All Souls

by Javier Marías

  During those evenings, after about half past eight or nine o'clock, I started going to a discotheque near the Apollo Theatre, which, on the whole, was more popular amongst the people who worked in Oxford's factories and offices (for Oxford, unlike Cambridge, does have industries and workers and people who don't belong to the university) than amongst its gowned inhabitants of whom I was one. I say "on the whole" because I did get a few surprises there. Each night I found myself confronted by a scene straight out of the seventies, a very English seventies that had not impinged in the least on the outside world. It was all very provincial and domestic from the strident music (well, it was a discotheque) to the decor with its vaguely Moorish motifs, from the (green and pink) lights that played over the dance floor to the clothes of the dancers, which could be dated with extraordinary accuracy. Nevertheless, to judge by the crowds that filled it every night, from who knows what bright evening hour onwards, the discotheque enjoyed enormous success. I remember there being an unusually high number of fat girls in miniskirts and permed hair: there were whole tables occupied solely by large groups of large girls (the term "fat tart" springs to mind) who sat in groups of six or seven, constantly elbowing one another and chewing gum, sunk into the sofas beneath their own weight and torpor, unashamedly displaying a row of vast thighs (in a state of constant friction) and even glimpses of their knickers. And then there were the young Oxfordshire dandies (from the local towns of Banbury and Charlbury, Witney and Eynsham) who gloried in the sort of cheap, loud taste in clothes one only finds in the south of England. It was clear that those rustic, effeminate young men hated the fat tarts and that the fat tarts hated the affected yokels. They never mixed but when they did meet in the queues for the toilets or found themselves dancing in the same spot in the crowd or on the dance floor, they'd exchange looks which were either scornful (on the part of the young men) or mocking (on the part of the young women) and shoot knowing glances at their sympathisers seated at the tables or standing at the bar, openly pointing out their risible adversary with an ostentatious wave of a thumb, thin or plump as the case might be. Although those two species were generally speaking the predominant clientele in the Moorish-style discotheque, it was not unusual to see students there (especially the more refined ones who are likelier to have a weakness and a taste for the plebeian) and even certain dons - the bachelors amongst them - disguised as youths. Most I knew only by sight, distantly enough to avoid the need to greet each other in such circumstances, but on my fourth night there I spotted my own boss Aidan Kavanagh, the author of the horror blockbusters, performing a wild, loose-jointed dance out of time with the music. I couldn't see very well — amongst all those bodies lit by that feverish light — and at first I thought with some alarm that his usually sober, anodyne clothes had given way to an eau de nil waistcoat and little else, but I realised immediately afterwards - with only a modicum of relief - that only his arms were in fact bare albeit to the shoulder: that is, he was as usual wearing a shirt and tie (apricot and bottle green respectively) beneath the eau de nil waistcoat, but it was a strange kind of shirt comprising only a shirt front. I wondered if he wore the same model to the faculty and determined to have a good look next time I met him in the Taylorian to ascertain whether or not his shirtsleeves were visible beneath his jacket cuffs. (As well as being a writer of horror novels under a pen name, he was also, after all, an international expert on my country's Golden Age.) Anyway, his disco wear did allow me to discover that he was extremely hirsute on his (upper) extremities, which were crowned within by dense jungles of underarm hair upon which I had no option but to gaze, since a combination of his frenzied dancing and the lack of space demanded that he keep his arms raised at all times. He saw me from a distance and, far from blushing and trying to hide, came over to me at the bar, still dancing, and greeted me in the most jovial and hospitable manner. He was dragging by the hand (still raised in the air) a fat girl who tottered and shoved her way towards me, smiling broadly. Kavanagh had to shout to make himself heard so that, like Alan Marriott, he spoke in clipped phrases.

  "Fancy meeting you here! I thought you didn't like these places! It's taken you nearly two years to discover it!" And he thrust two fingers into my face. "This is the best disco there is! The only really fun place in town!" He glanced back at the dance floor with a look of genuine appreciation and satisfaction: the dance floor resembled nothing so much as an operatic mutiny. "I come almost every night! Well, every night I can! I know everybody here!" And with one strong arm, bare to the shoulder, he made a sweeping gesture taking in the whole club. He took a long swig of his drink. "Would you like to meet someone? I can introduce you to anyone you want! Have a good look around! If you see someone you fancy, tell me and I'll introduce you, no problem! There are dozens of girls," he lowered his voice, "dozens. Ah, let me introduce you to Jessie. Jessie!" He hesitated a moment. "This is my friend Emilio! He's Spanish too!"

  "What?"

  "Emilio!" Kavanagh jabbed at me with a finger that only just missed poking my eye out. "Another Spanish friend."

