The Man of Feeling

by Javier Marías

  I can still remember perfectly how she listened to me as she lay on the bed in that hotel bedroom: she was barefoot but still dressed, leaning on her elbows and with her legs bent; her grey skirt had ridden up slightly to reveal part of her thigh; her straight, glossy brown hair was tilted away from me; and her sweet, grave, ironic gaze was so intent on my incessant lips that it made me feel as if I were only my lips, and that my lips were solely responsible for creating whatever emerged from them.

  “And what if I die first?”

  “Anything is possible,” I replied at once. But I think I did so in order to disguise or to postpone a little (I did it to gain time) the only other normal and admissible answer that immediately followed, the one she was waiting for, as would any mortal lying as she was, at that moment, on that bed: “But your death would also be mine.” “But your death would also be mine,” I said to this same woman and, just as happens in opera, I repeated these same words several times in this morning’s dream.

  MY PROFESSION OFTEN OBLIGES ME to lead a very solitary life in the great capitals of the world, and four years ago, Madrid, the city in which I spent much of my childhood and much of my adolescence, was no exception. Indeed, after a long period without visiting it, few cities I have been to on my numerous trips abroad have seemed to me sadder or more solitary. More even than English cities, which are the worst in the world, the most miserable and the most hostile; more even than those of East Germany, which are so disciplined and so deadened that to walk down the street whistling has a cataclysmic effect; more even than those of Switzerland, which are at least clean and quiet and give free rein to the imagination precisely because they say nothing.

  Madrid, on the other hand, seems in a hurry to say everything, as if it were aware that the only way it can win over the traveler is through unchecked noise and vehemence. It does not, therefore, allow for any long-term expectations, any reticence or reserve, nor does it allow the visitor (not to mention the perpetually harassed resident) the smallest imaginative or imaginary hope that anything more might exist—hidden, unexpressed, omitted or merely contingent—than what is brazenly offered to him as soon as he steps out along its dirty, suffocating streets. Madrid is rustic and talkative and lacks all mystery, and there is nothing so sad or so solitary as a city with no apparent enigma or even the appearance of an enigma, there is nothing so dissuasive, nothing so oppressive to a visitor. I, both in my dream and four years ago, was a visitor to this city despite having lived in it and in its environs when I was no more than a child and entirely dependent on my godfather, who took me in and moved me there from Barcelona when my mother died. (I was for many years what is known as a poor relation: I was quite literally that, and it was then that I lived in Madrid. On the other hand, at the time, four years ago, I had long since ceased to be a poor relation and was making a good living, but, given my prolonged absence and the minimal contact I had had with my former benefactor since my emancipation, I was just as much a visitor to Madrid as I had been to Venice and Milan and Edinburgh a few weeks earlier.)

  As I said, I was taken there and am still taken to all these cities by my profession, which, contrary to popular belief, is one of the saddest and most solitary of professions—people only ever see us on stage, on record covers, on posters and in the occasional televised gala performance: that is, always in full make-up. The truth is that, in essence, we are not so very different from traveling salesmen, except, of course, that profession is slowly dying out and is in danger of disappearing altogether, doubtless because the people in charge of large companies, though, on the whole, highly pragmatic individuals not known for their humanitarianism, have realized that no one can lead such a hard, disparate life. I have known traveling salesmen who have ended up in mental hospitals, or have murdered a would-be customer, or committed suicide in a luxury hotel, knowing that their unusual excesses (indoor swimming pool, sauna, massages, cocktails, but, above all, the dry-cleaning bill) would be vainly deducted from a posthumous salary that they had taken good care to overspend and which no one would notice anyway. At least they would die with their suit pressed.

  Opera singers always stay in luxury hotels and our excesses are neither unusual nor excessive, but rather the norm and what is required, yet our life in the city where we have come to work is not so very different from that of a traveling salesman. In every hotel in which I have stayed—in every hotel, therefore, in which there was a singer—there was at least one traveling salesman who, during my sojourn, slashed his wrists in a bubble bath or ruthlessly knifed a bellboy, performed a striptease in the foyer, set fire to a carpet, used the fire extinguisher to smash the mirrors in his luxury suite or, in the elevator, fondled the wife of a member of some government. And before or after such an outburst, I have always identified with some detail, some characteristic, some gesture of utter weariness which I had noticed in the salesman when we coincided in the elevator late at night, tie dishevelled and eyes docile; in a shared, sideways glance of patience and defeat; in the discreet way we smoothed our hair or mopped our brow with a handkerchief; in the unoriginal manner of their suicide. I have on occasion found myself in the company of just such a moribund traveling salesman in the hotel bar, perched on stools a few yards apart, letting another already dead hour pass in that area which is always the first place you seek out as soon as you move in, so as to have a third refuge or support (the first is your room, the foyer is the second) to protect us or guard us from having to go straight out into the world, into the new, unknown and unknowing city, where nothing needs us and where we are ignored by everything. On such occasions, however, if the salesman has happened to find out what or who I am, he has not regarded me as I have him, as an equal or as a fellow sufferer, but with envy and resentment. Indeed, even if they didn’t find out: my clothes are better, my self-confidence more apparent, my way of holding my glass more nonchalant, my legs always loosely crossed, the handkerchief with which I dab my forehead is clean and neatly folded and possibly colorful, while his is crumpled and dirty and invariably white; and his brow more furrowed. The difference has less to do with the degree of fame (non-existent in his case) or an awareness of the prestige to be gained by the exercise of our respective professions than with our familiarity with a certain type of terrain: thus while the traveling salesman is only staying in a luxury hotel out of extreme despair and cannot but feel himself to be an intruder—a poor relation whose admittance there is an exception, for there he will give full rein to his disquiet or else celebrate his own death—I am an artist and a man of the world and I am there because of my work, my despair is either latent or merely in the incubating stage, and I cannot see my own presence in that place as a transgression or an abuse of trust or even as a challenge, but rather as merely routine; to me, my presence there does not, as it does for him, have either a symbolic meaning or the character of an ultimatum. It is in no way a cry for help, as it is in his case. Nor does it portend anything. However, this has not prevented me from occasionally seeing in the destroyed or potentially self-destroying traveling salesman a shadow or an anticipation of what awaits me. He is at the end of a sad, solitary life, while the opera singer has still not reached the end of his for the simple reason that he is never quite as convinced as the traveling salesman that this life of his is, in fact, sad and solitary. The greasepaint makes him less clear-sighted.

  But, notwithstanding all these differences, I say again that life in the big cities is very similar for both professions. We opera singers arrive in a place: we are met at the hotel (although not always, and, of course, never at the airport or the station) and we are mildly feted on the first night by the organizers (that is, by the impresarios, by the contracting party who pretend to have invited us). All the honors and almost all the niceties end there, because from the next day onwards we begin a period of one or two or even three weeks during which we have strict obligations to fulfill, and all we do is rehearse, snack, rehearse and sleep, barely departing from the route taken between hotel
and rehearsal hall or, if making a recording, the studio. Bearing in mind that impresarios always judge that they are doing us a great favor by arranging for the two places to be close to each other, the routes we take through the cities we visit are often only a few hundred yards long (unless the existence of an old friend in the locality causes us to deviate or if, out of rebelliousness or curiosity, we propose other routes). I am not a conformist, but, rather, an exception, for I have colleagues for whom an immense city with thousands of inhabitants consists of one or two or three streets which they travel only on foot. When you go to a place to work, you don’t feel like visiting it; on the contrary, what we opera singers try to do is forget that we are in a different place from the one we’ve just been to, in the hope that we will avoid a geographical (as well as, in our case, linguistic) schizophrenia, which could lead us to the same crazed, criminal or suicidal end as that of so many traveling salesmen. To the great good fortune of most of us singers, one luxury hotel is always much like any other luxury hotel, and one recording studio or rehearsal hall is much like any other recording studio or rehearsal hall, and, ultimately, one cheering, applauding audience is much like any other audience who respond in more or less the same way, so much so that many of my colleagues manage to persuade themselves—intermittently—that every time they leave home and go off to work in another country or another town, the country or town in question does not vary, but is always the same. By means of this fiction, they try to convince themselves that they are not completely abnormal, itinerant people, that they are no different, for example, from university teachers who live in a capital city but teach in a provincial town, cramming all their classes into two days, or soccer players, who are only away on Saturdays and Sundays (and international soccer players on occasional Wednesdays), but that they are, on the other hand, quite different from professional golfers and lecturers, tennis champions, bullfighters during the season, and traveling salesmen.

  When we stay in cities, therefore, we generally try—and even if we didn’t, things couldn’t easily be different—to deal only with those in our own profession: the other performers in the opera in which we are going to appear, the members of the chorus (if there is one), the extras, and the orchestra, all of whom are sufficiently much of a muchness everywhere for them likewise not to underline for us the unfortunate and troubling fact that we find ourselves in a place which is not at all the same place we were in a few days ago or even a few weeks or months or years ago. But the problem with carrying this illusion through to its logical consequences lies in the fact that, were the place really the same on all occasions (as we try to pretend in our conscious mind), we would surely, in that case, have made friends there, and would feel as if it were our second home; more than that, we would actually have a second home there and would not be staying in a hotel. But since this is not the case, our lives, despite all the efforts of our imagination and all the conveniences, despite all the money we earn, despite the bouquets, the applause, the ovations and the acclaim, are ultimately just like those of traveling salesmen—who, however, are becoming extinct—at least during each of our sad and solitary sojourns in the great capitals of the world. And our lives are one long sojourn.

  But I am not like most singers. After the long, unsatisfactory and often irritating rehearsals, the last thing I want is the company of my colleagues and of the members of the orchestra (first violin and conductor included), not just because staying with them is in many ways an unconscious prolongation of work, but because you really cannot talk to them about anything else but work or about the world surrounding work, which means music or the world of music, and I have never seen the point of talking about music, it has always struck me as either exhausting and arid or frustrating and stupid. Either you talk about the technical aspects, which is exhausting and arid, or you talk in sentimental terms, which is just frustrating and stupid, mere chatter. Indeed, music aside, my colleagues’ conversation is no better than that of office workers, because they have the souls of office workers. Besides, unlike most of them, I enjoy the feeling that I am in a new and unfamiliar city; going into public places and being aware that the people there speak a language I know only imperfectly or not at all; studying the clothes and hats (though nowadays one sees fewer of the latter) that the good citizens choose to wear in the street; finding out if shops are fall or empty during office hours; seeing how the news is treated in the newspapers; looking at certain examples of domestic architecture that one can only find in that particular part of the world; noting the typefaces that predominate in shop signs (and reading these like a savage, understanding nothing); scrutinizing the faces in the metro and on the busses which I frequent for that very reason; picking out particular faces and wondering whether I might or might not meet them elsewhere; deliberately getting lost in parts of the city where I have already learned to find my way, that is, with map in hand if I need it; observing the inimitable passing of each languishing day at each point on the globe and the uncertain and variable instant when the lights are lit; setting foot in places where our feet leave no trace, on the luminous asphalt of the morning or on some dusty, ancient stone pavement illuminated by a single street lamp as evening falls; visiting bars full of indistinguishable, blithely insignificant murmurings that cover and erase everything; mingling with the people in the white streets of the south or in the grey avenues of the north at the declining hour when people are going out for a stroll or coming home from work, that brief respite; seeing how the women go out in the evening or perhaps at night, all dressed up, and seeing the cars in their many colors waiting for them; imagining the parties they are going to; wasting time. And in each city I visit I would like to meet people, to meet those smartly dressed women, who are perhaps climbing into their glossy, impeccable cars to drive to the opera to hear León de Nápoles: to go and see me.

  Now that I am reasonably famous, because I appear now and then on the televisions of the world, I usually get to know someone or other, albeit superficially, wherever I go; such people, however, are nearly always admirers, whose questions and sameness bore me. But four years ago, when I still had to make do with roles like Spoletta, Trabuco, Dancaïro and even Monostatos (it’s a good role, but I hated having to make myself up like a bald negro), I found it impossible to form any kind of relationship with the inhabitants of those cities, who would merely look at me the way one looks at an advertisement for a performance in a foreign newspaper which one reads at home. That is why, despite my inclinations, curiosity and non-conformity, I would often have to give in and lead the same kind of monotonous, lax and rather unimaginative life led by other singers. I found it exasperating not being able to blend in with the local population except on a purely physical and incidental level (sharing the same space or, at most, rubbing shoulders with them in various forms of public transport), not being able to take part in the deals and the desires being cooked up right there in front of me, nor in the determined, almost mechanical movements—denoting an objective, a plan, a job, haste—of the passers-by and the drivers who were continually passing before my gaze wherever I was in the city and whenever I chose to go on one of my rambles. It irritated me not to be one of them; it irritated me not being able to share their souls. Even the hotel foyer, by definition plagued with strangers, with people—like me—who were just passing through, filled me with infinite unease and envy: everyone, even those who clearly are just waiting, resting or killing time, gives the impression that they know exactly what they want, they all seem so busy, so determined, as if they were just about to set off to some place whose existence takes on real meaning because it is expecting them, so absorbed are they in their present or imminent or dreamed-of or planned activities that my awareness of my own dead hours used to depress me immensely, so much so that during my stays in hotels, I came to enjoy only the moment in the morning when I would stride across the foyer carrying a file full of scores and notes in order to step out into the street and head for the rehearsal hall, plus the few m
inutes that it took me to get there: the only moment in the day when my appearance and my gait and my gestures could become assimilated with those of everyone else, the only moment when I too, like those fortunate settled citizens, was obliged to direct my feet, I had no other option, towards a particular, pre-established place, a place—even more importantly—arranged beforehand by members (the opera impresarios) of that mysterious and elusive community. En route I would walk quickly and determinedly, head up and eyes front, stopping only for the traffic lights, not noticing faces or buildings, immersed in the self-absorbed, anonymous, ever-changing morning flood of people, knowing—for once—where I was going and where I had to go. I really savored that moment, as brief as it was coveted, in which I could at last pass among the crowd as one of them and, consequently, feel no desire to know anyone I did not already know. For one takes it for granted that someone who lives in a city all the time has—for good or ill, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily—filled his quota of acquaintances.

  In my leisure time, however, once I had returned to the hotel and, above all, when, after rehearsals, I had already spent a long time wandering fruitlessly through the city—always feeling an integral part of what in the great capitals of the world is known as the floating population—the only possibility remaining to me of meeting someone, even another foreigner or visitor like myself, was in the foyer or bar of the hotel, where, as I have said, the only person generally available and eager to strike up some sort of conversation (with no monetary or sexual interest involved, for, with the odd exception, these are not the best conduits to a sharing of souls) was the traveling salesman who, on those particular dates, has decided to lodge in that particular luxury hotel in order to prove fleetingly that, even far from home and among those who travel, there exist other lives in which suits are always pressed, and thus be confirmed in his utter despair and reaffirmed in his rebellion or death.