Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  Anyway, I believed myself to be fully formed and finished and felt that, broadly speaking, I knew my own character. I didn’t know where I’d learned the rules of behaviour by which I tried to live my life (not from my parents, who had no rules at all or else kept changing them, but then maybe that’s part of being a diplomat), but I never behaved in a solemn or ostentatious manner; I’ve always loathed pompous, bombastic individuals, or recriminatory types, who insist on imposing their guidelines on others instead of keeping them to themselves. Perhaps I’d gleaned those rules from films, novels or comic books, which is how it was, up until fairly recently, for boys and young men who lacked any clear role models in real life (and in real life nothing is ever very clear; it doesn’t even tell a story), especially when those stories were troubling and ambiguous and not mere edifying nonsense. I considered myself to be fairly respectful and loyal and a man of scruples, capable of guarding any confidence entrusted to me and of keeping a secret if asked to do so; what I feared most was disappointing those I loved or admired. Muriel belonged to the latter group right from the start and gradually became one of the former – no, not gradually, quickly: unless you really take against someone, you inevitably grow fond of them over time (there isn’t any happy medium, indifference barely exists, however many struggle to achieve it); and that is what happened to me with him and, of course, with Beatriz Noguera, and with their children, especially their oldest daughter, Susana, partly because of her resemblance to her mother, but also partly because of her kind heart and friendly nature; and even with Flavia and Rico and Roy, and with Gloria and Marcela, however much they irritated me and made me feel uneasy and however much I felt they were a bad influence on their friend. And even with Van Vechten before that afternoon in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Darmstadt; after that, for no objective reason, I couldn’t stomach the man, although it was no business of mine what Beatriz did, let alone what he did – that was up to them. One of the rules I was trying to follow was more or less this: to judge other people as little as possible and not to meddle in their lives, still less intervene in them. My wish was to see no shape in the ocean, and not to have to come to any decision as to what it was, but that’s impossible, because I, too, was a shape which others might recoil from or aim for or collide with.

  V

  * * *

  And so I didn’t at all like the task Muriel had set me, because of its very nature. I had withdrawn some of the superficial esteem I had felt for Van Vechten, both equally arbitrary acts, but we allow ourselves such absolute arbitrariness with those we know only slightly, whom we see as provisional or circumstantial and not of our choosing, mere ramifications of or bequests from someone else; the problem arises if that someone else is important to us, because then we feel under an obligation to accept those inherited friends and even to care for and protect them, especially if the person who bequeathed them to us is still alive and can find out if we have done as he asked, can thank or reproach us with his quick eye, can, at the very least, notice. Sometimes someone we really care for makes an explicit request (‘Treat that person as you would treat me, as if he were me; give him whatever he asks for and help him in every way possible’), sometimes this isn’t even necessary and we mentally anticipate that request (‘I get the message, I understand and will ask no more questions’). If we are staunch supporters of a lover, a friend, a teacher, we tend to welcome all those who surround them, not just those people who are essential to them: idiot children, demanding or poisonous wives, boring, even despotic husbands, dubious or disagreeable friends, unscrupulous colleagues on whom they depend, people in whom we can detect not a single good quality, not the slightest attraction and who lead us to wonder about the origin of the admiration expressed by those beings whose approval we ourselves crave: what past events bind them together, what shared suffering, what common experiences, what secret knowledge or vengeful motives; what strange, invincible nostalgia. We try to appear friendly, pleasant and intelligent and gain a pat on the back – from our lover a kiss or what usually follows kisses, or at least a look that prolongs our hopes a little longer – and cannot understand why these shrill or dull or inadequate or limited people, who, in our eyes, are entirely without merit, should obtain gratis and for nothing what costs us such invention, brio and vigilance. The only possible answer is often simply that these people came before us, date back to long before we entered the life of the lover, friend or teacher and that we know nothing of what happened between them and probably never will; that they may have travelled many possibly muddy paths together, without us there as companion or witness. We always arrive late in people’s lives.

