Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘Why do you think, Juan?’ she said gently, without any of the bitterness those words, that question might suggest; without implying that she thought me utterly obtuse; it was more as though she had no option but to take that as read, because it was so obvious. ‘You’ve been here long enough to have realized that Eduardo and me … that I have nothing to do with Eduardo. And that sours my whole existence, I can’t bear it. Each day, I find it harder and harder to get up and get going. If I had my choice, I wouldn’t wake up at all, and this has been going on for years now. On some days, I just can’t carry on, and that’s what happened the other day. It’s happened on other occasions too. On some days, it’s because I don’t feel quite right,’ she said, then immediately corrected this to: ‘I mean, I don’t feel quite right in the head. You may not know it, but for years I went to a psychiatrist for intensive therapy. And when the two things come together … Well, even I don’t know how such a day will end. When I have one of those days, I simply can’t predict the outcome.’

  I didn’t know what to say, not straight away. She again sat down beside me and rested her forehead on her hand, her palm open, all-embracing, the same gesture we make if we’re sick in the night, a memory of what our mothers did when we were children, they would hold our head in between spasms, and when they are no longer there, we, rather pathetically, as if we were them or were at least someone else, do exactly the same, just as someone dying alone clasps his own hand to pretend that someone is there with him in death.

  ‘Do you take any kind of medication?’

  ‘I have in the past. And now, of course,’ she showed me the bandage on her left wrist, ‘they’ve started giving it to me again. It does help. It helps me to function, but it doesn’t alter the basic problem, doesn’t take away the pain.’

  ‘Why don’t you separate? Why don’t you leave? Divorce will be made legal soon. Perhaps you would be better off putting some distance between you, just turning the page.’ There was no reason why she should know that I already knew the answer to this, more or less, having heard the explanation she gave to her malevolent female friends.

  She removed her hand from her forehead and turned to me. As she did, her knees met my right leg, I felt a slight pressure, which she did not withdraw; she probably didn’t even notice, although I’m of the opinion that everyone always notices any contact; or perhaps she thought it unimportant. I seized the chance to glance down at her thighs, which were there before me now. They were perhaps a little plump, but I found them very attractive; so bare and sturdy, pressed tightly together.

  ‘That’s something you’d have to ask him, why he didn’t leave, I mean, why he doesn’t leave. As for me, it’s a lot to ask of someone, to ask her to leave the person she most loves. If he left me, I would have to accept it, and he probably will, he’ll probably leave me as soon as divorce becomes legal. But he can’t expect me to make things easier for him, to take the initiative, when I don’t want to. Besides, he would probably object if I did. People react strangely. And we’ve come a long way together. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t leave, despite everything, perhaps that has some influence on him.’

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ I thought, ‘we don’t know what bonds were forged between the people who came before, and we probably never will, because we always arrive late in people’s lives.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to understand how you can still love someone who abuses you like that, verbally, that is.’ I couldn’t say ‘physically’ because that might have betrayed my nocturnal spying. ‘I’m sorry, but sometimes I couldn’t help but overhear. Never in your absence, mind, he’s never said anything negative about you when you’re not there, not when I’ve been present at least. But I have heard him talking to you. Well, you know how it is.’

  She smiled, resumed her initial position and took a sip of her drink. She wasn’t touching me now. I needed to get her to notice my desire, which was still on the increase (that’s always the first and most necessary step, to get the other person to notice, and sometimes it’s also the last step, the trigger), to the point where I was beginning not to feel contented with the purely visual phase, with imagining possibilities, and was now paying less attention to what she was saying, like someone who has crossed a line. In such situations, a moment always comes when all you care about are the waves of your own emotions.

