Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  She was not, however, an idle woman, as might be inferred from my description of her, and she earned a modest salary, compared, that is, with what Muriel brought in (as well as being modest, it was probably unnecessary as a contribution to their household expenses and she spent it on other things). She taught English at a school three mornings a week and, on a couple of afternoons, gave a few private lessons at her students’ homes, or at least that is the version she gave. I don’t think she had ever studied English systematically, but, born in Madrid towards the end of the Civil War, she had been taken, when still very young, to the United States and had spent part of her childhood, adolescence and early youth there, alternating periods spent in America with time spent in Spain, under the guardianship of an aunt and uncle (who were on good terms with the regime), and in close fraternity with her cousins. She was, out of laziness really, not completely bilingual, but very nearly. Her father, who had not been active during the Civil War and was not initially pursued by the franquistas (although in the 1930s and 40s and even in the 50s, this could change from one day to the next, all it took was some neighbourhood enmity, some old insult or affront to one of the victors, some arbitrary, false accusation, or people desperate to curry favour with the authorities), had succeeded in leaving the country a few months before Madrid was taken by Franco’s troops. A man of moderately Republican, secular views, aware of what the country could become in the hands of the rebels (who would now have a free, unfettered hand), he had been filled with distaste and fear, if not horror and panic, and had made the most of his sudden solitude to leave for France, taking his young daughter with him, despite all the difficulties this would involve and the potential risk to such a small child. From there Ernesto had managed to travel to Mexico with the support of the Foreign Office of that generous country (they cushioned the fall of many who fell at the time), where he stayed for almost a year, until – possibly thanks to the poet Salinas or the poet Guillén, both of whom he had known and admired in Madrid, or directly through Justina Ruiz de Conde – he was given the post of Spanish teacher at Wellesley College in Massachusetts or at Smith or Tufts or Lesley or some other institution near Boston (or perhaps he did the rounds of them all, but who knows in which order), which was considerably steadier and better paid than the sporadic work he found in the insecure world of publishing in a Mexico plagued with compatriot competitors. He had graduated in Philosophy and Literature shortly before the War broke out and, in Spain, had taught at a language school and translated books from German and English, works by Joseph Roth and Arthur Schnitzler, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, among others. He had an excellent grasp of English, although he had never spoken it much and, according to his daughter, even after all his years in America, he never lost his Spanish accent.

  She had never quite understood what I described earlier as his ‘sudden solitude’. According to the version she was given as a child, her mother had died shortly after giving birth to her in the midst of a bombardment or when a shell had fallen on the house, leaving a huge hole in the next-door apartment, so they had, all things considered, been very lucky. Her father never went into detail when she asked him about it, sometimes changing the story or contradicting himself, as if he had invented the whole thing as well as the circumstances surrounding it and had never bothered to fix the lie in his imagination or his memory. He rarely spoke about his wife and when he did, his tone was rather cool and indifferent; he wasn’t one of those young widowers who are devastated by their loss and find it terribly hard to recover. On weekends, he would hire a babysitter and go off to Boston, returning late at night. He clearly adored his daughter and cared for her, but with a kind of inherent negligence, after all, he was a man on his own, fairly young and inexperienced, doubtless distracted by his own youth. And so he found it relatively easy to send her off to her aunt and uncle, who often paid for her fare: Beatriz spent nearly every summer and sometimes a whole school year in Spain and, during those stays, she picked up certain comments and insinuations, which escaped – either deliberately or by chance – the lips of those relatives on her father’s side, the only ones she knew or had seen, and who seemed vexed with their brother or brother-in-law, and this had led her to think that perhaps her mother hadn’t died, but had either left her husband shortly after she was born and chosen not to keep the child of a man she bitterly resented or found repulsive or, because of political differences that proved insuperable at the time, had refused to accompany him on his journey into exile and allowed the child to go with him instead of demanding that she remain in her care in Spain. In short, she had either given up her child or the child had been snatched or stolen by her father. It wasn’t until much later that Beatriz dared to ask openly what had happened, in fact, it wasn’t until shortly before her wedding, she was never in much of a hurry to find out. There are some things about which it’s best just to have your suspicions, as long as these are not pressing or unbearable, rather than pursue some disappointing or painful certainty that, as Muriel had more or less said, would oblige you to go on living, meanwhile having to tell yourself a different story from the one you had lived with up until then, always supposing it was possible to cancel out or replace what you had already lived. Or even cancel out or replace what you had believed, if you had believed it for a long time.

