‘No, I’m sorry, Beatriz, it’s me, Juan. I just wondered if you needed anything, if you were all right. I haven’t heard you playing for quite a while, and you know how much I like to hear you play.’ I addressed her automatically and informally as tú, as we men do with women, as if they were children, or else they themselves urge us to do so, as if they found it far harder than men to accept being addressed more formally as usted, which they imagine makes them seem somehow older. At the time, she was about forty-one or forty-two, the age Mariella Novotny was when she was killed or died or committed suicide; nowadays, there would be no doubt about it, she would still be considered young. However, then, and given the difference in age, she did not seem young to me. Nor did I think of her as old, that would have made a nonsense of my vague or theoretical feelings of sexual admiration for her, my attraction to her fleshly beauty, a beauty that seemed to belong to another age and another place, or, as I said before, to some other dimension, some long-past, inanimate dimension.
‘Don’t worry, Juan, I’m fine. I leave the metronome on even when I’m not playing. It soothes me and helps me to think.’ That or something similar is what she would murmur to me through the door (her voice slurred and faint, as if I had torn her from sleep or from some imagination or machination), for she never opened the door when I knocked like that. Was she perhaps not fully dressed or only in her underwear? I would wonder, and then go back to my work.
On the day of the supper party, she was too busy getting things ready to need the metronome. She had ordered the main course from a restaurant like Mallorca or Lhardy or possibly from the Palace Hotel, I’m not sure. She gave Flavia the necessary instructions and took charge of the wines and the dessert, at least I assume she did, it wasn’t really my business. Muriel was filming at the studio and wasn’t expected back until eight fifteen or thereabouts, along with the two actresses and Herbert Lom, for whom he would wait at the hotel until they had showered and changed, then drive them to the apartment in his car. Rico had been given orders (as a young man, he was rather more eager to please than he is now) to pick up Towers and Wheeler, and the others would arrive under their own steam. Most of the guests were foreign, Muriel had nevertheless suggested they arrive at around half past eight and then sit down to eat at about nine; it was late spring, and the sun already took a while to disappear, and it was, he said, depressing to dine in broad daylight. By six o’clock – before the children were back from school – Beatriz appeared to have everything prepared and under control, she changed her clothes, did her hair and make-up, put on her high heels and went out. She had spent so many days without going out, except to her classes – during this sad or apathetic phase – that my curiosity got the better of me and I followed her as I had on other occasions, wanting to know who it was she had suddenly felt the need to see or who had roused her from her misanthropic mood, Van Vechten or the man in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, or possibly neither of them. She was wearing a skirt, which made it seem unlikely, although not impossible, that she would take the motorbike, because I did once see her mounted on the bike with her skirt pulled right up – without a flicker of embarrassment and as if it were the most natural thing in the world – revealing almost as much of her strong thighs as Celia the civil servant had in the taxi.
She did not go very far. She stopped outside the Hotel Wellington, just a few metres down the street and on the same side, and I saw her look up as if expecting a signal from someone staying in one of the rooms that faced on to the street, someone who might indicate with a nod or a lift of his eyebrows: ‘Come up, come up, I’m here already.’ If so, this must be a third lover, I thought, otherwise why would she meet up with Van Vechten or with one of the Poles Kociejowski or Gekoski or with Deverne or Mollá or Arranz, in a different place and so close to her own apartment, just before an evening when, purely in order to please Muriel, she was expecting a load of semi-important guests? Or perhaps that was precisely her reasoning, so that she would be close by and not risk arriving late. She stood gazing up at the windows or balconies for about thirty seconds before she went in. I approached the hotel’s lofty portal – a liveried doorman was on guard, they probably still have a doorman now, I haven’t been past the place for a while, I tend to avoid it – and I tried to peer in, to see if she had stopped in the foyer or headed for the bar or taken the lift. I saw no sign of her, even though I waited on the pavement for three or four or five minutes, time to chain-smoke two cigarettes. Had I gone inside, the porter wouldn’t have turned a hair, the hotel has always welcomed bullfighters, and I could have been a bullfighter’s young apprentice or even some up-and-coming matador; however, it made more sense not to risk her finding me there, because then it would have been clear that I had followed her, given the short distance and the closeness to home. Perhaps she was going to have a drink with Gloria and Marcela at the bar, so as not to get bored at home before supper, and the prospect of that social gathering meant that she couldn’t settle down alone with her metronome. While I was watching and waiting, I spotted the conductor Odón Alonso getting out of a right-hand-drive car – a Daimler or a Jaguar, I think – already in his evening clothes, as if about to give a concert. He left the keys with a valet and walked past me, humming and smiling. It was said he had a permanent suite at the Wellington, where, curiously enough, he almost always stayed with his wife. The thought crossed my mind that Beatriz might be meeting him. For some reason, I dismissed the idea.
