Javier Marias - When I Was Mortal

“Excuse me,” I said then, “you’ve done this kind of work before, haven’t you?”

He looked up from the newspaper, but didn’t put it down, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to start a proper conversation, or, rather, as if he was sure that he didn’t.

“Yes,” he said, “but not that much, two, no, three times, a little while ago. But don’t worry, you forget about the camera straight away. They told me it was your first time.” I was grateful to him for putting it like that, rather than calling me a novice as tall, bald Mir had done. “Don’t get embarrassed, that’s fatal, just follow me and try and enjoy it as much as you can, and take no notice of the others.”

“Easier said than done,” I replied. “I hope they’re patient if I get nervous. I am a bit nervous.”

The actor Lorenzo gave me his gap-toothed smile. He was reading the sports pages. He seemed very sure of himself, because he said:

“Look, you won’t even notice that they’re filming. I’ll take care of that.” He said it more ingenuously than proudly, that wasn’t what was worrying me, but it did worry me that it didn’t even occur to him that it wouldn’t be the people watching who would be the main cause of my nervousness on the set.

“Right,” I said, not daring to doubt him, perhaps intimidated. “But there’ll be breaks won’t there? For the different takes and so on? And what happens then? What do you do in between?”

“Nothing, you can put on a dressing gown if you like and have a Coca-Cola. Don’t worry,” he said again. “There are worse things. And there’s bound to be a few lines of coke if you need it.”

“Oh, so there are worse things, are there?” I said a little irritated by his excessive lack of concern. “I obviously just haven’t come across them yet; go on tell me one.” He finally put the newspaper down and I added hastily: “I’m not saying that because of you. I didn’t mean you, you do understand that, don’t you? I’m just doing it for the money, but you’re not going to tell me that it’s still not a pretty awful thing to have to do. Well, I don’t know about you, but it is for me.”

Loren ignored my attempts not to offend him and focused on what I had said before. He looked at me with his calm eyes, but he seemed slightly irritated now, as if he had been provoked and as if he were someone who had no capacity for feeling provoked, and didn’t know what tone of voice to use. His grey eyes were slightly wide-set too, quite far from his hooked nose, that seemed to draw his lips upwards, the kind of nostrils that always look as if their owner has a cold.

“There is something worse,” he said. “And I’m going to tell you about it now. What I used to do before was much worse, not that I’m going to do this for ever, but it’s all right to be going on with until something else turns up, and you have no idea how great it is compared with what I used to do before.”

“What did you used to do, then? Did someone throw knives at you in a circus?”

I don’t know why I said that. I suppose it must have sounded offensive as if the actor Lorenzo must, inevitably, have come from the lowest sphere of the entertainment world. After all, I was only doing what he was doing, and I’d merely lost my job two years ago and had an ex-husband who had disappeared, gone missing, and a daughter to look after. He probably had a daughter too. And besides, they don’t have shows like that now, that’s old hat, there aren’t even many circuses any more.

“Look, smartypants,” he said, but without sounding in the least reproachful and without intending to wound me, I’m not sure if that was simply because he was very tolerant or because he didn’t know how to. He said it the way children say it at school: “No, smartypants. I was a guardian.”

“A guardian? What do you mean a ‘guardian’? A guardian of what?” That was the last word I’d expected to hear from his lips and I couldn’t conceal my surprise, which may have seemed offensive. I looked him full in the face, a guardian, he looked more like someone out of a spaghetti western.

He touched the brim of his hat uneasily, as if straightening it.

“Well, I mean, I had someone under my guardianship, under my protection. Like being a bodyguard, only different.”

“Oh, a bodyguard,” I said, pulling a face, as if placing him further down the hierarchy. “And what was so bad about that? Were you constantly having to come between your boss and the bullets or something?” I had no reason to get stroppy with him, but I just kept coming out with these impertinent replies, perhaps I was beginning to feel sickened by the idea of soon having to suck him off with no preliminaries, time was moving on. Involuntarily I looked at his crotch, and immediately looked away again. I thought it again using that verb, ‘suck him off’, this modern age is making us all foul-mouthed, or perhaps we don’t much care if we are, or perhaps it’s just poverty: the less money you have, the fewer scruples too. And the older we get, the less life there is, there’s not that long left.

“No, I wasn’t that kind of bodyguard, I’m not a goon,” he said, not at all put out by my sarcasm, but speaking seriously, frankly, transparently. “I had to keep watch over a person who was ill, to stop her harming herself, it’s very difficult. You have to watch them twenty-four hours a day, be alert all the time and you can’t always manage it.”

“Who was she? What happened to her?”

Loren took off his hat and stroked the top of it with his right forearm, the way cowboys do in films. Perhaps it was a gesture of respect. His hair was thinning.

“She was the daughter of a rich guy, a multimillionaire, unbelievable, one of those businessmen who doesn’t even know how much money he’s got. You’d know his name, but I’d best not tell you. The daughter was crazy, a hysteric with suicidal tendencies, every so often she’d try and kill herself. For weeks at a time, she would lead an apparently normal life and then, suddenly, with no prior warning, she’d slit her wrists in the bath. She was completely nuts. They didn’t want to hospitalize her because that would be too cruel and because the whole world and his wife would end up finding out about it, whereas only a few people, the people who were close to her, knew about the suicide attempts. So they took me on in order to stop it happening, so, yes, I was a bodyguard but not to protect her from others, as a bodyguard would normally do, but to protect her from herself. Her friends took me for a normal bodyguard, but I wasn’t. My job was different, it was more like being a custodian.”

I thought that he probably knew that word because he had taken the trouble to find one that would describe his role. He would have recognized it when he found it.

“I see,” I said. “And that was worse than this. How old was she? Why didn’t they get a nurse to look after her?”

Loren passed the back of his hand under his chin, against the grain, as if he had suddenly realized he wasn’t properly shaven. He was going to have to kiss me everywhere. But he seemed well-shaven enough to me, I was tempted to touch his face myself, but I didn’t dare, he might have taken it for a caress.

“For the same reason, because a nurse is more obvious, what’s a young girl doing all day with a nurse hanging around? You could understand her having a bodyguard, with her super-rich Daddy. She could lead a normal life, you see, she was going to university, she was twenty years old, she went to parties and to other flash dos, to the psychiatrist as well, of course, but it wasn’t like she was depressed all day or anything, no. She’d be normal for a while, and friendly. Suddenly she’d get an attack and it was always a suicidal one, and you could never tell when it would happen. There were no sharp objects in her bedroom, no scissors, no penknives, nothing, no belts she could hang herself with, no tablets anywhere, not even aspirin; not even high-heeled shoes, her mother was always careful to make sure they weren’t too sharp ever since the time her daughter slashed her own cheekbone with one, they had to give her plastic surgery, you couldn’t tell, but she’d given herself a really nasty gash. She wouldn’t have been allowed to wear the shoes you’ve got on, quite a weapon really. In that sense, they treated her like a prisoner, no dangerous objects allowed. Her father was almost on the point of taking away her sunglasses when he saw Godfather III , in which someone kills another man with his glasses, with the sharp part of the arm, honestly, they’d given the guy a full body search and he goes and cuts the other guy’s throat with that. Have you seen Godfather III ?”