Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  'Nothing. They're just two people marked by the final episode of their life. Exaggeratedly so, to the point that it defines or configures both of them and almost cancels out everything they did before, even if they had done important things, which Mansfield clearly hadn't. If they'd known what the end had in store for them, those two people would have had good reason to suffer from narrative horror, as you said of Dick Dearlove. Both Jack Kennedy and Jayne Mansfield would have suffered from their own complex, K-M as we call it, if they'd guessed or feared how they would die. There are, naturally, many more such examples, from, say, James Dean to Abraham Lincoln, from Keats to Jesus Christ. The first and almost only thing anyone remembers about them is the way—shocking or unusual, premature or bizarre—their lives ended. Dean dead at twenty-four in a car crash, with an extraordinary career as a movie star still before him and the whole world at his feet; Lincoln assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, highly theatrically, in a box at the theatre, shortly after winning the War of Secession and having been re-elected; Keats dead in Rome from tuberculosis, at twenty-five, such a loss to literature; Christ on the cross at thirty-three, a mature adult in the eyes of the age he lived in, even a little slow off the mark in carrying out his work, but young, if not in years, and gone to an early grave according to our idle, long-lived times. As I said, it was at Mulryan's insistence that we called it the K-M complex, but any of those other names would have done, or many more, quite a few people owe their great celebrity or the fact of not being forgotten to the manner of their death or its timing, when it might be said that they weren't ready or that it was unfair. As if death knew anything about fairness or was concerned with meting it out, or could even understand the concept, quite absurd. At most, death is arbitrary, capricious, by which I mean that it establishes an order it doesn't always follow, one that it chooses either to follow or discard: sometimes it approaches filled with resolve and, as if intent on its business, draws near, flies over us, looks down, and then suddenly decides to leave it for another day. It must have a very good memory to be able to recall every living being and not miss a single one. Death's task is infinite, and yet it's been carrying it out with exemplary thoroughness for centuries. What an efficient slave, one that never stands idle and never wearies. Or forgets.'

  His way of referring to death, of personalizing it, again made me think that he must have had more dealings with it than most, that he must have seen it in action many times and had perhaps, on a few occasions, himself taken on the role of death. That very night he had approached De la Garza filled with resolve, he had drawn near, flown over him wielding his Landsknecht sword just like the helicopter with its whirling blades that had so frightened Wheeler and me in his garden by the river: in the end, it had merely ruffled our hair, and Tupra had merely cut off De la Garza's fake ponytail and plunged his head into the water and beaten him, and left him for another day, as if he really were Sir Death on a night when he had decided not to follow his own established order of things. Or perhaps Tupra, as a medievalist, albeit non-practicing, was accustomed to the anthropomorphic vision of past centuries: the decrepit old woman with her scythe or Sir Death in full armor and bearing a sword and a lance; but just whose 'efficient slave' did he think death was: God's, the Devil's, mankind's, or life's, even though life only has this one method of proceeding?

  'I know what happened, I mean I know, as does everyone else, how President Kennedy died,' I replied. 'But I don't know what happened to Jayne Mansfield. In fact, I know almost nothing about her and her extraordinary hourglass figure.' And after humorously quoting his own words back at him, I added a Spanish note to what I had said: 'I suppose Garcia Lorca would fit that complex too. We wouldn't evoke him so frequently, he wouldn't be remembered or read in the same way if he hadn't died the way he did, shot and thrown into a common grave by the Francoists, before he was even forty. However good a poet he was, he wouldn't be missed or praised half as much.'

