Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  The maritime eye regarded me differently, curiously, with perhaps a touch of suspicion, as if Muriel had not expected such pragmatism from me, we tend to assume that youth is all vehemence and intransigence, hating uncertainty and awkward compromises, as having an element of fanaticism in its search for any truth, however small and circumstantial that might be.

  ‘It’s always impossible to know the truth. One never can,’ he said. ‘The truth is a category –’ He broke off; he was thinking about what he was saying while he was saying it, this was not a sentence he had worked out beforehand; or else he was remembering it as if it were a quotation. ‘The truth is a category that remains in suspension while we’re alive.’ He pondered this phrase for a few seconds, gazing up at the ceiling, as though expecting to see it appear there, like the words and names that teachers of old used to write so painstakingly on the blackboard. ‘While we’re alive,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, it’s illusory to go in pursuit of the truth, a waste of time and a source of conflict, sheer folly. And yet we can’t not do it. Or, rather, we can’t help wondering about it, knowing that it does exist and is to be found in a place and a time to which we have no access. I realize that I’ll probably never know for sure if that friend did or didn’t do what I’ve been told he did. But I also know that the truth will be one of two things, or rather three: he either did it or didn’t do it or he did something in between, something not as black as I’ve been told and not as white as he would describe it to me. The fact that I’m doomed not to find out doesn’t mean that the truth doesn’t exist. The worst thing is that, by this stage, even the person concerned may not know what the truth is. When many years or even not so many years have passed, people tell the facts as it suits them to and come to believe their own version, their own distorted view of the facts. They often erase them altogether, banish them, blow them away like a piece of thistledown’ – he made a gesture with his fingers as if he were holding a thistle head, but he did not blow – ‘they convince themselves that nothing happened or that their role in events was quite different from what it actually was. There are cases of genuine amnesia or honest distortion, in which the person lying is not lying or at least not consciously. Sometimes not even the perpetrator of an act can dispel our doubts; he’s simply incapable of telling the truth. It’s all a blur, he can’t remember, he muddles things up or simply doesn’t know. And yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a truth, there is. Something happened or didn’t happen, and if it did happen, it did so in a certain way, that is how it took place. Notice that expression “to take place”, which we use as a synonym of “happen” and “occur”. It’s curiously appropriate and exact, because that is precisely what happens with the truth, it has a place and there it stays; and it has a time and it stays there too. It remains locked up inside that time and place and there’s no way we can undo that lock, we can’t travel back to either time or place in order to get a glimpse of their contents. All we’re left with are guesses and approximations, it becomes a matter of encircling the truth and trying to make out its shape in the distance or through veils and mists, but we never can, it’s just a ridiculous waste of time … And yet, and yet …’

  He coughed, a nervous cough I thought, impotent, uneasy. He sat up and leaned slightly to one side, one elbow resting on the floor, to feel for the matches in his trouser pocket so as to relight his pipe. He also took out an antique silver pillbox with a tiny compass on the lid; he used to study that compass imprisoned behind glass whenever he was plunged in thought, whenever he didn’t know how to continue or if he should continue, whenever he was filled by doubts and more doubts, as if he were hoping that the compass needle would guide him, would perhaps stop pointing north. I had the feeling that not only was he uncertain as to whether or not to reveal to me his friend’s supposed crime or vile deed or mean act (I knew for the moment that it wasn’t a betrayal), but also whether or not he should charge me with some related task, some mission, a bit of espionage, an investigation, whether he should ask me to intervene, though who knows how, for it would be hard for me to help without knowing the facts or, indeed, even if I did know them. And yet that was the feeling I had, that the hardest thing for him was deciding whether or not to involve me in something grubby, disagreeable, foul, knowing that if he did succumb to the temptation of involving me, I would cease to be a mere listener or even confidant and instead become party to certain facts or, rather, to a suspicion and a rumour. It was as if he knew that, once he explained the situation to me, he would also have to direct or guide me, to give me an order or ask me a favour.

  ‘And yet what?’ I didn’t know how else to encourage him to speak, apart from showing that I was interested and prepared to listen. I realize now that this was a sign of my youth, because what could be easier than drawing someone out when almost everyone is bursting to talk?

  At last, Muriel got nimbly and effortlessly to his feet and began pacing up and down before me, taking long strides around the living room and the study, skirting the desk, and I had to keep craning my neck so as not to lose sight of him, his pipe in one hand and, in the other, the pillbox, which he kept rubbing against his chin, as if smoothing a fortunately non-existent goatee beard – ‘fortunately’ because men who wear such beards are not usually to be trusted. He would also occasionally study the compass on the box. It amused me to see his one eye scrutinizing that diminutive object, and he did so, I think, partly for comic effect, perhaps to mitigate the waves of vacillation and anxiety given off by his endless circumvolutions.

