Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

I became impatient, in a hurry for what seemed about to happen to actually happen. I was afraid she might draw back, separate, or that I might push her away, suddenly keeping her at a distance by placing one hand on her shoulder, as Muriel had done, with that single authoritative gesture, after suffering her overwhelming response to his unexpected and doubtless commiserative embrace. There was nothing commiserative about my embrace, not at all, it was youthfully lustful or elementally lascivious; as I said, when you’re young, it’s hard to turn down any opportunity, you feel you should seize all opportunities or certainly the great majority of them, the only exceptions being when you feel a clear, unmistakable distaste or those occasions that don’t even seem likely to be worth calling up later as a memory, as a treasured image for the mature or old man we will one day become and whom we can’t even imagine then, can’t even glimpse on the horizon, but who, mysteriously, is already there in our unconscious mind like a ghost of the future. It is that older man who sometimes whispers to our youthful self: ‘Remember this experience and note every detail, experience it with me in mind and as if you knew it would never happen again except in your memory, which is my memory; engrave it on your retina as if these were the most memorable sequences and shots from a film; you won’t be able to preserve the excitement or relive it, but you will recall the sense of triumph and, more especially, the knowledge: you will know that this happened and you always will; grasp it firmly, take a long look at this woman and keep that image safe, because later on, I will ask you for it and you will have to offer it to me as consolation.’

I knew very clearly that this was one of those instances. There was no distaste, quite the contrary, but if there was a risk that I might retreat (a very minor risk as I recognized at once), this was because I was troubled by the idea that I was perhaps committing a vile deed. Not just because of the loyalty I owed to Muriel, but because I was possibly taking advantage of or abusing, to use the appropriate verb, Beatriz Noguera’s probable disorientation and confusion and fragility and, of course, her continuing unhappiness and even her accidental insomnia: she was much older than me and therefore more experienced in some respects, and she didn’t seem to care about her lovers, but perhaps she used them consciously to comfort herself, to feel that she wasn’t pure lard or a bag of flour or flesh, yes, solely for that reason and to avenge herself in her imagination, fictitiously (‘If he knew’ much more than ‘When he finds out’), because there can be no real revenge if the victim doesn’t know about it or doesn’t suffer; but she was also someone who had recently experienced an unbearable sense of world-weariness or despair, who had just tried to slit her own wrists — those still bandaged wrists were an additional element, one of those details my future self would recall in many years’ time, as I knew already because the sight of them only increased my desire — someone who was not always quite right in the head, as she herself had said, someone frustrated and rejected and who cared little what would come in the days that had been loaned or gifted to her following her attempted suicide, but then who does care what happens to them after death, and Beatriz had already died three times, at least in her mind; she was, inevitably, easy prey, beaten and will-less or weakened by indifference, the kind that would be capable of saying to anyone, not just to me: ‘Do what you like, I won’t resist, my time for resisting anything has passed.’ It bothered me that the word ‘prey’ should have leapt into my head, since she was the one who had stood up and turned round and thrown herself into my arms or, rather, at my whole body, even treading on my toes, climbing on to them as if she were a little girl, and she certainly wasn’t that. And yet, and yet … I couldn’t help persuading myself that my conquest — another unfortunate word — had been the result of my emanations or pulsations, that they had provoked this almost overreaction; I couldn’t help but see myself as the seducer, the opportunist, almost as the guilty party, perhaps that is always what the keener partner feels, although there’s never any certain way of knowing who is keener than who, sometimes it remains hidden until it can remain hidden no longer. And that is perhaps when I committed the vilest of deeds, in order to shake off all those other possibilities, and I did so with my thoughts alone, but fully intending to act and not to stop: ‘What does it matter, I saved her, I saved her from the blood and the water, because no one else would have known about it otherwise.’ I dredged up that same miserable idea and this time formulated it in my head more or less as I’ve written it down now, while I was exploring or groping a new area — not in a humiliating way, but ardently, appreciatively — and feeling for her knickers underneath her silk nightdress, then pulling them down to mid-thigh level, one tug, two, and they no longer covered what they had been covering, I could use one finger or two to caress her, with nothing in the way now, or even slip them inside. ‘The fact that she’s here and breathing, that her skin smells so good and her flesh is still so abundant and alive, is all thanks to me, I have won the right to enjoy them; this woman who is neither memory nor ash nor decomposing flesh nor bare bone, this woman who survived is mine and will be tonight for a while at least; after all, these encounters are short-lived and then we’ll both wash ourselves clean and it will be as if it had never happened, apart from our wretched memory, which presents us with events of which no visible trace remains, which means that no one else knows, no one will find out if they weren’t there, and if someone does talk about what happened later on, that’s pure rumour. I’m an extension of Muriel, she herself said so, perhaps that’s why she clings to me as she clung to him, in just the same way, as soon as she had the chance and it became a possibility; perhaps she’s doing it in order to replace him and to deceive herself with her eyes shut, or perhaps to annoy him, although he will probably never know that I’ve screwed her, I certainly won’t tell him and neither will she. But what do I care about the whys and wherefores, if there are any, and if she even knows what they are, it’s time to get down to business.’ And at this point, I grew impatient, hence the choice of language, which tends to be what passes through the mind when the feelings are superficial and the desire selfish. Vulgar terms, but they are never spoken out loud unless there is mutual trust and a liking for them or as a willing game between two lewd strangers, otherwise, they are only ever thought. There are no witnesses to our thoughts, and we don’t have to be respectful or polite in them. And so I had no hesitation in saying to myself: ‘I’ve got to screw her now, quickly and with no preliminaries, in case she takes a step back and has second thoughts midway through and what is just about to be won’t be; I would never forgive myself, to have come so close and then to fail, to have brought the painting to life, to have endowed it with tremulous movement and volume only to let that likeness escape intact and unentered. Once I’m inside, there’ll be no going back, I’ll feel that warmth, that moistness and it will have happened and then I’ll have that memory until the end of my days and be able to think about it whenever I choose: “I fucked Beatriz Noguera, who would have thought it, who could have predicted it; that’s how it was and no one can change it.” Even if she still is in a disturbed state and not in control of her decisions, her actions; even if she forgets all about it or wipes it from her mind, even if she’s dead and buried, even if she disappears from the world long before I do and hardly anyone knows who she was, still less remembers her, and even if no one tells the tenuous story of her private life even in whispers, this will have happened and no one will be able to take that away from me, and for me it will be an ineradicable piece of knowledge.’