Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  But I didn’t know then that nothing heals over time, nothing abates, nor that we can become lazier or more cautious, that we won’t necessarily pay more heed to private loyalties, which act as a filter, guide and brake, and I had plenty of examples to prove this was the case for many people, mature adults who never give up and who are always insatiable and restless, at least mentally, I mean: it’s as if they had to keep going merely in order to satisfy a tyrannical mind that never rests and never stops, having grown too accustomed to its own way of being for far too many years – youth and maturity are very long and the frontiers that mark their end very vague – independent of the needs and vicissitudes and capacities of their body, which they increasingly see as an annoying tool from which they have to demand ever greater efforts; too accustomed, as well, to carrying out certain habitual calculations – how many different women have I been to bed with this year, for example; how many didn’t I pay for – who will be the next man to fill this void, for example; I only need one more, then I’ll stick with him and ask no more questions. (Just as there are older people who seem to soften and become inoffensive, and whose indecipherable or fickle or absent minds – it’s impossible to know what someone else is thinking – are perhaps ceaselessly plotting vile deeds and accumulating ill will towards everyone around them. It is our deceived minds that never surrender, that feel the same as they always did and see no reason to change. And if they do ever look back with the advantage of distance, it is only to think: ‘My guilt has passed. The years have diluted it, I’ve been washed clean. I can start counting again, even if I’ll only be counting further guilty acts. It will be new, different, and shorter, because I don’t have so much time now.’)

  I could see that Beatriz had not given up counting, at least that seemed to me to be the point of those afternoon visits, even though from the outside they appeared banal and routine and in no way hopeful, even though she knew that basically, for her, the next man was the one she had always and only wanted, the one she had been with for longest and whom she still did not rule out (‘You’re the only one I’m interested in, you’re the only one I love, surely I don’t need to tell you that, however hard you try to drive me away’), but who had grown bitter and vengeful. When he was in a bad mood or had met with one too many setbacks in his dealings with Towers, Muriel didn’t only call her a ‘fat cow’ or a ‘bag of flour’, a ‘pachyderm’, ‘a lump of lard’ or ‘a ball of flab’, he didn’t only compare her to the big bell at El Alamo or to the stagecoach in Stagecoach or suggest that she resembled Shelley Winters at her plumpest or ‘Baudelaire’s Giantess’ (an allusion that escaped me at the time), he also compared her to obese actors (‘Stick a moustache on you and you’d look just like Oliver Hardy’ or ‘I hope you don’t start going thin on top, otherwise you could be mistaken for Zero Mostel, you remember him, don’t you, he was our friend Jack Palance’s sweaty sidekick’), knowing that she would know all the cinematographic references, far better than me. His insults were so unjustified and disproportionate, so ludicrous and ill-intentioned and absurd – almost comic – that perhaps, for that reason, she found them less wounding – they may even have made her laugh, somewhere deep inside – although they must also have been very hard to take, must have undermined her self-esteem and created a terrible sense of insecurity. I often wondered why she didn’t just fade away and give up her nocturnal expeditions to her husband’s bedroom door, perhaps what helped her recover from these rejections and to pluck up courage were her encounters with Van Vechten in that ultra-religious context and in the purely secular context of Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca with whoever it was she visited there (because both those visits were repeated), and possibly with someone else in El Escorial or wherever else she drove to on her motorbike. And perhaps she sensed what she could not know, but that I did, that while Muriel would happily throw these insults in her face, he would never refer to her in such terms in her absence, I mean, he never spoke of Beatriz in another person’s presence as ‘a cask of amontillado’ or as Charles Laughton, but always as ‘Beatriz’ or ‘my wife’ to third parties, and as ‘Mama’ or ‘your mother’ to the children and ‘Señora Beatriz’ or simply ‘Beatriz’ to Flavia, and he took great pains to make sure there were no witnesses around when he addressed her in that distasteful manner, this included myself, in theory, although he did let slip the occasional abusive phrase in my presence (I became as invisible as the air), but I also did my own bit of spying and heard things I shouldn’t have heard. Anyway, the fact that he refrained from reviling her so brutally when other people were present seemed to me a very feeble show of respect, or perhaps a feeble remnant of the affection he must have felt for her in prehistory.

