Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

At the time, I wasn’t much interested in what he said; later on, I was, when it was too late to unmask anyone and, besides, who really wants to take on that role, even now, all these years after the War, after so many falsified biographies, embellished legends and deliberate or collective forgetting. Hardly anyone cares about all that now — certainly no one who’s semi-young — or only in an artificial, dubiously idealistic way; and hardly anyone else who’s alive today. The dead stop telling their stories once they are just that, dead.

‘And the women went along with it?’ I was much more interested in that part of what Vidal was telling me. Van Vechten couldn’t have submitted Beatriz to that kind of blackmail: she had got married in 1961 or ’62, and Muriel was a child during the War, and his anti-Francoism had always been more intellectual than active. But I couldn’t help thinking about her. Why would she go and see Dr Arranz, Van Vechten’s old sidekick, because it was probably him she visited in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, not Mollá or Deverne or Gekoski or Kociejowski. Perhaps it was merely a matter of habit: perhaps the two men continued to share women, even though the sex was now free and not some form of payment. And maybe Beatriz really didn’t care, like certain vengeful women who have grown weary of their woeful bed, so long as she herself didn’t have to go looking for the instrument of revenge, which can be very depressing.

Vidal rolled his eyes with their large Paul McCartney eyelids. I could see him thinking: ‘God, you’re naive.’

‘Of course they did, Juan, don’t you see? They had no choice. On the one hand, their husband or father could go straight to prison — if they were lucky — on the other hand, what mother wouldn’t do whatever it took; what mother wouldn’t see it as a blessing being able to call out a paediatrician, knowing that he would come at once whenever their child was burning up with fever or at death’s door? I’m afraid many would have been willing to do as much even without the threats. Mothers are prepared to do anything, they’re hostages to fortune, although there are always notable exceptions. Some might even have felt grateful … in a mechanical, reflex-reaction way. Having sex with the person who cures your children isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman, not from her point of view.’ — ‘And I can assure you most of them do want to do it’, the few revelatory words the Doctor had let slip on one of our nocturnal sorties came back to me. — ‘I assume they also counted on that, Van Vechten and Arranz, on the inevitable gratitude, the relief of seeing a sick child out of danger, the slow realization that he was safe. And, as time passed, on familiarity and habit. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they had planted a child in one or two of those families, if they didn’t get bored too soon and if they weren’t careful. And too bad if the child was born very blond and the theoretical father was very dark.’

This reminded me of that brief encounter with the veteran whore in Chicote. ‘I know you, don’t I? I remember those blue, blue eyes and that blond hair,’ she had said to the Doctor. He wasn’t easy to forget, with that baguette on his head.

‘What I don’t understand is why Van Vechten was so desperate,’ I said. ‘Not that I consider him attractive, there’s even something rather repellent about him, I think. But with that yellow hair and those pale, watery eyes, with that perennial, rectangular smile and his large build, he must have been very striking as a young man and would have been a hit with women. You wouldn’t think he would need to use threats to get them into bed.’

This time, Vidal did not hold back. Like I say, he treated me like a younger brother with whom he had lived on and off.

‘I didn’t think you were so innocent, Juan. You’ve seen the way he behaves around women, haven’t you? With your own friends, I understand, and they’re young enough to be his daughters. He’s an insatiable predator and always has been, that part of his reputation is true; he’s the kind who keeps a tally of how many women he’s had sex with. You surely don’t think that in the 1940s and 50s there were many women prepared to go all the way, just like that and willingly. Not for pleasure or love or anything. Do you honestly imagine that the sexual revolution was up and running and that the pill already existed? It was really difficult to get laid in Spain. You had to waste a lot of time and make a lot of promises, and even then. Ask the nurses at the Hospital de San Carlos and at the Clínica Ruber, even at the Hospital Francisco Franco, where he landed up when he was older, as Head of Paediatrics no less, with even more power, of course, and in more liberated days too, at the end of the 60s or thereabouts. He tried it on with all of them, those worth having, that is; tastefully and not so tastefully, forcefully and not so forcefully, and with more or less success; and he’s still doing it in his sixties. He’ll never stop.’

I suddenly thought of Celia the civil servant, the bullfighter Viana’s girlfriend. Her verdict had been: ‘He’s a bit of an old lecher,’ and she had gone on to say: ‘It seemed to me that he touched me more than was necessary, a woman notices these things straight away … he’d stroke my abdomen as if his fingers were about to go where they shouldn’t … and he kept brushing my breasts with the sleeve of his white coat or with his wrist, as though by accident … I felt sort of queasy when I left … I felt like I’d been groped.’ And that had happened during a brief medical examination. And she wasn’t the kind of woman to imagine such things, nor was she a prude.

‘I see,’ I said slowly. ‘He’s obviously not one to miss a trick.’ And I blushed a little, thinking that perhaps already, at the age of twenty-three, I, too, was not one to miss a trick. I suppose I at least had the excuse of youth. And I had never blackmailed or threatened anyone.

‘And never underestimate the added pleasure of domination, of humiliating the defeated,’ Vidal went on, and his tone grew more bitter. ‘Screwing someone’s wife or daughter with his knowledge and with him unable to do a thing about it. The man’s a complete and utter bastard. Have nothing more to do with him. Admittedly, he may have changed radically since then, I’m not saying he hasn’t; maybe other people’s false perception of him has led him to fit himself to that mould and become a genuine conciliator and even a very belated anti- franquista . Always remember, though, that at the time he wasn’t. Then it was all a front and to him those cuckolds were the enemy, defeated, but nonetheless the enemy. He must have loved it. The very thought enrages me, but what can you do, that’s how things stand now. And it’s probably for the best. But I’m determined to tell the story, and whatever I know I tell.’

Vidal’s eyes once again fixed on the tabletop, on the ashtrays and the beers the waiter had just brought us.

‘Do you know a place called the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Darmstadt?’ I asked suddenly. I could see he knew a lot of things. ‘Not far from here —’

He looked up and, interrupting me, said:

‘Yes, I’ve often walked past it. And wait, I’ve heard Dr Naval mention it, now what did he say exactly? Oh, I know. I think it’s a branch or a replica of another sanctuary of the same name, in Chile. And it was founded by Germans, I believe, who settled there in the 1940s and 50s. Hence the name, I suppose; so the Chilean sanctuary is probably a replica too.’ — I’d seen the name ‘Father Gustavo Hörbiger’ on one of the signs at the sanctuary: a Hispanicized form of an undeniably German name. — ‘And it’s run by some Apostolic Movement …’ Vidal was trying to remember as he spoke. ‘No, I don’t know, I’d have to ask Naval, who mentioned it to me once, but I wasn’t really paying attention and now I can’t recall what he said. However, I’ve an idea that some of Pinochet’s high-ranking officers and even some of his ministers belong to that movement.’ — Pinochet’s dictatorship was still going strong in 1980 and would for a while longer. Five years earlier, Pinochet had turned up in Madrid to attend Franco’s funeral, wrapped in a sinister Dracula cloak and wearing the kind of dark glasses blind men wear, the living image of a humanoid bat in a peaked cap. — ‘Why do you ask?’