Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘Tell me then, go on. Don’t worry, I’m not going to prejudge anything. I have no reason to, no right.’

  He lay down again, feeling reassured, and it was then that I saw the smudge of a face, or someone’s head and shoulders, through the glass panes of the door, and because the panes were frosted I couldn’t make out who it was. When Muriel had summoned me to his side of the apartment, there had been no one else at home. The children had gone to a swimming pool, Flavia was out shopping and running various errands, and Beatriz had left as soon as she’d had breakfast without saying where she was going, certainly not to me. From Muriel’s supine position on the floor, that face lay outside his field of vision, that pink stain, which was not pressed against the glass, but a step or two away, so as not to attract attention or in the belief that it would remain undetected. But I could see it from where I was sitting at the desk. I wondered if that person could hear us, the doors were closed, but not completely; it was possible. I wasn’t sure whether to warn Muriel of that ghostly, distorted presence. ‘He’ll stop talking at once if I tell him,’ I thought, ‘and I still won’t know the story, and he may never again be in storytelling vein. I mustn’t risk it.’ When I looked harder at the pink smudge, I seemed to recognize the oval of Beatriz’s face, which I had seen once before through glass, except that then her face had been squashed against it and the glass had been clear, and her eyes had been tight shut while someone fucked her from behind: it hadn’t been me on that occasion, but the two memories combined and filled me with sudden shame – for Van Vechten in the Sanctuary and for me in my cubbyhole – so much so that I may have blushed. ‘Even if it is Beatriz,’ I thought, ‘there’ll be nothing new about Muriel’s version of events, nothing that he hasn’t flung in her face a thousand times for eight long years, it will be an old wound, if it is a wound.’ She had even admitted her guilt on that night of prowling and pleading, my first act of espionage: ‘I’m so sorry, my love, I’m so sorry I hurt you,’ she had said, and she had perhaps been sincere, or was it just a ploy? ‘I wish I could turn back the clock.’ That’s what we all wish sometimes, my love, to go back, have our time over, to change what that time held, all too often we’re the ones who decide what time holds and who determine how time will see us once it’s gone and has been definitively relegated to the past, and yet, as it’s happening, we can’t see it and can’t, therefore, picture it. In the end it will become an immutable image, full of hasty, random, twisted lines, and that’s how it will always appear to our eyes, or to the one eye in the back of our head, maritime blue or midnight blue. I decided not to warn him, not to tell him about the smudge, the face, the stain.

  ‘No, you don’t have the right,’ said Muriel, ‘but you won’t be able to help yourself. You will make a judgement, even if you don’t pronounce it. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, what is it that you keep looking at?’ He had noticed that I kept staring to my right, at the door.

  ‘Oh, nothing. There are a few books over there that need putting back on the shelves. You know what a fiend I am for order. I’ll just go and tidy them up. Sorry.’

  I got to my feet and went over to a small revolving bookshelf to the left of the door, where Muriel, who was something of a bibliophile, kept a few of his favourite first editions, or ones signed or inscribed by the author. The bookshelf was on a lower level than the glass panes I was looking at, but my excuse worked. As I walked past the door, the figure on the other side immediately retreated or disappeared briefly from view. I was pretty sure it was Beatriz; she must have come in without our noticing, and when she heard the murmur of our voices, she must have stopped to see if she could glean something of our conversation. I pretended to put the books back on the shelves and then returned to my place at the desk. A moment later, I saw the pink smudge reappear, like an unfinished pastel portrait.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, leave them be.’

  ‘Sorry. Do go on, please. What happened? What fault did she commit?’

  ‘Um,’ he said, ‘um’, as if he were a hesitant Englishman. ‘Well, the first fault was mine, if falling in love is a fault, given that it’s almost always involuntary. It can sometimes be deliberate, but that’s pretty rare. Months passed and more months, and Beatriz still couldn’t leave her father on his own. We postponed the wedding or decided, at any rate, not to fix a date, not until the situation was resolved, although it was quite hard to see how that would happen. Her father was feeling weak, bewildered, ashamed and indecisive. He had aged ten years, according to Beatriz; his hair had turned white, lines had appeared on his face as if by magic, he had lost both his physical and mental agility and seemed to be making no progress at all. And of course I carried on with my life here, you can’t go on endlessly waiting for someone, especially when they’re such a vast distance away and you can’t see them or even hear their voice from time to time, something that’s so easy now … I must confess, too, that misfortunes have a cooling, distancing effect, and if they continue for too long, you end up fleeing them … I was given the chance to make my second film and threw myself into that – films were made very quickly then, in three or four weeks, sometimes less, but five at most, apart from the editing and all that … Anyway, I fell madly in love with another woman, it doesn’t matter who she was.’ – ‘A woman who deserves my complete confidence. A former friend, a former actress, although she wasn’t an actress when I met her, that came later,’ I remembered or thought. ‘A former love. The love of my life, as people say,’ he had said. But I preferred not to interrupt him with an unnecessary question. – ‘I experienced a passion I had never known until then. I’m not going to explain to you what it feels like. If you haven’t yet experienced it yourself – and it rarely appears before you’re thirty – it will sound to you like certain fervid pop songs, shrill ballads, cheap, trite literature. And if you have, well, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s very dull to describe, just as sex is. Actually experiencing those things is fascinating, but talking about them is tedious, the same tired old story, with the occasional change of character or cast, but few variants. It’s a very bothersome thing, when you look back at it, when you’ve got beyond it. Later on, it’s even hard to imagine yourself in that state. But while it lasts, it’s all-absorbing. You feel sucked in, you’re under the illusion that real life consists entirely of that, and everything else pales into insignificance. You even rather look down upon those who don’t feel passion, you fall into a kind of hubris. I was quite clear that not only did I want to be with that woman, I wanted to be with her for ever, imagine that. And she felt the same. Our passion grew and showed no signs of diminishing. I had no choice but to break off my engagement and put an end to our relationship. Once I had discovered passion, staying with Beatriz would have meant unhappiness for us both. It would not be a pleasant task, it never is. But, given her situation, it became a mountain I couldn’t climb.’

  Muriel was not studying the painting now, but the ceiling. He was speaking almost as if to himself. He stopped. I glanced to my right, quickly so that he wouldn’t notice. The smudge was still there behind the glass, Beatriz’s legs must have been getting tired, weary of standing, she had been there a while. Although she did have strong legs, which would help; and she had probably taken off her shoes too. She must have been able to hear some of our conversation, she would hardly have stayed there all that time, if, as well as being barely able to see us, she couldn’t hear us either. I thought she would probably catch only fragments, for Muriel’s voice scarcely rose above floor level and I hardly spoke. ‘It must be worth her while though,’ I thought, ‘to catch the odd thread of this story that she knows already.’

  ‘And I assume you didn’t climb it, the mountain, I mean,’ I said.

  ‘And what makes you think that, may I ask?’ Muriel retorted angrily.

  ‘Well, Eduardo, because you married Beatriz. You had children together. You’ve been married for years. What other conclusion could I come to?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck, y
oung De Vere, don’t push your luck,’ he repeated, audibly offended, and he sat up again like a spring; I thought he was going to get up altogether, and that he would then notice the blurred face at the door and not finish his story. ‘Do you really think all my resentment stems from my having lacked the courage to speak, that I ruined my life out of delicatesse? That I avoided an unpleasant scene out of cowardice? How could I possibly have blamed her for that situation, man? Who do you take me for?’ I said nothing, and he calmed down and resumed his supine position on the floor, his liking for which never ceased to surprise me. He recovered his serene tone, grave, almost mournful, a feeling he could barely disguise. ‘No, I behaved honourably, as far as I could, although no one can be expected to do so indefinitely. I wrote her a long letter explaining what had happened, what was happening to me. I tried to word it as affectionately as possible, regretting the pain I was causing her, explaining that this was the last thing I would ever have wanted, well, the usual things one says when giving someone painful news. I couldn’t conceal it from her. I told her to stay in America, not to come back. Or not to come back because of me, because I wouldn’t be here for her, that it was all over between us. I assumed that if she stayed in America, she would soon forget about me and get on with her life. After all, she’d been brought up there and it was more her home than Spain was. The very people who had ousted her father would consider her an innocent victim and help her with scholarships or find her a job or whatever. Not that I felt comfortable about it, how could I? I marked the letter “Express” and prepared to wait. I half-expected an urgent call, not that it would have made any difference, you can’t talk about something like that with the meter ticking implacably onwards. In those days, you thought carefully before making a long-distance call, and tended to speak as quickly as possible, “You’re going to bankrupt yourself,” you’d say if someone was dragging things out. When I assumed the letter must have arrived, though, there was no phone call, but after a few days, I received a telegram. I opened it, convinced it was her reply, a scream, an insult, an entreaty, a reproach, a threat, a plea to wait until we saw each other again, to give her a chance to win me back, because distance distorts and displaces. But no. The telegram said: “Dad died last night. Another heart attack. Things to sort out here. Home in two weeks. Get everything ready. Love you.” ’

  ‘So the letter hadn’t arrived,’ I said.

  ‘Obviously not. Letters did sometimes take ages to arrive, however many times you wrote “Express” on them. Some got lost. Well, it’s not so very different today, I suppose. I hadn’t sent it registered mail, though, it simply hadn’t occurred to me to do so. My heart sank. She would receive the letter any day, adding despair to grief; she would feel as if her world had fallen in on her. If only I could stop the letter. Not in order to cancel it, but to wait for a more opportune moment, to postpone it a little, even if only for a week, and not add blow upon blow. But it was already flying to its destination, indeed, it must already have arrived. “Get everything ready.” She would leave behind her dead past, and I was her only future, her life. I didn’t know what to do. I was tempted to phone her briefly about her father, so that she could at least hear my voice. But that would have contradicted my letter. In the telegram, she sounded fairly calm. The way her father had been heading, stuck in that cul-de-sac, death was almost a solution. But she adored him and that hadn’t changed, I mean not since the most recent, shocking revelations: for many women, the father of the little girl they were survives intact and unchanged, they forgive him everything. She would be lost. And more or less alone. In the end, I judged the most prudent course of action would be to send another telegram: “Deepest condolences. Urgent letter on way. Important. Read first. Best wishes.” ’

  Muriel could recall exactly his words and hers in that telegraphic exchange. He was quoting verbatim, he must have read and reread them many times, and I imagine that isn’t something you forget. ‘He didn’t even write “Lots of love”,’ I thought, ‘still less return her “Love you”. “Best wishes” is what you would say to anyone, especially if they had just suffered a loss. He was watching his back, he must have thought about what he was writing; he didn’t want to be abrupt, to add blow upon blow, but neither did he want to give her any room for hope. Yes, in that respect, he acted honourably.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. She never answered. Not that there was really any need for her to answer that last telegram. It was simply a matter of waiting for the promised letter. And she would have been busy arranging the funeral, closing up their no doubt rented house, sorting out his will, not that he would have left very much, but there might have been something. Or so I assumed. Besides, she had already said that she needed two weeks to get everything done before she could fly back. I just had to await her reaction to my letter. It would happen sooner or later, but it didn’t. Every day, troubled and fearful, I expected that reaction and wondered how I would deal with it; but the day passed and no response, nothing. I was getting desperate and, at the same time, why deny it, I felt a kind of illusory sense of relief, well, no one wants to face up to the tears he has caused. But she didn’t even take those two weeks of extra time. She hurried everything along as if the devil were after her, as if she were fleeing persecution by the FBI, like Harry and his posh totty.’ He laughed abruptly at the thought of the two of them. ‘She left a lawyer friend to deal with the paperwork, and just nine days later, I received another telegram: “Arrive Barajas tomorrow Wednesday. TWA NY 7AM. Meet me there. Love you more than ever.” ’

  ‘So she still hadn’t read your letter,’ I said. ‘Arriving from New York the following day, and really early too. She wasn’t giving you much time to make a decision, to get things ready. And what was happening with the other woman meanwhile?’ I couldn’t help asking about her, the love of his life, who, either before or afterwards, had fallen victim to Van Vechten, or so she had told Muriel, when she discovered he was a close friend of the paediatrician.

  ‘You’re such a pest with your inquisitiveness,’ he said. ‘Hand me another cigarette and pour me a drink, will you? My mouth’s gone dry with all this talking.’ I did as asked and poured myself one too. I placed his on the coffee table, where he could easily reach it from the floor and put it down again. When I got up to go over to the drinks cabinet, the smudged figure again retreated from the glass panes or perhaps crouched down. Muriel took a sip and went on. ‘It doesn’t matter about her, she’s not relevant. She was extremely important once, but she’s ancient history now. She was erased completely and absolutely, at least for many years.’

  ‘You gave her up.’

  ‘What else could I do? It didn’t take me long to consider once I received that telegram. There was, quite simply, nothing to be done about it. My letter had got lost somewhere or would only arrive after she’d set off. Beatriz knew nothing of its contents and was flying back to me like someone travelling towards her salvation, to all that she’d left behind, in the belief that nothing had changed, that everything was just as it had been when she flew off to America. It was what had sustained her for all those months, and, although she was a grown woman, she was only twenty-one. I’d written the letter when her father was still alive, although he hadn’t yet recovered from his first heart attack and his future as a teacher was pretty much non-existent after the scandal. But Beatriz was still then in a position to stay put and had a very good reason to remain in America – a mission even – and make a life for herself there. Now, though, she had burned all her boats. She would have spent much of her remaining money on the air fare; she had closed the house in Massachusetts, so she couldn’t go back, she would have nowhere to live; there was nothing to keep her in that country, no strong bond. It was a fait accompli. I could have stood my ground and hoped she would get over it in Madrid. We do eventually recover from everything, and her aunt and uncle would have taken her in, at least initially. Later, who knows? People have, of course, found themselves in far wors
e situations. Dickens’s novels are positively teeming with orphaned children.’ A remnant of good humour almost always surfaced from his basically jovial self. ‘I didn’t have the courage. I had tried, but it hadn’t worked. I felt that I’d made a commitment, and was in her debt. She was travelling towards me entirely ignorant of what was happening, of what had happened to me; full of excitement and hope, despite her grief, despite several consecutive hard blows. I just couldn’t bring myself to deal her yet another blow, the definitive one, or so I thought. The inconveniences of an old-fashioned upbringing, young De Vere, and I was young then, too close to my childhood self. I’d been brought up to have a sense of responsibility, to believe that one must keep one’s word. The notion of behaving like a gentleman sounds so ridiculous now, but it didn’t twenty years ago. Everything disappears so quickly.’ – ‘Wretched haste,’ I thought; ‘it doesn’t afflict only tongues; time, too, is constantly driving out people, customs, concepts.’ – ‘The belief that you shouldn’t cause any harm if it’s in your power not to.’