When I Was Mortal

by Javier Marías

  Later on, he told me that the inheritance or private income he lived on had dried up (perhaps his father had been diverting money from the family business but had now grown tired of doing so). Up until then, Xavier’s only paid work had been his monumental translation of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, of which he had still not completed even fifty per cent; he had no concept of schedules nor, of course, of getting up early. However, he decided to return to his original, neglected profession and took the necessary steps to do so in Paris, which he still had no desire to leave as long as Eliane remained there. While he waited to be given French nationality and to have his qualifications validated, he had to work as a nurse and, subsequently, in a clinic (“men and women, old people and adolescents, like so much plumbing: I go there to arbitrate amongst the horrors and the trivia”). He almost joined Médecins du Monde or Médecins sans Frontières, organizations that would have sent him off to Africa or to Central America for a while, with all expenses paid but with no salary, which would have meant returning with empty pockets. Now that he couldn’t spend all his free time writing, the pace at which he was able to work towards his famous one hundred per cent had slowed considerably. He didn’t much like talking about Eliane, he preferred to talk about other women, young and not so young, amongst them my Italian friend to whom I’d introduced him some years before. According to his version of events, she’d been very cruel to him; according to her version, she’d simply acted in self-defence. It seems that after spending one night together, he’d left her house only to return a few hours later with his luggage, all set to move in. She threw him out in high female dudgeon. I listened to both versions and offered no opinion, merely regretting that it had happened.

  He was now no longer an unpublished author but, as expected, his novel didn’t sell in Spain and was reviewed almost nowhere. When I went to Paris, we used to arrange to have supper or lunch at Balzar or at Lipp, and that didn’t change, but now he allowed me to pay for him whereas before, he’d always imposed the law of hospitality: you’re a stranger and you’re in my city. He still dressed well – I remember he often wore a particularly smart raincoat – as if that were something his breeding would not allow him to give up; it was, perhaps, the only characteristic he’d inherited from his father. Now, however, the colours he wore were not so splendidly coordinated, as if that had always been dependent on Eliane’s exquisite taste in anything to do with adornment. He mentioned her only once in a letter: “From the severed root with Eliane furious lightning shoots sprout forth, draining away half my life.” We didn’t see each other for two years and when I saw him again after that time, his physical appearance had changed somewhat and, with his usual tact, he forewarned me: “I’m not only worn out mentally, I’m also in terrible physical shape. A witness to this is the galloping alopecia that obliges me to wear a cap to protect me from the ill-tempered autumns we get in this part of the world.” He’d had to move to a largely North African quarter. On one of my trips to Paris, I phoned him but got no reply, although I knew he was in town. Thinking that perhaps his phone had been cut off, I caught the Metro and arrived at his remote and unfamiliar new house, or rather, what turned out to be a room, tiny and sparsely furnished, a final desolate stopping place. But, in fact, all I remember of that scene was the look of happiness on his face when he opened the door to me. On his desk was a glass of wine.

  Things improved for him somewhat while I was away, travelling to Italy rather than to Paris. Xavier had at last found the perfect job for his purposes, although, accordingly, it earned him little money: he got a job as a locum in a hospital, working more or less only when he wanted or needed to. As long as he worked a certain minimum number of hours per month, he could then increase those hours depending on how energetic he was feeling and on how much money he needed and this freed him to hurry impatiently on towards the completion of his literary work. I never really understood this impatience, bearing in mind that, since Vivisection, nothing else of his had been published. His novel Hecate, the book entitled The Edgeless Sword, his Treatise on the Will, the poems he sometimes sent me, none of these was ever successful in finding a publisher. I remember two lines from one of his “night watches”: “The wakefulness of your geminate soul/is the sleep which I, mere body, deny myself.” Whilst everything he wrote remained extremely obscure, it nevertheless had a certain verve. I read very little of what he was writing and he was still engaged on translating Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

  One morning – by then we’d known each other for about ten or eleven years – we were once again sitting on the covered terrace of a café in St-Germain. He’d acquired a certain nobility of appearance and had discovered a way of combing his thinning hair, which did not look thin so much as lighter in colour. He seemed in good spirits after the misfortunes of recent years and he told me about the enormous progress he’d made in his writing. He had, he said, borrowing my ironic tone, completed eighty-three point five per cent of his entire body of work. Then he put on his confidential face and grew more serious: he had only two texts to complete now, a novel to be entitled Saturn and the long-postponed essay on pain. Given the novel’s technical complexities, he would leave that to last and he now felt strong enough to return to his experiment and again stop taking his medication. He thought that, this time, he’d be able to last out long enough and be able to start writing as soon as he’d learned whatever it was he needed to learn. “Over the past few years working in my profession I’ve seen a lot of pain, I’ve even controlled it; I’ve both fought it and permitted it, according to what was in the patient’s best interests; I’ve suppressed it completely with morphine, as well as with other medications and drugs that can’t be found on the open market and to which only doctors have access. Many are as closely guarded as state secrets; what you can buy in pharmacies and dispensaries is only a tiny fraction of what’s available, but there’s a black market in everything. I’ve seen pain now, I’ve observed it, gauged it, measured it, but now it’s my turn to suffer it again, and not only physical pain, which is commonplace enough, but psychic pain, the pain that makes the thinking brain want only to stop thinking, but it can’t. I’m convinced that consciousness is the source of man’s greatest suffering and there’s no cure for it, no way to blunt it, the only end is death, though even that you can’t be sure of.” This time I didn’t try to dissuade him, not even in the oblique, jokey way I had when he first announced his intention of embarking on this personal research. We had too much respect for each other and so I just said: “Well, keep me posted.”

  I can’t honestly say that he did, in that he didn’t keep me informed of his progress or of his thoughts on the subject, perhaps because he could only talk about it indirectly, by describing feelings and symptoms and states of mind, which he didn’t in the least mind discussing and so, in the letters I received in subsequent months – I was commuting between Madrid and Italy at the time – he never said much about what was happening to him or what he was thinking, his letters were even more laconic than usual, but he did sometimes let slip the occasional disquieting remark – explicit or enigmatic, confessional or cryptic, depending on the context. I’ve just today been re-reading some remarks of his that fall into the second category, remarks that usually came at the end of his letters, just before he signed off or even after that, in a postscript: “Pain thought pleasure and future are the four numbers necessary for and sufficient to my interest.” “Nothing sullies one more than an excess of modesty: pay up rather than be your own Shylock.” “Let’s just do our best not to fall off the back of the train.” “If you don’t desert the desert, the desert will desert you, not in the sense that it will leave you, but in the sense that it will make a desert of you.” “Best wishes and don’t let anyone have it easy. They might make you pay for it.” That’s the sort of thing he wrote. There was more of a sense of continuity, even a kind of progress, in the first category of remarks: “I don’t feel like writing, I don’t feel like working or travelling or th
inking or even despairing,” he said and then, in the next letter: “I read so as to give some semblance of being occupied.” Some time afterwards, I thought that perhaps he’d recovered slightly, for he spoke openly – for the first time – of the experiment on which he was engaged: “As for my ethical experiment in endogenous pain, I’m still waiting for the explosion of the time bomb I set ticking at the beginning of summer, but I don’t know the day or the hour it’s due to go off. You see how things are, but don’t waste too much time thinking about it, it’s too pathetic to merit any deep consideration, and if there can be said to be something titanic about all this, the truth is that I feel more like a midget.” I don’t know what I wrote in reply nor if I even asked him about it, for we forget what’s in our own letters the moment we put them in the letter box, or even before that, while we’re still licking the envelope and sealing it down. He continued to give me only the bare outlines of his inactivity: “A bit of medicine, very little wielding of the pen, rather more withdrawal. Dead wet leaves.” I remembered that, on his first and failed attempt, he’d mentioned a period of six months as the time he would need to go without his medication in order to achieve what he was after, and so, with the arrival of winter, I expected that his time bomb would either explode or he’d have to stop the experiment, even if that meant being rushed into hospital again. But that season only contributed to a worsening of his suffering, which he nevertheless still judged to be insufficient: “For two months now I’ve been more dead than alive. I don’t write, don’t read, don’t listen, don’t see. I hear the distant rumble of thunder but I don’t know if the storm is approaching or moving off, whether it’s in the future or in the past. I’ll close now: the vulture is already pecking at my left hemisphere.” I assumed he was referring to the migraine tormenting him.

  Another two months passed by with hardly any news and, at the end of that time, I received a phone call in Madrid from Eliane. After their separation I’d lost all contact with her but I still couldn’t manage to feel surprised, instead I immediately thought the worst. “Xavier asked me to call you,” she said, and since there was no indication as to when that had happened, I wasn’t sure whether he’d asked her to do so before he died or if he’d asked her that very moment, assuming he was still alive. “He suffered a serious relapse and he’s in hospital, possibly for some time, but he can’t write to you for the moment and he didn’t want you to worry too much. He’s been very ill, but he’s better now.” Her words were as acceptably conventional as one would expect in such a phone call, but I did manage to ask her two things, even though that meant obliging a memory, that is, someone who was a memory twice over, to speak: “Did he try to kill himself?” “No,” she replied, “it wasn’t that, but he has been very ill.” “Are you going to go back to him?” “No,” she replied, “that’s not possible.”

  During the final two years of our friendship, Xavier and I wrote and saw each other less frequently, I only went to Paris once and he never again visited Madrid. He often either neglected to answer my letters or took a long time to reply, and everything requires a certain rhythm. There are other things I could say about him, but I don’t want to talk about them now, they’re not things I actually experienced. The last time we saw each other was on a very brief trip I made to Paris. We had lunch at Balzar; he’d got a bit fatter – his chest had filled out – and it rather suited him. He smiled a lot like someone for whom going out to lunch is something of an event. He told me cautiously and briefly that, during our silence, he’d finally written his essay on pain. He said he felt sure it would be published, but said nothing about the text itself. Now he was working, continuously but with enormous difficulty, on his last book, Saturn. It all felt rather remote: for me, his life had become even more fragmentary, more spectral, as if, on the final pages of the defective book, there was now only punctuation, or as if I’d begun to feel that he too were merely a memory or some fictitious character. Although he was almost bald by then, his face was still handsome. I remember thinking that the veins on his forehead, even more prominent now, stood out like high relief. We said goodbye there, in rue des Écoles.

  After that, I received only one letter and a telegram. The former I received after some months had passed and in it he said: “I’m not writing because I’ve finally got something to say to you, but simply because time passes and every day leaves me with less to say. Nothing positive. A horrible winter, full of recesses filled by swirling whirlwinds. Sediment and chaos. A dematerializing silence from my publishers. Divorce from Eliane. And a feeling of nausea as regards any creative work. Last week was filled by a coagulating tedium. The night before last was even worse: I was woken by a scream, my own.” And the postscript said: “So I will darken for only a little while longer this my ash-grey matter.”

  I didn’t feel particularly worried by this and I didn’t bother to reply because in two weeks’ time I would be going to Paris anyway. That was a little over two years ago. I’d already been in the city for three days, staying as usual with my Italian friend, and I still hadn’t phoned Xavier, wanting to get my business in Paris over with first. On the third day I returned to the house of that Italian friend, the one who had been cruel to him or who had acted in self-defence, and she told me of his voluntary death the day before yesterday. This time he wasn’t too young, this time he didn’t miss; he was a doctor, he was precise; and he avoided all pain. Some days later, I managed to phone his mother, whom I never met. She told me that Xavier had completed Saturn two nights before the day he died (his one hundred per cent: he had reached the end of his life when he reached the end of the page). He’d made two copies and had written three letters, which were found on the table next to a glass of wine: a letter to her, a letter to his unsuccessful agent and a letter to Eliane. In the letter to his mother he’d explained the whole ritual: he would read for a while, listen to a bit of music and drink some wine before going to bed. Over the phone she was unable to tell me what music he’d listened to or what he’d read, and I never asked her again, so as not to have to remember that as well. Of the more than one thousand pages of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, he’d translated only seven hundred – seventy-two per cent – and the rest still awaits someone to finish the task. I don’t know what happened to his essay on pain.

  The telegram I found on my return to Madrid. This is what it said: “EVERYTHING GOOD GOES NOTHING GOES WELL EVERYTHING BAD COMES BACK YOURS XAVIER.”

  Today I received a letter that reminded me of this friend. It was written by a woman unknown both to myself and to him.

  FEWER SCRUPLES

  I WAS SO strapped for cash that, two days earlier, I’d gone for a screen test for a porn movie and was amazed to see how many other women aspired to one of those roles with absolutely no dialogue, or, rather, only exclamations. I’d gone there feeling shy and embarrassed, telling myself that my daughter had to eat, that it was no big deal and that it was unlikely that the film would be seen by anyone I knew, although I know that everyone always ends up finding out about everything that happens. I doubt, though, that I’ll ever be important enough in future to merit being blackmailed about my past. Besides, there’s quite enough material for that already.

  When I saw the queues inside the house, up the stairs and in the waiting room (the screen tests, like the filming, were being held in a three-storey house, somewhere around Torpedero Tucumán, not an area I know), I began to feel afraid that they wouldn’t choose me, when, up until then, my real fear had been that they would, and my real hope that they wouldn’t; that they wouldn’t think I was pretty enough, or well enough endowed. There was no chance of that, I’ve always turned heads, all my life, I’m not exaggerating, it’s true, not that it’s done me much good. “I probably won’t get this job either,” I thought when I saw all the other female hopefuls. “Unless the film includes a massive orgy scene and they need loads of extras.” There were a lot of girls my age and younger, and older women too, ladies who looked rather too homely, mothers l
ike me probably, but mothers with kids, with irrecoverable waistlines, all wearing rather short skirts and high heels and tight sweaters, like me, badly made up, it was absurd really, if we appeared at all, it would be naked. Some had brought their children, who were running up and down the stairs, the other women clowned around with them when they passed. There were a lot of students there too, in jeans and T-shirts, they would have parents, what would their parents think if their daughters were chosen and they happened to see the film one day; even if it was only going to be sold on video, they do what they like with them after that, they end up being shown on television in the small hours of the morning, and an insomniac father is capable of anything, a mother less so. People are really hard-up and there’s a lot of unemployment: they plonk themselves down in front of the television and watch anything that’s on just to kill time or kill the emptiness, nothing shocks them, when you have nothing, everything seems acceptable, atrocities seem normal and any moral scruples go by the board, and, after all, this kind of filth doesn’t actually do any harm, it can even be quite interesting sometimes. You can learn things.