Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘You know sometimes, Juan, I think I can hear the tick-tock of the metronome,’ he told me. ‘Especially when I’m here alone, when the children and Flavia go to bed and the others leave, or when I come back from having supper out with a crowd of people. The fact is that, lately, my friends have obliged me to lead a life of almost obscenely frenetic activity, as if I were at a fiesta or something, and they’ve done so with the very best of intentions, because they don’t want me to be left alone with my thoughts, imagining all too clearly what those thoughts will be. In fact, they have no idea what my thoughts will be, but they’re pretty sure what they’ll be about. It’s absurd of me in a way to agree to all this, since I’m hardly an inconsolable widower. Don’t get me wrong, I am sad. However much you expect it and even though you can do nothing to avoid it; however many warnings there have been and even though you’re not entirely sure you want to avoid it; however much you harden yourself and accept the probable consequences of your …’ he stopped, looking for the right word ‘… your impermeability, nothing prepares you for the event itself. I’m sad because we were together for a long time, and suddenly what resurfaces in my mind are the earliest years, when Beatriz was still almost a child and neither of us knew what the future might hold. But I’m not inconsolable in the sense of having suffered the loss of someone crucial to my life. There’s an element of unreality about it all, and that’s why I think I can still hear the tick-tock of her metronome, as if its echo had not yet faded and I could still hear in my head its music-less music, that beat which had become a permanent background feature here. It’s the same with everything else, as if it took longer for Beatriz’s footsteps or her smell to disappear than for her herself, people are survived by the traces they leave behind, that’s been my experience at least, and it’s perfectly normal, and then those traces will gradually evaporate too. But while they last … They seem to need a bit of extra time before they can leave altogether, time to clean up and collect their things. They’re never given notice so that they can prepare for the move.’

  He fell silent, and I didn’t know how to respond, and there probably was no appropriate response.

  ‘I see,’ I said, just to say something.

  That day, he was still looking a little older, but it didn’t last; they soon disappeared, those signs of the old age that would return to stalk and haunt him without ever daring to take full possession of him, to take root in his mind or make any real incursions into his appearance. The dark shadows under his eyes, his lined, weary face, his slight stoop, noticeable even when he was seated, were purely circumstantial, the product of that event for which nothing prepares us however much notice we’re given; the product of shock and corroboration. Then he suddenly sat up and looked at me with his one alert eye.

  ‘You know she was pregnant.’

  I was so taken aback that all I could come out with was a quite nonsensical question, possibly an instinctive attempt to gain a few seconds and recover from that revelation.

  ‘Who, Beatriz?’

  ‘Of course, who else? I mean, who are we talking about here, young De Vere?’

  ‘No, of course not, how could I possibly know? Had she said anything to you?’

  ‘Not a word. I found out just now from the Doctor. Fortunately, he managed to have a young colleague of his from the hospital carry out the autopsy, the bare minimum, very superficial, which was all that was needed. Enough, though, to detect that pregnancy. But the fact that she said nothing to me is hardly surprising. Needless to say, the child wasn’t mine. The Doctor says that she herself may not have realized either. Although given that she’d had four children, that seems unlikely to me, but who knows? Perhaps she couldn’t believe it, the possibility may not even have occurred to her. Anything is possible.’

  ‘And do they know how many months gone she was?’ I asked, a touch apprehensively.

  ‘A couple of months or so.’ Then he fell silent for a few moments and studied his nails as if he suddenly found the situation highly embarrassing. But what he found embarrassing was what he was about to ask: ‘You wouldn’t have any idea whose it might have been, would you?’ I must have blushed a little, but perhaps he, too, was blushing inside and so didn’t notice; or else he attributed my slightly flushed cheeks to what was causing him to blush under the skin, because before I could respond, he felt obliged to explain: ‘As you can imagine, I didn’t care tuppence about what Beatriz got up to. It was none of my business and I certainly never asked any questions, in case she took that as evidence of a certain interest on my part, or even jealousy, who can say? But if she was going to give my children a brother or sister and that child was going to live here, I would obviously feel a certain curiosity. You don’t have any idea, do you?’

