Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘Be so kind as not to address me as “my child”, Mother,’ I said in a rather blunt, pompous tone, ‘because I’m not your child, is that clear? You shouldn’t be so familiar with a complete stranger.’ How ridiculous to tell her off for calling me ‘my child’ and then address her as ‘Mother’. However, I knew this was a sure-fire way of pleasing elderly nuns (who may well be mothers superior) and softening them up, just as priests come over all sentimental when you call them ‘Father’, as they would like you to; a somewhat vain ambition in both cases.

  She looked slightly put out and eyed me curiously. She had very arched eyebrows.

  ‘Now, now, my child,’ she said, ignoring my comment entirely. ‘There’s no need to get upset, that’s how I address all the other young people who come here, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen you before. But whatever were you doing up there? You could have taken a real tumble.’

  I found it odd that she should speak so colloquially, it had been a long time too since I’d heard the expression ‘take a tumble’. She must be from a village originally or a small town.

  I hesitated for a moment, I needed to get going. I said the first idiotic thing that came into my head:

  ‘I wanted to go up really high to see if Our Lady would appear to me, Our Lady of Darmstadt,’ I explained unnecessarily. ‘I know she often does appear to people.’

  I had no idea if this was true or not, but I assumed it was: any Virgin with a sanctuary named after her was sure to have appeared several times suspended in mid-air or over the sea or on a rock or even at the top of a tree (which, after all, is where I had been – or almost). That’s their way of indicating where a church should be built in their honour, or so they say. And they show themselves in various places in order to get a basilica here, a shrine there, a niche over there – they’re never satisfied.

  ‘She doesn’t just appear like that, at the beck and call of the believer. That would be too theatrical. And if she did keep appearing, then where would we be? In a right pickle.’ I didn’t even know that last expression. It sounded very old-fashioned, although I could guess what it meant. That nun had definitely come from some hidden-away place or, possibly, the Middle Ages.

  ‘Ah, I see. You mean she’s shy. Well, yes, that makes sense. And if she did keep making those theatrical appearances, we would, as you say, be in a right pickle.’ I repeated her words as if this were an expression I used all the time. I glanced over at the double staircase, down which Beatriz, I assumed, would have to come on her way out. From where I was, I could see only one flight of stairs, the other remained hidden; I trusted that Beatriz would choose those stairs and would, therefore, not see me, just as I could not see them. Or that Van Vechten had detained her for a while longer. At any rate, I needed to get away as quickly as possible. ‘Well, I have to rush off now, Mother. Forgive my reaction, my ignorance, and for having startled or bothered you in any way. It was a pleasure to meet you.’

  I kissed her hand as if she were a cardinal or a bishop, I had little experience of ecclesiasticals, but had observed that with some of them, you were expected to plant a kiss on the big purple ring they wore – and if that isn’t theatrical, I don’t know what is – and besides, that nun from some remote time or place deserved no less: she had been very kind, despite her grating voice. In a few strides I had reached the street door. I looked left and right, but luckily saw no one else and only hoped that neither Beatriz nor Van Vechten had come over to the window during the few minutes I had stood talking to the nun at the foot of the tree. I strode rapidly off down the street, but stopped short when I had gone barely twenty paces, because I spotted Beatriz in the distance, the sway of her skirt was unmistakable, although now it swayed with rather less ease, since it had, needless to say, become somewhat creased. She had been very quick and had clearly allowed Van Vechten neither caresses nor words (Non, pas de mots, she might have said, had she been in a novel), she had obviously departed unnoticed while I was still talking to the old lady. She was about to go into the nearby Museo Lázaro Galdiano, on the opposite side of a broad street. This time, I did not go after her, doubting that yet another lover would be waiting for her inside.

