Javier Marias - While the Women are Sleeping

No, I wasn’t seeing something from the past, something I had forgotten. I knew this with absolute certainty when I saw the man, the husband, the man who was me, Tom, suddenly stand up and seize Janet by the throat, his wife, my wife, sitting there on the sofa. He seized her round the throat with both hands and I knew that he had begun to squeeze even though, again, all I could see was Tom’s back, my back, the vast white shirt blocking my view of Janet who was still sitting on the sofa. Of her I could see only her outstretched arms, her arms flailing in the air and then hidden behind the shirt, in desperate attempts to loosen the grip which was not my grip; and then, after a few short seconds, Janet’s arms appeared again, fallen on either side of the shirt of which I could see only the back, except this time they were limp, inert. Through the closed windows I could hear the child crying again. The man left the room, going off towards the left, doubtless towards the bedroom where the child was. And when he moved away, I saw Janet there dead, strangled. In the struggle her skirt had ridden up and she had lost one of her high-heeled shoes. I saw the garters I had tried so hard not to think about during those last four years.

I was paralysed, but I managed to think: that man who is me, that man who has not moved from Chesham during all this time, is going to kill Martin as well or else the new baby, assuming that Janet and I have had another baby during my absence. I must break the glass and go in and kill that man before he kills Martin or his own newborn child. I must stop him. I must kill myself right now. Except that I am outside the window and the danger is inside.

While I was thinking all this, the child’s crying stopped, suddenly. There were none of the little whimpers you usually get as a child calms down, none of the progressive calm that overtakes children when you pick them up or rock them or sing to them. Before I went away, I used to sing Lord Rendall’s song to Martin and sometimes I managed to soothe him, to stop him crying, but it took a long time, I had to sing the song over and over. He would go on sobbing, but his sobs would gradually diminish, until at last he fell asleep. That child, on the other hand, had fallen silent abruptly, with no transitional phase. And in that new silence, without realising what I was doing, I stood up and started singing Lord Rendall’s song by the window, the song I used to sing to Martin and which begins: ‘Where have you been all the day, Rendall, my son?’ except I used to sing: ‘Where have you been all the day, Martin, my son?’ And then, when I began singing it there next to the window, I heard the voice of the man in our bedroom join me to sing the second verse: ‘Where have you been all the day, my pretty Tom?’ But the child, my child Martin or his child who bore my name, had stopped crying. And when the man and I stopped singing Lord Rendall’s song, I could not help wondering which of the two of us would be hanged.

(1989)

Mr James Lawson looked up. He had just that morning rearranged the window display of the bookstore of which he was manager, Bertram Rota Ltd, Long Acre, Covent Garden, one of the most prestigious and discriminating second-hand bookshops in London. He preferred not to overcrowd the window, displaying, at the most, ten carefully chosen books or manuscripts, each one of which was extremely valuable. They were the sort of editions guaranteed to attract his usual clientele which consisted exclusively of distinguished gentlemen and the occasional elegant lady bibliophile. That morning, with some pride, he had placed in the window works such as Salmagundi by William Faulkner, never reprinted after that first 1932 edition (of 525 numbered copies), and a first edition of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, priced at £2,000. Although he himself set the prices according to the state of the market, he could still never get used to the fact that a book could be worth so much money. But those books were nothing compared with Beckett’s novel, Watt, typed and corrected by the author himself and priced at £50,000. He had had his doubts about putting such a valuable item in the window, but in the end, he had decided to go ahead. It was a source of great satisfaction to him and, after all, he would be there all morning and all afternoon, stationed at his desk, keeping guard over the window. Nonetheless, he felt uneasy and looked up from his desk whenever he noticed someone, some figure, standing on the other side of the glass. He even looked up when people walked past. This time, however, he kept his head raised, for before him, at the window, was a wild-looking beggar. His hair was rather long and he sported a few days’ growth of reddish beard. He was well-built and had a large, apparently broken nose. His clothes, like those of any mendicant, were shabby and of some indefinable colour. In his right hand he held a half-empty bottle of beer. He wasn’t drinking, though, he did not from time to time raise the bottle to his lips; rather he was utterly absorbed, staring into the window of Bertram Rota. Mr Lawson wondered what he could be looking at. At Camus? One of the books on display was a copy of La Chute dedicated by the author himself and open at the appropriate page. But La Chute was on the right-hand side, next to the typescript of Watt and the beggar was looking to the left. On that side Lawson had placed Salmagundi and the second 1839 edition of Oliver Twist , priced at £300. Dickens was possibly of more interest to the beggar than Faulkner. He might have read Dickens at school, but not Faulkner, for the man was at least sixty years old, and possibly older.

Mr Lawson looked down for a moment, believing (though without really thinking it) that perhaps this would make the beggar disappear. He immediately looked up again and found, to his surprise, that the man had indeed gone, there was no one there. He got up and, standing slightly on tiptoe, checked that everything in the window was still in order. Perhaps he should remove Watt , all £50,000 of it, or perhaps display only the first few pages, He returned to his seat and for a couple of minutes gave all his attention to the new catalogue he was compiling, but again he noticed a change in the light (someone was blocking the light coming from the street) and he felt obliged to look up. The beggar was back, bottle in hand (the beer would be completely flat by now), this time accompanied by two other beggars, each more ragged than the other. One was a young black man wearing green mittens and a large earring in one ear; the other, the same age as the first man, had a domed head that made the jockeys cap with which he tried to cover it seem even smaller; the cap (purple and white, although the purple had faded and the white was now yellow) was covered with large, greasy stains. The beggar with the reddish beard was urging them to draw nearer and when he had persuaded them to do so, all three of them stared in through the window, again at the left-hand side of the display, and the first beggar kept pointing at something with one grimy finger. He did so with pride, for afterwards, he would turn to his companions, first to the black man and then to the jockey, with obvious satisfaction. Was it Salmagundi or Dickens they were looking at? There was another item there too, a curious document consisting of an eight-page pamphlet which, in the previous catalogue, Lawson had entitled An Epigram of Fealty. It contained three poems by Dylan Thomas never published elsewhere. Lawson opened a drawer and took out the catalogue in which it had first appeared, the 250th since the founding of Rota, and rapidly reread the description: ‘Printed privately for the members of the Court of the Kingdom of Redonda [1953]’. Seventeen years ago. ‘Thirty commemorative copies, each numbered by John Gawsworth himself. Very rare. These three poems, not listed in Rolph’s bibliography of Thomas, are testaments to the poet’s “fealty” to John Gawsworth, Juan I, King of Redonda, who, in 1947, named Thomas “Duke of Gweno”. £500.’ Five hundred pounds, not bad for a few printed pages, thought Lawson. Perhaps that was what the beggars were looking at. He noticed that the one with the beard was now pointing at himself, tapping his chest with his forefinger. The others were also pointing, but in the way one points one’s finger at someone else, at a person deserving of ridicule. Now the three of them were talking and arguing. Though Lawson could hear nothing of what they said, he was beginning to feel worried. Why had they chosen to stand for so long outside his store window of all places? Not that sales at Rota depended on passing trade, but their disquieting presence would certainly scare off any potential distinguished customers (only distinguished people bought books at Rota). He couldn’t get rid of them though, they weren’t breaking any law, they were simply looking at a window full of old books. But that particular window contained the typescript of Watt, and Watt was worth £50,000.