Javier Marias - While the Women are Sleeping

Now and then she would raise herself into a sitting position and then spend a long time with her knees drawn up while she painted or polished her nails or, with a small mirror in her hand, scrutinised her face or shoulders for blemishes or unwanted hair. It was odd to see her holding the mirror to the most unlikely parts of her body (it must have been a magnifying mirror), not just to her shoulders, I mean, but to her elbows, her calves, her hips, her breasts, the inside of her thighs, even her navel. I’m sure her navel could never have had any fluff in it, and perhaps what its mistress wanted was to suppress it altogether. As well as her tiny bikini, she wore bracelets and various rings, never fewer than eight of the latter, distributed among her fingers. I rarely saw her venture into the water. It would be easy to describe her as a conventional beauty, but that would be a poor definition — too broad or too vague. Rather her beauty was unreal, which is to say ideal. It’s what children think of as beauty and which is almost always (unless the children are already deviants) an immaculate beauty, unmarked, in repose, docile, gestureless, with very white skin and large breasts, round — or at least not almond-shaped — eyes, and identical lips, that is, with upper and lower lip identical, as if they were both lower lips: the kind of beauty you get in cartoons or, if you prefer, in advertisements, and not in just any advertisements, but those you see in pharmacies, deliberately devoid of any hint of sensuality that might trouble other women or the elderly, who are the people most often in pharmacies. And yet neither was it a virginal beauty, and although I wouldn’t say it was a milky pale beauty — or perhaps creamy is the word, it was the kind that would take time to turn brown (her skin was glossy, but not golden) — like Luisa’s beauty; it was a smooth, voluptuous beauty, but one that didn’t cry out to be touched (except perhaps when clothed), as if it might melt at the slightest contact, as if even a caress or a gentle kiss could become violence or rape.

Her male companion doubtless felt the same, at least during daylight hours. He was what you might call fat or even gross or obese, and he must have been more than thirty years older. Like many bald men, he believed he could make up for his lack of hair by wearing what little he had brushed forward, Roman-style (it never works) and by cultivating an abundant moustache, and that he could disguise his age, in that particular setting, by wearing a two-tone swimsuit, that is, with the right leg lime-green and the left purple, at least, such was his chosen attire on that first day, because, like her, he rarely wore the same suit twice. The two colours (the style of trunks never varied, only the colours) invariably seemed to clash, although they were always highly original combinations: blue grey and apricot, peach and rose mallow, ultramarine and Nile green. The trunks were as small as his bulbous body allowed — it was inappropriate to talk about them having legs, really — and this meant that his movements were always slightly constrained by the ever-present threat of a rip. For the fact is he was in constant, agile movement, video camera in hand. Whereas his companion remained completely immobile or idle for hours on end, he never ceased circling her, tirelessly filming her: he would stand on tiptoe, bend double, lie on the ground, face up and face down, take pan shots, medium shots, close-ups, tracking shots and panoramic shots, from above and from below, full face, from the side, from behind (from both sides); he filmed her inert face, her softly rounded shoulders, her voluminous breasts, her rather wide hips, her firm thighs, her far from tiny feet, her carefully painted toenails, her soles, her calves, her hairless pubis and armpits. He filmed the beads of sweat provoked by the sun, probably even her pores, although that smooth uniform skin seemed to have no pores, no folds or bumps, and not a single stretch mark marred her buttocks. The fat man filmed her every day for hours at a time, with few breaks, always the same scene: the stillness and tedium of the unreal beauty who accompanied him. He wasn’t interested in the sand or the water, which changed colour as the day wore on, or the trees or the rocks in the distance, or a kite flying or a boat far off, or in other women, the little Italian sailor, the despotic Englishman, or Luisa. He didn’t ask the young woman to do anything — to play games, to make an effort or to pose — he seemed content with making a visual record, day after day, of that naked statuary figure, of that slow docile flesh, that inexpressive face and those closed or perhaps fastidious eyes, of a knee bending or a breast tilting or a forefinger slowly removing a speck from a cheek. For him, that monotonous vision was clearly a perennial source of wonder and novelty. Where Luisa or I or anyone else would see only repetition and weariness, he must, at every moment, have seen a remarkable spectacle, as multiform, varied and absorbing as a painting can be when the viewer forgets about the other paintings waiting for him and loses all notion of time, and loses, too, therefore, the habit of looking, which is replaced or supplanted — or perhaps excluded — by the capacity to see, which is what we almost never do because it’s so at odds with the purely temporal. For it is then that one sees everything, the figures and the background, the light, the composition and the shadows, the three-dimensional and the flat, the pigment and the line, as well as each brushstroke. That is, one sees both what is depicted and the rough surface of the canvas, and it is only then that one can paint the picture again with ones eyes.

They spoke little and only occasionally, in short sentences that never became conversation or dialogue, any hint of which died a natural death, interrupted by the attention the woman was giving to her body, in which she was utterly absorbed, and by the indirect attention the man was giving to her body too, through his camera lens. In fact, I don’t recall him ever stopping to look at her directly, with his own eyes, with nothing between his eyes and her. In that respect, he was like me, for I, in turn, viewed them either through the veil of my myopia or through my magnifying hat. Of the four of us, only Luisa could see everything without difficulty or mediation because I don’t think the woman looked at or even saw anyone, and she herself mostly used her mirror to scrutinise and inspect, and she often donned a pair of extravagant space-age sunglasses.

‘The sun’s hot today, isn’t it? You should put more sunscreen on, you don’t want to burn,’ the fat man would say, in an occasional pause in his circular tours of his adored one’s body; and when he didn’t receive an immediate answer, he would say her name, the way mothers say their children’s names: ‘Inès. Inès.’

‘Yes, it’s definitely hotter than yesterday, but I’ve put on some factor ten, so I won’t burn,’ replied the body, Inès, reluctantly and barely audibly while, with a pair of tweezers, she plucked out a tiny hair from her chin.

And there the conversation would end.

One day, Luisa — because we did have conversations — said:

‘To be honest, I don’t know whether I’d enjoy being filmed like poor Inès. It would make me nervous, although I suppose if someone was doing it all the time, like the fat man, I’d get used to it in the end. And then perhaps I’d take as much care of myself as she does, although she’s probably only so vigilant because she’s constantly being filmed or because she’ll see herself later on screen or maybe she does it for posterity’s sake.’ Luisa rummaged around in her bag, took out a small mirror and studied her eyes, which, in the sun, were the colour of plums, with iridescent flecks in them. ‘Then again, what kind of posterity would want to waste its time watching those tedious videos. Do you think he films her during the rest of the day, too?’

Читать дальше