Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  By the time I got to know him and his wife, he was no longer going away quite so often and was working less than he had in the past. He still enjoyed a certain prestige, and the fact that he’d made a couple of feature films in the States, with American money and some fairly big names, conferred on him an almost mythical aura in a country as easily impressed as ours. He capitalized on this as best he could – as well as on his image as a slightly mysterious, elusive figure – but he had no illusions about his position. ‘I’m a bit like Sara Montiel,’ he would say, ‘she dined out for years on her three or four Hollywood appearances, one of which meant sharing the screen with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. She wasn’t so lucky with the others: Rod Steiger, despite his Oscar and all that, wasn’t much help to her, because he was too unpleasant, too histrionic and unpopular, and poor Mario Lanza was no use at all, because he died soon afterwards and who now has heard of him or remembers him? You don’t even hear his famous voice any more. So I depend in large measure not only on what I do from now on, like anyone else, but also on the future careers, stretching far ahead, of the people who worked for me, no, more than that, on how long they survive in filmgoers’ fickle memories. In my world, and, indeed, in all worlds, you never know who will be remembered, not just in five or ten years’ time, but the day after tomorrow, or even tomorrow. Or who will leave not the slightest trace, however glittering their career, as they say on TV and in the magazines. In a few years’ time, the stars that shine brightest now might as well never have existed. And any real hate-objects are guaranteed oblivion, unless they truly were evil and people enjoy hating them retrospectively, even after they’ve left the stage or died.’

  With Beatriz Noguera, he was often sharp and malicious, even cruel and hateful, verbally that is. He could be really foul. I had known bickering couples – who hasn’t? – who often traded wounding comments, almost casually, as though they couldn’t help themselves. People who stay together out of sheer habit, because they’re as much a part of each other’s existence as the air they breathe, or at least as the city they live in and which, however unbearable, they would never dream of leaving. Each spouse has about the same value as the view from the living room or bedroom of their apartment: they are neither good nor bad, loathsome nor pleasant, depressing nor stimulating, beneficial nor harmful. They are simply what’s there – the envelope, the setting, the day’s normal grey pallor – we never question them or consider the possibility of dispensing with their breathing or with their permanent nearby murmurings, never consider making them change or improving the terms of our relationship. We take them for granted, they seem to be an utterly natural part of our existence, and we continue in their company, but not because we have decided to, nor do we even consider ceasing or reversing or suppressing our relationship, as if this were quite impossible, as if it were fate, just as we happened to be born in a particular country or in the bosom of a particular family or ended up with those particular parents or siblings. Such couples completely forget that they ever made a choice, albeit only partial or apparent and tinged with resignation, they forget that the presence of the other could be eliminated quite easily, unless, of course, they chose to use violence, and then the ensuing complications would be either infinite or non-existent, depending on the skill with which they rid themselves of the obstacle, or sometimes they have merely grown bored with looking at the same scenery. Otherwise, there are complications, but not that many, especially if divorce is legal, as it is in Spain today and has been for more than thirty years. Nevertheless, a few melodramatic scenes are pretty much inevitable.

  This was not the case with Eduardo Muriel and Beatriz Noguera, his was not, to put it in pedantic terms, a quotidian or perfunctory aggression. There was on his part a deep-seated antagonism, vital and pulsating and far from ordinary, and a kind of strangely inconstant desire to inflict frequent punishments. It was as if he had to force himself to remember (once the right ice-cold button had been pressed) that he must behave towards her with a complete lack of consideration, with revulsion and scorn, to make it clear to her what a curse and a burden it was to endure her presence; to mistreat and even abuse her, and certainly to undermine her and make her feel insecure and even hopeless about her personality, her work, her body, and he was doubtless successful; after all, anyone can do that, even the most stupid of us, it’s the easiest thing in the world to destroy and wound, you don’t have to be especially wily or astute, still less intelligent, a fool can easily crush someone cleverer, and Muriel was a clever man. You just have to be ill-natured, ill-intentioned, ill-disposed, qualities to be found in abundance among the brutish and the dim. I sometimes had the feeling that, at some point in his married life, Muriel had decided to embark on a revenge that would never end, never be sated, and I wondered about his possible motives, what unforgivable offence Beatriz Noguera might have committed. Not that I was convinced she had. I was already aware that the cruellest of individuals depend a great deal on the puzzlement of others, trusting that their assaults will seem so disproportionate that other people, rather than judging the assailant severely and trying to placate him or get him to stop, will merely shrug and wonder what terrible crime the object of his cruelty could have committed, and conclude, even though they have no idea if they’re right or wrong, that ‘it must have been something really bad, otherwise how explain such venom; whatever it is must justify such extreme behaviour’. And the cruel beast does his best to ensure that no one uncovers the truth, that nothing leaks out about that ‘whatever it is’, the mysterious alibi, which, up to a point, protects the perpetrator and, odd though it may seem, even saves him.

