Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘She still is young, Eduardo, although you don’t want to see that.’

  Either he didn’t hear me or he ignored me.

  ‘I insisted on having separate rooms and closed my door to her for ever. If nothing else, ours had always been a very sexual relationship. But I haven’t touched her since, not for … how old is Tomás now? … eight years. Nor have I gone back to loving her in that easy, celebratory, superficial way in which I always loved her, and which, for her, was enough.’ And yet I had on a few occasions seen them laughing together perhaps without realizing that they were; and after the Hotel Wellington incident, he’d behaved kindly and almost affectionately towards her: we can’t entirely suppress old habits, I suppose, however hard we try. ‘She put on weight, became depressed, began gradually to lose her mind, every day a little more. All her suicide attempts have occurred since then and are doubtless a consequence of that, or were to begin with. She would never even have considered suicide before, she had nothing to complain about. No, there was nothing benign about what I did, but it was just.’ – ‘Forgiveness doesn’t last as long as vengeance,’ I thought or recalled. Or perhaps I only think or recall that now.

  ‘Yes, but at the cost of staying bound to her. It reminds me of that expression that so perfectly defines us Spaniards: Quedarse uno tuerto por dejar al otro ciego – “To put out your own eye while trying to make another man blind.” ’

  He looked at me with a mixture of severity and irony.

  ‘I was already one-eyed, young De Vere, or hadn’t you noticed?’ And he again tapped on his eyepatch. But this time he didn’t mean this only in the literal sense, he was referring to his own ingenuousness, his good faith, his credulity of twenty or so years ago. ‘Since then, I do as I want, I don’t have to account to anyone or to bother inventing truths. And it’s the same for her, I suppose, I don’t care how she conducts her life, I’ve washed my hands of her; but she does what she wants because she has to, not because she wants to; she does it reluctantly, I oblige her to enjoy a freedom she doesn’t want at all, because she would much prefer to be tied to me. Besides, I haven’t missed anything: I haven’t met anyone else who interested me enough to make me consider running off with her. That’s all over, out of the question. Although who knows, soon …’

  ‘Soon what?’ The words just slipped out, and my pushiness doubtless prevented me from finding out what he was about to announce, what tempting future beckoned.

  ‘Nothing.’ He clammed up at once. ‘Just as the past isn’t really any of your business, the future certainly isn’t.’

  I didn’t insist, I prudently let it pass. ‘Just as well,’ I thought when I saw the recognizable oval face, the pink smudge behind the glass panes, she obviously didn’t care now if Muriel saw her or not, although he still had his back to her, while I was facing her. ‘It’s best if she doesn’t hear, assuming she can, it’s best if she doesn’t hear him, that poor unhappy woman, sad and affectionate. Poor soul, poor wretch.’

  ‘But you obviously do care how she conducts her life,’ I said, returning to what he had said earlier, ‘given how terrified you were on that night at the Hotel Wellington.’

  ‘Ha,’ he said. And after a few seconds, he made the same sound, not so much a laugh as a sign of faint disappointment or superiority: as if he needed to make himself superior to me. ‘Ha. So much for being the memory man. As you yourself said: I don’t care how she conducts her life, but I do care how she conducts her death and I don’t want her to succeed in that. I care a great deal about her dying, about her killing herself. That’s the last thing I want. It would be terrible for my children, and for me as well. Of course if she does succeed one day, there’s nothing I can do about it. But if that does happen, be in no doubt, it will be a real tragedy for me and I will weep for her. As I said, you can’t just put a line through the past to erase it. Even once you’ve decided that you no longer want that past.’

  Yes, I had heard him say something along those lines, and he had put it more elaborately to Beatriz at the door to his bedroom: ‘What is the point of setting the record straight? That’s even worse, because it invalidates or gives the lie to everything that went before, it obliges the deceived person to look at their whole life in a new light, or else deny it. And yet that was your life, and you can’t unlive what you’ve lived. So what do you do? Strike out your whole existence? That’s impossible but neither can you simply discard all those years, which were what they were and can be no other way, and of which there will always be a remnant, a memory, even if it smacks of the phantasmagorical, something that both happened and didn’t happen. And what do you do with something that both happened and didn’t happen?’ His tone had been one of lamentation, not scornful or aggressive, although there was still perhaps a hint of rancour. Beatriz Noguera had immediately adopted that same tone, wishing she could turn back the clock and asking his forgiveness; perhaps knowingly, perhaps sincerely.

