Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

As I said, Rico would come by in the afternoons — on those first afternoons when we were all treading very carefully — and would take her out or chat to her, cheer her up and make her laugh with his calculatedly condescending or fatuous remarks, and Roy came too to keep her company or simply to be there, more timidly and less enjoyably perhaps, but nonetheless eager to help. Flavia kept silent watch from her domain, and Beatriz’s daughters, who tried to be around more than usual and not shut themselves away in their rooms as much, seemed slightly saddened or anxious about their mother — especially the older girl — although not exaggeratedly so, more as if they already knew about those occasional suicide attempts or about the appalling risks she took, and had assimilated them, insofar as such things can be assimilated. The boy knew nothing, he was still too young. Beatriz was left alone as little as possible, and Muriel phoned from Barcelona every day, once or twice, depending on how busy he was, as if he were a caring husband. (If he had really cared, he would have cancelled everything and not gone away at all; but given his usual rough treatment of her, it was enough that he should take an apparently sincere interest from a distance. It was as though, this time, he felt that Beatriz had come perilously close to dying. Even though this wasn’t a new experience, it must have frightened him each time it happened. He doubtless preferred her as a muted, almost obscure presence in his life, but he certainly didn’t want her to disappear entirely; indeed, he would probably have found that unbearable.) If I picked up the phone, he would ask: ‘How is she?’ and I would say: ‘She seems quite normal, her usual self.’ Then I would pass the phone to her, and they would talk for a while, not long (it wasn’t easy to find things to say), and I would leave them alone, but I did once hear Beatriz’s side of the conversation: ‘No, don’t worry, I’m fine … Hmm … No, Jorge says the cuts are healing nicely … Yes, there’ll be scarring, but what does that matter now … I’ll worry about that later … No, I don’t feel weak at all. It’s as if I’d never lost a drop of blood … Everyone says how well I look and I don’t think they’re just saying that either, because even I think I look pretty healthy, and I’ve never been one for admiring myself in the mirror, on the contrary … Thank you.’ At that point, I wondered if Muriel had actually paid her a compliment, but rejected the idea as unlikely, I’d heard him make too many cruel insults about her physical appearance, but who knows, perhaps he had offered her a kind or encouraging compliment. ‘Yes, they’re being very good and attentive, they think I don’t notice, but they’re so transparent … It amuses me to see them trying to pretend that they’re not … No, really, you get on with things there, work comes first … Has Towers calmed down now? … Anyway, I’m sorry to have caused you so much upset, you don’t think at the time, you only think later, and I’m thinking more clearly now … Right, and the trouble is, he’s lost confidence in you … Jesús? No, certainly not; he’s too busy, no, you have to finish the film …’ I guessed that Muriel was having trouble focusing on the job in hand and had got badly behind, that Towers was getting impatient and even considering the possibility of replacing him with that whirlwind of activity, Jess Frank. ‘Tell him it will be all right, convince him … Me? You mean he’s worried about me? No, tell him from me there’s no need to worry, that I have no intention of interrupting your filming ever again … Of course I won’t, I haven’t the slightest intention … Eduardo, what happens happens when it happens, but that doesn’t mean it will go on happening. Like I say, what happened happened …’ After they had exchanged a few more words, this time of farewell, I heard her replace the receiver and I then went back into the living room. Oddly, once she had hung up, she stood there for a while, her hand still on the phone, gazing at it with a kind of dreamy fixity, as if, in that visual, tactile way, she wanted to prolong her contact with Muriel or to hold on for a moment to some of the words she had heard, perhaps that possible compliment. Or as if she had lied about something and was waiting to be found out and for him to call back and voice his suspicions, before she could lay down the instrument of her deception. Like someone waiting for the gun she has just used to stop smoking and grow cold in her hand.

At night, though, no one came, and it was up to me to take the initiative, to be on hand if she needed me, to distract her or talk to her or sit down with her to watch a film or a series on TV, so that she would feel less keenly her customary nocturnal solitude; my orders now were to tread carefully, but the situation wouldn’t last, only as long as it took her to convalesce, the few weeks it would take for us all to recover from the shock and regain our mutual trust, no state of alarm can be maintained indefinitely. I think I talked to Beatriz more during the ten days that Muriel was away filming in Barcelona than during the whole of the rest of the time I worked for him. We tended to avoid any very personal subjects, any thorny or delicate issues, but, as always, in situations of unexpected closeness, a false, provisional camaraderie soon sprang up, and a feeling of daily normality quickly took root; you only have to condemn two reasonably nice people to spending time in each other’s company for it to come to seem perfectly normal, especially if, for some reason, those exceptional circumstances become permanent; it takes only a couple of days for routines to be established, to the extent of each person always sitting in the same place, in the same armchair if they play chess or cards, on the same side of the sofa if they’re watching TV, and, if they sleep in the same bed for two consecutive nights, that’s quite long enough for each to choose which side he or she will sleep on.

When she went to her room, I would stay up for another hour or so, not feeling tired enough to go to bed myself, and when I did finally go to my own room, I remained, not perhaps with one eye open, as Muriel had ordered, but with some corner of my consciousness watching, in perhaps the same way that the parents of young children have to remain constantly alert, not, of course, that Beatriz was as important to me as that. Nevertheless, I would hear her whenever she left her room, as she briefly did each night, if she went into the living room or the kitchen for a few minutes, doubtless the time it took to smoke one or two cigarettes, before returning to her side of the apartment and closing her bedroom door, then I would go back to sleep, feeling easier, as if she were safer in her room, although probably quite the opposite was true: if she had tried to kill herself again, she would have avoided doing so in any communal areas, where there was a danger that her children or Flavia might find her, where there was more likelihood that someone would stop her or frustrate her in her wish to die by once again arriving just in time.

One night, I heard her clattering around in the kitchen for longer than usual, while she waited for exhaustion or sleep to get the better of her, and this was so close to where I was sleeping that I found it impossible not to listen to and interpret her every movement. She opened and closed the fridge three or four times, lit cigarettes — the repeated sound of a faulty lighter; she poured herself a cold drink — liquid falling into a glass, the clink of ice cubes — a chair or stool scraping on the floor, she would sit down only to stand up a few seconds later, then sit down again, what I couldn’t hear were her footsteps, and I imagined she must be barefoot or wearing the silent slippers that allowed her to pace back and forth outside her husband’s bedroom door without him hearing her, until she decided to announce her presence by rapping on the door with one knuckle. She took no such pains now, perhaps she had forgotten that I was sleeping next door or perhaps she wasn’t bothered about waking me, probably too absorbed in her own thoughts and able to think only of them — insomnia is very selfish. The persistent scraping of a stool or chair — probably only restlessness and nerves, the kitchen being furnished with both stools and chairs — made me imagine a possible danger. ‘I hope she’s not going to climb on to one,’ I thought, ‘then kick it away and hang herself; I hope that’s not what she’s preparing to do,’ and I tried fruitlessly to remember if there was anything on the ceiling to which she could attach a rope or a strip of fabric. This idea had only to cross my mind for me to listen more acutely, to struggle to decipher every sound and to worry whenever there was a longer than usual pause or silence. In the middle of the night everything seems plausible and real.