Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘Van what? Is he Dutch?’

  ‘No, he’s as Spanish as you and me.’ And he spelled out the obscure part of the name. ‘But his distant ancestors must, of course, have been Flemish, like the painter Carlos de Haes or that other artist, Van Loo, although he may have been French, but of Dutch descent, or Antonio Moro, who was really Anthonis Mor, they all came to Spain and stayed; or like the soldier-sailor Juan Van Halen and possibly the Marqués de Morbecq, do you know him, he has a collection of editions of Don Quixote that would take your breath away; Professor Rico is green with envy. So there have been quite a few in Spain. His family, Van Vechten’s that is, came from Arévalo, in Ávila, if I remember rightly, he told me about it once: apparently, there are lots of fair-haired, blue-eyed people there because it’s one of the places, in Castile and Andalusia, that was repopulated with Flemings and Germans and Swiss in the time of Felipe IV or Carlos III, or perhaps both, I’m not sure. Not that it matters. Now he’s as Spanish as Lorca. Or as Manolete. Or as Lola Flores. Or as Professor Rico himself. Imagine that!’ He smiled. He had amused himself more than he had me. I knew Professor Rico only by name. He paused and asked: ‘So, can I count on your help if I need it? As an infiltrator, shall we say? Or would you rather not get involved in anything that goes beyond your strict duties? Not that we’ve ever defined what those are, so they can’t be very strict.’

  Having just about finished my degree, not only did it suit me perfectly to earn the monthly wage that Muriel paid me, but I counted myself lucky that, thanks to my parents, I had found a job so quickly, however strange and transitory it might be. Most young people then – things have changed since – subscribed to my father’s view: ‘There’s no such thing as a bad job as long as there’s no better one in sight.’ Also, right from the start, Eduardo Muriel had become for me one of those people whom one admires unreservedly, whose company one finds enjoyable and illuminating and whom one very much wants to please. Or more than that, one of those people whose esteem and approval you hope to gain. As you would with a particularly good lecturer at college or university (although, with one exception, all the teachers in my faculty were absolutely dreadful) or a school teacher, or a guru if you’re an ignoramus trying to be less of one, even if only by dint of staying close and being in the presence of his wisdom. At the time, I would have done almost anything Muriel asked, I was at his service and very happily so, and was filled with a growing sense of loyalty that bordered on the unconditional. He wasn’t even in the habit of issuing orders, or only when it came to minor matters and practices. When, as in this case, it was something unusual, he would consult me and ask my opinion; he was always polite and never imposed his views on me. He was also very persuasive: having drawn me in, having aroused or pricked my curiosity (and he must have known that, as a great admirer of his, I would be interested in everything he did), he would doubtless know that I would go wherever he sent me, find out whatever he asked me to, if that was within my capabilities, and would even be prepared to strike up a friendship with the most vile or unpleasant of individuals.

  ‘I’m entirely at your disposal, Don Eduardo, I mean, Eduardo, in whatever way I can help. You just have to tell me when and where. I await your orders. If I should meet Dr Van Vechten, do you want me to give you my impressions?’

  ‘No, if you do meet, which is highly likely, leave it to me to ask you. Don’t confuse me by taking the initiative.’ He fell silent again. I thought he was going to bring the conversation to a close and would leave any letters to be dictated for another occasion; that he would get up, put on his jacket and head off to his office, where he was usually alone, or so I assumed, or, at most, accompanied by a kind of telephonist-cum-accounts-clerk-cum-representative-cum-housekeeper, a woman who did not come in every day, but only when she wanted to or when Muriel expressly asked her to. Instead, he went on: ‘Listen, Juan. A moment ago, when you quoted my words and boasted of your good memory, you said “to a friend, an enemy, a mistress, a stranger …” I’m sure I didn’t mention a mistress, so where did you get that from? What made you think my friend would have a mistress? Though I did mention a wife and children.’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Don Eduardo, it was just a manner of speaking. I didn’t even realize you were referring to that particular friend, but rather to anyone with some deep, dark secret to conceal. Besides, doesn’t everyone have a mistress? Temporary ones at least, on and off. Since there’s still no divorce … Until they change the law, whenever that will be. Meanwhile people have mistresses, and a mistress is also someone close to you, someone on whom you want to make a favourable impression, from whom you would conceal or deny anything that made you look bad. Anyway, I’m sorry if I misquoted you and for my arrogance.’

