Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

‘Well, I know what I felt and I’m not a prude or a hysteric. I know what I’m talking about.’ — She didn’t sound offended, she just wanted to be clear. — ‘But no, he’s not the violent type, I don’t think that’s his style, and I’ve known a few of them. He’s just a pest, the kind who doesn’t quite overstep the mark, but comes very close. He’s a lecher, a sleazebag, someone who stores up sensations for later on, do you know what I mean? Someone who pretends not to know what he’s doing, but keeps trying again and again, just to see what happens, to see if he gets anywhere. Thinking that you’ll get all excited, if he touches you here, feels you up there, or that you’ll just give in to avoid an embarrassing situation. Some men take advantage of women who are very timid or young or polite, women who have a horror of confrontations or of giving a straight No. You may not believe it, but there still are women like that. And they’ll end up letting a man get away with a lot, just so as not to seem rude or to avoid making a scene.’

‘Really? Even nowadays? That sounds like something out of a novel from the eighteenth or nineteenth century? A novel set in the country, you know, the young master of the house and the peasant girl.’

She didn’t seem put out by my unwitting pedantry. She was probably more educated than I had at first thought.

‘You mean Dickens and the like? I don’t know about that, but I can assure you it still goes on, and it’s not that uncommon either. They plead with you and you give in. They insist and you give in. Oh, they flatter you too, I don’t deny it, and that counts and sometimes even convinces. Anyway, you may not much want to do it, but it’s almost easier to give in than to refuse. It doesn’t wash with me, mind, but it happens to a lot of women.’

‘Really?’ I thought of the bullfighter, who was at least twenty years older than her. ‘Do you only ever go with someone you really like? With someone you liked before they made it clear that they liked you too? Sometimes you only notice someone because that someone has noticed you. Sometimes we only consider those who have already considered us. It’s not unknown for the way someone looks at you to influence the way you look at them.’

She smiled and answered only my first question; she must have found the rest far too complicated.

‘More or less. There’s always the exception, of course. I’m sure it’s happened to you too, with some overly affectionate or overly enthusiastic girl you couldn’t bring yourself to reject. Come on, own up, I’m sure you have plenty of admirers.’ And she nudged me with her elbow, very gently, not in a vulgar way, while we were walking shoulder to shoulder along the empty streets, just as she would occasionally grab my arm to steady herself, our footsteps made a lot of clatter, especially her high heels (such a promising sound). With each step her earrings swung gracefully back and forth, and sooner or later, I imagined, if it took us much longer to find a taxi, she would regretfully take them off, because they must have been bothering her.

I took her words as a compliment not a come-on. She was some ten years older than me, possibly more, and so could allow herself to be a kind of pretend older sister to me. She knew a lot, but not enough, or else, accustomed as she was to being with older men like the actor or the bullfighter, she had forgotten what many young men are like. She must have forgotten that for most of us any sexual relationship is still a miracle, a gift (at least it was in 1980), unless we find the girl in question repellent or creepy, someone we had discounted at first glance, someone horribly obese and flabby or an out-and-out freak. When you’re young, you’re not that fussy or pernickety, you’re still rather coarse-minded, in that area and in others. You hardly ever turn down an acceptable opportunity, especially if you don’t have to try very hard. Young men are often quite heartless when it comes to sex. Or at least unscrupulous. I was, I don’t deny it, and I remained so for a few more years after that. Considerateness is something you learn, as is the advisability of not gaily forging links with people. However unlikely, there is always a stronger link than you might believe, even if it springs from one night of wild partying and you eventually forget the person’s name and even her existence or almost what happened. The truth is that you never forget anyone you’ve been with, if you ever happen to meet them again, even though, paradoxically, you have retained no images, no memory, of the occasion. It’s like a mental record on which the information is stored, and which reappears the moment you see that face again or hear the name if the face has changed beyond all recognition. You know it, you know you had that experience, that you fucked that woman in another life, another you of whom there is only evidence rather than memory. It doesn’t make much sense, knowing something that you can’t remember, but that’s how it is.