  'Exactly, that's another clear example of a death defining a life, of ever-present death enfolding and sweeping someone along,' replied Tupra, not really listening to what I'd said; I wondered how much he knew about the circumstances of Lorca's murder. 'Throughout her brief and brilliant career and her almost equally brief decline, Jayne Mansfield was always ready to turn her hand—and certainly her bust—to doing whatever was necessary to attract the attention of the press and to publicize herself. She always kept her door open to reporters, wherever she was, in motels when she was on the road, in the suites she stayed in and even in hotel bathrooms; she loved them to come and photograph her in her pink Spanish-style mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, full of dogs and cats, and she would wear provocative outfits and strike suggestive poses, and nothing was ever too ridiculous or too trifling, she would welcome anyone, however stupid or malicious, from even the most mediocre of publications. She posed nude for Playboy a couple of times, married a muscle-bound Hungarian, and would happily show off her swimming pool and her bed, both of which were heart-shaped, to the least significant of provincial hacks. She divorced the strong man and the odd subsequent husband, went to Vietnam to cheer up the troops with her saucy remarks and her tight sweaters, and when even Las Vegas would no longer have her, she toured Europe appearing in tacky shows and Italian films about Hercules. She took to drinking, she picked fights and worked very hard at creating scandals, but as her career declined, she found this increasingly difficult because no one took much notice and, besides, she wasn't very talented. It was said that she converted to the Church of Satan, a nonsense invented by one Anton LaVey, its High Priest, a bald fellow sporting a puerile diabolical goatee and fake horns on his bald head, who claimed, falsely, to be of Hungarian or Transylvanian origin, and was just as publicity-hungry as she was, as well as being a compulsive con artist: he claimed to be the author of The Satanic Bible, which was blatantly plagiarized from four five different writers, among them the famous Renaissance alchemist John Dee and the novelist H. G. Wells; he claimed, also, to have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe and, needless to say, with Mansfield too. This was all complete fantasy, of course, but then, as you know, people will believe all manner of vile and despicable things about celebrities. He was mad for her and she would sometimes phone him from Beverly Hills, surrounded by her friends, so that she could laugh at and make fun of his demoniacal ardor, filling his shaven head with titillating thoughts from afar. Later, it was rumoured that a vengeful LaVey put a curse on Mansfield's then lover, a lawyer named Brody, and there begins the legend of her death. In June 1967, she was driving in the early hours from a place called Biloxi in Mississippi, where she'd been standing in at a club for her friend and rival Mamie Van Doren, en route to New Orleans, where she was going to be interviewed the next day on a local TV program, as you see, nothing was ever too much trouble or too trivial. The Buick she was travelling in was crammed with people: the young man who was driving, namely Brody, Mansfield and three of her five children, the ones from her marriage to the muscle-bound Hungarian, plus four chihuahuas; really it's hardly surprising that they had a crash. About twenty miles from their destination, the car slammed into the back of a truck that had braked suddenly when it came upon a slow-moving municipal vehicle spraying a swamp for mosquitoes, Mulryan always emphasized that sordid, boggy, Southern detail. The impact was such that the roof of the Buick was sliced clean off. Mansfield and Brody—her driver and lover—died instantly and their bodies were hurled out onto the road. The three children, asleep in the back, only suffered bruises, and there's no news of the chihuahuas, probably because they were unharmed and perhaps escaped.' Tupra paused, threw something onto the fire, I didn't see what, perhaps a speck of fluff from his jacket or a match I hadn't seen him light and which he had been holding between his fingers. He told the story as if it were a report he had in his head, memorized. It occurred to me that, given his profession, he might have hundreds and thousands of such reports stored away, reports on both real events and possibilities, on proven facts and speculation
, written not only by him, but by me and by Pérez Nuix, Mulryan, Rendel and others; and by other people in the past such as Peter Wheeler and, who knows, Peter's wife Valerie and Toby Rylands and even Mrs. Berry. Perhaps Tupra was a walking archive. 'Jayne Mansfield's ostentatious blonde wig fell onto the bumper,' he went on, 'which gave rise to two rumors, both equally unpleasant, which is probably why they became so fixed in people's imaginations: according to one rumor, the actress had been scalped in the accident, her scalp torn off as if by an Indian from the Wild West; according to the other, she had been decapitated along with the roof of the Buick, and her head had rolled across the asphalt into the swampy mosquito-infested area by the side of the road. Both ideas proved irresistible to popular malice: it wasn't enough that the woman whose opulent curves had for a decade adorned the walls of garages, workshops and dives, as well as trucks and the lockers of students and soldiers, should suffer an extremely violent death at the age of thirty-four, when she was still desirable despite her rapid decline and when she might still have profited from her physical splendors; it was much more satisfying to know that death had also left her bald and ugly, or grotesquely decapitated and with her head in the mud. People like cruel punishments and the sarcastic turns that fortune takes, they like it when someone who had it all is suddenly dispossessed of everything, not to mention the ultimate dispossession of sudden death, especially a bloody death.'