  Then she opened the door, revealed her presence. She wasn’t barefoot, she was wearing the high heels she almost always wore when she went out and that accentuated her voluptuous figure. When Muriel heard the door open, he got up and turned round, and when he saw her, his one eye glinted. She remained on the threshold with one hand held out, looking at him pleadingly, as if she were asking him to take her hand and lead her into the room, as if she were again calling him ‘my love’. Hearing him say that her death was the last thing he wanted, hearing him say that he would weep for her, must have seemed to her a motive for gratitude, or perhaps for unreasonable hope. However, the gesture he made was unequivocal. A gesture of rejection repeated several times, driving her away, ordering her to leave at once, as if he were scaring off a cat. I felt he was repeating the words he’d been saying to her for eight years: ‘Non, pas de caresses. And no kisses either.’

  XI

  * * *

  And he did weep for her, I saw it with my own eyes. He wept for her when he heard the news and wept copiously during the burial at La Almudena cemetery, one sunny Madrid morning; I saw how the irrepressible tears flowed from his speaking eye – not from the silent one, which presumably had no tear duct or maybe the tightly fitting patch acted as a dam – while the gravediggers were finally lowering the coffin into the grave and covering it with the first spadefuls of earth. No one stayed behind to see the last spadefuls nor for the gravestone to be lowered back into place, after it had been removed to make way for the new coffin; there was still room though in the family tomb – presumably for Muriel himself; and their ill-fated son, Javier, who had been resting there for a long time and took up very little space, having died so young, would now be wrapped in his mother’s imaginary embrace. However hard Muriel found it to say goodbye, he didn’t stay behind and was so unsteady on his feet that he had to be supported, and Susana, Tomás and Alicia, who provided that support, didn’t stay behind either, more concerned about their living and temporarily aged father – a sudden ageing that lasted only a day – than about their mother who was now only abundant, inert flesh that would soon be lost, a process which, fortunately, we would not see: we, very sensibly, do not impose witnesses on the dead, but leave them in their deathly pallor to continue dying. Neither Rico nor Roy nor Van Vechten stayed behind, nor Gloria nor Marcela nor Flavia, nor Beatriz’s colleagues at the school where she used to teach her American English, nor the few students who attended as representatives, nor the two or three private students who also came. Still less Muriel’s acquaintances, who came out of obligation or out of vergüenza torera, the bullfighter’s fear of what the public will say if he holds back: maestro Rafael Viana and other gambling pals, the former accompanied by the civil servant Celia, who shot me a veiled and neutral glance; a couple of diplomats and a few people from the film industry, among whom I spotted a wine-producer whom Muriel was trying to cajole into financing his latest project and, very briefly, Jess Franco, who left almost at once, taking short, hurried steps, doubtless hoping to finish shooting half a film in what remained
of the day. I was not exactly surprised to see, standing at a discreet distance, the impresaria Cecilia Alemany, who I recognized despite her dark glasses, partly because she was chewing gum, unaware of how inappropriate her mandibular movements were in that place and that context. A brazen woman, as very wealthy women tend to be, and as confirmed by her recent close relationship with my boss. I didn’t stay behind either to see the coffin disappear completely beneath the earth; it wouldn’t have been right and would have seemed strange. However, I promised myself I would visit the grave now and then, although I haven’t done so in all this time, or only once, years later, to accompany the dear departed and to support Susana, who was then the person unsteadiest on her feet.

  Shortly after my conversation with Muriel, he and Beatriz, the children and Flavia went to spend the summer in a house they often stayed at in Soria, a cool, breezy town with Romanesque churches, memories of the poet Antonio Machado, a river you can swim in and a beautiful park. They had been going there for years, or else, if it got too hot there, and depending on the highs and lows of their finances, to a hotel in San Sebastián, and since Soria was less than three hours from Madrid by road, Muriel could drive back if any urgent business cropped up. I don’t know what happened during their time there, if anything did. It probably didn’t, apart from Muriel’s usual foul behaviour, possibly exacerbated by a lack of escape routes: I imagine that Muriel was only there occasionally, his presence being required urgently in Madrid or in other places, whether on genuine business or not or perhaps summoned by the first woman in many years to exercise a real hold over him. And when they came back at the end of August, I stopped working at the apartment in Calle Velázquez and said goodbye to my cubbyhole, as I had more or less decided to do anyway. I’d become too involved in everything, or perhaps that troubled marriage had got in the way of my own life, the life of a mere beginner. Another deciding factor was the invariable presence of Van Vechten, who continued coming and going as usual, although with me he was no longer friendly and chatty and relaxed, but stiff and severe. Muriel was grateful enough and fond enough not to care much about what the Doctor might have done, and after those wretched, tormenting doubts of his – which were the reason he had involved me in the whole sordid story in the first place – he preferred to know nothing about it. Van Vechten, he said, hadn’t done whatever it was to him, whereas Beatriz had. But after what Vidal had told me and after my meeting with Van Vechten in Bar Chicote, after his far-from-veiled threats (‘Be careful what you say … Do you understand me, boy?’), I didn’t even want to be in the same room as him.

  This meant that I couldn’t be there to follow Beatriz or to guard or keep watch over her, to set off after her when she went out alone, which was when we should have been worried, according to her husband and as I myself discovered later on. On the other hand, I gave up that furtive and hard-to-explain habit more or less after I’d had sex with her – only on that one night and unbeknown to anyone, or known only to the someone who had run down the corridor and then said nothing or behaved no differently towards me afterwards or never looked at me reproachfully – not a sign – whoever that was, I’ve never been certain, although I have my suspicions. And even if I had been there, I wouldn’t have been able to follow her that afternoon, I never could when she got on her Harley-Davidson and disappeared off who knows where or with whom or to see whoever, if such a whoever existed. Muriel never talked to me about the two suicide attempts she had made before I came on the scene, or not in detail, but if they failed they must, like the one attempt I thwarted, have been less drastic and less rapid, less brutal and less hesitant, with a chance that she might be saved. Beatriz Noguera crashed into a tree in September, as it was getting dark, on a minor road near Ávila, a couple of kilometres from where Muriel’s brother, Roberto, had been killed, along with a young Frenchwoman, both of them in a very unbuttoned state. I don’t know why, but I imagined it would have been one of those trees – there are long rows of them – with a white line painted round them to make them more visible at night, although it may be that, by 1980, they’d stopped painting those lines, I can’t be sure, I don’t remember. Even though with motorbike or car crashes there is always the possibility that it wasn’t intended, that it happened by chance, the result of the driver’s distraction or imprudence or something quite unforeseen, we all thought that she had driven into the tree on purpose, at least we adults did. (The children, of course, were given a version involving a fallen branch, a patch of oil or an animal suddenly running out on to the road, the kinder story of cruel fate and bad luck, which Susana, wise as she was when she was fifteen, pretended to believe out of pity for her two siblings.) The crash had been so head-on that it seemed Beatriz must have chosen the tree with great care: that one and no other, even though they all look the same, perhaps thinking: ‘My guilt has passed, but the punishment remains. If not now, then when is the right time to die? I will not return to my woeful bed, I don’t want to be haunted by sorrow any more. The readiness is all.’ As I learned from Rico and Roy and Flavia and, days later, from Muriel himself, she had presumably stopped the Harley-Davidson at some point on the road and taken off her helmet, which not many people wore at the time, although she did sometimes: it was found on the grass, not on the road itself, and some metres from the site of the accident, as if it had fallen off or been thrown from that head that didn’t always feel quite right, thinking perhaps: ‘I wouldn’t want a new life with another man. 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, but to carry on in exactly the same way, like a prolongation of what was.’ Probably few cars passed at that hour, and she could have taken her time before getting up enough imaginary momentum and setting off again and accelerating to top speed, could have looked around her a little to accustom herself to that dark, leafy place, which would be her last, and perhaps, as she waited, she wondered: ‘Why should we be loved by the person we have chosen with our tremulous finger? Why that one person, as if he were obliged to obey us? Why should the person who troubles or arouses us and for whose flesh and bones we yearn, why should he desire us? Why should we believe in such coincidences? And when they do happen, why should they last? Yes, why should it last, this rarest of conjunctions, something so fragile, so held together with pins?’ She perhaps took one last look at herself and her clothes, or even took a small mirror from her handbag, now that she was about to become definitively the past, a fixed portrait; although, by then, she may not have cared at all about the state in which she would be found or seen, feeling instead very much as the poet Bécquer wrote in a letter: ‘By then, I won’t care if they place me in an Egyptian pyramid or throw me in a ditch like a dog.’ She may not even have bothered to look up at the incipient moon, all too familiar with its bored, impassive eye, she herself bored with its insistence, and may have thought: ‘Soon I will cease to belong to the foolish, unfinished living and will be like falling snow that does not settle, like a lizard climbing up a sunny wall in summer that pauses for a moment before the lazy eye that will not even notice its existence. I will be what was, and once I am no more, I will be what never was. I will be an inaudible whisper, a light, passing fever, a scratch you barely notice and that heals up at once. In short, I will be time, which no one has seen and no one ever will.’ And when at last her eyes finally grew used to the dim light, or perhaps when she started to feel cold, and she turned on the headlight again to see more clearly and not miss the tree chosen by her tremulous finger, and pressed down on the pedal to start Muriel’s bike, which ended up being more hers than his, perhaps her last thought, as she raced along, was shorter and simpler and very much like this: ‘Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.’

