Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  I became impatient, in a hurry for what seemed about to happen to actually happen. I was afraid she might draw back, separate, or that I might push her away, suddenly keeping her at a distance by placing one hand on her shoulder, as Muriel had done, with that single authoritative gesture, after suffering her overwhelming response to his unexpected and doubtless commiserative embrace. There was nothing commiserative about my embrace, not at all, it was youthfully lustful or elementally lascivious; as I said, when you’re young, it’s hard to turn down any opportunity, you feel you should seize all opportunities or certainly the great majority of them, the only exceptions being when you feel a clear, unmistakable distaste or those occasions that don’t even seem likely to be worth calling up later as a memory, as a treasured image for the mature or old man we will one day become and whom we can’t even imagine then, can’t even glimpse on the horizon, but who, mysteriously, is already there in our unconscious mind like a ghost of the future. It is that older man who sometimes whispers to our youthful self: ‘Remember this experience and note every detail, experience it with me in mind and as if you knew it would never happen again except in your memory, which is my memory; engrave it on your retina as if these were the most memorable sequences and shots from a film; you won’t be able to preserve the excitement or relive it, but you will recall the sense of triumph and, more especially, the knowledge: you will know that this happened and you always will; grasp it firmly, take a long look at this woman and keep that image safe, because later on, I will ask you for it and you will have to offer it to me as consolation.’

  I knew very clearly that this was one of those instances. There was no distaste, quite the contrary, but if there was a risk that I might retreat (a very minor risk as I recognized at once), this was because I was troubled by the idea that I was perhaps committing a vile deed. Not just because of the loyalty I owed to Muriel, but because I was possibly taking advantage of or abusing, to use the appropriate verb, Beatriz Noguera’s probable disorientation and confusion and fragility and, of course, her continuing unhappiness and even her accidental insomnia: she was much older than me and therefore more experienced in some respects, and she didn’t seem to care about her lovers, but perhaps she used them consciously to comfort herself, to feel that she wasn’t pure lard or a bag of flour or flesh, yes, solely for that reason and to avenge herself in her imagination, fictitiously (‘If he knew’ much more than ‘When he finds out’), because there can be no real revenge if the victim doesn’t know about it or doesn’t suffer; but she was also someone who had recently experienced an unbearable sense of world-weariness or despair, who had just tried to slit her own wrists – those still bandaged wrists were an additional element, one of those details my future self would recall in many years’ time, as I knew already because the sight of them only increased my desire – someone who was not always quite right in the head, as she herself had said, someone frustrated and rejected and who cared little what would come in the days that had been loaned or gifted to her following her attempted suicide, but then who does care what happens to them after death, and Beatriz had already died three times, at least in her mind; she was, inevitably, easy prey, beaten and will-less or weakened by indifference, the kind that would be capable of saying to anyone, not just to me: ‘Do what you like, I won’t resist, my time for resisting anything has passed.’ It bothered me that the word ‘prey’ should have leapt into my head, since she was the one who had stood up and turned round and thrown herself into my arms or, rather, at my whole body, even treading on my toes, climbing on to them as if she were a little girl, and she certainly wasn’t that. And yet, and yet … I couldn’t help persuading myself that my conquest – another unfortunate word – had been the result of my emanations or pulsations, that they had provoked this almost overreaction; I couldn’t help but see myself as the seducer, the opportunist, almost as the guilty party, perhaps that is always what the keener partner feels, although there’s never any certain way of knowing who is keener than who, sometimes it remains hidden until it can remain hidden no longer. And that is perhaps when I committed the vilest of deeds, in order to shake off all those other possibilities, and I did so with my thoughts alone, but fully intending to act and not to stop: ‘What does it matter, I saved her, I saved her from the blood and the water, because no one else would have known about it otherwise.’ I dredged up that same miserable idea and this time formulated it in my head more or less as I’ve written it down now, while I was exploring or groping a new area – not in a humiliating way, but ardently, appreciatively – and feeling for her knickers underneath her silk nightdress, then pulling them down to mid-thigh level, one tug, two, and they no longer covered what they had been covering, I could use one finger or two to caress her, with nothing in the way now, or even slip them inside. ‘The fact that she’s here and breathing, that her skin smells so good and her flesh is still so abundant and alive, is all thanks to me, I have won the right to enjoy them; this woman who is neither memory nor ash nor decomposing flesh nor bare bone, this woman who survived is mine and will be tonight for a while at least; after all, these encounters are short-lived and then we’ll both wash ourselves clean and it will be as if it had never happened, apart from our wretched memory, which presents us with events of which no visible trace remains, which means that no one else knows, no one will find out if they weren’t there, and if someone does talk about what happened later on, that’s pure rumour. I’m an extension of Muriel, she herself said so, perhaps that’s why she clings to me as she clung to him, in just the same way, as soon as she had the chance and it became a possibility; perhaps she’s doing it in order to replace him and to deceive herself with her eyes shut, or perhaps to annoy him, although he will probably never know that I’ve screwed her, I certainly won’t tell him and neither will she. But what do I care about the whys and wherefores, if there are any, and if she even knows what they are, it’s time to get down to business.’ And at this point, I grew impatient, hence the choice of language, which tends to be what passes through the mind when the feelings are superficial and the desire selfish. Vulgar terms, but they are never spoken out loud unless there is mutual trust and a liking for them or as a willing game between two lewd strangers, otherwise, they are only ever thought. There are no witnesses to our thoughts, and we don’t have to be respectful or polite in them. And so I had no hesitation in saying to myself: ‘I’ve got to screw her now, quickly and with no preliminaries, in case she takes a step back and has second thoughts midway through and what is just about to be won’t be; I would never forgive myself, to have come so close and then to fail, to have brought the painting to life, to have endowed it with tremulous movement and volume only to let that likeness escape intact and unentered. Once I’m inside, there’ll be no going back, I’ll feel that warmth, that moistness and it will have happened and then I’ll have that memory until the end of my days and be able to think about it whenever I choose: “I fucked Beatriz Noguera, who would have thought it, who could have predicted it; that’s how it was and no one can change it.” Even if she still is in a disturbed state and not in control of her decisions, her actions; even if she forgets all about it or wipes it from her mind, even if she’s dead and buried, even if she disappears from the world long before I do and hardly anyone knows who she was, still less remembers her, and even if no one tells the tenuous story of her private life even in whispers, this will have happened and no one will be able to take that away from me, and for me it will be an ineradicable piece of knowledge.’

