Javier Marias - While the Women are Sleeping

And it was during these sessions that the ghost of the house first made his appearance. Every evening, while Elena was speaking the words of Cervantes or Dumas or Conan Doyle, or verses by Dario or Martí, she could just make out the figure of a young man of somewhat rustic appearance, a man of about thirty or so, who politely removed his broad-brimmed hat and whose perfectly decent clothes were, nevertheless, full of holes, as if he, or, rather, the short jacket, white shirt and tight trousers that clothed his absent body, had been riddled with bullets. The latter, however, seemed quite unscathed, and his face, barricaded behind a bushy moustache, had a healthy glow. The first time she saw him standing there — leaning his elbows on the back of the chair occupied by her mistress, occasionally playing with the hat he held in his hand, as if listening, rapt, to the words she was reading — she almost cried out with fright, especially when she saw that, although he wasn’t carrying any weapons, he did have a cartridge belt slung across his chest. But the young man immediately raised one finger to his lips and made reassuring signs to Elena, indicating that she should continue and not betray his presence. He had a very inoffensive face, and there was in his mocking eyes a constant, shy smile that occasionally gave way, during certain sombre passages — or perhaps when he was assailed by thoughts or memories of his own — to the alarmed, naive seriousness of someone who cannot quite distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. And so the young woman obeyed, although that first day, she could not help but keep glancing up rather too frequently and staring at a point above the bun on her mistress’s head, so much so that Señora Suárez Alday also kept glancing anxiously up, as if wondering whether some hypothetical hat were awry or whether her halo were not quite bright enough. ‘Whatever’s wrong, child?’ she said, somewhat annoyed. ‘What do you keep looking at?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Elena Vera, ‘it’s just a way of resting my eyes before going back to the text. Reading for such a long time is tiring.’ The young man with the scarf about his neck nodded and raised his hat for a moment in a gesture of approval and gratitude, and her explanation meant that the young woman could thereafter continue the habit and thus at least satisfy her visual curiosity. For, from then on, evening after evening and with very few exceptions, she read for her mistress and for him, without the former ever once turning round or discovering the young man’s intrusive presence.

He did not appear at any other moment, so Elena never had the opportunity, over the years, of speaking to him or asking who he was or had been or why he was listening to her. She considered the possibility that he might have been the cause of the disappointment in love suffered by her mistress at some time in the past, but her lady never offered any confidences, despite the promptings of all those sentimental or tragic pages read out loud and despite the hints dropped by Elena herself during the slow, nocturnal conversations of half a lifetime. Perhaps the local rumours were false and the lady had no adventures worth telling, which was why she enjoyed hearing about the most remote and foreign and improbable of tales. On more than one occasion, Elena was tempted to take pity on her and tell her what was going on each evening behind her back, to allow her to share this small daily excitement, to tell her of the existence of a man between those ever more asexual, taciturn walls in which there was only the echo, sometimes for whole nights and days together, of their female voices, the lady’s grown ever older and more confused, and Elena’s, each morning, a little weaker and fainter, a little less lovely, a voice that, contrary to her mistress’s predictions, had not brought her love, not at least of the permanent, tangible kind. But whenever she was about to give in to that temptation, she would suddenly remember the young man’s discreet, authoritative gesture — one finger on his lips, repeated now and then with a slightly teasing look in his eyes — and so she kept silent. The last thing she wanted was to make him angry. Perhaps ghosts got as bored as widows did.

One day, Elena noticed a sudden change in the expression on the face of that man, half-peasant, half-soldier, with the holes in his clothes which she always felt an impulse to sew up, so that the night chill from the sea air would not slip through them. Señora Suárez Alday’s health began to decline, and a few days before her death (although no one knew then that she would die so soon) she asked Elena to read from the Gospels rather than from novels or poems. Elena did as she requested and noticed that whenever she pronounced the name ‘Jesus’—which was often — the man would grimace in pain or sorrow, as if the very name hurt him. By the tenth or eleventh time, the pain must have become unbearable, because his always rather diffuse, but nonetheless perfectly distinguishable body grew gradually more and more tenuous until it disappeared altogether, long before she had concluded her reading session. Elena wondered if the man had been an atheist, an enemy of official religions. To clarify this, she insisted, a couple of days later, on reading her mistress a novel much praised by the critics, Enriquillo , by the Dominican author Manuel de Jesus Galván. And before beginning her reading, she spoke a little to her mistress about the novelist, making a point of saying his whole name and never just his surname; and she saw that whenever she pronounced the name ‘Jesus’, her visitor shrank back and his eyes shone with a mixture of fury and fear. Elena came to suspect something that had, for a long time, seemed unimaginable, and as she read the book, she invented a very brief dialogue, in which she had Enriquillo address an inferior in these terms: ‘Hey, you, Jesus, guajiro .’ The ghost covered his eyes in terror for a moment, utterly shaken. Elena did not insist and the man regained his composure.

Elena kept back her final test for another three days. Her mistress was growing weaker, but she nonetheless refused to stay in bed and sat in her armchair as if that sign of health would be a safeguard against death. And Elena expressed an interest in The Travels of Marco Polo , or so she said, because, in fact, what really interested her was the prologue and the biographical note about the traveller. She introduced a few words of her own, saying: ‘This great adventurer travelled to China and to Mecca, among other places.’ She stopped, and feigning surprise, added: ‘Imagine that, Señora, what a long journey, all the way to China and to Mecca.’ The man’s tanned weather-beaten face turned deathly pale and, at the same time and without transition, how can we put it, his entire figure abruptly vanished, as if that ashen pallor had erased him from the air, made him transparent, a nothing, invisible even to her. And then she was sure that the man was Emiliano Zapata, murdered in his thirties by the treachery of a supposed zapatista called Jesus Guajardo, in a place called Chinameca, or so the legend goes. And she felt very honoured to think that she was being visited by the ghost of Zapata, his clothes still full of the holes made by those treacherous bullets.

Her mistress died the next morning. Elena stayed on in the house, and for a few days, saddened and disoriented, with no reason to continue, she stopped reading. The young man did not appear. And then, convinced that Zapata wanted to have the education he had doubtless lacked in life, and persuaded by the idea that in his lifetime he had suffered from an excess of reality and for that reason, after death, wished to find repose in fictions, but also fearful that this was not the case and that his presence had somehow been mysteriously linked to the old lady — a love affair with Zapata required more secrecy than any other, a secret that would have to be kept forever — she decided to go back to reading out loud in order to call him back, and she read not only novels and poetry, but books on history and the natural sciences. The young man took some time to reappear — perhaps ghosts go into mourning, for who else has more reason to or perhaps they are still wary, perhaps words can still wound them — but he did finally return, attracted perhaps by the new material, and he continued to listen with the same close attention, not standing up this time, leaning on the chair back, but comfortably installed in the now vacant armchair, his hat dangling from his hand, and sometimes with his legs crossed and holding a lit cigar, like the patriarch he never, in his numbered days, had had the chance to become.