Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘So, young De Vere.’ This was the way in which Muriel introduced me and how all his friends addressed me, at least initially. ‘You’re a handsome lad, so tell us all, in confidence, of course: given the age we live in, with all these liberated young women around, how often do you get laid a month, more or less? In a good month, that is. I shouldn’t think you ever stop.’ And he awaited my response with a salacious look in his eyes, anticipatorily greedy and amazed, I could have given him any number, and he would have swallowed it down enthusiastically. They all imagined a world that did not exist or only among the more active and fortunate of huntsmen, just as in any other age, although things were certainly a lot easier then: a world with no moral restrictions or hindrances, a kind of neopaganism as portrayed in certain scandalous, pseudo-artistic films, of which there was a veritable plague in European cinemas at the time and to which those men would flock, not to Jess Franco’s films, but to the more famous ones that they would find easier to justify seeing. As I said, there was no AIDS at the time or no one knew of its existence, and so there was no fear and no precautions taken. It was a privileged time in that respect, a time that has not so far returned.

  I felt awkward talking about such things, still less pretending I was a womanizer, it wasn’t my style. I could see that the truth – something normal, something modest, although I certainly had no complaints in that regard – would have disappointed them, especially Van Vechten, the most febrile, the most eager, the most gullible. I found his old-school fantasies depressing and rather pathetic, not so very different from those of adolescents crowding round the pioneer who claims to have already had certain sexual experiences and is prepared to describe them in detail, in the playground, to a credulous because ignorant audience, which expects and even demands lies and exaggerations, because without them no story is worth listening to. His fantasies struck me as somewhat pitiful or creepy. There were two women present, lovers or friends or rather ex-lovers of the actor or the bullfighter or of both, who were not playing cards, but were there to provide company or decoration and were keeping each other amused; every now and then, Van Vechten’s eyes would swivel over to them, for they were both wearing tight skirts and showing quite a lot of leg, greatly enhanced by their high heels. I noticed that they had stopped talking to each other and were awaiting my answer, which made me feel even more embarrassed than if there had been only men present; we speak more freely and feel less absurd in exclusively male encounters. I hesitated. Then I remembered that many women don’t normally mind a man or a youth having such multiple adventures. On the contrary, they admire him in an imaginary way and feel intrigued, it can even be an incentive to them to become one of those adventures, either at once or at some future date, as if they made a mental note: ‘He’s a sexy guy and popular with women, better bear that in mind and not discount him.’ I saw that Muriel was also awaiting my response. He would never have asked such a question himself (he did not sail in those particular waters), but now that someone else had asked, he was hoping I would provide his friends with some satisfaction and amusement, as if, having brought me with him, I were his responsibility. And so when my silence grew somewhat lengthy, creating an unnecessary sense of expectation, he decided to prompt me:

  ‘What’s wrong, lad, has the cat got your tongue? You’re being awfully coy. Don’t let me down now, answer the Doctor, he wants to know what you young people get up to with your limitless freedom.’

  I decided it would be best to lie. In order to make those grown men green with envy, which is what they wanted: to be amazed and to bemoan their having been born too soon. To arouse the imaginations of the two thirty-something women, who would see me as an indefatigable near-child, possibly a demon between the sheets. To please my employer, who had deemed me worthy of being present, along with the grown-ups. After all, we were there to have a good time, it was a jolly occasion.

  ‘Well, in a good month, as you put it, Doctor,’ I said at last (despite his protests, I addressed him as ‘Doctor’ at first, although not, of course, once he started accompanying me to places where he would never have gone alone), ‘I’ll have seven or eight, never less than that. In a slow month, three or four.’ And I think I must have visibly blushed, more at my own brazen deceit than for any other reason. They probably thought I was blushing at this confession of my own greed.

  There was a murmur of voices around me, the odd whistle of astonishment, I was, for a moment, the centre of attention. The bullfighter and the actor must have felt their own glorious past lives as ladykillers somewhat diminished. Muriel, I thought, looked half-surprised, half-pleased (‘That many, eh?’ he said paternally). The two women exchanged glances, raised their eyebrows, and then uncrossed and crossed their legs at the same time (a flash of thighs), as if this were a dance routine they had rehearsed or as if they were twins. Van Vechten’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets and he repeatedly tugged at his tie and then again at the knot in order to straighten it, it was a gesture he made whenever he was agitated or excited at some interesting prospect or promise. Most striking of all was that no one showed the least scepticism, they clearly didn’t know the world, however long they had been in it, or knew only the world of their youth, the only one we understand naturally and effortlessly: in life we experience a little of what will happen after our death, when time leaves us behind at such incredible speed and transforms us into the remote past and lumps us together with the antiquities. When still alive, we realize that we cannot possibly keep up, we get left behind and waste our energy and begin to grow weary of so much change and tell ourselves: ‘This is where my age ends, I’m not going to bother with the next one, it doesn’t belong to me; I’ll pretend as best I can, but I’m fast becoming an anachronism and outstaying my welcome.’ Things would have been minimally different had Professor Rico been there. Not because he knew the world any better, not at all, but because he would never have allowed himself to appear to be impressed with witnesses present and would have come out with some scornful comment: ‘Ha, a mere bagatelle’ or ‘Is that all?’ or even ‘And you call that a good month, young De Vere? I thought you were more competent, more adept.’ But he wasn’t in Madrid that night, and so no one called my bluff, and Van Vechten, the most inclined to believe what I had said and impressed by the sheer scale of it, tried to draw me out, with the acquiescence of the others as a background rumble.

  ‘Come on, then, tell us all,’ said the Doctor, highly excited, as if this were the beginning of another party. ‘Ages? Places? Settings? And where do you pick them up?’ The expression ‘pick them up’ betrayed his view of these encounters, the old world to which he belonged. ‘Do you stick with girls your own age or are you happy with anyone who isn’t actually old? I imagine you have your limits. When you’re spoiled for choice, you have to, at least that’s how it was for me when I was your age.’ He glanced across at the two women, some comment dancing on the tip of his tongue, I feared the worst, some unpleasantly vengeful remark, because they gave no response, either visual or verbal. I was afraid he might say something like: ‘Those two lovely ladies over there, for example, would have seemed old to me at the time, but now I’d quite happily screw them.’ Fortunately, he said nothing, but, given the context, that glance in itself seemed crude and inappropriate. They were quite attractive, those two ex-lovers of the actor or the bullfighter, one rather coarse, the other more delicate. They didn’t deserve to be belittled like that, not even hypothetically or retrospectively. They had noticed Van Vechten’s sidelong glance and understood its meaning. They exchanged another subtle look as if to check that they were in accord, then they uncrossed and crossed their legs again, not, this time, as a mark of their approval of me, the young man, but as a reproof to that man in the autumn of his years. The Doctor was often impertinent and expansive and not fully aware of his age because it was not as yet apparent on his still unlined face or on his still agile body; his lack of tact meant that one had to give him more than the usual amount of leeway.
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  I was not prepared to continue along the path he was suggesting. It was one thing to lie briefly about numbers, as a joke and so as not to disappoint, but quite another to provide detailed descriptions and accounts, continuously, inevitably, boastfully, even if it was all invented. There was something unpleasant and unsavoury about his questions, however jovial or jokey his tone; a lack of respect for women which, even though it was pretty much the norm in many areas of life, both Spanish and non-Spanish, both then and now, nonetheless troubled me. Not that I didn’t occasionally slip into that mode myself (I’m not going to pretend I’ve always been the perfect gentleman), but he went too far, he teetered on the edge of abuse, or, rather, that was his normal mode. Having daughters cures one of that involuntary or reflex disdain that far too many of us men inherit. In the Doctor, it was deliberate; even though, as I found out later, he himself had sons and daughters, he had never moved on from that instinctive disdain.

  I smiled apologetically:

  ‘No, Doctor. I’m sure you’ve had far more success than me. I just catch what I can, like most people. What I didn’t tell you was how many women I try it on with, and if I were to total them up, I’d definitely have far more failures than successes.’

  The actor and the bullfighter and Muriel and a few other men laughed, even though what I said was also a lie, because I wasn’t the kind who went around making a play for women left, right and centre. The first two must have felt slightly relieved, thinking that nothing very much had changed and that, regardless of the times, any success is always the result of skill, luck and effort. Van Vechten didn’t laugh, or only belatedly, reluctantly copying the others. He looked at me as if I were wilfully concealing useful information, as if I had whisked away from him the anecdotes he had been so looking forward to hearing, perhaps hoping to learn something about the new world that lay just beyond his grasp. He once again immersed himself in the poker game, but with a look of puerile resentment on his face.

  Not long after this, one of the women decided she wanted to leave, having got what she could out of the evening. Since it was nearly three o’clock in the morning (these poker evenings used to begin after supper, at around midnight, and, at the time, people of all ages tended to stay up very late and we madrileños have always only ever slept the bare minimum) someone needed to accompany her, but the bullfighter and the actor (she had come with one of them, if not both) were not yet ready to strike camp, preferring to recover some of their losses and return home victorious and slightly richer.

  ‘The boy will take you in a taxi,’ the bullfighter said, ‘he’s not playing at the moment.’ And he took a note from his wallet and handed it to me, for the taxi fare, and I took it so as not to leave him with his hand poised disdainfully in mid-air. It was true, I had hardly played at all, they had merely made room for me for five or six rounds when Muriel was taking a somewhat curmudgeonly rest from a series of bad hands. I hadn’t even bet any of my own money, only his, and had managed to break his run of bad luck, which had cheered him up sufficiently for him to resume his place at the table.

  ‘Leave it to me now, clever clogs, let’s see if I can hang on to some of your good luck,’ he said, happily patting the back of the chair to indicate that I should give it up to him. He had recovered his good humour, and it pleased me to be called ‘clever clogs’, you only call someone that if you’re genuinely fond of them, and it’s usually a term reserved for children. Or it used to be, that’s yet another term that, like so many others, has fallen into disuse; our languages are slowly shrinking. ‘If it lasts, I’ll give you a percentage of the booty. Does five per cent seem reasonable?’ he added mockingly.

  The woman and I had to walk quite a way in search of a taxi, she should have booked one over the phone, but once she had decided she was going, she wanted to leave immediately and was too impatient to wait. No taxis, either occupied or free, passed through that residential area near El Viso or thereabouts, with its detached houses, large and small, the streets unlit by a single shop or cinema, bar or restaurant, and besides, it was late, and the street lamps fewer and further between. It was a spring night verging on summer, she was wearing only a skirt and a close-fitting, low-cut top that left her arms almost bare, and no tights either, she had clearly not been expecting to have to walk anywhere, or only from a car to the house, which belonged either to the actor or the bullfighter. Her high heels meant that she had to walk fairly slowly, and I had to fall in with her rhythm, but she walked well, with a discreet wiggle. It made me think that she was not entirely indifferent to how she appeared in my eyes, that she wanted me to like her, not that this means very much, some people have a need to be liked by whoever they’re with, even if it’s the monster from the deep or, if they’re in the countryside, a herd of pigs. She was the one I described as being more delicate, which means only that she was more so than her friend, but not necessarily delicate per se. She was too curvaceous for that (not that I minded in the least) and she was wearing very large hoop earrings and a very short skirt, short even by the brazen standards of the time, revealing most of her tanned thighs, in fact, she was tanned all over; as soon as the good weather arrived, she must have spent every spare minute at the local swimming pool or at the poolside of some wealthy friends. I asked her name (we hadn’t been formally introduced) and she said it was Celia and asked me for mine, for throughout the evening, everyone had referred to me as either ‘young De Vere’ or ‘the boy’ or ‘Romeo’ or even ‘the lad’.

