When I Was Mortal

by Javier Marías

  I spent more time out on the terrace than did my wife, Luisa, always with my binoculars in my hand, or rather, hanging round my neck so that they didn’t slip from my grasp and fall from the terrace to shatter on the ground below. I tried to focus on someone on the beach, to pick someone out, but there were too many people to be able to remain faithful to anyone in particular, I panned across the beach with the binoculars, I saw hundreds of children, dozens of fat men, scores of girls (none of them topless, that’s still fairly rare in San Sebastián), young flesh, mature flesh and old flesh, children’s flesh which is not yet flesh and mother’s flesh which is somehow more fleshly for having already reproduced itself. I soon grew tired of looking and went back to the bed where Luisa was lying down, I kissed her a few times, then returned to the terrace, and again peered through the binoculars. Perhaps I was bored, which is why I felt slightly envious when I saw that two rooms down to my right there was a man, also armed with binoculars, who had them trained on one particular spot, lowering them only from time to time and not moving them at all when he was looking through them: he held them up high, motionless, for a couple of minutes, then he would rest his arm and, shortly afterwards, he would raise it again, always in the same position, he didn’t change the direction of his gaze one inch. He wasn’t leaning out, though, he was watching from inside his room, and so I could only see one hairy arm, now where exactly was he looking, I wondered enviously, I wanted to fix my gaze on something too, it’s only when you rest your gaze on something that you really relax and become interested in what you’re looking at, I merely made random sweeps, just flesh and yet more indistinguishable flesh, if, when we finally left the room, Luisa and I went down to the beach (we were killing time until it got a bit emptier, possibly around lunchtime), we would form part of that conglomeration of distant, identical flesh, our recognizable bodies would be lost in the uniformity created by sand and water and swimming costumes, especially by swimming costumes. And that man to my right would not notice us, no one looking down from above – as he and I were doing – would notice us once we formed part of that disagreeable spectacle. Perhaps that’s why, in order not to be seen, in order not to be focused on or marked out, holiday-makers like to take off a few clothes and mingle with other half-naked people amidst the sand and the sea.

  I tried to work out where that man, my neighbour, was looking, and I managed to fix on a space that was not small enough for me to rest my gaze on entirely and take an interest in whatever it was that was interesting, but at least in that way, by imitating or trying to guess the direction of his gaze, I could discount most of everything else that lay before me, an entire beach.

  “What are you looking at?” my wife asked from the bed. It was very hot and she had placed a wet towel on her forehead, it almost covered her eyes, which were not in the least interested in looking at anything.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said without turning round. “I’m trying to see what another man here beside me on a neighbouring balcony is looking at.”

  “Why? What does it matter to you? Don’t be so nosy.”

  It didn’t matter to me, in fact, but in summer wasting time is what you try hardest to do, if not, you don’t really feel that it’s summer, which is supposed to be slow and purposeless.

  According to my calculations and observations, the man to my right had to be looking at one of four people, all fairly close together and lined up in the back row, far from the water’s edge. To the right of these people was a small empty space, to their left as well, which was what made me think that he was looking at one of those four. The first person (from left to right, as they say in photo captions) had her face turned to me or us, for she was sunbathing lying on her back: a youngish woman, she was reading a newspaper, she had the top part of her bikini undone, but hadn’t removed it entirely (that’s still rather frowned upon in San Sebastián). The second person was sitting down, she was older, plumper, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a straw hat, she was smearing suncream on herself: she must be a mother, but her children were nowhere to be seen, perhaps they were playing by the sea. The third person was a man, possibly her husband or her brother, he was thinner, he was pretending to shiver as he stood on his towel, as if he had just emerged from the sea (he must have been pretending to shiver because the sea would certainly not be cold). The fourth person was the easiest to make out because he was wearing clothes, at least his top half was covered: he was an older man (the hair at the nape of his neck was grey) sitting with his back to us, erect, as if he, in turn, were watching or surveying someone on the shore or some rows ahead, the beach his theatre. I fixed my gaze on him: he was evidently alone, he had nothing to do with the man to his left, the man who was pretending to shiver. He was wearing a short-sleeved, green T-shirt, you couldn’t see if he had swimming trunks on or trousers, if he was fully dressed, most inappropriate on a beach, if he was, that would certainly attract attention. He was scratching his back, scratching his waist, he had a lot of fat around his waist, it must have weighed on him, he was one of those men who have great difficulty getting to their feet, to do so they have to throw their arms forward, with their fingers outstretched as if someone were pulling them. He was scratching his back, almost as if he were pointing to it. I didn’t have time to find out if he would get to his feet like that, with difficulty, nor if he was wearing trousers or swimming trunks, but I did find out that he was the man my neighbour was looking at, because suddenly, with my binoculars fixed at last on his thick waist and his broad back, I saw him collapse, fall forwards in a sitting position, the way puppets fall when the hand holding diem lets go of the strings. I had heard a brief, muffled noise, and I just had time to see that what was disappearing from the balcony to my right was not the arm of my neighbour with the binoculars, but his arm and the barrel of a gun. I don’t think anyone realized what had happened, although the man who had been shivering abruptly stopped, no longer cold.

