Design of the non

by Javier Marías

  "And did you answer him?"

  "No. He only wanted to know about what we got up to in bed, that's what he was really asking me."

  "And you didn't answer him."

  "No."

  Luisa burst out laughing, her good humour suddenly restored.

  "But that's the sort of conversation schoolboys have," she said, still laughing.

  I think I blushed a little, in fact, I blushed for Custardoy, not for myself, they hardly knew each other then and that's why, in her presence, I felt responsible for Custardoy, who was my friend, an old friend, well, not exactly, but you feel responsible for everything that might embarrass you and almost anything can embarrass you before the object of your love (when you first begin to love them), which is also why we're capable of betraying anyone, because, above all, you betray your own past, or whatever one hates or denies in that past (she was not in that past, the person who saves us and improves us, the person who ennobles us, or at least so we believe while we love her).

  "That's why I didn't want to get involved," I said.

  "What a pity," she said. "If you had, you could now be telling me what you'd told him."

  Now I was the one who didn't feel like laughing, people are so often out of step with each other by a matter of seconds. But laughter can usually wait.

  I felt uncomfortable, ashamed. I remained silent. Why tell her? Then I said:

  "So you don't think Guillermo will ever kill his sick wife." I returned to Havana and to the topic that had made Luisa so serious. I wanted her to go back to being serious.

  "Of course he won't kill her, of course he won't," she replied with confidence. "No one kills anyone because someone else asks them to, someone who might then leave them. Otherwise he'd have done it already, difficult things always seem possible if you think about them a little, but they become impossible if you think about them too much. Do you know what'll happen? The man will stop going to Cuba one day and they'll forget about each other. He'll stay married to his wife for the rest of his life, whether she's ill or not, and if she is ill, he'll do whatever he can to make her better. She's his guarantee. He'll go on having mistresses, doing his best to find ones who don't give him any trouble. Married women, for example."

  "Is that what you'd like?"

  "No, that's what I think will happen."

  "And what about her?"

  "She's less easy to predict. She might meet another man soon afterwards and the time she spends with him will seem little or nothing. She might well kill herself as she said she would, when she sees that he isn't coming back. She might just wait and remember. Whatever happens, she's done for. Things will never work out the way she wants them to."

  "They say that people who talk about killing themselves never do."

  'That's stupid. It takes all sorts."

  I took the remote control from her. I put down on the bedside table the book I'd been holding in my hands, without reading a line. The book was Pnin by Nabokov. I never did finish it, although I was really enjoying it.

  "And what about my father and my aunt? Now, according to Custardoy, it turns out that she killed herself."

  "If you want to know if she gave any prior warning, you're going to have to ask him. Are you sure you don't want me to?"

  I hesitated a little before replying, then said:

  "No." I thought for a while longer and said: "I don't think so. I'll have to think about it."

  I turned the sound up on the Jerry Lewis retrospective. Luisa turned out the light on her side and turned over as if she was going to sleep.

  "I'll switch off the light in a minute," I said to her.

  "The light doesn't bother me. But can you tum the sound down on the television?"

  Jerry Lewis was now sitting in a cinema before the film began, holding a bag of popcorn in one hand. When he applauded all the popcorn fell on the head of a staid, white-haired lady sitting in front of him. "Oh, madam," he was saying, "my popcorn's fallen in your hair, allow me to remove it," and in fifteen seconds he destroyed the woman's carefully coiffed hair. "Just sit still a moment," he said to her whilst he rumpled and manhandled her hair, turning it into the hair of a bacchante. "Well," he said reproachfully, "just look at the state of your hair." I laughed out loud, I'd never seen that sketch when I was a child, I was sure of it, it was the first time that I'd seen or heard it.

  I turned the sound down again, as Luisa had asked me to. I wasn't sleepy, but when two people share the same bed there has to be a minimum of agreement as regards when to go to sleep and when to get up, when to have lunch and supper, though breakfast is another matter, I thought. I remembered that I hadn't bought any milk and I'd said I would, Luisa would be annoyed in the morning. Though on the whole, she's very easygoing.

