Javier Marias - When I Was Mortal

“What’s wrong? Still awake?” I said, relieved finally to be able to express myself in my own language.

“Yes, I feel really ill. The doctor’s coming.”

“At this hour?”

“He’s a night doctor, he’s on call. I often have to get him out at night.”

“But what’s wrong? You didn’t mention anything to me.”

Claudia dimmed the lamp that stood by the armchair, as if she wanted the room to be in darkness before she replied, or else did not want me to catch some involuntary expression on her face, for our faces, when they speak, are full of involuntary expressions.

“It’s nothing, women’s problems. But it really hurts when I get it. The doctor gives me an injection to ease the pain.”

“I see. And couldn’t Hélie learn to do that for you?”

Claudia gave me an unequivocally wary look and lowered her voice to answer that question, though she hadn’t lowered it to answer the others.

“No, he can’t. His hands shake too much, I don’t trust him. If he gave me the injection I’m sure it wouldn’t do me any good, or else he’d just get all mixed up and inject something else into me, some poison. The doctor they usually send is very nice and, besides, that’s what they’re there for, to come to people’s apartments in the early hours of the morning. He’s Spanish by the way. He’ll be here any moment.”

“A Spanish doctor?”

“Yes, I think he’s from Barcelona. I assume he has French nationality, he must have in order to practise here. He’s been here for years.”

Claudia had changed her hairstyle since I left the apartment to walk her friend home. Maybe she had merely let her hair down prior to going to bed, but it looked to me as if she had done her hair specially, rather than undone it at the end of the day.

“Do you want me to keep you company while you wait or would you rather be alone if you’re in pain?” I asked rhetorically since, having found her still up, I wasn’t prepared to go off to bed without satisfying my desire to have a chat and a rest from those other abominable languages and from the wine drunk during the evening. Before she had a chance to reply, I added: “Your friend’s very nice. She said her husband was ill; the local doctors are in for a busy night.”

Claudia hesitated for a few seconds and it seemed to me that she again looked at me warily, but said nothing. Then she said, this time without looking at me:

“Yes, she’s got a husband too; he’s even more unbearable than mine. Hers is young, though, just a bit older than her, but she’s had him for ten years now and he’s just as mean. Like me, she doesn’t earn very much with her job, and he even rations out the hot water. Once he used his old bath water to water the plants, which died soon after. When they go out together, he won’t even buy her a coffee, they each pay for themselves, so that sometimes she goes without and he has a full afternoon tea. She doesn’t earn that much, and he’s one of those men who thinks that the person who earns less in a marriage is inevitably taking advantage of the other. He’s obsessed with it. He monitors all her phone calls, he’s fitted the phone with a device that stops her calling anywhere outside of the city, so that if she wants to speak to her family in Italy she has to go to a public phone box and use coins or a card.”

“Why doesn’t she leave him?”

Claudia didn’t reply at once:

“I don’t know; for the same reason I don’t, although my situation isn’t as bad as hers. I suppose it’s true that she does earn less, I suppose she does take advantage of him; I suppose they’re right, these men who are obsessed with the money they spend or manage to save with their low-earning wives; but that’s what marriage is about, everything has its compensations and it all evens out in the end.” Claudia dimmed the light still further, so that we were sitting in almost complete darkness. Her nightdress and dressing gown seemed to glow red, an effect of the growing dark. She lowered her voice still further, to the point where it became a furious whisper. “Why do you think I get these pains, why do you think I have to call a doctor out to give me a sedative? It’s just as well it only happens on nights when we give suppers or parties, when he’s eaten and drunk and enjoyed himself. When he’s seen that others have seen me. He thinks about other men and about their eyes, about what others don’t know about, but take for granted or assume, and then he wants to make it reality, not just taken for granted or assumed or unknown. Not imaginary. Then it isn’t enough for him just to imagine it.” She fell silent for a moment and added: “That great lump of a man is sheer torment.”

Although our friendship went back a long way, we had never exchanged this kind of confidence. Not that it bothered me, on the contrary, there’s nothing I like more than being privy to such revelations. But I wasn’t used to it with her, and I may have blushed a little (not that she would have seen me) and I answered awkwardly, perhaps dissuading her from continuing, the exact opposite of what I wanted:

“I see.”

The doorbell went, a feeble ring, just loud enough to be heard, the way you ring at the door of a house where people are already alerted or expecting you to call.

“It’s the night doctor,” said Claudia.

“I’ll leave you then. Goodnight, and I hope you feel better soon.”

We left the studio together, she went into the hall and I in the opposite direction, towards the kitchen, where I thought I might read the newspaper for a while before going to bed, for at night the kitchen was the warmest room in the house. Before turning the corner of the corridor that would take me there, though, I paused and looked back towards the front door that Claudia was opening at that very moment, obscuring with her salmon-coloured back the figure of the doctor who had just arrived. I heard her say to him in Spanish: “ Buenas noches ,” and all I could see, in the doctor’s left hand, sticking out from behind my Italian friend’s body, was a bag identical to that carried by the other doctor to whom I had been introduced at the door by her friend — also Italian — whose name I can’t remember. The doctor must have come by car, I thought.

They closed the front door and walked down the corridor without seeing me, with Claudia in front, and then I headed for the kitchen. There I sat down and poured myself a gin (ridiculous, mixing drinks like that) and opened the Spanish paper I had bought that afternoon. It was from the previous day, but for me the news was still fresh.

I heard my friend, and the doctor go into the children’s room, the children were spending the weekend with other children in someone else’s house. The room was immediately opposite the kitchen, on the other side of a broad corridor, so, after a few moments, I moved the chair I was sitting on so that I could just see the door of the room out of the corner of my eye. The door was ajar, they had switched on a very dim light, as dim, I said to myself, as the one that had lit the studio while she and I were talking and she was waiting. I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t hear anything either. I went back to reading my newspaper, but, after a while, I looked up again because I sensed a presence in the doorway of the door that stood ajar. And then I saw the doctor, in profile, holding a syringe in his left hand. I only saw him for an instant, and since he was standing against the light, I couldn’t see his face. I noticed he was left-handed: it was that moment when doctors and nurses raise the syringe in the air and press down the plunger, just a little, to make sure that the liquid comes out and there’s no danger of any blockage or, more seriously, no danger of injecting air. That’s what the nurse, Cayetano, used to do in my house when I was a child. After performing this action, the doctor stepped forward and again disappeared from my field of vision. Claudia must have been lying down on one of the children’s beds, which was probably where the light was coming from, too faint for me but sufficient for the doctor. I assumed he would inject her in the bottom.