  So I was greatly alarmed by what I saw and heard, because it made me think that, when no witnesses were around, his irritation would only increase, his wounding words would become still more cutting, and he might even use foul language, which he rarely did in my presence or even when we were with his friends. I trusted that it never went beyond words, that he never raised his hand to her (I was less alarmed by the thought that she might slap his face, for she had more than enough reason to), and I didn’t believe he would ever do that. My belief, however, was also my wish, which meant that my belief was necessarily a qualified one, and this did not entirely reassure me. At first, I didn’t dare ask Muriel what lay behind the sharp, sullen, scornful way in which he treated his wife, he had already warned me once that he wasn’t paying me to ask questions about matters that were none of my business, and on that occasion I’d been asking him about something far less delicate than his wretchedly unhappy relationship with his wife, namely, the silencing of his now silent eye. And in those early days, I rarely or almost never saw Beatriz on her own; she viewed me from afar as a mere appendage of her husband, which I suppose I was. And yet, doubtless because of my youth, she looked on me kindly. Besides, I was always solicitous and attentive, which is how I was brought up to treat all women (initially), and I was in no way infected – as would have been equally inappropriate – by my boss’s rough ways. On the contrary, I tried to oppose them, insofar as I could, without stepping out of line or butting in where I wasn’t wanted. I mean that I would always, without fail, stand up whenever Beatriz entered the room, although Muriel never followed my example, but then, between a married couple, that might have been a touch excessive; I would greet her with a slight nod, as if we were still living in the nineteenth century, and with a broad, spontaneous smile, making it clear by my amiable attitude that, should she ever need me, I would always be glad to help. She was, after all, the wife of my employer, a man whom I admired. As such, she deserved my utmost respect and all I could do was to demonstrate this to her, regardless of what great rifts lay between them. And Muriel would doubtless have ticked me off had he noticed the slightest negligence in my treatment of his wife. I should add that there were also times when he spoke or listened to her with deference, interest and even affection. As I said, I found it very easy to be nice to her. In fact, I liked Beatriz Noguera right from the start.


  I didn’t like her any less than I did her husband, which says a lot; her life, albeit in a different way, was also being ground down by the weak wheel of the world, and I imagined that the indifferent sentinel observing all our lives would be more than usually bored by hers. But who knows, that same moon, just as we writers do (even if we only write private memoirs or diaries or letters, not intending them to be read by anyone or perhaps by just one person), may occasionally take a long hard look at those who will never go beyond their own bounds, those who one knows early on will leave no trace or track and will barely be remembered once they disappear (they will be like falling snow that does not settle, like a lizard climbing up a sunny wall in summer, like the words, all those years ago, that a teacher painstakingly wrote on the blackboard only to erase them herself at the end of the class, or leave them to be erased by the next teacher to occupy the room) and about whom not even their nearest and dearest will have any anecdotes to recount. That sentinel has doubtless grown weary of watching with half an eye the battles and travails of those whose foolish fate and future it can already foresee, weary of hearing their shouts and embarrassed by their bragging, of being present at the usually avoidable tragedies most such creatures bring upon themselves, and to which, from time immemorial, it has sworn to be a silent witness, impartial and useless, as darkness falls and throughout the night. Yes, just to pass the time – to vary and escape the tedium imposed on it by the monotonous masses – it might notice those beings who seem to tiptoe through life and to be just passing through or on temporary loan even while they’re alive, knowing that some of them might well harbour stories that are far odder and more intriguing, clearer and more personal, than the stories of the shrill exhibitionists who fill most of the globe with their racket and exhaust it with their wild gesticulations.

