Javier Marias - While the Women are Sleeping

‘He’s dead.’

‘May he rest in peace,’ chorused the others.

I saw how my brother and his wife immediately withdrew, once they had told Esperancita that they would take care of the funeral, due to take place the following day. Gradually, everyone else went too, and I was left alone. I didn’t know what to do. I could think, see and hear, therefore I existed, therefore I was alive, and the next day they were going to bury me. I tried desperately to move, but couldn’t. Then I realised that I was dead, that beyond death there was nothing, and all that remained for me was to lie in my grave forever, not breathing, but alive; without eyes, but able to see; without ears, but able to hear.

The next day, they put me in a black coffin and then in the hearse that took me to the cemetery. Not many people turned up. After the brief service, everyone left and I was alone. At first, I didn’t like it here at all, but I’m used to it now, and I enjoy the silence. I see Esperancita once a month, and the boys every other month, and that’s all: this is my life and my death, where there is nothing.

(1968)

He devoted his whole life to trying to resolve an enigma.

When his best friend’s father, Isaac Custardoy by name, was still a young man, a threat, a curse or a malediction was put on him. He lived in Havana and was a landowner and a soldier; he would boast about his career and his reputation as a ladies’ man and had no plans to marry, at least not until he was fifty or so. When he was out riding one morning, he passed a mulatto beggar, whose request for alms he refused. Just as he was about to ride off and had dug in his spurs, the beggar grabbed the reins of his horse and said: ‘You and your eldest son and the eldest son of your eldest son will all die when you are far from your own country; you will never reach fifty and you will receive no burial.’ His friend’s father paid little heed; when he returned home from his ride, he told the story over lunch and promptly forgot all about it. This happened in 1873, when his friend’s father was only twenty-five.

In 1898, by which time he, the best friend’s father, was a lieutenant colonel and married with seven children, it was clear that Commodore Schley was sure to win and that Cuba was about to fall to a foreign power, and he could not bear the thought of seeing anything other than a Spanish flag flying over the port of Havana. He hurriedly sold off all his possessions, hardened himself to the idea of leaving his native land for good and, despite never having left the island before and despite suffering from Ménière’s disease, he embarked for Spain along with all his family. After only a week on board ship, a particularly virulent attack of said disease ended his life: he was leaning on the rail up on deck, thinking and wondering (even allowing himself a frisson of excitement): what would it be like, that country whose name he knew so well? Suddenly, doubtless after being assailed by terrible noises and then by silence — to judge by his brief frantic gestures, first, of pain and, then, of stupefaction — he dropped dead. A cannonball was attached to his corpse and he was thrown overboard. He was about to turn fifty.

In Spain, the eldest son, also called Isaac Custardoy, continued the military career he had begun in Cuba under the auspices of his father. Possessed of a genuine vocation and great determination, he rose very swiftly to the rank of colonel and became aide-de-camp to General Fernandez Silvestre. He lived in Madrid and, having always felt responsible for his younger siblings, watched over them and rarely left the city. In 1921, however, he had no option but to accompany his friend and commanding officer to Morocco. In the midst of the disastrous battle of Annual, when the Spanish troops had been scattered and defeated by the berbers of Abd-el-Krim, the General, Custardoy, and the general’s son, victims of the prevailing mayhem, mass panic and confusion, found themselves helpless and cut off from the rest of the main group; they did, however, have a truck at their disposal. Silvestre refused to leave the field and Custardoy refused to leave his commanding officer; between them, though, they persuaded the general’s son to drive to safety in the truck. The two soldiers were left to face the rout alone and their bodies were never found. Of Custardoy they retrieved only his field glasses and his leather belt. The two men had presumably been impaled. Isaac Custardoy was forty-five years of age. He left only a wife.

Isaac Custardoy’s best friend spent his whole life trying to resolve that enigma: why had the mulatto beggar’s prediction been so absolutely right on two counts, but not on the third? The eldest son had no eldest son. The idea of an illegitimate heir was simply too banal. If none of the curse had been fulfilled, or if all of it had, then he would have been able to rest easy. Instead, he devoted his whole life to resolving the enigma.

When he was old and bored with doing nothing, he used to enjoy reading the Bible. And one day, rereading it for the nth time, he paused over the words: And Abraham was fourscore and six years old when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abraham. Further on, he paused again: And Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born unto him. Yahweh had announced the birth of Isaac long before Ishmael, the son of Hagar, had been born — indeed, he was already thirteen when Sarah gave birth. This gave him cause to reflect: ‘Where was Isaac all that time, from the moment when his birth was prophesied to the moment when he was born, from the moment when his existence was predicted to the actual moment of conception?’ Well, he must have been somewhere, because Yahweh knew about him, as did Abraham and Sarah. This led him still further on, to his problem; it led him to think: ‘The birth of Isaac Custardoy’s grandson had been prophesied too, but he was never born, neither born nor engendered. But the mulatto beggar and Custardoy himself had known about him since 1873. Where had he been since then? He must have been somewhere.’

He continued to ponder this and devoted what remained of his life to resolving the enigma. And when he was close to death, he wrote his thoughts down on a piece of paper: ‘I sense that I am about to die, to set off on my final journey. What will become of me? Where will I go? Will I go anywhere? I can sense the approach of death because I have lived and was engendered, because I’m still alive; death, therefore, is not perfect or all-embracing, it cannot prevent something other than itself from existing; it has to put up with the fact that something waits for it and thinks about it. Someone who has not been born or, even more so, someone who has not even been engendered or conceived is the one thing that belongs to death entirely. The person who has not been conceived dies most. He or she has travelled unceasingly along that most tortuous and labyrinthine of paths: the path of contingency. He or she is the only one who will have neither homeland nor grave. That person is Isaac Custardoy. I, on the other hand, I am not.’

(1978)

‘ON A RECENT brief stay in New York, one of the two things that Europeans most dread happening to them happened: I was trapped for half an hour in a lift between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth floors of a skyscraper. I don’t, however, want to talk about the fear I felt nor the more than justified claustrophobia that made me shout out (yes, I admit it) every few minutes, but about the man who was riding with me when the lift stopped and with whom I shared that half-hour of confidences and terror. He was immaculately dressed and extremely circumspect (in that difficult situation, he only shouted once and stopped when he realised that we had been heard and located). He looked exactly like the butlers you see in films and, as it turned out, he was a butler in real life. In exchange for a little incoherent, disparate information about my country, he gave me the following account of his life while we waited in that large vertical coffin: he was working for a wealthy young couple comprising the president of one of the largest and most famous American cosmetic companies and his recently acquired European wife. They lived in a five-storey mansion; they travelled around the city in an eight-door limousine with smoked-glass windows (like the one belonging to the late President Kennedy, he added), and he, the butler, was one of their four servants (all of them white, he said). The butler’s hobby was black magic, and he had already managed to obtain a lock of his young mistress’s hair, having cut it off while she was taking a nap in an armchair one very hot, very sleepy afternoon. He told me all this quite calmly and despite my own panic, I managed to listen to him relatively calmly. I asked him why he had so cruelly cut off that lock of hair. Had she perhaps mistreated him?