Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

It was only on my second night that I noticed the empty area adjacent to my bolt-hole, from which it was separated by another small but less pygmyish door, which I had been too exhausted even to notice on the first night. On the second night, however, my brain was perhaps overexcited by the frenetic pace of work and the slapdash, improvised nature of that script being written at breakneck speed, and I was so wide awake that I sat down on the bed fully clothed, intending to smoke and read and while away the hours. And for a long time, I looked around me without noticing anything, until I realized that what I had mistakenly assumed to be a built-in, white lacquer wardrobe was no such thing. Its door opened on to a very narrow space that had probably once been used as a small lumber room, but which was now clean and empty, and just beyond was that other tiny door which I automatically assumed would bring me out into the corridor. I opened it and, as soon as I did, saw that it could only be opened from the inside and that if I wanted to return by the same route, without having to go via the kitchen, I would have to take care not to close it behind me. I was just about to crouch down and peer through — I was still half-sitting on the bed — when I saw a dim light in the distance and the figure of Beatriz Noguera in a nightdress taking short steps back and forth in the corridor outside her husband’s bedroom — or, rather, her steps were not particularly short, it was just that the area she was pacing up and down in was very small — she was not so much pacing as prowling. My first impulse was to withdraw into my room, but instead I assumed a squatting position and stayed there watching, realizing at once that it would be virtually impossible for her to see me: I was crouched down at a distance and in darkness, and no one would expect that door, which must have been closed for ages, to open. Beatriz did not once glance over to where I was hiding, not just because it didn’t occur to her that, most unusually, someone was occupying that abandoned spot, but because every one of her five senses was focused on what she was doing, even though she was merely smoking — she had a cigarette in one hand and, in the other, the cigarette packet and an ashtray — and walking back and forth outside the closed door, as if waiting for someone who was late for an appointment.

She wasn’t wearing a dressing gown, just a brief, thigh-length nightdress that revealed her strong legs, and at first I thought she was barefoot, because her steps made no sound or so little that you could almost blame any noise she made on the disquiets of the somewhat elderly wooden floorboards, which, like all old floorboards, occasionally seemed to be bemoaning all the things they had seen, after the manner perhaps of old ships, although far less so, given that they are never called on to be pitched and tossed by the waves. Her nightdress was made of white or cream-coloured silk, and was either slightly transparent or, because of the way the light fell — from a discreet wall lamp in the corridor — merely seemed more than usually transparent, allowing me to see her as almost naked but clothed, which is perhaps the most attractive way of seeing an attractive naked body, involving as it does an element of guesswork, surreptitiousness or theft. (I say ‘more than usually’ because, as it turned out, there was a witness, but she couldn’t have known there would be, or rather the only likely witness would be one for whom her attire, alas, would seem neither revealing nor novel.) I should say that this was my main reason for staying there studying her, for I was still at an age when a glimpse of any forbidden image seemed like a trophy to be stored away on the retina for days or weeks or months, if not, in some mysterious way, for ever. I still have the Beatriz Noguera of that night: I could sense — or more than sense — that she had nothing on beneath her nightdress, not even the tiny undergarment that many women wear in bed, perhaps as a kind of superstitious protection, perhaps so as not to risk staining the sheets with any involuntary secretions. I saw her mainly from the back, because she would occasionally stop her pacing and stand motionless outside Muriel’s door as if she were tempted to rap on it with her knuckles and either could not bring herself to do so or did not dare. She must have been about twenty years older than me, and up until then, I had viewed her with a kind of distant esteem, with growing pity and — how can I put it without being misunderstood? — a vague sexual admiration so muted and latent as to be purely theoretical, as though belonging to another hypothetical life, to another me that would never exist, not even in my imagination (real life is so all-absorbing that it doesn’t leave us time to create an imaginary, parallel life). We know the kind of glances we must avoid, and also those that are inappropriate because of age, position or hierarchy, and it’s easy enough to give them up, to dismiss rather than repress them, no, ‘repress’ would be the wrong word. With the wife of a brother or a superior or a friend we adopt a veiled or neutral gaze and do so effortlessly and as if under orders, except in very unusual and extremely rare cases, when the lust aroused is unstoppable, explosive, a whirlwind. If, in addition, the wife in question is much older, the task is made easier by habit: when you’re twenty-three, you tend to notice women of the same age, or at most ten years older or five years younger — although there are exceptions — and to ignore all the others as one might ignore trees or bits of furniture, or perhaps paintings. Until that night, that is how I had viewed Beatriz Noguera, like a picture that arouses a feeble, ephemeral flicker of desire, quite impossible to satisfy: the woman you’re looking at is on one plane, silent, motionless and imprisoned for all eternity; she has only one gesture, one angle and one expression, however challenging the look in her eyes, and her unchanging flesh has no texture, no pulse; she lacks volume and what we are attracted to is pure illusion and, if the portrait is an old one, the woman is probably dead. You study her for a few moments, think fleetingly about what might have been had you shared the same time and space, then, with no regrets, move on and forget her.

The vague sexual admiration I had felt for Beatriz was of that same almost unconscious order. Given that she was Muriel’s wife and many years older than me, I considered her, as an object of desire, someone with whom I no longer shared the same time and space, as though I lived in the real and present dimension and she only in long-past, inanimate representations. And all the thoughts I had — which were not even thoughts, more like mental flashes bereft of the words I give them now from the distance of my maturity — were of a conditional or chimerical nature, if, indeed, they existed at all: ‘If I were Muriel, I wouldn’t treat her like that, I would respond to her occasional, intended caresses, which he rejects so forcefully, and move closer’ or ‘She must have been very alluring when she was young, I can understand why Muriel would have wanted her at his side day and night, I’m sure I would have too. Even if only for her sheer carnality, which counts for a lot in a marriage. But I wasn’t Muriel then, nor am I now.’

And that night, Beatriz Noguera seemed to me neither long-past nor inanimate, nor, indeed, a representation, even though, to my hidden, watching eyes, there was something theatrical about her pacing up and down and her waiting and her hesitations, it was like spying on some minor display of voluptuosity (that revealing nightdress) or a painful monologue without words. Until, that is, there were some words. After smoking two cigarettes, Beatriz finally decided to knock timidly at her husband’s bedroom door with the knuckle of her middle finger. It was a very quiet knock, like that of a fearful child who has already gone too many times to her parents’ room and is afraid she won’t be welcome, but could be seen as too easily frightened, importunate and annoying, or might even be told off.