  I realized that I needed to answer very quickly and without hesitation, that any pause or vacillation wouldn’t necessarily point to me, but would indicate that I might know something or have my suspicions. I wanted to think – no, I was sure – that he was only asking because a couple of months or so before, I had been Beatriz’s custodian while he was in Barcelona filming his final sequences with Towers and Lom; I had been closest to her and her main witness. He wasn’t the suspicious type, it hadn’t even occurred to him that I could have anything to do with it. For him I was almost a callow youth. I summoned my wretchedly swift tongue, the tongue that both condemns and saves us, and said confidently:

  ‘No, Eduardo, Don Eduardo, I haven’t the slightest idea. How would I know who it was?’

  And since I really couldn’t possibly know, I didn’t even have to lie.

  Afterwards, I saw him less and less frequently and, in the end, almost not all. I wouldn’t say that we had become friends exactly, but while he may not have felt friendship for me, I felt it for him, and even though I no longer worked for him, I would have gladly continued to please and help him in anything he might reasonably have asked of me. But one quickly ceases to depend on someone who is no longer present on a daily basis, let alone at all hours and prepared to do any task. He never phoned me, and although I occasionally phoned him, I perhaps felt I was bothering him and didn’t want to insist, and so my calls became fewer and further between until I was just another person who had passed through his life and not stopped.

  Despite his dislike of photos – which is why, for years, there had been so few full-face portraits of him – I began to see him appearing more in the press, but not because of any cinematographic projects or productions. In fact, he made only one more film and it wasn’t the one with Palance and Widmark, which took its place in the vast, crowded limbo of not-to-bes, and for which, I assume, he never managed to get the necessary financial support. He appeared in gossip magazines, doubtless reluctantly and unwillingly, first as the new partner and then as the husband of the impresaria Cecilia Alemany, who was attractive and wealthy enough to arouse more interest than him, for he, as he had once commented to me jokingly, was becoming a bit like Sara Montiel, only with an increasingly minority audience of archaeologists and film buffs and experts like Roy. I thought, too, that she was attractive enough to have made Beatriz lose all hope, had she ever known of her existence, or would always have been a threat. Someone who would have prevented her from taking any small trophy back to her woeful bed, saying to herself as she returned from her nocturnal incursion: ‘We’ll see.’

  Muriel married for the second time just a year after he was widowed, in a discreet civil wedding to which I was not invited, not that there was any reason to include me in the cast, a mere former employee, a fleeting young man to whom he had given a job opportunity. Divorce had finally arrived in Spain when Muriel no longer needed it, and if Beatriz had lived, he might not even have made use of it, I sometimes think that the bonds of deceit and unhappiness are the strongest of all, as are those of error; they may bind even more closely than those of openness, contentment and sincerity. In the few pictures of the wedding available, I saw Van Vechten and Rico and Roy, as well as maestro Viana who adorned the c
eremony – well, a bullfighter always lends colour to an occasion. There was no Gloria or Marcela or Flavia, the first two would have considered it a betrayal and the third perhaps preferred not to attend. I also saw the three children, older now, and all still identical to Beatriz. I looked for a long time at Susana: when she was just a little older, she would be the very image of her mother in those youthful photos that Beatriz kept on show out of nostalgia and persistence and which I had so often seen, the one with the dead child still alive in her arms and the one of her wedding to Muriel some twenty years before. I had a better understanding now of the expressions of both of them on that day: she smiling broadly and directly at the camera, revealing her obvious euphoria – or was it triumphalism? – a child disguised as a bride. He, on the other hand, seemed anxious, almost sombre, like a man convinced he’s taking on an enormous responsibility. She was playing at getting married, while he was seriously contracting a marriage, as if aware of the appropriateness of that verb when applied to obligations, debts and diseases. To her the world was a lightweight affair, as were the consequences of her actions, which, once over, were mere childish nonsense, the past; he was someone who already knew what it means to renounce something or who was aware that love always arrives late for its appointment with people, as he once gloomily told me, a phrase he had read in some book, although I don’t know which. In the pictures of his second wedding, there’s no trace of that, his one eye looks distracted and patient, with not a hint of seriousness. He seems merely to be going through the motions of a social formality and to be looking – without looking – at his watch.

