Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

Just as on that earlier poker night, when his simultaneously chilling and greedy eyes had been repeatedly drawn to Celia and her friend, so now they were drawn to women of almost any age (those places were fairly ‘intergenerational’ at the time, within reasonable limits), and even to the transvestites who were beginning to display themselves provocatively and brazenly on the Paseo de la Castellana near Calle Hermanos Bécquer, and who gradually spread out, eventually invading all the adjacent territory too. I always found their popularity odd, and the fact that their clients were mainly heterosexuals, many of them, apparently, married men: however convincing the transvestites were as women, you would have to go through a whole mental process, a form of self-deceit, that I find hard to comprehend, to convince yourself that they really were women, and that, in the middle of a transaction, you weren’t going to be put off by the sudden appearance of certain inappropriate and dissuasive genitals. Whenever we drove past the transvestites in Dr Van Vechten’s flash car, he, I recall, was always adamant that they couldn’t possibly be men on hormone treatment or who had undergone surgery, or perhaps half one thing and half another. He would glance at them out of the corner of his eye while he was driving and make as if to turn to me or to my friends.

‘What do you mean? How can they possibly be men? They’re obviously women, and I should know. Look at those breasts, those legs. You’re having me on.’ And he would smile his becoming smile, half-amused, half-bewildered.

‘Look, Jorge, most of them are too tall. Were women ever that tall when you were young?’ I would say. He had insisted I call him ‘Jorge’ and not ‘Dr Van Vechten’. ‘Their legs are too muscular. Their tits are too hard. Some of them have suspiciously large hands. And most take at least a size eight in shoes. More importantly, if you look closely, they all have an Adam’s apple.’

‘How can I look closely from this far away and travelling at this speed?’ On the long home straight of the Castellana, late at night, you could go like a bullet, although he always slowed down slightly when he reached the transvestite zone, for they clearly aroused in him, at the very least, great curiosity. ‘I can’t see a single Adam’s apple from here. Don’t talk nonsense, they’re clearly women and pretty spectacular ones at that. The race has improved over the years, that’s why they’re tall. Or perhaps they’re foreign — for example, there was a real stunner of a mulatta back there. You’re all mad, and you want to drive me mad too.’ His remarks betrayed the fact that he came from a much earlier generation. And he occasionally used very dated expressions; no one of my age would have used the word ‘stunner’.

‘Well, spend a night with one of them, then. You just have to stop the car and pick one up. If you don’t just settle for a blow-job, it won’t take you long to find out. And, as I understand it, it won’t cost you much either. Then come and tell me all about it, about the nasty shock you get, I mean.’

I knew they didn’t charge much because a transitory friend of mine at the time, Comendador, who was five or six years older than me, had taken to paying for their services now and then. He had always been heterosexual, and he still was, and even had a girlfriend he was madly in love with. He tried to give me details of those ambiguous encounters, but I always stopped him in his tracks, preferring not to know. He saw them as very attractive women, I’m sure, but he also knew that they weren’t. I found this all very odd.

Van Vechten said nothing for a few moments (this was one of several such conversations), as if hesitating. He glanced over at the pavement, at the road, then back at those apparently real women wearing skirts or very short shorts and with their breasts almost exposed, eyeing them lustfully. The strange thing is that his hesitation appeared not to be related to the problem of their uncertain or deceiving gender, but to something else.

‘No, certainly not, I’ve never paid for sex in my life,’ he said at last, dismissing the possibility. ‘And I’m not going to start now.’

This was presumably true, and from what I saw he didn’t seem to be the kind of man who went with prostitutes. Perhaps he had never needed to, perhaps his height and his blond hair, his captivating teeth and his pale blue eyes, which, in certain lights, took on a watery quality, had been enough to dissipate or conceal the repellent quality I saw in him — I’m not quite sure how to describe it: a combination of conceit, a kind of exaggerated, jokey warmth and sheer ruthlessness, which, however vague, was there on his face — and which, it seemed to me, could not have gone unnoticed by women, now and in the past — it was something intrinsic and nothing to do with age. Of course, I’ve often been wrong about this and have seen remarkable women fall in love with and give or surrender themselves to truly nauseating men, and he wasn’t quite that bad. And even though he no longer looked young, he was, as I said, very well preserved. This, however, was not enough to explain why some of my female acquaintances or friends not only didn’t avoid him or exclude him from their nocturnal excursions, they happily chatted to him, sometimes while sitting slightly apart from the others, I mean, it wasn’t that they were all talking together and including him in the conversation — he was there, after all, and with me as his visiting card — but they ended up talking only to him. Seeing the women laugh, I would think that perhaps he was regaling them with the string of ancient jokes he sometimes trotted out, or perhaps it was his air of sophistication and his ability to flatter — the young are so sensitive to this that you often only have to administer a good dose of it to get whatever you want from them, in almost any area.

I observed Van Vechten constantly, for this was, in part, the task Muriel had set me and I wanted to be useful to him, and, on two or three occasions, I saw the Doctor and a young woman heading towards the toilets of whatever bar or club we happened to be in. I made a mental note of how long they were away, and, on each occasion, it didn’t seem to me that they would have had time to do anything more than snort a line of coke or something of the sort (cocaine wasn’t as commonplace as it became years later, but it was beginning to be sold and to lose its alarming image, and Van Vechten had more than enough money and could use it as bait, as flattery, to make him look like one of us), not even time for a quick blow-job. That was the expression I used when I was with him, along with other still cruder ones. They did not come naturally to me (I’ve always been rather polite), but that is what Muriel had ordered me to do, along with other things I found still harder to follow: ‘Show off. Boast … Don’t worry about seeming vulgar or even disrespectful when talking about women, be as vulgar and disrespectful as you like, exaggerate … Reveal yourself as vile and unscrupulous and watch his response, whether he’s sympathetic and even of a like mind, whether he urges you on or disapproves.’ All this was unknown territory to me or went against my nature, but I forced myself to do it, as if I were an actor in a film Muriel was directing blind and at a distance, an actor who — and it frustrated and pained me that he wouldn’t see me play the part — would receive neither congratulations nor applause. Soon, I was blithely boasting about supposed exploits that had never happened and talking about women as if they were objects, as if they were as interchangeable as melons, artichokes, watermelons, bags of flour or parcels of meat. At first, hearing me talk so cynically, Van Vechten would look at me wide-eyed — his eyes were positively glacial then — and listen to me part-condescending and part-surprised, as though he had already sussed out my basically respectful nature and couldn’t quite square my current attitude with the impression he’d had of me at Muriel’s apartment, at suppers and occasional outings and poker games, when talking to Beatriz and her children and Flavia, with whom I was usually exquisitely polite, and even with the insidious Marcela and Gloria, from whom I did my best to conceal my antipathy.