Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘I’m not insinuating anything, Doctor, nor do I have anything to do with any hard-line Franco supporters. I don’t know a single one.’ I addressed him by his title this time, in a friendly fashion, but I wanted him also to feel a certain coldness on my part. ‘I’m just remembering something you said to me once and making a few connections.’

  ‘What did I say? I’ve never said anything of the sort.’

  ‘You were speaking about women and how to get them into bed, Maestro,’ I said. We forget more of what comes out of our mouths than what enters our ears, and so he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘You said: “There’s nothing more satisfying than when a girl doesn’t want to do it, but can’t say No.” And then you spoke about the resentment they feel because “the very first time, they had no choice”. That, more or less, is what you said. “Obliged”, you said. “But can’t say No”, you said.’ I repeated what he had said, underlined it. ‘What other interpretation could I give those words?’

  The Doctor hesitated for a few seconds. In the light of what I had been told and what he had guessed, in the light of the vengeful rumours spread, according to him, by former comrades, those words sounded very bad, even though they had been spoken at a different time and in another context. He must have realized that they sounded almost like a confession, an acknowledgement, he must have seen them as ugly and besmirching. He recovered at once, however, and laughed out loud, all congeniality and good nature, revealing his healthy, dazzling teeth in all their glory, his protuberant chin gleaming.

  ‘What nonsense is this, Juan? I was just talking for the sake of it and we were joking, weren’t we, you were pulling my leg. You’ve certainly got a good memory, though. I’d completely forgotten ever having said that. I was talking about the kind of girls who go all prudish and play hard to get and object if you insist, so as not to appear too easy if they’re young, or adulterous if they’re married. Every married woman will tell you: “It’s the first time anything like this has ever happened to me, I can’t understand why it’s happening now.” They need you to believe it or to believe it themselves. And of course you pretend to believe them, so that they can feel they emerge from the situation smelling of roses and generally feel relaxed about the whole thing. Women may be less fastidious nowadays, but it was different in my youth. And young women, girls like your friends, for example, have to justify it to themselves before they give in to someone like me, a man twice their age or more, someone they consider to be an old man: he begged me, he insisted, he tricked me, he made me feel sorry for him. It’s all a matter of flattering them. That’s all I meant. And there you go putting a sinister interpretation on it. You and your conspiracy theories.’ And he slapped me on the arm with his great hand, and either he misjudged it or else he did so on purpose, because it really hurt, and I saw that he hadn’t intended it as a friendly gesture at all. He tried to pass it off as one, fixing me with his unvaryingly cordial smile, his large, rectangular incisors, that smile that had so eased his way with mothers and children and his superiors. But the smile wasn’t cordial at all, it was angry and possibly alarmed.

  I came very close to pitying him for having suddenly to consider himself an old man and having to admit it openly, someone reduced to spending what remained of his life merely admiring – or possibly entreating – not only young women, but almost any woman. Successful men take their decay very hard, it’s not easy to recover from rejection if you’re not used to it. I realized, too, that he was one of those men whom old age betrays by failing to teach them the usual lessons or quieting their passions and, instead, preserves their ambition and their energy rather than making them slower or more docile. And so it gradually undermines them, but without giving them any warning. I shook off that shadow of pity, however; after all, how could a man so unaware of the passage of time suddenly present himself as time’s victim in the middle of a conversation that was highly embarrassing for him? I thought: ‘He’s resorting to trickery, he’s defending himself. There is, as I’ve always felt, something voracious and troubling about him, and I mustn’t allow myself to be deceived.’ And in view of his denial, I decided, without further delay, to mention the third name and not bother waiting for some meandering path that would lead me to the Sanctuary:

  ‘You’re a religious man, Jorge.’

  This was half-statement, half-question. And whichever it was, he was momentarily taken aback. His laugh lingered on a little, like a mechanism that takes a while to stop. But if it had been a cadaverous laugh to begin with, it was now the laugh of a dead man.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? What kind of a question is that?’

  ‘I’ve seen you at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Darmstadt, and so I assume you’re very religious. You must be extremely devout to belong to the Apostolic Movement.’

  His expression changed, he cancelled that now defunct smile and buried it once and for all, or at least for what remained of the night. He clearly didn’t like me knowing that fact.

  ‘You’ve seen me there? Seen me doing what?’ His tone of voice was one of fear and scepticism.

  ‘I often go to the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, which is almost next door.’ I hesitated. I waited. What emerged from my lips next was not what I was planning to say at all, it simply escaped my wretched tongue. ‘I saw you with Beatriz. I saw you in your consulting room.’

  There was no jokey shove this time, that belonged to quite another sphere of behaviour. He took advantage of the fact that we were sitting on one of Bar Chicote’s semicircular seats – almost like seats on a train or a tram – to place one of his large hands on my shoulder. As I said, when he did this apparently affectionately, it was as if his great paw had fallen from a considerable height and then gripped me like claws or talons, provoking in me an immediate urge to shrug it off and free myself from both its weight and grip. This time it was worse, I experienced a real pressure, an unmistakable threat. Van Vechten was strong and well built, he was, you might say, squeezing my shoulder, twisting it, bearing down on me, so much so that I felt I wouldn’t be able to get up from my seat, that my whole body was powerless against that great weight. He was really hurting me, more than he had before and the pain was more prolonged. I imagined how that hand would have rested on the shoulders of the timid, while he gave them two options: ‘So it’s up to you: you either have a bit of a hard time accepting my conditions or you stop having any time at all, either good, bad or indifferent.’ And he whispered in a very slow, unnaturally calm voice (but since he was normally such an expansive man, he was unused to whispering and his voice sounded like sandpaper):

  ‘Listen, young De Vere, just watch what you say. Be very careful what you tell people. You wouldn’t want to harm someone you shouldn’t harm. Or even several people.’

  I managed to slide sideways to the other end of the semicircular seat, beyond his reach. An old waiter with a napkin draped over one arm was keeping a watchful eye on us, he must have been sensitive to any tensions, able to sniff out a brawl before it happened. Van Vechten wasn’t going to intimidate me, young people are such unconscious beings that they often fail to notice when they’re in danger. And I was convinced I was in charge of the situation. I even thought he might offer me something in exchange for my silence, once his anger had passed and he had recovered from the shock.

  ‘If you mean Beatriz, forget it. Who could possibly be interested?’

  ‘Exactly, who could possibly be interested?’

  And I replied coolly:

  ‘No one, as far as I know. Absolutely no one. It’s that curious place that interests me. A strangely neat and tidy place, with a devout, almost fundamentalist air about it; a Germanic air from another age.’

  He was still preoccupied by the carnal aspect of the matter and by his friend’s wife, and hadn’t realized that this was a secondary issue for me, part of his private life, about which one should never speak – a rule almost no one obeys. It was as if his amazement at my having seen them together prevente
d him from making the connection between the supposed calumnies about his remote past to which I had only alluded – I hadn’t actually said anything – and his duties there in the Sanctuary in 1980. Maybe that connection was an indication that he had never entirely changed, I mean that he hadn’t even changed sides, despite his reputation and his friends and despite appearances. At the time, people in Spain lived in permanent fear that a coup d’état might, any day, return us to a dictatorship. Indeed, later on, there were two attempted coups, the second being the most famous.

  ‘What did you see? And how did you see it?’ asked the bemused sandpaper voice. Even though we weren’t as close to each other as before, he was still speaking in a whisper. He must have assumed that no one could possibly have seen them from outside.

  ‘I saw everything. Not exactly romantic, I must say.’ I added that last impertinent comment so that he would know I wasn’t bluffing. ‘It was pure chance. I just happened to look in. And there’s a particular corner …’ I wasn’t going to tell him the truth, nor that I had climbed a tree, although if I hadn’t done that, I doubt I would have seen his face. And then I returned to the important, revealing fact: ‘As I understand it, that place, the Sanctuary, is a branch office of Pinochet’s supporters. And you know who their allies are here in Madrid. I’m sure Muriel would like to know about those connections of yours, Doctor. And with good reason. So as to know where he stands.’

  Van Vechten turned pale, finally understanding the intent behind my possible indiscretion. First, he came up with an excuse, then he got a grip on himself. First, he felt afraid, then he tried to make me afraid.

  ‘I’m just doing a favour for an old friend of mine, a priest, and he has absolutely nothing to do with politics. I’m not religious, but neither do I interfere with other people’s beliefs. Nor do I have to answer to a little squirt like you.’ That was when he recovered his sangfroid. He slithered over towards me, his great paw outstretched, doubtless intending to grab me again, though who knows where. However, before he could reach me, I leapt up and removed myself from the semicircle. The waiter shot us another glance. ‘I’m warning you, Juan, be careful what you say. There’s a good and a bad way of telling things and a good and a bad way of listening – and of understanding. So best not say anything, all right?’ And when I said nothing at all, but just stood there looking him up and down as if dumbstruck, he added: ‘Do you understand me, boy?’

  I left no money on the table, he was much richer than me. That night’s odyssey was obviously not going to take place, unless he went alone.

  ‘Still doing people favours, eh, Doctor?’ I said as I was about to make for the bar’s revolving doors. ‘From 1939 until now. How very exhausting.’

  X

  * * *

  When you’re impatient to see someone or to reveal what you’ve discovered, you also tend to put off the moment for as long as possible. Although only, of course, when you’re sure that sooner or later you’ll see the person and be able to tell them your story. If there’s any doubt about this, then haste takes over and things happen in a rush, usually with disappointing results, anticlimax and frustration. I could afford to postpone my encounter with Muriel, to prepare for it and savour it beforehand; to wait until that period of frenetic activity ended and he spent a little more time at home. Besides, during those febrile days, full of brief entrances and continual exits, it wouldn’t have been a good idea to force him to stop, to sit or lie down on the floor and then listen to me for a good long while, entirely against his will. (A prior period of boredom is vital to awakening curiosity and invention.) If, that is, he would agree to hear what I’d found out about Van Vechten, and I thought he would if I insisted and managed to intrigue him. I had to wait for him to calm down, for him to sort out the financing of this new, angrily urgent project or for him to give it up as impossible and resign himself to that for the moment and perhaps until after the summer. The delay suited me, since I was in no particular hurry, but was rather enjoying that pleasurably expectant, alert state of impatience when you feel absolutely certain that your impatience will finally be assuaged.

  I had felt uncomfortable about not being upfront with the Doctor when I took him out with me at night in order to observe him and try to get him to open up about his past, and I felt equally ill at ease having to behave like an informer and denounce him and his now proven indecent behaviour to his friend, with all too foreseeable consequences. Many years had passed since his blackmailing activities, if that was true, of course: I had been very slightly persuaded by his explanation that these were slanders put about by his vengeful former franquista comrades, who felt betrayed by his clemency and lack of venom, because everything we are told leaves a faint mark and sows a tiny seed of doubt, which is why it’s not so very odd that sometimes, when we have already composed our own picture of events, we would prefer not to hear any more or to allow the accused to speak, so that he cannot gradually convince us of his innocence and the truth of his story. Yes, many years had passed and people do change and do repent, and they look at their past selves with a feeling of horror, but at the same time are unable to recognize that primitive self, as if they were gazing into a distorting mirror: ‘Was I that person? Did I do that? Was my former self so very bad? If so, there’s no way I can alter it. Guilt is stronger than my desire to make amends, guilt prevents me from even trying, and all I can hope for is that the guilt will pass or grow so old that its remnants will dissolve into the mists in which everything that has ever happened fades and vanishes, until its shape blurs and becomes indistinguishable: the good and the ambiguous, the contradictory and the bad, the crimes and the acts of heroism, the malevolence and the generosity, the honesty and the deceit, the never-ending rancour and the forgiveness finally wrested from the weary victim, the self-sacrifice, the promises made and the cunning acts of exploitation, all, in the end, will be greeted with an oblivious shrug of the shoulders by those who come afterwards and succeed us, preoccupied with their own passions, which are quite enough to cope with, indifferent to everything that happened before they trod the earth, where they will merely be superimposing their footprints on those of their infinite predecessors and peers, not knowing that they’re merely imitating them and that nothing is new under the sun, that everything is doomed to become confused and mingled and homogenized, to be forgotten and left to float on a repetitive magma of which, nevertheless, no one tires, or is it just that none of us has ever found the path that will lead us out?’ (That’s why history is full of Eduardo Muriels and Beatriz Nogueras, of Dr Van Vechtens and Professor Ricos, of Celias and Vidals and Juan de Veres and identical extras, determined, one after the other, to perform the same play and rewrite the same melodramatic plot. There’s nothing original about my character, nor, I suppose, about any of the others.) ‘But until that happens – and however brief a life, it will take a while – there is a terrible, hateful interlude that belongs to us alone, and during which we have no alternative but to cope with what we have done or omitted to do and to distract or placate our feelings of guilt, and sometimes the only way of achieving this is to increase that guilt, to heap up new guilt to cover the old, to overshadow or blur or minimize it, until finally all guilt has passed and there isn’t a soul in the world who can remember what we did, no quick, wicked tongue to talk about it, not even a tremulous finger to point us out as having been the cause of anything.’

