When I Was Mortal

by Javier Marías

  All those who have speculated on the afterlife or the continuing existence of consciousness beyond death – if that is what we are, consciousness – have not taken into account the danger or rather the horror of remembering everything, even what we did not know: knowing everything, everything that concerns us or that involved us either closely or from afar. I see with absolute clarity faces that I passed once in the street, a man I gave money to without even glancing at him, a woman I watched in the underground and whom I haven’t thought of since, the features of a postman who delivered some unimportant telegram, the figure of a child I saw on a beach, when I too was a child. I relive the long minutes I spent waiting at airports or those spent queuing outside a museum or watching the waves on a distant beach, or packing my bags and later unpacking them, all the most tedious moments, those that are of no account and which we usually refer to as dead time. I see myself in cities I visited a long time ago, just passing through, with a few free hours to stroll around them and then wipe them from my memory: I see myself in Hamburg and in Manchester, in Basle and in Austin, places I would never have gone to if my work hadn’t taken me there. I see myself too in Venice, some time ago, on honeymoon with my wife Luisa, with whom I spent those last few years of peace and contentment, I see myself in the most recent part of my life, even though it is now remote. I’m coming back from a trip and she’s waiting for me at the airport, not once, all the time we were married, did she fail to come and meet me, even if I’d only been away for a couple of days, despite the awful traffic and despite all the activities we can so easily do without and which are precisely those that we find most pressing. I’d be so tired that I’d only have the strength to change television channels, the programmes are the same everywhere now anyway, while she prepared me a light supper and kept me company, looking bored but patient, knowing that after that initial torpor and the imminent night’s rest, I would be fully recovered and that the following day, I would be my usual self, an energetic, jokey person who spoke in a rather low voice, in order to underline the irony that all women love, laughter runs in their veins and, if it’s a funny joke, they can’t help but laugh, even if they detest the person making the joke. And the following afternoon, once I’d recovered, I used to go and see María, my lover, who used to laugh even more because my jokes were still new to her.

  I was always so careful not to give myself away, not to wound and to be kind, I only ever met María at her apartment so that no one would see me out with her anywhere and ask questions later on, or be cruel and tell tales, or simply wait to be introduced. Her apartment was nearby and I spent many afternoons there, though not every afternoon, on the way back to my own apartment, that meant a delay of only half an hour or three quarters of an hour, sometimes a little more, sometimes I would amuse myself looking out of her window, the window of a lover is always more interesting than our own will ever be. I never made a mistake, because mistakes in these matters reveal a sort of lack of consideration, or worse, they are acts of real cruelty. I met María once when I was out with Luisa, in a packed cinema at a première, and my lover took advantage of the crowd to come over to us and to hold my hand for a moment, as she passed by without looking at me, she brushed her familiar thigh against mine and took hold of my hand and stroked it. Luisa could not possibly have seen this or noticed or even suspected the existence of that tenuous, ephemeral, clandestine contact, but even so, I decided not to see María for a couple of weeks, after which time and after my refusing to answer the phone in my office, she called me one afternoon at home, luckily, my wife was out.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “You must never phone me here, you know that.”

  “I wouldn’t phone you there if you’d pick up the phone in your office. I’ve been waiting a whole fortnight,” she said.

  And then, making an effort to recover the anger I had felt a fortnight before, I said:

  “And I’ll never pick up the phone to you again if you ever touch me when Luisa is there. Don’t even think of it.”

  She fell silent.

  You forget almost everything in life and remember everything in death, or in this cruel state which is what being a ghost is. But in life I forgot and so I started seeing her again now and then, thanks to that process by which everything becomes indefinitely postponed for a while, and we always believe that there will continue to be a tomorrow in which it will be possible to stop what today and yesterday passes and elapses and flows, what is imperceptibly becoming another routine which, in its way, also levels out our days and our nights until they become unimaginable without all their essential elements, and the nights and days must be identical, at least in their essence, so that nothing is relinquished or sacrificed by those who want them and those who endure them. Now I remember everything and that’s why I remember my death so clearly, or, rather, what I knew of my death when it happened, which was little and, indeed, nothing in comparison with all that I know now, given the constant razor edge of repetition.