  ‘And yet, and yet,’ he repeated, or replied, ‘I have no option but to try and get closer, to dispel the mist or remove the veil, to waste a little of my life on it. Sometimes, in order to justify making a decision, to, as you put it, decide what the truth is and to stick fast to that truth from then on and for ever, all it takes is the removal of a single layer, even if you only pretend to remove it. After that one attempt – however sceptical and superficial – you can, as you suggested, ignore what you’ve been told or else believe it wholeheartedly and allow a friendship to languish, put it on hold or end it once and for all, but not immediately. You need either to have in your possession or to acquire some clue to serve as a guide, however false or erroneous. We have to find by our own means some way of orienting ourselves’ – and he tapped with the stem of his pipe on the glass cover – ‘some intuition that will allow us to say: “That’s a downright lie” or “Oh dear, it must be true.” ’ He suddenly stopped pacing and looked at me, a look of infinite sorrow, but I couldn’t tell who he was feeling sorry for, himself or me, because I had so much still to discover, so far to go. I find myself looking at young people like that now, when I see them worried and bewildered or discouraged, and also when I see them excited and full of plans, and I cross my fingers to wish them luck, a pointless, superstitious gesture, a gesture of resignation. It’s a paternalistic look that ignores the fact that we are all different and that some generations are more worldly-wise than others; I think my generation was tougher than Muriel’s and, beneath our motley idealistic disguises, we certainly had fewer scruples. ‘My first impulse was to believe what I was being told,’ he went on, still wearing the same sorrowful expression. ‘I had an initial doubt, but dismissed it out of hand because I thought no one would lie about something so important. Not important for other people, because it would be a matter of indifference to most, but important for the person telling me that lie or that truth. You assume that no one would willingly harm himself, at least you probably still do at your age. How old are you now? Twenty-three? It certainly took me a long time to learn that this was a false assumption, that one should assume nothing. People make wild calculations and are often prepared to take a risk. Most suffer from a strange overdose of optimism, convinced they’ll get their own way, that they’ll change things or that luck will smile on them; that any harm inflicted will be compensated for in the long term by some greater benefit and that no one will ever find out what they said or did in order to gain th
eir objective: to hold on to someone, to ruin another, to send someone else to prison or to the wall, to profit from something and grow rich, or to get into bed with some woman. And perhaps they’re right, we probably never will know very much about what really happened, most of which will never see the light of day. And so on that occasion, I didn’t test out what I was told, I just accepted it and acted accordingly and held to my decision and thus ruined one life or perhaps two or even three, depending on your point of view, perhaps more if you count any descendants, individuals who should never really have been born and others who were prevented from being born in their place.’ After this excursus, he resumed his pacing, still with his pipe in one hand and the compass in the other, then added: ‘Yes, I’m going to have to waste a little of my life over this friend of mine.’

  I didn’t understand much of what he was saying. He was circling around another story now, a story from the past, possibly the remote past, but, again, he wasn’t really telling me that story either. Finally, I thought of a question that might encourage him to be more explicit. He had mentioned the possibility of bringing his friendship to a drastic end, were this justified by his tentative future inquiries or explorations or intuitions. But if what he had been told did not affect or involve him personally, almost only one thing, at that time and in our country, would be deemed so objectionable as to merit ending a friendship that had lasted half a lifetime. In those days, in those years, certain distant events were just beginning to be discussed in private, things that many Spaniards had been obliged to keep quiet about in public for decades and which had only very occasionally been talked about in whispers within the family and with ever-longer intervening silences, as if, quite apart from the forbidden nature of the subject matter, there was a desire to confine such events to the realm of nightmares, to relegate them to the bearable fog of what may or may not have happened. Such is the fate of things deemed shameful, the fate of all humiliations and impositions. None of us likes to dwell on past defeats or on the times when we or our families were the victims of injustices or acts of cruelty or were forced to surrender or to pander to the other side in order to survive, to betray our comrades in order to ingratiate ourselves with the vicious new powers that be – who are also tireless persecutors of the defeated – or to crouch in a corner so as not to attract attention, leading a cowardly, submissive life spent kowtowing to the crazy demands of the victorious regime; and – despite the damage inflicted by that regime, of which you and your parents or siblings all had personal experience – to try to embrace it, praise it, become part of it and thus prosper under its aegis. Nowadays, people tell many a tall tale of unbowed resistance fighters, whether passive or active, but the truth is that most real-life resistance fighters – of whom there were few and all of them short-lived – were shot or imprisoned during the years after the War or else went into exile or were purged and suffered reprisals and were prevented from freely exercising their professions: some were elderly or mature men who spent the rest of their days watching their widows and daughters going out to work so they could afford to buy food – because it was as if their wives were already widows – while they, ill-shaven pre-cadavers – engineers, doctors, lawyers, architects, professors, scientists, even the occasional loyal soldier who had somehow survived – gazed out of the window and tried hard not to think too much. After a while, most of the population were enthusiastically pro-Franco, or were timidly so, out of fear. Many of those who had loathed him and suffered under him gradually became convinced that things were, in fact, better, that they had been mistaken and had lived and even fought in error. Never have there been so many turncoats, such a mass display of turncoatery. The Civil War ended in 1939, and whatever people may say now, no one was eager to give their version of events, I mean those who could not have done so safely, either in the 1940s or 50s, nor, of course, in the somewhat more relaxed 60s or even in the 70s, right up until the death of the dictator in 1975. The winning side had initially repeated their version ad nauseam and continued to do so, but they larded it with so many lies, so much grandiloquence, so many obfuscations, calumnies and prejudices, that, ultimately, their version of events no longer satisfied them and wore so thin with repetition that it reached a point where, on the assumption that everyone must know the story by heart, they, too, fell almost silent and stopped harping on about it and applied themselves instead to forgetting the darker aspects of their deeds, their more superfluous crimes. In the long run, there’s little to be gained by imposing your story on other people, it’s almost like telling a story to yourself, which is no fun at all: if your views are only ever endorsed by your co-religionists or by mere acolytes and fearful servants, it’s a bit like playing yourself at chess. And those who had lost preferred to forget the atrocities committed, either by them or the still worse ones committed by the other side – more enduring, more brutal, more gratuitous – and they certainly didn’t tell their children (after all, no one would choose to describe episodes or scenes in which they appear in such a poor light), for whom their one wish was that nothing similar would ever happen to them and that they would be blessed with a boring, uneventful life, albeit a life lived with head bowed and with no real freedom, because one can live without freedom. Indeed, freedom is the first thing that fearful citizens are prepared to give up. So much so that they often ask to lose it, ask for it to be taken away, banished from their sight, which is why they not only applaud the very person intending to take it from them, they even vote for him.