  He gave an ironic or amused smile.

  ‘So everyone has a mistress, do they? Since it seems to me that you’ve less experience of life than you have of books or films, what do you know about such things? Not that it really matters, I just happened to notice.’ It took only a second for him to recover his air of seriousness or concern, or was it anxiety or sadness, or even perhaps a degree of suppressed or postponed anger, postponed perhaps until his fears were confirmed. And he added: ‘You’ll find out eventually, but this is the last thing I’m going to tell you today about this discomfiting, distasteful story, a story I wish I’d never heard; as I said, what I was told about my friend Van Vechten has nothing to do with any deaths, not at least with any actual, physical deaths, either to his credit or to his shame, I’m not sure which is the right word here. It’s nothing that bad, but it is, in a way, more disappointing, more depressing, more banal and more contemptible. More incongruous.’ He had searched around for another more conclusive, all-embracing adjective, but had encountered only that one, as if by chance. He himself seemed surprised by his choice. He shook his head then as though the memory of the story made him shudder. ‘Any benefits and favours gained won’t haunt his memory or gnaw at his conscience or have left any mark, since nothing irreparable occurred, and so he can wash his hands of it, as if it had never happened. So he won’t be worried in the slightest, always assuming it did happen. What stops me simply dropping the matter, rejecting it as frankly unbelievable and not even worth considering, is that, according to what I’ve been told, the Doctor behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman or possibly more than one. Call me old-fashioned or whatever you like, but that, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low.’ He paused briefly, stood up, looked at me with his marine eye as though it could see straight through me or had gobbled me up with one glance, then moved on, in search of something more resistant to his dark gaze; there was such anger in his one blue eye that I felt a flicker of fear, not for myself but just to see that eye grow suddenly so dark, so pitiless; he pointed at me with the stem of his pipe as if I were Van Vechten and his pipe were an accusatory implement or perhaps a knife with which one might cut up a piece of fruit, with no intention, as yet, of using it for any other purpose. ‘Do you understand? That’s as low as one can go.’

  II

  * * *

  I was astonished by these words. Not because they jarred with the general character I attributed to Muriel, who had captivated me right from the start, ever since he put me through a brief examination before taking me on, or, rather, chatted to me and asked a few questions, just to see if he liked me. In his comments and conversations and in his attitude towards most people, he seemed to me one of the most upright, charming, fair-minded men I had ever met or have met since. There was even a kind of ingenuousness – almost innocence – about him, unusual for someone approaching his fifties, a well-travelled, restless man, who, while he’d made some really good films, had nevertheless had to lower himself, with no great fuss – that is, resignedly – to make some distinctly bad ones, at least from his point of view (‘To what base occupations one is sometimes reduced: you must be prepared for that, Juan,’ he said to me once); someone who had to put up with producers – all of them bandits to a greater or les
ser degree – and movie actors and actresses – almost without exception, puerile and spiteful or, which comes to the same thing, cruel and hard as nails, or so he said; someone who spent long periods of time immersed in the pragmatic world of advertising in order to raise lots of money very fast and so allow him to maintain his old family fortune more or less intact; someone who devoted much of his time to seeking exotic sources of funding for the projects that really interested him, a process that involved mixing with the fairly brutal or, at best, surly and cunning people who inhabit the business world – that is, the one real, universal world – and others with whom he had little or nothing in common: he was often called on to have lunch or supper or go to nightclubs or out drinking with uncouth property developers and ignorant secretaries of state, with the loud-mouthed presidents of football clubs or dull producers of milk products, with excitable shoemakers from Elda, canners of tuna and clams from Villagarcía de Arosa or curers of ham from Salamanca, even breeders of fighting bulls – a lot of people are completely crazy about the idea of films in general, rather than about the actual films – all of whom he tried to persuade or, rather, cajole into investing, and he himself recognized that he had no real talent for the task, although he had, over the years, acquired a certain expertise. He also occasionally received and entertained various foreigners who were passing through Madrid and who, he had been told by someone in the know, were interested in dipping a toe in the film industry and putting money into some film or other: from semi-retired sly old foxes or hyenas, who had a whole backlist of co-productions behind them and couldn’t kick the habit, to the semi-fascistic patrons of Formula 1; from German cigarette manufacturers with an artistic streak to shady Italian property developers (if those two adjectives are not surplus to requirements); from Scotch whisky distillers who didn’t know what to do with their excess money and wanted to please a mythomaniac wife who, at the end of that very long and winding road, hoped to sign up or have supper with Sean Connery, to the representative of the adviser of the secretary of some uppity Arab sheikh (here, just one of the adjectives is surplus to requirements) bound for Marbella.

  He usually returned from those evenings and encounters exhausted and chastened, and pretty much empty-handed, his usual complaint being: ‘You have to speak to fifteen people in order for just one of them to write you a cheque or express an apparently genuine or at least half-credible interest. Then the cheques might bounce and their declared interest vanish. And if that’s the case, they’ll put you off with a lot of lame excuses, so it’s best to assume from the start that any show of interest will lead nowhere.’ Sometimes, he returned from these meetings in a state of almost comic humiliation and frustration, by which I mean that he tried to make it seem comic; once he had recovered, he could see the funny side of his frustrations and humiliations, and had both a highly developed sense of the absurd and the ability to take a few knocks. Hoping to dazzle and impress – as I said, he was a touch ingenuous – the shrewd, refined owner of a fashion boutique, who had deigned to receive him in her office, he decided to play the intellectual card and launch into some pedantic, historical anecdote about the Second World War, but before he had even completed the first paragraph (admittedly one with various subordinate clauses), she interrupted him with a sympathetic but firm smile: ‘That’s hardly relevant now and, besides, my time is not like this piece of chewing-gum.’ Muriel was completely taken aback (as well as somewhat in awe of this attractive, elegant, educated woman, who was, of course, very well dressed), because there was no chewing-gum in sight, not even an empty packet on the desk or the merest whiff of mint or strawberry. True, the office was so pleasant and so highly perfumed that no other odour could possibly have survived, and at first, Muriel felt as if he were floating helplessly in the air, drunk or even drugged. ‘What chewing-gum? What are you talking about?’ he asked with genuine curiosity. ‘This chewing-gum, although it could be any gum,’ and with that, she drew a piece of gum out of her mouth between thumb and forefinger – my boss hadn’t noticed that she was chewing anything, she was so distinguished and cultivated, that she must have kept it glued to the roof of her mouth or to her gums while they were talking – and she stretched it out like a long tongue; it came so close that Muriel thought she was about to stick one end of it to his nose and he recoiled despite the coarse sensuality of her gesture, which, on reflection, did not displease him in the least, I think it even rather excited him and he regretted retreating instead of allowing himself to be joined to her by that pink gum or, which comes to the same thing, by her saliva. ‘You see how far it will stretch,’ added the owner of the boutique, Cecilia Alemany by name, who had amassed a fortune in a matter of years, and she wasn’t yet thirty-five. ‘Well, my time won’t stretch that far. So get to the point, my dear man, and make it snappy.’ And with one quick, skilful curl of her tongue, she rolled the long, flexible substance back into her mouth, she probably blew bubbles too, and it would have been a treat to see them, since she was clearly a real artist. Muriel admitted that this gummy threat had left him stammering and embarrassed, almost unable to speak, and that the rest of his spiel (with no subordinate clauses this time) had been one incoherent sentence after another, a mess. His admiration for Cecilia Alemany had only grown as a consequence, and he now considered her to be not only a terrific businesswoman who wouldn’t put up with any nonsense or with any smooth-talkers, but also a demigoddess, even though he knew he would never get a single penny out of her for any of his projects, whether cheap or expensive, and that she must have thought him little more than a parasite. What he had found most humiliating – and fascinating too – wasn’t her cutting short his erudite, intellectual preamble, but that she had called him ‘my dear man’, as if he were a labourer she had met down a lane. Whenever she appeared on television or in the newspaper, he would gaze at her enraptured, and a smile would appear on his lips as he listened to what she had to say or else read the relevant article, and he would murmur: ‘Ah, Cecilia Alemany, what a remarkable woman. Who wouldn’t want to be the object of her esteem rather than of her utmost scorn? Needless to say, there’s almost no one alive who would deserve her esteem, myself included; I had a rare opportunity, but, like a peasant, like a fool, I failed to seize it.’

  Muriel was generally good-humoured, when he wasn’t in one of his dark moods, to which all of us are prey sometimes, or in one of his melancholic, misanthropic phases. He would listen discreetly (alone, although I would come and go and was always nearby, alert to what was happening) to whoever came to him with a request or problem, and there were quite a number in those uncertain times; he would listen to them, their odd appeals amused him and he took an interest in all of them, even those I would have thought he would find boring; he was curious to hear other people’s stories, I suppose, even when they seemed somewhat sordid. I observed him lending or giving small or large amounts of money to friends in trouble or to technicians or actors who had worked with him on some film and were having a tough time of it – or even to one or two of their widows, whom he had never met before; but then the world produces widows at a giddying pace and, for most, no financial aid is too small. He did this almost secretly (when they said goodbye, he would slip a cheque or a few notes into their hand, or send them a banker’s order the next day), but I was often a witness to those scenes too. He always assumed that any loans he made would never be repaid. One night, when we were having a drink together in Bar Chicote, he said: ‘You should never lend more money than you would be prepared to give as a gift to the person asking for a loan. So it’s best to gauge quantities carefully and judge how much each person wants or how much pity they inspire, so that you don’t feel resentful later on. If they pay it back, so much the better; if they don’t, well, that’s what you were expecting anyway.’

  I believe that modesty and tact led him to cover up his natural generosity (and which, contrary to what happens nowadays, one should never boast about), as well as his extreme sensitivity, which he thought was hidden
away, and of which he was probably embarrassed and which, with undeniable skill and talent, but little conviction, he would sometimes try to disguise by being brusque or sarcastic; it was as if he were suddenly aware of how he should behave and had to press a button to set that behaviour in motion, as if he decided to act, but only after an almost imperceptible pause; as if any intemperate or impertinent outbursts always required a minimum of willpower – a little play-acting, a little fabrication. Perhaps the only person with whom there was no such transition – not always, but at least most of the time – the only one who regularly bore the brunt of those harsh, unpleasant, cold outbursts, was his poor wife, Beatriz Noguera, or so she seemed to me, a poor, unhappy woman, sad and affectionate. Poor soul, poor wretch.

  That’s why I was so astonished by those words: ‘That, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low. Do you understand? That’s as low as one can go’, the words with which he had brought the conversation – his lament – to a close for that day and for several more to come. It was the idea that Van Vechten had behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman, ‘or possibly more than one’, that had provoked these drastically negative statements and prevented Muriel from choosing to forget the troubling thing he had been told about Van Vechten. Knowing Muriel’s ideas and having observed his habits and seen some of his films – especially those he had made in the days of censorship, with one version intended for the home market and another for abroad, or made solely for the foreign market – it seemed to me impossible that he would use the word ‘indecent’ when applied to sexual behaviour, to disapprove of or condemn any such activity from a moral or religious perspective (the latter was quite simply unimaginable). Despite the intrinsically ambiguous nature of the term, when I heard him say it, I understood him to mean ‘vile’, ‘despicable’ or ‘base’, and certainly not ‘sinful’ or ‘obscene’. And it struck me as both paradoxical and shocking that he should find such behaviour so execrable – I noticed that he laid special emphasis on the fact that the victim was a woman, possibly more than one – when he, who could often be utterly charming and indeed was so with almost everyone, as long as he didn’t instantly judge them to be either pompous or imbecilic, made one exception, his own wife, Beatriz Noguera, the person who was and had been closest to him for much of his life, regardless of how much time he spent, and always had spent, filming and on location, on occasional pilgrimages in search of funds, and on visits to actors and actresses whom he had to flatter into taking a role in his films, although there was a time when they were the ones to flatter him and were eager to be involved in his projects, at least among Spaniards and the occasional other European national, and even among certain Americans, nonconformist or arty types (everything that came out of Europe at the time was considered to be arty). This period had lasted for only five or six years, because the period during which a film-maker is deemed fashionable can be very brief, a gentle breeze that almost never returns.