  And yet when I followed Beatriz again a few days later, during that same period when Muriel was away from Madrid, I did think there might be a second lover. On that occasion, Beatriz had again gone out for a walk and at a similar hour. She walked for a while along Calle Velázquez where she lived, or where we (in a sense) lived, for I was spending more and more time at the apartment, whether intentionally or by chance, I’m not sure; when she reached Lista – the name we madrileños gave, and still give, to what is officially Calle de Ortega y Gasset, as it appears on maps and in guides – she turned right and walked the short distance to Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca. I saw her go in through the high doorway of one of the houses in the square. I allowed a few minutes to pass before going over to read the small metal plaques – there were a few of them, mostly brass – screwed into the wall beside the door, so that they could easily be seen from the street, perhaps as a discreet advertisement for companies that had their headquarters in the building in question or for professionals with a certain prestige or reputation or for those aspiring to that and trying their luck and making their way. There were seven plaques beside that particular door: three were rather cryptic, ‘Meridianos’, ‘221B BS’ and ‘Gekoski’, but I presumed they were the names of companies. The same would be true of ‘Marius Kociejowski. Middle Eastern Travel’, but at least it told you what he did (broad, but specific; he was not, I presumed, a mere travel agent). I was struck by the fact that there were two more or less Polish surnames on the plaques, or so they seemed to me, there weren’t as many Poles in Madrid then as there would be a decade or more later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the Poles who arrived then tended not to be businessmen. I knew ‘Deverne Films’, a very influential and successful film distributor, which also owned various cinemas, and, after all, who didn’t know the vast logo that regularly filled cinema screens, announcing: ‘Deverne Films presents …’? Muriel, I recall, had dealings with the family, as, no doubt, did all directors. In fact, a few months before, I had accompanied Muriel to a meeting in a café with the company’s founder and one of his sons, who although not yet thirty, was already very much part of the firm. The distributors were involved in film production, advancing initial funding so that a film could be made and, assuming they liked the finished product, reserving the distribution rights or else making money by selling it off to another distributor. The two remaining plaques were more run of the mill: ‘Juan Mollá. Lawyer’, said one, and the last was equally terse: ‘Dr Carlos Arranz. Medical Consultant’.

  I crossed Calle Príncipe de Vergara and waited outside a shop called La Continental, which sold all kinds of things for the home: furniture, crockery, artefacts, all in excellent taste. (At least I think that was the shop: I’m not sure now if it existed then, and it certainly doesn’t now; and yet that is the shop that has remained lodged in my memory, perhaps because, later on, I spent a lot of time there with my wife, choosing items for our apartment, with me occasionally glancing across at No. 2 and thinking back to that day.) I could go inside to pass the time, while keeping a close eye on the doorway for when Beatriz re-emerged, I wanted at least to know how long she would spend in there, not that any activity requires a great deal of time, how long a meeting lasts doesn’t really tell you anything. I couldn’t help but speculate while I waited: I didn’t think she would have gone to see the lawyer or the doctor, although that couldn’t be discounted. The name ‘221B BS’ made me suspect that it was a detective agency; I couldn’t help associating that strange name with 221B Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson lived and received their various intriguing commissions. It seemed more likely to me that Beatriz would be visiting them: unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people
’s lives as a distraction from their own. She could have been visiting Gekoski or Meridianos, whatever they were, or Marius K and his journeys to the Middle East, or someone else, who had no plaque. However, I inclined towards Deverne Films, after all, they were in the same line of work as her husband and she would probably know them. I hadn’t paid much attention to that conversation in the café, but I did notice the founder’s handsome son, Miguel Deverne, a young man not much older than me, but who was dressed with surprising aplomb in suit and tie and even wearing cufflinks, which I thought very old-fashioned. He was a friendly man, with a warm, ready laugh, any woman would have found him attractive, even a woman in her forties, especially if she had spent painful, frustrating years being rejected by her husband.

  The sight of Beatriz and Van Vechten a few days before had revealed a new active aspect of her personality, or had perhaps shrouded or contaminated my view of her, if I can put it like that (the truth is that I had seen nothing, only her face and her closed eyes), and now I imagined her in that same pose all the time, which was both inappropriate and unfair, since at home she always behaved discreetly and even timidly sometimes – especially in Muriel’s presence, as if she were apologizing for her very existence – he had managed to cow her, to diminish her, despite her robust build and stature, to make her feel she was in the way, as if she were something imposed by custom or by a commitment made long ago, which, precisely because it was now old, could no longer be questioned; she even seemed somewhat apologetic with me too, and for months hardly dared to speak to me because I so clearly belonged to her husband’s world, and he was someone she dreaded, possibly even feared. And so it seemed to me that regardless of who she was seeing in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, the meeting was sure to be of a sexual nature, however much I kept telling myself that this wasn’t necessarily the case, that she might well have an appointment with the lawyer, Mollá, to discuss a possible divorce when divorce eventually became legal; or with Dr Arranz about some problem or symptom or out of pure hypochondria, and that the doctor could well be a psychiatrist or psychologist – the plaque didn’t specify what field he was in – and it would have come as no surprise to discover that Beatriz was going to a therapist to unburden herself or to learn to cope better with her sorrow; she could be hiring a private investigator to look into some incident or individual from the past or present (she might want to probe into the origin of her misfortune), or be planning a trip to Egypt or Syria; she could be interceding on Muriel’s behalf, trying to get the distributors to take on a project of his that was otherwise hanging by a thread; she could be doing business with Gekoski, which sounded to me like the name of a dodgy auctioneer or an upmarket pawnbroker, if such things still exist. And yet despite all this hypothesizing, I still kept imagining a repetition of the scene with Van Vechten. It even occurred to me, in my meanderings, that she might be prostituting herself to help her husband – unconditional love does not exclude paradox and, as the word ‘unconditional’ indicates, such love is capable of anything – and she had gone there to offer her body to the founder of the company, Deverne, who would be in his sixties or older and would be unlikely to turn his nose up at the chance.

  ‘Hers is such a woeful bed,’ I thought, ‘that she has to visit other beds, or dispense with beds altogether, so that she doesn’t risk feeling the contrast with her own cold, solitary bed, to which she returns each night. She can’t bear to be still and simply accept her fate, so she seeks out these forays, these adventures. She would far rather be with Muriel, but since he won’t have her, she refuses simply to languish or waste away at home, and in her more animated moments, she looks for substitutes, as almost everyone does, very few of us ever find what we yearn for, or if we do, we don’t hang on to it for very long, and who knows how long she managed to hang on to her happiness.’ We strive to conquer things, never thinking, in our eagerness, that they will never definitely be ours, that they rarely last and are always susceptible to loss, nothing is ever for ever, we often fight battles or hatch plots or tell lies, commit vile deeds or acts of treachery or foment crimes always forgetting that the thing we obtain might not last (it’s a very ancient fault in all of us, to see the present as final and forget that it’s inevitably and infuriatingly transitory), and that once their effect fades or expires, all the battles and plots, the lies and vile deeds, the betrayals and crimes will seem utterly futile to us, or worse, superfluous: such a waste of verve, such a squandering of energy, we might as well have saved ourselves the bother, since nothing much has changed. We are led on by wicked haste and easily surrender ourselves to poisonous impatience, as I once heard Muriel describe it, although whether he was quoting someone else I have no idea. We see no further than tomorrow and see it as the end of time, just as if we were little children believing that our mother’s momentary absence will be definitive and irreversible, that she has abandoned us completely; that if our hunger or thirst is not immediately satisfied, we will remain hungry and thirsty for ever; that if we suffer even the tiniest of scratches, the pain will never end, we don’t even foresee the scab forming; that if we feel safe and protected now, we will feel so for the rest of our life, which we can only conceive of from day to day or hour to hour or five minutes to five minutes. In that respect, we don’t change very much when we’re adults, not even when we’re old and what remains to us of life is so much shorter. The past doesn’t count, it’s time expired and negated, a time of error or ingenuousness and ignorance, which we end up perceiving as merely pathetic, and what ultimately invalidates and overwhelms it is this idea: ‘How little we knew, how stupid we were, how innocent, we had no idea what awaited us and now we do.’ And in that state of present knowledge, we are incapable of bearing in mind that tomorrow we will know something else and today will seem as stupid to us as yesterday or the day before or the day on which we were first thrust into the world, or perhaps this happened in the middle of the night beneath the bored and scornful moon. We go from deceit to deceit and know that, in that respect, we are not deceived, and yet we always take the latest deceit for the truth.

  I waited and waited and felt as if I had been waiting a long time. I went into the shop and left again over and over, I browsed around inside without buying anything, avoiding the solicitous assistants as best I could (‘No, thank you, I’m just looking, I’ll come back when I’ve made a decision’). I gazed up at the windows of the building opposite, but saw no one, and it was impossible to know which floor Beatriz had gone to. I was tempted to peer in and ask the porter, but that would have been inappropriate and he would have answered in rude, patronizing tones: ‘What’s it got to do with you, young man, why do you want to know? It’s no business of yours who the lady is visiting. Who sent you, anyway? I’m going to tell Señor Gekoski, Dr Arranz, Señor Mollá, Mr Holmes, Señor Kociejowski, and the Devernes, so that they can take action and know all about your meddling.’ Of course, by threatening me with a name, he would have answered my question. I continued to wait, and the more time passed, the more likely it seemed to me that Beatriz’s meeting was a carnal one; then, a few seconds later, I thought exactly the opposite, it takes longer to talk than it does to have a prearranged fuck, forgive the vulgarity, but it’s best to call a spade a spade.

  She did not reappear for nearly an hour, but which of those men had she been with and what had she done? At first, I noticed no change in her attitude or her appearance, although there was perhaps a change in her expression, which seemed to me – how can I put it? – disjointed or blurred, as if one part of her face expressed pleasurable intensity and the other disgust, as if she had just had a thrilling but somehow distasteful experience. She began walking back the way she came. I followed her at a distance, to see where she was going, until she went into a very classy clothes shop on Calle de Ortega y Gasset, or, rather, Lista. And it was while she was walking that I noticed the enormous ladder in her tights, almost a tear, and her skirt, obviously disarranged in the fray, was slightly caught up at the back, despite
her efforts to smooth it into place while she walked. I know now and knew then how very easily tights ladder, you only have to brush against something, but it confirmed my suppositions: whoever she had just gone to bed with – well, not bed, of course, but there are always ledges and walls and tables on which to lean – the man had not been as careful as Van Vechten; if you keep your clothes on, they can easily become dirty or torn. When she left the shop, she had changed her tights and her skirt swung freely, any obstacle removed. She must have bought them there and then, and gone into the shop for that purpose.

  No one had sent me, contrary to what the porter would have thought had I inquired who Beatriz Noguera was visiting, asked the name of her visitee. No, no one had ordered me to follow her when she went out alone, and at the time, I myself didn’t really know why I was doing it, or felt no need to explain to myself or preferred not to recognize the real reason, despite my naturally reflective nature. That is one of the advantages of youth: you allow yourself to act far more impulsively and obliquely, it makes you feel terribly original somehow – even though this turns out not to be the case at all, and what you’re doing is actually supremely banal – because you’re prepared to take rash, instantaneous decisions, thinking you can get away with a certain degree of eccentricity or irresponsibility or even a touch of feigned madness, or, rather, you’re of an age that allows for that – only a little sporadic madness, because flirting with insanity is never risk-free – without incurring any real consequences, and you rarely do slide into a more serious, more enduring madness; and you are still very close to childhood and adolescence, when you see yourself as a character out of a novel or a comic or a film and try to emulate them; perhaps I was imitating Hitchcock’s creations, suggested by that season of films to which Muriel had taken me, unresisting, and in which there are often long sequences during which no one says a word, no dialogue at all, just people coming and going from one place to another, and yet you sit, eyes glued to the screen, feeling increasingly intrigued and anxious, even when sometimes there’s no objective reason to feel that. The mere act of watching creates that feeling of anxiety, that sense of intrigue. We just have to lay eyes on someone for us to begin to ask questions and fear for their fate.