  "I forgot to buy any milk," I said to her.

  "Don't worry, I'll pop down and get some tomorrow," she replied.

  I turned the television off and darkness filled the room. My light hadn't been on because I hadn't got round to reading. For a few seconds I could see nothing, then my eyes grew somewhat accustomed to the darkness, although they never do entirely, Luisa likes to sleep with the shutters closed, I don't. I turned over and lay with my back to her, we hadn't said goodnight, but perhaps we wouldn't always have to say goodnight, every night, in the years to come. But perhaps that night we should.

  "Goodnight," I said.

  "Goodnight," she replied.

  When we said goodnight, we hadn't said one another's names, neither did we use any of our usual terms of endearment, all couples have them, often several, or at least one, just to make it seem as if they were different and not always the same and to avoid calling each other by their real names, which they keep for when they insult each other or are angry or have to give some piece of bad news, for example, that one of them is about to be left alone. My father had been called various names by at least three women, it would all have come to sound the same to him, similar, repetitive, it must have been confusing, or perhaps not, it would be different with each wife, when he'd had to give them some bad news he'd have called them Juana or Teresa or another name which I don't know, but which he won't have forgotten. With my mother he would have had many years, with my Aunt Teresa almost no time at all, perhaps only the brief time that Luisa and I have been married, there were no future years for them, or even months, she'd killed herself, according to Custardoy. And the third wife, who was the first, how long had that lasted? What did they call each other when they said goodnight and turned their backs on one another? Or would only she address him or he her and then lie separately, embracing the shared pillow (that's just a manner of speaking, because there are always two pillows)?

  "I wouldn't want to know if you were ever to consider killing me one day," I said to Luisa in the dark.

  I must have sounded as if I meant it, because then she turned to me and I felt the contact that had been lost some time before, her familiar chest against my back, and I immediately felt supported. I turned round and then I noticed her hands on my forehead, caressing me or scolding me, and I felt her kisses on my nose, eyes and mouth, on my chin, forehead and cheeks (on my whole face). My face allowed every bit of it that was kissable to be kissed, because at that moment, after those words - after turning to face her — I was the one who was protecting and supporting her.

  AS I MENTIONED, not long afterwards, once the honeymoon and the summer were over, I had to absent myself again because of my work as translator and interpreter (now more as an interpreter) for various international organizations. I'd agreed with Luisa that, for a while, she would work less and dedicate herself to the (unnatural) business of preparing our new home, until we could, as far as possible, make our presences and absences coincide or until we changed careers completely. The sessions at the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York begin again in the autumn, halfway through September, and continue for three months, and that was where I was to work as a freelance interpreter (they always need a few on hand during the As
sembly), as I had in other years before I met Luisa, eight weeks of interpreting before going back to Madrid from where I wouldn't stir or do any interpreting for at least a further eight weeks.

  It's no fun being in big cities, not even in New York, because you work flat out for five days a week and the two remaining days seem unreal somehow (like a parenthesis) and you're so exhausted that all you can do is gather strength for the next week, go for a walk, gaze from afar at the drug addicts and the future delinquents, go shopping (almost everything is open on a Sunday), spend all day reading the mammoth New York Times, drink high-energy fruit juices or tutti-fruttis and watch the ninety TV channels ( Jerry Lewis is bound to be appearing on one of them). All you want is to rest your ears and your tongue, but it's not possible, you always end up either listening or speaking, even if you're alone. I'm not, as it happens. The majority of the so-called freelances rent some squalid apartment for their stay there, which always works out cheaper than a hotel, a furnished apartment with a fitted kitchen, and no one can ever decide whether it's best to cook there and put up with the smell of what they're going to eat or have eaten, or else have lunch and supper out, which is both tiring and expensive in a city in which nothing costs what they say it costs, in restaurants you have to add an extra fifteen per cent for the obligatory tip and then an extra eight per cent for the local New York tax, which applies to everything (and which is extortionate, in Boston it's only five). I'm lucky, I have a Spanish friend in New York, who's kind enough to take me in as a lodger during my eight weeks at the Assembly. She's settled there and has a permanent post as a United Nations interpreter. She's been in New York for twelve years now, she has a nice apartment, not in the least squalid, in which one can cook from time to time without the smell of the food invading the sitting room and the bedrooms (in small apartments, as you know, it's open-plan). I've known her even longer than the time she's spent away from Spain, I knew her at university, we were both students, although she's four years older than me, which means that now she's thirty-nine and was one year less than that when I was in New York after my marriage, on the occasion I'm writing about or about which I'm going to write. Then, when we were students that is, fifteen years ago in Madrid, we went to bed together on two isolated occasions, or perhaps it was three or maybe four (but no more than that), though I'm sure that neither of us remembers those occasions with any clarity, but we do nonetheless know about them and our knowledge of that fact, much more than our knowledge of the event itself, means that we treat each other with great delicacy but at the same time with great trust, I mean that we tell each other everything. And we offer each other words of consolation or distraction or encouragement when we see that one or the other of us is in need of such words. We also miss each other (vaguely) when we're not together, she's one of those people (in everyone's life there are four or five such people whose loss one truly feels) to whom you're used to telling everything that happens to you, that is, one of those people you think about when something happens to you, be it funny or dramatic, and for whom you store up events and anecdotes. You accept misfortunes gladly because you know you can tell those five people about them, afterwards. "I must tell Berta that," you think (or I often think).

  Berta had a car accident six years ago. One of her legs was crushed and she suffered multiple open fractures, then osteomyelitis set in and they thought they'd have to amputate, but they managed to save her leg, although she lost part of the femur, which they had to shorten, and ever since then she's had a slight limp. It's not so pronounced that she can't wear shoes with heels (which she does with great panache), but the heel of one always has to be a little longer and thicker than that of the other shoe, she has them specially made. You don't notice those unequal heels unless you've been told about them, but you do notice that she has a limp, particularly when she's overtired or at home, where she makes no attempt to amend the way she walks: she relaxes once she's shut the door behind her and put the key away in her handbag, she doesn't pretend any more, her limp becomes exaggerated. She was also left with a scar on her face, it's very faint, so faint that she's never considered having plastic surgery, it's like a half moon on her right cheek which sometimes grows darker and more visible when she hasn't slept well or feels upset about something or is very tired. Then, for a few moments, I think she's got a smudge on her cheek, that she's dirtied her face, and I point it out to her. "It's my scar," she reminds me, which has grown blue or purple.

  She was married when she was younger and that, in part, was the reason she went to America and looked for work there. She got divorced after three years, married again two years later and a year after that again got divorced. Since then, nothing has lasted very long. For six years now, since the accident, she's felt unjustifiably old and has lost faith in her abilities to seduce anyone (in the long term, that is). She's a pretty woman whose looks were never that youthful and so she seems barely to have changed since we were at university. She'll age well, her face won't undergo those transformations that make some faces from our past unrecognizable, or our own face for that matter, for we never really look at our own face. But, however unjustified her feelings seem to me, that's how she feels, and although she hasn't given up on herself or written herself off entirely, her relationship with men has become tainted by those obsessive, involuntary feelings, a tense relationship that has not as yet become indifference, as it doubtless will do in the not too distant future. Over the years, whenever I've done my stint as a temporary interpreter in New York, various men have entered and left her apartment (the majority of them Americans, plus a few Spaniards, even the odd Argentinian; the majority would arrive with her, others phoned and arranged to meet her elsewhere, a few came by to pick her up, one or two even had a key), none of whom has shown the slightest interest in meeting me and therefore couldn't have any genuine interest in her (long-term interest, I mean, because you want to know and even be nice to the friends of someone who might be with you for some time). Every one of those men has let her down or abandoned her, often after spending only one night together. She's placed her hopes in each and every one of them, she's imagined she had some future with them, even on that first night which so often seemed likely to be the last and which so often was. It's becoming more and more difficult for her to hold on to someone and yet she tries harder every time (as I said, she's not yet reached the time of indifference or cynicism).

  When I was there after my wedding, from mid-September to mid-November, she'd been experimenting for two years with dates arranged through an agency and, for a year, had been replying to adverts in the personal columns (or "the personals" as they're called) in magazines and newspapers. She'd made a video of herself for the agency who then, for a fee, would send her video to anyone interested in someone like her. It's an absurd expression, but it's the one they use and which Berta herself uses, "people interested in someone like me", that is, Berta measures herself against some previous but non-existent model instead of creating her own. In the video, she was sitting on her sofa talking (she showed it to me, she'd kept the original, the people at the agency made copies and sent them out), she looked very pretty, very smart, very composed, younger than her years, and was speaking in English to the camera, at the end she said a few conventional phrases in Spanish to attract any other solitary Spaniards, resident or just passing through, or people who liked the exotic touch or what Americans call Hispanics. She talked about her likes and dislikes, about her interests, her ideas (though not too many), but not about her work, she mentioned the accident and, with an apologetic smile, her slight lameness, you had to admit to any physical defects so that no one could claim they'd been cheated; then she was shown walking round the apartment, watering her plants, reading a book (by Kundera, a mistake), with background music (something by Bach for the cello, a cliché), in the kitchen wearing an apron, writing letters on a table by the light of a lamp. The videos were very short, only three to five minutes long, all very innocuous. After payment of a modest fee, she (an
d this is why I speak of them in the plural) also received copies of such tapes, videos of men who had or hadn't seen hers and wanted to meet her or be introduced to new women. She received two or three a week, during my stay there we used to watch them together and laugh, I'd give her advice, not that I felt able to give her any very serious advice, it all seemed like a game to me, it was hard for me to believe that she could pin her hopes on any of those men. I felt that the people who got involved in that kind of thing must, by definition, be weird, anomalous types and far from trustworthy. But when I thought that, I was forgetting that Berta was one of those people and she was my friend and worthy of anyone's trust. The agency was quite a respectable one, or at least that's how they presented themselves, it was all controlled up until the first meeting, everything was in the best possible taste, they even censored the videos if necessary. Things were different in the personal contacts she made by letter. There was no control at all, no intermediary, and talk turned at once to things carnal, the correspondents immediately wanted videos that were, first, suggestive and, later, lewd, they made bold remarks, cracked repellent jokes, which Berta didn't seem to see as such, nothing we're part of, nothing to which we've become accustomed, strikes us as repugnant. After a while the agency was no longer enough, although she went on asking for tapes in order to feel that she was still part of that innocuous world, but she also exchanged letters and videos with weird, anomalous men, people with faces and bodies but no names, people with initials or nicknames, I still remember some she mentioned to me, they gave themselves names like: 'Taurus", "VMF", "De Kova", 'The Graduate", "Weapons", "MC", "Humbert", "Sperm Whale", or "Gaucho". They all smiled nonchalantly at the camera, home videos, doubtless filmed by themselves when they were alone, talking to no one, to someone they'd never met or had yet to meet, or perhaps to the world that ignored them. Some spoke to her from their pillow, reclining on the bed, wearing underpants or minuscule bathing trunks, revealing incipient beer-bellies, chests smeared with oil as if they were athletes. Which they weren't. The more daring ones (the older they were the more daring) appeared naked and with an erection, chatting away as if it were the most natural thing in the world, making no mention of what was all too often far from noteworthy. Berta would laugh when she saw them and I would laugh too, but uneasily, because I knew that, after the laughter, Berta would reply to one of these, send them her video and arrange to meet and perhaps come back with them to the apartment. And on those occasions, after shutting the door and putting her key away in her handbag, she'd make a special effort to walk without a limp, and even though she was at home, she wouldn't relax her efforts to hide her lameness, at least until they reached the bedroom, because nobody walks in bed.