  'Why is he talking to me about heads being cut off,' I thought, 'when only a short while ago, he was about to cut one off himself, right before my eyes? 'And it seemed to me that Tupra was using this gruesome story in order to drive me to some destination much closer than either New Orleans or Biloxi. However, I didn't interrupt him with questions, I merely quoted back to him the words he'd said to me at our first meeting:

  'And besides, everything has its moment to be believed, isn't that what you think?'

  'You don't know how true that is, Jack,' he replied, then immediately took up his story again. 'It was then, after her death, that LaVey started to boast in public about his affair with her (as you know, the dead are very quiet and never raise any objections) and to put it about in the press that the spectacular accident had been the result of a curse he'd put on her lover Brody, a curse so powerful that it had blithely carried her off too, since she was seated beside him, in the place of highest risk. And people love conspiracies and settlings of scores, the weird and the wonderful and the dangers that come to pass. Most people deny the existence of chance, they loathe it, but then most people are stupid.' I remembered hearing him say the same thing or something similar to Wheeler, perhaps it was one of the beliefs on which our group had always based itself, as does every government. 'If Jayne Mansfield had been attracted by or flirted with the Church of Satan, no less, it was hardly odd that her pretty face should have ended up like that, in a swamp, being nibbled by animals until it was picked up; or with her celebrated platinum blonde hair snatched from her skull, for it had always been her second most striking feature, the first being the one on such conspicuous display in the postcard I showed you. The rabble demands explanations for everything'—Tupra used that word 'rabble,' which is so frowned upon now—'but it wants explanations that are ridiculous, improbable, complicated and conspiratorial, and the more those explanations are all those things, the more easily it accepts and swallows them, the happier it is. Incomprehensible as it may be, that's the way of the world. And so that bald, horned grotesque LaVey was listened to and believed, so much so that those who still remember Mansfield and worship her (and there are plenty of them, just take a look on the Internet, you'll be surprised), what survives of Jayne Mansfield are not the four or five amusing Hollywood comedies she made, nor her two flamboyant Playboy covers, nor the wilful, dissolute scandals she was involved in, nor her crazy pink mansion on Sunset Boulevard, nor even the bold fact that she was the first star of the modern era to show her tits in a conventional American film, but the dismal legend of her death, so humiliating for a sex symbol like her and created perhaps by a satanist, a pervert, a wizard. This, ironically, caused more of a sensation and brought her more publicity than anything she ever did during a lifetime spent pursuing the limelight, daily renouncing all privacy and what the overwhelming mass of people would call dignity. What a shame she couldn't enjoy the thousands of reports about her and the accident, and see whole pages devoted to her horrible death, like something out of a novel. It made no odds that the coffin in which she was buried was pink: her name was forever swathed in black, the blackness of a fatal, diabolical curse and a sinful life crowned by punishment, a dark road surrounded by mud, and a lovely head separated from its voluptuous body until the end of time. If she hadn't died in that way, with the possibly invented details that so fire the rabble's imagination, she would have been almost completely forgotten. Kennedy wouldn't, obviously, if he'd simply suffered a heart attack in Dallas, but you can be quite sure that he would be remembered infinitely less and with only slight emotion if his name were not immediately associated with being gunned down and with various convoluted, unresolved conspiracy theories. That, in essence, is the Kennedy-Mansfield complex, the fear of having one's life forever marked and distorted by the manner of one's death, the fear that one's whole life will come to be viewed as merely an intermediary stage, a pretext, on the way to the lurid end that will eternally identify us. Mind you, we all run the same risk, even if we're not public figures, but obscure, anonymous, secondary individuals. We are all witnesses to our own story, Jack. You to yours and I to mine.'

  'But not everyone fears such an ending,' I said. 'There are those who desire and seek out theatrical, spectacular deaths, even if, lacking any other recourse, they can only achieve this with words. You have no idea the care many writers have taken to utter a few memorable last words. Although, of course, it's hard to know which will truly be your last word, and more than one writer has blown the opportunity, by being over-hasty and speaking too soon. Then, at the final moment, nothing suitable has come to mind and they've spouted some utter nonsense instead.'

  'Yes, I agree, but it's still a response based on fear. Anyone who yearns to die a memorable death does so because he fears not living up to his reputation or his greatness, whether assigned to him by others or by himself in private—it makes no difference. The person who feels, to use your term, narrative horror, as you believe Dick Dearlove does, is as afraid of someone spoiling his image or the story he's been telling as someone might be who's planning his own brilliant or theatrical and eccentric denouement, it depends on the character of the individual and on the nature of the blot, which some will confuse with a flourish, but death is always a blot. Killing and being killed and committing suicide are not the same thing. Nor is being an executioner, or being mad with despair, or a victim, or being a heroic victim or a foolish one. Obviously, it's never good to die before one's time—and, still worse, foolishly—but the living Jayne Mansfield wouldn't have disapproved of the legend of her death, although she would might well have wished she hadn't worn a wig on that particular car journey. And I don't think your Lorca or that rebellious, provocative Italian filmmaker, Pasolini, would have been entirely displeased with the kind of blot that fell on them, from an aesthetic or, if you like, narrative point of view. They were both of them somewhat exhibitionist, and their memories have benefitted from their unjust, violent deaths, both of which have shades of martyrdom about them, don't you think? In the minds of yokels, that is. You and I know that neither one nor the other consciously sacrificed himself for anything, they were just unlucky'

  Tupra had used the word 'rabble' twice and now he was using the word 'yokel' (or was it 'fool,' I can't quite remember now). 'He can't think much of people,' I thought, 'to use such words so easily and so casually, and with a kind of natural, unaffected scorn. However, in the latter category he's including both the cultivated and the common, from biographers to journalists and sociologists, from men and women of letters to historians, all those people, in short, who view those
two famous murder victims—made even more famous by their murders—as martyrs to a political or even a sexual cause. Reresby clearly doesn't think much of death either, he doesn't see it as anything extraordinary; perhaps that's the reason he asked me why it was that one couldn't go around dealing it out, or maybe he thinks it's just another instance of chance, and he neither denies nor loathes chance, nor does he require explanations for everything, unlike stupid people who need to see signs and connections and links everywhere. It could be that he loathes chance so little that he doesn't mind joining forces with it now and then, and setting himself up as Sir Death with his sword and playing serf to that efficient slave. He must have been a yokel himself once, possibly even for quite a long time.'

  'You don't think much of people, do you?' I said. 'You don't think much of death either, of other people's deaths.'

  Tupra moistened his lips, not with his tongue but with his lips themselves, as if pressing them together would be enough—they were, after all, very large and fleshy and would always have a little saliva on them. Then he took a sip from his glass, and I had the disquieting sense that he was licking his lips. He again offered me some port, and this time I accepted, my palate felt as if it were covered by a communion wafer or a veil, he poured from the bottle until I raised my hand to say 'Enough.'

