When I Was Mortal

by Javier Marías

  “Can you smell what I smell?” I asked Ruibérriz, who was beginning to get fed up.

  “Can I look at her now?” he said.

  “Can you smell it?” I insisted.

  “Yes, is someone smoking incense or something?”

  “It’s cloves,” I said. “Tobacco with cloves.”

  The man’s gesture to the waiter allowed me to make the same gesture of writing in the air to another waiter and so be ready when the couple got up. Only then did I give permission to Ruibérriz to turn round; he did so and decided to accompany me. We followed a few paces behind the couple, I saw the woman standing up for the first time – a short skirt, open-toed shoes, painted toenails – and as we took those steps, I also heard her name, the name that she had never had for me or for Gómez Alday nor perhaps for Dorta. “You’re a lovely mover, Estela,” said the coarse man, not so coarse that he wasn’t absolutely right in his remark, which was spoken more in admiration than by way of being an amorous compliment. Ruibérriz and I separated for a moment, he went over to the car in order to pick me up as soon as they got in theirs, they weren’t travelling by taxi. When they did so, I got into our car and we drove off after them, keeping a short distance behind, there wasn’t much traffic, but enough for them not to notice us. It was a brief journey, they drove to an area of suburban houses, the street was called Torpedero Tucumán, a comical address to send a letter to. They parked and went into one of the houses, a three-storey house, lights were lit on every storey, as if there were already plenty of people there, perhaps they were going to a party, supper followed by a party, that guy was really going to a lot of trouble.

  Ruibérriz and I parked the car and stayed where we were for the moment, from there we could see the lights but nothing else, most of the blinds were pulled halfway down and there were lace curtains that didn’t move in the wind, you’d have to go right up to one of the windows on the ground floor and peer through a crack, we might even end up doing that, I thought quickly. It immediately seemed to us, though, that it couldn’t be a party, because there was no music drifting out through open windows, no sounds of anarchic conversations or laughter. The blinds were only up on two windows on the third floor and you couldn’t see anyone in there, just a standard lamp, and walls without books or pictures.

  “What do you think?” I asked Ruibérriz.

  “I don’t think they’ll stay very long. There’s not much fun to be had in that house, apart from the intimate kind, and those two aren’t going to spend the night together, not there at least, whatever kind of place it is. Did you see who opened the door, did they have a key or did they knock?”

  “I couldn’t see, but I don’t think they knocked.”

  “It might be his house, and if it is, then she’ll be out again in a couple of hours, no longer than that. It might be her place, in which case, he’ll be the one to come out, much sooner too, say about an hour. It might be a massage parlour, that’s what they like to call them now, and then again he’ll be the one to leave, but give him about thirty or forty-five minutes. Lastly, there might be a few select poker games going on, but I don’t think so. Only then would they spend the night there, losing and recovering what they’d lost. No, I don’t think it’s likely to be her house. No, it can’t be.”

  Ruibérriz knows all the different territories in the city, he has experience and a good eye. He doesn’t need to ask many questions and he can find out anything or locate anyone with a couple of phone calls and perhaps a couple more made by his contacts.

  “Why don’t you find out for me whose house it is? I’ll wait here, in case one or other leaves unexpectedly. It wouldn’t take you long to find out, I’m sure.”

  He sat there looking at me, his tanned arms resting on the steering wheel.

  “What is it with this woman? What are you after? I didn’t get a very good look at her, but I don’t know that she’s worth all this fuss.”

  “Not for you probably, as I said. Just let me see what happens tonight and I’ll tell you the whole story another day. I just need to know where she lives, where she hangs out or where she’s going to be sleeping tonight, when she does finally go to bed.”

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve asked me to wait for a story, I don’t know if you realize that.”

  “But it’ll probably be the last,” I said. If I told him straight out that I thought I might be seeing a dead woman, it was quite likely that he wouldn’t help me at all, things like that make him nervous, as they do me normally, we who hardly believe in anything.

  I got out of the car and Ruibérriz drove off to make his enquiries. There were no shops or cinemas or bars in that area, a boring, tree-lined residential street, with barely any lighting, with nothing you could use as a pretext or to distract yourself while you were waiting. If a neighbour saw me, he would doubtless take me for a marauder, there was no reason why I should be there, alone, silent, smoking. I crossed to the other side of the street just in case I could see anything of the upper storey from there, the only one where the windows were unobstructed. I did see something, but only briefly, a large woman, who was not Estela, passing and disappearing and passing again in the opposite direction after a few seconds and then disappearing again, obscuring my view still more after she had gone, since, when she left the room, she switched off the light: as if she had just gone in there for a moment to pick something up. I crossed the road again and approached the gate as stealthily as an old-fashioned thief; I pushed and it gave way, it was open, people leave it like that when there’s a party on or if a lot of people come and go. I continued to advance so carefully that had I been treading on sand there would have been no footprints, I moved slowly towards one of the windows on the ground floor, the one to the left of the front door from where I was standing. As with nearly all the windows, the blind was down but the slats were open to let in the warm breeze that had slackened now, that is, they weren’t tight shut. Behind the blinds there were motionless lace curtains, the room must be air-conditioned or perhaps it was a sauna. You often unwittingly take steps that you consider possible merely because they are possible and it has occurred to you to take them, and that is how so many acts and so many murders are committed, sometimes the idea leads to the act as if it could not live and sustain itself as long as it was a mere idea, as if there were a certain kind of possibility that grows frustrated and begins to fade if it is not instantly put into action, without our realizing that, in that way too, it has vanished and died, it will no longer be a possibility, but a past event. I found myself in the situation I had foreseen in the car, with my eyes glued to a crack at about eye level, looking, peering, trying to make out something through the tiny gap and through the transparent white cloth that made it even harder to see. That room too was only dimly lit, a large part of it lay in shadow, it was like trying to get to the bottom of a story from which the main elements have been deliberately omitted and about which we know only odd details, my vision blurred and with only a restricted view.