  For me, Van Vechten was one such individual, up to a point, though not entirely. He was clearly no fool, but he lacked Rico’s depth and cleverness as well as his not always intentional absurdity, he lacked Roy’s devotion and exhaustive knowledge of Muriel’s work, which made my boss’s patience and willingness to take him under his wing perfectly understandable, he lacked the ingenuity or kindness of other friends. At the time, Van Vechten was a highly respected paediatrician with a very successful practice in the Salamanca area of Madrid, and he also acted as occasional family or duty doctor to the Muriels and to a few other prestigious or neighbouring families (by which I mean that, since he was a good friend and close neighbour, a combination of convenience and confidence meant that they would call him out for almost any reason, even if the complaint had nothing to do with his specialism and was afflicting a grown adult; he would then advise them what to do or, if it came to it, who to go to, on the few occasions when he thought a second opinion necessary, and would refer them to a consultant at the lavish hospital that had opened to a great fanfare in 1968 and where he had been appointed Head of Paediatrics). Like many men in his profession, he enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the intelligentsia and with show-business types, who tended to belong to the Left or were, at the very least, opposed to Franco, and he was well received by them – for other reasons too, I suppose: his influence and his money being among them, I fear – because in the difficult and seemingly endless years of the dictatorship, that is, during most of Van Vechten’s career, he had treated the persecuted and the victims of reprisals very well, despite having fought during the Civil War on the so-called Nationalist side and despite being on good terms with the regime, a relationship that had, in part, helped him build a successful career. His early affiliation had been watered down, if not forgotten, and later, younger generations never knew about it, as was the case with so many others who were quick to dissemble or to sever any embarrassing links, or else to sit on the fence and act with generosity and understanding towards the losers: they were sometimes quite sincere, supporters of the new harmony (which ultimately depended on them); others were equally quick to see what was likely to happen in the long term and were mere opportunists. The latter were always aware that even in a situation in which the winners ruled absolutely and completely crushed the opposition or their scattered and battered remnants, it suited them to be at least partly on good terms with everyone or to have them all partly in their debt, or at least not to be seen by anyone as their bitter enemy. They know that any such remnant will, sooner or later, regroup and recover enough to reorganize itself and reconquer those areas despised and ignored by the current tyrant, usually because he has no idea what to do with them: in Spain, for example, this applied to culture and the arts.

  Van Vechten had been one of the sincere ones, at least he had that reputation. It was said that even during the 1940s and 50s, when the repression was still at its most hyperactively meticulous, and he could have been accused of being nice to the ‘Reds’ and thus damaged his career prospects, he had nonetheless made home visits, completely free of charge, to the sick children of individuals who had been purged and those who had been banned from exercising their professions and were thus condemned to earning nothing or only what they managed to scrape together as and when they could (an eminent botanist was reduced to working as a gardener and
certain university professors became teachers at some modest language academy), obliging their wives and older daughters to offer their services as seamstresses or cleaners in the wealthy households of those who had them in their power or of the black marketeers who took advantage of everyone. Van Vechten had been conciliatory or magnanimous and compassionate, as had some of his colleagues, and he had appeared promptly to deal with cases of influenza and colic and measles, mumps and chickenpox, even meningitis and other such serious ailments afflicting those proscribed children. He had salved and saved many small lives, a service for which the parents could not have paid or only with great difficulty and by sliding into unpayable debt and bankruptcy. He had built a reputation as a good, kind man, civilized and caring, and with the passing of time – which passes particularly slowly during dictatorships, where everything becomes legend, often heavily embellished, especially if the interested party has a role in spreading that legend – democratic, cultivated people had come to consider him to be one of them, quite ignorant of how he had prospered under the regime or else attributing this to his extraordinary professional skills, his ability to get on with everyone and to move easily in all circles, and a little, too, to the luck that accompanies any success. This gave him the aura of a moderate, theoretical and almost semi-heroic left-winger, someone who, in the hardest of times, had put his shoulder to the wheel and run risks in order to help valuable, useful people who had been cast into the outer darkness to fend for themselves.

  No one gave any importance to the fact that he had completed his medical degree when he was only twenty, in 1940, the first year after the victory, when the universities had been closed for the three years that the War had lasted; that when he was twenty-three (my age at the time), he had been appointed Assistant Paediatrician at the Hospital de San Carlos; or that when he was thirty-one he had been able to open his own surgery, which met with immediate success and acclaim, in the then relatively new Clínica Ruber, founded in 1942 by the very franquista and very clever doctors-cum-impresarios Ruiz and Bergaz, who combined the first letters of their two surnames to give the clinic its absurd title. Or maybe it was simply that no one knew, just as in the years of the Transition, people preferred to ignore or deny the past lives of many individuals opposed to the regime – whose opposition only began at some early or late moment in slow-moving time – whose trajectory was considered impeccable, especially if they were confident and distinguished, not to mention vociferous. No one bothers to trace the steps or origins of someone they admire and respect, still less if they owe them a debt of gratitude. No one noticed either that Van Vechten had always enjoyed prestige, reputation and money. It was assumed he had earned this through hard work, talent, dedication and effort.