  Those are also thoughts appropriate to youth, when you are too new to the world to be able to believe in the things that happen to you or in your own actions, when everything seems improbable and as if it belonged to someone else, as if our experiences were not really ours and were simply on loan to us. It’s not just a young man’s heart that is on hold, it’s also his consciousness. It takes a while, a long while, for it to find its proper place and settle in, and it’s years before we realize that what i
s happening to us really is happening to us, and that we are not just spectators in the dark, staring at a stage or a screen or at a book lit by a lamp.

  It had to be now, so that it would actually happen and not run the risk of failing to happen, for it to cease being a promise or the future or mere imminence. I proceeded cautiously – spurred on by my impatience – and gently, so as not to frighten her, I drew Beatriz towards my chambre de bonne, into the small room that would be almost unknown to her, for no one tended to visit me in my place of exile; it was best if the irreversible – although it was not as yet irreversible, not yet – didn’t happen in the kitchen, where someone might come in or peer round the door, for wakefulness could assail any of the apartment’s inhabitants who wanted to drink or eat something or stand at the open fridge door for a few seconds to cool off; we were too exposed there, it was a communal area, Flavia’s territory and a transit point. I closed the door of my cubbyhole, but did not hear the usual click: I didn’t bother to close it properly, though, since nothing could be seen from the outside, and matters were now urgent. Almost in the same movement – it’s odd how we become so deft and efficient when it comes to preventing another person from reacting or retreating or waking – I removed her knickers and took off my jeans, but not my boxer shorts, there was no need, the fly was already open and in use, or indeed my shirt, since I hadn’t buttoned it up, and my chest would touch whatever there was to touch without impediment. I gave her another gentle push so that she fell backwards on to the bed and let me do as I pleased, just reaching out her arms – the bandages visible, those bandages – waiting to clutch me to her again, as soon as I had completed my minimal preparations. I slipped off the straps of her nightdress so as to see her bare breasts and to touch them with whatever part of my body she or I chose. But I saw that she wasn’t going to choose anything or guide me in any way. Then I drew back slightly and looked for a moment at her gleaming thighs, so close together. I parted them, carefully and resolutely, if such a combination is possible, and, while she once again enfolded me in a tight embrace, I thought: ‘Now it’s happened, my cock is inside her, nothing can now stop this happening, can prevent it from having happened.’ I wanted to see her face, although she clearly wasn’t interested in seeing mine, she couldn’t, with her eyes tight shut as they had been when she was with Van Vechten in the Sanctuary, except that there, he had been behind her when I saw her face, while I was in front. I tried to drive away that image, but for a few moments, it remained unpleasantly vivid, troubling and distracting me. The first physical sensations succeeded in repelling it a little, as did my thoughts, which were intent on convincing themselves of what was happening with their coarse, crude language: ‘Yes, I’m fucking Beatriz Noguera, my cock’s inside her cunt and there’s nothing to stop it now.’ She had denied me her mouth and continued to do so, but she kept kissing my eyelids, thus obliging me to keep them closed. I could see nothing and perhaps that sharpened my other senses, definitely my sense of touch, but also my hearing. I heard rapid footsteps close by, as if someone were running. I stopped for a moment so as to hear better, Beatriz noticed this, but obviously didn’t know the reason, lost in her own depths or thoughts, perhaps as she had been in the bathtub in the Hotel Wellington, who knows. Then I heard nothing more, they were evidently the footsteps of someone hurrying away – bare feet on the wooden floor – not of someone approaching. I turned my head to look at the door, it was closed, but not completely, it was open the tiniest crack through which no one could have seen anything.

  ‘What is it? Is something wrong?’ Beatriz asked quietly.

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing.’ I didn’t want to alarm her, to put her to flight, that would have been disastrous.

  But someone might have heard something. There had been no words spoken between us, but perhaps some louder-than-usual breathing and a faint interjection or groan, despite Beatriz’s discreet silence and my efforts to make not a sound, because I had not, for a moment, forgotten that there were three children in the apartment. I hoped desperately that the footsteps had been Flavia’s and not the children’s; she was of an age not to be shocked or to be less shocked, or perhaps she already knew or suspected or assumed. I was aware, though, that those fleet, barefoot steps were more like those of a child or an adolescent than of a grown woman. ‘Damn,’ I thought, ‘one of them probably woke up and went looking for Beatriz, if so, I hope it was Tomás or, if not him, then Alicia, they probably wouldn’t have fully understood what was going on, wouldn’t have put two and two together; if it was Susana, though, she will have sized up the situation and will now be lying awake in her bed, her cheeks burning, listening for her mother to return to her bedroom. Whatever the truth, there’s no undoing the situation; I’ll feel embarrassed tomorrow, but today is not tomorrow. This is my moment, and I have to get back to the business in hand.’

  The body lying underneath me required my attention, indeed it was demanding or hijacking it, and in those circumstances, it was impossible to remain absent for very long, not even after a brief fright. I took advantage of the fact that I had raised my head, thus preventing Beatriz from kissing my eyelids, and I looked down at her face, the better to retain the moment, the bold eyebrows, the very thick eyelashes, which were neither turned back on themselves nor curled, the straight nose so charmingly retroussé, the full, wide mouth that revealed – a dreamy half-smile – the slightly widely spaced teeth that unwittingly lent her a vaguely salacious air, in marked contrast to her otherwise childish face, one of those mouths that would instantly lead many men to imagine unexpected and inappropriate scenes, often quite against their perfectly respectful efforts to suppress such scenes entirely, except that I didn’t need to suppress or imagine anything, I was performing one of those scenes with her, and she looked even more attractive than usual, as happens with so many women who, in such situations, grow more beautiful and more youthful, her lips fuller and redder and more porous, her skin so young and firm that I again had to curse those footsteps that had forced me to think of Susana, because for a few seconds I had the disquieting feeling that I was with her and not with her mother, of whom she was the very image: the same features, the same candid expression, the daughter already promising – already blossoming into – the same intimidating, explosive body that was now so closely connected to mine. And I was once more assailed by a feeling of incongruousness: when I looked at Beatriz’s face and, where my perspective allowed, at her breasts, hips, thighs and buttocks, I realized that her features were not in keeping with her curvaceous body; they seemed to demand a less powerful, more moderate trunk, abdomen and legs, and her insolent curves a less innocent, ingenuous face. And in Susana, who was so much younger, that divergence would become more marked as soon as she was a little older. I don’t know what was wrong with me: the mother led me to think about the daughter at that most inopportune of moments. However, I did not forget about the former, not at all, not for an instant: I carefully noted everything so that I could file it away in my memory. It’s still there, as clear as clear, even though many years have passed, even though it’s accompanied by many other memories, and even though she has been dead for nearly the same number of years.

