Javier Marias - When I Was Mortal

His stay in London had coincided with an auction at Sotheby’s of literary and historical items which some diplomatic friends had encouraged him to attend. They were selling all kinds of documents and objects that had belonged to writers and politicians. Letters, postcards, billets-doux, telegrams, whole manuscripts, rough drafts, files, photos, a lock of Byron’s hair, the long pipe that Peter Cushing smoked in The Hound of the Baskervilles , Churchill’s cigar butts, engraved cigarette cases, over-elaborate walking sticks, tried and tested amulets. It wasn’t an unusual walking stick that had aroused his capricious buyer’s impulse during the bidding, but a ring that had belonged to Crowley, Aleister Crowley, he explained benevolently, a mediocre writer and a self-declared madman who called himself “The Great Beast” and “The wickedest man in the world”, all his private possessions had 666 engraved on them, the number of the Beast according to the Apocalypse, nowadays rock groups with demonic pretensions play around with the number, but it’s also to be found hidden in many computers, it’s the joker’s number, the living have no idea how old everything is, remarked Dorta, how hard it is to be new, what do young people know about Crowley, the orgiast and satanist, he’d probably be considered a harmless, naive conservative these days, a kindly man at heart who transformed his disciple Victor Neuburg into a zebra for making too many mistakes during an invocation of the Devil in the Sahara, so Dorta told me, and rode on his back all the way to Alexandria, where he sold him to a zoo which looked after the incompetent disciple or, rather, zebra for two years, until Crowley finally allowed him to resume his human form, he was a compassionate man at heart. Neuburg later became a publisher.

“A magic ring, that’s how it was described in the catalogue, with a precious oval emerald set in platinum with the inscription ‘Iaspar Balthazar Melcior’, I wasn’t sure the ring would fit, but even so I bid like a mad thing, way above my limit.” Dorta had told me all this while his good mood lasted, when he was happy he would talk endlessly, then he would grow quiet and ask about me and my life, he would let me be the one to do the talking, two consecutive monologues rather than a real dialogue. “The other bidders gradually fell away apart from one guy with a Germanic face and one of those noses that always looks as if it must have a dewdrop hanging from it, it made me feel like passing him a handkerchief and banishing him to a corner, a tapir’s nose, a guy with irritating features, he was well dressed, but he was wearing crocodile-skin cowboy boots, you can imagine the effect, the mere sight of them was enough to enrage you. I bid higher and he bid higher, steadily and without moving a muscle, merely lifting his nose as if he were a mechanical toy, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye each time I increased my bid and saw the apparently bedewdropped nose rising up like the little flag on ancient traffic lights, or was it taxis that used to have those? anyway, he blocked my way each time, forcing me to make rapid mental conversions from sterling into pesetas only to realize that I was offering a sum of money that I didn’t actually possess.”

“Really? The magic ring couldn’t have been that expensive, Dorta,” I said mockingly. He didn’t have much money, but he pretended he did, he behaved like a spendthrift and he rarely deprived himself of anything he fancied, at least not with witnesses present, meanness was a blight. Of course, the things he fancied were never excessive, they didn’t require a large outlay, as people used to say, or so I thought, I don’t know how much everything cost. Anyway, he had enough to pay for his vital pleasures.

“Well, yes, I could have gone a bit higher, but that would have meant making small sacrifices later on, which are the kind I hate most, it’s the small sacrifices that make you feel really miserable. And it’s so much harder to give things up in the summer. Anyway, the other man kept raising his nose again and again, like some malfunctioning level crossing, until one of my companions grabbed me by the elbow and stopped me putting my hand up. ‘You can’t afford it, Eugenio, you’ll regret it,’ he whispered, and I really don’t know why he whispered, no one there understood Spanish. But he was right and I didn’t pull away and I felt wretched, I immediately fell into a great depression, I’m still in it, and I had to put up with seeing that dripping nose lift once more and look at me defiantly, as if saying: ‘I beat you, what did you expect?’ He left at once, clattering out in his crocodile-skin cowboy boots, he didn’t stay for the rest of the auction, although he may have come back later for other lots, I don’t know, because I too left after a couple more bids. It was a terrible humiliation, Victor, and it happened abroad of all places.”

He called me Victor, not by my surname, Francés, as he usually did. He only called me Victor when he was feeling under the weather or he felt alone. I never called him Eugenio, ever. Dorta still had a lot of Dorta the little boy in him, but also a great deal of his mother and his aunts whom I had often seen on the way out of school or in their various homes, invited there by their son or nephew. From time to time, he came out with some phrase that doubtless belonged to those innocent, antiquated ladies who had so dominated his world. He just came out with them, he didn’t avoid them, indeed, he probably enjoyed perpetuating those ladies like that, verbally, through their lost turns-of-phrase: “and it happened abroad of all places”.

“What the hell did you want the ring for anyway?” I asked. “You haven’t started believing in magic I hope. Or was there someone you wanted to transform into a giraffe?”

“No, don’t worry. It just took my fancy, it amused me, it was unusual and it had a history behind it, if I’d worn it here lots of people would have asked me about it, it’s all grist to the mill when you’re trying to chat someone up in a bar. The only magic I believe in is other people’s, not my own, of course; I’ve never been touched by magic once in my entire life, as you well know.” And he added smiling: “In fact, when I lost the ring, I regretted not having bid for the previous lot on your behalf, it wasn’t that expensive. ‘Crowley’s magic talisman for sexual potency and power over women,’ was how it was described in the catalogue, what do you think, a nice silver medallion with the inevitable 666 engraved on it. The German or whatever he was made off with that too, only he wasn’t competing with me for that one, perhaps that’s why it was less expensive. At least I have the consolation of knowing that I forced him to pay far too much money for the ring. What do you think: ‘power over women’? It was engraved with the initials AC as well as the number. You might have found it useful.”

I laughed at his malice which, when directed at me, was always benign, not necessarily with others, though, his tongue was his only weapon.

“I’m sure it would have been in a few years’ time, I can see it now. But at the moment, I haven’t much to complain about in either respect.”

“Oh really? Tell me all about it.”

Perhaps that was the moment when I started talking during our last supper together and he listened with interest, but seemed slightly cast down too; if he fell silent for too long, that usually meant he was worried about something or momentarily dissatisfied with himself or with his life, it happens to all of us from time to time, but it doesn’t last if there are no serious grounds for it, concern about the uncertain future or about everyday regrets, for which there isn’t much time, genuine regret requires both perdurability and time. When a friend dies we want to remember everything about the last occasion we saw them, the supper that we experienced as just another supper, but which suddenly acquires unmerited significance and insists on shining with a light not its own; we try to see meaning where there was none, we try to see signs and indications and perhaps magic. If the friend has died a violent death what we try to see are perhaps clues, without realizing that something might equally well not have happened that night, and then the clues would be false ones. I remember that, after supper, he was happily smoking some Indonesian cigarettes that he’d brought back from London and that tasted and smelled of cloves. He gave me a packet which I still have, it’s a brand called Gudang Garam, a slim red packet, “12 kretek cigarettes”, I don’t know what “kretek” means, it must be an Indonesian word. The health warning doesn’t beat about the bush, it says bluntly “Smoking kills”. Of course it didn’t kill Dorta, he was killed by an African spear. When I stopped regaling him with my anodyne tales, he again took over the talk with renewed energy having returned from the bathroom, but he was no longer cheerful. With one forefinger he traced the little relief design on the box, it looked like a stretch of railway track, forming a curve, a railway landscape, to the left there were some childish houses with triangular roofs, perhaps a station, all in black, gold and red.