Javier Marias: Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

No one knows what it is to be hunted down without having lived it, and unless the chase was active and constant, carried out with deliberation, determination, dedication and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but look for you, keep after you, follow your trail, locate you, catch up with you and then, at best, wait for the moment to settle the score. It isn’t that someone has it in for you and stands at the ready to pounce should you cross his path or give him the chance; it isn’t that someone has sworn revenge and waits, waits, does no more than wait and therefore remains passive, or schemes in preparation for his blows, which as long as they’re machinations cannot be blows, we think the blows will fall but they may not, the enemy may drop dead of a heart attack before he sets to work in earnest, before he truly applies himself to harming us, destroying us. Or he may forget, calm down, something may distract him and he may forget, and if we don’t happen to cross his path again we may be able to get away; vengeance is extremely wearying and hatred tends to evaporate, it’s a fragile, ephemeral feeling, impermanent, fleeting, so difficult to maintain that it quickly gives way to rancor or resentment which are more bearable, easier to retrieve, much less virulent and somehow less pressing, while hatred is always in a tearing hurry, always urgent: I want him now, I want him dead, bring me the son of a bitch’s head, I want to see him flayed and his body smeared with tar and feathers, a carcass, skinned and butchered, and then he will be no one and this hatred that is exhausting me will end.

No, it isn’t that someone would harm you if given the chance, it isn’t one of those civilized enmities in which someone takes a certain satisfaction in striking a name off the list of invitees to the embassy ball, or publishes nothing in his section of the newspaper about his rival’s achievements, or fails to invite to a conference the man who once took a job away from him. It isn’t the betrayed husband who does his utmost to pay back the betrayal — or do what he thinks will pay it back — and see you betrayed in turn, it isn’t even the man who trusted you with his savings and was had, buying in advance a house that was never built or going up to his eyeballs in debt to finance a film when there was never the slightest intention of shooting a single millimeter of footage, it’s incredible how the movies lure and delude people. Nor is it the writer or painter who didn’t win the prize that went to you, and believes his life would have been different if only justice had been done back then, twenty years ago; it isn’t even the peon thrashed a thousand times by the vicious and abusive capataz who is the owner’s right-hand man, the peon who yearns for a new Zapata in whose wake he’ll slip a knife all the way down his torturer’s belly and, in passing, across the landowner’s jugular, because the peon, too, lives in a state of waiting, or rather of that childish daydreaming we all fall into from time to time in order to make ourselves remember our desires, that is, in order to keep from forgetting them, and though repetition would appear to be in the service of memory, in fact it blurs and plays tricks on memory and mutes it, relegating our needs to the sphere of that which is to come, so that nothing seems to depend on us right now, nothing depends on the peon, and the capataz knows there is a vague or imaginary threat and suffers from his own dream, a dream of fear that makes him the more brutal and vicious, repaying in advance the knife thrust to the belly that he receives only in dreams, his own and those of others.

No, being hunted down is none of those things; it isn’t knowing that you could be hunted down, it isn’t knowing who would come to kill you if another civil war were to break out in these countries of ours, so prone to war, so full of rage, it isn’t knowing with absolute certainty that someone would stamp on your hand if it were clutching the edge of a cliff (a thing we don’t usually risk, not in the presence of heartless people), it isn’t fearing a bad encounter that could be avoided by walking down other streets or going to other bars or visiting other houses, it isn’t worrying that fate will make a mockery of us or the tables will be turned against us one day, it isn’t making possible or probable enemies or even certain but always future ones, committing transgressions whose atonement lies far ahead, almost everything is put off, almost nothing is immediate or exists in the present, and we live in a state of postponement, life usually consists only of delay, of signs and plans, of projects and machinations, we trust in the indolence and infinite lethargy of the whole world, the indolence of knowing that things will come about and come to pass, and the indolence of carrying them out.

But sometimes there is neither indolence nor lethargy nor childish daydreaming, sometimes — though rarely — there is the urgency of hatred, the negation of reprieve and cunning and stratagems, which are present only if improvised by the intolerable resistance of the one being pursued and exist merely as setbacks, without other power than to cause a slight adjustment to the planned trajectory of a bullet because the target has moved and evaded it. This time. But never again, or that’s the hope; if the bullet went astray, the only thing to do is fire again, and again and again until the mark falls and can be finished off. When you’re being hunted down like that you feel as if your pursuers do nothing but search for you, chase you twenty-four hours a day: you’re convinced that they don’t eat or sleep, they don’t drink or stop even for one second, their venomous footsteps are incessant and tireless and there is no rest; they have neither wife nor child nor needs, they don’t need to pee, they don’t pause to chat, they don’t get laid or go to soccer games, they don’t have television sets or homes, at most they have cars to pursue you in. It isn’t that you know something bad could happen to you someday or if you go where you should not go, it’s that you see and know that the worst is happening to you right now, the thing you most dread, and then the hunted man doesn’t drink or eat or stop either; or sometimes he does, staying still more out of panic than from any certainty of being safe and sheltered, more than a stillness, it’s a paralysis, like an insect that doesn’t fly away or a soldier in his trench. But even then he doesn’t sleep except when exhaustion undermines what is happening right now and deprives it of reality, when all the years of his former life reassert themselves — it takes so long for habits to fade, the idea of an existence that isn’t short-term — and he decides for an instant that the present is the lie, the daydream or nightmare, and rejects it for being so incongruent. Then he sleeps and eats and drinks and has sex if he gets lucky or pays, stops to chat for a bit, forgetting that the venomous footsteps never stop and are always moving forward while his own perpetually innocent feet are detained or don’t obey or might even be bare. And that’s the worst thing, the greatest danger; you must not forget that if you’re fleeing you can never take off your shoes or watch television, or look into the eyes of someone who appears in front of you and might hold your attention, my eyes only look back while those of my pursuers look ahead, at my dark back, and so they are bound to catch up with me always.

It all happened because of Mr. Presley, and that is not one of those idiotic lines referring to the record that was playing the night we met, or to the time we were careless and went too far, or to the idol of the person who caused the problem by forcing us to go to a concert to seduce her or just to make her happy.