Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  And sometimes it’s very hard for me to bear the fact that I was unaware of my mother’s serious illness, Lolita was her name. It was kept from me and I wasn’t living in Madrid and didn’t see her often and was too immersed in the passing problems—or perhaps misfortunes, or only chagrins—of my twenty-sixth year to perceive the concealment and try to find out a thing you believe cannot happen and which is therefore the explanation you first rule out. A still juvenile, or superstitious, or complacent belief. And when I came to my belated realization of what was coming to her, I quickly returned from the pointless travels of those months of turmoil and she lasted only a few hours longer after my arrival; sometimes I’ve thought that she lived those hours and then no more because with me there we were all at her side, at home, the four sons—and the fifth or first still closer, soon to be in her care, the child—and at last she could let herself go, knowing that all four of us were, for the moment, safe and with her and at home. Yes, it’s possible. A little more than a year ago I found what must have been her penultimate letter to me, the fourth son she gave birth to, third among those still living, dated November 3, 1977, less than two months before her death; in it she discreetly offered to help me, because during a recent brief visit of mine at home she had seen me looking sad, without knowing why (“The capacity for respect that leads me to forget the secrets people tell me, for I never reveal them, and I try to make peace, has been useful to other people more than once … and to you boys? Can’t I help you?”), and went on to say, “I slept better while you were here, as I alway do when I know you’re here, sleeping; but now I can’t sleep and I turn it over and over in my head, I know that there is something I don’t know, and that always makes me give free rein to my imagination when it has to do with you boys … There are so many problems around all of you!” And perhaps, once she knew that the only one who was missing was now nearby, at home, and that he had said goodbye to her, she could sleep once and for all. I sometimes wonder whether she didn’t hold out against that sleep until my arrival, more than she should have and beyond exhaustion, it would have been unlike her not to wait for me before saying goodbye. Not long before she had said to my father, “I’m a doctor’s daughter and I know what I have,” because they had hidden the seriousness of her condition from her, as well, and she went on to describe precisely the nature of her illness and what it was going to do to her. In the final hours during which we coincided something ordinary happened that ceased to be ordinary because it was among the last things, and so it is what I remember most. I had recently been in Paris and seen a very large Rubens exhibit there and bought a number of postcards. She was in bed and I sat down on the edge, she had stopped dying her hair—but for me it is always black—and it was a very clean grey, surrounding her face that was so much like mine and that never became wrinkled, or hardly, her skin full and smooth. She looked drowsy and dazed, and I showed her postcards of Rubens paintings to distract her, she enjoyed museums very much. She looked at each one in turn, having to force herself a little to focus her attention and her gaze, I made a comment here or there. She stopped at the portrait of a woman, Helen Fourment, less brightly colored and more sharply etched than the large compositions. “Look at that hand,” she said, pointing to the young woman’s right hand, then smiling at the extravagant hat. “If I’d worn that I would have looked taller,” she said playfully. Every time I see a Rubens now I remember that moment, Helen Fourment’s hand, and the hat, and her. It goes without saying that I hadn’t allowed her to help me, almost two months earlier; I rarely told my parents about my personal affairs, which generally upset them; like most children, or those of my generation at least, I said nothing. Well, I must have told her something, just enough to keep her imagination from mistakenly wandering toward worse things than those actually happening to me and to calm her apprehensions a little, because in her last letter, which I lost in one of my moves, I remember that she responded tactfully, saying, “No, I don’t understand, but I also understand that I don’t understand.” In the car that took me to her burial the next day I saw my face in the rear view mirror, and I rode along, drowsy and dazed, thinking: “I’m what’s left that’s most like her. I’m what’s left that’s most like her.” It was December 24; I don’t have many other memories of her final hour, I arrived on the 23rd, a little late.

  And I didn’t know it was the last time when I last saw Juan Benet, my literary teacher and friend for twenty-two years or more. We did know he was gravely ill and we wouldn’t have him with us much longer, but I was sure I would still see him a few more times, and the last visit I made to his house with Mercedes López-Ballesteros wasn’t felt to be the farewell by either of us, we weren’t somber, we didn’t think the time had come yet to say goodbye, in our minds. I had recently come back not from Paris this time but from London, and was spouting funny and semi-apocryphal anecdotes I had heard from Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his wife Miriam Gómez, both stupendous storytellers—imitating their Cuban accents for good measure—and Don Juan, who held them in great affection, always enjoyed their stories. Some of the anecdotes were so ludicrous that they made him laugh very hard, so hard that at one point he started to protest and told me with little conviction, amid gales of laughter, “Ouch, don’t make me laugh so much, it hurts me here,” pointing to his chest or his side, I don’t remember. But I was merciless and went on raving and recounting and exaggerating, I no longer know if it was the incredible story of Borges in Sitges (“a very savage place”) with the slice of pa amb tomàquet that got stuck, or the one about the erect “homosexualistic” kangaroo in Australia, or the one about the actor Richard Gere and the amatory device that got stuck, or the one about Dr. Dally, half of whose body (longitudinally) was immobile but of varying colors and who sold books that he shouldn’t have, the Cabreras are inexhaustible. And thanks to them I made Don Juan laugh endlessly that night and how glad I am now that I did, and that I didn’t stop when he said the laughter was hurting him, because it turned out to be the last night, and so my penultimate vision of him is of a Juan in great hilarity. I didn’t see him again after that, I only spoke to him over the phone to tell him I had re-read Volverás a Región—his first novel, published nearly twenty-five years before—for an article I was writing and that now it had become truly good. “Yes? You think so?” he asked with unfeigned ingenuousness. In fact, I did see him again, but it was a few minutes after he had died, in the first hour of January 5, 1993, almost five years ago now. Vicente Molina Foix was with me and he went home to get some cufflinks for Juan to be buried in, because neither his wife nor his children could find his own that night (no one could have identified Don Juan from his cufflinks). The night Mercedes and I paid our visit was the night of the 12th to the 13th of December, a Saturday. He came to the door to say goodbye, it was late, and the final glimpse was of his tall figure at the top of the stairs to the door of his house in El Viso, with a smile still lingering from the recent laughter like a slight, somnolent trace on the face of someone who’s falling asleep, the long shape veiled in penumbra and outlined against the light from inside, saying goodbye with a waving hand, but not in his mind. As soon as he closed the door and we’d gone around the corner, Mercedes burst into tears and buried her face in my shoulder, getting my coat wet. She had worked for him every day for three years, and she, I think, had said goodbye, in her mind.

  After Ewart died, many hours passed during which it never occurred to anyone to imagine that he wasn’t alive, and many more hours went by before his family and friends learned that some time ago by then he had said his final farewell to the world beyond the ocean, perhaps without realizing it or even saying it to himself, not even in his mind. I don’t know why the 31st of December and 1922 are given as the date and year of his death, when there were no witnesses—not even the person who killed him was a witness, and had no certainty of having killed—and he could well have died during the first hour or first minute of January 1, who knows, and therefore in 1923. It’s frightenin
g to think of the hours—soon distant and forgotten, yet so slow and negligible while they’re going by—during which our friends and relatives think we’re alive when in fact we are dead, and they sleep peacefully, dreaming their primitive dreams, or watch television or laugh or curse or fuck instead of dropping everything and running belatedly to meet us and make phone calls and attend to formalities and not believe it, and grieve and despair, to whatever degree. This fear isn’t for the dead, for their imagined solitude and abandonment, but for the living who will later have to reconstruct those hours—the actual passage of which is now unusable and annulled, and which are even slower and more negligible in memory—that they lived through unaware their world had changed, easy and indifferent or with a happiness now improper, or maybe even speaking ill of the one now dead. “Put out the light, and then put out the light,” perhaps that’s why—to make it entirely certain—it has to be said twice, once for the event, once for the telling. And, too, as I said at the beginning, remembering and telling can become not only homage but affront.

  Wilfrid Ewart’s dead body was not found until nearly noon on New Year’s Day, so almost twelve hours had passed without anyone realizing that this was what he was now, a dead body, and no longer one of us, if saying “us” makes any sense. According to the Mexican newspaper Excelsior, of Wednesday January 3, 1923, which both González Rodríguez and Muñoz Saldaña consulted and cited for me verbatim, respecting both its incorrect punctuation and its typographical errors:

  Quien primero tuvo conocimiento del suceso fue la señora Angelina Trejo de Estrevelt, quien presta sus servicios en calidad de camarera en el Hotel Isabel. La señora de Estrevelt, como de costumbre se dirigió ayer en la mañana, ya cerca del medio día a las habitaciones superiores con el fin de hacer el aseo de las mismas. Al llegar al cuarto número 53 miró por la cerradura y le extrañó ver que la luz artificial estaba encendida. Llamó a la puerta varias veces y no obtuvo contestación alguna. Temerosa de que algo hubiera occurrido al pasajero, penetró a la habitación, encontrando las ropas de la cama en perfecto orden. Poco después y dirigiendo la vista al balcón con vista a la calle, que se encontraba abierto, vio el cadáver del señor Etwart, en medio de un charco de sangre ya coagulada.

  (The first to take cognizance of the event was Señora Angelina Trejo de Estrevelt, who lends her services to the Hotel Isabel in the capacity of chambermaid. Señora de Estrevelt, as is her custom made her way yesterday morning, already close to noon to the upper rooms in the aim of ensuring the hygiene of same. On reaching room number 53, she looked through the keyhole and found it strange that the electric light was on. [“Put out the light, and then put out the light,” that again.] She knocked several times, and obtained no response whatsoever. Fearful that something might have happened to the transient occupant, she went into the room, finding the bedclothes in perfect order. Shortly after that, directing her gaze to the balcony overlooking the street, which was open, she saw the corpse of Señor Etwart, in a puddle of already coagulated blood.)

  At this point, we might well ask ourselves why the chambermaid looked through the keyhole first, before taking any other step, and the corresponding news article from the English-language section of the same newspaper does not clear up this mystery, though it does call Ewart Ewart and not Etwart, and specifies that

  … a chambermaid coming to clean his room found the door locked [my italics] and peering through the keyhole saw that the light was still burning. After calling several times she became alarmed, and entering the room noticed that the bed had not been slept in. Proceeding toward the balcony of the window she discovered the body lying in a puddle of clotted blood.…

  The fact that the door was locked seems in no way surprising and is not sufficient reason to peep through the keyhole and only then knock several times on the door, rather than knocking first, before doing anything else. Perhaps it was the waste of electricity that alarmed Doña Angelina Trejo de Estrevelt and her desire to put out the superfluous light and make the night cease entirely that prompted her to decide to use her key.

  Immediately [the article written in Spanish goes on] she gave notice of this funereal discovery to the boy in charge of the elevator, so that he in his turn, could give notice to the administrator of the hotel, Señor Manuel Olvera. He went precipitately up to the fifth floor and, upon reaching room 53, did indeed find the inanimate body of Señor Etwart. [It would have been quite miraculous if that had not been the case, or perhaps the article was hinting that chamber-maids can be fatalistic and prone to absurd fancies and you can never tell what they’ll come up with.] Immediately he gave notice to the police, the personnel of the fifth precinct presenting themselves moments later, proceeding to raise the corpse. It was in a dorsally prone position and bore signs of a death that was not recent. When the body was examined, it was seen to have a wound from a firearm in the left eye, without exit orifice. It was ordered that the corpse be taken to the Hospital Juárez for the legally mandated autopsy.

  The police commissioner, Señor Mellado, made an inspection of the clothing of the deceased finding documents and papers, cash money, a check that had yet to be cashed and a book of blank checks. He also found a receipt from the Banco Montreal where Señor Etwart had deposited on the day of his arrival a goodly sum of money. Señor Mellado drew up an orderly inventory of all this so that the judicial authorities could take cognizance of the case.

  Before going on, we need to go back to the beginning of the article, which was published under the following headlines and subheads: “English Subject Dies of a Gunshot,” “Barbaric Habit of Firing into the Air, Had an Outcome,” “Fatal Curiosity,” “Killed When Listening to Popular Rejoicing from Hotel Balcony.” The article begins like this:

  From within room number 53 of the Hotel Isabel yesterday, police personnel of the fifth precinct retrieved the corpse of Señor Wilfrid Herbert Gore Etwart, of English nationality and which presented a wound caused by a projectile from a firearm, with an entry orifice in the left eye, the bullet remaining lodged in the skull.

  Señor Gore Etwart had arrived the previous night in this capital city proceeding from the United States and on a business trip. From the investigations of the police it is presumed that Señor Etwart died as a consequence of a stray bullet among the many that were fired on New Year’s Eve by one of the numerous troglodytes who cannot express enthusiasm without shooting off firearms.

  (It’s been eons since I’ve read or heard the word “troglodyte,” which has become antediluvian, but perhaps in 1923 it was a novelty and struck the anonymous reporter as precise and perfect for this none-too-objective paragraph remonstrating with his compatriots.)

  The corpse of the English subject was found on the balcony of room number 53, located on the fifth floor of the Hotel Isabel on Avenida República del Salvador and could be identified owing to the passport contained in one of the pockets of the jacket.

  Then, after the narrative previously cited, the article concludes with some repetition and a renewed bout of scolding, but it’s worth reproducing here in its entirety:

  The Consul of Great Britain in Mexico, on taking cognizance of the event, presented himself at the precinct house requesting the corpse of Señor Etwart which will be surrendered to him of course.

  (The “of course” is rather touching, as if in vehement denial of some offensive insinuation about the honor of the Mexican people, or of their police, who would never withhold the body of a gunshot victim.)

  From the declarations of the hotel employees, it is deduced that Señor Etwart, at midnight on the last day of the year, on hearing the whistles and firecrackers announcing the advent of the new year, went to the balcony out of mere curiosity, that being the moment when a shot fired into the air by one of so many careless individuals was to cause him the lesion that must have deprived him of life almost instantaneously.

  (Given that no hotel employee noticed the tragedy until noon of the following day, it’s not entirely clear why anything whatsoever “
is deduced” from their declarations, which could only have been hypotheses, and the excessive or superfluous explanation that Ewart or Etwart looked out from the balcony “out of mere curiosity” is also surprising, as if he could have done so for some other reason.)

  The English section of the newspaper Excélsior didn’t offer any additional information on the discovery of the body, but did relate the death to an accident that had happened to another guest of the ill-starred Hotel Isabel not far away and about an hour earlier: “A strange coincidence in the death of Mr. Ewart is the accident that befell Carlos Duems, representative of the Duems News Agency, who is a resident of the same hotel of the tragic death of the Englishman.”

  In its implausible and macaronic English the article goes on to say that towards 11:00 p.m. on the night of December 31, the newspaper’s chief wire service editor, Salvador Pozos, found Mr. Duems seriously injured at the corner of Nuevo México and Revillagigedo, where he had been struck by “one of the many crazed Fords jam-packed with New Years’ revellers,” who had dragged him five yards along the road for greater revelry. Señor Pozos, who was personally acquainted with the victim, a representative of the news agency that bore his name, picked him up and carried him to his room in the Hotel Isabel, located on the same floor as the room occupied by Ewart. Clearly that fifth floor meant trouble, though all in all, Mr. Duems came out of it very well by simply managing to stay alive through those days in that place, for on January 3, just as the newspapers were collecting themselves and beginning to recover from these dreadful events, another British subject named George W. Steabben perished—accidentally, once again, we may suppose—in the crossfire of a fierce brawl that, according to Stephen Graham, erupted between two bands of Mexicans, both riding in cars and firing at each other with no qualms and in broad daylight, though most of them were government officials or congressmen, or perhaps for that very reason, which put all of them “above the law.” Sergio G.R. found the details in a collection of periodicals and, with my gratitude, has permitted me to reproduce them: