For many years, the memory of that night remained very dim. It was as if that tenuous story had never happened, for as long, that is, as Susana was young and, despite her striking resemblance to her mother, as long as her youth kept at bay the image of her mother, the image I had known personally, not so much the one in those old photos that had led me to think – although it wasn’t only the photos that led me to think this: ‘She must have been very alluring, I can understand why Muriel would have wanted her at his side day and night, I’m sure I would have too. Even if only for her sheer carnality, which counts for a lot in a marriage. But I wasn’t Muriel then, nor am I now.’ However, since Susana has grown older, that memory has taken on colour, it slips into my bed and troubles my sleep. She has come more and more to resemble the Beatriz I knew when I was twenty-three, although I certainly don’t see her as fat and she isn’t fat at all, indeed, I’ve noticed only very tiny changes in her – but then I’m biased – since, at Muriel’s funeral, she appeared to me as a grown woman, newly and fully formed and with the same intimidating, explosive body, in full bloom now and no longer the adolescent girl I’d forbidden myself to look at – another inanimate representation – and I didn’t look at her, while she perhaps, without my noticing, couldn’t keep her eyes off me, the young man who spent so much time in her home, like one of those very stubborn girls determined to see her childhood dreams come true, until she reaches a certain age or sees those dreams crushed for ever. Muriel once said that the other person’s enthusiasm helps a lot, persuades and carries you along. And another person’s love is always more touching and provokes more pity than the love you yourself feel.
Of course I never saw the forty-something Beatriz as fat, it was my boss who insisted on that or who had decided to compare her with the most rotund of film stars simply in order to wound her. Lately, though, when I’m making love with Susana, I’ve found that remote image slipping into my mind to trouble and disturb me, to almost paralyse and strike me dumb. The past has a future we never expect, and just as, on that distant night, Beatriz’s unexpectedly youthful face – her face embellished as happens with many women in that state of semi-oblivion – momentarily suggested that of her daughter, the same features and the same candid expression, so now the daughter leads me back to the mother at the most inopportune of moments, and even becomes overlaid by that scene watched from the top of a tree in the Sanctuary of Darmstadt, which now I find utterly repellent (fortunately, I can drive that scene away at once, it’s gone in a flash). What is perhaps most regrettable (or, perhaps, disquieting because impossible to assimilate) about these intersecting images is that I am now that older man who, in our youth, appears in our unconscious mind and whispers mysteriously to us, like a ghost from the future: ‘Remember this experience and note every detail, experience it with me in mind and as if you knew it would never happen again except in your memory, which is my memory; you won’t be able to preserve the excitement or relive it, but you will recall the sense of triumph and, more especially, the knowledge: you will know that this happened and you always will; grasp it firmly, take a long look at this woman and keep that image safe, because later on, I will ask you for it and you will have to offer it to me as consolation.’
I don’t want to ask for it, but the images blur together and that’s what I end up doing. And when this happens, I can’t help feeling that Susana notices that something odd is going on, can sense the incongruousness of what’s happening in my mind, or in that uncontrollable thing – the mind’s eye. She pauses for a few seconds, observes me with one half-open eye, and waits for the malaise to pass. And I sometimes wonder if she hasn’t always known exactly what happened, if the barefoot steps I heard in the corridor were, in fact, hers and whether her cheeks burned with a daughter’s indignation or with the childish jealousy of the young girl in love or with a combination of both those things, if those were her footsteps. She has never mentioned it, however, and I certainly haven’t; some secrets are best left secret. That’s also why I’ve never told her what I found out about her mother when I followed her nor what Muriel told me later on. What would be the point? She witnessed the results and her father’s wounding, punishing behaviour, and I don’t think she wants to delve into what happened in the lost past, before she was even born. However, I’m always afraid that one day, in a fit of anger, she’ll reveal what she knows and reproach me for what I did that night, that she’ll throw it in my face and say: ‘How could you?’ Or that I might angrily reveal my secret, as Beatriz did with Muriel, showing him the letter she denied having received and thus, after long years of careful concealment and deceit, unleashing her own misfortune. The two situations can’t really be compared, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a misfortune if we managed to laugh about it, anything is possible, and I’m not Muriel and Susana isn’t her mother, although, like Beatriz, she takes a light-hearted view of her own actions and those of other people and often considers things to be ridiculous or mere childish nonsense, and rarely gives any importance to what isn’t important at all. I was right to wait to love her, until she chose me with her tremulous finger and I was capable of seeing her; and how right I’ve been to love her during all these years, all these past years. I’ve probably never done anything better.
That’s why I find it so worrying when the image of Beatriz suddenly, and however fleetingly, comes into my mind in the middle of some intimate moment. Then I try to summon up that remote foreshadowing, which disquieted and troubled me at the time, the ephemeral, intrusive vision of an adolescent Susana. Now, on the other hand, I’d like to recover that vision, so that, through the memory of that vision, reality can be restored and that forgotten yesterday can return the today, which, just for an instant, has slipped away from us. It isn’t only Susana who, with one half-open eye, stops to observe me suspiciously, or is it questioningly, curiously? I stop too, become distracted, absent, turn my face away as if I didn’t want to be kissed on the mouth by a ghost who also once turned away her face and denied me her mouth when she was still flesh, brimming, moving flesh. And then there’s a moment when one of us, either Susana or me, I’m not sure, must be thinking: ‘No, no kisses.’ We look at each other without saying anything, and perhaps what we’re saying to ourselves is something on which we both agree: ‘And no, no words.’
Translator’s Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Javier Marías for all his help and generosity, and, as always, Annella McDermott and Ben Sherriff for their unfailing support and advice.
THE BEGINNING
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HAMISH HAMILTON
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
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Hamish Hamilton is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in Spanish as Así empieza lo malo by Alfaguara, Madrid 2014
This translation first published by Hamish Hamilton 2016
Copyright © Javier Marías, 2016
Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa, 2016
Cover photograph © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-97283-0
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Thus Bad Begins Page 46