And so I went back to the apartment to wait. There was no way I could know for sure, unless I ventured into the foyer, and that, I had decided, would be a mistake.
As arranged, Muriel arrived at eight fifteen, along with the former Phantom of the Opera, Goldfinger’s mistress and victim, and Lisa Raines, the future Fanny Hill in another Towers film. From my room, I heard Muriel ask the girls and Flavia where Beatriz was, clearly puzzled not to find her there.
‘She wasn’t here when we got back from school,’ said Susana.
‘She went out,’ said Flavia. ‘She should be back soon.’
‘What time did she go out?’ he asked.
‘Shortly before six.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’
‘No, just that she’d be back in time for supper. But don’t worry, everything’s ready.’
‘She’s probably gone to the hairdresser’s or something,’ Muriel said. ‘And where is young De Vere?’ He tended to call me ‘young De Vere’ rather than ‘Juan’, both when addressing me and when referring to me, just as he called Rico ‘the Professor’ and Van Vechten ‘the Doctor’.
‘He’s in his room.’
‘I’ll go and fetch him. I’ve brought him a young beauty of his own age for him to entertain.’
The bedroom beyond the kitchen, where I had slept the first time I stayed in the apartment, had become ‘my room’, and it was no longer seen as unusual for me to sleep there. I preferred not to appear just at that moment, so that Muriel wouldn’t ask me directly about Beatriz and so that I wouldn’t have to lie to him. Not telling him what I had seen with my own eyes, for example in the Sanctuary, was not the same as saying: ‘I’ve no idea where she’s gone. She left without saying goodbye.’ Even though that last part would have been true. I thought with some irritation: ‘A young beauty of my own age indeed. What is Muriel talking about? Obviously all young people look the same to him.’ As Lisa Raines was about sixteen or seventeen, she really was an apprentice; for me, at twenty-three, she was almost as much of a baby as Susana.
Since Muriel had to look after the guests he had brought with him, he didn’t come to demand my presence immediately. However, after four or five minutes, the doorbell rang and he strode over to my room and, without looking in, called:
‘Young De Vere, would you mind opening the front door? Flavia’s got things to do and Beatriz isn’t back yet. And the young Raines girl may already be getting bored. Come and keep her company and stop sulking. Just because you haven’t got a place at the table doesn�
��t exempt you from being helpful. And you never know, we may end up making room for you, but that will depend on whether the young prodigy approves of you or not.’
I left my room at once, and saw him walk down the corridor and into the living room, while I went to the front door. The bell rang impertinently several more times, Rico had arrived with Towers and Wheeler (now that I think of it, Rico wasn’t very eager to please them either, although he made an exception for Muriel and Beatriz, whenever he got the chance to enjoy their company: I think the only reason he had agreed to play the part of chauffeur was because he wanted to meet the illustrious Oxford Hispanist, to whom he was chatting away in Spanish, completely ignoring the producer and his wife). I ushered them all into the living room and, shortly afterwards, the couple from the British embassy arrived too, all the foreigners observing relative punctuality. I repeated the same operation and, six or seven minutes later, the person ringing the bell was Van Vechten with his inevitable rectangular smile, and I wondered if Lom would notice his resemblance to Robert J. Wilke, with whom he had appeared in Spartacus. When Van Vechten came in and saw everyone there, he remarked in smug, stiff, mediocre English, like a Spanish TV presenter:
‘Oh dear, I must be the last. So sorry to keep the distinguished guests waiting.’ He gave an anachronistic click of his heels and introduced himself to the assembled company. ‘Dr George Van Vechten,’ he said, absurdly translating his own name from ‘Jorge’ to ‘George’.
The truth is that no one was waiting for him, none of the foreigners had even heard of him, and the only guest who did know him, Rico, had seen him dozens of times before, and, as far as he was concerned, Van Vechten was just another shape coming and going in Muriel’s motley apartment.