  ‘Is it something to do with the Civil War, Don Eduardo, I mean, Eduardo? Something that your friend did at the time and that you knew nothing about until someone came to you now with the story? Is that what it is?’ And I even dared to be more precise and urge him to explain what he meant. ‘Did he participate in a massacre? Did he carry out summary executions?’ And here I used the expression darle a uno el paseo, literally ‘take someone out for a stroll’, which few young people nowadays would know, but which was still familiar to my generation, because it formed part of the normal vocabulary of both parents and grandparents, and most families had experienced such summary executions during the three years that the War lasted: darle a uno el paseo meant going to someone’s house with a group of other men, either at night or in the early hours or even in broad daylight, bundling him into a car, driving him to the outskirts of the town, to some deserted spot or even to the cemetery walls, where he would be shot in the head or the back of the neck, and his corpse left at the gates of his future home or, more likely, kicked into the gutter; in Madrid or in Seville, in both the Republican and the franquista zones, there were months when not a morning went by without numerous bodies being picked up in the streets, as if they were a new kind of rubbish, too awkward for the road sweepers to deal with, too heavy and difficult to handle, and with a face. ‘Was he one of those Falangists who strutted around with a pistol in his belt? Or a militiaman with a rifle over his shoulder? Did he betray someone as soon as the War was over, denounce people he knew and send them to the firing squad? Was he some kind of butcher, did he commit a lot of murders or order others to do so? What is it you’ve been told, what is it you find so troubling?’

  Things had changed a little in that respect, as regards telling people things, although not very much. Adolfo Suárez was in power, the first elected Prime Minister for forty years, Franco having died four or five years before. On the one hand, Franco had been instantly discarded and was seen by most as a kind of dinosaur, and, six months on, the more thinking members of the public were astonished at how little time had passed, because it felt as if entire centuries had gone by since his disappearance. It wasn’t just that one part of the population had longed and hoped and yearned for this, and that in a number of respects – insofar as this was possible – society had, for some time, begun to behave as if he had already gone; what also became clear, even to his supporters, was the extraordinary speed with which he came to be viewed as a complete anachronism, as superfluous: himself, hi
s dictatorship and his Church, to whom he had granted unlimited powers and privileges. On the other hand, incredible though it seemed, we were aware that his regime had withdrawn almost without a murmur (people commented at the time that the regime had committed hara-kiri), obeying the will of the King, which is why we had been granted democracy. We, of course, had not imposed democracy ourselves, because it would not have been in our power to do so without further spillage of the mingled bloods of both sides, which would have ended in certain disaster, although it didn’t take us long to call for more and more freedoms. In those years, though, we were keenly aware that everything hung by a thread, that concessions can always be revoked, that the suicides might well have second thoughts and decide to come back to life, that they had the support of most of the army, who were still franquista to the core and remained in possession of the nation’s only weapons.