  But I thought I saw them and I did, both of them, Estela and the coarse man one on top of the other, outside the beam of the light, the niceties were over, on a bed or perhaps it was a mattress or the floor, at first I couldn’t even make out who was who, two dark, intertwined masses of flesh, someone was naked in there, I said to myself, the woman would have uncovered those breasts that I so needed to see, or perhaps not, perhaps not, she might still have her bra on. There was movement or was it struggle, but hardly any sound emerged, no grunts or cries or groans of pleasure or laughter, like a scene from a silent movie that would never have been shown in decent cinemas, a grim, muffled effort of bodies doubtless entering upon what was just another stage in the proceedings – the fuck – rather than a surrender to genuine desire, his body felt no more desire than hers did, but it was difficult to say where the one began and the other ended or which was which, given the darkness and the veil of the curtain, they were just a grotesque shape, how could I possibly not be able to distinguish
the body of a young woman from that of a coarse man? Suddenly a torso and a head with a hat on loomed into view, they entered the beam of light for a moment before plunging down again, the man had donned a cowboy hat in order to have a fuck, good grief, I thought, what a jerk. So he was the one who was on top or above, when he rose up, I thought I also saw his hairy, swarthy, unpleasant torso, broad and undelineated, not exactly athletic. I looked through the slat below to see if I could catch a glimpse of the woman and her breasts, but I couldn’t see anything and so returned to the slat above, hoping that the man might grow tired and want to rest underneath, it was odd not knowing if it was a bed or a mattress or the floor, and even odder how muffled the sound was, a silence like a gag. Then I noticed a new singlemindness about the sweating, two-headed beast into which they had been momentarily transformed, they’re going to change position, I thought, they’re going to change places in order to prolong this stage of the proceedings, which is just that, another stage, since the participants remain the same.

  I heard the bolt on the door and scuttled off to the left, just managing to disappear round the corner of the house before I heard a woman’s voice saying goodbye to some people who were leaving (“Bye then, come back and see us again sometime,” as if she were an American): a literary critic I know by sight, with a pure primate face and wearing red trousers and hiking boots, another jerk, if that was a whorehouse it didn’t surprise me in the least that he should visit it, he always has to pay, like his friend, a fat guy with a greying crewcut, a head like an inverted egg and a reptilian mouth, wearing glasses and a tie. They swaggered out and ostentatiously slammed the gate shut, no one would see them, the street was empty and dark, the second guy sounded as if he came from the Canaries, another jerk to judge by his appearance and his behaviour, a bit of a flash harry. When I could no longer hear their footsteps, I returned to my post, a couple of minutes or three or four had passed and now the man and Estela were no longer intertwined, they had not changed position, but they had stopped, the end or a pause. The man was standing up, or kneeling on the mattress, the beam of light illuminated him more than it did her, reclining or sitting, I could see the back of her head, the coarse man grabbed her head with his two hands and made her turn it a little, now I could see both their faces and his erect body with its proliferating hair and his ridiculous hat, it seemed to me he was starting to squeeze Estela’s face with his two thumbs, how strong two thumbs can be, it was as if he were caressing her, but hurting her too, as if he were digging into her high cheekbones or giving her a cruel massage that went ever deeper, becoming more and more intense, he was pushing into her cheekbones as if he wanted to crush them. I felt alarmed, I thought for a moment that he was going to kill her and he couldn’t kill her because she was already dead and because I had to see her breasts and talk to her about something, ask her about the spear or the wound – the weapon wasn’t left impaled in her, someone had pulled it out – and about my friend Dorta who had received her blood on that spear. The man eased the pressure, let her go, he squeezed his knuckles and cracked them, muttered a few words, then moved away, perhaps it was nothing, perhaps it was just the reminder some men like to give women that they could hurt them if they wanted to. He took off his hat, threw it on the floor as if he no longer needed it, and picked up his clothes from a chair, he would be the one to leave. She lay back, absolutely still, she didn’t appear to be hurt, or perhaps she was used to being treated violently.

  “Victor!” I heard Ruibérriz’s voice calling to me quietly from the other side of the gate. I hadn’t heard him arrive, or his car.