‘No, you’re not the last, Doctor,’ my boss said in Spanish, then as an aside: ‘Beatriz is missing. It’s really very odd that she shouldn’t be here.’ And he looked at his watch. ‘Have you by any chance heard from her today?’
Van Vechten responded defensively, although only I would have noticed:
‘No, why would I?’
Then Muriel turned to me. With all the comings and goings of people and languages, I had escaped being interrogated on the subject until then. It was gone nine o’clock and the motley English contingent and their companions were beginning to flag.
‘And what about you, young De Vere, do you know anything?’
No, I couldn’t tell Muriel a lie, I could, at most, tell him a half-lie, enough to cover myself.
‘I’m not sure. I popped out earlier to run a couple of errands and happened to see her going into the Wellington. I was on the opposite side of the street. But that was quite some time ago, at around six.’
Muriel’s one eye rested with a look of alarm and incredulity on my two eyes, as if I had just acted a scene only he could understand, perhaps because he already knew it, perhaps because he had a more penetrating visual imagination than most. For a fraction of a second, he closed his eye, as if with tedium or weariness, anticipating the labour involved in some future task or in his vision of events. Or as if gathering all his strength and patience and allowing himself time to think before taking action: ‘I’m going to have to deal with it all over again. Or maybe I’ll never have to deal with it ever again.’
‘At the Wellington? The Hotel Wellington? But why didn’t you so say so before?’
He said this so loudly and in such a tremulous voice that the guests’ murmured conversations ceased at once and they all looked at him, concerned or uncomprehending. Professor Peter Wheeler was the only one of the foreigners present who knew Spanish perfectly, but the couple from the embassy understood too, even though they had not long been in Madrid.
‘I don’t know, Eduardo, you didn’t ask me. What’s wrong? What does it matter? That was hours ago. It never occurred to me to mention it,’ I stammered, already feeling guilty of some grave fault, although I had no idea what.
But Muriel hadn’t really expected an answer to his question: I don’t even know if he heard what I said.
‘Quick, Jorge,’ he said to Van Vechten. ‘You come too, Juan.’ Then he turned to Rico and said: ‘Paco, please, keep our guests entertained, will you, and invent some explanation. We may have to cancel supper, I’m not sure. I’ll let you know as soon as possible, or else I’ll send Juan.’
This time, he called all three of us by our proper names, which meant that there was no room for so much as a hint of a joke, as there normally was when he was surrounded by his usual spectators and accomplices, of whom I was now one. He only had room in his mind now for anxiety and a deadly seriousness.
I had never seen Muriel run any distance at all. ‘Running is undignified, young De Vere,’ he had said to me once, telling me off after seeing me race for a taxi when the lights were about to change, or when he saw other people, either painfully struggling or brimming with health, as they engaged in what at the time we Spaniards called footing – as a nation, we are as useless at languages in general as we are eager to adopt foreign terms we can neither understand nor pronounce. As I say, I had never before seen him run and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone run as swiftly and desperately as he did, covering the few metres between his house and the Hotel Wellington in no time at all, so at least the indignity lasted only briefly, and besides, in such an extreme situation, that would have been the last thing on his mind. He ran so fast for a man of fifty – jacket flapping open, its tails and his tie flying like flags – that even I, at half his age, would have been unable to keep up with him for another two hundred metres, and Dr Van Vechten certainly wouldn’t, for despite all those hours spent working out in gyms, he was still a good ten years older than Muriel. However, the distance between house and hotel was so short that all three of us arrived pretty much at the same time, with Muriel at the head, of course, not only because he was running as if the devil himself were after him – an expression used and understood by everyone, even though no one has ever actually seen the devil – but because he knew why he was running and what he had to do. During that brief race, I also guessed what had happened, as doubtless Dr Van Vechten had, if he hadn’t done so earlier: Muriel wasn’t afraid that Beatriz had forgotten the time or that supper had completely slipped her mind because she was too consumed by her needs or her passions or her sexual appetites – a regular lover, the manager perhaps; a guest, maybe Baringo Roy, our friend Roy’s extraordinary Andalusian cousin; a bellboy or a casual waiter, or whoever – I don’t think he even imagined such a scene; what he imagined was what I had entirely failed to notice when I was trying to peer into the hotel foyer: Beatriz must already have reserved a room, perhaps that very morning or even the previous night, which is why she hadn’t had to go to reception to pick up her key or fill in a form; they would have handed her the key as soon as she appeared or she would have had it with her, depending on the hotel rules; she would have gone up to the room whose window she had stopped to gaze up at from the street, already imagining herself inside it, like someone contemplating her own coffin; she would have ordered something to drink or plundered the minibar and begun swallowing pills, lying on the bed, barefoot, possibly in her underwear so as to be more comfortable and with the television on so as to feel less alone, to see faces that would not see her or be able to intervene, to hear voices in the background to make more bearable the transition from being in the world to ceasing to be in the world – that irreversible transformation – just as children fall asleep more easily to the distant murmur of conversation between their parents and a guest, if there is one: as if they were lingering for a while in the waking, adult world they are reluctant to leave, not yet, not yet. The moon would not have been present, or perhaps Beatriz would have waited to see it rise – still very pale, still intimidated by the late-setting sun – so as to die in the dim glow of its deathly pallor.
Or perhaps she would have calmly and slowly filled the bathtub and then climbed in before slitting her veins – if you cut them before, the blood will start
to flow at once and stain the towels and the hotel’s immaculate bathrobe, very few suicides are entirely indifferent to the mess they make or the image they leave behind – and what happened once she was in the water would depend on various factors: the number, length and depth of the cuts, whether on one wrist or on both; whether the water was really hot or not hot enough, because the cold would make the incisions close up, thus delaying death, not yet, not yet, although the cold is sure to come sooner or later; and two other things would determine the speed or otherwise of that death: if the person lost consciousness and her head slipped beneath the water, then she would drown, unless her body became wedged in the tub, her nose and mouth unsubmerged; in that case, if she didn’t drown, she would lie there unconscious until her heart stopped, incapable of pumping the little remaining blood around the body. It would, therefore, be a question of when she had sliced into her veins with the razor and how often and how deeply, whether she had done this at just gone six, shortly after going up to the room, or had waited and amused herself anticipating and savouring what would happen at home when the guests had all arrived and she had still not appeared; or if she had hesitated for a long time, knowing there would be no turning back, no possible postponement, once the skin was cut and the flesh opened, now, yes, now, it’s not easy to remain calm enough to staunch your own blood once it has started to flow; or if she had wanted to wait and see which complete stranger would win the latest TV quiz show – sometimes the most insignificant of things can detain us – and the minutes would have passed without her noticing, or she’d be thinking all the time that it wouldn’t be much longer until the dimmest contestant was eliminated or else declared the winner. It would be the same if she had taken pills, it would be crucial to know when she had started swallowing them and how quickly – the throat rebels and you have to stop now and then – and how much alcohol she had drunk. And depending on all these things, we three would arrive in time or too late, although the presence of the Doctor meant there would be not a moment’s vacillation or horror, he would know precisely what to do in any circumstance, Beatriz’s life would probably be in his hands, assuming there was still life in Beatriz. There was also a third possibility that could not be ruled out, for the fact that she had not, up until then, jumped off the balcony didn’t mean that even as we were still running, still on our way, she might not be climbing on to the balustrade and jumping – I didn’t look up as I was running, if I had, I might have seen her crouched on the ledge, ready to let herself fall – or even as we were asking at reception for her room number or persuading the staff that, given the imminence or actual occurrence of a tragedy, they would have to break down the door or use the master key, the staff would have resisted at first and called the hotel manager so that he could take charge and authorize such an intrusion, thus wasting possibly vital minutes. There was also a chance that Beatriz had hanged herself by using strips torn from the sheets, then climbing on to a chair that she herself would have kicked away, in which case, there would be no delay, no margin, nothing to be done, she would be dead when we finally entered the room as daylight was fading, or as night had already fallen, or so it would appear from inside the room, where all the lights would be on so that she wouldn’t have to kill herself without being able to see properly or perhaps so as not to have to die in the dark: it’s impossible not to imagine that, afterwards, there will be only blackness and so why torment yourself with the idea beforehand, unless you prefer to become accustomed to it with your eyes wide open, with your failing, fading consciousness, clinging on to life’s last threads.
Thus Bad Begins Page 26