Javier Marias: While the Women are Sleeping

Of the ten stories that make up this collection, a few perhaps require some explanation.

‘Lord Rendall’s Song’ was first published in my anthology Cuentos únicos (Ediciones Siruela, Madrid, 1989) in apocryphal form, that is, attributed to the English writer James Denham and purportedly translated by me. For that reason, I also include at the beginning of the story the biographical note that appeared there, since some of the facts in it contribute, tacitly, to the story itself, which would, otherwise, remain incomplete.

‘The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga’ was published in El Noticiero Universal (Barcelona, 19 April 1968). It was, I believe, my first published piece. I was sixteen when it appeared, although I see from my typewritten original that it was written on 21 December 1965, that is, when I was just fourteen (be kind, please). Perhaps the most interesting thing about it, however, is that it bears some similarity to another story of mine, ‘When I Was Mortal’, written in 1993 and included in the story collection of the same name.

As regards ‘A Kind of Nostalgia Perhaps’, I was asked to contribute a story to a Mexican anthology, the royalties for which would go towards helping children in the state of Chiapas, who would provide the illustrations for the book. The deadline was so short that I decided to adapt an earlier story ‘No More Love’, which appeared in the collection When I Was Mortal. The English characters have been replaced by Mexicans, and the ghost is no longer a nameless rustic youth.

JAVIER MARIAS, 2010

For three weeks, I used to see them every day and now I don’t know what has become of them. I probably won’t ever see them again, at least not her — one tends to assume that summer conversations and even confidences will lead nowhere. Not that anyone has anything against that, not even me, even though I do wonder about them or perhaps miss them slightly. Only very slightly, as one misses everything that disappears.

I nearly always saw them at the beach, where it’s difficult to get a good look at anyone. Particularly so in my case, because I’m nearsighted and would rather see everything through a haze than return to Madrid with a kind of white mask on my otherwise tanned face, and I never wear my contact lenses when I go to the beach or the sea, where they might be lost forever. Nevertheless, from the very first moment, I was tempted to rummage around in the bag in which my wife, Luisa, keeps my glasses case — well, the temptation came from her really, because she, if I may put it like this, was constantly transmitting to me the more peculiar activities of the more peculiar bathers around us.

‘Yes, I can see him, but only vaguely, I can’t make out his actual features,’ I would say when she, in an unnecessarily low voice, given the noise level on the beach, would point out some character she found particularly amusing. I would keep screwing up my eyes, reluctant to get my glasses out only to have to return them once more to their hiding place once my curiosity was satisfied. Then one day, Luisa, who knows the strangest and most insignificant things and is always surprising me with scraps of useful knowledge, passed me her straw hat — closer to hand than my hidden glasses since it was on her head — and advised me to look through its mesh. And I discovered that by peering through this screen I could see almost as well as with my contact lenses, more clearly in fact, although my field of vision was greatly reduced. From that point on, I myself must have become one of the more peculiar or eccentric beachgoers, bearing in mind that I often had a woman’s straw hat, complete with ribbons, clamped to my face with my right hand while I scanned the length and breadth of the beach near Fornells, where we were staying. Luisa, without a word of complaint or a flicker of annoyance, bought another hat that she didn’t like as much, because hers, with which she had intended to shade her face — her fine-featured, open, and as yet unlined face — became mine, not for my head, but for my eyes, the hat through which I saw.

One day, we were enjoying ourselves following the exploits of a small Italian sailor, that is, an insubordinate one-year-old wearing nothing but a sailor’s hat, who, as we kept reporting to each other, was going around destroying not only the fortifications built in the sand by his siblings and older cousins but doubtless some of his progenitors’ long-term friendships, and doing so with the same aplomb with which he drank the salt water (he seemed to swallow gallons) to the complete unconcern of the families accompanying him. He frequently lost his sailor’s hat and then was left completely naked, lying on the shore like a spurned cupid. On another day, we followed the despotic comments and idle comings and goings of a middle-aged Englishman — the island was heaving with Brits — who kept up a kind of running commentary on the temperature, the sand, the wind and the waves, speaking as emphatically and grandiloquently as if he were uttering deep, long-pondered maxims or aphorisms. He had the virtue, one that is becoming increasingly rare, of believing that everything is important, or, rather, that everything that comes from oneself has the virtue of knowing itself to be unique. His slothful nature was evident in how he sat — his legs always inelegantly splayed — and in the fact that he never took off the green T-shirt with which he protected his barrel chest from the sun, not even to go into the water. Needless to say, he never swam and when he did wade into the sea, never very far, he only did so in pursuit of one of his offspring so as to photograph him or her in action from a better angle or closer up. With his green stomach — but not, for example, his chest — wet from the waves, he would return to the shore muttering further unforgettable pronouncements, which the wind promptly scattered, and pressing his camera to his ear, as if it were a radio, seemingly concerned that it might have got splashed, a primitive way, I suppose, of checking that it had come to no harm. Or perhaps, we thought, it was some kind of camera-radio.

Then one day we saw them, I mean they came to our attention, well, to Luisa’s first and then to mine, through my seeing hat. From then on, they became our favourites, and, each morning, without realising it, we would look for them first before choosing our spot and would then choose somewhere close to theirs. On one occasion, we arrived at the beach before them, but, shortly afterwards, saw them roar up on a gigantic Harley-Davidson, with him at the handlebars wearing a black helmet (with the straps hanging loose) and her clinging on to him, her long hair streaming behind her. I think what drove us to seek out their company was that they offered us a rare sight, one from which it’s always hard to look away: the spectacle of one human being adoring another. In accordance with the old and still valid rule, it was he, the man, who did the adoring, and she, the woman, who was the appropriately indifferent idol (or perhaps she was just bored and wished she had something to complain about). She was beautiful, indolent, passive and, by nature, languid. Throughout the three hours we spent at the beach (they stayed longer, perhaps taking their siesta there and, who knows, remaining until sunset), she barely moved and was, of course, concerned only with her own beautification and cleanliness. She dozed or was, at any rate, lying down, eyes closed, on her front, on her back, on one side, on the other, covered in sunscreen, her gleaming arms and legs always fully extended so that no part of her would remain untanned, no fold in her skin, even her armpits, even her groin (nor, it goes without saying, her buttocks), because her bikini bottom was minuscule and revealed that she was entirely free of hair, which made one think (well, made me think) that she must have had a Brazilian wax before she arrived.