  IX

  * * *

  ‘Thus bad begins and worse remains behind,’ that is the Shakespeare quote Muriel was alluding to when he spoke of the benefits or advisability of – the comparatively minor harm involved in – giving up trying to know what we cannot know, of removing ourselves from the hubbub of what others tell us throughout our life, so much so that even what we ourselves experience and witness sometimes seems more like a story told to us, as it moves further off and becomes besmirched by time, or grows faded with the tick-tock of the passing days or grows dim beneath the breath of all those moons and the dust of all those years, and it’s not so much that we then begin to doubt its existence (although occasionally we do), it’s more that it loses its colour and its importance wanes. What was important no longer is, or only very faintly, and to
retrieve that scrap of importance you have to make a real effort; what seemed crucial to us is revealed to be a matter of complete indifference, and what destroyed our life seems mere foolishness, an exaggeration, a piece of nonsense. How could I have been so upset or felt so guilty, how could I have wished to die, even if only rhetorically? It really didn’t merit so much fuss – I can see that now – when its effects are on the path to dispersal and oblivion and there’s barely any trace left of the person I was then. Of what significance is what happened or what happened to me, what I did, what I kept secret or failed to confess? What does it matter that a little child died, when millions of others have fallen without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow, apart, that is, from their progenitors, and sometimes not even them: the world is full of stoical mothers who say nothing and endure, and who perhaps press their grieving face into their silent pillow in the solitude of night, so as not to be seen. What does it matter if, one insomniac night, a young man went to bed with one of those mothers and what if a daughter found out and ran back down the corridor, troubled and barefoot, trying to erase that knowledge or, on the contrary, storing it away, so that it would have a determining effect on her own future marriage and, therefore, on her existence? What does it matter if a woman told a lie once, however much harm it did, or perhaps the harm attributed to that lie was exaggerated, for when all’s said and done, lies form part of the natural flow of life, which is inconceivable without a dose of falsehood, without that equilibrium between truth and deceit? What does it matter if a decent, upright man should, for years, reject that woman and insult her? Households are full of rejections and slights and mortifications and insults, especially behind closed doors (and sometimes one gets shut inside with them by accident). What does it matter if one of those mothers kills herself, when she had already teetered along that knife-edge and when her nearest and dearest were expecting her suicide, which was even announced by the tick-tock of the metronome that she herself set in motion, when she was playing or not playing the piano? What does it matter that a twisted man abused his power and knowledge and behaved indecently with certain vulnerable women, almost all of them mothers and daughters? Just as now it doesn’t matter in the least that a film producer for whom we work either was or wasn’t involved in trafficking women in America in the Kennedy era, women who were vulnerable or invulnerable and stoical. What point is there in trying to stop, avoid, watch, punish and even know all this; history is too full of minor abuses and major villainies against which nothing can be done because there is such an avalanche of them, and what do we gain by finding out about them? What happens has happened and is irreversible, that is the terrible force of facts, their unliftable weight. Perhaps it’s best to shrug one’s shoulders and nod and ignore them, to accept that this is the way of the world. ‘Thus bad begins and worse remains behind,’ that’s what Shakespeare said. And only once we have nodded and shrugged our shoulders does worse remain behind, because at least it is over. And thus only bad begins, the bad that has not yet happened.