Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘Perfumed gloves? I’ve never heard of those before,’ commented Bettina, who probably wasn’t much interested, but whom the Professor appeared to have entranced with his torrent of useless knowledge (useless to most of humanity, but not to him). ‘How do they make sure they stay perfumed?’

  ‘You mean how did they, because no one wastes their time nowadays on such folderols. I’ll explain later, rica,’ replied the Professor. I was taken aback to hear him address her as rica – or sweetheart – given that his name was Rico, unless it was intended as a prophetic appellation, as if he were summoning her to a subsequent secret meeting. He was in his stride now and wanted to tell us everything he knew about that particular De Vere. He again turned to me, although still looking at Bettina out of the corner of his eye. ‘As you know, there are numerous theories about the non-existence of Shakespeare, each one stranger than the last; to be honest, it’s developing into a real industry. Or, I should say, theories about whether his name was used as a pseudonym or perhaps as a front for that incomparable literary treasure for which some cretinous critics can see no human explanation, which is understandable really when measured by the standard of their own sterility. Some say that Marlowe wasn’t stabbed in a tavern brawl when he was twenty-nine, but staged and faked his own death in order to escape his enemies and then continue writing as Shakespeare; some claim that the real author of the plays was Bacon, while others say it was Heywood or Fletcher, or several of them all together; others opt for Kyd or Middleton, others Webster or Beaumont or even Rowley, Chettle, Lord Brooke, even Florio or Fludd, all utterly absurd, ridiculous.’ I had heard a couple of those names in my lectures, but most were new to me. I was impressed by his knowledge, he was like a walking biographical dictionary, although it also occurred to me that they might be invented names, because, in the face of ignorance, one is always free to invent. ‘Frushta,’ he said, using one of his original onomatopoeia to fill the brief pause. ‘And now there’s this arrogant sod who thinks he can prove that Shakespeare was a front for Edward de Vere; he vouchsafed this information to me at a conference – in utmost confidence, of course – urging me to keep his secret safe. For several years! Can you imagine? I had no qualms, however, about spilling the beans, hoping either that someone would refute his theory before he finally gave birth to his Big Book or that someone would get in first and ruin his discovery, my colleagues have no scruples whatsoever and are constantly stealing other people’s ideas and, besides, I don’t like the fellow.’ (‘OK, we get the picture,’ I thought, scandalized.) ‘He dared to challenge something I had written about Lazarillo de Tormes. True, there weren’t many people present, but still he had the nerve to challenge me. An Anglo-Saxon challenging me on Lazarillo,’ he said again. ‘They’ll invite any ragamuffin to these symposia nowadays and allow them to hold forth on whatever they bloody well like. Yes, any rapscallion is welcome.’

  ‘What’s a rapscallion?’ asked Bettina. It was a fairly antiquated word that she might never have heard or read.

  ‘I’ll tell you that later too, rica.’ Rico, again rather suspiciously, repeated that assimilatory or bamboozling appellation. You had to watch that bald-headed man, he was quite capable of stealing a girl from under your nose. And yet I still couldn’t believe that he would take advantage of his closeness to Beatriz, however much she enjoyed his company. He could hold your attention whatever the subject and even if you didn’t understand half of what he said, he was doubtless a magnetic teacher, a mesmerizer of students (whether blockheads or geniuses, it didn’t matter). In fact, I noticed that Muriel and Beatriz, who had been elsewhere in the apartment, had come to the living-room door when they heard him speechifying and were smiling as they listened, and they rarely smiled at the same time. They each raised a finger to their lips almost simultaneously, as if they were well matched to the point of synchronicity, warning me to say nothing and not to interrupt. However, it was Rico himself who suddenly stopped talking, surprised and bewildered: ‘But why the fuck am I talking about this?’ he asked. ‘How did I get on to the subject of that impostor in the first place?’

  ‘It was because of my surname, Professor,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes. Now then, can you explain to me the sham of your being called De Vere?’ and he again pronounced this as ‘De Viah’, to which he had obviously taken a great liking and which emerged from his mouth like an explosion.

  ‘There’s no mystery about it, Professor, and you’re right, it really is a complete sham, although a fairly ancient one. Apparently, our original surname was the much more common Vera. My family clearly has a long history of delusions of grandeur or perhaps originality. On a whim, some great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather of mine changed it to Vere, thinking that changing one letter would lend it a certain distinction. And I believe it was my grandfather who added the “de”. My father likes it and has kept it, he obviously has his own delusions of grandeur and must think it suits his profession, where high-sounding surnames are par for the course. He’ll be thrilled when he finds out that there was a De Vere hiding behind Shakespeare’– and I pronounced it Spanish fashion, it was, after all, my surname – ‘even though we’re not related to those genuine De Viahs.’ I couldn’t help myself this time and the name came out like a roar, even more exaggerated than his own pronunciation; Rico realized I was making fun of him and looked at me somewhat askance. ‘He’ll boast about it, he’ll tell everyone and will contribute more than anyone else to spreading the word. That Anglo-Saxon colleague of yours is well and truly finished. Soon, half the world will know about it.’

  This, however, seemed to vex the Professor.

  ‘Your father’s profession? He’s a diplomat, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, a career diplomat, not a political one.’

  ‘He must know people all over the world.’

  ‘Quite a few, yes. He’s travelled around a lot.’

  ‘And where has he been posted to now? Algeria, I hope.’

  I didn’t understand why he said this.

  ‘He’s Consul in Frankfurt,’ I replied. ‘Why?’

  The Professor pondered deeply and, while he did so, kept up a rapid muttering like a man possessed, although none of his comments seemed addressed to me.

  ‘Far too civilized. Airport hub. Business deals by the shedload. No, I don’t like it, I don’t like it all. Tons of visitors. The annual Buchmesse. Money calling to money. A lot of very cultivated people. Buchmesse,’ he repeated, as if it were one of his onomatopoeia. Then he uttered a real one, which sounded like an interjection. ‘Áfguebar. No, best not. He’ll send a circular. To all the delegations in the world. And the world’s a big place. National and foreign delegations. Multiplication. Too many countries. Telegrams. Best not. No, I’d rather be hanged first.’ And then he spoke to me again: ‘Listen, young De Vere or De Vera, be very careful. Something that’s merely a tall story could be taken for the truth. That fellow will never be able to prove it, for all his research and rummaging around in archives and however much he twists and distorts the facts to fit his theory. He’ll never get away with it. So I ask you to be discreet, best not say anything to anyone, I wouldn’t want things to backfire on me because of that gossipy father of yours. We certainly don’t want it to become a generally held idea that Shakespeare was just an actor and didn’t write a single line and that it was all the work of Edward de Vere. If he ever does publish his book, maybe fifty experts will know about it, of which forty-five will ignore it and the other five, having flipped through a couple of pages, will gladly lay into him, out of sheer spite (that’s what it’s like in the groves of academe). If the press picked it up, then a lot more people would find out, although, it would doubtless be forgotten again within a month. Rumour on the other hand is what lasts, it’s unstoppable, undying, the one thing that endures. I certainly don’t want to give that imbecile the gift of a rumour. Like the man said …’ And here the Professor began reciting from memory, in a loud, passionate voice, his arm raised (not, fortunat
ely, in the Roman or the Fascist manner, he was merely trying to be theatrical and eloquent, but his arm remained rigid): ‘Open your ears; for which of you will stop the vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, making the wind my post-horse, still unfold the acts commenced on this ball of earth. Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, the which in every language I pronounce, stuffing the ears of men with false reports.’ Rico had the bit between his teeth now and didn’t look as if he were about to stop, this was no parenthesis, no mere footnote. Absorbed, perhaps enthused, he continued to declaim as if only that ancient text existed in the room or in the universe, and it was doubtless a very long text. ‘And who but Rumour, who but only I, make fearful musters and prepared defence, whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief, is thought with child by the stern tyrant war …?’ I looked at Bettina, who was listening open-mouthed to these barely comprehensible words. I touched her thigh, the thigh that Rico had so coveted (although not now, for poetry drives out or suspends lust), and she emerged from her trance and, in turn, looked at me as if she had suddenly woken up. She realized that it was time for us to leave, she had, after all, come to pick me up on her way to a couple of parties. I glanced across at Muriel and Beatriz, who were watching Rico with affection and amusement, it was clear that they were both very fond of him and that they occasionally still enjoyed a certain complicity, a shared sense of humour, perhaps dating back to their youth. They gestured to us, letting us know that the way was clear and that the reciter would not miss us if we left. And so we very quietly got up and left the room, without the Professor even noticing, sequestered in his mind by his invasive memory, his arm still held stiffly aloft, as if it were mummified. He probably often had such attacks of oral literature. When I opened the front door, I could still hear his vibrant voice in the distance, addressing his words now only to himself and his two watching friends. ‘The posts come tiring on, and not a man of them brings other news than they have learn’d of me …’

