Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

‘Thus bad begins and worse remains behind,’ that is the Shakespeare quote Muriel was alluding to when he spoke of the benefits or advisability of — the comparatively minor harm involved in — giving up trying to know what we cannot know, of removing ourselves from the hubbub of what others tell us throughout our life, so much so that even what we ourselves experience and witness sometimes seems more like a story told to us, as it moves further off and becomes besmirched by time, or grows faded with the tick-tock of the passing days or grows dim beneath the breath of all those moons and the dust of all those years, and it’s not so much that we then begin to doubt its existence (although occasionally we do), it’s more that it loses its colour and its importance wanes. What was important no longer is, or only very faintly, and to retrieve that scrap of importance you have to make a real effort; what seemed crucial to us is revealed to be a matter of complete indifference, and what destroyed our life seems mere foolishness, an exaggeration, a piece of nonsense. How could I have been so upset or felt so guilty, how could I have wished to die, even if only rhetorically? It really didn’t merit so much fuss — I can see that now — when its effects are on the path to dispersal and oblivion and there’s barely any trace left of the person I was then. Of what significance is what happened or what happened to me, what I did, what I kept secret or failed to confess? What does it matter that a little child died, when millions of others have fallen without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow, apart, that is, from their progenitors, and sometimes not even them: the world is full of stoical mothers who say nothing and endure, and who perhaps press their grieving face into their silent pillow in the solitude of night, so as not to be seen. What does it matter if, one insomniac night, a young man went to bed with one of those mothers and what if a daughter found out and ran back down the corridor, troubled and barefoot, trying to erase that knowledge or, on the contrary, storing it away, so that it would have a determining effect on her own future marriage and, therefore, on her existence? What does it matter if a woman told a lie once, however much harm it did, or perhaps the harm attributed to that lie was exaggerated, for when all’s said and done, lies form part of the natural flow of life, which is inconceivable without a dose of falsehood, without that equilibrium between truth and deceit? What does it matter if a decent, upright man should, for years, reject that woman and insult her? Households are full of rejections and slights and mortifications and insults, especially behind closed doors (and sometimes one gets shut inside with them by accident). What does it matter if one of those mothers kills herself, when she had already teetered along that knife-edge and when her nearest and dearest were expecting her suicide, which was even announced by the tick-tock of the metronome that she herself set in motion, when she was playing or not playing the piano? What does it matter that a twisted man abused his power and knowledge and behaved indecently with certain vulnerable women, almost all of them mothers and daughters? Just as now it doesn’t matter in the least that a film producer for whom we work either was or wasn’t involved in trafficking women in America in the Kennedy era, women who were vulnerable or invulnerable and stoical. What point is there in trying to stop, avoid, watch, punish and even know all this; history is too full of minor abuses and major villainies against which nothing can be done because there is such an avalanche of them, and what do we gain by finding out about them? What happens has happened and is irreversible, that is the terrible force of facts, their unliftable weight. Perhaps it’s best to shrug one’s shoulders and nod and ignore them, to accept that this is the way of the world. ‘Thus bad begins and worse remains behind,’ that’s what Shakespeare said. And only once we have nodded and shrugged our shoulders does worse remain behind, because at least it is over. And thus only bad begins, the bad that has not yet happened.

This, or something like it, is what Muriel must have thought when I finally had a stroke of luck and could provide him with information about what Van Vechten had done during the years when he’d behaved so well towards the people suffering persecution or reprisals under the Franco regime, and when he’d gained a reputation as a compassionate, understanding man who had refused to take any money for treating the whooping cough or measles or chickenpox of the children of those struggling to scrape a living. It’s true, however, that we always arrive late in people’s lives, indeed, we generally arrive late for everything: Muriel had decided not to hear what I had to say, not to listen to what I’d chanced to discover, whether I’d discovered it entirely by chance or thanks to my own persistence (‘I don’t want you to tell me about it, to test my curiosity. Keep it to yourself, say nothing,’ he said) and he had ordered me to cease my investigations and my wheedlings, even to abandon my outings with the Doctor, albeit gradually. However, I found it impossible not at least to try to get him to listen, to tell him the story I’d heard not from Van Vechten, but from another doctor, a younger man, Dr Vidal Secanell, a family friend and my friend too, even though we saw each other only occasionally. If the story was true, it would have been inconceivable that Van Vechten would have openly admitted it to me, not even on a night of heavy drinking or endless boasting or contrite confessions (the latter was hard to imagine); we could have gone out to discos and bars and so on thousands of times and have developed a profound sense of camaraderie, but still not a word about what he had done would have left his lips; it was the kind of thing you hope will remain hidden for ever, a secret you will take with you to the grave, although we all know which of our secrets would be best discreetly buried, if it were up to us. We don’t, however, always get our way: as soon as someone else intervenes — and someone will always intervene, be it an accomplice, an intermediary, a witness or a victim — rumours, however subterranean, will start to spread, and nothing is ever completely safe. In the light of that story, Van Vechten had already told me a lot, and although I did pass on his words to Muriel, they weren’t enough: ‘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.’ Of course I couldn’t understand the meaning of those words without knowing the story I was told by Vidal, who was scornful of and shocked by my friendship with Van Vechten. Muriel, on the other hand, would have understood, because he would probably have been told the same story by the person who had come to him or, rather, by a former lover, ‘the love of my life, as people say’.

It didn’t happen at once, but neither did I have to wait long for an opportunity to tell him. I mean that it happened immediately after Muriel’s return from Barcelona. He came home only a few days later, looking very angry and annoyed and bearing bad news, an insult. Towers had got rid of him, sacked him, had refused to allow him to finish filming, and had turned instead to Jesús Franco to see if he, with his sans-façon and talent for juggling multiple projects, could bring the film into safe harbour. Jesús had said Yes, but that he wouldn’t be able to take over for another week and a half, having other business to finish. The amazing thing is that he was able to find time at all, because I see from the Internet that no fewer than thirteen feature-length films by him are dated 1980 or 1981. And his trusted friend Don Sharp was busy too. Towers couldn’t have Herbert Lom and the other actors twiddling their thumbs for another ten days and so he had sent them all home and suspended the production for the moment. Filming was never resumed, which is why, as I said, the title doesn’t appear in any filmography and remains unfinished, a ghost work. I asked Muriel what exactly had happened, but he was in no mood for giving explanations.