  I returned from one of my trips exhausted and Luisa didn’t fail me, she came to meet me. We didn’t talk much in the car, nor while I was mechanically unpacking my suitcase and glancing through the accumulated mail and listening to the messages on the answering machine that she had kept for my return. I was alarmed when I heard one of them, because I immediately recognized Maria’s voice, she said my name once and was then cut off, and that made my feeling of alarm subside for a moment, the voice of a woman saying my name and then breaking off was of no significance, there was no reason why Luisa should have felt worried if she had heard it. I lay down on the bed in front of the television, changing channels, Luisa brought me some cold meat and a shop-bought dessert, she clearly had neither the time nor the inclination to make me even an omelette. It was still early, but she had turned out the light in the bedroom to help me get to sleep, and there I stayed, drowsy and peaceful, with a vague memory of her caresses, the hand that calms even when it touches your chest distractedly and possibly impatiently. Then she left the bedroom and I eventually fell asleep with the television on, at some point, I stopped changing channels.

  I don’t know how much time passed, no, that’s not true, since now I know exactly, I enjoyed seventy-three minutes of deep sleep and of dreams that all took place in foreign parts, whence I had once again returned safe and sound. Then I woke up and I saw the bluish light of the television, the light illuminating the foot of the bed, rather than any actual images, because I didn’t have time. I see and I saw rushing towards me something black and heavy and doubtless as cold as a stethoscope, but it was violent rather than salutary. It fell once only to be raised again, and in those tenths of a second before it came crashing down a second time, already spattered with blood, I thought that Luisa must be killing me because of that message which had said only my name and then broken off and perhaps there had been many other things that she had erased after listening to them all, leaving only the beginning for me to listen to on my return, a mere foreshadowing of what was killing me. The black thing fell again and this time it killed me, and my last conscious thought was not to put up any resistance, to make no attempt to stop it because it was unstoppable and perhaps too because it didn’t seem such a bad death, to die at the hands of the person with whom I had lived in peace and contentment, and without ever hurting each other until, that is, we finally did. It’s a tricky word to use, and can easily be misconstrued, but perhaps I came to feel that my death was a just death.

  I see this now and I see the whole thing, with an afterwards and a before, although the afterwards does not, strictly speaking, concern me and is therefore not so painful. But the before is, or rather the rebuttal of what I glimpsed and half-thought between the lowering and the raising and the lowering again of the black thing that finished me off. Now I can see Luisa talking to a man I don’t know and who has a moustache like the one Dr Arranz wore in his day, not a slim moustache, though, but soft and thick and with a few grey hairs. He’s middle-aged, as I wa
s and as perhaps Luisa was, although she always seemed young to me, just as my parents or Arranz never did. They are in the living room of an unfamiliar apartment, his apartment, a ramshackle place, full of books and paintings and ornaments, a very mannered apartment. The man is called Manolo Reyna and he has enough money never to have to dirty his hands. It is the afternoon and they are sitting on a sofa, talking in whispers, and at that moment I am visiting María, two weeks before my death on the return from a trip, and that trip has still not begun, they are still making their preparations. The whispers are clearly audible, they have a degree of reality which seems incongruous now, not with my current non-tactile state, but with life itself, in which nothing is ever quite so concrete, in which nothing ever breathes quite so much. There is a moment, though, when Luisa raises her voice, like someone raising their voice to defend themselves or to defend someone else, and what she says is this:

  “But he’s always been so good to me, I’ve nothing to reproach him with, and that’s what’s so difficult.”

  And Manolo Reyna answers slowly:

  “It wouldn’t be any easier or any more difficult if he had made your life impossible. When it comes to killing someone, it doesn’t matter any more what they’ve done, it always seems an extreme response to any kind of behaviour.”

  I see Luisa put her thumb to her mouth and bite it a little, a gesture I’ve so often seen her make when she’s uncertain, or, rather, before making a decision. It’s a trivial gesture and it’s unseemly that it should also appear in the midst of a conversation we were not party to, the one that takes place behind our backs and mentions us or criticizes us or even defends us, or judges us and condemns us to death.

