gaze fixed on the trees that, for years and years, were mine alone. Or he sits on the sofa deep in thought, while I’m in my study preparing my classes. And when I go back into the living room, and it’s grown dark, there he still is, as if, for him, time hadn’t passed. I don’t know what he’s thinking or remembering, I don’t know what inner depths he plumbs and never will. I tell myself that we all have our secret sadnesses. Even those of us who have stayed quietly at home and never experienced any drama, any turbulence. Or to quote Dickens – at least I think it was him – who I sometimes have to teach: ‘… every human creature is destined to be a profound secret and mystery to every other creature. A solemn thought comes to me whenever I enter a great city by night: that every one of those darkly clustered houses and every room in every house contains its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts hidden there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it, the one that drowses and beats by its side. And there is in all of that something akin to awe …’
When I see Tomás sitting there, pensive and weary or perhaps lost in remembrance of things past, I’m assailed by the unpleasant memory of Miguel Ruiz Kindelán’s words on that worst of mornings: ‘No one ever emerges from that business well,’ he told me, the lighter still open in his hand, and referring to the ‘business’ in which Tomás was involved. ‘I’ve known a couple of men like him, and they usually come out either mad or dead. And those who survive end up not knowing who they are. They lose their life or it splits in two, and those two parts are irreconcilable, mutually repellent. Some try to return to normality years later and just can’t do it, they don’t know how to reintegrate themselves into civilian life, or else enforced retirement simply finishes them off. It makes no difference what age they are. If they’re no good any more or are burned out, they’re withdrawn from service, just like that, sent home or left to vegetate in an office, and some individuals don’t even reach thirty before feeling that their time has passed. They miss their days of action, of villainy, deceit and falsehood. They remain attached to their murky past, and are sometimes overwhelmed by remorse: when they stop, they realise that what they did achieved little or nothing; that they weren’t indispensable; that anyone could have done what they did and with the same result. They also discover that no one will thank them for their efforts or their talent, their astuteness or their patience or their sacrifices, that they will receive no gratitude, no admiration, not in those invisible worlds. What was important for them is of no importance to anyone else, but merely an unknown past …’
He’s not always like that, far from it. He has very busy, active days too, he’s learned to enjoy his new or old job, and every few months, he travels to England as he did before, but now he’s only ever away for a week at most, and he phones me almost every day, as dusk is falling, when he’s finished work. When he’s in Madrid, though, these ruminative moods come upon him more frequently, or perhaps they’re moments of surrender, as if, unlike his state of mind before he returned to normal life, when everything was so tentative and uncertain, he had now accepted that he would be defenceless if confronted by someone who did remember him, someone who hadn’t mellowed over time and who had come to settle some distant account with him; as if he were no longer prepared to run away or defend himself if it came to it; as if he were tired of waiting or tired of feeling afraid, and had said to himself: ‘At last they’ve found me. I shouldn’t complain. I was given a lot of extra time. Useless, meaningless time, but nevertheless time to spend in the universe. And since all such respites must have an end, so be it.’
I don’t know, though, because, one night, we went to the cinema together. When the film ended and the lights went up, and as he was unfolding the raincoat he’d placed on his lap, a small revolver fell to the floor, the sound muffled by the carpet. I stared at him in astonishment before he’d realised what had happened and swiftly picked up the gun and put it back in his pocket. Fortunately, no one else noticed.
‘What’s that gun for?’
‘Oh, nothing, don’t worry. I’ve just been used to carrying it around, and have been for years.’
‘Do you always have it with you?’
‘No, not always, and less and less now.’
So I don’t know if this means he would defend himself if he had to or if he hasn’t discounted the possibility that he might shoot himself one day, if he turns out to be the one anchored in the past, the one who remembers and can’t bear his own continued existence on Earth. When he sits looking at the trees from his place on the sofa, I wonder vaguely what horrors he must have accumulated over the years, while I was playing no part in his life, neither his living nor his dead life. It’s a blessing really not to know, it’s good that he’s not authorised to say anything; after all, why make a story out of something that simply happens. Most people would insist that the opposite is true, that nothing simply happens. They’re the kind who revisit and repeat what happened until the end of days, and never let it stop happening.
I often tell myself that there’s nothing so very odd about the fact that I don’t really know my husband, just as I don’t really know anyone else. Dickens also wrote, if the words that surface in my memory are indeed his: ‘My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, my heart’s darling, is dead, and that means the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always there in them … In any of this city’s cemeteries through which I walk, is there a sleeper more inscrutable to me than its busy inhabitants are in their innermost selves, or than I am to them?’ Even as a boy, an adolescent, Tomás was never interested in knowing or deciphering himself, in finding out what kind of person he was. This seemed to him a job for narcissists and a waste of time. Perhaps he hasn’t changed in that respect, despite all he’s been through, or perhaps he’s always known this ever since his consciousness took its first steps. So why should I struggle to understand someone who doesn’t even bother to observe himself. W
e expect a lot of ourselves, we think we can get to the bottom of people, especially the person who lies dozing and breathing beside us in bed.
He does occasionally spend the night in my bed, but not often, or else I stay with him in his garret in Calle Lepanto; if the children need me, I’m very near, they just have to phone or run across the square, where there are no cars, and, besides, they’re older now. Tomás still doesn’t sleep deeply; he’s restless and anxious and mumbles in his sleep, but he does sleep. When I look at him, I feel like softly stroking the back of his neck and whispering: ‘Lie very still, my love. Don’t move or turn around, that way sleep will come upon you without you realising it and gradually, in your nightmares, you’ll stop thinking. It’s just as well you don’t tell me what it is you think about for hours and hours, at all hours, sleeping and awake. You’re always thinking something, and, luckily, I don’t know what that something is. I’m far better off with the blank page. I know you have your reasons, and you’re fated now to have a brain that never stops thinking.’ But I resist the temptation and say nothing, nor will I say it however long I live. I keep it to myself and simply think those words. Saying it to him would be a gift too far, even if he didn’t hear me: he was away from me for far too long, he even declared himself dead, left his body on some distant shore.
Sometimes, when he’s standing on the balcony, looking out, absorbed in thought, he runs his thumbnail over the scar on his cheek, a scar that hasn’t existed for ages, and which was swiftly erased by surgery. Then I speculate about what he might be thinking when he recalls an invisible mark that only he remembers and whose origin he alone knows, probably not the result of a mugging, but something more premeditated, an act of revenge or a punishment. And he may be thinking that, basically, he belongs to the category of people who don’t see themselves as protagonists, not even of their own story, their lives shaken and shaped by others from the very start; who discover halfway through that, regardless of the uniqueness of each individual’s story, their story will not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting another person’s more eventful and interesting life. Not even as a way of passing the time during some prolonged after-dinner conversation, or sitting beside the fire one sleepless night. That is what usually happens to lives which, like mine and his, and like so many, many others, simply exist and wait.
Acknowledgements
The translator would like to thank Javier Marías for all his help and advice, and, as always, Annella McDermott and Ben Sherriff for their unfailing support.
THE BEGINNING
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HAMISH HAMILTON
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Hamish Hamilton is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Spain by Alfaguara, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial S.A.U. 2017
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2018
Copyright © Javier Marías, 2017
Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa, 2018
Extracts taken from ‘Little Gidding’, ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, copyright © Estate of T. S. Eliot, from Collected Poems 1909–62.
Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
Cover image © Quentin de Briey
ISBN: 978-0-241-98356-0
Berta Isla Page 48
