Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  I couldn’t help myself and so I missed the opportunity. Few of us can resist the need for an immediate explanation of something someone says to us.

  ‘What’s a paco?’ I asked, instead of seizing the moment and asking to know more about the Doctor or about Beatriz. Had I been more patient, I could have looked it up in a dictionary later on. According to him, the word was first used to describe the Moroccan snipers during the war in Africa and the word then spread, although it obviously didn’t last very long.

  ‘That’s what they called the snipers, there were quite a lot during the first weeks and months of the Civil War and they caused a lot of injuries in Madrid, and I’m not saying that just because of my own experience. The word comes from the sound made when they fired, which happened in two stages, the second was either the impact or the echo, I’m not sure: pa-co or, rather, pa-có. There was even a verb paquear. But, of course, there’s no reason why you should know that.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is what you and your brother were doing up on the roof if there were snipers about.’

  Muriel looked up, and his non-pacoed eye regarded me scornfully:

  ‘Why? Because good little boys never disobey their parents? What kind of a boy were you? We were actually playing at being pacos, with a couple of sticks for rifles. Children always play at being the most dangerous thing they see or hear about. I’ve often wondered if the man who hit me didn’t realize we were children and mistook us for pacos like him and shot to kill. Or perhaps he did realize and fired anyway. People could be real swines then, so who knows? I’ll certainly never know. But we’ve rather strayed off the subject, young De Vere. Let the Doctor go. Abandon your investigations and leave him in peace.’ He was using our nicknames again, the time for seriousness having passed.

  I wasn’t best pleased to receive this counter-order. Having obeyed the original order with great reluctance, I was now the one who felt curious; it’s always upsetting not to be able to bring to a successful conclusion some project requiring patience and skill. I suppose that’s why some hitmen warn their clients that there can be no going back. Even though they’ll get paid anyway, they don’t want to feel they’ve wasted valuable time studying the victim’s habits and itineraries, seeing how the land lies and painstakingly preparing the ground. It’s annoying to have all your efforts come to nothing.

  ‘I can’t just drop him like that, Eduardo,’ I said. ‘He loves coming out and about with me, discovering the new nightlife and meeting young people. As I said before, never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined having access to the girls he’s met thanks to me. Do you really expect me to suddenly stop taking him out, just like that, to tell him he’s no longer welcome? He’d protest, he’d insist, he’d make an almighty scene.’

  ‘You don’t have to be abrupt about it, you can always make excuses,’ said Muriel. ‘Space things out. Tell him you’re really busy helping me, that the filming has got bogged down what with this Beatriz business, and we’re not at all sure what’s going to happen. Unfortunately, that’s true. I don’t know how much longer Towers will allow me to be absent, he’s practically climbing the walls as it is, and each day that passes is money down the drain. The director on the second unit is going ahead with some action shots in the mountains, but, as you know, there aren’t that many of those; actors hate sitting around doing nothing, they get bored, so something’s got to give. Or tell him you’ve got a steady girlfriend now and that you see each other every night, which means you can’t go hanging around in clubs any more. You could also, for the moment, tell him another truth: tomorrow, or the day after, Beatriz will be coming home and I’m not going to be around very much if I start filming again. I need to go straight to Barcelona, for the scenes in Parque Güell and in a few other locations. I can’t really count on the girls, and Flavia being Flavia, well, she does what she can. Oh, and best to ration any visits from Marcela and Gloria, and ideally, in the circumstances, keep them away altogether – you can imagine the poison and the hysteria they’ll spread. I want you to move in, at least for the first week when I’m away, to watch her, to sleep with one eye open. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll try it again soon, she usually allows some years to pass between attempts, but you never know. Keep her company, talk to her, amuse her, take her out. Don’t let her get depressed, or as little as possible. I’m not sure if the Professor’s going to be around at all, but he certainly won’t be sleeping here. And as for Roy, well, youth makes for better company than middle age. Tell the Doctor you’re looking after Beatriz, he’ll accept that. He’ll be sure to visit, though, but I beg you, please, not to ask him about the past, don’t probe him at all.’ Despite that ‘please’, the tone remained imperative. ‘That’s the last thing he deserves, after what happened a couple of days ago. Don’t even, as I suggested, boast to him about your own lack of scruples; don’t tempt him further. If he did show a lack of scruples on one occasion or on various, I wasn’t there, and I don’t want to know about it. I’m sorry, but when I asked you to do that, I allowed myself to be carried away, to be influenced by others. We should only be concerned with what we have seen with our own eyes, with what directly affects us. We can’t go around handing out punishments, even if the punishment consists only in behaving coldly or withdrawing our friendship from someone who may once have done something bad. It would be never-ending, we’d never have time for anything else.’ He paused for a moment, then concluded: ‘We need to remember that we have all done something bad at some point. Even you, and if you haven’t, you’ve got all the time in the world, far too many years, in fact; that’s the downside of being young. So one day you, too, will do something bad.’