  I waited a few days after the funeral before going to see Muriel on my own, a kind of tacit, individual presentation of condolences, and, I suppose, to keep him company for a while, although most of the time he was with other people, because in those circumstances, people do
tend to flood in for a short period, never leaving the bereaved person alone for a minute, visiting him, taking him out, trying to distract him and keep him so busy and buzzing with activity that he doesn’t think about the one thing occupying his thoughts, and feels less keenly the absence of the person who has irreversibly absented herself. Then those same people grow weary in unison and leave him alone, as if there were a social expiry date for mourning, two or three weeks at most, and as if they then considered the widow or widower to be in a fit state to get back up and running again and resume her or his normal life and habits, when it is precisely normal life that has ended, never to return. Muriel was clearly deeply affected and doubtless disconcerted, he seemed slightly shrunken and hesitant, as though the loss of Beatriz had uncovered a certain vulnerability, although I didn’t imagine this would last. But when a situation ends, you miss it, even the worst possible situation, even one you’d wished would end countless times. That paradoxical nostalgia doesn’t last very long, but initially you get the same empty feeling as when you’ve achieved an objective that has cost you great effort and patience, closing a deal or getting a job, for example, or finishing a film or putting the long-delayed full stop to a novel.

  Muriel probably didn’t even remember the words I’d heard on that night of supplications, just before he ran his hands over Beatriz’s body roughly, crudely, pointlessly, before groping her breasts and grabbing her crotch like someone picking up a handful of earth or a clump of grass or catching a thistle head in the air before blowing it away and leaving it to float, not even noticing where it’s going. ‘When the hell are you going to understand that this is serious and for good, until you die or I do?’ were the words that had vomited forth from his mouth. ‘I just hope I’m the one who’ll carry your coffin, because I could never be sure you wouldn’t rub yourself up against my still warm or already cold corpse, because warm or cold it would be all the same to you.’ Superimposed on that memory, though, was another more concise, more poetic version: ‘I hope to be the one to bury you, the one to see your lifeless body, your deathly pallor.’ His wish had been granted, but the trouble was he didn’t even remember saying those things (we forget more of what comes out of our mouths than what enters our ears), whereas they still reverberated in my mind as they would have in Beatriz’s, possibly right up until the evening when she stopped in that dark, leafy spot on the road; and perhaps she would have said to him in her thoughts, when she was already astride the Harley-Davidson and had her gaze fixed on the target: ‘Now you’ll have to rub yourself up against my corpse.’ Muriel hadn’t gone that far, of course, but he had been visibly shaken when he heard the news and at the cemetery too, and it was clear, in his perplexity, that at first he missed her irritating, uncomfortable presence, irksome and even exasperating at times, the size and the shape and the footsteps of the person who had been his wife both for too many and possibly too few years, because when something ends we almost always feel that it wasn’t enough and could have lasted a little longer.