  “Well, you kill him, then; you can’t expect me to do anything that extreme.”

  Now I see that the person standing next to my television set – still on – and wielding the black thing is not Luisa, nor even Manolo Reyna with his folkloric name, but someone contracted and paid to do it, to strike me twice on the forehead, the word is assassin, in the war a lot of militiamen were used for such purposes. My assassin hits me twice and does so quite dispassionately, and that death no longer seems to me just or appropriate or, of course, compassionate, as life usually is, and as mine was. The black thing is a hammer with a wooden shaft and an iron head, a common-or-garden hammer. It belongs in my apartment, I recognize it.

  There where time passes and flows, a lot of time has gone by, so much so that no one whom I knew or met or pitied or loved remains. Each one of them, I suppose, will return unnoticed to that space in which forgotten times past accumulate, and they will see only strangers, new men and women who, like children, believe that the world began with their birth and there’s no point asking them about our past, erased existence. Now Luisa will remember and will know everything that she did not know in life or at my death. I cannot speak now of nights and days, everything has been levelled out without resort to effort or routine, a routine in which I can say that I knew, above all, peace and contentment: when I was mortal, all that time ago, in that place where there still is time.

  EVERYTHING BAD COMES BACK

  For the night doctor,

  who did not want to remain fictitious

  TODAY I RECEIVED a letter that reminded me of a friend. It was written by a woman unknown both to myself and to that friend.

  I met him fifteen or sixteen years ago and – for no other reason than that he died – stopped seeing him two years ago, not that we ever saw each other with any frequency, given that he lived in Paris and I in Madrid. Although he visited my city only rarely, I used to visit his quite often. However, we first met in neither of those two cities, but in Barcelona, and before that meeting, I had previously read a book of his sent to me by a Madrid publishing house I used to work for as a reader (work, as is usually the case, that was poorly remunerated). There was little likelihood of this novel, or whatever it was, ever being published and I can remember almost nothing about it, except that it revealed a certain inventiveness with words, a strong rhythmic sense and a broad culture (for example, the author knew the word “wrack”) but apart from that it was more or less unintelligible, at least to me. Were I a critic, I would have described him as out-Joycing Joyce, though he was less puerile, or perhaps senile, than the later Joyce, to which his own work bore only a remote resemblance. Nevertheless, I recommended the book for publication and expressed my qualified regard for it in my report. His agent subsequently phoned me (for this writer, whose true vocation seemed to be to remain forever unpublished, nonetheless had an agent) to arrange a meeting to coincide with a trip his client would be making to Barcelona, where his family lived and where, fifteen or sixteen years ago, I too was living.