  WHEN I WAS MORTAL

  I OFTEN USED to pretend I believed in ghosts, and I did so blithely, but now that I am myself a ghost, I understand why, traditionally, they are depicted as mournful creatures who stubbornly return to the places they knew when they were mortal. For they do return. Very rarely are they or we noticed, the houses we lived in have changed and the people who live in them do not even know of our past existence, they cannot even imagine it: like children, these men and women believe that the world began with their birth, and they never wonder if, on the ground they tread, others once trod with lighter steps or with fateful footfalls, if between the walls that shelter them others heard whispers or laughter, or if someone once read a letter out loud, or strangled the person he most loved. It’s absurd that, for the living, space should endure while time is erased, when space is, in fact, the depository of time, albeit a silent one, telling no tales. It’s absurd that life should be like that for the living, because what comes afterwards is its polar opposite, and we are entirely unprepared for it. For now time does not pass, elapse or flow, it perpetuates itself simultaneously and in every detail, though to speak of “now” is perhaps a fallacy. That is the second worst thing, the details, because anything that we experienced or that made even the slightest impact on us when we were mortal reappears with the awful concomitant that now everything has weight and meaning: the words spoken lightly, the mechanical gestures, the accumulated afternoons of childhood parade past singly, one after the other, the effort of a whole lifetime-establishing routines that level out both days and nights – turns out to have been pointless, and each day and night is recalled with excessive clarity and singularity and with a degree of reality incongruous with our present state which knows nothing now of touch. Everything is concrete and excessive, and the razor edge of repetition becomes a torment, because the curse consists in remembering everything, the minutes of each hour of each day lived through, the minutes and hours and days of tedium and work and joy, of study and grief and humiliation and sleep, as well as those of waiting, which formed the
greater part.

  But, as I have already said, that is only the second worst thing, there is something far more wounding, which is that now I not only remember what I saw and heard and knew when I was mortal, but I remember it in its entirety, that is, including what I did not see or know or hear, even things that were beyond my grasp, but which affected me or those who were important to me, and which possibly had a hand in shaping me. You discover the full magnitude of what you only intuited while alive, all the more as you become an adult, I can’t say older because I never reached old age: that you only know a fragment of what happens to you and that when you believe yourself capable of explaining or recounting what has happened to you up until a particular date, you do not have sufficient information, you do not know what other people’s intentions were or the motivations behind impulses, you have no knowledge of what is hidden: the people closest to us seem like actors suddenly stepping out in front of a theatre curtain, and we have no idea what they were doing only a second earlier, when they were not there before us. Perhaps they appear disguised as Othello or as Hamlet and yet the previous moment they were smoking an impossible, anachronistic cigarette in the wings and glancing impatiently at the watch which they have now removed in order to seem to be someone else. Likewise, we know nothing about the events at which we were not present and the conversations we did not hear, those that took place behind our back and mentioned us or criticized us or judged us and condemned us. Life is compassionate, all lives are, at least that is the norm, which is why we consider as wicked those people who do not cover up or hide or lie, those who tell everything that they know and hear, as well as what they do and think. We call them cruel. And it is in that cruel state that I find myself now.

  I see myself, for example, as a child about to fall asleep in my bed on the countless nights of a childhood that was satisfactory or without surprises, with my bedroom door ajar so that I could see the light until sleep overcame me, being lulled by the voices of my father and my mother and a guest at supper or some late arrival, who was almost always Dr Arranz, a pleasant man who smiled a lot and spoke in a low voice and who, to my delight, would arrive just before I went to sleep, in time to come into my room to see how I was, the privilege of an almost daily check-up and the calming hand of the doctor slipping beneath your pyjama jacket, the warm and unrepeatable hand that touches you in a way that no one else will ever touch you again throughout your entire life, the nervous child feeling that any anomaly or danger will be detected by that hand and therefore stopped, it is the hand that saves; and the stethoscope dangling from his ears and the cold, salutary touch that your chest shrinks from, and sometimes the handle of an inherited silver spoon engraved with initials placed on the tongue, and which, for a moment, seems about to stick in your throat, a feeling that would give way to relief when I remembered, after the first contact, that it was Arranz holding the spoon in his reassuring, steady hand, mistress of metallic objects, nothing could happen while he was listening to your chest or peering at you with his torch fixed on his forehead. After his brief visit and his two or three jokes – sometimes my mother would lean in the doorway waiting until he had finished examining me and making me laugh, and she would laugh too – I would feel even more at ease and would begin to fall asleep listening to their chatter in the nearby lounge, or listening to them listening for a while to the radio or playing a game of cards, at a time when time barely passed, it seems impossible because it’s not that long ago, although from then until now enough time has elapsed for me to live and die. I hear the laughter of those who were still young, although I couldn’t see them as young then, I can now: my father laughed the least, he was a handsome, taciturn man with a look of permanent melancholy in his eyes, perhaps because he had been a republican and had lost the war, and that is probably something you never recover from, having lost a war against your compatriots and neighbours. He was a kindly man who never got angry with me or my mother and who spent a lot of time at home writing articles and book reviews, which he tended to publish under various pseudonyms in the newspapers, because it was best not to use his own name; or perhaps reading, he was a great francophile, I mainly recall novels by Camus and Simenon. Dr Arranz was a jollier man, with a lazy, teasing way of talking, inventive and full of unusual turns-of-phrase, the kind of man children idolize because he knows how to do card tricks and comes out with unexpected rhymes and talks to them about football – then it was Kopa, Rial, Di Stefano, Puskas and Gento – and he thinks up games that will interest them and awaken their imaginations, except that, in fact, he never has time to stay and play them for real. And my mother, always well-dressed despite the fact that there wasn’t much money in the home of one of the war’s losers – there wasn’t – better dressed than my father because she still had her own father, my grandfather, to buy her clothes, she was slight and cheerful and sometimes looked sadly at her husband, and always looked at me enthusiastically, later, as you get older, not many people look at you like that either. I see this now because I see it all complete, I see that, while I was gradually becoming submerged in sleep, the laughter in the living room never came from my father, and that, on the other hand, he was the only one listening to the radio, an impossible image until very recently, but which is now as clear as the old images which, while I was mortal, gradually grew dimmer, more compressed the longer I lived. I see that on some nights, Dr Arranz and my mother went out, and now I understand all those references to good tickets, which, in my imagination then, I always thought of as being clipped by an usher at the football stadium or at the bullring – those places I never went to – and to which I never gave another thought. On other nights, there were no good tickets and no one mentioned them, or there were rainy nights when there was no question of going for a walk or to an open-air dance, and now I know that then my mother and Dr Arranz would go into the bedroom when they were sure I had gone to sleep after having been touched on my chest and on the stomach by the same hands that would then touch her, hands that were no longer warm, but urgent, the hand of the doctor that calms and probes and persuades and demands; and having been kissed on the cheek or the forehead by the same lips that would subsequently kiss the easy-going, low voice – thus silencing it. And whether they went to the theatre or to the cinema or to a club or merely went into the next room, my father would listen to the radio alone while he waited, so as not to hear anything, but also, with the passage of time and the onset of routine – with the levelling out of nights that always happens when nights keep repeating themselves – in order to distract himself for half an hour or three quarters of an hour (doctors are always in such a hurry), because he inevitably became interested in what he was listening to. The doctor would leave without saying goodbye to him and my mother would stay in the bedroom, waiting for my father, she would put on a nightdress and change the sheets, he never found her there in her pretty skirts and stockings. I see now the conversation that began that state of affairs, which, for me, was not a cruel one but a kindly one that lasted my whole life, and, during that conversation, Dr Arranz is sporting the sharp little moustache that I noticed on the faces of lawyers in parliament until the day Franco died, and not only there, but on soldiers and notaries and bankers and lecturers, on writers and on countless doctors, not on him though, he was one of the first to get rid of it. My father and my mother are sitting in the dining room and I still have no consciousness or memory, I am a child lying in its cradle, I cannot yet walk or speak and there is no reason why I should ever have found out: she keeps her eyes lowered all the time and says nothing, he looks first incredulous and then horrified: horrified and fearful, rather than indignant. And one of the things that Arranz says is this:

  “Look, León, I pass a lot of information on to the police and it never fails; basically, what I say goes. I’ve taken a while to get around to you but I know perfectly well what you got up to in the war, how you gave the nod to the militiamen on who to take for a ride. But even if that wasn’t so, in your case, I’ve no n
eed to make anything much up, I just have to stretch the facts a little, to say that you consigned to the ditch half the people in our neighbourhood wouldn’t be that far from the truth, you’d have done the same to me if you could. More than ten years have passed, but you’d still be hauled up in front of a firing squad if I told them what I know, and I’ve no reason to keep quiet about it. So it’s up to you, you can either have a bit of a rough time on my terms or you can stop having any kind of time at all, neither good nor bad nor average.”

  “And what are your terms exactly?”

  I see Dr Arranz gesture with his head in the direction of my silent mother – a gesture that makes of her a thing – whom he also knew during the war and from before, in that same neighbourhood that lost so many of its residents.

  “I want to screw her. Night after night, until I get tired of it.”

  Arranz got tired as everyone does of everything, given time. He got tired when I was still at an age when that essential word did not even figure in my vocabulary, nor did I even conceive of its meaning. My mother, on the other hand, was at the age when she was beginning to lose her bloom and to laugh only rarely, while my father began to prosper and to dress better, and to sign with his own name – which was not León – the articles and the reviews that he wrote and to lose the look of melancholy in his clouded eyes; and to go out at night with some good tickets while my mother stayed at home playing solitaire or listening to the radio, or, a little later, watching television, resigned.