  Needless to say, I gleaned most of these facts from Muriel or Beatriz or from third parties later on, and some facts (for example, the translations Beatriz’s father had published) I learned more recently thanks to the Internet and its boundless but not always accurate information. Anyway, Beatriz spoke English almost like a native, and although many years of barely leaving Spain had made her accent a little rusty and corrupted her syntax (she sometimes made mistakes), this nevertheless meant she could be something more than a mere housewife and earn a little money. Not that she was entirely inactive or idle when she wasn’t teaching; she appeared to do her best to fend off her underlying unhappiness by filling her days, at least in fits and starts. On her free mornings or afternoons she would leave the apartment without saying where she was going and without Muriel asking her – well, why would he, given how estranged they were from one another? Sometimes Rico would come and pick her up when he was in Madrid, and sometimes it was Roy or a female friend, of which she had several, but two of whom were particular favourites, although I liked neither very much. However, she would always try to be back in time for the children’s supper, if not before, just in case they needed help with their homework or to tell her their troubles, especially the two younger ones (troubles at school, I mean, the kind that can still be talked about openly).

  When she was at her lowest ebb, however, she would take refuge in her part of the apartment and could be heard playing the piano badly, practising so very lazily or reluctantly that what we mainly heard was the metronome, which ticked away for long periods without a single note or chord being played, as if it were a perpetual threat or a representation of the tempo of her thoughts or the insistent beat of her sufferings, perhaps it was a way of telling Muriel that her life was passing by without his company and without her regaining his affection, of making him notice her absence second by second, or at the very least, I would think, forty times a minute. It used to make me nervous, and I would sometimes wonder if Beatriz had lost consciousness and was lying on the floor beside the piano – or if she were dead – so prolonged were the intervals without any music or something at least resembling music, while the needle beat back and forth, indifferent to the fate of the person who had set it in motion. I’ve no idea how long those machines can keep going, but I had the impression that, as soon as it wound down, Beatriz would immediately reactivate it, and there were some mornings or afternoons when its tick-tock seemed to me eternal, as though Beatriz were insisting to us that she was there, just a short distance away, thus imposing her invisible presence on us, so that we would not forget her for a single moment, however busy or distracted we were. Muriel was so used to it that he neve
r succumbed to the disquiet provoked by that rhythmic, tireless, monotonous sound, but for me there was something ominous about it, an element of pent-up waiting or warning. Sometimes, I felt I could almost see Beatriz interminably drumming her fingers, about to explode or attack someone or destroy the piano or do something foolish, to use the classic euphemism that avoids actually saying the word ‘suicide’. He, however, immune to that obsessive reminder, would continue talking or speechifying or dictating, as if the noise didn’t exist. On those occasions, I thought he had managed to erase her from the face of the earth, even though she was there every day, so close, and even though he occasionally exchanged with her a few almost friendly domestic words and even unwittingly smiled at her now and then, like an automatic reflex reaction from a past, long-past, affection, or like the palest of ghosts of a defunct desire; it’s hard to keep a permanent frown on your face in anyone’s company.

  One day, when the metronome had been beating away for more than half an hour, untempered by a single note from the piano, I dared to express my fears.

  ‘Excuse me, Eduardo,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there hasn’t been any music for quite a while and yet the metronome hasn’t stopped. Do you think your wife’s all right? She may be ill or have fainted. It just seems very odd.’

  ‘No,’ he answered. ‘She takes her time, then gets distracted and falls asleep at the piano. As long as she’s there, she’s fine. It’s quite another matter when she goes out and about on her own.’

  ‘Do you mean we should be worried about her when she goes out, then?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he said and changed the subject or picked up whatever we had been doing before. He was clearly not going to explain or add anything more. And so I didn’t insist and accepted the convention that as long as we could hear the tick-tock of the metronome, everything was fine, more or less, and Beatriz was safe and sound, which was not the same thing as her being at peace and in her right mind.

  Fortunately, she was usually very active. I don’t know why – perhaps it was that remark of her husband’s, or, if I do know why, I’d rather not say, or not yet, perhaps later – but when Muriel was out, looking for locations or travelling around in search of financial backing or shooting the one film he made during the time I was working for him, a strictly bread-and-butter project for the British producer Harry Alan Towers, when the latter returned to Spain to try his luck again after the 1960s and 70s, when he had made films about or based on Fu Manchu, Dracula, Sumuru and the Marquis de Sade, usually with Jesús Franco aka Jess Frank as director and with Muriel himself occasionally deputizing (although he would always become as involved in the project as if the original idea had been his alone, convinced that, thanks to his finer hand and eye, he would produce something that would be both personal and rather artistic); anyway, while he was away for a week here and there, and I had nothing much to do but draw up exhaustive chronological lists of authors, in an attempt to impose some order on his vast library, and other such tasks (I have known few men who were so well read), as I say, when he was absent, I took to following his wife whenever she went out alone. Not, of course, when she was escorted from the apartment by Rico or Roy or one of her meddlesome female friends. I knew then that they would be going to the theatre or shopping or to a concert or a museum, or even to the occasional lecture or some old-fashioned literary gathering (Beatriz adored the writer Juan Benet, a friend of Rico’s, and whom she also found extremely attractive); sometimes, on her return, she would tell me what she had been up to and even relate the odd anecdote. Rico always complained about being dragged off to the cinema, but he pleased her in order to please Muriel. Roy was far more docile, and just as the Professor couldn’t be totally ruled out as anybody’s lover, even, in theory, Beatriz’s (he was a dangerous fellow, despite his deceptively scholarly air and his dissuasively off-hand manner, which he extended even to the women he was wooing or pretending to woo, I think he enjoyed seeing how far he could go, often simply dropping the whole business once he’d proved to himself that he could, if he’d wanted, have gone all the way), Roy, however, appeared inoffensive, a genuine cicisbeo, to use the old Italian name given to the merely obliging and, in principle, non-carnivorous escorts of neglected married ladies, widows with a social position to keep up and even a few spinsters nervous of going into society alone.

