Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  At night, though, no one came, and it was up to me to take the initiative, to be on hand if she needed me, to distract her or talk to her or sit down with her to watch a film or a series on TV, so that she would feel less keenly her customary nocturnal solitude; my orders now were to tread carefully, but the situation wouldn’t last, only as long as it took her to convalesce, the few weeks it would take for us all to recover from the shock and regain our mutual trust, no state of alarm can be maintained indefinitely. I think I talked to Beatriz more during the ten days that Muriel was away filming in Barcelona than during the whole of the rest of the time I worked for him. We tended to avoid any very personal subjects, any thorny or delicate issues, but, as always, in situations of unexpected closeness, a false, provisional camaraderie soon sprang up, and a feeling of daily normality quickly took root; you only have to condemn two reasonably nice people to spending time in each other’s company for it to come to seem perfectly normal, especially if, for some reason, those exceptional circumstances become permanent; it takes only a couple of days for routines to be established, to the extent of each person always sitting in the same place, in the same armchair if they play chess or cards, on the same side of the sofa if they’re watching TV, and, if they sleep in the same bed for two consecutive nights, that’s quite long enough for each to choose which side he or she will sleep on.

  When she went to her room, I would stay up for another hour or so, not feeling tired enough to go to bed myself, and when I did finally go to my own room, I remained, not perhaps with one eye open, as Muriel had ordered, but with some corner of my consciousness watching, in perhaps the same way that the parents of young children have to remain constantly alert, not, of course, that Beatriz was as important to me as that. Nevertheless, I would hear her whenever she left her room, as she briefly did each night, if she went into the living room or the kitchen for a few minutes, doubtless the time it took to smoke one or two cigarettes, before returning to her side of the apartment and closing her bedroom door, then I would go back to sleep, feeling easier, as if she were safer in her room, although probably quite the opposite was true: if she had tried to kill herself again, she would have avoided doing so in any communal areas, where there was a danger that her children or Flavia might find her, where there was more likelihood that someone would stop her or frustrate her in her wish to die by once again arriving just in time.

  One night, I heard her clattering around in the kitchen for longer than usual, while she waited for exhaustion or sleep to get the better of her, and this was so close to where I was sleeping that I found it impossible not to listen to and interpret her every movement. She opened and closed the fridge three or four times, lit cigarettes – the repeated sound of a faulty lighter; she poured herself a cold drink – liquid falling into a glass, the clink of ice cubes – a chair or stool scraping on the floor, she would sit down only to stand up a few seconds later, then sit down again, what I couldn’t hear were her footsteps, and I imagined she must be barefoot or wearing the silent slippers that allowed her to pace back and forth outside her husband’s bedroom door without him hearing her, until she decided to announce her presence by rapping on the door with one knuckle. She took no such pains now, perhaps she had forgotten that I was sleeping next door or perhaps she wasn’t bothered about waking me, probably too absorbed in her own thoughts and able to think only of them – insomnia is very selfish. The persistent scraping of a stool or chair – probably only restlessness and nerves, the kitchen being furnished with both stools and chairs – made me imagine a possible danger. ‘I hope she’s not going to climb on to one,’ I thought, ‘then kick it away and hang herself; I hope that’s not what she’s preparing to do,’ and I tried fruitlessly to remember if there was anything on the ceiling to which she could attach a rope or a strip of fabric. This idea had only to cross my mind for me to listen more acutely, to struggle to decipher every sound and to worry whenever there was a longer than usual pause or silence. In the middle of the night everything seems plausible and real.

  I realized that as long as Beatriz stayed in the kitchen, I wouldn’t be able to relax, and so I got out of bed. It was already hot in Madrid and I was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, the kind I’ve worn since I was a young man, having always found so-called Y-fronts unpleasantly macho and even faintly distasteful. I couldn’t and shouldn’t appear dressed like that, I thought – although I would have been justified in doing so, since this was, in a way, my territory – and since I didn’t have a dressing gown, I put on my jeans and a shirt, although without bothering to button the latter up or to tuck it in. I cautiously opened the door of my cubbyhole – I didn’t want to startle her – which Flavia had smartened up a bit since the first time I stayed overnight, making it a little more welcoming, a little less bare; and I saw Beatriz with her back to me, sitting, just as I had thought, on one of the stools in the kitchen, which is where we used to have breakfast, individually and at an hour of our choosing, the only ones who ate together being the children and then only on school days, no one person acted as a kind of agglutinative hub, the family tending to disperse.

  The lights were already on in the kitchen, and so the light from my door when I opened it didn’t warn Beatriz of my presence, locked as she was inside her own head. She wasn’t wearing a dressing gown either, even though Muriel was away and there was no one she could tempt with her rather short nightdress, when she was standing it came only to mid-thigh and was identical to the one I’d seen on that now distant night, except that it wasn’t white or cream, but a very pale blue – perhaps she had bought two or three, thinking it was a flattering style. I assumed that the heat had made her leave her room so very lightly dressed, that and her self-absorbed state and her sense of being alone even in an apartment where five other people were sleeping, employees and children, but perhaps we counted for little in her insomnia. Seated as she was, I couldn’t tell whether, as on that night of prowling and pleading, she was wearing any knickers, although obviously, and as is only natural, she wasn’t wearing a bra, well, who would go to sleep in a piece of clothing that controls and constricts; I’ve never in my life met a woman who kept her bra on in bed. I was surprised that the first thing my eyes noticed or tried to discover was whether she had anything on underneath her silk nightdress; or, rather, it didn’t surprise me, but I silently reproached myself for a second, after all, you can’t control your own gaze, it lives a quite separate existence to our instructions and our vetos, or that’s the excuse we use to allow it to disobey us. I realized, moreover – and this was immediate – that I didn’t care that my gaze should have become so uninhibited, as if Muriel’s absence had given me – however irresponsibly, however inappropriately – the freedom to look at anything I wanted, including his wife. That sudden visual incontinence of mine didn’t make much sense really, given how little he cared about Beatriz physically and how violently he rejected her. But we feel more in charge of a place when the owner isn’t there, as if we had temporarily replaced or usurped him. That’s why every servant who has ever lived immediately lounges on the sofas, rolls around on the beds, uncorks the wine bottles and dives into the swimming pool as soon as he sees his employer vanish, or at least he secretly fantasizes about doing such things without being noticed, especially since it would be his job to erase all trace of rebellion. And I was, after all, a kind of servant, albeit in disguised form. I was aware that my brazenness also had something to do with the fact that Beatriz had recently tried to commit suicide; we take strange liberties with someone who might have killed herself: ‘Well,’ we say to ourselves, ‘she’s escaped the worst, fate has smiled on her; this period of time is a gift, and she can’t really complain; she tried to make whatever happens from now on not happen, decided not even to expect it to happen, never to experience it.’ And what I thought there in the kitchen, or what flashed through my mind, although certainly not in such a clearly formulated way, was this: ‘If it weren’t for me, that body would be rotting in a grave
, beneath the earth, or reduced to a mere heap of unrecognizable ash, never to be looked at by anyone again; in a way her survival, or part of it – a few minutes or a few hours – belongs to me and I’ve earned the right to enjoy looking at her as much as I want.’ Some cultures believe that if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for whatever happens to them afterwards, for ensuring that the extra time you’ve granted them is neither tragic nor a torment; other cultures believe that you become not that person’s owner exactly, but something like a usufructuary, and the saved person places herself at the disposal of her saviour, entrusts or surrenders herself to him. All of a sudden, I had the conceited thought that if Beatriz was glad to be still alive, then she was in my debt; if she regretted it, though, she would consider herself my creditor. She was holding a glass of whisky in one hand and, in the other, an unlit cigarette, and there were already two cigarette ends in the nearby ashtray. Her bandaged wrists contrasted with the bare arms revealed by her sleeveless nightdress, because her skin was quite dark, which is why it was so worrying when she did occasionally turn terribly pale.

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’ I asked, after first clearing my throat, so as to warn her of my presence in two stages, one following on from the other.

  She turned and gave a faint, wan smile. She didn’t just turn her head, but her whole body, thus revealing much of her strong thighs, since she was sitting with her legs crossed. (Which is also why I didn’t manage to see anything more than that.) Not as much thigh as the civil servant Celia had revealed in the taxi, but quite a lot. She indicated the glass of whisky, as if to excuse herself, for she was not a heavy drinker.

  ‘Yes, I’m just seeing if this will do the trick,’ she said. ‘But I’m not very used to drinking whisky.’ Then she added: ‘I’m sorry I woke you up. I sometimes forget you’re here at night too, now that you’ve been appointed my sentinel. Although you’ve stayed over on other nights too. You don’t seem very happy at home.’

  It had not escaped her notice that I spent more time than necessary in the apartment, but the remark was a neutral one, it didn’t come across as a hint or a complaint about my too frequent presence. She also knew what my role there was in Muriel’s absence, while he was six hundred kilometres away filming his bizarre scenes.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, ‘but I do sometimes miss a little company, and there’s plenty of that here. I hope I’m not making a nuisance of myself, not bothering you. Do tell me if I am.’

  She shook her head as if to say: ‘Of course not, don’t be silly.’ As if my concern were a bit of nonsense not even worth trying to dissipate with words.

  ‘Now that I’ve woken you up, come and sit here with me for a while, until I get sleepy.’ And she pulled over another stool and placed it next to hers. I sat down to her left and, from that angle, had a partial view of her décolletage, that is, a partial view of her right breast and, of course, her cleavage, I no longer felt ashamed that my eyes should give priority to such things, but I still only looked out of the corner of one eye, it’s best not to be too impertinent initially, a certain degree of dissembling is required on all occasions, even when you know how things will end or why you have come, why two people have come together. Not that this was the case then, not at all. I had no idea (I was merely accumulating elemental desires, if such a thing is necessary when one is young), and at that point, nothing of the sort would have occurred to her either, she was merely fighting against her insomnia and perhaps thinking about nothing; and ignoring everything else and barely noticing the outside world is enough of an occupation in itself. She was forty-one or forty-two, and very few women then bothered to undergo absurd, counter-productive surgical operations, and what I could see of her décolletage was natural, it moved, rose and fell with every breath, was simultaneously firm and soft, still firm and abundant, tremulous and apparently soft, and yet Muriel found this repellent, or perhaps not; after all, on that other night, he had groped her breasts, although his intention then had been to humiliate and belittle. I would never have touched her like that, certainly not, not on that night or this night or any other. The tips of my fingers were itching to touch her just then, no, they weren’t, that’s just a manner of speaking. She remained silent for a few seconds, busy lighting her cigarette, then she inhaled deeply and her breast rose visibly, that is, both breasts rose, but I had to make do with imagining her left breast under her nightdress; and then she referred for the first time to my intervention: ‘So, you saved my life. You were the one who stole me from death.’

  The verb ‘stole’ seemed a strange one to use (but, then, insomnia does have a strange effect on the mind and the vocabulary that passes through it) and it made me wonder if she intended her words as a reproach or as an expression of gratitude or neither; perhaps she was merely stating a fact. At least she hadn’t said ‘who snatched me from the jaws of death’, which would have sounded both affected and accusatory.

  ‘Well, only indirectly. It was pure chance that I happened to see you go into the hotel.’ Chance had nothing to do with it, but no one knew that I had taken to following her on some afternoons, and had it not been for that habit of mine, she would have moved towards her end without witnesses. ‘But I wasn’t the one who realized what that meant, it would never have occurred to me. It was lucky, I suppose, at least for us. Whether it was lucky for you, I’m not sure. But I hope it was.’

  ‘Yes, let’s hope it was. I’ll let you know,’ she replied with a touch of irony. ‘And who is “us”, may I ask? Who do you include in that “us”?’

  I don’t know why I had used the first-person plural, probably so as not to single myself out or draw attention to myself and have to explain. At that moment, on that dark night, I felt lucky to have her there alive and present, even if only because the sexual admiration I felt for her was now neither vague nor damped down, but real and palpable and growing, my gaze had cast aside all thoughts of age, position or hierarchy, leaving only a remnant of courtesy, which is to say, pretence. Desire is a selfish thing too and will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction – lie, flatter, take risks, inveigle, make false promises, all to ensure that the person stays long enough in this world for us to enjoy her. What follows is another matter; afterwards, everything returns to normal and it seems to us absurd to have risked so much of real value merely in order to achieve something that immediately seems empty and meaningless and is sometimes forgotten almost as soon as it’s over.

  ‘I don’t know, everyone, I suppose,’ I said. ‘I don’t think any of us would have felt indifferent to your death. For Susana, Alicia and Tomás it would have been disastrous. For Flavia too. For your friends, for Eduardo. For me, for Rico and Roy. For Van Vechten. For everyone. And I imagine for other people as well, people I don’t know.’ I thought of the man, whoever he was, who lived in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca.

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, Juan. It might have saddened you, I don’t say it wouldn’t, but for you, it would hardly have been a disaster, you barely know me and, besides, you’re very young. It wouldn’t have been a disaster for Eduardo either.’

  ‘You should have seen him run, should have seen his distress, when we came to find you.’

  ‘Yes, Jorge told me that too. It must be all those films he’s made.’ She got up and went over to the fridge. She opened it, peered in, not knowing quite what she was looking for, took out a can of coke and poured half into her glass of whisky. I saw then that she was wearing knickers, I could see them through her silk nightdress when she had her back to me, she certainly didn’t have a small bottom, but it formed a pleasingly prominent curve and would have been the envy of any real fatso, any bag of flour or flesh, any ball of lard, any fat cow or El Alamo bell; Muriel was mad to call her those names, or not mad exactly, it was more the cold, calculated punishment of years, or perhaps, in his resentment, that really was how he saw her, because when you decide to dislike someone, nothing can save them, even what we liked yesterday now seems plagued with defects and p
roblems, and nothing and no one can resist someone’s dislike. Perhaps I myself would see Beatriz differently, more negatively, were I to satisfy my desire, I mean, once that desire had been appeased, complaint and regret often follow on the achievement of an objective. But I wasn’t thinking of that desire as a real thing, it was still in the realm of the purely visual, any intended or conscious contact seemed to me an impossibility. The idea hadn’t so much as occurred to her, she hadn’t even noticed the covetous nature of my looks, not even the most furtive, and all my glances were becoming steadily less and less furtive. She probably included me in the world of minors, the world occupied by her own children, rather than the world of the real adults like Muriel, Rico and Van Vechten; after all, far fewer years separated me from the former than from the latter, and I was far closer in age to Susana than I was to Beatriz. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t bother to cover herself, although it’s also true to say that, at the time, the whole of society had instantly shaken off the modesty imposed by the dictatorship and its Church: it was a time of ease and unconcern as regards the way people behaved, a time of defiance. ‘There’s a very good reason why I don’t usually drink,’ she said, to justify that mixture. ‘I don’t actually like the taste. Do help yourself if you’d like something, though.’

  ‘Yes, in a moment.’ And almost without pause, I went on to ask: ‘What was that about? Why did you do it? I mean what happened at the Hotel Wellington. I suppose that, yes, I did save you, but I could easily not have seen you going into the hotel.’

  She hadn’t yet sat down again and I was aware of her standing by my side, her large, exuberant body very close to mine, I thought I could feel her nightdress brushing against my shoulder or my arm, but I might have been imagining that, desire tends to have such imaginings. I again looked at her out of the corner of my eye, up and down, I didn’t have to raise my eyes very far: her bra-less breasts rose and fell as if her breathing had grown somewhat agitated in response to my question.