Javier Marias - While the Women are Sleeping

The young woman, who was growing older, jealously guarded her secret and spoke ever more confidingly to him, but never received a reply: ghosts cannot always speak nor do they always want to. And as that one-sided intimacy grew, so the years passed, and she was always careful not to mention the name ‘Jesus’ again in any context and to avoid any words that resembled ‘ guajiro or ‘Guajardo’ and to exclude forever from her readings any references to China or Mecca. Then one day, the man failed to appear, nor did he in the days and weeks that followed. The young woman, who was now almost old herself, was worried at first like a mother, fearing that some grave accident or misfortune might have befallen him, not realising that such things only happen to mortals, that those who are no longer mortal are quite safe. When she understood this, her worry turned to despair: evening after evening, she would stare at the empty armchair and curse the silence, she would ask sorrowful questions of the void, hurl reproaches into the invisible air, and curse the past to which she feared he had returned; she wondered what mistake or error she could have made and searched eagerly for new texts that might arouse the guerrilleros curiosity and make him come back — new topics and new novels, new adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for she put more faith in Conan Doyle’s narrative skills than in any other scientific or literary bait. She continued to read out loud every day, to see if he would come.

One evening, after months of desolation, she found that the bookmark she had left in the Dickens novel she was patiently reading to him in his absence was not where she had left it, but many pages ahead. She carefully read the pages he had marked, and then, bitterly, she understood, experiencing the disappointment that comes in every life, however quiet and recondite. There was a sentence in the text that said: ‘And she grew old and lined, and her cracked voice was no longer pleasing to him.’ Don Alejandro de la Cruz says that the old lady became as indignant as a rejected wife, and that, far from accepting this judgement and falling silent, she reproached the void thus: ‘You are most unfair, but in life, so they say, you always tried to be scrupulously fair. You do not grow old, and want to listen to pleasant youthful voices, and to contemplate firm luminous faces. I can understand that; you’re young and always will be, and you may not have had much time, and many things escaped you. But I have educated and amused you for years; and if, thanks to me, you have learned much, possibly even how to read, it hardly seems right that you should leave me offensive messages in the very books I have shared with you. Bear in mind that when the old lady died, I could easily have read in silence, but I didn’t. I could have left Veracruz, but I didn’t. I know that you can go in search of other voices, nothing binds you to me and it’s true that you’ve never asked me for anything — you owe me nothing. But if you have any notion of gratitude, Emiliano,’ and this was the first time she called him by his name, still not knowing if anyone was listening, ‘I ask you to come at least once a week and to have patience with my voice, which is no longer a beautiful voice and no longer pleases you, and now will never bring me love. I will try hard to read as well as I can. But do come, because now that I’m old, I need you to amuse and keep me company. I would miss seeing you and your bullet-riddled clothes. Poor Emiliano,’ she added more calmly, all those bullets.’

According to the scholarly Don Alejandro de la Cruz, the ghost of that rustic man and eternal soldier, who may have been Zapata, was not entirely lacking in sympathy. He accepted her reasoning or felt that he owed her a debt of gratitude: and from then until her death, Elena Vera awaited with excitement and impatience the arrival of the day chosen by her impalpable, silent love to return — from the past, from a time in which, in fact, neither past nor time existed — the arrival of each Wednesday, when he was perhaps coming back from Chinameca, murdered, sad, exhausted. And it is thought that those visits, that that listener and their pact, all kept her alive for many more years, in that city facing the sea, because with him she still had a past and a present and a future too — or perhaps they too are a kind of nostalgia.

(1998)

Whether it was one of those bizarre occurrences to which Chance never quite manages to accustom us, however often they may arise; or whether Destiny, in a show of caution and prudence, temporarily suspended judgement on the qualities and attributes of the new teacher and so felt itself obliged to delay intervening just in case such an intervention should later have been found to be a mistake; or whether, finally, it was because in these southern lands even the boldest and most confident of people tend to distrust their own gifts of persuasion, the fact of the matter is that young Mr Lilburn did not discover what truth there might be in the strange warnings issued to him — only a few days after he had joined the Institute — by his immediate superior, Mr Bayo, and by other colleagues too, until he was well into the first term when sufficient time had elapsed for him to be able to forget or at least to postpone thinking about the possible significance of the warnings. Mr Lilburn, in any case, belonged to that class of person who, sooner or later, in the course of a hitherto untroubled life, finds his career in ruins and his unshakable beliefs overturned, refuted and even held up to ridicule by just such an event as concerns us here. And so it would, therefore, have made little difference if he had never been asked to stay behind to lock up the building.

Lilburn, who was just thirty-one, had eagerly accepted the post offered him, through Mr Bayo, by the director of the British Institute in Madrid. Indeed, he had experienced a certain sense of relief and something very like the discreet, imperfect, muted joy felt in such situations by men who — while they wouldn’t ever dare to so much as dream of rising to heights they had already accepted would never be theirs — nevertheless expect a small improvement in their position as the most natural thing in the world. And although his work at the Institute did not, in itself, constitute any improvement at all, either economic or social, with respect to his previous position, young Mr Lilburn was very conscious, as he signed the rather unorthodox contract presented to him by Mr Bayo during the latter’s summer sojourn in London, that, while spending nine months abroad was almost an invitation to people in his native city to forget all about him and his abilities, and implied, too, the loss — perhaps not, he imagined, irrevocable — of his comfortable but extremely mediocre post at the North London Polytechnic, it also brought the distinct possibility of coming into contact with people higher up the administrative ladder and, more importantly, with prestigious members of the diplomatic corps. Furthermore, having dealings, for example (why not?), with an ambassador could prove most useful to him — however sporadic and superficial those dealings might be — possibly in the not too distant future. And so, around the middle of September, and with the indifference characteristic of any only moderately ambitious man, he made his preparations, recommending a far less knowledgable replacement for the post he was vacating at the Polytechnic, and arrived in Madrid, determined to work hard if necessary to earn the esteem and trust of his superiors — with an eye to any future advantages this might bring him — and to resist being seduced by the flexibility of the Spanish working day.