Thus Bad Begins

by Javier Marías

  ‘Yes, he was suspiciously precocious, but then he wasn’t alone in that. Mainly, though, I’m just relieved to know that you’re not completely in the dark about him, as I feared when I first saw you out partying with the bastard.’

  ‘As I said, my boss asked me to befriend him and see what I could worm out of him. I have to say I didn’t get very far. I gleaned all those facts about his life from Who’s Who, and then Muriel pulled me up short, told me to leave him alone. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to know why, according to you, he’s such an utter bastard. I did quite like him – sometimes – not that much, you understand, because there’s also something chilling about him, something voracious, even when he’s at his most friendly and paternal, offering fatherly advice. But then it’s rare to meet anyone entirely devoid of charm. I even introduced him to a few of my female friends, but from what you say, I suspect they might not thank me for that. Am I right?’ I suddenly felt alarmed and guilty. Perhaps I had unknowingly let a wolf in among the lambs.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ replied Vidal, frowning. ‘Mind you, the man’s older now and perhaps makes do with just looking. Let’s hope so. What kind of relations did he have with those friends of yours? Do you know? Did you see for yourself?’

  I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

  ‘To my surprise, and if he’s not lying and merely bluffing, he certainly got at least one of them to do much more than you’d ever imagine he could, given the enormous age gap. To be honest, I don’t know how he did it.’

  Vidal did not for one moment believe Van Vechten would have played by the book. His instant response was:

  ‘He’ll have threatened them with something, you can be sure of that.’

  ‘With what though?’

  ‘There’s bound to be something. Do your friends take drugs? Do you all take drugs? Did he see you doing it?’

  ‘In certain places, almost everyone takes drugs now, José Manuel, you know that as well as I do. Especially when you’re out clubbing. I think Van Vechten himself, being a wealthy man, sometimes bought drugs for my various girlfriends or gave them drugs in small quantities, just as an enticement. It’s a sure-fire way of winning people over or at least of wooing them. Well, a temporarily sure-fire way, because young people will flock to anyone who’s got the stuff.’

  ‘There you are, then. He’ll have threatened to tell their parents: “As a doctor, I’m very worried about the company your daughter is keeping. I met her once through a young friend of mine …” etc. etc. And who are the parents going to believe, the famous Dr Van Vechten, celebrated paediatrician, or their crazy, nightclubbing daughter? He’ll have taken care to give her the drug only when they’re alone and with no witnesses. And if her parents are of the liberal variety, he’d threaten to report them to the police and get them into trouble, not deep trouble admittedly, but they might be frightened enough to want to avoid it in exchange for a small favour. The man’s capable of anything. Or if a girl has had an abortion and been foolish enough to tell him about it, because you did say he offers fatherly advice, didn’t you? He has the advantage of being a doctor, and I know from my own experience as a doctor that people do tend to ask your advice and even to confess. By the way, as a cardiologist, I would recommend giving up the drugs. Cocaine plays havoc with your blood pressure and your heart, if, that is, you’re into coke. I’m not asking, mind. What you do is your own business. But people take these matters very lightly, and there are always consequences. Just so you know.’

  I’m afraid I blushed a little, even though I took cocaine only rarely, if someone happened to offer me some, which was not that often. Van Vechten had never offered me any, of course, although I suspected that he used it himself, but I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he reserved it for those accompanied visits to the toilets and for when we did the home run in his car and he dropped off his final female passenger.

  ‘OK, I’ll make a note,’ I said and rapidly changed the subject. ‘But would he really go to the police? Would he be capable of that? Because girls nowadays aren’t that easily intimidated.’

  Vidal did not hold back. He really had it in for Van Vechten.

  ‘It’s the same now as it’s always been, and fear doesn’t take long to come back, you just have to feel exposed and helpless, or to be with someone who makes you feel afraid, and he’s a past master at that. Look, I’m going to tell you what his so-called help consisted of, the famous solidarity that has given him such a good reputation among anti-franquistas, although you’ve probably worked that out for yourself. He would go and visit people he knew things about, people who had escaped the worst initially, but who still didn’t dare poke their heads above the parapet. I’m talking about the 40s and 50s and even the very early 60s. People who had no money, who couldn’t write anything under their own name, for example, even as translators, people who had to use a pseudonym on film scripts or articles, assuming any newspaper editor was brave enough to ask them to write one, or else they’d work illegally for someone just to earn a few pennies. Teachers who weren’t allowed to teach, lawyers and architects and ophthalmologists, businessmen who had been barred from trading and had their business confiscated. As happened to people from my own family. It’s true that he did tend and treat their children, but not in that legendarily selfless way, not for free. The stuff he could blackmail them with was far more serious than anything he might use against your young friends now, no, forget frigging drugs or parents.’ Vidal was a cultivated man with a wide vocabulary, but this didn’t mean he couldn’t be foul-mouthed if the occasion called for it. ‘He could threaten them with prison or even death, at least in the immediate post-War years, when the victors had no qualms about shooting people wholesale, in Madrid and elsewhere. He and Arranz swapped information and would take turns visiting when the other one got bored. And as far as I know, they didn’t beat about the bush, they didn’t bother with hints or innuendos. They were absolutely blunt about it, saying to some: “I know that, during the War, you did this and this, took part in illegal shootings or tipped off the militias, that you have blood on your hands,” and to others: “I know you remained loyal to the Republic, that you wrote anonymous editorials for newspapers or broadcast propaganda programmes on the radio, that you worked for such and such a ministry, even if you were just a private and had been posted there and were simply obeying orders. That doesn’t matter, it’s enough for them to screw you good and proper. I pass on a lot of information to the police and what I say goes, it never fails. It’s taken me a while to find you, but I know exactly what you did during the War. And even if you’d done much less it would be the same. In your case, I don’t even need to invent very much, just exaggerate a little. I could easily say that you collaborated with the Russians or that you condemned half your neighbours to being shot and left in the gutter. Just as you might have done with me if you’d had the chance; who knows what would have happened if you’d caught me here at the time of the uprising. A few years have passed since then, but if I blab to the people who are always happy to listen to what I have to say, it’s the firing squad for you or else life imprisonment, and why would I keep quiet? So it’s up to you: you either have a bit of a hard time accepting my conditions or you stop having any time at all, either good, bad or indifferent. You certainly won’t see your wife and children again, that’s for sure. Never – or at least not for a very long time. You decide.” ’

  Vidal Secanell fell silent for a few moments, staring down at the table, wide-eyed, at the ashtrays used by Professor Rico and by me, for we had been smoking as we drank. He had spoken almost without pausing for breath, as if he himself had once heard such a speech, but even though he came from a family that had suffered reprisals, this seemed unlikely. I had always thought of his father, Vidal Zapater, a friend of my aunt and uncle, as being very well-off and as having a certain Mexican arrogance (quickly acquired), a man with no financial problems and not easily intimidated either – quite the opposite. His grandfather was a different ma
tter, although Vidal, who was born in 1950 or ’51, would probably not have witnessed a scene like the one he had just enacted: parents then concealed everything from their children, especially the truly shameful things. Those were very different times: no one confessed to a humiliation, even if they had been repeatedly, horribly humiliated. Now there’s nothing more profitable than declaring yourself to be a victim, subjugated and downtrodden, and to whinge on about your own misfortunes. It’s odd that pride should have disappeared so completely, when, during the post-War years, those on the losing side were very proud indeed, and didn’t even talk about their dead or those in prison, as if doing so – even in private – were a dishonour in itself, almost a recognition, an acknowledgement of the side that had humiliated them and of their continued power to do harm. They didn’t keep quiet purely out of fear and so as not to refresh the memories of those who still had the capacity to inflict fear, to increase and augment it, but so as not to give their enemies that pleasure and not to have to bow their heads still lower by complaining.

  ‘And what were those conditions?’ I asked, in order to draw him out of that lost stare. ‘Although I can well imagine.’

  Vidal was by nature more pragmatic than meditative, and so he quickly returned from his momentary absence.

  ‘You imagine quite rightly. The condition was that they could screw their women.’ He used that crude verb as if it were the one Arranz and Van Vechten would have used themselves, as he immediately confirmed. ‘That’s what they proposed, apparently, with no beating about the bush, no circumlocutions, no attempt at delicacy. And with no hypocrisy either, although, in the circumstances, I’m not sure that was a virtue. They’d screw the wives or, later on, an older daughter. They converted them into objects, into money, which wasn’t really that unusual at the time, I suppose, especially when one part of the population was so vulnerable. And they screwed them as often as they wanted and until they got bored. Always assuming they fancied the women, of course, found them desirable. If they didn’t, then those families might well be left with no medical care for their children, because, as I said, these were people with nothing, with no other way of paying. They might have a valuable painting they’d managed to hold on to, a bargueño desk they’d inherited, a few jewels or antiquarian books they’d kept, although, after three years of siege, it was unlikely they’d have anything left, most people had sold all their valuable possessions. And then, on top of all that, they had to agree not just to say nothing about the transaction, the blackmail, but actively to boost the doctors’ reputations and spread the word that, despite being friends of the regime, the two paediatricians were altruistic and compassionate, conciliatory and civilized, and treated their children for free. I don’t know about Arranz, although I imagine the same applies to him, but that arrangement has really helped Van Vechten socially. Well, you know how it is. It’s the same with all those professors, historians, novelists and painters who supported Franco and served him during the cruellest decades of his regime, and who, with passing time, once it was no longer dangerous, have declared themselves, nominally at least, to be left-wingers. And now they claim to have been lifelong dissidents, to have lived in exile, to have been censored. I find that Catalan painter, whatever his name is, particularly infuriating. And that ugly, bald philosopher who preaches about ethics and whose name I can’t remember either. Naval knows all about it, about what really happened, what each one did and said and where they were. And don’t, whatever you do, consider denouncing Van Vechten publicly, because the left-wingers would be the first to leap like lions to his defence and throw it back in your face, accusing you of trying to discredit and tarnish the reputation of one of their own – one of their own since the day before yesterday. Can you believe it? People who have always known which side their bread was buttered on, both in the 1940s and now.’

  At the time, I wasn’t much interested in what he said; later on, I was, when it was too late to unmask anyone and, besides, who really wants to take on that role, even now, all these years after the War, after so many falsified biographies, embellished legends and deliberate or collective forgetting. Hardly anyone cares about all that now – certainly no one who’s semi-young – or only in an artificial, dubiously idealistic way; and hardly anyone else who’s alive today. The dead stop telling their stories once they are just that, dead.

  ‘And the women went along with it?’ I was much more interested in that part of what Vidal was telling me. Van Vechten couldn’t have submitted Beatriz to that kind of blackmail: she had got married in 1961 or ’62, and Muriel was a child during the War, and his anti-Francoism had always been more intellectual than active. But I couldn’t help thinking about her. Why would she go and see Dr Arranz, Van Vechten’s old sidekick, because it was probably him she visited in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, not Mollá or Deverne or Gekoski or Kociejowski. Perhaps it was merely a matter of habit: perhaps the two men continued to share women, even though the sex was now free and not some form of payment. And maybe Beatriz really didn’t care, like certain vengeful women who have grown weary of their woeful bed, so long as she herself didn’t have to go looking for the instrument of revenge, which can be very depressing.

  Vidal rolled his eyes with their large Paul McCartney eyelids. I could see him thinking: ‘God, you’re naive.’

  ‘Of course they did, Juan, don’t you see? They had no choice. On the one hand, their husband or father could go straight to prison – if they were lucky – on the other hand, what mother wouldn’t do whatever it took; what mother wouldn’t see it as a blessing being able to call out a paediatrician, knowing that he would come at once whenever their child was burning up with fever or at death’s door? I’m afraid many would have been willing to do as much even without the threats. Mothers are prepared to do anything, they’re hostages to fortune, although there are always notable exceptions. Some might even have felt grateful … in a mechanical, reflex-reaction way. Having sex with the person who cures your children isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman, not from her point of view.’ – ‘And I can assure you most of them do want to do it’, the few revelatory words the Doctor had let slip on one of our nocturnal sorties came back to me. – ‘I assume they also counted on that, Van Vechten and Arranz, on the inevitable gratitude, the relief of seeing a sick child out of danger, the slow realization that he was safe. And, as time passed, on familiarity and habit. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they had planted a child in one or two of those families, if they didn’t get bored too soon and if they weren’t careful. And too bad if the child was born very blond and the theoretical father was very dark.’

  This reminded me of that brief encounter with the veteran whore in Chicote. ‘I know you, don’t I? I remember those blue, blue eyes and that blond hair,’ she had said to the Doctor. He wasn’t easy to forget, with that baguette on his head.

  ‘What I don’t understand is why Van Vechten was so desperate,’ I said. ‘Not that I consider him attractive, there’s even something rather repellent about him, I think. But with that yellow hair and those pale, watery eyes, with that perennial, rectangular smile and his large build, he must have been very striking as a young man and would have been a hit with women. You wouldn’t think he would need to use threats to get them into bed.’

  This time, Vidal did not hold back. Like I say, he treated me like a younger brother with whom he had lived on and off.

  ‘I didn’t think you were so innocent, Juan. You’ve seen the way he behaves around women, haven’t you? With your own friends, I understand, and they’re young enough to be his daughters. He’s an insatiable predator and always has been, that part of his reputation is true; he’s the kind who keeps a tally of how many women he’s had sex with. You surely don’t think that in the 1940s and 50s there were many women prepared to go all the way, just like that and willingly. Not for pleasure or love or anything. Do you honestly imagine that the sexual revolution was up and running and that the pill already existed? It was
really difficult to get laid in Spain. You had to waste a lot of time and make a lot of promises, and even then. Ask the nurses at the Hospital de San Carlos and at the Clínica Ruber, even at the Hospital Francisco Franco, where he landed up when he was older, as Head of Paediatrics no less, with even more power, of course, and in more liberated days too, at the end of the 60s or thereabouts. He tried it on with all of them, those worth having, that is; tastefully and not so tastefully, forcefully and not so forcefully, and with more or less success; and he’s still doing it in his sixties. He’ll never stop.’

  I suddenly thought of Celia the civil servant, the bullfighter Viana’s girlfriend. Her verdict had been: ‘He’s a bit of an old lecher,’ and she had gone on to say: ‘It seemed to me that he touched me more than was necessary, a woman notices these things straight away … he’d stroke my abdomen as if his fingers were about to go where they shouldn’t … and he kept brushing my breasts with the sleeve of his white coat or with his wrist, as though by accident … I felt sort of queasy when I left … I felt like I’d been groped.’ And that had happened during a brief medical examination. And she wasn’t the kind of woman to imagine such things, nor was she a prude.

  ‘I see,’ I said slowly. ‘He’s obviously not one to miss a trick.’ And I blushed a little, thinking that perhaps already, at the age of twenty-three, I, too, was not one to miss a trick. I suppose I at least had the excuse of youth. And I had never blackmailed or threatened anyone.

  ‘And never underestimate the added pleasure of domination, of humiliating the defeated,’ Vidal went on, and his tone grew more bitter. ‘Screwing someone’s wife or daughter with his knowledge and with him unable to do a thing about it. The man’s a complete and utter bastard. Have nothing more to do with him. Admittedly, he may have changed radically since then, I’m not saying he hasn’t; maybe other people’s false perception of him has led him to fit himself to that mould and become a genuine conciliator and even a very belated anti-franquista. Always remember, though, that at the time he wasn’t. Then it was all a front and to him those cuckolds were the enemy, defeated, but nonetheless the enemy. He must have loved it. The very thought enrages me, but what can you do, that’s how things stand now. And it’s probably for the best. But I’m determined to tell the story, and whatever I know I tell.’