Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  The vague sexual admiration I had felt for Beatriz was of that same almost unconscious order. Given that she was Muriel’s wife and many years older than me, I considered her, as an object of desire, someone with whom I no longer shared the same time and space, as though I lived in the real and present dimension and she only in long-past, inanimate representations. And all the thoughts I had – which were not even thoughts, more like mental flashes bereft of the words I give them now from the distance of my maturity – were of a conditional or chimerical nature, if, indeed, they existed at all: ‘If I were Muriel, I wouldn’t treat her like that, I would respond to her occasional, intended caresses, which he rejects so forcefully, and move closer’ or ‘She must have been very alluring when she was young, I can understand why Muriel would have wanted her at his side day and night, I’m sure I would have too. Even if only for her sheer carnality, which counts for a lot in a marriage. But I wasn’t Muriel then, nor am I now.’

  And that night, Beatriz Noguera seemed to me neither long-past nor inanimate, nor, indeed, a representation, even though, to my hidden, watching eyes, there was something theatrical about her pacing up and down and her waiting and her hesitations, it was like spying on some minor display of voluptuosity (that revealing nightdress) or a painful monologue without words. Until, that is, there were some words. After smoking two cigarettes, Beatriz finally decided to knock timidly at her husband’s bedroom door with the knuckle of her middle finger. It was a very quiet knock, like that of a fearful child who has already gone too many times to her parents’ room and is afraid she won’t be welcome, but could be seen as too easily frightened, importunate and annoying, or might even be told off.

  ‘Eduardo.’ Her voice was almost inaudible. There was no reply, and it occurred to me that Beatriz had chosen a bad night to approach him; Muriel would be tired after all his work, possibly already asleep, or else absorbed by thoughts of that urgent script about which he had his doubts. ‘Eduardo,’ she said again, a little louder this time, and she bent down slightly to look at the crack under the door, to see if the light was on in his room. (When she bent down – this lasted only five seconds, which I counted, the better to enjoy them: one, two, three, four; and five – I had an even clearer view of her bottom, which I had noticed before when she was walking around the apartment fully clothed and erect: round or curvaceous, pert and shapely – or ‘firm’, to use the adjective so often used to describe tempting flesh – contrary to what Muriel thought, or said he thought, in order to undermine and humiliate her, I had heard him call her ‘fat’ and a few other more offensive things; and when she bent down, her already brief nightdress rode up another centimetre, revealing more of her sturdy thighs – this time unclothed – although not enough to show her actual buttocks, she would have had to bend further, as if to pick something up from the floor.) Muriel immediately turned off the light, but it was too late for him to pretend to be asleep or to have abandoned wakefulness, this much was clear from what his wife said next: ‘Eduardo, I saw the light under the door, I know you’re awake. Please open the door. It will only take a second, I promise.’ And she knocked again with that one knuckle, more boldly this time. Then she pressed her ear to the door, as if to make sure her husband really was awake, sometimes we need to confirm what we know perfectly well, or to have someone else do so, it’s typical of people who no longer entirely trust their own five senses; perhaps, I thought, because this has been going on for years, night after night, and neither of them is capable now of distinguishing the day before yesterday from yesterday or today or tomorrow. I thought this, I really did, just before there came an unexpected response (I was expecting a continued state of imperviousness, although that is a very slow form of dissuasion), which led me to believe that this was the case, that Beatriz’s possibly frustrated visit was something she repeated each conticinium, as the Romans called the night hour when everything was still and silent, something that no longer exists in our cities, which is perhaps why the word has died out or lies languishing in dictionaries.

  ‘Don’t you get bored making the same scene over and over? How many more nights are you going to keep it up? I have to sleep, I’m really tired. Juan and I are working against the clock, you know.’ Through the door, Muriel’s voice sounded patient rather than irritated. Although he had spoken quite loudly, I was sure that neither of them wanted this exchange to be heard by anyone else in the house, at least in principle. It could also be that this scene had become so customary that everyone knew about it anyway and paid no attention. Even though there was nothing remarkable about him mentioning my name, it still made me jump. I was, after all, spying, and if the spied-upon refer to the spy, this makes him feel more exposed, a somewhat irrational reflex reaction and, fortunately, short-lived.

  ‘I don’t want to talk or anything, Eduardo. I won’t go on at you. I won’t take up much time, I promise. I just want to embrace you, it’s been ages since I did. That would soothe me, and then I could go to sleep. Please, open the door.’ She said this meekly, sweetly.

  ‘It’s a trick,’ I thought. ‘He doesn’t know she’s out here with no dressing gown on, nothing, nothing to cover her nightdress, nothing underneath. Or maybe he does and doesn’t care, maybe it no longer affects him.’ It occurred to me that it would be hard to embrace that voluptuous body and do nothing more, not linger or run your hands over it. ‘But then I’m not Muriel,’ I said again. ‘He’s seen it all before, whereas it’s all new to me. The touch of her flesh will be a matter of indifference to him, possibly even tedious or unpleasant, I mustn’t even think about it.’

