Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

She removed her hand from her forehead and turned to me. As she did, her knees met my right leg, I felt a slight pressure, which she did not withdraw; she probably didn’t even notice, although I’m of the opinion that everyone always notices any contact; or perhaps she thought it unimportant. I seized the chance to glance down at her thighs, which were there before me now. They were perhaps a little plump, but I found them very attractive; so bare and sturdy, pressed tightly together.

‘That’s something you’d have to ask him, why he didn’t leave, I mean, why he doesn’t leave. As for me, it’s a lot to ask of someone, to ask her to leave the person she most loves. If he left me, I would have to accept it, and he probably will, he’ll probably leave me as soon as divorce becomes legal. But he can’t expect me to make things easier for him, to take the initiative, when I don’t want to. Besides, he would probably object if I did. People react strangely. And we’ve come a long way together. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t leave, despite everything, perhaps that has some influence on him.’

‘Yes, it’s true,’ I thought, ‘we don’t know what bonds were forged between the people who came before, and we probably never will, because we always arrive late in people’s lives.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to understand how you can still love someone who abuses you like that, verbally, that is.’ I couldn’t say ‘physically’ because that might have betrayed my nocturnal spying. ‘I’m sorry, but sometimes I couldn’t help but overhear. Never in your absence, mind, he’s never said anything negative about you when you’re not there, not when I’ve been present at least. But I have heard him talking to you. Well, you know how it is.’

She smiled, resumed her initial position and took a sip of her drink. She wasn’t touching me now. I needed to get her to notice my desire, which was still on the increase (that’s always the first and most necessary step, to get the other person to notice, and sometimes it’s also the last step, the trigger), to the point where I was beginning not to feel contented with the purely visual phase, with imagining possibilities, and was now paying less attention to what she was saying, like someone who has crossed a line. In such situations, a moment always comes when all you care about are the waves of your own emotions.

‘Of course you’ll have heard him, and if only he would hold off when others are present. With some he’s more careful because he knows they like and respect me. With Jorge, with Paco, with my female friends. Less so with Alberto Augusto. And not with you, with you he feels too relaxed, too comfortable, too at ease; right from the start, he made you a kind of extension of himself, which is both good and bad. But what you don’t know is that it wasn’t always like that, on the contrary. This began a long time ago, shortly after Tomás was born, imagine that. But for many years it was quite different, and for me it’s those years that count. I lived through them, and Eduardo …’ She stopped as if afraid of what she was about to say, but then she said it anyway: ‘Eduardo is the kindest, most upright man you could ever meet. The loathsome way he’s been treating me all this time goes completely against his nature, he has to make himself do it. You’ll think I’m deluding myself, but I still believe that the day will come when he can’t bear it any more, going against himself and against his nature. And then he’ll stop and will want to make amends.’

‘The kindest and most upright man,’ I thought. It was possible. As well as admiring him, I myself held him in high regard. As I said before, my loyalty bordered on the unconditional. And yet it was strange to hear such praise on the lips of the one person to whom I had seen and heard him be so cruel. Not malicious or insolent or scornful — he was capable of being all those things sometimes, and with considerable wit and relative impunity. No, with her he was wounding and vicious (although not all the time, not even with her). I remembered some of what Beatriz had said to her friends: ‘I wouldn’t want a new life with another man,’ she had told them, had explained. ‘I want the life I had for quite a number of years and with the same man. I don’t want to forget or get over it or move on, as they say, but to carry on in exactly the same way, like a prolongation of what was. I was never dissatisfied, I never longed for change, I was never one of those women who gets bored and requires movement, variety, arguments and reconciliations, moments of euphoria and terrible shocks. I would have been happy for everything to have stayed eternally the same. Some people are content and satisfied, and hope only for each day to be the same as the previous day and the next. I was one of those people. Until everything went wrong.’

Then I got up and went over to the fridge. Like her, I had no idea what I wanted. I picked up a glass, put some ice in it, peered vaguely inside the fridge and then round about me, saw the bottle of whisky on the table and decided to try that, adding a little Coca-Cola too, imitating her in everything, and while I was standing, I was able to take a proper look at her from above, to gain a wider vision of her décolletage, looking down inside it, I mean, especially during the few seconds when I stood just behind her, and then I felt like reaching out a hand or placing both hands on her shoulders and from there moving them downwards, not suddenly, but gradually, distractedly, waiting for her to interrupt me, for her to shout, ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ and for me to take fright and blush and apologize and retreat, or for her to say nothing and allow me to carry on, knowing perfectly well what I was doing, but pretending she didn’t or not until later, when it would be impossible not to make some verbal acknowledgement of that contact, when it became clear that it meant more than just sympathy, although it’s also true that such acknowledgement need never be articulated, there’s no need for anyone to speak or say anything, or only with their breathing, and even that can be suppressed, every moan silenced, many such sounds have had to be hidden away and to remain as mute as if they’d never existed, indeed, it’s impossible to lay down any strict rules for the way two people come together.

And so I lingered there, behind her — longer than a few seconds now — and decided I could make the first move without Beatriz seeing it as in any way suspicious or improper, placing my hands on her shoulders in a friendly or comforting manner; besides, many things are permissible during a sleepless night, as if that state of wakefulness were contaminated by the sleep that should replace it, but that refuses to come when called, and as if, up to a point, everything were happening under its dominion, in some borrowed life, nebulous, hypothetical and parallel. And so I did delicately place my hands on her shoulders and, at the same time, to disguise my boldness, I spoke to her too, so that she would have more than one thing to attend to.

‘So what happened? Why did it all go wrong? Why did Eduardo become so unpleasant and so brusque?’

She shrugged her shoulders, but only very slightly. She could have taken the opportunity to move away from me, to free herself. However feebly she had done this, I would have understood that she was rejecting that contact and would have removed my hands at once. The movement she made was so slight, though, that I experienced it more like a response, as if her grateful shoulders were exerting a slight pressure in order to move closer and mould themselves better to the palms of my hands. That, at least, is how I chose to interpret it, doubtless pushing my luck.

‘It was something really stupid,’ she said. ‘Because he found out that, once, years ago, I’d lied to him. An old lie that should have made him laugh, not take it to heart. So many other things had happened in between, so much had happened between us, that any importance it had at the time should have dissipated, should, how can I put it, have expired, been cancelled out by the sheer weight of our lives spent together; we had even lost a child, and nothing brings a couple closer than that, if, of course, it doesn’t destroy them. In fact, he wasn’t even the one to discover the lie, I got angry with him one day and blurted it out.’ She said nothing for a few seconds. ‘I never imagined he would react the way he did. If only I had.’