Design of the non

by Javier Marías

  As I said before, this initial feeling of unease came upon me on the first leg of our honeymoon, in Miami, which is a hideous place but has excellent beaches for newlyweds, and got worse in New Orleans and in Mexico and worse still in Havana, and for nearly a year now, since we returned from that trip and inaugurated our home together in that extremely unnatural way, it's continued to grow or rather has become lodged inside me, perhaps inside us both. But the second feeling of unease only appeared in full force towards the end of the trip, that is, only in Havana, where, in a sense, I come from, or, to be more precise, where a quarter of me comes from, for it was there that my maternal grandmother (the mother of Teresa and Juana Aguilera) was born and from there that she came to Madrid as a little girl. It happened in the hotel where we were spending three nights (we didn't have that much money and our stays in each city were only brief), one afternoon when Luisa was taken ill while we were out walking, indeed so ill that we interrupted our walk and came back to the room at once, so that she could lie down. She was shivering and felt slightly nauseous. She literally couldn't stand up. No doubt something she'd eaten had disagreed with her, but we didn't know that for certain then and I immediately wondered if perhaps she'd caught something in Mexico, one of those illnesses to which Europeans are so susceptible, something serious like amoebic dysentery. The unspoken presentiments of disaster that had accompanied me since the wedding ceremony took different forms and one of them (the least hidden, that is, not left entirely unspoken), was the threat of an illness or sudden death overtaking the person with whom I was going to share my life as well as both the concrete and the abstract future, despite my impression that the latter was no more and that my life was already half over; as, perhaps, was our life together. We didn't want to call a doctor immediately in case it passed off of its own accord, and I put her to bed (in our hotel bed, our marriage bed) and left her to go to sleep, as if that might make her better. And she did appear to fall asleep and I remained silent so that she could rest and the best way of keeping silent without growing bored or being tempted to make some noise or speak to her was to go out on to the balcony and watch the outside world, watch the people of Havana passing by, observe how they moved, how they dressed, and listen to the murmur of their voices in the distance. But although I was looking out, my thoughts were still directed inwards, behind me, to the bed that Luisa was lying diagonally across, and so nothing in the outside world really held my attention. I was looking out rather like someone arriving at a party from which he knows the only person who really interests him will be absent, having stayed at home with her husband. That one person was in bed, ill, behind me, watched over by her husband.

  Nevertheless, after a few moments of this looking without seeing, I did pick out one particular person. I picked her out because, during all that time, unlike the others, she hadn't moved or shifted or disappeared from my field of vision, but had stayed on the same spot. She was a woman who, from a distance, looked about thirty and was wearing a yellow blouse with a scoop neck, a white skirt and white high-heeled shoes, and she carried a large black handbag over one arm, like the handbags women in Madrid used to carry when I was a child, big handbags carried over the arm, not over the shoulder the way they carry them now. She was waiting for someone, her attitude was unmistakably that of someone waiting, because every now and then she would walk up and down, just one or two steps, and on the last step she would — quickly, lightly — drag her heel along the ground, in a gesture of suppressed impatience. She didn't lean against the wall, as people who are waiting usually do, to avoid getting in the way of the other people who are passing by and not waiting; she stood in the middle of the pavement, never going beyond those three measured steps that always returned her to the same spot, and so she frequently collided with passers-by; one passer-by said something to her and she responded angrily and threatened him with her voluminous bag. Every now and then she would look behind her, bending one leg and smoothing her tight skirt with one hand, as if fearing that some crease might be spoiling the line of her skirt at the rear, or perhaps she was simply adjusting the elastic of a recalcitrant pair of knickers through the fabric covering them. She didn't look at her watch, she wasn't wearing one, perhaps she was being guided by the hotel clock, somewhere above my head, invisible to me, with rapid glances I hadn't noticed. Perhaps the hotel didn't have a clock facing on to the street and she had no idea of the time. She looked like a mulatto, but from where I was standing, I couldn't be sure.

  Suddenly night fell, almost without warning, as happens in the tropics, and although the number of pedestrians didn't instantly diminish, the loss of light made her seem more solitary to me, more alone and more condemned to wait in vain. The person she was supposed to meet would never arrive. She was standing with her arms crossed, her elbows cupped in her hands, as if, with every second that passed, her arms weighed more heavily, or perhaps it was her handbag that was growing heavier. She had strong legs, strong enough to withstand the wait, legs that seemed to dig into the pavement with their thin, high, stiletto heels, but her legs were so strong, so striking, that they became one with her heels and it was her legs that dug solidly in — like a knife in wet wood — every time she returned to her chosen spot after that minimal movement to right or left. Her heels stuck out over the backs of her shoes. I heard a slight murmur, or perhaps a moan, coming from the bed behind me, from Luisa, who was ill, from my new wife, about whom I was so concerned, who was my chosen task. But I didn't turn my head, because it was a moan made as she slept, one quickly learns to distinguish the sounds made in their sleep by the person one sleeps with. At that moment the woman in the street looked up at the third floor where I was standing and, I think, noticed me for the first time. She peered up as if she were myopic or as if she were looking through grubby contact lenses and she seemed disconcerted, staring up at me, then looking away slightly, then screwing up her eyes to see better and again staring and looking away. Then she raised one arm, the arm without the handbag, in a gesture that neither greeted nor beckoned, I mean it wasn't the way one would beckon to a stranger, it was a gesture of appropriation and recognition, finished off by a swift flourish of the fingers: it was as if, with that gesture of the arm and that rapid flutter of fingers, she was not so much trying to attract my attention as to grab hold of me. She shouted something I couldn't hear because of the distance and I was sure that she was shouting at me. From the movement of her lips I could only make out the first word, and that word was "Hey!', uttered with great indignation, as was the rest of the phrase that failed to reach my ears. As she spoke, she started walking, in order to get nearer, and to do so she had to cross the street and traverse the broad esplanade which, on our side of the road, separated the hotel from the pavement, distancing and protecting it a little from the traffic. When she took more than the few repetitive steps she'd ventured during her wait, I noticed that she walked slowly and with difficulty, as if she were unaccustomed to wearing high heels, or as if her strong legs weren't used to them, or as if her handbag threw her off balance or as if she were dizzy. She walked rather in the way Luisa had walked after being taken ill, when she came into the room and fell on to the bed, where I had then half-undressed her and covered her up (tucking her in despite the heat). But in that uneasy gait of hers you could sense a certain grace too, albeit absent at that moment: when she was barefoot, the mulatto woman would walk elegantly, her skirt would float about her, dashing itself rhythmically against her thighs. My room was in darkness, no one had put on the light when night fell. Luisa was ill and asleep, I hadn't moved from the balcony, I was watching the people of the city and then that woman, who was still stumbling towards me, still shouting words which, now, I could hear:

  "Hey! What you doin' up there?"

  I was surprised when I understood what she was saying, but not so much because she was saying it to me as because of the way she said it, confidently, furiously, like someone ready to settle accounts with the person closest to them or the pers
on they love, who is a source of endless irritation. It wasn't because she felt she'd been being watched by a stranger from the balcony of a hotel intended for foreigners and had come to reproach me for having observed with impunity her fruitless wait, but because, when she looked up, she'd suddenly recognized in me the person for whom she'd been waiting for who knows how long, certainly since long before I'd first spotted her. She was still some way off, having crossed the road, dodging the few cars, not bothering with the traffic lights, and had now reached the edge of the esplanade, where she'd stopped, perhaps to rest her feet and her remarkable legs or to smooth her skirt again, more earnestly now that she could be seen by the person deemed worthy to judge and appreciate the way her skirt fell. She still kept looking up at me and then looking away again, as if she had a slight squint, her eyes kept shifting slightly to my left. Perhaps she'd stopped and stood at some distance in order to make it clear that she was angry and not prepared to meet me once she'd finally found me out, as if she hadn't already suffered or been wronged enough up until only a few minutes before. Then she said other things, all accompanied by that same gesture made with her arm and her mobile fingers, that grasping gesture, as if she were saying: "Come here you" or "You're mine". But her voice was saying - and she had a vibrant, sonorous, unpleasant voice, like that of a television presenter or a politician giving a speech or a teacher in class (although she seemed illiterate):

  "What you doin' up there? You don't see how I been waitin' one hour down here? Why you don't tell me you gone up already?"

  I think that's how she said it, with that slight change in the word order and that odd turn she gave to the tenses, different from the way I, or, I suppose, anyone else from my country would have said it. Although I was still startled and beginning to be afraid that her shouting might waken Luisa who was sleeping behind me, I could see her face more clearly now, the face of a very light-skinned mulatto, perhaps a quarter Black, more evident in her large lips and her rather flat nose than in her skin colour, which was not so very different from that of Luisa, lying on the bed, who'd spent several days tanning herself on the beaches for newlyweds in Miami. The woman had her eyes screwed up but even so they seemed to me to be pale, grey or green or perhaps hazel, but maybe, I thought, she'd had some tinted lenses made, the reason for her deficient vision. In her rage, her nostrils were vehemently flared (which made her look as if she'd been running) and she moved her mouth a lot (I would have been able to read her lips without any difficulty had I had to), grimacing in the way women in my own country do, expressive, that is, of utter scorn. She continued to approach, growing more and more indignant at my lack of response, still repeating the same gesture with her arm, as if she had no other means of expression, just a long bare arm beating the air, her fingers simultaneously darting forth for a moment as if to catch me and drag me towards her, like a claw: "You're mine" or "I kill you".

  "You got no sense? You lost your tongue? Why you don't answer?"

  She was quite close now, she'd taken some ten or twelve steps across the esplanade, enough for her strident voice not only to be heard, but to begin to thunder round the room; enough too, I thought, for her to see me quite clearly, however short-sighted she was, and it therefore seemed certain that I was the person with whom she'd arranged this important meeting, the person who'd worried her with my lateness and had offended her by my silent vigil on the balcony, a vigil that continued to offend her. But I knew no one in Havana, more than that, it was the first time I'd ever been to Havana, on honeymoon with my new wife. I turned round at last and saw Luisa sitting up in bed, her eyes fixed on me but not yet recognizing me or realizing where she was, the feverish eyes of the sick person who wakes up frightened, having received no warning while they slept that they were about to waken. She was sitting up and her bra had shifted to one side as she slept or with the brusque movement she'd just made when she sat up: it had slipped to reveal her shoulder and part of one breast, it must be uncomfortable, in her ill, drowsy state she must have trapped it unknowingly with her own body.

  "What's wrong?" she said apprehensively.

  "Nothing," I said. "Go back to sleep."

  But I didn't dare go over to her and stroke her hair to calm her down properly and help her back to sleep, as I would have done under normal circumstances, because what I didn't dare do at that moment was abandon my post on the balcony, or even take my eyes off that woman who was convinced she had an arrangement to meet me, or to shrink any longer from the abrupt dialogue being demanded of me from the street. It was a shame we spoke the same language and that I understood her, because what was not as yet a dialogue was becoming increasingly violent, perhaps precisely because it wasn't a dialogue.

  "I kill you, you bastard! I swear, I kill you here and now!" the woman was shouting from the street.

  She was shouting this from her position at ground-level, unable to see me, because just at the moment I'd turned round to say a few words to Luisa, the mulatto woman had lost a shoe and fallen over, without hurting herself but instantly dirtying her white skirt. She was shouting: "I kill you", and getting to her feet, she'd taken quite a tumble, her handbag still over her arm - she hadn't let it go for an instant, she wouldn't let go of that bag if they flayed her alive - she was trying to dust herself off or clean her skirt with one hand and she had one foot bare, raised in the air, as if she wanted at all costs to avoid putting it down on the ground, not even the tips of her toes, and thereby dirty the sole of her foot, the foot that the man whom she'd finally found would see, close to, upstairs, and later on, possibly touch. I felt guilty about her, about her wait and her fall and my silence, and guilty too about Luisa, my new wife, who needed me now for the first time since the ceremony, even if only for a moment, the moment it would take to dry the sweat beading her forehead and her shoulders and to adjust or remove her bra so that it didn't cut into her and to talk her back into the sleep that would make her better. I couldn't give her that moment just then, how could I? I had a strong sense of their two presences almost paralyzing and silencing me, one outside and one inside, before my eyes and behind my back, how could I? I felt a duty towards both of them, there must be some mistake, I had no reason to feel guilty towards my wife for anything, apart from a minimal delay at the moment when she needed me to tend to her and calm her, and still less towards an offended stranger, regardless of her conviction that she knew me and that I was the person who had offended her. She was wobbling about trying to put her shoe back on without touching the ground with her bare foot. Her skirt was a little too tight to accomplish this manoeuvre successfully, the bones of her feet were too long, and she wasn't shouting while she was engaged in this, she was merely muttering, you can't pay much attention to other people when you're struggling to regain your composure. She had no option but to put her foot down, where it was instantly dirtied. She lifted it up again as if the ground were contaminated or red hot and brushed off the dust the way Luisa brushed off the dry sand from her skin just before leaving the beach, sometimes when night was already falling; she put her toes into the shoe, into the instep, then, with the forefinger of one hand (the hand not holding the handbag), she adjusted the heelstrap that stuck out beneath the strap on the instep (Luisa's bra strap would still be awry, but I couldn't see it at that moment). Her strong legs stepped firmly again, stamping the pavement as if they had hooves. She gave three more steps without looking up and when she did, when she opened her mouth to insult me or threaten me and began for the nth time to make that prehensile movement, like a lion's claw, the grasping gesture that meant: "You won't get away from me" or "You're mine" or "I'll see you in hell", she left it raised in mid-air, her bare arm frozen in action, like that of an athlete. I saw her newly shaved armpit, she'd shaved it carefully for her date. She glanced again to my left then back at me, glanced to my left and again at me.

  "What is going on?" asked Luisa again from her bed. Her voice was fearful, full of a double fear, internal and external, she was afraid of what was happ
ening to her body, so far from home, and of whatever it was that was going on out there, on the balcony, out in the street, of what was happening to me and not to her, for married couples soon get used to the idea that whatever happens, happens to them both. It was night and our room was still in darkness, she must be feeling so confused that she hadn't even thought to switch on the bedside lamp next to her. We were on an island.