  Of course, I knew nothing of all this when Muriel charged me with that task. I knew only of Van Vechten’s excellent reputation as a doctor and that he had selflessly given aid to those victims of political reprisals who lacked the means to pay him, or so people said and so anyone would tell you if asked. It was easy enough to check the facts of his biography and career, but no one bothered, even though they were there for all to see in Spanish encyclopaedias, Durban, for example, or even in the most recent edition of Who’s Who in Europe, which I found in the British Institute library in Calle Almagro; I was surprised to see his name there, I didn’t know at the time that there are various short cuts you can take in order to appear in almost any list of important people, if you’re determined enough. It was because of the mission Muriel had given me that I decided to find out exactly who I was trying to entrap, hoping to find some more justification for what I was about to do. That’s what I didn’t like, having to drag him along with me and observe him, with the intention of informing Muriel about his behaviour, especially with women. Even though I didn’t much like doing this (right from the start, I could have given my boss some very concrete facts about how, where and who Van Vechten was screwing, at least on that one afternoon, but I had decided to keep quiet about that or keep it to myself for the moment); even though Muriel had been told an ugly story from the past and now harboured grave reservations about Van Vechten that troubled him deeply and threatened their friendship; even though I soon learned that the Doctor had clearly had certain links with the regime in the remote or not so remote past (possibly merely passively or by silent consent; after all, what else could they do, the majority of those who felt unable to give up prospering or growing rich for forty years, it took real guts to abandon all hope), but what I really disliked was the idea of deceiving someone from the outset, of offering him a camaraderie based entirely on someone else’s initiative – I mean, why on earth would I choose as a companion on my nights out a sixty-year-old man, even one who looked ten years younger? – and which was completely false from top to bottom. Not only because that camaraderie was feigned, but because behind it lay an ulterior motive, a desire to unmask him, the setting of bait with which to tempt him.

  I realized how uncomfortable it is being a spy, however worthy the cause, and in this situation, I wasn’t even sure what the cause was, I was simply following orders. There is something base, something grubby about passing yourself off as someone else, about behaving in an underhand manner, gaining the confidence of someone in order to betray him, even if that person is a villain, an enemy, a murderer. That is the job of moles and infiltrators, of the secret or double agents who inhabit every sphere of society, even the most innocuous; of the policemen who sometimes spend years working, for example, for a terrorist organization or a mafia, as if they were just another member of the gang. They must be thoroughly convinced of the ultimate nobility of their job, they must think every day, when they get up and when they go to bed, that thanks to their imposture, lives will be saved and crimes averted. And yet, I thought, I could not be one of them. Perhaps it’s a matter of training and practice and habit, of feeding an already existing hatred; of developing a sense of righteous indignation, of severity and indifference and hardness of heart, a renunciation of any finer feelings for those around you, or modifying or neutralizing your conscience. I imagine I would have felt guilty when I saw the criminal or fanatic growing fond of me, gradually abandoning his suspicions and becoming ever-more confiding, when I saw that he genuinely liked me, possibly, in the long term, unconditionally, if such people have such feelings. I suspect that they do, since feelings of loyalty and friendship are within everyone’s grasp, even a ruthless, malicious monster. Who doesn’t have a soft spot for someone, a lover, a daughter, a colleague, a comrade?

  I had no difficulty whatsoever in persuading Van Vechten (‘persuade’ is hardly the right word). It was child’s play really and he was the child, which only added to my bad conscience. In those days of permissiveness and freedom, which had been going on for quite a while, even some years before Franco died, it was not unusual for men of previous generations to regard us youngsters with amazement and envy, imagining that we led a wild, unruly existence, something to which they had aspired in vain in their stricter, more confined youth. On one occasion, at a card game to which Muriel invited me, along with other people of his age or even slightly older (I remember there was a bullfighter and an actor there, men who, all things considered, had not exactly lacked opportunities for a certain amount of old-fashioned professional promiscuity, now long since past), their curiosity centred on me for a few minutes, because of my youth. I discovered that, because they thought me good-looking, they took it for granted, with touching ingenuousness, that I spent my nights hopping from bed to bed – that’s what they said – screwing away to my heart’s content. And the most ingenuous or perhaps the most lustful, the most prurient, was Van Vechten, who, in the cheerily frank tone he occasionally adopted – but only occasionally – concluded this brief interrogation or display of old men’s fantasies by asking me point-blank: