Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘I’ll grant you that,’ he said. ‘All the more reason for me to feel I’ve thrown away my life. A part of my life. That’s why I can’t forgive you.’ He said this in a gentle, almost regretful voice, nothing like the bitter, insulting tone he had used up until then, as if this were the first time he was giving her these sorrowful explanations. ‘If only you’d never told me,’ he went on, ‘if only you’d kept me in the dark. When you embark on a deception, you should maintain it right until the end. What is the point of setting the record straight, of suddenly telling the truth? That’s even worse, because it invalidates or gives the lie to everything that went before, it obliges the deceived person to look at their whole life in a new light, or else deny it. And yet that was your life, and you can’t unlive what you’ve lived. So, as the now undeceived person, what do you do? Strike out your whole existence, retrospectively cancel everything you felt or believed? That’s impossible, but neither can you preserve it intact, as if it had all been true, when you know it wasn’t. You can’t ignore it, but neither can you simply discard all those years, which were what they were and can be no other way, and of which there will always be a remnant, a memory, even if it smacks of the phantasmagorical, something that both happened and didn’t happen. And what do you do with something that both happened and didn’t happen? Ah, what a fool you were, Beatriz. Not just once, but twice.’

  Yes, the tone was one of lamentation now, not scornful or aggressive, although there was still perhaps a hint of rancour. Beatriz Noguera immediately adopted that same tone, perhaps knowingly, perhaps sincerely.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my love, I’m so sorry I hurt you. I wish I could turn back the clock,’ she said, not making it clear whether she would like to turn it back to the moment before she deceived him, in whatever way that was, or to the moment before she had undeceived him. Whether she wished not to have done the former or the latter. And after all the barbarous things he had said to her, she still had courage enough to call him ‘my love’, that’s what she said, I heard her.

  Then Muriel, doubtless seeing the slow tears that I could not see, leaned forward very slightly and embraced her, gave her the embrace she had asked for and which he had denied her. I imagine she could not then contain herself, for she flung herself into his arms and pressed him to her tempting bosom; and not only that, she pressed her belly against his, her thighs against his, her whole, firm, abundant body wrapped around him, she clung to him with her whole self, as if desperate to relive something from the remote past she had almost given up for lost. I felt almost envious of him, even though there was nothing sexual about his embrace, whereas, despite the circumstances, there had been something sexual about his earlier gropings. On the other hand, I saw instantly that her embrace was overtly sexual, which is doubtless why it was so short-lived, with him firmly pushing her away, he must have noticed too, only far more viscerally; and it seemed to him outrageous and he couldn’t allow her that or perhaps he feared contagion, that she might transmit to him her sensuality, her lust, her unfettered adoration. Muriel again placed one hand on her shoulder and thus kept her at a distance, an authoritarian gesture worthy of Fu Manchu.

  ‘Go on, clear off. I need to sleep and so do you. And don’t forget, Juan is sleeping here night, he might have heard us.’

  I again jumped at the mention of my name, especially given my role at the time, that of gossip and spy. I had been crouching for a while now and longed to get up, although when I did, my legs and feet would probably have gone to sleep. However, sheer dread of being discovered helped me not to move a millimetre, to remain inaudible and undetected in the dark, to avoid making the floorboards creak by any movement of mine.

  ‘Eduardo, Eduardo,’ she said, and she placed one hand on that distancing arm, squeezing and rubbing it with a mixture of boundless affection and fear. It was a clumsy, untimely gesture. That was all she said, but it came across as importunate and would not, therefore, be well received. And it was not.

  ‘Look, I’ve told you already, you fat cow, just leave me in peace.’ It wasn’t just that the term ‘fat cow’ was in bad taste, inappropriate, hurtful and humiliating. His tone was once again harsh, insulting, bordering on the irascible. ‘I opened the door to you and I embraced you, but, no, you always want more. You don’t know when to stop. You simply can’t tell when enough is enough. Just piss off, will you, and don’t come back.’

  He took a step back and closed the door, calmly but quickly. I heard him slide the bolt across. Beatriz stood for a few moments staring at the door, as she had at the start. She had left her pack of cigarettes and her ashtray on the floor. She picked them up and, this time, when her nightdress rode up higher, I did see the beginning of her buttocks. Or perhaps I imagined it – wishful thinking – and I didn’t actually see anything. She took out another cigarette and lit it. She remained there smoking for a while longer, recovering, waiting until her breathing had calmed. She took a few steps back and forth, I couldn’t tell if she was simply bewildered or if she was resuming her prowling, reluctant to abandon her post as sentinel. I could see her face more clearly. She had, as I thought, shed a few tears, but she seemed not so much disconsolate as relieved, almost serene, I’m not sure. Perhaps resigned, as if she were thinking that ever-comforting thought: ‘We’ll see.’ Then she walked unhurriedly back to her room, her half-smoked cigarette in one hand and the packet and the ashtray in the other, leaving not a trace of her incursion. She returned to her woeful bed as she did every night, but this time, unlike on other nights, she was taking with her a small trophy, a sensation. Sensations are unstable things, they become transformed in memory, they shift and dance, they can prevail over what was said and heard, over rejection or acceptance. Sometimes, sensations can make us give up and, at others, encourage us to try again.

  III

  * * *

  The Muriels, as people knew and referred to them, gave suppers and small parties, and this was presumably part of the diurnal pact by which they had agreed to live. These occasions were not that common, but nor were they a rarity. The suppers were less frequent and required more organization, that is, when they were arranged ahead of time rather than being impromptu affairs, as happened when a good friend – or several – stayed longer than expected and ended up sharing a meal with them. Every now and then, however, Muriel would invite a professional or amateur producer – plus his wife or mistress – who needed to be feted, or an impresario – and his wife – whom Muriel was trying to persuade to invest in a project, or an ambassador or cultural attaché – and their wives – to whom he had to cosy up, indulging in that Spanish mania for mixing business deals with a semblance of incipient friendship; Muriel had to explore every possible source of finance, and he knew from experience that when foreigners promised to lend a hand or to intercede, they proved far more trustworthy than our fellow Spaniards, who were much given to putting on airs, yapping on gratuitously and incomprehensibly, then disappearing without handing over any money at all and without explanation. This was why he had made a number of his films abroad or as co-productions, the good, the average and the feeble, the ones that were all his own work and those that weren’t, and, of course, the bits of nonsense he’d been commissioned to make in the late 1960s and early 70s by the prolific Harry Alan Towers, although most of those were directed by Jesús Franco, aka Jess Frank, Towers’s favourite Spanish director, with whom Muriel enjoyed an intermittent and superficial friendship. He had, you might say, inherited or been bequeathed any film – only two or three – that Frank or Franco had been too busy to make, which was hard to imagine since the latter usually made time for everything that was thrown at him, indeed, according to legend, that ubiquitous, tireless, supernatural creature sometimes worked on three films at once, using the same actors on two of them, but without the actors realizing they were doing double the work for a single fee, and using an entirely different cast and location for the third.

  Muriel met these people (although not Towers or Franco) at re
ceptions and suppers, at premieres, gala dinners and cocktail dos, at poker evenings, at parties and even at the occasional literary gathering, where he also met some of the inexperienced politicians of the day, one of whom – a fairly prominent figure – he once managed to inveigle into having supper at his apartment. On first meeting, Muriel made an instantly good impression, he could be friendly and pleasant and slightly enigmatic – playing down his bitter, melancholic or misanthropic side as best he could and instead bringing to the fore his natural joviality – and not only was he good at social chit-chat, he had a reputation for being able to banish boredom from any soirée, for, in those days, people still had a taste for social occasions where relatively theoretical or abstract topics were raised, inviting serious discussion, even if it was only around the dinner table. He also had a way of being impertinent without causing any real offence, or only to pompous fools; and he was aware that his presence was sought after at meetings and parties by people eager to hear his good-humoured jibes or to watch him pulling the leg of some vain, puffed-up individual – well, we all have our wares to sell, a contribution to make to the general gaiety, and it’s best to know this and accept that everyone who goes into society has a role to play as jester, even a banker or the King, who, as well as playing the fool like everyone else, has to pay for the feast, where everyone is everyone else’s jester, including those who believe they were the ones who hired the entertainment. The other almost equally undignified reason for these invitations was his fast-fading prestige, but he was happy to take advantage of this, knowing that people still liked to say: ‘We had Muriel over to supper the other night’ or ‘Muriel has invited us to one of his private parties’; and in his more pessimistic moments, he wondered how much longer this would last, given that his films hadn’t met with any real critical or public success for five or six years, which is an eternity in the world of cinema. When someone becomes known merely by his surname, he usually considers this a triumph – especially in France, where it’s proof of one’s uniqueness – but, in actual fact, it’s an act of depersonalization, reification, commercialization, a cheap medal that others can pin on themselves in exchange for almost nothing: a little flattery, a small investment of money or a few vague promises. In Spain, oddly enough, it’s considered far more prestigious to be known by one’s first name, and this applies to only four or five or six people: ‘Federico’ is always García Lorca, just as ‘Rubén’ is Rubén Darío, ‘Juan Ramón’ is the Nobel Laureate Jiménez, ‘Ramón’ is Gómez de la Serna, ‘Mossèn Cinto’ is Verdaguer and, five centuries on, ‘Garcilaso’ is Garcilaso de la Vega, and this list has remained unchanged for ages, perhaps because in order to join it, you need to have a surname that is either too long or too commonplace or might lead to confusion (the existence of Lope de Vega must have helped all three, ‘Garcilaso’, ‘Lope’ and ‘El Inca Garcilaso’, the latter owing his absurd designation to the need to differentiate him from his more important namesake), as well, perhaps, as a touch of pseudo-popular affection that encourages familiarity.

  These ‘private parties’ – which took place on Muriel’s birthday and saint’s day, or were impromptu affairs put on to entertain a visitor or celebrate some promising bit of news when it was still little more than a promise – usually had a fairly fixed guest list, with others being added as and when. Regulars on that list were Rico and Roy, whom Muriel, on my first night as a spy, had accused of having carnal relations with his despised wife, an accusation she had brushed aside. Rico was Professor Francisco Rico, who, although far more famous now than he was then, was nevertheless pretty well known; he was not yet forty, but already had a veritable library behind him (by which I mean books that he himself had written or created), and enjoyed a brilliant career as scholar, expert, righter of literary wrongs, luminary, highbrow, perfect pedant (for he made of his pedantry an art), professional schemer and, of course, eminent and much-feared teacher (he was probably already a professor when I met him; in fact, given his astonishing precociousness in all things, he had probably been a professor since puberty). He lived and taught in Barcelona and its environs, but travelled widely within Europe in order to scheme and plot (the Americas did not attract him, because it was a continent with no Middle Ages and no Renaissance) and he often came to Madrid to engage in murky and disastrous dealings (God had not called him to the path he insisted on travelling), to establish diplomatic relations with the various circles he had access to, including the world of politics, and to work on his candidature to the Real Academia Española, a body he probably despised deep down, but which he nonetheless wished to enter. He was clearly only prepared to remain outside those bodies where membership depended not on others, but solely on himself, just as he could happily leave behind him those places where the doors had already been flung wide to him and where, if possible, he was being begged to cross the threshold. Needless to say, he also came for his own amusement, and there was no doubting the affection bordering on adoration that he felt for Muriel. He clearly enjoyed Muriel’s company enormously and admired him too, perhaps not so much for his films – Rico did not care for the cinema, an art invented far too late and in what, for him, was a hideously decadent century – but for his personality and because of an affinity of character that meant they sparked each other off and generally got on like a house on fire: they both, each in his own way, tended to be arrogant and disrespectful and had a sharp sense of humour that not everyone understood. Such was the Professor’s veneration for Muriel that he pretty much extended it to everyone who surrounded him, as if their nearness to and acceptance of the maestro in itself gave them value, and it seemed to me that it was for this reason – at least in principle – that he acted as chevalier servant to Beatriz Noguera and, whenever he was in Madrid, often accompanied her to the theatre, to a museum, a concert or even shopping. He was a salacious fellow, as was clear from the overeager look on his face, although he was oblivious both to this and to the fact that women find such eagerness either a complete turn-off or rather attractive – there’s no halfway house – but I nevertheless believe that, regardless of the state of the Muriel marriage, the enormous respect and affection he felt for Muriel would have prevented him from getting close to his wife in any capacity other than that of companion, friend and helpmate, as an extreme gesture of deference towards Muriel with Beatriz as intermediary. It was quite likely that Rico and Beatriz also got on well and had developed their own estimable friendship; it was equally possible that the Professor’s eyes did occasionally linger on her opulent figure (he was a man who, like me and despite the difference in our ages, appreciated flesh and detested bone), or that their fingers might accidentally have touched when she was trying on a dress in a shop and invited him to feel the fabric, or that he had placed a hand on her shoulder, arm or waist to protect her from the speeding cars as she was about to cross the street, but nothing more than that, at least in my opinion. And Beatriz was three or four years older than him, enough for her to treat any suggestion or advance on his part with a certain irony, if she preferred not to take him up on them, but play them down and let them pass.

  Rico’s salacious nature – or, perhaps, his strong sexuality – was evident in his soft, flexible mouth permanently occupied by a cigarette, in his oblique gaze hidden behind rather large spectacles that made him seem diligent and innocuous – but only when you first met him – it was there even in his prematurely bald head, which he carried with a poise and an aplomb unusual in those who go bald before their time, and which can often be a cause of complexes or even a kind of universal resentment, whereas he was all loquacity, good cheer and remarkable sans-façon, as if he were a Don Juan or a handsome, dashing fellow adorned with a fascinating toupee that women find magnetically attractive (his bald head was, in fact, like a battering ram, make of that what you will). Once, at Muriel’s apartment, he had the temerity to flirt in my presence with a girl I was going out with at the time – well, I was going out with several girls, and they, of course, as w
as normal among people our age, were going out with several other men – and who had come to pick me up at the end of my working day. His main method of attack always consisted in trying to impress whoever it was with his encyclopaedic knowledge, and this sometimes led him to misjudge his audience: to most twenty-one-year-old women – apart from a few rare exceptions brimming with curiosity – his excessive display of learning, in this case on the origin of my surname, would have seemed either boring or alarming or quite frankly bewildering.

  ‘Come over here, young De Vere.’ That’s how I was sometimes addressed both by Muriel and his followers, although the latter did so merely by imitation or perhaps impregnation. Professor Rico always treated me kindly and benevolently because of my closeness to Muriel, but also somewhat dismissively because of my youth, he was, after all, fifteen years older than me and I was more or less the same age as his students, whom he took great pleasure in humorously despising, humiliating and terrorizing, although his victims seemed not to notice, thus demonstrating, according to him, their sad lack of little grey cells or nous (he loved to mix high-flown language with slang or sometimes even genuinely crude expressions, just so that we wouldn’t think he lived entirely in the limbo of centuries past). It was the same, indeed, with his teaching assistants, with most of his colleagues or supposed peers and almost every other being under the sun; generally speaking, any contemporary of his merited little respect and was, by definition, deemed to be defective. I imagine that he himself regretted being his own contemporary as well as that of all the many ignoramuses and idiots who criss-crossed the world, happily bellowing forth their blatant idiocy, as he once put it. I still see him from time to time, and, as is only natural, his distaste has only increased with the passing decades. ‘Sit down for a moment, young De Vere, I need to question you. And bring your friend too, or were you hoping to smuggle her past me? Introduce us.’ She was called or called herself Bettina and worked nights in a bar, which is where I had met her; she was a cheerful, quick-witted girl and wore short skirts, well, not so very short, but they did prove pretty spectacular when she sat down, a fact doubtless anticipated by the Professor as soon as his swift eye saw her standing there. ‘De Vere, now what kind of a surname is that?’ And he pulled a sceptical face. ‘It’s not hard to pronounce nor does it look particularly odd when written down, but it is very un-Spanish, if it is Spanish at all. No, no, it’s French in origin.’ And he said my name with a French accent and repeated it, stressing the guttural ‘r’. ‘But the most famous De Veres are to be found in England, as far as I know, and I do, of course, know all there is to know, where the name is pronounced De Viah, De Viah.’ He liked the sound of his own voice, and he pronounced my name this time very affectedly and with a more or less English accent; he was admirable really, he never had the slightest fear of making a fool of himself, indeed, he never did, however close to the edge he trod; he didn’t care who he was talking to or who was listening, whether addressing a congregation of international luminaries or a young woman he didn’t even know, he always felt he was the dominant, superior party (except when he was with Muriel). ‘It’s the family name of the earls of Oxford, and dates back to the reign of William the Conqueror – in the eleventh century, just in case you didn’t know, nowadays, one can never assume that people know even the most basic of facts.’ I did know, as it happened, having studied English history at university, but I wasn’t going to interrupt him. ‘Not so long ago, I had a student who was convinced that the French Revolution was a rebellion against Napoleon. I mean, for fuck’s sake, ça suffit,’ he added in French. Sometimes, by way of a preamble or conclusion, Rico would utter strange, unintelligible onomatopoeia (if one can call them that) of his own invention, perhaps as a way of avoiding the usual filler words like ‘Well’, ‘So’ and ‘Anyway’, which he must have thought vulgar. ‘Svástire,’ he said, or I think he did, then went on: ‘The oldest recorded De Vere, I seem to recall – and if I seem to recall it, it must be true – was named Aubrey, which is neither more nor less than a distorted version of Albericus (how’s that for a bit of unexpected Latin), a Christian name that has recurred several times throughout the family history. There has also been a Robert, a Francis, a Horace and a few Johns, which means that you share the same name as – or have copied it from – a couple of far nobler subjects from an earlier age.’ He was speaking to me, but was sitting half-turned towards Bettina and kept shooting sideways glances at her thighs or perhaps higher up than that; she had not crossed her legs, and so her brief, tight skirt allowed one to discern something in between them; the crotch of her knickers, I suppose, although she, like so many of her contemporaries, did not always wear knickers: it was all part and parcel of that liberated age and of a consequent desire to provoke. She noticed these myopic glances and allowed herself to be looked at; she appeared to be listening to Rico with close attention, although it could equally well have been amazement. ‘More than that, I have an Anglo-Saxon colleague who is just beginning to maintain, secretly until he has published his study (it won’t be worth a button, but that’s his lookout), that the corpus of texts we believe to have been written by William Shakespeare’ – that’s what he said, ‘corpus of texts’ – ‘was in fact written by a De Vere.’ Pleased with his phonetic skills, he again pronounced this as ‘De Viah’, with great delight and exaggeration, it sounded almost like an insult or as if he were retching. ‘Edward, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Lord Great Chamberlain, ambassador, a wild, quarrelsome individual, not without talent: soldier, duellist, poet, failed plotter against Sidney and the person responsible for introducing into Elizabeth I’s court the perfumed, embroidered glove. You probably haven’t a clue who Sidney was, but never mind, now you do,’ and he paused for a second. This was entirely untrue, because how could we know who Sidney was from the mere mention of his name? I was also confused by that mention of a glove, but perhaps he hadn’t just slipped it in by chance, maybe it was a way of drawing us in.