  "Buona sera!" shouted Jessie above the racket.

  "Ciao!" I said so as not to disappoint her. She was wreathed in smiles.

  "It's best they don't know our real names," Kavanagh whispered in my ear in Spanish. "It's perfectly safe, they only come to Oxford at night. She thinks I work in the motor industry. I've promised her an Aston Martin."

  "Do they still make them?"

  "I don't know, but she swallowed it." And he added, in English this time: "Come and join us. We're sharing a table. There are simply dozens of girls," he murmured, "dozens. Del Diestro's here too. He arrived today."

  Kavanagh grabbed me by the arm and, with me in tow, gyrated his way over to one of the fat tarts' tables, which was all too familiar to me and which, on the previous three nights, I had rejected with an emphatic scorn worthy almost of one of the effeminate, rustic young men from Oxfordshire (Jessie followed, treacling on her own toes and shoving people to one side). Sure enough there was the celebrated Professor del Diestro, in his own opinion the greatest and youngest world expert on Cervantes, and known in Madrid (according to how much one disliked him) either as Dexterous Diestro or Dastardly Diestro who, at the Department's invitation, was due to deliver a magisterial and suitably dexterous lecture the following morning. I recognised him from his photographs. The professor, a distinguished, opinionated man in his forties, wearing his designer shirt and his bald pate with equal panache ("A distinguished Spanish professor," I thought when I saw him, amazed and suddenly understanding the reason for his success), was slobbering over and allowing himself to be slobbered over by one of the fattest of the fat girls. It should be said that the sole aim of all these girls, as well as of the rural dandies, the bachelor dons and the more refined students (and my aim too, although at the time I neither realised it nor, therefore, admitted it to myself) was to make the acquaintance of some complete stranger (which was not that easy given the fixed and repetitious nature of the clientele), one's principal goals then being to ask a few superficial questions, to respond untruthfully to the other person's equally superficial questions, to offer them some chewing gum (dancing wasn't obligatory), to kiss them after a decent interval had elapsed and perhaps - depending on the progress and quality of the kisses and on whether one of you had a condom handy - to have a quick fuck in the toilets or in the darker recesses of the discotheque itself or a slower fuck at home later.

  Professor del Diestro was already well enough advanced in acquainting himself with his chosen stranger to permit himself a momentary interruption in order to exchange a few cordial words with me, and Kavanagh, after introducing me to the five or six girls present, forced me down on to the sofa in between two of them. I remained lodged between four of the aforementioned thighs (two per girl) and in the sudden knowledge or acknowledgement of the fact that I would not be leaving the discotheque alone that night, I immediately looked to my left and right in order to weigh them up, with the intention of
choosing the more lightweight of the two. I perceived at once that the girl on my right was not really fat, only plump, and in that case — or so I calculated — I would after a while find it possible to feel a certain sexual interest in her. Knowing beforehand the degree of intimacy I would eventually enjoy with them, her features seemed most agreeable and her leonine curls were stupendous, although they had very much the appearance of having only come into existence a few hours before (it was Thursday). I turned my back on the other girl, who was undeniably and undisguisedly fat, and with the one who wasn't quite so fat, Muriel by name, I began an intermittent and rather desultory conversation conducted at shouting pitch of which I recall almost nothing (it was after all just a formality), only that she said she lived in a tiny village - or was it a farm? - near Wych-wood Forest, between the Rivers Windrush and Evenlode. But that might well have been false, as false as the names Emilio and Muriel. Like her companions she chewed gum incessantly and, although she wasn't as full of smiles as young Jessie, who had returned to the floor to dance with Kavanagh and thus secure her Aston Martin, she seemed quite jolly and pleased to meet me and didn't move away when my legs, covered by their lightweight trousers, rubbed against hers, so preeminently abundant but covered only by finemesh tights; more than that, she tended to transform that contact (unavoidable given the cramped conditions) into a deliberate pressure. I did nothing to avoid it either and at one point she put her hand on my knee in familiar fashion and yelled dutifully into my ear:

  "D'you want some gum?"

  "No, thanks," I said, and only after I'd said it, did I realise that it might not be the most appropriate of answers in a place so steeped in the seventies.

  For a while she said nothing more. She remained rather pensive, her chewing gum stationary somewhere on her palate or gums. Then she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

  "I'm only chewing it in case we kiss. But if you like I'll take it out now."

  (I still had time to notice the strong taste of mint in that round, absorbent mouth.) (Mine no doubt tasted of tobacco.)

  When I left the disco with her an hour later I met with two gazes, one multiple and the other singular, although I can't be sure of the latter. Several dandies whom I was already beginning to know by sight were regarding me critically, or rather classifying me as deserving of great scorn for my choice of companion; and a few yards ahead, at the very door of the discotheque, I think I passed (she was just going in and if it was her I think I received from her no more than a lightning glance) the girl from Didcot station who was later also, though more briefly, the girl from Broad Street — near Trinity and Blackwell's - who was walking along one windy afternoon with a friend who would not let her stop. As on that second occasion (if it was her on this third occasion: it was over a year since I'd seen her, and I'd seen so little of her before) I only realised it was her - or thought I did - once we'd turned our backs on each other. I turned round, as I had the time before, but she did not, not on this occasion when I cannot be sure it was her. I just saw her back disappearing into the discotheque along with the man accompanying her, whose presence I had not even noticed when face to face, or at most for a second, with the two of us men walking along and trying perhaps to avoid bumping into each other. From behind he looked like Edward Bayes. But that was impossible: Edward Bayes would be seated at the foot of the child Eric's bed, reading him a story that Clare Bayes would have stayed behind to hear. It was too late now to confirm anything or to go back; as on that other occasion in Broad Street someone was tugging at a sleeve, only this time it was mine. It wasn't windy outside this time, but Muriel, who was already out in the street, was growing impatient.

  Back at my house, on the second floor, she went back to chewing gum for a while, combining it with the gin (a generous Spanish measure) that I served her in a glass with ice and tonic. I wasn't in the least drunk but she was somewhat drunk, or at least gave that impression (I don't know how much she'd had to drink before we were introduced). But it was only later, upstairs, on the third floor, when we were undressed and in my bed, that I really began to think about Clare and to miss her again or, rather (because it wasn't exactly that I missed her), to realise with surprise and some perplexity that this girl verging on plumpness, with her pleasant face and curly hair was not Clare. Fidelity (the name given to the constancy and exclusivity with which one particular sex organ penetrates or is penetrated by another particular sex organ, or abstains from being penetrated by or from penetrating others) is mainly the product of habit, as is its so-called opposite, infidelity (the name given to inconstancy and change, and the enjoyment of more than one sex organ: the literal promiscuity in which, as far as I knew, Cromer-Blake engaged, as too did Muriel and possibly Kavanagh and Professor del Diestro). When, over a period of time, one has become used to one mouth, other mouths seem incongruous, and present one with all kinds of difficulties: the teeth are either too big or too small, the lips too thin or too fleshy, the tongue moves at the wrong time or just lies there, rigid, as if it were flesh and bone not muscle; the smell of the more odorous regions (the groins, the sex, the armpits) is disconcerting as is the disparate intensity of the embrace, the anaesthetic contact of skin on skin, the sour sweat on thighs (due perhaps to remorse), the ill-fitting shapes, the unfamiliar colours that disturb the light in the room, the size and moistness of the orifice. One's hands cannot take in the different size of breasts that perhaps overflow or seem to withdraw from them or, when they grow hard, have a rather rough nipple that almost rasps when one licks it. The new body is not manageable (no new body is) and there is always a certain feeling of reserve or uncertainty about the order in which one should kiss different parts of the body or the force with which one should kiss or squeeze or bite and explore with one's fingers or about the effect it will have on the other if one stops and looks at those parts, withdraws all contact and simply devotes oneself to looking. "I have my cock in her mouth," I thought at a certain point, and I thought it in exactly those words which are the only appropriate ones when you are expressing in words or thoughts what you're doing with the thing they designate (when the designated object is active), even more so when one scarcely knows the other body and especially if the words refer to parts of one's own body and not to those of the other person, about which one is always more respectful and for which one would seek and use euphemisms, metaphors or more neutral terms. "I have my cock in her mouth or rather she has her mouth round my cock, since it was her mouth that sought it out. I have my cock in her mouth," I thought, "and it isn't like other times, all those other times in recent months. As I noticed the first time I kissed her, Muriel's mouth is absorbent but not as spacious and liquid as Clare's mouth. It lacks saliva and space. She has nice lips but they're a bit thin and immobile or, rather, not immobile exactly (for they're not, I'm very aware of them moving) but lacking in flexibility, rigid. (They're like taut ribbons.) While I have my cock in her mouth I can see her breasts, they are large and white with very dark nipples, unlike Clare's, whose breasts combine their two colours very subtly, like the transition from apricot to hazel. On my thighs (that gently squeeze her breasts, though not enough to hurt them) I notice the texture of those white breasts, and although this girl is very young, her breasts are soft, like new Plasticine that has been neither kneaded into shape nor hardened by use and by the prints left on it by the child who plays with it. I used to play with Plasticine a lot, but I don't know if the child Eric does. It's incomprehensible to me that I should have my cock in her mouth (who would have thought it only three hours ago, when I was killing time before leaving here, shaving and keeping one eye on the evening light and she, perhaps, was standing in front of the bathroom mirror in her house or farm in Wychwood Forest, putting on her lipstick and thinking about a stranger, applying it to those lips now so bare of colour). It's far less comprehensible than the fact of placing my cock, as I very soon will, inside her vagina, for - or so one hopes — there will have been nothing else in her vagina i
n the last few hours whilst in her mouth there's been chewing gum and gin and tonic and ice and cigarette smoke and peanuts and my tongue and laughter and also words that I did not listen to. (The mouth is always full, abundance itself.) Now she doesn't drink or smoke or chew or laugh or speak, because my cock is in her mouth and that keeps it occupied, there's no room for anything else. I don't speak either, but I'm not occupied in doing anything, I'm thinking."

  And then, a little later, still upstairs on the third floor of my pyramid house, still naked on my bed, I started thinking again and I thought: "With her I don't miss what I always miss when I go to bed with Clare, that is, that my cock has no eye, no vision, no gaze, that can see as it approaches or enters her vagina. I want neither to see it nor her. But I do see her. Although I like Muriel and she's helping me pass the night in the best possible way, I don't know her. I know she's not Clare but one of the plump girls from the discotheque near the Apollo Theatre. I have various ways of knowing this: her size and height (she's slightly shorter); her thighs, which do not separate quite enough (perhaps because of all that flesh; will the thighs of the even fatter girl Professor del Diestro was kissing be capable of separating at all? Perhaps the Professor is grappling with the problem even at this very moment); also her bones, which are scarcely detectable beneath their generous padding (I can feel her pubis but not her hipbones); and her sighs, which are timid and shamefaced (I'm a stranger and, when she half-opens her eyes, she looks not at me but at the blank wall above the pillow on which I lean). But more than anything else I know it because of the different smell. It's not the smell of Clare Bayes nor even that of Oxford or London or Didcot station, but perhaps it's the smell of Wychwood Forest, of the Rivers Windrush and Evenlode, between which Muriel lives and grew up, as Clare Bayes lived and grew up by the River Yamuna or Jumna with its trifling songs, its rudimentary barges and its iron bridge from which unhappy lovers threw themselves. She's panting now but she's thinking too. She's thinking perhaps about how I smell, and thinking it's a foreign smell, the smell of a Continental, a passionate (reputedly), hot-blooded southerner. My blood can be hot or lukewarm or cold. How must I smell to her? The English don't use much cologne and I do, Trussardi, and that might be the biggest difference, a complete novelty; maybe the Italian cologne I always bring back with me from Madrid is the only thing she can sense as regards smells. She may not like it, she may love it, the only way I can find out is by asking, later, because now she's absorbed in herself (she's thinking only of herself). Perhaps she hasn't even noticed it, perhaps she can't smell a thing, she doesn't seem to have a cold, though there are a lot of colds about in this English spring, this furtive winter, not to mention allergies to pollen, hay fever they call it, young people are the main sufferers, although Clare - who is not so young any more - also gets it. Last spring she sneezed several times whilst lying in the very place now occupied by this girl from Wychwood Forest, a forest that no longer exists, apart from a few remnants, it was cut down and flattened last century, but it's difficult to give up a name, names tell you a lot. Muriel doesn't look as if she's about to sneeze, if she did, given our relative positions, I'd get the full blast of it and it would really shake me, I would notice a violent thrust that is absent now. Perhaps she's getting tired, she did have quite a lot to drink. The room was cold when I left the house but now it's hot because Muriel's body is hot, whilst Clare's body is only lukewarm and that of the girl on the train from London might well have been cold, to judge by her appearance. I think I saw her but it doesn't matter to me now, I haven't thought of her for over a year and for over a year now I've thought about Clare nearly all the time, although we've never seen each other with the urgency of people with plans for a future together. But if I'd waited tonight - if I hadn't met the smiling Jessie and Professor del Diestro — perhaps I would have ended up leaving the discotheque with that girl from the London train and — though not yet, because it would only have happened later, but soon enough — she would be here (if it was her, even if it wasn't her), in place of Clare and in place of this plump girl Muriel -who is neither fat nor a tart - who says she lives between the Rivers Windrush and Evenlode in what was Wychwood Forest. She's the one here, on my bed, on top of me — hiding or containing my cock — because Clare won't see me in these weeks she's reserved for the child Eric who's come home ill, and because it was her and no one else - it was her and not the girl from Didcot station - who was chewing gum in case we kissed. And she was right to do so because we're kissing now."