  I imagine there were various factors that overcame my natural and general reluctance to squeal on someone else. First, what I had learned was precisely what Muriel had asked me to find out and, as an unconditional admirer of his, I had wholeheartedly set about doing just that. Second, what Vidal had told me coincided all too closely with my boss’s suspicions: he had never been explicit about these, but had mentioned the possibility or rumour that Van Vechten had behaved indecently with a woman, or possibly more than one, as seemed to be the case (‘That, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low’). Third, the Doctor’s actions had been so
despicable that, once discovered, they deserved to be exposed. Not that anything would happen to him: there was no proof, it didn’t constitute a crime and, in Spain at the time, no one was in a mood to denounce anyone. The Amnesty Law had been passed, that is, an agreement had been reached according to which no one individual would begin an endless chain of accusations or bring out anyone else’s dirty linen, however filthy – murders, summary executions, betrayals provoked by envy or revenge, show trials, military tribunals condemning to life imprisonment or death civilians with little or no access to a lawyer (and that went on until the final, far milder years of the dictatorship): not even the crimes common to both sides during the War or those perpetrated afterwards by the winning side, which was free to continue soiling its own linen. It wasn’t just that there could be no judicial consequences for any abuse or crime, it was even frowned upon to talk about them in public or write about them in the press; as I mentioned, the few people who tried this were met with the instant disapproval not just of former Franco supporters who had a personal interest in the matter – in reality, there was nothing ‘former’ about them – but of anti-franquistas and committed democrats too: as Vidal had pointed out, it suited some people perfectly to have the slate wiped clean like that, so as to conceal their own remote pasts and polish up their less than immaculate biographies. It was decided rather too soon that all guilt was gone, that such ancient history should be left to dissolve into those blurring mists, as if a whole century had passed not just four or five years. I thought it likely that the Doctor’s misdemeanours would have been known by some in private, that they would at least have cost him one or, with luck, two precious friendships. Fourth, I was troubled now by that routine relationship between him and Beatriz Noguera, by those prosaic fucks at the Sanctuary; it wasn’t, I think, that I was jealous exactly – that would have been absurd when nothing between us had changed, certainly not on her part: the night spent in my cubbyhole must have been a mere caprice as far as she was concerned, or a remedy for insomnia, or perhaps a delirium she scarcely remembered or was unaware of the following day; she was, to use her own eloquent and simplified words, not always quite right in the head. But young men – or myself at the time – need to believe that every one of their experiences or actions is unique and all it takes is for something unthinkable – not to say impossible – to happen for them to embellish it in their memory and cleanse it of any ugly accretions, and Van Vechten was a vulgar and now very ugly accretion. And lastly, I had found his behaviour in Bar Chicote altogether disagreeable, unconvincing and evasive: he had begun by denying everything, then tried to make a joke of it, presenting himself as the victim of other people’s defamatory remarks, before becoming threatening and aggressive, planting one large hand on my shoulder, warning me that I could get hurt, calling me ‘boy’ and ‘little squirt’. As to his present-day links to and relationship with El Movimiento Apostólico de Darmstadt, he had not even attempted an explanation, indeed, had avoided doing so. In the light of all this, my desire to do him harm prevailed over my reluctance to squeal on him.