Javier Marias - When I Was Mortal

“Are you in much of a hurry?” she asked point-blank.

“Yes.” I didn’t mind what she understood by that, after a while, she would understand everything, and she would be the one obliged to give me an explanation. She looked at me with absolutely no curiosity, without really looking, not like Gómez Alday did, but like someone who, given her situation, expects no surprises. She was an imperfectly pretty woman, or, rather, she was pretty despite her imperfections, at least in the summer.

“Do you want me to get dressed or am I all right like this?” she said, immediately calling me ‘tú’, perhaps she felt she had the right to when she knew I was in a hurry. To get dressed in order to get undressed, I thought, just in case I wanted to see the second part.

“You’re fine as you are.”

She said nothing more, she gestured with her head towards one of the doors on the ground floor and walked towards it like a clerk going to look for a file, she opened the door. I stood up and followed her at once, she must have noticed my evident impatience, it didn’t seem to frighten her, rather it made her feel superior to me, she was condescending in her manner, a big mistake if it really was her and she had to answer for a night that was now old and perhaps forgotten. We went in, it was the same room, still unaired, in which she had just been grappling with the coarse man, there was an acidic smell, but it was much more bearable than one might have supposed. A fan turned on the ceiling, through my slat I hadn’t been able to see it. There was the cowboy hat, thrown on the floor, perhaps for use by clients with complexes or with a head like an inverted egg, the hat was for hire too. There had been a cowboy element in Dorta’s last night too, he had spoken to me of some peculiar crocodile-skin cowboy boots.

She sat on the bed that was neither a mattress nor a bed, one of those low Japanese affairs that I can’t remember the name of, I believe they’re fashionable.

“Did she tell you how much it is?” she asked. The question was lacklustre, mechanical.

“No, but it doesn’t matter, we can discuss that later. There’ll be no problem.”

“With the lady,” said Estela. “You discuss it with the lady.” And she added: “Right, what do you want? Apart from it being quick.”

“Undo your bathrobe.”

She obeyed, she untied the belt allowing me to see something, but not enough. She seemed bored, even irritated, if before there had been no desire, now there was tacit rejection. Her accent was Central American or Caribbean, doubtless hardened by several years in Madrid.

“Open it more, right open, so that I can see you,” I said, and my voice must have sounded odd, because she looked at me properly for the first time, slightly apprehensively. But she undid the bathrobe, so wide that she revealed even her shoulders, like an old-fashioned movie star at a gala performance, not much of a gala performance tonight, there they were, those breasts so familiar in black and white, I recognized them in colour too without a moment’s hesitation, despite the darkness, the provocative, shapely, but, nevertheless, soft breasts, they would give in the hand like bags of water, she was too poor to consider plastic surgery, for two years I had looked at them, all bloodstained, in a slowly fading photocopy, more often than I should have, more often than I had imagined I would when I made my extravagant, macabre request to Gómez Alday, he was an understanding man. On her breasts, where the skin was not quite as dark as elsewhere, there was no wound or cut or scar or gash, her skin was uniform and smooth, unmarked apart from her nipples, too dark for my taste, one gets used to knowing at a glance what one likes and what one doesn’t.

I was immediately assailed by far too many thoughts, the woman alive and therefore still alive, the look of pain in the photo, the screwed-up eyes and the gritted teeth, those closed eyes were not the eyes of a dead woman because the dead no longer struggle and everything ceases when they expire, even pain, why had it not occurred to me that her expression was of someone alive or of someone dying, but never of someone dead. And why the knickers, why was her corpse wearing knickers, why preserve one item of clothing when you’ve gone that far, only someone still alive keeps her knickers on. And if she was alive, my best friend might be alive too, Dorta the joker, Dorta the resigned, what kind of joke had he played on me making me believe in his murder and in his condemnation, what kind of joke was that if he were still alive?

“Where did you get those cigarettes from?” I asked.

“What cigarettes?” Estela was immediately on the alert, and to gain time she said once more: “What cigarettes?”

“The ones you were smoking before, in the restaurant, the ones that smell of cloves. Let me see the packet.”

She instinctively closed her bathrobe, without tying the belt, as if to protect herself from discovery, this was a man who had watched her and followed her from La Ancha or perhaps before that, perhaps all night. My voice must have sounded rather nervous and angry, because she pointed to a handbag left on a chair, the chair that had borne the clothes of the coarse man.

“They’re in there. A friend gave them to me.”

I’d made her feel afraid, I saw that she was afraid of me and that she would therefore do whatever I asked her to. There was no more superiority or condescension, just fear of me and of my hands, or of a sharp weapon that might pierce or tear her. I picked up the bag, opened it and took out the slim red and gold and black packet, with its design of curved rails in relief and its message, “Smoking kills”. Kretek.

“What friend? The one who was with you? Who is he?”

“I don’t know who he is, he wanted to go out to supper tonight, I’ve only been with him once before.”

How I hate men who hurt women and now I hated myself — or I did afterwards — when I grabbed Estela’s arm and snatched open her bathrobe again, leaving her unprotected, and I ran my thumb between her breasts as if I wanted to draw something out of there, I did so several times, pressing hard and saying:

“Where’s the wound, eh? Where’s the spear, eh? Where’s all the blood, what happened to my friend, who killed him, you killed him. Who put his glasses on him, tell me, you did, whose idea was it, yours?”

I held her immobilized with her arm twisted, twisted up her back, and with my other hand, with my strong thumb, I was pressing against her sternum, up and down, crushing it, or rubbing it, feeling on either side the actual touch of those breasts I had seen so often with my tactile eyes.

“I don’t know anything about what happened, they didn’t tell me,” she said, whimpering, “he was already dead when I got there. They just called me in to do the photos.”

“They? Who did? When?”

You never know what your thumbs might do, someone who might have been watching me through the slats in the blinds would have felt alarmed, other people’s thumbs seem unstoppable or uncontrollable and as if it will always be too late. But these were my thumbs. I realized that there was no need to frighten her any more or hurt her any more, I stopped, I let her go, I noticed that my thumbs were hot from the rubbing, as if momentarily on fire, she would feel that same burning sensation between her breasts like a warning and a reminder, she would tell me everything she knew. But before she spoke, before she recovered and spoke, the idea had already crossed my mind, why had they found him the following night, so late and after such a long delay, the two corpses that were only one, perhaps in order to plan and prepare it all and take the photos, and who took those photos that were never published, not even the one of her, not even her face half-covered by her hair, pulled forward by her own living hand, just pictures of my friend Dorta in better times, it was a set-up that hair slightly covering her face, the news just said what the police had said, there was no evidence from neighbours and I alone saw the photos, and only in Gómez Alday’s office, only a judge would have seen them otherwise.