Javier Marias - When I Was Mortal

“Can you smell what I smell?” I asked Ruibérriz, who was beginning to get fed up.

“Can I look at her now?” he said.

“Can you smell it?” I insisted.

“Yes, is someone smoking incense or something?”

“It’s cloves,” I said. “Tobacco with cloves.”

The man’s gesture to the waiter allowed me to make the same gesture of writing in the air to another waiter and so be ready when the couple got up. Only then did I give permission to Ruibérriz to turn round; he did so and decided to accompany me. We followed a few paces behind the couple, I saw the woman standing up for the first time — a short skirt, open-toed shoes, painted toenails — and as we took those steps, I also heard her name, the name that she had never had for me or for Gómez Alday nor perhaps for Dorta. “You’re a lovely mover, Estela,” said the coarse man, not so coarse that he wasn’t absolutely right in his remark, which was spoken more in admiration than by way of being an amorous compliment. Ruibérriz and I separated for a moment, he went over to the car in order to pick me up as soon as they got in theirs, they weren’t travelling by taxi. When they did so, I got into our car and we drove off after them, keeping a short distance behind, there wasn’t much traffic, but enough for them not to notice us. It was a brief journey, they drove to an area of suburban houses, the street was called Torpedero Tucumán, a comical address to send a letter to. They parked and went into one of the houses, a three-storey house, lights were lit on every storey, as if there were already plenty of people there, perhaps they were going to a party, supper followed by a party, that guy was really going to a lot of trouble.

Ruibérriz and I parked the car and stayed where we were for the moment, from there we could see the lights but nothing else, most of the blinds were pulled halfway down and there were lace curtains that didn’t move in the wind, you’d have to go right up to one of the windows on the ground floor and peer through a crack, we might even end up doing that, I thought quickly. It immediately seemed to us, though, that it couldn’t be a party, because there was no music drifting out through open windows, no sounds of anarchic conversations or laughter. The blinds were only up on two windows on the third floor and you couldn’t see anyone in there, just a standard lamp, and walls without books or pictures.

“What do you think?” I asked Ruibérriz.

“I don’t think they’ll stay very long. There’s not much fun to be had in that house, apart from the intimate kind, and those two aren’t going to spend the night together, not there at least, whatever kind of place it is. Did you see who opened the door, did they have a key or did they knock?”

“I couldn’t see, but I don’t think they knocked.”

“It might be his house, and if it is, then she’ll be out again in a couple of hours, no longer than that. It might be her place, in which case, he’ll be the one to come out, much sooner too, say about an hour. It might be a massage parlour, that’s what they like to call them now, and then again he’ll be the one to leave, but give him about thirty or forty-five minutes. Lastly, there might be a few select poker games going on, but I don’t think so. Only then would they spend the night there, losing and recovering what they’d lost. No, I don’t think it’s likely to be her house. No, it can’t be.”

Ruibérriz knows all the different territories in the city, he has experience and a good eye. He doesn’t need to ask many questions and he can find out anything or locate anyone with a couple of phone calls and perhaps a couple more made by his contacts.

“Why don’t you find out for me whose house it is? I’ll wait here, in case one or other leaves unexpectedly. It wouldn’t take you long to find out, I’m sure.”

He sat there looking at me, his tanned arms resting on the steering wheel.

“What is it with this woman? What are you after? I didn’t get a very good look at her, but I don’t know that she’s worth all this fuss.”

“Not for you probably, as I said. Just let me see what happens tonight and I’ll tell you the whole story another day. I just need to know where she lives, where she hangs out or where she’s going to be sleeping tonight, when she does finally go to bed.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve asked me to wait for a story, I don’t know if you realize that.”

“But it’ll probably be the last,” I said. If I told him straight out that I thought I might be seeing a dead woman, it was quite likely that he wouldn’t help me at all, things like that make him nervous, as they do me normally, we who hardly believe in anything.

I got out of the car and Ruibérriz drove off to make his enquiries. There were no shops or cinemas or bars in that area, a boring, tree-lined residential street, with barely any lighting, with nothing you could use as a pretext or to distract yourself while you were waiting. If a neighbour saw me, he would doubtless take me for a marauder, there was no reason why I should be there, alone, silent, smoking. I crossed to the other side of the street just in case I could see anything of the upper storey from there, the only one where the windows were unobstructed. I did see something, but only briefly, a large woman, who was not Estela, passing and disappearing and passing again in the opposite direction after a few seconds and then disappearing again, obscuring my view still more after she had gone, since, when she left the room, she switched off the light: as if she had just gone in there for a moment to pick something up. I crossed the road again and approached the gate as stealthily as an old-fashioned thief; I pushed and it gave way, it was open, people leave it like that when there’s a party on or if a lot of people come and go. I continued to advance so carefully that had I been treading on sand there would have been no footprints, I moved slowly towards one of the windows on the ground floor, the one to the left of the front door from where I was standing. As with nearly all the windows, the blind was down but the slats were open to let in the warm breeze that had slackened now, that is, they weren’t tight shut. Behind the blinds there were motionless lace curtains, the room must be air-conditioned or perhaps it was a sauna. You often unwittingly take steps that you consider possible merely because they are possible and it has occurred to you to take them, and that is how so many acts and so many murders are committed, sometimes the idea leads to the act as if it could not live and sustain itself as long as it was a mere idea, as if there were a certain kind of possibility that grows frustrated and begins to fade if it is not instantly put into action, without our realizing that, in that way too, it has vanished and died, it will no longer be a possibility, but a past event. I found myself in the situation I had foreseen in the car, with my eyes glued to a crack at about eye level, looking, peering, trying to make out something through the tiny gap and through the transparent white cloth that made it even harder to see. That room too was only dimly lit, a large part of it lay in shadow, it was like trying to get to the bottom of a story from which the main elements have been deliberately omitted and about which we know only odd details, my vision blurred and with only a restricted view.

But I thought I saw them and I did, both of them, Estela and the coarse man one on top of the other, outside the beam of the light, the niceties were over, on a bed or perhaps it was a mattress or the floor, at first I couldn’t even make out who was who, two dark, intertwined masses of flesh, someone was naked in there, I said to myself, the woman would have uncovered those breasts that I so needed to see, or perhaps not, perhaps not, she might still have her bra on. There was movement or was it struggle, but hardly any sound emerged, no grunts or cries or groans of pleasure or laughter, like a scene from a silent movie that would never have been shown in decent cinemas, a grim, muffled effort of bodies doubtless entering upon what was just another stage in the proceedings — the fuck — rather than a surrender to genuine desire, his body felt no more desire than hers did, but it was difficult to say where the one began and the other ended or which was which, given the darkness and the veil of the curtain, they were just a grotesque shape, how could I possibly not be able to distinguish the body of a young woman from that of a coarse man? Suddenly a torso and a head with a hat on loomed into view, they entered the beam of light for a moment before plunging down again, the man had donned a cowboy hat in order to have a fuck, good grief, I thought, what a jerk. So he was the one who was on top or above, when he rose up, I thought I also saw his hairy, swarthy, unpleasant torso, broad and undelineated, not exactly athletic. I looked through the slat below to see if I could catch a glimpse of the woman and her breasts, but I couldn’t see anything and so returned to the slat above, hoping that the man might grow tired and want to rest underneath, it was odd not knowing if it was a bed or a mattress or the floor, and even odder how muffled the sound was, a silence like a gag. Then I noticed a new singlemindness about the sweating, two-headed beast into which they had been momentarily transformed, they’re going to change position, I thought, they’re going to change places in order to prolong this stage of the proceedings, which is just that, another stage, since the participants remain the same.