  With my head turned towards the house – sometimes it’s hard to make yourself look away – I went to meet him as daintily as I had come, I took him by the sleeve and dragged him over to the other pavement.

  “So,” I said, “what did you find out?”

  “The usual, it’s a whorehouse, open all hours, they advertise in the newspapers, superchicks, European, Latin American and Asian, they say, amongst other things. I warn you there’ll be hardly a soul in there. In the phone book it’s listed under the name of Calzada Fernández, Monica. So the man will be the one to leave, if he hasn’t already.”

  “He must be about ready to, they’ve finished and he’s getting dressed. A couple of punters with pretensions to being literary types have just left, they probably fancy themselves as real Renaissance men,” I said. “We’ll have to skedaddle in a minute, but I’m going in there as soon as he comes out.”

  “What, have you gone mad? You’re going to follow in the footsteps of that hick? What is it with you and that woman?”

  I again tugged him by the sleeve and dragged him further off, beneath the trees, where we would be invisible to anyone coming out. A lazy neighbourhood dog barked and immediately fell silent. Only then did I answer Ruibérriz.

  “It’s not at all what you’re thinking, but I have to get a look at her breasts tonight, that’s all that matters. And if she is a whore then all the better, I’ll pay her, I’ll have a good look at them, we might talk for a bit, and then I’ll leave.”

  “You might talk for a bit and then leave? You can’t be serious. She’s nothing very special it’s true, but she’s worth more than just a look. What’s with her breasts?”

  “Nothing, I’ll tell you tomorrow because there may well be nothing to tell anyway. If you want to follow the guy in the car when he leaves, fine, although I don’t think you need bother. If not, thanks for the research and now please go, I’ll be all right on my own. Is there nothing you can’t find out?”

  Ruibérriz looked at me impatiently despite that final bit of flattery. But he usually puts up with me, he’s a friend. Until the day he ceases to be.

  “I don’t give a damn about the guy, or her for that matter. If you’re OK, then stay, you can tell me about it tomorrow. But be careful, you’re not used to these places.”

  Ruibérriz left and this time I did hear his car in the distance while the door of the house opened (maybe the woman again said “Come back and see us again sometime”, I couldn’t hear from where I was). I saw that the coarse man was outside the house now, I heard the noisy gate. He walked wearily in the opposite direction – his night of pretence and effort over – I could approach now behind him while he disappeared off amongst the black foliage in search of his car. I felt intensely impatient, and yet I waited a few moments longer, smoking another cigarette before pushing open the gate. There was still a light on in the bedroom where the encounter had taken place, the same lamp, the blind still lowered, but with the slats open, they didn’t air the rooms immediately.

  I rang the bell, it was an old-fashioned bell, not chimes. I waited. I waited and a large woman opened the door to me, I’d seen her on the third floor, she was like one of our aunts when we were little, Dorta’s aunts or my aunts, fresh from the 1960s even down to her platinum blonde, flying-saucer hairstyle or her make-up, courtesy of eyebrow pencil, powder and even tweezers.

  “Good evening,” she said interrogatively.

  “I’d like to see Estela.”

  “She’s having a shower,” she said quite naturally, and added guilelessly, displaying an excellent memory: “You haven’t been here before.”

  “No, a friend of mine told me about her. I’m just passing through Madrid and a friend of mine spoke well of her.”

  “Ah,” she said, drawing out the vowel, she had a Galician accent, “I’ll see what we can do. You’ll have to wait a moment, though. Come in.”

  A small room in near darkness with two sofas facing each other, you walked straight in there from the hallway, all you had to do was to keep walking. The walls were almost empty, not a book or a painting, just a blown-up photo stuck on a thick piece of board, like they used to have in airports and travel agencies. It was a photograph of white skyscrapers, the title left no room for doubt, Caracas, I’ve never been to Caracas. I immediately thought, perhaps Estela is Venezuelan, but Venezuelan women don’t have soft breasts, at least they don’
t have that reputation. Perhaps Estela didn’t either, perhaps she wasn’t the dead woman and it was all just a mirage born of alcohol and the summer and the night, a lot of beer with a dash of lemon juice and too much heat, if only it was, I thought, stories already absorbed by time should not subsequently change, if in their day, they’ve been filed away without explanation: the lack of any explanation ends up becoming the story itself, if the story has already been absorbed by time. I sat down, Aunt Mónica left me alone, “I’ll go and see how long she’ll be,” she said. I awaited her return, I knew that she would return before the person I wanted to see, the lady was her aide-decamp. And yet that isn’t what happened, the lady didn’t come back for ages, she didn’t come back at all, I felt like looking for the bathroom where the prostitute was having a shower and simply going in and seeing her without waiting any longer, but I’d only frighten her, and after I’d smoked two cigarettes, she was the one who came down the stairs with her hair uncombed and wet, wearing a bathrobe but still in her street shoes, open-toed, her nails painted, the buckles loose as the only sign that her feet were also at home, off duty. Her bathrobe was not yellow, but sky blue.