  ‘Do you know Dr Jorge well?’ she asked. She perhaps couldn’t remember Van Vechten’s surname or didn’t feel like struggling to say it.

  ‘No, not well. I’ve only ever met him at gatherings like tonight’s. Only with other people around.’

  ‘He’s a bit of an old lecher.’ She said this confidently, without expecting any corroboration on my part. But I didn’t know if she was saying this after what she had just heard, after his inquisitorial questions about my exploits, or because she’d had dealings with him herself and knew all about his manners and manias.

  ‘Why do you say that? Because he kept asking me questions? Or have you been out with him and he’s tried it on with you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t even go rowing on the Retiro lake with him, and there are always loads of people there. But I once went to him for a medical examination, I was getting these pains and Rafael sent me to see him for a consultation.’ Rafael was the bullfighter, Maestro Rafael Viana. ‘I know he mainly treats children, but since he was a friend, Rafael thought he could perhaps check me over just to see if there was anything wrong.’

  ‘And what happened? Was there something wrong?’

  ‘No, he said it was nothing and that it would pass, and he was right, because the pain hasn’t come back. No, I mean, he must be a good doctor, he’s highly respected and all that, but it seemed to me that he touched me more than was necessary, a woman notices these things straight away. He had me lie down on a couch and get half-undressed, which was fine, perfectly normal. But then he kept saying, “Does it hurt you here?” “Can you feel this?” “And this?” and “What happens if I press harder?” I don’t know, he spent far too long doing this and in places that were some way away from where I was getting the pain. He’d say, “Relax your stomach” and then stroke my abdomen as if his fingers were about to go where they shouldn’t, if you know what I mean, and he kept brushing my breasts with the sleeve of his white coat or with his wrist, as though by accident. But almost no such contact is purely accidental, we all know that, you’re almost always aware of touch, I mean, aware of what you’re touching or what’s being touched, and if you don’t move away, that’s fine. That’s all I’m saying, that he kept touching me. I tried to move away, but he took no notice. It went no further than that, but the fact is I felt sort of queasy when I left. Not because of the pain, which vanished magically as soon as he told me it was nothing to worry about’ – ‘The hand of the doctor that calms and dispels,’ I thought, ‘his words like a balm’
– ‘but because I felt like I’d been groped. I think he probably didn’t dare go any further because Rafael had sent me, and he was afraid I might tell on him and Rafael might get angry, because otherwise …’

  ‘Otherwise what? Would he have gone further, forced the matter? I mean, doctors do have to touch you. And it’s easy to misinterpret such things. In America, oversensitive patients are always suing their doctors for some mad reason. I think most doctors are so used to touching people that they no longer feel anything, it’s as if they were touching cork. With their patients, I mean.’

  ‘Well, I know what I felt and I’m not a prude or a hysteric. I know what I’m talking about.’ – She didn’t sound offended, she just wanted to be clear. – ‘But no, he’s not the violent type, I don’t think that’s his style, and I’ve known a few of them. He’s just a pest, the kind who doesn’t quite overstep the mark, but comes very close. He’s a lecher, a sleazebag, someone who stores up sensations for later on, do you know what I mean? Someone who pretends not to know what he’s doing, but keeps trying again and again, just to see what happens, to see if he gets anywhere. Thinking that you’ll get all excited, if he touches you here, feels you up there, or that you’ll just give in to avoid an embarrassing situation. Some men take advantage of women who are very timid or young or polite, women who have a horror of confrontations or of giving a straight No. You may not believe it, but there still are women like that. And they’ll end up letting a man get away with a lot, just so as not to seem rude or to avoid making a scene.’