  ‘Of course you’ll have heard him, and if only he would hold off when others are present. With some he’s more careful because he knows they like and respect me. With Jorge, with Paco, with my female friends. Less so with Alberto Augusto. And not with you, with you he feels too relaxed, too comfortable, too at ease; right from the start, he made you a kind of extension of himself, which is both good and bad. But what you don’t know is that it wasn’t always like that, on the contrary. This began a long time ago, shortly after Tomás was born, imagine that. But for many years it was quite different, and for me it’s those years that count. I lived through them, and Eduardo …’ She stopped as if afraid of what she was about to say, but then she said it anyway: ‘Eduardo is the kindest, most upright man you could ever meet. The loathsome way he’s been treating me all this time goes completely against his nature, he has to make himself do it. You’ll think I’m deluding myself, but I still believe that the day will come when he can’t bear it any more, going against himself and against his nature. And then he’ll stop and will want to make amends.’

  ‘The kindest and most upright man,’ I thought. It was possible. As well as admiring him, I myself held him in high regard. As I said before, my loyalty bordered on the unconditional. And yet it was strange to hear such praise on the lips of the one person to whom I had seen and heard him be so cruel. Not malicious or insolent or scornful – he was capable of being all those things sometimes, and with considerable wit and relative impunity. No, with her he was wounding and vicious (although not all the time, not even with her). I remembered some of what Beatriz had said to her friends: ‘I wouldn’t want a new life with another man,’ she had told them, had explained. ‘I want the life I had for quite a number of years and with the same man. I don’t want to forget or get over it or move on, as they say, but to carry on in exactly the same way, like a prolongation of what was. I was never dissatisfied, I never longed for change, I was never one of those women who gets bored and requires movement, variety, arguments and reconciliations, moments of euphoria and terrible shocks. I would have been happy for everything to have stayed eternally the same. Some people are content and satisfied, and hope only for each day to be the same as the previous day and the next. I was one of those people. Until everything went wrong.’

  Then I got up and went over to the fridge. Like her, I had no idea what I wanted. I picked up a glass, put some ice in it, peered vaguely inside the fridge and then round about me, saw the bottle of whisky on the table and decided to try that, adding a little Coca-Cola too, imitating her in everything, and while I was standing, I was able to take a proper look at her from above, to gain a wider vision of her décolletage, looking down inside it, I mean, especially during the few seconds when I stood just behind her, and then I felt like reaching out a hand or placing both hands on her shoulders and from there moving them downwards, not suddenly, but gradually, distractedly, waiting for her to interrupt me, for her to shout, ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ and for me to take fright and blush and apologize and retreat, or for her to say nothing and allow me to carry on, knowing perfectly well what I was doing, but pretending she didn’t or not until later, when it would be impossible not to make some verbal acknowledgement of that contact, when it became clear that it meant more than just sympathy, although it’s also true that such acknowledgement need never be articulated, there’s no need for anyone to speak or say anything, or only with their breathing, and even that can be suppressed, every moan silenced, many such sounds have had to be hidden away and to remain as mute as if they’d never existed, indeed, it’s impossible to lay down any strict rules for
the way two people come together.

  And so I lingered there, behind her – longer than a few seconds now – and decided I could make the first move without Beatriz seeing it as in any way suspicious or improper, placing my hands on her shoulders in a friendly or comforting manner; besides, many things are permissible during a sleepless night, as if that state of wakefulness were contaminated by the sleep that should replace it, but that refuses to come when called, and as if, up to a point, everything were happening under its dominion, in some borrowed life, nebulous, hypothetical and parallel. And so I did delicately place my hands on her shoulders and, at the same time, to disguise my boldness, I spoke to her too, so that she would have more than one thing to attend to.

  ‘So what happened? Why did it all go wrong? Why did Eduardo become so unpleasant and so brusque?’

  She shrugged her shoulders, but only very slightly. She could have taken the opportunity to move away from me, to free herself. However feebly she had done this, I would have understood that she was rejecting that contact and would have removed my hands at once. The movement she made was so slight, though, that I experienced it more like a response, as if her grateful shoulders were exerting a slight pressure in order to move closer and mould themselves better to the palms of my hands. That, at least, is how I chose to interpret it, doubtless pushing my luck.

