Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  Javier Marías

  * * *

  THUS BAD BEGINS

  TRANSLATED BY

  MARGARET JULL COSTA

  Contents

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V

  PART VI

  PART VII

  PART VIII

  PART IX

  PART X

  PART XI

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOLLOW PENGUIN

  THUS BAD BEGINS

  Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published sixteen novels, including, most recently, The Infatuations, as well as two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

  Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz’s masterpiece The Maias, and, most recently, the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant’s Journey by José Saramago.

  By the same author

  All Souls

  A Heart So White

  Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

  When I was Mortal

  Dark Back of Time

  The Man of Feeling

  Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

  Voyage along the Horizon

  Written Lives

  Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

  Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

  Bad Nature, or with Elvis in Mexico

  While the Women are Sleeping

  The Infatuations

  To Tano Díaz Yanes,

  after forty-five years of friendship,

  for always being there to deflect

  any charging bulls

  And to Carme López Mercader,

  who, most improbably, has still not tired

  of listening to me. Yet

  I

  * * *

  This story didn’t happen so very long ago – less time than the average life, and how brief a life is once it’s over and can be summed up in a few sentences, leaving only ashes in the memory, ashes that crumble at the slightest touch and fly up with the slightest gust of wind – and yet what happened then would be impossible now. I mean, above all, what happened to them, to Eduardo Muriel and his wife, Beatriz Noguera, when they were young: rather than what happened to me and them when I was a young man and their marriage was a long, indissoluble misery. The latter would, of course, still be perfectly possible: what happened to me, I mean, given that it’s happening to me now, or perhaps it’s all part of the same ongoing story. And I suppose what happened with Van Vechten and so on could also occur. There must always have been Van Vechtens and they won’t suddenly stop existing, they will always be there, in real life and in its twin, fiction, because the nature of the characters never changes, or so it seems, they continue to be repeated over the centuries as if the two spheres lacked imagination or had no alternative (after all, both spheres are the work of the living, perhaps the dead are more inventive), sometimes it’s as if, like very young children, we can only really enjoy one drama or one story, albeit with infinite variations that disguise both drama and story as either ancient or modern, but always essentially the same. Therefore, throughout the ages, there must also always have been Eduardo Muriels and Beatriz Nogueras, and the same applies to the bit-part players too; there have been endless Juan de Veres, because that was and is my name, Juan Vere or Juan de Vere, depending on who is saying or thinking my name. There’s nothing original about me.

  Divorce did not exist then, nor was there much hope of it ever existing when Muriel and his wife married some twenty years before I became involved in their lives, or rather before they entered mine, the life, if you like, of a mere beginner. But right from the very moment we come into the world, things begin to happen to us, its weak wheel takes us up sceptically and dully, and reluctantly drags us along, because it’s an old wheel and has unhurriedly ground down many lives by the light of its idle sentinel, the cold moon, which dozes and observes with just one eye open, and knows all the stories even before they happen. Someone only has to notice you – or cast an indolent glance in your direction – and there’s no withdrawing, even if you hide away or stay very still and quiet and take no initiative or do anything. Even if you try to erase yourself, you have been spotted, like a distant shape on the ocean that you can’t ignore, that you must either avoid or approach; you count for other people and they count on you, until you disappear, although, in the end, that wasn’t true of me either. I wasn’t totally passive nor did I pretend to be a mirage, to make myself invisible.

  I’ve always wondered how people dared to contract marriage – and did so for centuries – when marriage was for life; especially women, for whom it was harder to find an escape route, or if they did, they had to be doubly or triply careful to conceal such escapades, and five times more careful if they returned carrying cargo and had to disguise a new being before it even had a face to show to the world: from the moment of its conception or detection or presentiment – not to say its annunciation – and to make it an impostor for the rest of its existence, often leaving that new being perennially unaware of its own imposture or its bastard origins, not even when he or she was old and on the verge of never again being detected by anyone. Innumerable children have believed someone to be their father who was not and believed half-siblings to be their true brothers or sisters, and they have gone to their grave with that belief and that error intact, or perhaps one should say the deceit to which their stoical mothers had submitted them from birth. Diseases or debts are the other two main things one can ‘contract’, all three share the same verb, as if all of them augured ill or presaged doom or were, at the very least, painful: but unlike them, there was definitely no cure, no remedy for marriage, no resolution. Or only through the death of one of the spouses, a death sometimes silently longed for and, less often, sought or induced or prompted, usually even more silently or in deepest secrecy. Or the death of both, of course, and then there would be nothing more, only the unwitting children they’d had, if any and if they had survived, and a brief memory. Or, on occasions, a story. A tenuous, rarely told story, since people tend not to tell stories about their personal life – mothers who remained stoical until the last breath, and many non-mothers too; or if they do tell their story, they tell it only in whispers, so that it isn’t as if they had never existed, so that they do not remain with their grieving face pressed into the silent pillow, or visible only to the somnolent, half-open eye of the cold, sentinel moon.

  Eduardo Muriel had a thin moustache, as if he had first grown it when the actor Errol Flynn was still around and had then forgotten to change it or allow it to grow more thickly, one of those men of fixed habits as regards his appearance, the kind who doesn’t notice that time passes and fashions change nor that he himself is growing older – it’s as if time did not concern him and so could be discounted, rendering him immune to its passing – and up to a point he was right not to worry about it or to pa
y it any attention: by attaching no importance to his age, he kept it at bay; by not giving in to it in external matters, he rejected it, and so the timid passing years – which make bold with almost everyone else – prowled and stalked, but didn’t dare to claim him, did not take root in his mind or affect his appearance, merely casting upon it a very slow shower of sleet or shadow. He was tall, well above average height for a man of his generation, the generation just after my father’s or possibly the same one. At first glance, his height made him seem strong and slim, although he didn’t exactly conform to the manly stereotype: he had rather narrow shoulders, which made his belly seem larger, even though he carried no excess fat there or on his hips, from which emerged a pair of very long legs that he didn’t know quite what to do with when he sat down: if he crossed them (and that, generally speaking, was his preferred position), the foot of the upper leg easily touched the floor, a pose also achieved – albeit by artificial means and with the aid of foreshortening and high heels – by certain women who are particularly proud of their calves and who prefer not to leave one leg dangling free or to become pushed out of shape by the supporting knee. Because of his narrow shoulders, Muriel used to wear jackets with carefully disguised shoulder pads, I think, or perhaps his tailor cut them in the form of an inverted trapezium (in the 1970s and 1980s, he still went to see his tailor or his tailor came to him, which was unusual even then). He had a very straight nose, with not a trace of a curve despite its good size, and his thick, predominantly dark brown hair (parted with a wet comb as doubtless his mother had done ever since he was a child – a tradition he had seen no reason to break with) had a sprinkling of grey. His thin moustache did little to diminish his bright, spontaneous, youthful smile. He tried to restrain that smile or repress it, but often failed, because there was in him an underlying spirit of joviality, or a past self that emerged easily and without the need to send a sounding line down very deep. Nor, on the other hand, was it to be found in very shallow waters, for in those there floated a certain bitterness, either habitual or unconscious, of which he felt he was not the cause, but possibly the victim.

  The most striking thing about him, though, when one saw him for the first time or came across a rare full-face photo in the newspaper, was the patch he wore over his right eye, a classic, theatrical or even filmic eyepatch, black and bulky and held in place by a thin black piece of elastic. I have always wondered why such eyepatches have a rough surface, I don’t mean the cloth ones intended only as temporary protection, but the permanent, fitted ones made of some stiff, compact material. (It looked like Bakelite, and I often felt tempted to drum on it with my fingernails to find out how it felt, not that I ever tried this with my employer; I did, however, find out what it sounded like, because sometimes, when he was upset or irritated, but also whenever he paused to think before uttering a sentence or embarking on a speech, with his thumb tucked under one armpit as if it were the tiny riding whip of a soldier or a cavalryman reviewing his troops or his mounts, Muriel did exactly that, drumming on his eyepatch with the fingernails of his free hand, as if summoning the aid of his non-existent or useless eye; he must have liked the sound it made and it was rather pleasing, toc, toc, toc; although until one got used to the gesture it did make one cringe slightly, to see him invoking his absent eye.) Perhaps the somewhat bulky shape of the patch is intended to give the impression that there is an actual eye underneath, when there might only be an empty socket, a hollow, a dent, a depression. Perhaps those patches are convex precisely in order to contradict the awful concavity that, in some cases, they conceal; who knows, perhaps the cavity is filled by a polished sphere of white glass or marble, with the pupil and the iris painted on with pointless, perfect realism, an eye that will never be seen, always covered in black, or seen only by its owner at the end of the day, when, standing before the mirror, he wearily uncovers or perhaps removes it.