  Again I was burning to ask a question and again I waited until Muriel had finished or reached the end of a paragraph, so to speak, just as we do with a silent book that couldn’t possibly take offence, before we stop reading and go out or go to bed.

  ‘Did you say “attempts”? How many have there been, then?’

  Muriel raised his little finger, his ring finger and his middle finger.

  ‘This was the third.’

  ‘And always the same method?’

  ‘No, each time has been slightly different, what happened before doesn’t serve to warn or to raise one’s suspicions. But the fact that I’ve told you a little doesn’t give you the right to know everything, so don’t ask what she did, I don’t like talking about that either. Let’s leave it there. I think you’ve found out quite enough for today.’

  Muriel was making an effort now to put on his usual prickly self, but he had either softened or was tired, perhaps the shock of what had happened two nights before had temporarily tamed him, dulled his sharpness and his vigour. I sensed that I could push my luck a little further.

  ‘At least tell me who came to you with that story about the Doctor. What if, one day, he tells me of some vile deed he did, without my trying to wheedle it out of him? How will I know if that was the one we were after?’ I deliberately used the first-person plural, in order to remind him of his disquiet and anger, now extinguished or banished or kept at bay by gratitude. ‘That’s how you described it, wasn’t it, a vile deed? That he had behaved indecently with a woman. I assume the person who told you was the victim of that deed, a woman.’

  Muriel got up from the floor and sat down at his desk, and I moved my chair so that I was facing him. He rested his cheek on one hand, rather than the other way round. As if his face had grown very heavy or as if he’d felt dizzy when he stood up, for he had done so far too suddenly, with no intermediate stage. However much you might want to limit or mete out what you say, it isn’t easy to apply the brakes once you’ve started, you always end up saying more than you intended, more than you wanted to. He spoke without looking at me, his head bent, his eye fixed on the correspondence on the desk, and which I had left for him to read when he felt like it or had time – none of it was urgent; if he was reading one of the letters now, he was doing so purely involuntarily, withou
t taking in what was written or without caring.

  ‘Yes, a woman first, and then a few others,’ he said, perhaps not even quite aware that he was answering my question, that there was someone there listening and making a mental note. ‘A woman who deserves my complete confidence. A former friend, a former actress, although she wasn’t an actress when I met her, that came later –’ He paused, broke off, but sometimes the tongue gets swept along by its own wretched velocity. ‘A former love.’ He paused again, but this time succumbed even more easily to his tongue’s speed. ‘The love of my life, as people say. Or so I believed for a long time and, during that time, I always felt indebted to her. Which is why, now, when she reappeared, I felt obliged to take what she said seriously, not to doubt her word, but to believe her version of events. Holding back slightly, of course, trying to temper the shock she felt on learning of my friendship. What possible interest could she have in lying to me about the Doctor? To deprive me of an old friend? That wouldn’t have been much of a revenge, if she’d wanted to have her revenge for something that happened a long, long time ago and to which she gave her consent or that she at least understood, or so she said. “Do what you think you ought to do,” she said. “Do what will cause you least pain, what you’ll find easiest to live with. But never think of us, of you and me. Never think of us together if you don’t want to be filled with regret day after day and, still more, night after night. Never even think of us apart either, because, by remembering that, you’ll bring us together again,” that’s what she said, what she advised. And I took her advice, while I could. The other debt, the debt owed to Beatriz, would have weighed on me far more. At the time, I did all I could to do my duty: another of youth’s downsides, quite a few of which one leaves behind as one grows older. The trouble is that once you’ve taken those steps, there’s no going back when you finally discover what a fool you’ve been. The film has been shot and edited, the actors have dispersed along with the rest of the team, there’s no way of adding scenes or changing the plot or the ending: it is what it is and will be for ever. Far too many lives are shaped by deceit or error, it’s probably always been like that, so why should I be any different, why shouldn’t my life be the same? That thought gives me some consolation, convinces me that I’m not the only one – on the contrary, I’m just one more on an endless list of those who tried to act correctly, to keep their promises, those who prided themselves on being able to say something that sounds more and more like a piece of antiquated foolishness: “My word on it”, when almost no one honours their word any more, or considers it a virtue to do so …’ He fell silent, looked up from his papers and, seeing me, fixed his sharp eye on me. He had strayed from my question, had started remembering out loud. Not that he wasn’t aware of my presence or had forgotten I was there or had been pretending I wasn’t. It was more that he had momentarily lapsed into a soliloquy and didn’t care who was listening, like a character in a play when he’s on stage talking to himself, knowing that there’s no point in doing this unless the rest of us are listening. Now he did care and perhaps regretted what he’d said. He managed to use a prolonged silence to rein in that wretched, racing tongue of his. He looked at his watch. He tapped its face. And finally added: ‘I have to go to the hospital to relieve Susana. She spent all last night there. But let’s settle this once and for all, Juan: I find it highly unlikely that the Doctor would tell you of any vile deed he committed, unless you were to ignore my orders and continue to try to draw him out for your own satisfaction. I can’t stop you doing that. But if it happened, I don’t want you to tell me about it, to test my curiosity. Keep it to yourself, say nothing. It was hard for me to decide not to know, but after what happened two nights ago, that decision is now unshakable. Don’t tell anyone else either. A lot of vile deeds were committed here over many years, but we’ve managed to live with those who committed them, and some even did us favours too. We will have to live with them until we all die, and then everything will begin to even out and no one will bother trying to track down the perpetrators. It will be about as relevant to us as the Napoleonic era, which none of us experienced personally. It will be as if it had never happened or will sound to us like fiction. I’m only including myself in that “we” rhetorically, because I, too, will have to die. It’s still early days, I know and, as I say, many vile deeds were committed over many years, but in what age and in what country has that not been the case?’

  VIII

  * * *

  It would be an exaggeration to describe what happened shortly afterwards as a vile deed. Of course, this all depends on one’s point of view, and, needless to say, the point of view of the person listening to or reading the story – which is, after all, the viewpoint of someone hearing a rumour, even if the teller of the tale swears he’s speaking from personal experience and that he either committed or participated in the act himself – never coincides with that of the person who experienced or created it. When we hear or read something, it always seems disappointing and trivial (‘Big deal’), just another story (‘So what else is new?’), an occurrence similar to so many others, almost predictable given that we’ve been inundated with stories ever since the first person spoke the first word to us; there are far too many stories in the world, and we’re rarely surprised or shocked by them or even interested, it’s as if everything had already happened in life or, if not, in the imagination, disseminated by innumerable printed pages and multiplying screens, the old screens of cinemas and televisions and the new ones of computers and even those of the ridiculous mobile phones that everyone now gazes into as if they were crystal balls, which, in a way, they are: they may not predict the future, but they do inform us about what didn’t exist and hadn’t even happened only a second before, about the new-born coming into existence all over the world, and sometimes they’re in such a hurry that they tell us things that haven’t happened, a fallacy, a calumny, a false rumour that proves hard to deny or to shake off; our level of credulity has reverted to what it was in the Middle Ages, with rumour still stuffing our ears with false reports – from the orient to the drooping west – and we refuse to ask for proof, accepting everything as credible because everything has already happened, or so we believe.

  We become more and more like that ancient sentinel of our existence, the moon, for whom what came later and of which I was co-creator could never be considered a vile deed, merely another banal, hackneyed episode, incapable of rousing it from the tedium in which it has been condemned to live, night after night, since before the world was peopled; perhaps, who knows, the first men and women at least provided it with some novelty and amusement, until, inevitably, they began to repeat themselves. As I said earlier, though, perhaps the moon takes less notice of the battles and travails of the monotonous masses, the strutting and the shouting, and focuses more on those beings who seem to tiptoe through life, to be just passing through or on temporary loan even while they’re alive, those who will never go beyond their own bounds, those who one knows early on will leave no trace or track and will barely be remembered once they disappear (they will be like falling snow that does not settle, like a lizard climbing up a sunny wall in summer that pauses for a moment beneath the indolent eye that will not even notice it, like the words, all those years ago, that a teacher painstakingly wrote on the blackboard only to erase them herself at the end of the class, or leave them to be erased by the next teacher to occupy the room) and about whom not even their nearest and dearest will have any anecdotes to recount, for the moon knows that some of them might well harbour stories that are far odder and more intriguing, clearer and more personal than the stories of the shrill exhibitionists who fill most of the globe with their racket and exhaust it with their wild gesticulations.

  But although we may more and more come to resemble that moon in our indifference and saturation, we who are still alive and active tend to endow our lives and acts with some special significance, even though, when measured against the accumulation of events, they have none and, i
n any case, they lose all significance – alas, even for us – as soon as we decide to talk about them to others, and they join the overflowing ranks of stories already told. ‘Ah,’ thinks the person hearing or reading or watching, ‘that story reminds me of another story, and now that I know it, seems almost predictable; it didn’t happen to me, and so it doesn’t surprise me and I only half-listen to it; what happens to others seems always so diffuse and rather unimportant and perhaps not even worth talking about.’ And the person telling the story feels something similar when he passes it on, as if putting it into words or images and in order were tantamount to cheapening and trivializing it, as if only the unrevealed or the unspoken preserved its prestige and uniqueness and mystery. ‘What to me was a grave and important fact – perhaps some vile deed I committed – becomes instead merely another story, nebulous and interchangeable, an original tale intended to amuse.’ Having told it, whether orally or in writing or in images, it doesn’t matter, you think: ‘What was remarkable for me as long as it remained secret and unknown becomes commonplace once revealed and tossed into the bag along with all the other stories heard and mixed up and forgotten and that can be reported and mangled by anyone passing, by whoever hears them, because once told, they’re present in the air and there’s no way you can stop them floating or flying if they get caught up in the mist or the wind pushes them along, and they travel through space and time disfigured by all the many echoes, worn thin by repetition.’