  He owned an agency, inherited from his father, which practically ran itself and to which he devoted almost no time at all, apart from spending a few hours there in the morning to greet some particularly demanding client, supervise the work of his employees and pretend to give them orders. His real passion was the cinema, and his admiration for Muriel infinite. He had invested modest sums in Muriel’s productions (entirely non-recoverable, but he liked to feel he was participating in what, for him, would always be a grand enterprise) and had written a couple of brief monographs on Muriel’s work, which were taken up by publishers with limited distribution, and which provided him with an excuse to meet the maestro, as he often called Muriel when addressing or referring to him, as if Muriel were the conductor of an orchestra or a matador, the only people in Spain to merit such a form of address without it sounding either adulatory or phoney. Muriel had welcomed him and opened his doors to him (there were a few regular visitors to the apartment who would turn up unannounced or at short notice, and who were often to be found there, almost part of the furniture, and whom one could, without causing offence, either put off or simply dismiss if they arrived at an awkward moment) and he did so largely because he liked him, but partly out of fellow feeling and pity: Roy clearly led a very empty life and was such a devoted fan that the maestro allowed him to fill up that emptiness a little with the leavings from his own life, which Roy greedily gobbled up. For him, every visit to our household was an event (and I say ‘our household’ because I ended up becoming part of the furniture too, often opening the door to visitors and either ushering them in or barring the way), especially when he, being rather star-struck, met the occasional semi-famous director, actor or actress. He would sit apart from everyone else, never joining in the conversation, discreet, invisible, a mere shape, so that some people thought he was a kind of silent attorney literally lurking in the shadows, as a witness to certain meetings and encounters, indeed, Muriel didn’t even always introduce him. Roy savoured every moment, every fleeting contact with anyone (even me), but especially with the famous, and one day, he was struck dumb and rigid (although he did subsequently begin to shake) when he entered the living room and saw Jack Palance, the bad guy in Shane and in so many other unforgettable films, and with whom Muriel had become friends when Palance appeared in a completely insane adaptation of de Sade’s Justine in Spain, under the baton (if I may put it like that) of that crazy and prolific duo Towers and Franco. Palance had studied at Stanford University, recorded an album of country music, painted, written poetry, and was filled by far more artistic impulses than one would ever have imagined when seeing him play Attila, a cruel gladiator or a hot- or cold-blooded murderer; he considered Muriel to be an intellectual and that was the aspect of his personality he most respected and found most interesting. When Roy came in, Palance, being a gentleman, stood up and, since he was extremely tall and Roy was on the short side, had to bend so low to shake his hand that it looked almost as if he were bowing to him. He slightly lost his balance and, to steady himself, placed his other large hand on the shoulder of the diminutive Roy. When this failed, he had no option but to turn that gesture into a clumsy embrace, but then, fearing perhaps that he might crush Roy beneath his weight, he nimbly recovered himself and instead lifted Roy into the air as though he were a doll. For a few seconds he offered Muriel and me an image that we would often recall later on: Roy in Jack Palance’s arms, his feet off the ground and his face pressed to Palance’s breast. Palance gave a loud laugh and gracefully returned Roy to earth, like a dancer lightly depositing a ballerina he had been holding aloft. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘my fault entirely.
I really should make myself shorter when I visit southern Europe.’ And he laughed again, revealing his small teeth. Roy did not understand and could only stammer out something supposedly English and which ended in ‘meet you’, then he smoothed down his jacket and his hair and withdrew to his usual corner to observe Palance avidly, if not rapturously, not daring to utter another word for as long as he remained there, eclipsed and trembling with excitement, like a filmgoer sitting in a darkened cinema. I’m sure he wrote a very long entry in his diary that night (like many unhappy, lonely people, he kept a diary) in which, as well as setting down the little he could have understood of the English conversation, he would doubtless write, accompanied by many exclamation marks, some such puerile words as: ‘The very hand now wielding this pen was tonight shaken by Jack Palance!!! The great gunman even lifted me up in his arms!!!’ In the late 1990s, by the way, I found a book written and illustrated by Palance and entitled: The Forest of Love: A Love Story in Blank Verse. As with his album of country music, which has some nice songs sung in a pleasant, unusual voice (one song begins rather comically with the words: ‘I’m the meanest guy that ever lived, I spit when others cry’), in memory of that evening and out of my unconditional, completely star-struck admiration for the actor, I prefer not to pass comment on his blank verse.