  His name was Xavier Comella and I never did ascertain whether the business to which he sometimes referred vaguely as “the family business” was in fact the chain of clothes shops of the same name in Barcelona (selling mainly sweaters). Given the iconoclastic nature of his writing, I was expecting some wild, bearded individual, some kind of visionary with a penchant for pendants and vaguely Polynesian clothes, but he wasn’t like that at all. The man who emerged from the exit of the Metro at Tibidabo, where we’d arranged to meet, was only slightly older than myself, I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time, and much better dressed (I’m a very neat person myself, but he was wearing a tie – with a small knot – and cufflinks, unusual in men of our age and particularly so then); and he had an extraordinarily old-fashioned face, a face – like his writing – straight out of the interwar period. He wore his slightly wavy, blondish hair combed back, like a fighter pilot or a French actor in a black-and-white movie – Gérard Philipe or the young Jean Marais – and his sherry-brown eyes had a small dark fleck in the white of the left one, which gave his gaze a wounded look. He had good, robust teeth and a well-defined jaw so firm it gave the impression of being permanently clenched. His very prominent cranium, the bones of which were clearly visible beneath the smooth brow, always seemed on the point of exploding, not because of its unusual size, but because the taut skin over the frontal bone seemed incapable of containing it, or perhaps that was just the effect of the two vertical veins at his temples that seemed somehow too protuberant, too blue. He was good-looking, genial and, moreover, extraordinarily polite, especially for a man of his age and given the rather boorish times we lived in. He was one of those men you know you will never be able to confide in, but one in whom you can confidently trust. He had a studiedly foreign, or rather, extraterritorial look about him that only emphasized his estrangement from the times he’d been born into, a look acquired no doubt during the seven or eight years he’d spent out of Spain. He spoke Spanish with the attractive pronunciation of Catalans who have never actually spoken much Catalan (with soft c’s and z’s, soft g’s and j’s) and with the slight hint of a stammer at the beginning of sentences, occasionally stumbling over the first three or four words, as if he had to perform some minor mental act of translation. He could speak and read several languages, including Latin, in fact he mentioned that he’d been reading Ovid’s Tristia on the plane from Paris, and he said this without a trace of pedantry but rather with the satisfaction of one who has mastered some difficult task. He possessed a certain degree of worldly wisdom which he enjoyed showing off; during the long conversation we had in the bar of a nearby hotel, we talked almost exclusively about literature and painting and music, that is, about highly forgettable things, but he did tell me something of his life, about which he always spoke – on that occasion and during all the years we knew each other – with a contradictory blend of discretion and shamelessness. By that I mean that he was prepared to reveal everything or nearly everything, even about very intimate matters, but he always did so with a kind of grave artlessness – or was it perhaps tact? – which, in a way, diminished their importance, like someone who considers that all the strange, sad, terrible, agonizing things that happen to him are perfectly normal, a fate shared by everyone and so, presumably, by the
person listening, who will not, therefore, be surprised by what he hears. Not that Xavier eschewed the confessional gesture, but he resorted to it, perhaps, more because he saw it as part of the gestural repertoire of the tormented than because he had any real awareness of what is, at least in principle, untenable. On that first occasion, he told me the following: he’d studied medicine but never practised as a doctor, instead living a life dedicated entirely to literature, funded by a generous inheritance or by some kind of private income, possibly – I can’t quite remember now – from a grandfather who owned a textile factory. Whatever the origin of the money, he enjoyed the use of it and had lived off it for the seven or eight years he’d spent in Paris – a move indeed made possible by that money – fleeing from what he considered to be the mediocrity and flaccidity of intellectual life in Barcelona, which, given how young he was when he left, he really only knew about through the press. (Although he grew up in Barcelona, he was born in Madrid, where his mother came from.)

  In Paris he’d married a woman called Eliane (he always referred to her by name, I never once heard him call her “my wife”), who, according to him, had the most exquisite colour sense he’d ever come across in a fellow human being (I didn’t ask at the time, but I presumed that she must be a painter). He had a wide-ranging and ambitious literary plan of which, he remarked precisely, he had so far completed about twenty per cent, although none of it had as yet been published. Apart from the people closest to him, I was the first person to have shown any interest in his writings, which comprised novels, essays, sonnets and plays, even a play for puppets. He obviously thought that my opinion held considerable sway at the head office of the publishing house, not realizing that mine was only one voice amongst many and, given my youth, far from being one of the most influential. He gave me the impression that he was reasonably happy, whatever that means: he seemed to be very much in love with his wife; he was living in Paris whereas, in Spain, we were only just getting over Franco, or so people said; he didn’t have to work, his only obligations being those he imposed upon himself; and he doubtless enjoyed a pleasant and interesting social life. And yet, even at our first meeting, I sensed something turbulent and uneasy about him, as if he were surrounded by a cloud of suffering, like a cloud of dust, that gradually gathered about him only to be shaken off afterwards and left behind. When he described to me the amount of work he put into his writing, the endless hours spent labouring over every one of those pages I had read, I thought it was nothing more than that, a concept of writing as old-fashioned as he was himself, a concept that was almost “pathetic”, in the original sense of that word: a summoning up of the pain required to make words, regardless of meaning, communicate intense emotion, the way, he said, that music or pure colour do, or the way mathematics is supposed to. I asked him if he’d also spent hours on one of his rather easier pages to remember, which consisted of the word “riding” repeated five times on each line, thus: