Design of the non

by Javier Marías

  On one of her visits we went out to supper with a friend of my father's - younger than him and older than me by some fifteen years - who was in Geneva for one night, on his way to Lausanne or Lucerne or Lugano, and who, I imagined, had murky or dirty dealings in all four cities; he was an influential man, a shadowy figure as my father had been when he worked at the Prado, since Professor Villalobos (for that's his name) is best known (though only to a literate public) for his studies of eighteenth-century Spanish painting and architecture and for his childish behaviour. He's known to an even smaller but less literate public as one of the chief academic and political intriguers in the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Rome, Milan, Strasbourg and even Brussels (and Geneva; much to his annoyance he still has no power in Germany or England). As one would expect in such an exalted and busy personage, he has, over the years, touched on a wide variety of fields of study and Ranz has always claimed to feel great respect for his brief but illuminating study of the Casa del Principe at El Escorial, which, I'm afraid, I've never read and never will. This professor lives in Catalonia, which is enough of an excuse for him not to visit my father whenever he comes to Madrid, having so many other things to do in the kingdom's capital city. But the two of them often exchange brief letters, those from Professor Villalobos (which Ranz, amused, has sometimes allowed me to read) being written in a deliberately antiquated, ornate prose style which, on occasions, also infects his diction or rather his loquacity: he's the sort of man who, confronted by some obstacle or snag, would never say, for example, "We're in a mess", rather 'This is a fine pickle we're in." I'd seen him only rarely, but one Monday afternoon (intriguers never travel at weekends) he phoned me, at the suggestion of my father (as the high-ranking Spanish official with the dancing, silicon-enhanced wife had done in New York), hoping not to have to languish alone in his hotel room that night (when evening falls, local intriguers return to their homes to rest after the intrigues of the day, leaving the foreign intriguer to his own devices). Although I wasn't too pleased at the idea of sacrificing one of my nights with Luisa, we didn't in fact have anything planned for that night beyond a tacit agreement to spend it together, and within marriage such agreements can be broken without serious consequences.

  Villalobos didn't just want to invite us to supper, he wanted to impress us too, Luisa more than me perhaps, or perhaps just in a different way. He was impertinent, as was apparently his habit, criticizing the profession I'd chosen or, rather, drifted into. "Where are you going with this job?" he said, a superior sneer on his moist, fleshy lips (they were naturally moist, but he'd also drunk a lot of wine), as if he were my father (one's father's friends seem to think that they inherit from the former their way of treating their children). He did not, on the other hand, reproach Luisa with having chosen the wrong path, perhaps because she was no longer working as a translator or perhaps because, deep down, he saw no reason why she should choose any path at all. He was pleasant, smug, nominally wise, coquettish, pedantic and affable, he took pride in being shocked at nothing, in knowing untransmittable secrets and knowing all there was to know about everything that goes on in the world, be it yesterday or four centuries ago. Over dessert he fell silent for several minutes, as if overcome by weariness after all the frenzy and excitement or as if he'd plunged into dark thoughts, perhaps he was unhappy and was suddenly reminded of this. It was clear that he was a man of talent, being able to move so swiftly from smugness to depression without appearing false or insincere. It was as if he'd said: "What does it all matter anyway?" The conversation faltered (he'd taken it upon himself to do most of the talking) while his gaze grew absent and the hand holding the spoon with which he was eating his raspberry tart remained poised in mid-air.

  "Is anything wrong?" Luisa asked him, touching his arm.

  Professor Villalobos dropped his hand and spooned up another piece of tart before replying, as if some physical movement was necessary before he could emerge from his state of inner stupor.

  "No, nothing, nothing. What could possibly be wrong, my dear?" And he pretended that his reverie had been a pretence. Then he recovered his composure and added, with a rhetorical gesture of his spoon: "Your father-in-law wasn't exaggerating when he told me about you. Your merest wish is my command."

  He'd had a lot to drink. Luisa gave a short, mechanical laugh and said:

  "How long have you known him?"

  "Ranz? Since before his son, your new husband, was born." This wasn't something I knew about with any exactitude, we tend not to be interested in anything that happened before we were born, in how the friendships that preceded our existence were formed. Addressing me, the professor, who always presumed to be better informed than anyone else about everything, added: "Do you know, I even knew your mother and your Aunt Teresa before he did. My father, who was a doctor, used to visit your grandfather when he came to Madrid. I sometimes went with him and I knew them all slightly, although, to be honest, I only knew your father by sight then. I bet you don't know what your grandfather died of."

  "From a heart attack, I think," I replied. "I don't know exactly, he died a short while before I was born, it's one of those things one tends not to take an interest in."

  "A great mistake," said the professor, "You should take an interest in everything, you won't get anywhere with that apathetic attitude. In medical terms, yes, he did die of a heart attack, but in artistic terms, which is how one really dies and what really counts, he died of worry, anxiety and fear, and all because of your father. Every illness is caused by something which is not an illness." As well as his untransmittable secrets, Professor Villalobos enjoyed these little theatrical effects when recounting something, whether secret or not.

  "Because of my father? Why because of my father?"

  "From the moment your Aunt Teresa died shortly after marrying him, your grandfather conceived an utter dread of him. He was as frightened of him as he was of the Devil himself, a superstitious fear. I take it you know what happened."

  The professor didn't beat about the bush the way Custardoy had done. He came straight to the point, he had no doubts whatsoever about the value of knowing about everything, or that knowledge could ever harm anyone, and that if it did then you just had to lump it. I thought then — in an intuitive flash - that it was in fact time for me to know, as if stories, which have lain for years in a state of repose, each had their moment to awake, an awakening no one could do anything to prevent, at best you could delay it slightly, but only slightly and to no real effect. "I don't believe in things whose time has passed," Luisa had said to me in bed just before my arm brushed her breast, "it's all there, waiting for us to call it back." She put it well, I think. Perhaps there is a time when the things themselves want to be told, in order, perhaps, to rest or in order finally to become fiction.

  "Yes, I do, I know that she shot herself." I realized then that I knew something about which I, in fact, had neither proof nor assurance, it was just a recent rumour, passed on from Custardoy to me and from me to Luisa.

  Professor Villalobos was still drinking and demolishing the tart at enormous speed now, wielding his spoon as if it were one of his father's scalpels. After each mouthful or each sip of wine, he would dab with his napkin at his moist mouth, which remained moist even after he'd dried it. He knew more than I did about this matter too.

  "Something you might not know is that my parents were there when it happened, they were guests at lunch." He used the plural form of "you" as one does with married couples. 'They returned to Barcelona in a state of shock and I often heard them talk about it. Your aunt got up from the table, picked up your grandfather's pistol, loaded it, went into the bathroom and shot herself through the heart. My parents saw her dead, as did all of your family apart from your grandmother, who was spending a few days outside Madrid, in the house of a sister of hers who used to live in Segovia or was it El Escorial?"

  "It was Segovia," I said. That I did know.

  "It was lucky for her really, or perhaps, though
it seems improbable, your aunt had thought of that. Your grandfather, on the other hand, never recovered from having seen his daughter, all bloody, lying on the floor of the bathroom, with one breast destroyed. She'd been more or less normal during lunch, well, she'd been very quiet, barely eating or saying anything, as if she were unhappy when she had no reason to be, she'd only got back from her honeymoon a week or so before. But it was later on that my parents recalled all that, while they were eating no one could have suspected what was going to happen." And then Villalobos went on to recount what I didn't want to know, but which I do now know. He talked for some minutes, he described it all in detail. He talked. And talked. The only way I could have avoided hearing what he was saying would have been to leave. Finally, he remarked: "Everyone said how unlucky for Ranz, being widowed for a second time." Then he paused and finished his raspberry tart, the ingestion of which he'd delayed (his spoon again poised in mid-air in that rhetorical gesture) while he recounted every detail and mentioned another tart, an ice-cream cake that had melted. Neither Luisa nor I said anything, so he replaced the implement on his plate and went back to the beginning, like the teacher he was. "You can imagine why it was that later, when Ranz married your mother, your grandfather lived in a permanent state of panic. They say he grew pale and clutched his head in his hands every time he saw your father. Your grandmother was made of sterner stuff and, besides, she hadn't seen her daughter dead, only buried. After that your grandfather lived, although not, it's true, for very long, like a man who, though sentenced to death, doesn't know the date of his execution and rises each morning wondering if today will be the day. That's not a very apt comparison, for he feared for the death of his one remaining daughter. He barely slept, he jumped every time the phone or the door bell went or whenever a letter or a telegram arrived, even though your parents didn't go away on honeymoon, such frivolity would have seemed out of place; in fact, they didn't leave Madrid once while he was alive. According to my father, he'd never seen a clearer case than that of your grandfather of somebody dying from fear, the heart attack was just the form it took, the medium, it could have been anything, he said. When your grandfather died our two families saw much less of each other. It wasn't until years later that I got to know Ranz again, through quite different channels. So there you have it!" There was a certain self-satisfaction in those last words, everyone enjoys experiments, being the bringer of news. The professor summoned the waiter and, despite having devoured the tart, he asked for the cheeseboard and for more wine to accompany it. "I'm ravenous," he said, "I didn't eat any lunch today."

  Luisa and I were drinking our coffee. There were two questions to be asked, two main questions it would have been difficult not to ask, especially since there were two of us there to ask them. In fact, both were questions we needed to ask my father, but he was far away and you couldn't talk about the distant past with him, or perhaps you could, the unlikely possibility occurred to me that it had been Ranz who'd sent Custardoy to me some months back and that now he'd sent Villalobos, to warn me, to prepare me for a story that he now wanted to tell me himself, perhaps because I'd just got married for the first time, he'd been married three times and two out of those three times things had turned out badly for him, or, as everyone said at the time and as the professor himself had just said, he'd had very bad luck. But then he'd also sent me the high-ranking civil servant from Spain with the frivolous, pneumatic wife and he had told me nothing. Luisa and I spoke almost at the same time: "But why did she kill herself?" she said, getting in before me by half a second.

  "Who was the first wife?" I said.

  Professor Villalobos cut himself some Brie and some Camembert, both very ripe. He spread a little of the first on some toast that crumbled when he put it in his mouth. One piece remained on it, too large to be consumed in one bite, and he contrived to stain both his lapel and the tablecloth.

  "No one knows why she killed herself," he replied, his mouth still full, but quite unruffled, as if he were confronting a battery of questions in class. He gulped some wine to help him wash the cheese down. "Even your father doesn't know, or so he said. When he got to his father-in-law's house, he was as shocked as any of the other people present or as any of those who arrived later, his pain even greater. He said everything was going fine, that there'd been no disagreement between them, that they were very happy. It was inexplicable and he could offer no explanation. He hadn't noticed anything unusual when they parted that morning, they'd said goodbye with a few vaguely amorous words, as on any other day, the kind of conventional words you two might well say to each other tonight or tomorrow. If that's true, he must have been in a state of constant torment all these years. Obviously your mother was an enormous help. Perhaps Ranz also had to ascertain if your Aunt Teresa had led some kind of double life and had a suicidal side to her he knew nothing about, such things do happen. If he did find out anything, I imagine he kept quiet about it. Though I can't really say." The professor dabbed at his lips, this time with more reason, to wipe the crisp crumbs of toast and the soft remains of the Brie from the corners of his mouth.

  "You've got some on your lapel too," Luisa pointed out.

  The professor looked down with displeasure and surprise. It was a very expensive Gigli lapel. He dabbed at it clumsily, Luisa moistened one corner of her napkin with water and went to his aid, she moistened the napkin just as I had moistened the corner of a towel in the bathroom of the hotel in Havana in order to cool her face, her throat, the back of her neck (her long, dishevelled hair had clung to her skin and a few stray hairs lay across her forehead like fine lines sent by the future to cast a momentary shadow over her).

  "Do you think it will leave a mark?" the professor asked. He was a vain man, distinguished-looking despite his broad face.

  "I don't know."

  "Well, I'll find out soon enough," said the professor and with his middle finger he gave the expensive, besmirched lapel of his Romeo Gigli suit a disdainful flick. He spread some more Camembert (not on his lapel but on another piece of toast, he was mixing up a lot of different flavours), drank some more wine and went on, without losing his thread: "As for the first wife, I don't know much about her, except that she was Cuban, like your grandmother. As you know, Ranz lived in Havana for a while. For a year or two, around 1950, he had a minor post in the Embassy there. Was it cultural attaché perhaps? Do you happen to know? Anyway, knowing him as I do, I've always thought he must have been something like artistic advisor to Batista. Has he never told you anything about all this?"

  The professor was expecting some firm statement from me, such as I'd provided about Segovia. But I had no idea that my father had once lived in Cuba. For a year or two.

  "Who's Batista?" asked Luisa. She's young and forgetful and doesn't have a very good memory for things, except when it comes to translating.

  "I don't know," I said answering Villalobos, not her. "I had no idea he'd lived in Cuba."

  "I suppose that's another of those things you weren't ever interested in," said the professor. "Oh well. That was where he married his first wife and I think he met your mother and your aunt there too, they were spending a few months in Havana with your grandmother on a trip she made to sort out something to do with a legacy or perhaps because she wanted to revisit her childhood haunts before she got too old, I can't say, bearing in mind that this was all gleaned from scraps of conversation I overheard from my parents years back, conversations not intended for my ears." Professor Villalobos was making excuses. He was no longer telling the story with his previous gusto, it irritated him to be unsure about his facts, he hated incompleteness and inexactitude, he could never have written anything but monographs, never anything biographical, biographies never end. He popped a truffle in his mouth, they'd brought them with our coffee. At least I think he did, the movement was so abrupt (he popped it into his mouth as if it were a pill) and he hadn't finished with the cheese yet, it all seemed too much of a mixture to me. I only know that the plate now had one truffl
e missing. 'Whatever the reason, she took the girls with her, to keep her company, for three months or so. Your father only met her briefly there, his courtship of your aunt began some time later, of course, and by then he was a widower and had returned to Madrid. It seems he was a good-looking chap, well, he still is, the sad but merry widower, irresistible, he had a small moustache at the time, it seems he didn't shave it off until his third wedding and then he never let it grow again, out of superstition perhaps. But I know almost nothing about his first wife." The professor seemed troubled by the fact that he'd failed to foresee this topic of conversation and make sure he was better informed. Perhaps he couldn't have been any better informed. "You know how it is, you tend to say little or nothing about the dead to the people who've replaced them, you couldn't keep on talking to your family or to acquaintances about someone who was a stranger to them, who, when viewed in retrospect, had occupied the place of your Aunt Teresa. There are two ways of looking at things, don't you think? From the perspective of the future and from the perspective of the past and things can look very different depending on which view you choose. Anyway, as I was saying: I imagine that everyone knew about her, but no one bothered to mention her, with some people it would have been better if they'd never existed; although there was no alternative when your aunt killed herself, for a short time it was inevitable that people would remember her, he becoming a widower for the second time. She wouldn't have shared the same fate when your mother took her place, you don't forget a sister, however inconvenient a role she played, but you do forget a foreigner and a stranger. They were different times then." The professor almost sighed.