  For a time, I assumed that this night sentinel would pay closest attention to what Shakespeare called ‘a woeful bed’, like that of the young widowed princess, whose husband had been murdered in Tewkesbury, stabbed in a conveniently ‘angry mood’ by the person who had most to gain. Except that Muriel was still alive and, when he was in Madrid, he shared an apartment with Beatriz. They did not, however, share a bedroom, they each had their own, and I soon realized that she was banned from entering his room, its door kept firmly shut day and night, night after night and day after day.

  It was after a week or more of intense work, involving the feverish preparation and translation of a hastily cobbled-together script to be presented to Harry Alan Towers (I was, by then, an English graduate), when Muriel decided that I should spend the night there so that I could work until late and start again, without delay, the following morning. It was the first time I’d stayed over in his spacious apartment (although there were other occasions later on), in a big house near the top of Calle Velázquez, with, from the balconies, a view to one side of the Parque del Retiro; an old house that had not yet been divided up into several smaller apartments, as has become the norm in Madrid and in other cities since the well-to-do or merely bourgeois families ceased to be quite so large and dispensed with any live-in servants; the Muriels still employed a maid, who had been the children’s nanny when they were small. The very long corridor was in the shape of a U, although it seemed more like a J if you stopped in the kitchen, where you felt it came to a complete halt, just where the curve of a J would end. The maid’s room was immediately before that, and she took efficient care of all the housekeeping, a stoical or possibly merely puzzled woman – or maybe these were simply the disguises adopted by her discretion – who had probably been of an indefinable age ever since she was in the first flower of youth (it was odd to think of her like that, even retrospectively and speculatively) and who bore the unlikely name of Flavia, as if she were a Roman. Anyway, a white door at the far end of the kitchen gave unexpected access to the rest of the apartment, and once you got past a tiny bedroom and a minuscule bathroom with a shower over one of those once fashionable hip baths (an idiotic, uncomfortable invention) and an area of apparently redundant space reached through a low, arched doorway, seemingly made for children or dwarves, you returned once more to the corridor and the remaining part of the U. And that chambre de bonne with barely enough space for a bed and a chair – it had probably belonged to the maid in bygone days, and the room Flavia now occupied would have been the cook’s room, for cooks traditionally had more authority – was where I stayed for those few nights, as though I were living in a diminutive, separate apartment, almost cut off from the rest of the house, given that the only access was through the kitchen. However, this wasn’t quite true because, as I said, if you went through that gnome-sized door, theoretically unusable – it had no external handle or knob, only an internal one, so while you could open it from the inside, from the corridor it appeared to be blocked, and there was no lighting in that forgotten area either – you then found yourself at the end of the U and, although you were some considerable distance from the apartment proper and from the main bedrooms, all or most of those rooms opened out on to that corridor.

  It was only on my second night that I noticed the empty area adjacent to my bolt-hole, from which it was separated by another small but less pygmyish door, which I had been too exhausted even to notice on the first night. On the second night, however, my brain was perhaps overexcited by the frenetic pace of work and the slapdash, improvised nature of that script being written at breakneck speed, and I was so wide awake that I sat down on the bed fully clothed, intending to smoke and read and while away the hours. And for a long time, I looked around me without noticing anything, until I realized that what I had mistakenly assumed to be a built-in, white lacquer wardrobe was no such thing. Its door opened on to a very narrow space that had probably once been used as a small lumber room, but which was now clean and empty, and just beyond was that other tiny door which I automatically assumed would bring me out into the corridor. I opened it and, as soon as I did, saw that it could only be opened from the inside and that if I wanted to return by the same route, without having to go via the kitchen, I would have to take care not to close it behind me. I was just about to crouch down and peer through – I was still half-sitting on the bed – when I saw a dim light in the distance and the figure of Beatriz Noguera in a nightdress taking short steps back and forth in the corridor outside her husband’s bedroom – or, rather, her steps were not particularly short, it was just that the area she was pacing up and down in was very small – she was not so much pacing as prowling. My first impulse was to withdraw into my room, but instead I assumed a squatting position and stayed there watching, realizing at once that it would be virtually impossible for her to see me: I was crouched down at a distance and in darkness, and no one would expect that door, which must have been closed for ages, to open. Beatriz did not once glance over to where I was hiding, not just because it didn’t occur to her that, most unusually, someone was occupying that abandoned spot, but because every one of her five senses was focused on what she was doing, even though she was merely smoking – she had a cigarette in one hand and, in the other, the cigarette packet and an ashtray – and walking back and forth outside the closed door, as if waiting for someone who was late for an appointment.

  She wasn’t wearing a dressing gown, just a brief, thigh-length nightdress that revealed her strong legs, and at first I thought she was barefoot, because her steps made no sound or so little that you could almost blame any noise she made on the disquiets of the somewhat elderly wooden floorboards, which, like all old floorboards, occasionally seemed to be bemoaning all the things they had seen, after the manner perhaps of old ships, although far less so, given that they are never called on to be pitched and tossed by the waves. Her nightdress was made of white or cream-coloured silk, and was either slightly transparent or, because of the way the light fell – from a discreet wall lamp in the corridor – merely seemed more than usually transparent, allowing me to see her as almost naked but clothed, which is perhaps the most attractive way of seeing an attr
active naked body, involving as it does an element of guesswork, surreptitiousness or theft. (I say ‘more than usually’ because, as it turned out, there was a witness, but she couldn’t have known there would be, or rather the only likely witness would be one for whom her attire, alas, would seem neither revealing nor novel.) I should say that this was my main reason for staying there studying her, for I was still at an age when a glimpse of any forbidden image seemed like a trophy to be stored away on the retina for days or weeks or months, if not, in some mysterious way, for ever. I still have the Beatriz Noguera of that night: I could sense – or more than sense – that she had nothing on beneath her nightdress, not even the tiny undergarment that many women wear in bed, perhaps as a kind of superstitious protection, perhaps so as not to risk staining the sheets with any involuntary secretions. I saw her mainly from the back, because she would occasionally stop her pacing and stand motionless outside Muriel’s door as if she were tempted to rap on it with her knuckles and either could not bring herself to do so or did not dare. She must have been about twenty years older than me, and up until then, I had viewed her with a kind of distant esteem, with growing pity and – how can I put it without being misunderstood? – a vague sexual admiration so muted and latent as to be purely theoretical, as though belonging to another hypothetical life, to another me that would never exist, not even in my imagination (real life is so all-absorbing that it doesn’t leave us time to create an imaginary, parallel life). We know the kind of glances we must avoid, and also those that are inappropriate because of age, position or hierarchy, and it’s easy enough to give them up, to dismiss rather than repress them, no, ‘repress’ would be the wrong word. With the wife of a brother or a superior or a friend we adopt a veiled or neutral gaze and do so effortlessly and as if under orders, except in very unusual and extremely rare cases, when the lust aroused is unstoppable, explosive, a whirlwind. If, in addition, the wife in question is much older, the task is made easier by habit: when you’re twenty-three, you tend to notice women of the same age, or at most ten years older or five years younger – although there are exceptions – and to ignore all the others as one might ignore trees or bits of furniture, or perhaps paintings. Until that night, that is how I had viewed Beatriz Noguera, like a picture that arouses a feeble, ephemeral flicker of desire, quite impossible to satisfy: the woman you’re looking at is on one plane, silent, motionless and imprisoned for all eternity; she has only one gesture, one angle and one expression, however challenging the look in her eyes, and her unchanging flesh has no texture, no pulse; she lacks volume and what we are attracted to is pure illusion and, if the portrait is an old one, the woman is probably dead. You study her for a few moments, think fleetingly about what might have been had you shared the same time and space, then, with no regrets, move on and forget her.