Javier Marias - When I Was Mortal

The man still seemed depressed, he had suddenly lost all his bonhomie, as if a cloud were hanging over him. He no longer chatted to me or paid me any attention. I felt tempted to say that I would prefer to see that race by the track, where I could manage perfectly well without binoculars, and leave him to himself. But I feared for his job. He was sunk in thought, and not at all vigilant, just when he needed to be.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” I said, and then, more than anything in order to remind him of the imminence of his task. “If you’re not feeling well, do you want me to watch for you? If you tell me who your boss is …”

“There’s nothing to watch,” he replied. “I know what’s going to happen this afternoon. It may have happened already.”

“What?”

“Look, you don’t get fond of someone who pays you to protect them. Like I said, my boss doesn’t even know I exist, he barely knows my name, I’ve been as invisible as air to him for the last two years, and from time to time he’s bawled me out because I was over-zealous. He gives orders and I carry them out, he tells me when and where he wants me and I go there, at the time and place indicated, that’s all. I take care that nothing happens to him, but I don’t feel fond of him. On more than one occasion, I’ve even thought of attacking him myself just to ease the tension and make myself feel necessary, to create the danger myself. Nothing serious, just rough him up a bit in the garage, do a bit of play-acting, hide somewhere and pass myself off as a mugger in my spare time. Give him a fright. I never imagined that the day would come when we’d have to knock him off for real.”

“Knock him off? And who’s we?”

“My colleague and me. Well, either him or me. He might have managed to do it already; I hope so. If he has, the boss won’t appear for this race either, he won’t even have left the house and he’ll be lying on the carpet, or stuffed in the boot of the car. But if he does come, you see, it will mean that my colleague didn’t manage to do it, and then I’ll have to, on the way back from the race course, in the car itself, while my colleague does the driving. With a length of rope, or a single shot once we’re off the road. I really hope they don’t come, I don’t much like him, but the idea of having to kill him myself … It makes me feel ill.”

I thought he was joking, but until that moment he hadn’t seemed like a man much given to jokes, he’d seemed almost incapable of them, that’s why — I thought fleetingly — he had laughed so much when I made that one rather unfunny remark. People who don’t know how to make jokes are so surprised and grateful when others do.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

He kept rubbing furiously at his sideburns. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and remained staring at me like that.

“Of course you do, I explained it perfectly clearly. Like I said, I don’t much like him, but I’d be relieved if they didn’t come, if my colleague had already done it.”

“Why are you doing it?”

“It’s a long story. For money, well, not just that, sometimes you have no option, sometimes you have to do things that disgust you, but you have to do them all the same, because it would be worse not to, hasn’t that ever happened to you?”

“Yes, it has,” I said, “but never anything so drastic.” I glanced at the grandstand, a pointless gesture on my part. “If this is all true, why are you telling me?”

“It really doesn’t make any difference. You’re not going to tell anyone else, even if you read about it in the paper tomorrow. Nobody likes getting involved in bother; if you go and tell somebody, you’ll get nothing but complications and a lot of trouble. And threats too probably. No one tells anyone anything unless they’re going to benefit in some way. Not even God helps the police, everyone thinks, oh, let them get on with it. And no one says anything. You’ll do the same. I don’t feel like having any secrets today.”

I picked up the binoculars and looked again at the grandstand, with the lenses on full magnification. It was almost empty, everyone must have gone to the bar or to the paddock, it was still some minutes before the race was due to start. That gesture was all the more useless, because I didn’t even know his boss, although, if I saw him, I might guess who he was by his rich man’s face.

“Is he there?” he asked me fearfully, looking at the track.

“I don’t think so, there’s hardly anyone. You look.”

“No, I prefer to wait. When the race is about to start, when they all come in. Will you tell me?”

“Yes, I’ll tell you.”

We fell silent. I glanced again at his boots (his feet were very close together now) and he was staring at the cufflinks on his shirt, his wine shirt, his cufflinks in the form of tobacco leaves. Suddenly I found myself hoping that a man was dead, that his boss was already dead. I found myself preferring that option, so that he wouldn’t have to kill him. We started to notice the stand filling up, people were pressing in on us, we had to get to our feet to make room.

“You have the binoculars,” I said, “we agreed that you would watch the start of the race.” And I handed them to him.

The bodyguard took them and raised them brusquely to his eyes, with the same gesture that had rendered mine unusable. I saw him focus them on the starting boxes and then, when the horses were under orders, he turned the binoculars towards the grandstand for a few seconds. I heard him counting:

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He hasn’t come,” he said.

“They’re off,” I said.

He looked again at the track and when the horses were taking the first bend, I heard him shouting:

“Go on, Charon , go on! Come on, Charon , come on!”

Despite his excitement and his joy, he was still clearheaded enough to pass me the binoculars when the horses were reaching the final bend. He was a considerate man, he kept his promise to let me watch the finish. I raised the binoculars to my eyes and I saw that Charon was winning by half a length over Heart So White in second place: the two horses that my companion had bet on that afternoon to win and to come second. I, on the other hand, would have to tear up my tickets once more and throw them to the ground.

I lowered the binoculars and I was surprised not to hear him shouting and happy.

“You won,” I said.

But he obviously hadn’t followed the last part of the race, he obviously didn’t know. He was staring at the grandstand with his own eyes, without the help of binoculars. He was very still. He turned to me without looking at me, as if I were a stranger. I was a stranger. He buttoned up his jacket. His face had grown dark again, almost contorted.

“There they are, they’ve arrived. They’ve arrived for the fifth race,” he said. “I’m sorry, I must go and join them, he’ll want to give me instructions.”

He said nothing more, not even goodbye. He had pushed his way through the crowds in a matter of moments and I watched him from behind, a giant figure moving off towards the grandstand. As he walked, he patted his jacket on his right side, the gun in its holster. He had left his binoculars with me. I tore up my tickets but not his winning tickets. I put them in my pocket, he was unlikely to want to claim them, I thought.

I DON’T KNOW whether or not I should talk about what happened recently to Custardoy. It’s the only time, as far as I know, that he’s shown any scruples, or perhaps it was pity. Then again, why not.

Custardoy is a copier and forger of paintings. He receives fewer and fewer commissions for the latter, better-paid work, because the new forgery detection techniques make fraud almost impossible, at least in museums. A few months ago, however, he got a request from a private individual: a bankrupt nephew wanted to do a switch on his aunt, who owned a small, unfinished Goya, hidden away at her house near the sea. He could no longer afford to wait for her to die, for his aunt had told him that although she was going to leave him the house, she had decided to leave the Goya to a young servant girl whom she had watched grow up. According to the nephew, the aunt was senile.