  ‘It was something really stupid,’ she said. ‘Because he found out that, once, years ago, I’d lied to him. An old lie that should have made him laugh, not take it to heart. So many other things had happened in between, so much had happened between us, that any importance it had at the time should have dissipated, should, how can I put it, have expired, been cancelled out by the sheer weight of our lives spent together; we had even lost a child, and nothing brings a couple closer than that, if, of course, it doesn’t destroy them. In fact, he wasn’t even the one to discover the lie, I got angry with him one day and blurted it out.’ She said nothing for a few seconds. ‘I never imagined he would react the way he did. If only I had.’

  This reminded me again of what I’d heard Muriel say on the night he appeared at his bedroom door, wearing his long, dark Fu Manchu or Dracula dressing gown: ‘How stupid of me to love you during all those years, love you with all my heart, as long, that is, as I knew nothing.’ Later, he had said: ‘If only you’d never told me, if only you’d kept me in the dark … What is the point of setting the record straight, of suddenly telling the truth?’ And he had concluded his string of reproaches, saying: ‘Ah, what a fool you were, Beatriz. Not just once, but twice.’ He must have been referring to the same thing Beatriz was talking about now.

  ‘What was the lie?’ I asked.

  She thought for a few moments, perhaps not wanting to go into detail. She drank her glass of adulterated whisky, still without detaching herself from my hands, which were so cautious, so respectful that they hadn’t shifted so much as a millimetre, as if with that initial brazen move they had exhausted all their boldness for quite a while. When she did not respond at once, I added, so as to encourage her to reply: ‘Or would you rather not say?’

  ‘Let him tell you if he wants to, young De Vere, and then you can judge for yourself.’ She didn’t often call me by that name, only when she was in a good mood (only very erratically) and chose to join in the household tradition of giving people jokey nicknames. ‘It’s so ridiculous that I’m embarrassed to tell you, that such a childish thing should have ruined my life, something so silly.’ She paused again, then went on: ‘The most important aspect of that lie (important to me, you understand) was that it proved to me how kind and upright Eduardo was, without him ever knowing just how well I knew this. Men are very easy to deceive, however intelligent and wary and astute.’ She hadn’t said ‘you men’, and so I wasn’t sure whether she was referring just to men or to mankind generally, or if she didn’t yet consider me to be a proper man. ‘But Eduardo was an extreme case. He was so kind and upright that he couldn’t really exist in the world without being deceived by someone. So it was best if I was the one to deceive him, in our marriage at least, because I loved him so much and didn’t wish him any harm. On the contrary, I thought that other people, in other fields, would find it harder to deceive him with me by his side.’

  I realized then that I was finding all this slightly tedious, or that it didn’t interest me in the way it would have in almost any other circumstance, or as it did interest and intrigue me a posteriori, when I thought about it on my own in the days that followed. At the time, in the middle of the night, in the kitchen, it felt to me like a toll I had to pay for a remote hope, a fantasy even, because I still didn’t dare to assume that anything unforeseen or extraordinary was about to happen, but impatience and desire are, at once, both uncontrollable and all-absorbing. Actions and movements are, of course, controllable; we civilized people have learned to put a brake on them and store them away in our imaginations and postpone them, to toss them into the bag of imaginings and make do with that, at least temporarily; this, however, is not the case with feelings, and they always do, I think, end up being communicated to others and betraying us, and that is where those with very strong feelings have the advantage. The desire you give off, especially if you’re young and untutored in the art of dissembling, condenses in the air and impregnates it, like a spreading mist; it reaches the object of desire and then she has to do something about it; she must either leave, remove herself, disappear and thus dissipate the feeling, or accept it and take it up and become entangled. In either case, she finds herself having to deal with something that is nothing to do with her, not of her own creation, which is often both unfair and awkward. The greatest danger (if that’s the right word) is that, in noticing the other person’s desire, you might come up with or conceive of the possibility of actually responding, when it would never have occurred to you to take such an initiative spontaneously. Noticing that someone wants to connect with us sexually obliges us to consider the possibility, even in the most fleeting and rudimentary way; and if you don’t instantly reject or dismiss the idea, if you don’t immediately flee from that mist, then it becomes very difficult not to feel those emanations, which tend not to abate, but to persist, they don’t even succumb to weariness or to the knowledge that they’re useless or unworkable: they exist because they exist, independent of whether they are or aren’t of any use. And so that other person inoculates us with the idea or plants it in our mind, he gives it to us and infects us, and its attractiveness grows with every second that it’s there floating in the air and no one punctures, deflates or bursts it. Sometimes all it takes is a little vehemence to achieve something that seemed unreachable only moments before its release, before it floated upon the air, before we liberated or unleashed it or before it escaped without our consent. Possibly much to our regret.

