The Man of Feeling

by Javier Marías

  The note was from Dato, who asked me to go to his room without fail, as soon as I got back to the hotel, regardless of the lateness of the hour. It was half past two and I was utterly exhausted, and the benefits of uncertainty had run their course: now I needed to know, and so I went up to Dato’s room. I have rarely seen a man in such a state of contained anxiety as Dato, the former stockbroker with the eighteenth-century hands, in the early hours of that morning. He had been smoking while he waited for me—the ashtray was overflowing—and he was wearing a burgundy red silk dressing gown, although underneath he still had on his shirt and trousers; he had shoes on too, brown shoes (with laces). He looked me up and down several times, doubtless because I was looking absolutely terrible. But it was also as if he were looking at me for the first time and with new eyes, perhaps as I imagine I would have looked at Noguera four years ago if he had been introduced to me then as the future husband of my girlfriend Berta.

  “I trust you will turn up in a more presentable state for the rendezvous I have been asked to make for you tomorrow morning. Would you like something to drink?” And with that, he placed one hand on the handle of the small fridge or minibar in his room. He didn’t even give me time to shake my head. “No, I suspect not, given your condition. Some mishap?”

  I looked down at my jacket.

  “I didn’t have a chance to change, but it was nothing very serious. What’s wrong?”

  “You probably know that better than I do. It looks as if you’re going to relieve me completely of my role as companion, perhaps deprive me of a job as well.” The man speaking was no longer the indispensable and circumspect Dato, the silent presence at our suppers and conversations and walks and shopping expeditions, he was once again the man I had met on his own in the hotel bar: lively, frivolous, disrespectful, although now he was not smiling (he was simultaneously vivacious and somber).

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about? Why weren’t you all there at the theater?”

  Dato lit another cigarette and immediately tapped it with one finger to get rid of some as yet non-existent ash. He was agitated, but, as I said, still very contained.

  “I don’t know, not that it matters. I have no idea what’s going on, for the first time in many years, I simply don’t know. But don’t concern yourself on my account, there’s no real danger of my losing my job. On the contrary, I will probably prove to be even more essential, now I’ll just have the other half to take care of. As I told you once before, dealing with a married couple is like dealing with one very contradictory and forgetful person. Now it will be different, perhaps easier, a man alone and without contradictions,” and he said again: “a man alone.”

  I said nothing. Dato was smoking. Suddenly, his face lit up (slightly) and his protuberant gums appeared:

  “Unless, of course, I am wrong to assume that I know what your intentions are. If tomorrow, when you go to your rendezvous, you merely have a bit of fun, enjoy yourself and then leave things as they are, as they have always been … that, if you will allow me, is what I would recommend. It would be for the best, not perhaps for Natalia or for you, but certainly for me and for Señor Manur. And probably for the two of you as well, although I doubt that you’ll believe me.”

  “What appointment are you talking about? Can you just tell me what you’re talking about? Where’s Natalia?”

  On this occasion, despite once again making the mistake of asking more than one question at a time, Dato answered all of them.

  “Natalia is in her room, sleeping with Señor Manur. The reason I asked you to come and see me is to give you a message from her. She told me to reserve a room in this hotel,” as he spoke, he picked up a card from the table with two fingers and handed it to me, “and she wants you to go there with her at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. She won’t be able to see you before, I mean, at breakfast and everything. I presume it is a romantic assignation,” and he did not make the slightest pause between this comment and what he went on to say, as if he wanted his first comment to be heard, but to go unnoticed. “She also told me to congratulate you on your performance tonight. She is sure, she says, that it was a great success. She is very sorry that she could not be there.”

  I looked at the name and address of the hotel. It was in the same street, almost opposite I seemed to remember—a modest place, as if it had been the first one that Natalia Manur had seen when she walked out of our hotel.

  “Thank you,” I said. Then I hesitated: “Listen, Dato, I assume Señor Manur doesn’t know anything about this.”

  Dato stubbed out his cigarette without finishing it, with an air of irritation and with a despair that was still new.

  “What do you think? You spoke to him this morning, you met him, didn’t you? That had never happened before.”

  “What had never happened before?”

  “I told you that Natalia Manur had no lovers.”

  Before Dato I was incapable of blushing.

  “You told me that you only kept Señor Manur informed of what you knew and nothing else, and that you didn’t know if she had or had ever had any lovers. Tomorrow, on the other hand,” I still did not blush, “tomorrow she might have a lover, about whom you will be informed. I don’t know if you intend telling Manur, but it seems to me that, with a man like him, there is a great difference between telling him before and telling him afterwards.”

  Dato took his pack of cigarettes out of his dressing gown pocket and, with those slenderest of fingers, which looked as flammable as the paper or the match, he lit another one.

  “My dear sir, you don’t seem to understand, or perhaps you are actually going to do what I have advised you to do, but which I am assuming you won’t. If Natalia Manur goes to that rendezvous tomorrow and you go too, if you do not restrict yourself, as I have suggested, to having a bit of fun and being more or less satisfied with that, then there will be no need for me to say anything that night to Señor Manur. She won’t come back and he will know that she won’t come back. I don’t know at what point in the small hours he will give in and admit it (that is when he will come to me), but he will have understood before day breaks. It is only right that this time, when it is for real, that she should not have to put up with his scenes. I will do that.” He fell silent for a moment and breathed the smoke from his cigarette out through his nostrils, as if he were trying to disguise a sigh. Then he said: “Don’t you see? You have been chosen.”

  I have heard nothing more of Dato since that stay in Madrid, I have not even been able to imagine his face during the four years that have passed between the events I am recounting and this morning. Today I can see him clearly again, although I know that, over the next few days, his mysterious, ageless features will inevitably fade again. I can clearly see his curly hair and his bulging eyes, his tiny hands and his rubbery gums, his lace-up shoes and his burgundy red silk dressing gown (I can see especially those minute hands that will no longer pick up the change from bills paid for by his mistress, and, who knows, perhaps it was the very disinterestedness of that gesture that tipped the balance in her favor at that point). I can see too his scornful expression when, as I was leaving the room and turned to ask him why he did not try to stop that rendezvous, that inauguration, why he favored Natalia Manur over her husband, he replied in a hoarse, rusty voice, half-concealed by a mouthful of unexhaled smoke:

  “It’s hard to know whom one favors by an action or by an omission, but one can also tire of having no preferences at all.”

  Just as that was the last time I heard Dato speak, so five o’clock in the afternoon of the following day was the first time that I saw Natalia Manur without her companion, who—obedient, venal, divided, but also subject to his choices—did not, in fact, follow us that afternoon of green- and orange-tinged clouds and high winds, when Natalia Manur and I walked into the rented room in that rather sordid hotel because we had nowhere else to go in the city which had once been both hers and mine. I closed the door and, with silent ardor, almost with
out knowing I was doing so, rained down kisses upon her face, as if I were in a hurry to touch her soul. I kissed her pale cheeks, her firm forehead, her heavy eyelids, her large, pale lips. And, almost without knowing what was happening, she felt herself lifted up by my powerful embrace, as if I were launching a wave over her head which would overwhelm her with its mere passing.

  WHEN YOU DIE, I WILL TRULY mourn you. I will approach your transfigured face to plant desperate kisses on your lips in one last effort, full of arrogance and faith, to return you to the world that has rendered you redundant. I will feel that my own life bears a wound and will consider my own history to have split in two by that final, definitive moment of yours. I will tenderly close your surprised, reluctant eyes and I will watch over your white, mutant body all through the night and into the pointless dawn that will never have known you. I will remove your pillow and the damp sheets. Incapable of conceiving of life without your daily presence and seeing you lying there, lifeless, I will want to rush headlong after you. I will visit your tomb and, alone in the cemetery, having climbed up the steep hill and having looked at you, lovingly, wearily, through the inscribed stone, I will talk to you. I will see my own death foretold in yours, I will look at my own photo and, recognizing myself in your stiff features, I will cease to believe in the reality of your extinction because it gives body and credibility to my own. For no one is capable of imagining their own death.

  MANUR WAITED FOUR DAYS before beginning to die, that is, before trying to kill himself with the gun that he owned and which he dared to carry with him over borders when he crossed them by train; and that was the only time—until today—when I ran the risk of losing Natalia Manur and had to beg her in that hotel room and say to her, as I did in my dream: “I do not want to die like a fool.” But she wanted to be by his side while he was recovering and she did, in fact, return to his side and was with him during the three weeks that it took for him not to recover, but to die. That at first apparently failed attempt took place while I was on stage at the Teatro de la Zarzuela playing the role of Cassio in Verdi’s Otello for the third and last time in Madrid and while Natalia was gazing admiringly up at me from her seat in the packed stalls. When we found out, on returning very late from our private celebration, Manur was already sleeping in a hospital and everything seemed to indicate that he would live. They had found him five hours earlier, immediately after the shot was fired: a couple—possibly the couple from Cuba or the Canary Islands—got out on the wrong floor: they had been playing on the elevators after consuming a variety of cocktails in the bar downstairs. The woman, who had the key in her handbag, tried in vain to open the door to what they believed to be their room; he, impatient with what he took to be either her excessive clumsiness or some new jape on her part, grabbed the key from her and, in the midst of their giggles and their fruitless grappling with the door to Manur’s room, they were startled to hear the clear sound of a gunshot inside. Alerted by the couple, the night porter in turn informed the manager, who arrived at the door bearing the pass key and accompanied by three assistants. Also present was Dato, who had been notified at once. This group could do nothing to prevent the tipsy couple following in their footsteps in the midst of loud exclamations and guffaws of laughter. After knocking and receiving no reply, they opened the door and went inside, where they found Manur on the floor at the foot of an armchair, from which he had doubtless fallen after the impact. He was sitting with his back against the edge of the seat, the tails of his jacket all rumpled. The breeze was buffeting the net curtains, which looked blue in the early evening dark. One light was on, in the bathroom, projecting an illuminated rectangle onto the floor. Manur was not inside that rectangle. He was dressed as if to go out. He was wearing the glasses which, earlier, I had not been sure he would wear or not. He had the gun in his hand—his index finger still on the trigger—and a hole in his chest. Blood was soaking his shirt, jacket and tie. Like a traveling salesman.

  His hand had wavered and the bullet intended for his heart had pierced his left lung instead, without harming any vital organ. Unless, of course, his hand had held firm and he had wounded what he meant to wound, although, in that case, he ran the risk of a fatal deviation. They thought at first that Manur would live, but this did not turn out to be the case. I know nothing about medicine or wounds or weapons or bullets (indeed, I understand almost nothing outside my own profession), but it was explained to me that not only are bullets usually dirty—bullets are dirty, it seems—but they carry with them as they enter the body the fragment of clothing which they pierce and drive inwards, and clothing always contains bacteria which, if the doctor in charge of the operation is not sufficiently skilled and conscientious or is simply unlucky, can produce extremely serious infections which sometimes prove fatal: and that is all Natalia said when she told me later what had happened to Manur. (Perhaps, if he had not taken pains to keep his tie straight at the moment he fired the shot, the fragment of cloth that penetrated his lung, causing the fatal infection, could have come from the green tie onto which, in my presence, he had spilled a drop of coffee a few days before, but it is impossible to know whether it was or not, because no one will now remember—if, indeed, anyone noticed—what exactly he was wearing when he shot himself; it also occurs to me that perhaps Manur wanted to die, not immediately but with Natalia by his side—the incarnation of his life—and that he had not missed the target at all, but had aimed accurately, having taken care beforehand, however, to make sure that the bullet was dirty: who knows, perhaps he had conscientiously soiled and smeared it the previous night with rubbish from some trashcan he had walked past before the insatiable garbage trucks of the city of Madrid began their devouring work.) He died, as I said, three weeks after the attempt (which at that point, I suppose, ceased to be an attempt) and Natalia Manur was by his side until the last moment. (She saw him die and has never spoken to me about his death or about those three weeks, of which I know nothing.) I cancelled a song recital in Lisbon programmed for some days later and returned to Barcelona two days after that shot was fired in the luxury hotel bedroom or—which comes to the same thing—the morning after Natalia had abandoned our second hotel, in which, therefore, if I am not mistaken, I spent only one night without her. (I think I felt that I should start preparing Berta for when—once Manur had either recovered or died—Natalia decided to come looking for me again and returned to my side. But that thought did not appear in my dream.)

  I did not see him, I mean, I did not see Manur bloodied or bandaged or convalescent or dying. Nor, of course, did I see him dead. I have always believed that he made a mistake, that despotic man who, at first sight, seemed incapable of making mistakes and nevertheless made so many. I don’t know what that mistake was, though, and I only, in fact, know what Dato told Natalia and what she told me: that Manur spent the first three days of his solitude carrying out, unaltered, the activities he had planned before his discovery on the night (or perhaps the dawn) following my première. According to Dato, he reacted very calmly at first, contrary to what one would expect and contrary to how he usually reacted to such alarms, false or at least foreseeable. He did not even try to get his secretary to tell him where we were meeting, which was, of course, almost immediately opposite his hotel. Dato said—so Natalia told me—that he seemed absorbed, almost indifferent and, above all, showed not the slightest desire to talk about her departure, nor even to complain. Dato did say, however (though Dato might have been lying about this and about everything, as anyone might when recounting something that only he knows or claims to know), that the only strange behavior he noticed was that, on two of those evenings, Manur turned on the television and watched for a long time, something unheard-of in a man as restless and active as Señor Manur (he watched a game show and a soccer match involving Real Madrid). The evening or night on which he attempted to kill himself and indeed later succeeded in doing so was preceded by a normal working day—which, in his case, meant a day of intense activity—nor did he make any specia
l arrangements or try to resolve all the things that had taken him to Madrid in the first place. There were still many matters pending and he had even made two appointments for the following morning, in theory, the penultimate day of his stay in the city. There was absolutely nothing—Dato said—in the previous seventy-two hours or on the actual day of the attempt that would have indicated to anyone what his intentions were. He may not have had any intentions. Manur may have returned to his room as the day was beginning to draw to a close and, worn out, he may have lain down, fully clothed, on the double bed, having first placed his green fedora on the bedspread beside him, doubtless unaware of the superstition that says that you should never put your hat down on the bed. It may be that after lying down for ten or fifteen minutes, he picked up the remote control and watched television alone, as I used to watch it with Berta when I came back to Barcelona from one of my trips and as, in recent weeks, Natalia had endlessly done in our latest luxury rooms in the great capitals of the world where I was singing. It may be that on that evening or night there were no game shows or soccer matches. It may be that Manur then got up and opened the wardrobe in order to change his clothes or to put on a dressing gown which, like Dato’s, would be made of silk, but, unlike the one I saw Dato wearing, it would probably be coffee-colored or green, Señor Manur’s favorite colors, at least according to the indelible image or idea of him I have been left with. But perhaps he did not get as far as changing his clothes or putting on that dressing gown, because in that wardrobe he would have seen, as I saw today in the wardrobes here, many of the clothes left behind by Natalia Manur, who arrived in the second, sordid hotel immediately opposite with only the bare essentials in the medium-sized, expandable suitcase which, for four days, I saw lying on the floor of our room and which she still owns and which she took away with her this morning. Perhaps Manur would have touched those clothes with his slightly plump fingers, he would probably have kissed them with his thick lips or have rubbed his coarse features against the perfumed, lifeless material, and a slight growth of beard (he will have to shave again tonight, if he intends going out) prevents the material from sliding smoothly over his cheeks. Manur watches the evening fall: he opens the balcony door so that he can get a better view of precisely how the evening falls, and a spring-like air, unlike that in his own country, slightly stirs the net curtains which the darkness has not yet tinged with blue and which would have been identical to those I had in my room, although I, on the other hand, did not have a double bed, but two singles with a rug between them. Manur puts on his glasses and turns to glance at the television which has nothing of interest to offer him; then he looks outside again: the Madrid sky, a plane in which I will no longer be afraid to fly, the street, the square, the women going out all dressed up, the cars in their many colors. This is not his country. His cognac-colored eyes stare out calmly and deliberately through his glasses: they no longer skim rapidly over or feel flattered by the things of the world. Manur turns off the television and switches on the light in the bathroom, in whose mirror he catches a fleeting glimpse of himself—his robust self—but he does not stop. He smoothes his few hairs without realizing that he is doing so. He urinates with the door open, he still has his jacket on. He goes back into the room, he watches the evening as it falls. He sits down and waits for night to come. He does not smell of anything. My day is over and I feel sleepy, I wonder what I will dream about tonight when I put down this pen and go to bed alone. My consciousness is accustomed to remaining alert (gennaio, agosto, novembre). Manur looks at his hand in the shadows. Then, sitting down, dressed to go out, he feels a desire to destroy himself. My hand is in the shadows. But don’t worry, I would be incapable of following his example.