  'Now you're beginning to get there,' he replied, which again made me think that he was driving or leading me; yes, as long as I was the one demanding an explanation, he was the person doing the leading. A bad defendant and a bad witness. He looked at me smugly from his blue or grey eyes, from his eyelashes shaped like half-moons, which gleamed in the firelight. 'Now you're going to start criticizing me again, asking why I did what I did and all that. You're too much a man of your time, Jack, and that's the worst thing to be, because it's hard if you always feel other people's suffering, there's no room for maneuver when everyone agrees and sees things the same way and gives importance to the same things, and the same things are deemed serious or insignificant. There's no light, no breathing space, no ventilation in unanimity, nor in shared commonplaces. You have to escape from that in order to live better, more comfortably. More honestly too, without feeling trapped in the time in which you were born and in which you'll die, there's nothing more oppressive, nothing so clouds the issue as that particular stamp. Nowadays, enormous importance is given to individual deaths, people make such a drama out of each person who dies, especially if they die a violent death or are murdered; although the subsequent grief or curse doesn't last very long: no one wears mourning any more and there's a reason for that, we're quick to weep but quicker still to forget. I'm talking about our countries, of course, it's not like that in other parts of the world, but what else can they do in a place where death is an everyday occurrence. Here, though, it's a big deal, at least at the moment it happens. So-and-so has died, how dreadful; such-and-such a number of people have been killed in a crash or blown to pieces, how terrible, how vile. The politicians have to rush around attending funerals and burials, taking care not to miss any—intense grief, or is it pride, requires them as ornaments, because they give no consolation nor can they, it's all to do with show, fuss, vanity and rank. The rank of the self-important, super-sensitive living. And yet, when you think about it, what right do we have, what is the point of complaining and making a tragedy out of something that happens to every living creature in order for it to become a dead creature? What is so terrible about something so supremely natural and ordinary? It happens in the best families, as you know, and has for centuries, and in the worst too, of course, at far more frequent intervals. What's more, it happens all the time and we know that perfectly well, even though we pretend to be surprised and frightened: count the dead who are mentioned on any TV news report, read the birth and death announcements in any newspaper, in a single city, Madrid, London, each list is a long one every day of the year; look at the obituaries, and although you'll find far fewer of them, because an infinitesimal minority are deemed to merit one, they're nevertheless there every morning. How many people die every weekend on the roads and how many have died in the innumerable battles that have been waged? The losses haven't always been published throughout history, in fact, almost never. People were more familiar with and more accepting of death, they accepted chance and luck, be it good or bad, they knew they were vulnerable to it at every moment; people came into the world and sometimes disappeared at once, that was normal, the infant mortality rate was extraordinarily high until eighty or even seventy years ago, as was death in childbirth, a woman might bid farewell to her child as soon as she saw its face, always assuming she had the will or the time to do so. Plagues were common and almost any illness could kill, illnesses we know nothing about now and whose names are unfamiliar; there were famines, endless wars, real wars that involved daily fighting, not sporadic engagements like now, and the generals didn't care about the losses, soldiers fell and that was that, they were only individuals to themselves, not even to their families, no family was spared the premature death of at least some of its members, that was the norm; those in power would look grim-faced, then carry out another levy, recruit more troops and send them to the front to continue dying in battle, and almost no one complained. People expected death, Jack, there wasn't so much panic about it, it was neither an insuperable calamity nor a terrible injustice; it was something that could happen and often did. We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last forever. We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword. And we're bound to be cowed when confronted by those who still see death, their own or other people's, as part and parcel of their job, as all in a day's work. When confronted by terrorists, for example, or by drug barons or multinational mafia men. And so it's true, Iago.' I didn't like it when he called me by the name of that troublemaker; it sounded grubby to me, it wasn't a name I wanted to answer to (I, who answered to so many). 'It's important that some of us don't think much of death. Of other people's deaths, as you said, outraged, oh, I noticed despite your neutral tone, it was a good try, but not enough. It's lucky that some of us can step out of our own era and look at things as they used to in more robust times, past and future (because those times will return, I assure you, although I don't know whether you and I will live to see them), so that we don't collectively suffer the fate described by a French poet: Par delicatessen j'ai perdu ma vie.' And he took the trouble to translate these words for me, and in that I saw a remnant of the yokel he had left behind: 'Out of delicacy I lost my life.'