Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

This reminded me again of what I’d heard Muriel say on the night he appeared at his bedroom door, wearing his long, dark Fu Manchu or Dracula dressing gown: ‘How stupid of me to love you during all those years, love you with all my heart, as long, that is, as I knew nothing.’ Later, he had said: ‘If only you’d never told me, if only you’d kept me in the dark … What is the point of setting the record straight, of suddenly telling the truth?’ And he had concluded his string of reproaches, saying: ‘Ah, what a fool you were, Beatriz. Not just once, but twice.’ He must have been referring to the same thing Beatriz was talking about now.

‘What was the lie?’ I asked.

She thought for a few moments, perhaps not wanting to go into detail. She drank her glass of adulterated whisky, still without detaching herself from my hands, which were so cautious, so respectful that they hadn’t shifted so much as a millimetre, as if with that initial brazen move they had exhausted all their boldness for quite a while. When she did not respond at once, I added, so as to encourage her to reply: ‘Or would you rather not say?’

‘Let him tell you if he wants to, young De Vere, and then you can judge for yourself.’ She didn’t often call me by that name, only when she was in a good mood (only very erratically) and chose to join in the household tradition of giving people jokey nicknames. ‘It’s so ridiculous that I’m embarrassed to tell you, that such a childish thing should have ruined my life, something so silly.’ She paused again, then went on: ‘The most important aspect of that lie (important to me, you understand) was that it proved to me how kind and upright Eduardo was, without him ever knowing just how well I knew this. Men are very easy to deceive, however intelligent and wary and astute.’ She hadn’t said ‘you men’, and so I wasn’t sure whether she was referring just to men or to mankind generally, or if she didn’t yet consider me to be a proper man. ‘But Eduardo was an extreme case. He was so kind and upright that he couldn’t really exist in the world without being deceived by someone. So it was best if I was the one to deceive him, in our marriage at least, because I loved him so much and didn’t wish him any harm. On the contrary, I thought that other people, in other fields, would find it harder to deceive him with me by his side.’

I realized then that I was finding all this slightly tedious, or that it didn’t interest me in the way it would have in almost any other circumstance, or as it did interest and intrigue me a posteriori, when I thought about it on my own in the days that followed. At the time, in the middle of the night, in the kitchen, it felt to me like a toll I had to pay for a remote hope, a fantasy even, because I still didn’t dare to assume that anything unforeseen or extraordinary was about to happen, but impatience and desire are, at once, both uncontrollable and all-absorbing. Actions and movements are, of course, controllable; we civilized people have learned to put a brake on them and store them away in our imaginations and postpone them, to toss them into the bag of imaginings and make do with that, at least temporarily; this, however, is not the case with feelings, and they always do, I think, end up being communicated to others and betraying us, and that is where those with very strong feelings have the advantage. The desire you give off, especially if you’re young and untutored in the art of dissembling, condenses in the air and impregnates it, like a spreading mist; it reaches the object of desire and then she has to do something about it; she must either leave, remove herself, disappear and thus dissipate the feeling, or accept it and take it up and become entangled. In either case, she finds herself having to deal with something that is nothing to do with her, not of her own creation, which is often both unfair and awkward. The greatest danger (if that’s the right word) is that, in noticing the other person’s desire, you might come up with or conceive of the possibility of actually responding, when it would never have occurred to you to take such an initiative spontaneously. Noticing that someone wants to connect with us sexually obliges us to consider the possibility, even in the most fleeting and rudimentary way; and if you don’t instantly reject or dismiss the idea, if you don’t immediately flee from that mist, then it becomes very difficult not to feel those emanations, which tend not to abate, but to persist, they don’t even succumb to weariness or to the knowledge that they’re useless or unworkable: they exist because they exist, independent of whether they are or aren’t of any use. And so that other person inoculates us with the idea or plants it in our mind, he gives it to us and infects us, and its attractiveness grows with every second that it’s there floating in the air and no one punctures, deflates or bursts it. Sometimes all it takes is a little vehemence to achieve something that seemed unreachable only moments before its release, before it floated upon the air, before we liberated or unleashed it or before it escaped without our consent. Possibly much to our regret.

That is probably more or less what happened. The most probable explanation. My involuntary or voluntary emanations, or both alternately, had their effect, for there were moments when I didn’t care whether she noticed or not and others when I was filled with shame and self-reproach, judging my intentions to be a betrayal of Muriel, even though he had long since abandoned that particular field. Or that’s what I was thinking when I noticed that my paralysed, almost numb hands resting on Beatriz’s shoulders were being drawn slowly down by hers, over her nightdress, not inside. I couldn’t see her face, she was still sitting with her back to me, and I was still standing and could see only the top of her head, I had no idea what her expression might be, whether her eyes were open or closed, if she was fully aware that it was me touching her or if she was imagining the caresses or the pressure of someone else, doubtless her longed-for husband. My position was rather like that of Van Vechten at the Sanctuary, except that I was not yet thrusting away, nor was I at the right height to do so, the most I could do would be to press my belly against her shoulder, so that she could feel it, but I didn’t even have the courage to establish that too explicit contact, I held back — not yet — even though she had guided my hands down towards her breasts, which were almost too large for me to encompass. When I was perched in the tree at the Sanctuary, I’d been able to see her face clearly, pressed against the window, in fact, that was all I could see once the Doctor had turned her round; before that, I had, with some alarm, been staring at the back of her neck as it almost beat against the panes. And that is how I imagined her while I was touching her — yes, I was actually touching her — with her eyes tight shut as if she were some strange, unwonted portrait, her skin firmer and more youthful, her lips fuller or fleshier, as if this were unknown territory for them, more porous, softer, redder, and slightly parted, her eyelashes longer or more visible; but all that was appropriate to the moment of orgasm or to a series of orgasms or a pre-orgasm, and it was far too soon for that.

Then things accelerated and it all happened very fast. She stood up, pushed aside the stool, turned towards me and, in one movement, had pressed her whole body against mine, as she had with Muriel on that other night, when he, at last, unexpectedly granted her wish. I felt the embrace of her chest and belly and limbs, if chest, belly and limbs can be said to embrace: her breast crushed against my breast, her pelvis against mine, her thighs against mine, her arms encircling me with an iron grip, and even her feet on my feet, as if she had stood on them in order to be the same height as me, except that she was tall enough not to need to do that — in fact, in heels, she was taller than me. For a moment, I had a sense of being bound to some supernatural creature, possibly a giantess, not because of her size, for although she was well built, she was of perfectly normal stature, but because of that absolute fusion of bodies, her body coupled with mine, glued to mine, and all in a matter of seconds, with no preamble. Her mouth was the only thing she did not press to mine, though, and when I tried to kiss her, she turned away and offered me her throat or her cheek: ‘No, no kisses,’ I thought, as Beatriz had perhaps said to Van Vechten, ‘No, no caresses’, at the end of their sacred and profane fuck, from my branch I hadn’t been able to hear what they said. Non, pas de baisers, pas de caresses , I must have read something of the sort in some French novel for these imaginary prohibitions to come into my mind in that other language. And neither she nor I said anything during that strange, perfect juxtaposition, standing in the kitchen near the fridge. And so no words either: Non, pas de mots .