Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

I couldn’t understand how Beatriz could have vanished so quickly, without trace, not that there was any sign of anyone else either. The Sanctuary was clearly inhabited, cared for and venerated, but, at that precise moment, it seemed to have been abandoned even by Our Lady’s most devout, not to say fanatical followers. ‘Maybe they all just happened to have errands to run or are having tea together somewhere,’ I thought somewhat irrelevantly, as if I were in England, while I strolled about the garden ever-more nonchalantly, keeping close to the two-storey buildings, hoping to see something through the ground-floor windows, which were on my level, keeping half an eye out, so to speak. I still saw no one, and I walked round nearly the whole area, until I came to a protecting boundary wall, where the garden ended on that side. So I turned back and stood beside the chapel to get a better view of the upper floor. At first, even by craning my neck, I still saw no one. Until suddenly, someone’s back appeared at a window or was propelled towards it and, for a moment, appeared in my field of vision. I craned my neck still more, wishing I was taller, I stood on tiptoe, thinking if only I had a ladder, I looked around me, but there was none to be seen, I considered climbing on to a chair or one of the tables, but it would make little difference and I’d have to pick it up and carry it over to where I was standing, I hesitated, didn’t move, glued to the spot, paralysed perhaps.

The first time lasted only a moment, the back appeared and disappeared, but I already felt, in that flash, that it was Beatriz, not for nothing had I contemplated that back during my long pursuit. I kept my eyes fixed on that point, on that frame, and the back soon reappeared, and it really was as if the person to whom it belonged had been hurled against the glass with a touch of aggression or violence. If so, I definitely couldn’t see who was doing the pushing and hurling. I felt alarmed, afraid that someone might be mistreating her, harming her, I even had the wild idea that someone was trying to push her through the lattice window, those wooden struts could easily give way, could break and shatter, a body can easily pass through glass if pushed hard enough, and those struts were quite slender. ‘A tree,’ I thought, ‘I’ll climb a tree,’ they were there beside me, far closer than the tables and chairs. I was very agile then and perfectly capable of scaling the trunk, grabbing a low branch and, from there, scrambling up to the very top. However, I was afraid I might miss something while I climbed, I realized that I couldn’t take my eyes off the window for a second, I saw Beatriz’s back thud again and again into the window, remain pressed against it for a moment, then move away, and this was happening continuously, as if they wouldn’t leave her alone or even allow her to take two steps. ‘Perhaps they’re hitting her,’ I thought, ‘or shoving her around, so that she keeps hitting the window, they’ve got her corralled, cornered like a boxer.’ I was about to call out and thus reveal my presence, although I don’t know if I would have been heard. Another possibility would have been to go upstairs to help her or save her from whatever was happening, but I didn’t know which door to go through (there were several) or if it would be open.

I was the victim of my own ingenuousness, you have to be much older than I was at the time to lose that quality, always assuming we more trusting souls ever do lose it entirely. I suddenly understood what was happening: someone — a man — was fucking her or pressing himself on her or gripping her hard in readiness to begin, standing up, with no preliminaries and fully clothed, without removing a single item of clothing, hurriedly or perhaps on the spur of the moment, as they say, they probably had very little time before the custodians of the temple returned and were making the most of that moment when they knew that, for whatever reason, the place would be empty, perhaps it always was at that hour. I could only see Beatriz’s back from the waist up or not even that, just the upper part of her torso and the old-fashioned nape of her neck — she was wearing her hair up that day. Obviously, the man who was pressing or pounding her — I don’t much like that verb, but it might be the most appropriate — was further away from the window, and, besides, she filled the whole space with her large body, for she had fairly broad shoulders, although her hips, fortunately, were less so. He was invisible to me, a ghost, I could see nothing of him, not so much as a hair. And I had no further doubts about what was happening when Beatriz brusquely turned round — or was made to — and leaned forward, and it seemed to me then that her hands must be resting on or gripping the lower part of the window frame or perhaps the sill. Instead of her back and the nape of her neck, I could now see her face, only her face and throat, not her body at all, and this really scared me: if I could see her from below, then she would be able to see me from above. In two strides I was behind a tree, from where I continued to watch. This proved to be an unnecessary precaution, because Beatriz had her eyes tight shut, she wasn’t looking outside or anywhere, she was absorbed in herself, I assumed, and in her sensations. I imagined that the man, when he spun her round, would have hoisted up her skirt — there would be no comings and goings now or only of a very different kind — and he would have yanked down her tights and knickers to mid-thigh level so that he could penetrate her with the necessary ease, given the relative discomfort of their vertical position, especially his, because she would have to bend over.

I felt embarrassed, even though I was fairly well hidden behind the tree, peering out just enough — again with half an eye. Now it wasn’t only that I was afraid of being caught out, but all that espionage and seeing what I was seeing filled me with guilt: Beatriz’s face during what I supposed to be an orgasm, or more than one, or maybe a pre-orgasm, I’ve never really been able to tell the difference, women tend to string these things together and it’s not always easy to tell them apart, people also say that they’re brilliant at faking it, and all I could see now was her face pressed against the glass like an odd portrait with eyes tight shut, there are hardly any such portraits in the history of painting — when an artist paints or draws someone asleep or dead, the eyelids are soft or at peace — I couldn’t see the possible quickening of her movements or the trembling of her limbs, nor, of course, could I hear anything, no moan, no heavy breathing, no word, if, that is, she uttered any — it didn’t look as if she did — in such circumstances, some women talk and urge the man on, or even shout barely credible obscenities, at the risk of making utter fools of themselves or turning their lover off completely, as if they were performing for the benefit of their one witness or for themselves alone, a few even make jokes, while some concentrate hard and say nothing. There are still others who close their eyes tight so that they can imagine they’re with someone other than the person embracing or clasping or penetrating them, and I wondered if this would be the case here, if Beatriz would be imagining that she was with the elusive Muriel or if she would be quite clear about the identity and presence of the man she was coupling or copulating with, all barriers down, no precautions taken, I don’t think we had heard about AIDS in Spain then, nor perhaps had the rest of the world.

Yes, I felt ashamed and embarrassed, but still I looked and looked at that face in the window, almost squashed against it sometimes — a hint of breath on the glass — sometimes it’s hard to interpret the expression on the face of a woman you’re screwing, you assume it’s pleasure she’s feeling, but it can look very like pain (you stop and scrutinize her face and ask: ‘Are you OK? Am I hurting you?’) or even like despair or profound grief or bitterness, I have occasionally suspected a woman of being with me in that most intimate of situations in order to deaden her sadness or to have her revenge on someone else without his knowledge (thinking somewhat irrelevantly, ‘If he only knew’ instead of ‘When he finds out’: as if she were never going to tell him), so as to alleviate for a while the loneliness of her woeful bed, or even to degrade herself in her own imagination and feel sticky and dirty and treacherous, a fleeting illusion, because that muddy feeling soon dissolves, and the following day there’s not a trace of mud and you’re as clean as you were before — cleanliness is more persistent than dirt, and almost anything can be washed away. I have sometimes suspected that I was just a mechanism, a tool, an instrument. The expression on Beatriz’s face could mean anything, and I wasn’t there with her, I couldn’t stop and ask: ‘Are you OK? Am I hurting you?’ Because I wasn’t the one doing the hurting, if anyone was.