  That is probably more or less what happened. The most probable explanation. My involuntary or voluntary emanations, or both alternately, had their effect, for there were moments when I didn’t care whether she noticed or not and others when I was filled with shame and self-reproach, judging my intentions to be a betrayal of Muriel, even though he had long since abandoned that particular field. Or that’s what I was thinking when I noticed that my paralysed, almost numb hands resting on Beatriz’s shoulders were being drawn slowly down by hers, over her nightdress, not inside. I couldn’t see her face, she was still sitting with her back to me, and I was still standing and could see only the top of her head, I had no idea what her expression might be, whether her eyes were open or closed, if she was fully aware that it was me touching her or if she was imagining the caresses or the pressure of someone else, doubtless her longed-for husband. My position was rather like that of Van Vechten at the Sanctuary, except that I was not yet thrusting away, nor was I at the right height to do so, the most I could do would be to press my belly against her shoulder, so that she could feel it, but I didn’t even have the courage to establish that too explicit contact, I held back – not yet – even though she had g
uided my hands down towards her breasts, which were almost too large for me to encompass. When I was perched in the tree at the Sanctuary, I’d been able to see her face clearly, pressed against the window, in fact, that was all I could see once the Doctor had turned her round; before that, I had, with some alarm, been staring at the back of her neck as it almost beat against the panes. And that is how I imagined her while I was touching her – yes, I was actually touching her – with her eyes tight shut as if she were some strange, unwonted portrait, her skin firmer and more youthful, her lips fuller or fleshier, as if this were unknown territory for them, more porous, softer, redder, and slightly parted, her eyelashes longer or more visible; but all that was appropriate to the moment of orgasm or to a series of orgasms or a pre-orgasm, and it was far too soon for that.

  Then things accelerated and it all happened very fast. She stood up, pushed aside the stool, turned towards me and, in one movement, had pressed her whole body against mine, as she had with Muriel on that other night, when he, at last, unexpectedly granted her wish. I felt the embrace of her chest and belly and limbs, if chest, belly and limbs can be said to embrace: her breast crushed against my breast, her pelvis against mine, her thighs against mine, her arms encircling me with an iron grip, and even her feet on my feet, as if she had stood on them in order to be the same height as me, except that she was tall enough not to need to do that – in fact, in heels, she was taller than me. For a moment, I had a sense of being bound to some supernatural creature, possibly a giantess, not because of her size, for although she was well built, she was of perfectly normal stature, but because of that absolute fusion of bodies, her body coupled with mine, glued to mine, and all in a matter of seconds, with no preamble. Her mouth was the only thing she did not press to mine, though, and when I tried to kiss her, she turned away and offered me her throat or her cheek: ‘No, no kisses,’ I thought, as Beatriz had perhaps said to Van Vechten, ‘No, no caresses’, at the end of their sacred and profane fuck, from my branch I hadn’t been able to hear what they said. Non, pas de baisers, pas de caresses, I must have read something of the sort in some French novel for these imaginary prohibitions to come into my mind in that other language. And neither she nor I said anything during that strange, perfect juxtaposition, standing in the kitchen near the fridge. And so no words either: Non, pas de mots.