  And while the patch inevitably drew one’s attention, his useful, visible eye, the left one, was no less striking, being of an intense dark blue, like the sea at evening or perhaps at night, and which, because it was alone, seemed to notice and register absolutely everything, as if it possessed both its own faculties and those of the other invisible, blind eye, or as though nature had wanted to compensate for the loss of its pair by making it more than usually penetrating. Such was the energy and speed of the left eye that I would, gradually and furtively, try to place myself out of its reach so as not to be wounded by its piercing gaze, until Muriel would tell me off: ‘Move a little to the right, I can barely see you there unless I lean sideways. Don’t forget, my field of vision is more limited than yours.’ And at first, when I didn’t know where to look – torn between that living, maritime eye and the dead, magnetic patch – he would have no hesitation in calling me to order: ‘Juan, I’m talking to you with the seeing eye, not the dead one, so please listen and don’t get distracted by the eye that isn’t saying a word.’ Muriel would openly refer to his halved vision, unlike those who draw an awkward veil of silence over any personal defect or disability, however conspicuous and dramatic: people who have had one arm amputated at the shoulder, but who never acknowledge the difficulties they face and do just about everything short of taking up juggling; one-legged people who scale Annapurna on crutches; blind people who go to the cinema and then make a fuss during the scenes with no dialogue, complaining that the image is out of focus; disabled people who pretend they’re not wheelchair-bound and insist on trying to climb stairs rather than using the ramps that are available everywhere nowadays; men with heads like billiard balls, who, whenever there’s a gust of wind, are constantly smoothing their non-existent hair and getting frustrated with their imaginary unruly mop. (Not that I’m criticizing them in the least, of course, they’re free to do exactly as they like.)

  But the first time I asked him what had happened to his eye, how his silent eye had been struck dumb, he replied as brusquely as he did sometimes to people who annoyed him, although he rarely did so with me, for he usually treated me with great kindness and affection: ‘Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t employ you to ask me questions about matters that are none of your business.’

  At first, there wasn’t much that was my business, although this soon changed, and simply by dint of being there, willing and waiting, I ended up being entrusted with various tasks, some even created especially for me; and by ‘there’ I mean his apartment, although, after a while, it vaguely came to mean ‘at his side’, when I accompanied him on the occasional trip or visited him when he was filming, or when he decided to include me in suppers or card games with friends, more to make up the numbers, I think, and for him to have an admiring witness on hand. In his more extrovert moods, of which fortunately there were many – or perhaps I should say his less melancholic or even misanthropic moods, for he regularly went from one extreme to the other, as if his mind lived on a rather slow-moving seesaw that sometimes picked up speed in the presence of his wife, for reasons I couldn’t understand and that must have gone back a long way – he enjoyed having an audience and being listened to, or even being egged on a little.

  When I met him at his apartment in the morning to receive my instructions for the day, if there were any, or to allow him to hold forth for a while, I would often find him lying on his back on the floor of the living room or the adjoining study (the two rooms were separated by a folding door that was almost always left open, so that, together, the rooms formed a single ample space). Perhaps this was because of his difficulties in knowing what to do with his legs when seated and he felt more comfortable like that, lying full length, unimpeded, unchecked, whether on the living-room carpet or on the study floor. Obviously, when he was at ground level like that, he didn’t wear one of his smart jackets – it would have become too wrinkled – but a shirt with a waistcoat or a V-neck sweater and a tie, yes, he always wore a tie, he was of an age when such an item seemed essential, at least when in the city, even though, at the time, sartorial norms had been blown sky-high. T
he first time I saw him lying on the floor – like a nineteenth-century courtesan or the contemporary victim of an accident – it caught me by surprise and I was alarmed, thinking he must have had a stroke or fainted, or bumped into something and fallen over and was unable to get up. ‘What’s wrong, Don Eduardo? Are you ill? Can I do anything? Did you slip?’ I went over to him solicitously, holding out both hands to help him up. After a slight tussle (he had urged me, right from the start, to address him as ‘Eduardo’ or tú), we had agreed that I could continue to address him formally as usted or as ‘Eduardo’, as long as I omitted the courtesy title of ‘Don’, but I still found this very hard to do, it just came out naturally, spontaneously.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said from the floor, giving not the slightest sign either that he was about to get up or that he felt in the least embarrassed by my presence; he regarded my two outstretched hands as if they were a couple of pesky flies buzzing around him. ‘Can’t you see I’m just having a quiet smoke?’ And he brandished his pipe at me, holding it by its bowl. He mostly smoked cigarettes, especially when he was away from home, when he only smoked cigarettes, but in his apartment, he alternated them with his pipe, as though wanting to complete a picture that, otherwise, few of us would see (for he never smoked a pipe during the occasional, mostly spur-of-the-moment parties he threw), to complete that image for his own benefit: eyepatch, pipe, thin moustache, thick hair with a high parting, tailored suit, sometimes a waistcoat; it was as if, unconsciously, he had remained stuck with the image of the male leads from the films of his childhood and adolescence, in the 1930s and 40s, not just the image of Errol Flynn (par excellence, and with whom he shared a dazzling smile), but those of now slightly more nebulous figures, like Ronald Colman, Robert Donat, Basil Rathbone, even the rather longer-lasting David Niven and Robert Taylor; he had a touch of all of them even though they were all quite different. And given that he was Spanish, he occasionally reminded me of certain swarthier actors: the even more distinct and exotic Gilbert Roland and Cesar Romero, especially the former, who also had a large, straight nose.