  Nor did I see Muriel, who was approaching or already in his fifties, relenting in his pursuit of women, if ‘pursuit’ is the right word. He never seemed to be urgently pursuing anyone, he appeared, rather, distracted, at least in that regard, and adopted a negligent, contemplative attitude. He appeared surprised when he discovered he was being lusted after by some beautiful young upstart or by some more upmarket seductress. On those occasions, however, he never paused to wonder if his suitors wanted something from him – a minor role in a film or the mere allure of his name – nor did he drive them away when this became obvious. He allowed himself to be led and manipulated, or so it seemed, but afterwards would appear indifferent and stoical or wouldn’t even remember – indeed he sometimes said as much, and I’ve already mentioned one such case – having shared a bed with someone who would have liked to have made further visits to his bed – with him inside it of course – or had dared to demand a small favour. Since he had offered nothing, he felt under no obligation, it was up to them what they did, but he certainly hadn’t encouraged them. I never saw him seriously ‘paired up’ with any woman, at most he would go out with the same woman several times if he got on well with her and liked her, usually just as a companion at premieres or cocktail parties, at superficial and usually group outings with other people, I thought he would probably get bored having supper with any of them alone, or having to engage in conversation with them after those occasional rolls in the hay, which I imagined would be rather mechanical, more medicinal than sexual and certainly not passionate. I’m sure he found tedious the young and not-so-young, be they upstarts or aristocrats, who had never heard of Zero Mostel or Andy Devine or Eugene Pallette or Sydney Greenstreet, to mention other overweight actors to whom, on his angry or overly jocular days, he might have compared Beatriz, nor would they have heard of Baudelaire, with or without his giantess. On the other hand, with those women he genuinely admired or found interesting or fascinating, like Cecilia Alemany, not only were they few and far between, he didn’t usually stand much chance, for they belonged to other worlds where he was just a pauper at the gate or, at best, an intriguing artist who might bring a little sparkle or glamour to the supper table. And perhaps he allowed himself to praise them and tell them he adored them precisely because they were mere chimera. It sometimes occurred to me that Muriel would probably have had one or two or three women in his life, to whom he would have given himself unreservedly, but who were so important and intelligent, so fine, that he found it hard to take seriously almost any other woman who approached him. I was convinced that one of those two or three – if there had been two or three – would have been the Beatriz of earlier days, the one who had lived in America and whom he had married, the willing, optimistic, cheerful Beatriz who was still there, the Beatriz who had not yet gone half-mad, who was not yet utterly wretched. Or, how can I put it, cast adrift.

  Professor Rico was quite a lot younger than Muriel and had not yet reached the age when nothing can be healed, although it was fast approaching. Even though he was getting on for forty, he was still childishly and verbally lewd and opinionated and arrogant, and therein lay much of his wit and charm (for those who could see them, because some people couldn’t stand him), and these qualities brought him quite a few conquests, theoretical or hypothe
tical ones at least, as I’ve explained. He might have been the sort to engage in the kind of masculine calculations I mentioned before (‘How many women etc. etc. …’), except that he would have made a mental notch on his gun as soon as he saw that a seduction was a sure thing, as soon as he was certain that, as he had occasionally declared with touching glee – or, rather, complacency – ‘that woman could be mine at the click of my fingers, it’s obvious, indubitable’, which was his reason for not always feeling it necessary to allow the seduction to reach its inevitable conclusion or ‘to finish the job’, although this was more Van Vechten’s way of putting it than Rico’s.

  No, it seemed to me that almost no one around me had lost any of their eager desires – perhaps it was the unexpected, agitated nature of the times – least of all the celebrated paediatrician, the oldest member of the group – he was about ten years older than Muriel, nearly twenty years older than Beatriz or Rico and almost forty years older than me. And although, as I said, he looked more like a fifty-year-old and was still strong and agile, it still seemed incomprehensible and incongruous that I should invite him to go out with me and my friends. However, it proved easy enough to persuade him, he certainly didn’t play hard to get, he didn’t resist or turn up his nose; he was a pushover, fertile ground. Such was his keenness, such was his sorrow at missing out on that easy-going, permissive age, such was his desperation when he imagined what was slipping past him because of a mere incompatibility of dates (which is something that, as long as we live, we still think can be remedied, if not turned on its head), he was over the moon when I invited him to go with me, first, to bars and, later, to discotheques and live-music venues. The latter were full of people of various ages, where you could talk despite the decibels and even sit down now and then, and so he wouldn’t feel so very out of place, especially since some of those venues were old haunts of his, which had come back into fashion with a new, enthusiastic clientele, generally ignorant of the past and utterly different from the clientele who had frequented them during their various antediluvian phases. This was the case, I think, with El Sol in Calle Jardines or, later on, the Cock in Calle de la Reina, or, of course, Bar Chicote, in Gran Vía, which, if I’m not mistaken, had been open since before the Civil War and is, inevitably, mentioned by Hemingway in some of his articles and his more touristy novels. Afterwards, during the post-war years, it had first been taken over by discreet, fairly classy whores, by bullfighters, actors, singers, footballers, actresses and, later, by high-ranking civil servants in Franco’s government, businessmen with close links to the regime and even the occasional party-mad minister; the first group were eager to meet the second group, and the second group to meet the first, and the club provided the ideal meeting place. I wondered if Van Vechten had been a regular during those seemingly endless years, when he was officially on good terms with the victors (well, in the 1940s he was one of them, something people always forgot) and benefited from his contacts; if he had joined the rich and powerful in partaking of Bar Chicote’s famous cocktails and occasionally glanced over at the stools where any women on their own used to sit, leaning on the bar, carefully seated in half-profile (so as not to offer only a monotonous view of female posteriors) and pretending to chat with each other, until they were invited to join a group at a table. Around 1980, you would still see the occasional elderly, absent-minded woman, who, perhaps seeing the place so lively again after a long period of decay, again sat down on her bar stool of yesteryear, thinking that the good old days had somehow miraculously been restored and the clocks turned back. In fact, one of those veteran ladies once came over to our table, where she stood staring at Van Vechten, then said very sweetly:

  ‘I know you, don’t I? I remember those blue, blue eyes and that blond hair. You’ve hardly changed at all. Not a grey hair in sight and not a hint of a bald patch.’

  However, Van Vechten, who remained seated and adopted a look of genuine surprise and doubtless genuine malice, responded:

  ‘No, Señora. You must be confusing me with my father, whom I greatly resemble. As you can see, the people who come here now’ – he paused heartlessly, looking round at me and my group and smugly, arrogantly including himself – ‘are all rather young.’

  Dr Van Vechten was anything but inhibited, so much so that my initial fears proved not only unfounded, but ridiculous, namely, that he would find my friendly suggestion that he join me now and then on my nocturnal sorties suspicious and inappropriate. Muriel knew him well, which is why he’d had no qualms about setting me that task, sure that Van Vechten would never judge anything to be gratuitous or unmerited if it brought with it the promise of amusement and pleasure. I had put this down at first to a misjudgement on the part of my boss, to his often unworldly sense of reality. This was not entirely true, however, for I soon realized that he missed almost nothing of what really mattered about people or situations; that beneath his abstracted, even self-absorbed appearance, he noticed and saw far more than he seemed to. Whenever I failed in my attempts to decipher his thoughts, I assumed he must be making plans in his head, imagining future shots and camera moves, and this may have been true, but he still never lost track of the story he was telling or that was being told to him, or of the idea that was troubling him. He had a very distinctive style, but he wasn’t a mere stylist, still less an aesthete, either in his films or in life. He liked to pretend that he knew very little about what was going on around him and preferred to say nothing about what he did notice, but I think he noticed a lot and knew about almost everything.

  Van Vechten did indeed have very blue eyes and the kind of blond hair which is still memorable in a country where such hair colour is much more common than people think and admit, albeit less pure and more mixed: here, pale-coloured eyes tend to be greyish or green or reminiscent of various liqueurs or dark blue like Muriel’s one seeing eye, and hair is rarely that insipid or Nordic blond. He really did look like a foreigner, as if his numerous ancestors in Arévalo must have gone more and more frequently to Holland in search of a bride. That’s why he was so instantly recognizable, the veteran whore was probably quite right, although he didn’t at all strike me as a classic whoremonger. His eyes had a bright, youthful glint to them – indeed, they were southern European in their intensity, an intensity that could quickly become obscene and offensive; he had regular, indeed, attractive features (he must have been handsome when young), dazzling and healthy-looking teeth – large, rectangular incisors – a very strong jaw and a rather square face; the only things that slightly spoiled his looks were his rather pointed nose and ears, like an elf’s ears, and his somewhat protruding chin, though not quite a witch’s chin. I once remarked to Muriel that Van Vechten resembled a minor, almost incidental American actor, who appeared in hundreds of films but whose name would be unknown to most cinema-goers: ‘Robert J. Wilke,’ I said with youthful, point-scoring pedantry, and he nodded and replied instantly: ‘Yes, one of the three gunmen who spend almost the whole of High Noon waiting for the train to arrive. But you’re right, well spotted. And oddly enough, I think that as well as appearing in innumerable Westerns, he also appeared on more than one occasion in a doctor’s white coat.’ That is how I had seen Van Vechten when he was screwing Beatriz at the Sanctuary of Darmstadt, both of them standing up and both fully clothed. But Muriel didn’t know that I had that image of the Doctor in my head, his white coat unbuttoned.

  Van Vechten’s features suggested a triumphant, expansive nature, as did the way he behaved in public: with enormous confidence, perennial good humour, too perennial not to seem somewhat false – although perhaps suitable for a paediatrician who needed to instil confidence in mothers and children – with undeniable joviality and a constant, welcoming smile, a man who told jokes, clean or dirty depending on the company he was in, and who was always joshing, perhaps too much – as if this were his visiting card – a kind of easy humour that nevertheless seemed to me old-fashioned (but perhaps that was normal, given that we were separated by many ca
lendar years) and which I perhaps unfairly associated with the long, fast-receding Franco era, but it might have been just the same under a completely different regime. When he was a child, someone must have told him: ‘You have such beautiful teeth, Jorgito, you should always smile, whether it seems appropriate or not; that will win you good friends and goodwill; it will help smooth your path.’ He was very tall, almost as tall as Muriel or possibly taller, and very solidly built. That’s why, I think, he was much given to slapping people on the back, to grabbing their arm, which he would then tug or shake in jocular fashion while laughing a strangely mechanical laugh; he was very strong and could doubtless have inflicted harm had he wanted to, indeed, I was sometimes left slightly bruised whenever he gave me a friendly shove or placed one of his huge hands on my shoulder, which felt as if a great paw had fallen from a considerable height and then gripped me with what was intended to be affection, but which felt more like the paw of a lion and provoked in me an immediate urge to shrug it off and free myself from both its weight and grip.