Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

Muriel had forgotten the purpose of his speech, his riposte or defence. This happened more and more often. It wasn’t his age, he was only in his fifties after all. Sometimes he spoke at length and, at others, was brusque and laconic, and this had been so since I first met him. But the two tendencies had become more marked: when he spoke at length he spoke for longer and when he was brusque he was even brusquer. Now he stopped, as if disoriented, as though asking himself: ‘Why the devil are we talking about this?’ And I took advantage of this pause to try to lead him in the direction I wanted:

‘But Beatriz did harm you,’ I said. ‘Beatriz did something unforgivable to you.’ His eye flashed into life, as if he were shooting an arrow at me, albeit not as yet a very sharp one. ‘You see, Eduardo, while you were in Barcelona, Beatriz and I talked more than usual; that was my role, I was here as her companion, her guardian, her protector.’ — ‘Don’t let your tongue run away with you,’ I thought, ‘and be careful what you reveal, you don’t want to betray yourself: Muriel has seen far too much cinema.’ — ‘Since I came to work here … well, I can see you feel a kind of retrospective affection for her, I don’t know how else to put it. For old times’ sake. She remembers them as having been very good times, or more than that, she holds them close and clings to them, as you well know. And I saw how alarmed you were that night at the Hotel Wellington, your panic at the possibility that she might have killed herself. But I also see that you find her unbearable. You almost always treat her badly, very badly. Perhaps you have good reason, but I don’t know that reason, and it’s really not at all pleasant to see.’

Muriel’s eye softened, now it was only sarcastic. With two rapid movements, he rolled up his sleeves still further; the sun was getting higher and it was beginning to get hot.

‘And did she not tell you the reason during one of your long chats? The lady of the house complaining to the innocent boy, with her as the poor victim.’

‘No. She said she was ashamed to tell me, because it was so ridiculous. That it would be better if you told me yourself and then I would see how disproportionate your reaction had been. All I could get out of her was that she once told you a lie that you took very much to heart. Something really stupid, a childish thing, was how she described it. She never imagined you would react in such a violent, exaggerated fashion.’

‘And you believed her?’

‘How can I believe anything when I still don’t know the facts? But unlike you with regard to the Doctor, I would like to find out what lies behind what I’ve witnessed. Don’t worry, you’ve made it quite clear that whatever the Doctor did doesn’t affect you in any way; if it happened, you weren’t there to witness it, so why should it interest you? Don’t worry, I won’t insist. But in exchange for my silence, why don’t you tell me once and for all? I think I’ve been very respectful of your reserve since I’ve been working here. I’ve asked you very few questions. But all reserve has its limits, as does all respect. Forgive me for being so direct, but what exactly did Beatriz do to you?’

Muriel did not respond at once. He was, it seemed to me, pondering my words. Then he looked at his watch, tapped its face with his finger, as I had seen him do on other occasions and as if he were calculating whether or not he could afford to devote a little time to me, time that had not been part of his plan for that morning. His eye changed again: it again looked at me with a certain fondness or understanding or patience; perhaps also with a degree of interest. I assumed that he had heard my request and accepted it, that he understood my curiosity and did not reproach me for it. Perhaps he realized that he had kept me too much in the dark. By bringing someone into your home, you are inevitably obliging him to be a witness to your life. And while there’s no reason why you should have to explain anything to him if he’s being paid to work for you, inevitably the employee will silently pass judgement and ask questions, it happens with even the most invisible and sporadic and insignificant of employees. He would never know to what extent I had become established and involved in his world, and I hoped he never would. But he did know that I had served him as spy and vigilante and had saved his wife from death, although not as purely by chance as he believed, for he knew nothing about my unseemly habit of secretly following her on some or quite a number of afternoons, a habit I had since abandoned. Perhaps Muriel had never stopped to think that I might have made any silent judgements or had questions that remained unasked. Now he was discovering that I had both and perhaps discovering, too, that they were not a matter of indifference to him, but of some importance, and that he needed to give me his version of events in order to influence those judgements, those questions, that it was no longer appropriate to answer me brusquely: ‘Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t employ you to ask me questions about matters that are none of your business.’ That time had gone or been replaced, but he hadn’t noticed until I voiced my discontent, until that moment.

‘Give Mercedes a ring and tell her I won’t be coming in this morning after all. Tell her to get on with whatever needs doing. And then sit down. This is going to take a while.’

I phoned from the desk in the office, right there. Meanwhile, he went over to the door separating his side of the apartment from the corridor and carefully pulled it to: it was a high door with two leaves that had become warped so that they never quite clicked shut; the lower half was painted white, while the upper half was made of frosted panes of glass framed in white wood, typical of those old Madrid apartments.

‘Where do you want me to sit?’ I asked absurdly, to make his job easier, just in case he had a preference.

‘Wherever you like,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lie on the floor, in keeping with your possible opinion of me, if you’re of the view that Beatriz is right and that I have fallen very low. That it was all ridiculous, a piece of childish nonsense.’ He said this with a faint smile, which seemed to me somewhat forced. It can’t have been easy to start talking about what he was going to talk to me about, or perhaps he was reluctant to revisit those distant events, or still felt so embittered by them that they had extinguished any underlying joviality in his character. ‘Don’t go thinking you’re the first person she’s told this to, her women friends can’t stand the sight of me, my sister-in-law, for example. Beatriz genuinely believes it, so either she’s an idiot or I’m very wicked. You might incline to the latter view. But she’s not normally an idiot and I’m not naturally wicked. One of us has changed.’ And once he was lying down on the floor, one arm under his head as a pillow (when he was already staring up at the ceiling or at the topmost shelves of the library or at the painting by Casanova, and at me out of the corner of his one half-closed eye), to my surprise, he added: ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to witness those embarrassing scenes these past months. And you’re quite right, I should have been more careful, more discreet. It took me no time at all to get used to having you around and I’ve come to think of you as an extension of myself.’

This was the same diagnosis Beatriz had made on that insomniac night. She had added: ‘Which is both good and bad.’

‘Don’t worry, it wasn’t so very terrible.’ I felt obliged to play down the importance of those scenes. He had unexpectedly apologized and that only increased my feeling of betrayal and baseness, at least nominally. I’d had sex with his wife in his absence and couldn’t apologize for that, if, indeed, I needed to, given that he didn’t want her in his own bed. That’s the trouble with secrets, one can never ask forgiveness.