I was about to answer Celia: ‘Yes, it’s true, I’ve experienced that myself, which leads me to suspect that some girl must have experienced the same thing with me, which is not a pleasant thought. But what can you do, it’s impossible to know what someone else is thinking, which is just as well really, because, otherwise, we’d never do anything, never even tentatively brush another’s hand.’ I was just about to say something along those lines when we spotted the green light of a taxi far off and started waving frantically like exiles or shipwreck victims; her feet must have been hurting by then, although, with great dignity, she wasn’t complaining, and at no time did she appear to consider taking her shoes off, not even once inside the taxi. I let her get in first, not yet having learned that the man should always get into a car ahead of the woman, especially if the woman is wearing a skirt, and especially if that skirt is short and tight. When she sat down, it became still shorter, indeed it was almost as if she wasn’t wearing one at all (but she was, that was the point), I kept casting sideways glances at her smooth, firm, tanned thighs, which, all the while we were walking, I hadn’t been able to see. I asked where she lived, she said in Calle Watteau and launched into a complicated explanation, I had no idea where it was nor indeed that Watteau even had a street named after him. The driver had never heard of it either and got out his A — Z , she spelled the name for him (‘Bloody hell, the names they give streets these days,’ he muttered when he had finally grasped not just the initial ‘W’ but all the other letters too), and she ended up giving him directions, which I ignored completely, and we finally set off. I soon found myself in completely unknown territory, as if I had been transported to another city, and with the meter ticking too. ‘It’s just as well Viana gave me some dosh,’ I thought. ‘If he hadn’t, I’d be in trouble.’

We didn’t continue our earlier conversation; that had got left behind. I asked where she worked.

‘In a government department,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m a civil servant.’

‘Oh, really?’ I could not, I think, avoid the note of surprise in my voice, and to make amends, I added: ‘High up?’

‘Hmm,’ she said with a smile, then added after a pause: ‘Not low down.’

I made no attempt to draw her out further, I was waiting for something else to happen, one of those things that makes you fall silent, hold your breath a little and concentrate solely on that for as long as it lasts. Celia had not sat at the furthest end of the back seat (perhaps momentary carelessness or laziness, perhaps because of her skirt), but had stopped about halfway along (or less), so that I had no alternative but to sit very close to her, with her right thigh rubbing or, rather, pressing against my left thigh. She obviously wasn’t bothered by this (she could have moved along, there was plenty of space). Perhaps she was too tired to notice or didn’t care, she saw me as almost a boy, and certainly not as an indefatigable demon between the sheets. I didn’t move away either. Not that I had much room for manoeuvre, but I did have a little, or I could have asked her to shift over and allow me more space. But I wasn’t going to do that. Certainly not. It wasn’t flesh against flesh, but flesh against fabric, not that it mattered, I could still feel it, feel her firm, warm flesh, and I preferred to go on feeling it. I wondered if she could feel my warmth too or not at all. Only a few minutes before she had spoken about precisely this with regard to Van Vechten, saying: ‘But almost no such contact is purely accidental, we all know that, you’re almost always aware of touch.’ What more did I need? And yet I did need more: even young men whom others judge to be good-looking are insecure and even the boldest are timid. There was that qualifying ‘almost’, she might consider that contact in the taxi to be accidental, and it could be the exceptional occasion on which she didn’t notice. She had added: ‘You’re aware of what you’re touching or what is being touched, and if you don’t move away, that’s fine.’ What if she was experimenting to see if I would be the one to move, or if I was perfectly fine with the insistent touch of her thigh? I, of course, didn’t draw back or move away or retreat. Nor did she, but what the other person does is never clear, it’s always obscure, even wives and children are opaque to us, and we can never know what someone else is thinking and sometimes the other person isn’t thinking at all, but merely responding to stimuli or bypassing the brain or ignoring or avoiding it, not giving it time to express itself or to formulate a thought, I’ve never had the good fortune of being in that position, and it probably is fortunate rather than unfortunate.