  The reason I can remember and reproduce these lines is that, a few days later, Muriel dispatched me to Bourguignon the florist’s to choose and order some flowers to be sent to an actress, and when I set off to perform this errand, I felt a sudden twinge of curiosity and went into the library of the British Institute in Calle Almagro, which is right next to the florist’s, and there I tracked them down in English. Just as I thought, they were Shakespeare’s (or Edward de Vere’s) words and it was easy enough to find out in which play he had assumed the voice of noisy Rumour. What I couldn’t find, later on, was a Spanish translation that corresponded to the one the Professor had unleashed on us, and so I wondered if it was perhaps his own work, even though English was not the foreign language in which he was most fluent. It had sounded pretty good. In none of the existing translations (there were various then and there are even more now) did I come across the expressions el año grávido and el encorvado oeste (‘the pregnant year’ and ‘the stoop-backed west’) to translate ‘the big year’ and ‘the drooping west’, two images that had particularly struck me. Next time I see him, I’ll have to ask Paco about it, he’s insisted I call him ‘Paco’ for years now, much against my will, and he insists on calling me ‘Juan’ and not ‘young De Vere’. His arguments for this are indisputable: a long time has passed, I’m no longer young, Muriel and Beatriz are both dead, and they were the ones who gave us our respective appellations, and what binds us together is that ‘before’ (which means we should not be ironic or overly formal with each other), having met in an age that is beginning to seem as remote as the Second World War seemed to us then, with the added complication that while we hadn’t personally experienced that War and it had been swallowed up by fiction, 1980 was still for us a recent date and entirely real. Yes, we’re bound together by something troubling, sad and, at the same time, comforting: being survivors, that is, having outlived far too many friends, of whom we become the intermittent wake or the brief memory which is, for a while, transmitted in ever-quieter whispers.

  In honour of Professor Rico, I should mention a couple of things. One morning, about three months after that occasion, when I’d stopped seeing Bettina (nothing lasted very long in those effervescent days), I saw them together at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, towards the top of Calle de Alcalá, standing before a painting by Mengs, which, if I remember rightly, is a full-length portrait of an eighteenth-century lady wearing a beret, holding a mask and with a parakeet perched on her shoulder. Muriel had sent me there to the Reproductions Department to buy a print of an etching by Fortuny (‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘it’s called Meditation’), which he wanted as inspiration for some shots in his latest film: a man in a frock coat, breeches and stockings, leaning against a wall, his chin in one hand and his head bowed so low that his elongated bicorn hat covers his face completely, invisible then and forever more. After buying the print, I went for a wander round that small, discreet and somewhat unfrequented museum (The Knight’s Dream is the best thing there), and I saw them some way off, but chose not to approach or to wave; he, I think, would have felt triumphant rather than embarrassed, but she might have felt a little awkward. Rico was giving her a (doubtless prolix) explanation, and Bettina, her lovely eyes fixed on the painting, was listening devotedly, which was surprising in a girl who, when we were going out together, used to jump rapidly from one subject to the next, never focusing on anything for very long. This was probably all down to the magnetic qualities of the Professor, who, while he was speaking, kept running his hand up and down her spine and waist (I imagine this was intended as a fond caress, but there was, too, an element of satisfied or possibly newly reawakened lust), and his hand even ventured as far as the incipient curve of her bottom (possibly covered by nothing but her flimsy skirt), and as she made not the slightest gesture or movement to avoid that hand, it was also clear that the Professor had already explored that territory without the hindrance of any intervening fabric; I didn’t even rule out the possibility that they had woken up together in a hotel room and that Rico, not wishing to get rid of her too abruptly or brusquely, and unable to think of any better way of distracting her, had decided to educate and enlighten her solely because, whoever he was with and whatever the circumstances, he found it hard not to slip into pedantic, didactic mode. He probably continued to lecture even between the sheets or in his bathrobe. I wondered half-heartedly quite when he had managed to obtain her phone number or how he had got in touch with her. I was astonished to see how much could be achieved with a few oblique, appreciative glances and a few lines quoted from memory. I always was impressed by his ability to get his own way.