  I wondered how this new, artificial family would manage, if they would all live together in the apartment in Calle Velázquez or would start anew in another apartment; if the impresaria would gladly accept having an adolescent and two children – or two adolescents and one child – permanently around, especially when their father was away travelling, absorbed for months on end in the making of some film; if Flavia would leave them or be forced to emigrate to the new address. I considered phoning Muriel to congratulate him, but discovered to my surprise that even I felt that was a kind of betrayal. Absurdly enough, it would, it seemed to me, be like heaping more earth on Beatriz, regardless of the fact that she had chosen to be the first to start digging her grave on that lonely, shady road. Perhaps carnal bonds, however ephemeral and unmemorable and basically unimportant, oblige us to feel a certain irrational concern for the people with whom we have established those bonds; or perhaps it’s imposed on us by a ghostly personal sense of loyalty.

  I went to see Muriel’s last film when it opened. It wasn’t generally well received, but I liked it. I phoned to tell him so, but he wasn’t in, and then I let the matter slide, because he didn’t exactly need my opinion. He hadn’t managed to make another film until five years after Beatriz’s death; and two years later, seven years after her suicide, I learned that my former boss and maestro had suffered a devastating heart attack while lunching with a group of boorish bankers from whom he was trying to extract a little small change for some new film project. As soon as I heard the news on television, I called Professor Rico, the only one in that circle with whom I’d remained in contact and with whom I’m still in touch today. By then, he was already a member of the Real Academia: his enemy papyruses – or were they mummies? – had all pegged out at a rate of knots and he’d been elected with more than enough votes, almost by acclamation, although he’s since acquired a few more splendid enemies, without whom he cannot live or only at the risk of getting royally bored. He was about to catch a plane to Madrid to attend the funeral, and he told me the hour and the place. That’s the only time I’ve heard a tremor of emotion in his voice. No, I lie, that tremor is always there whenever we speak of Muriel or Beatriz – he’s basically an old sentimentalist – even though it’s ages since they bade farewell to life without first bidding farewell to either of us.

  The following morning, I went to La Almudena cemetery and stood before the grave I’d first seen some years before, although to me it felt like only yesterday: time vanishes when you return to a place you rarely visit and where you only go in sorrow or for some other exceptional reason. There were a lot of people and a fair number of journalists, and I kept well to the rear, not daring to push my way to the front. For most of those present I was a stranger, an interloper, an intruder, no one they need say hello to. Some distance away I saw Susana and her siblings with their backs to me, I recognized them at once despite the intervening years and despite how much the two younger ones had grown. Susana looked round now and again, perhaps so as to see how many people had come, how respected her father had been, until on one of those occasions, she spotted me and came running over to me. I was thirty by then and she was twenty-two, but she immediately hugged me hard and wept silently, in the wholehearted way one embraces someone who belonged to old, imperfect but far less sad times, when all those who should have been there still were; then she took my hand and led me over to the front row, along with Alicia and Tomás and Flavia and other people I didn’t know, including Cecilia Alemany, who doubtless found a moment to look at me from behind her dark glasses (she wasn’t chewing gum this time) and wonder indifferently who the hell I was: I don’t think she was much interested in the past of her short-lived and now late husband, and it occurred to me that she would probably now simply shake him off, like someone leaving behind her an episode that had been the fruit of weakness or seduction. During the rest of the ceremony, the lowering of the coffin and the replacement of the gravestone for the last time (no one else would fit in), Susana kept her hand in mine, squeezing my hand hard so as to steady herself, for as I said, she was far unsteadier on her feet than the widow or than anyone else. Or perhaps she clung to my hand like a stubborn child.

  I’ve been married to Susana for so long now that she’s older than her mother ever came to be and I am more or less the age reached by Muriel, who survived his wife by seven years; more or less the same number of years, seven or eight, that separated him from her, and me from Susana, so in total, he lived about fifteen years longer than Beatriz. She seemed mature to me in 1980, like a painting in comparison with me, when I was twenty-three and she was forty-two or possibly forty-one – I never knew exactly – but she was about two decades older than me, which is a lot for a mere callow youth. Now, on the other hand, Beatriz seems very young in retrospect, and not just too young to have died, but too young for everything. It wasn’t, therefore, so very odd that she should still have nurtured hopes and that, on the nights when she was defeated, she would temporarily abandon the field in order to gather renewed strength and valour and withdraw to her room, thinking: ‘Not tonight, no, not tonight, but later perhaps. My pillow will receive my tears and I will learn how to wait just as the insistent moon waits. A time will come when his offensive groping will, out of inertia, slide into a different territory, where it will suddenly become yearning or irresistible caprice or primitive desire, for nothing can be driven away like that by pure mental effort, by a punitive decision, not for ever or not entirely – such things are mere suspensions of activity, mere postponements. He might come back one day or one night, and, besides, who can resist being wanted and loved?’ As far as I know, he never did go back either by day or night, but I can’t be sure.

  Yes, she was young when she killed herself, and fertile enough to be expecting another baby, that’s what Muriel told me, that’s what Van Vechten told him, that’s what the young colleague at Van Vechten’s hospital told him; so all of that is merely a rumour that stopped with me, never even reaching the drooping west, or his daughter Susana, not through me at any rate, and it’s best that it stays in the orient. Over the years, I’ve often remembered the whisper that Muriel transmitted to me in the form of a rhetorical question (‘You know …’). And I often shamefacedly congratulate myself – in one aspect, but only one – that Beatriz did kill herself and that the child was not born, and had perhaps not even developed enough for its future, dis
tracted mother to notice. I don’t know which man was the cause of that new shoot, if it was Dr Van Vechten himself in the Sanctuary of Darmstadt or Dr Arranz in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca or some other lover she visited on her Harley-Davidson, in El Escorial or the Sierra de Gredos or in Ávila. I often stubbornly tell myself that there must have been a third man, just to share out the responsibility. But I can’t deny that the new shoot could also have been my work on one hot, insomniac night in Calle Velázquez, which would have been very bad luck, of course, but then neither of us took any precautions. Whenever that nightmare possibility crosses my mind, I shudder and cannot help but feel glad – rather despising myself as I do, but I can take it – that that projected being did come to nothing, because it might have spent its whole existence as an impostor, unaware of its own imposture, or would have prevented all the good things that came later in my life and, I think, in Susana’s life too, and our daughters would not exist. Had that child, a girl say, emerged into the world, it would have been a half-sister to my wife, a kind of stepdaughter, both my daughter and my sister-in-law, and the children I’ve had with Susana would have been both her sisters and her cousins, and it’s usually at that point that I stop these ramblings, because the whole hypothetical chain of relationships makes me dizzy, but also because it evokes the dreadful thought that my marriage to Susana would then have been almost impossible. (How little it takes for what exists not to have existed.) Nothing could have been proved at the time, and Beatriz might have kept quiet about the identity of the father, if she had managed to deduce it or know for certain. However, there’s no getting away from the fact that I once had sex with the grandmother of my daughters, that is, with the person who would have been my mother-in-law had she lived long enough. But who can possibly know who is going to be what in the course of a lifetime, and we shouldn’t hold back because of conjectures or predictions that are beyond our grasp, we only have what we know today and never what we might know tomorrow, and yet we do sometimes give ourselves over to such prognostications.