  There was no immediate reply. I thought Muriel must be considering whether to give in to her request, even if only as a quick way of putting an end to the siege. After a few seconds, he spoke and, from what I heard, his tone of voice had a mocking edge to it.

  ‘No, I’ve already given myself an embrace, thank you. Consider your embrace duly delivered and go back to bed, off you go.’

  He wasn’t angry or at least not yet, it was just one of his witty comments. And those last words, ‘off you go’, had sounded kind, almost affectionate, the words of a long-suffering father to an overly anxious, nervous daughter. After all, he was six or seven or eight years her senior, which was, I would say, a normal age difference between couples at the time, or indeed now, but ultimately, all these things count in how couples treat each other, including who has more experience of the world, who has been in the world longest (and this inevitably strikes a paternalistic note), and the nature of the relationship.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Eduardo. Just one embrace. I’m so on edge tonight, I can’t sleep.’ And when she said this (the first part), Beatriz Noguera gave a little laugh; even though her husband was mocking her, she still found his joke funny. Perhaps that was her curse, her main problem, and one of the reasons why she still loved him so much: he made her laugh and always had. It’s very hard not to stay in love with or be captivated by someone who makes us laugh and does so even though he often mistreats us; the hardest thing to give up is that companionable laughter, once you’ve met someone and decided to stay with them. (When you have a clear memory of that shared laughter and it occasionally recurs, even if only very infrequently and even though the intervals between are long and bitter.) It’s the tie that binds most tightly, apart from sex when that’s still an urgent need and more than sex as that need grows less.

  ‘No, really, I gave myself a very warm and tender embrace,’ retorted Muriel, still in joking mode. ‘Yours would be quite unnecessary.’ Then his voice changed suddenly, as if, from one moment to the next, he had grown tired of being humorous or had suddenly recalled some injury or source of resentment, and he added sharply: ‘Look, go away and leave me in peace, will you? Aren’t Roy, Rico and all the others enough for you? You’re not exactly in need of more diversions, so why keep pestering me every night? You’ve known for years what I’m going to say. You’ve known for years what my terms are. I made them quite clear. God, you’r
e a pain. Unbearable. Just listen to yourself, begging and pleading, how do you stand it? And you’re getting a bit long in the tooth to be permanently on heat.’

  Beatriz Noguera clearly lacked all dignity and pride, she must have left them behind long ago, and probably had no use for them during the many years Muriel kept referring to. She neither missed them nor had any plans to recover them, they were absent from her life, at least from her married life. For she gave no sharp retort, did not move or leave, she took not a step, nor did she go back to her own room, as would anyone else after receiving such a cruel, emphatic rejection.

  ‘You’re so certain, aren’t you? And your certainty is so convenient too,’ she answered, ‘that way you can feel free of all responsibilities and all doubts. You know perfectly well that there is no Rico, no Roy or anyone else for that matter, I just go out with them occasionally, and it’s lucky for you I have them to distract me, because I can hardly count on you to do as much, or only when you want to put a good face on things and not turn up with one of your actresses, or whatever they are, at some place where they shouldn’t be seen.’ She did not say this bitterly or reproachfully, it was, rather, an attempt to be persuasive, and she returned at once to her previous line of attack: ‘You’re the only one I’m interested in, you’re the only one I love, surely I don’t need to tell you that, however hard you try to drive me away. And I don’t do this every night, don’t exaggerate. Why shouldn’t I try or at least make an attempt? It costs me nothing. It wasn’t like this before. I didn’t bore you then, and our relationship wasn’t exactly languishing. You suddenly broke it all off, over some stupid thing that happened ages ago. However determined they might be, people don’t just stop desiring or loving each other from one day to the next, it just doesn’t happen. If it did, it would save everyone a lot of problems and dramas. If you could see me now … Go on, just open the door for a moment and look at me. Put your arms around me. And then go back in, if you can.’

  Her tone was still cautious, even in those final, slightly challenging words, although they were spoken modestly, more in order to encourage herself than with any real expectation that Muriel would respond. I was nonetheless struck by the fact that she had summoned up the necessary courage and vanity to say them, bearing in mind how disagreeable he could be in his comments, or insults, about her physical appearance: ‘Isn’t it time you lost some weight? Your backside’s the size of a bus!’ he would say for no reason. Or ‘You’re looking more and more like Shelley Winters, not facially, which is something, but otherwise, you’re the spitting image; put a short, blonde wig on you and in a three-quarter shot or from behind, you could get a part as her double.’ He often made cinematographic comparisons, holding his hands as if he were framing a shot, doubtless an occupational habit. She took these very sportingly sometimes – at others, she was almost reduced to tears – and was undaunted, knowing as she did all his references: ‘She can’t have been that ugly, after all, she married two good-looking actors, Vittorio Gassman and Tony Franciosa,’ she would say. Beatriz bore no resemblance at all either to a bus or to the poor, clumsy, albeit excellent actress Shelley Winters, who, broad in the beam as a young woman, and heavy-set in her mature years, almost always played touching characters worthy of our pity. To start with, Beatriz was very tall, almost as tall as her husband and, with heels on, even taller. She was also strongly built and large-boned, which meant that she aroused neither female solidarity nor male compassion, for it was hard to imagine that someone so strong and healthy would ever need any kind of protection or consolation. As for her supposed fatness and her figure, in this – give or take some obvious differences, and bearing in mind that Beatriz had had children – she was more like Senta Berger, an Austrian actress who had been at the peak of her fame in the decade just drawing to a close and in the preceding one, perhaps more because of her green eyes and her prominent bust than because of her talent as an actress, although she hadn’t actually ruined any films either. Perhaps that figure and those breasts would be considered excessive by today’s more parsimonious young men, but, at the time, she was merely regarded as buxom and considered to be a real stunner by most male filmgoers, including me and my friends, who, when she was in her heyday, were young men or boys. For a woman like that, however (almost bursting out, shall we say, not from her clothes, of course, but from her own flesh that completely fills her skin, leaving not a fold or wrinkle), it’s hard to be sure that she isn’t somehow excessive and to accept, fully and unselfconsciously, the way she looks, especially if the person closest to her, the person she most wants to please, is constantly bombarding her with denigratory and sometimes almost ingenious comparisons – there’s no defending oneself against the latter without appearing ridiculous – or with out-and-out insults. (The praise and flattery of other men count for nothing, they neither counteract the insults nor help, vanishing as soon as they are spoken.) I assumed that to have said what she said (‘If you could see me now … Go on, look at me. And then go back in, if you can.’), Beatriz must have spent a long time studying herself in the mirror in her skimpy nightdress, from every angle; she must have persuaded and convinced herself of her own desirability, emboldened perhaps by a couple of drinks; she must have dredged up sufficient pride and self-approval. That takes a lot of willpower or, in her case, a lot of passion or neediness, both of which distort our perceptions and our understanding, and tend to lead to errors when calculating probabilities. I would have said that, in theory, everything was in her favour. I was still not so very far from my boyhood, and as I crouched there, enjoying her figure, I remembered the childish, slightly coarse word we used to describe any beautiful woman, macizo, which means both ‘gorgeous’ and ‘solid’ or ‘well built’ (it’s considered old-fashioned now and rather frowned upon), but it seemed to me then that it fitted her exactly.

  Muriel did not speak again for a while. I wondered if he was perhaps considering opening the door. As a spectator, I would have preferred him to appear and thus add to the spectacle, because once you begin to look and listen, you always want the performance to continue. It’s an instantaneous addiction if your curiosity is aroused, a stronger and more irresistible poison than acting and taking part. If you do take part, you have to make decisions and invent, which is hard work and depends on you ending a conversation or a scene, it brings with it responsibilities; if you merely look, everything is done for you, as in a novel or a film, you simply wait to be shown or told about events that haven’t actually happened, and sometimes you get so caught up in them that no one can shift you from your sofa or armchair and you would curse the first person to try. Except that the events were happening that night, and despite the unreality of the dark corridor, a little light was coming in from the street, the pale, indirect light from the street lamps or from the sentinel moon was slipping into the rooms and was reflected more palely still on the waxed floorboards, on which stood the apparently bare feet of a tall, anxious, well-built woman of about forty or perhaps a little more by then, who, having knocked on her husband’s door, was humbly waiting, begging him for a little sex or a little affection, I couldn’t be sure, or perhaps she wanted both things, or to her they were indistinguishable, I couldn’t be sure of that either; at any moment, I thought, she might lose her initial fearlessness and feel ashamed, ugly, pathetic and fat, if he did open the door, it was, I thought, possible that Beatriz would suddenly feel too skimpily dressed, too exposed, with her voluptuous figure covered only by the brief nightdress she had chosen after trying on all her other night attire, that she might see herself as a shameless beggar and cover herself with her arms in a sudden fit of modesty, when she was at last given her opportunity, when she was at last seen as she had wanted to be seen. She would certainly have done so had she noticed my presence and my admiring eyes drinking in every detail – they did not, I think, dare to be covetous, insofar as one can control such things. What I had seen and heard was enough for me to hope the scene would not end, not yet, I at least wanted to
find out if Muriel would soften or would keep his door as blank and shut as a wall, as if there were no door, only a wall, however flimsy, because I had been able to hear his voice through the door’s constraining thickness. I saw Beatriz lean forward again to study the crack under the door – a clearer view of buttocks and thighs, my gaze sharper – and heard her utter an expectant or triumphant or relieved ‘Ah’. I deduced from this that the light in Muriel’s room had been turned on and then I thought I heard his footsteps, or perhaps I was merely anticipating, as one does in the cinema. Or perhaps he had got up and was going over to the door, to look at his wife as she had asked, and then go back in or not, if he could.