Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

‘There was no half-joking about it, Jorge, it was a joke, pure and simple. Anyway, how did it happen? How was it? Did it just come out of the blue? To be honest, I’m staggered. I take my hat off to you.’ And I made a gesture as if doffing my hat.

‘You’re surely not expecting me to reveal my methods to you, Juan.’ He was smiling unreservedly now, flattery can soften anyone and often proves to be our undoing, our downfall. It encourages us to talk too much.

‘At least give me a clue. Lessons from the master.’ I immediately bit my tongue, I’d gone too far and he might get annoyed again. ‘Don’t play hard to get. After all, I’m the one who introduced you to all those girls.’

He hesitated. No, he wasn’t stupid, and couldn’t possibly hope to persuade me that whatever had happened with Maru had been at her instigation or had happened spontaneously without some trick on his part, some entreaty, some trap. Maru was quite a wild young woman, who laughed loudly at the slightest thing, regardless of whether it was funny or not, she might even have creased up at one of the Doctor’s ancient jokes. But there was a vast difference between that and fellating him while he was at the wheel of his car, in downtown Madrid. He shrugged and opted for an enigmatic silence, but I sensed in him a desire to crow about his methods, which he didn’t yet want to reveal. I was sure he would talk more freely on the next occasion.

‘It isn’t only a matter of how you get something, Juan’ — and he said this rather in the tones of a master, a maestro, so perhaps I hadn’t gone too far — ‘what matters is getting it in a way that gives you most satisfaction. And nothing gives one more satisfaction than when a girl doesn’t want to do it, but can’t say No. And I can assure you most of them do want to do it, once they realize they’re obliged to. They want it once they’ve experienced it, but they’re left with the memory, the knowledge, the resentment, that the very first time, they had no choice. And as I’m sure you know, it doesn’t get much better than that: new desire mingled with a touch of old resentment.’

What he had said was pretty nebulous, not to say cryptic, but it seemed worth mentioning it to Muriel, informing him. Van Vechten had referred to something that could be relevant to my boss’s first semi-explicit words, to the doubts possibly sown in him by ‘a spiteful, devious person who harboured an implacable grudge’ against Van Vechten, ‘the kind of grudge that never dies’. That is the defence Muriel imagined the Doctor would use if he asked him point-blank about the troubling story someone had told him, the story that had eventually led him to send me on this mission: ‘malicious lies or the product of some vile settling of accounts’, mere ill-intentioned rubbish. Those first words had remained engraved on my memory, as have so many other first words spoken to me by almost everyone: ‘What stops me simply dropping the matter, rejecting it as frankly unbelievable and not even worth considering, is that, according to what I’ve been told, the Doctor behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman or possibly more than one … That, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low.’ Now Van Vechten had stated that he found nothing more satisfying than ‘when a girl doesn’t want to do it, but can’t say No’ and he’d spoken of them feeling ‘obliged’ to do it and of having no choice ‘the very first time’ and of an ‘old resentment’. I had taken pains to remember his words exactly, which is something I’ve always been good at, I’ve always had the ability to report verbatim what people say in my presence, with no summarizing, no paraphrasing, no approximations, as long as it’s not a long lecture of course. However confusing I found Van Vechten’s words, I was ready to repeat them to Muriel, and they would doubtless be more meaningful to him than to me, or he could perhaps throw some light on them. What I found most bewildering was this: if Van Vechten neither paid for nor offered anything in exchange, why on earth would Maru or any of my female friends say Yes when their first reaction was to say No? I didn’t think the Doctor would be capable of violence or of making physical threats. And if that had been the accusation, Muriel wouldn’t have used a subtle, moral term like ‘indecent’, which was too flimsy a word to describe any action involving force or rape.

And so I dared to interrupt my boss in the middle of making his latest film, and he arranged to meet me two mornings later, very early, taking advantage of a brief return to Madrid to shoot a few scenes in the studio, although he usually spent whole days away when he was on location, this time in Ávila, Salamanca, La Granja and El Escorial, and from there they would later have to travel to Baeza and Úbeda, and finally, to Barcelona. He was too busy to come back to the apartment and would instead be staying in a hotel with the actors. When I arrived, he was doing repeated takes of a stern speech given by the British actor Herbert Lom, who was less of a mythic figure for me than Jack Palance, but whom I had known and admired and, indeed, feared since my childhood visits to cinemas showing double bills, and had seen him in dozens of films, often playing the refined or exotic villain (he tended to appear in oriental costumes). Seeing him in person confirmed to me his fine voice and excellent English diction, although I have since found out, after his recent death at the age of ninety-five, that he was Czech by birth — or, rather, Austro-Hungarian — and that he didn’t come to England until he was twenty-one, fleeing the Nazi invasion, and with an unpronounceable surname, as long and complicated as the professional name he adopted was short and simple: he was originally called Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru, but I doubt that such a name would have been allowed either on screen or on a poster. He had played minor roles in some major films, for example, Napoleon in War and Peace , probably more because of his short stature than because of any other physical resemblance, although his broad forehead with a single lock of hair brushed forward certainly helped; he had also played Captain Nemo and the Phantom of the Opera and one of the murderers in The Ladykillers , and he had appeared in Spartacus playing a Cilician envoy; but I had found him particularly frightening in El Cid as the Almoravid Ben Yusuf, all dressed in black and with his face covered throughout the film (you could only see his eyes), and with his drumming hordes, who disembarked in my own country of Spain. It didn’t much matter that the action took place in the eleventh century, panic travels fast in fiction or in what one experiences as fiction.

Anyway, when Muriel stopped filming in order to talk to me and hear my report, the rest of the team dispersed, apart from Lom, who, after he and I had been introduced, did not move, but stayed where he was, perhaps so as not to lose his concentration. He took a cigarette out of his cigarette case, inserted it into a holder that he removed from its own tiny box and began smoking with an elegance that seemed to belong to another age. His successful career had come to a halt towards the end of the 1960s, and he had fallen into the hands of Inspector Clouseau (bringing to life Clouseau’s crazed boss in the various sequels to The Pink Panther ), and into the hands of Towers and even those of Jess Franco (he had appeared in the latter’s lesbian-prison fantasy 99 Women and in Count Dracula , which no one really thinks of as being the best version). Muriel, however, considered him to be a great artist and treated him with enormous respect (‘He’s worked with Vidor and Huston, with Mackendrick, Kubrick and Anthony Mann, with Dassin and Carol Reed,’ he would exclaim, enraptured). According to what I’ve heard, he was also an extremely cultivated man and had written a novel about Marlowe, to whom, as Rico had kindly informed me, some had attributed both a fake death and the entire works of Shakespeare. And so as not to be rude to the actor and leave him out of the conversation, unable to understand a word, my boss asked me to give my report in English, having first said to me in Spanish: ‘After all, he won’t know what we’re talking about and, even if he did, it wouldn’t matter, but, as long as he remains here in our company, I don’t want him to feel excluded or sidelined.’ ‘Couldn’t you ask him to leave us alone or couldn’t we just go somewhere else?’ I asked apprehensively. ‘It’s going to seem very artificial, you and me speaking in English, and I’m not that used to speaking English, you know.’ Muriel had made films in America, whereas I had made only a few brief visits to England.