Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

‘Beatriz, as you know, was largely brought up in America. But she often spent whole summers here as well as the occasional school term, living with her aunt and uncle, and that’s how we first met, when she was almost an adolescent and I was a young man. And when she was a young woman and I a slightly older young man, we got engaged. I suppose it was inevitable that she would fall in love with an older friend of her cousins; with a Spaniard, like her father, rather than with an American. And that she would have the patience to wait until she’d grown up enough to be noticed and to win my heart. Yes, although I’m a few years her senior, which mattered more then than it does now, that is the right expression. Girls are very determined and stubborn, and tend to want to see their childhood dreams come true. Until they reach a certain age or until they see them crushed for ever. That wasn’t the case with us. As soon as she reached adolescence, which she did very early, I began to look at her differently, and the other person’s enthusiasm does tend to persuade and carry you along, and I’ve almost always been the passive type. It wasn’t hard to love her. Besides, Beatriz wasn’t the great fat cow you know now. On the contrary.’

At the risk of revealing my secret — when you’ve something to hide, you’re afraid to utter even the most innocent of words — I broke in, driven by an urge to do her justice and defend her — which I was finally in a position to do — more than by a need to justify to myself my carnal baseness on that insomniac night and my occasional visual baseness on other nights.

‘You do exaggerate, Eduardo, you do blow things up out of all proportion. It’s hard to believe that you don’t intend to wound her when you come out with things like that. How can you possibly describe Beatriz as a fat cow? Or a cask of amontillado.’ It had probably never occurred to him that I might remember his insults, but it was time he realized that I’d memorized nearly all of them. ‘She’s still a very attractive woman, whom many men would find desirable. As you well know.’

Muriel laughed unexpectedly. He was doubtless amused to be reminded of his own wounding insult, with its incidental homage to Poe. I preferred not to remind him of other outrageous comparisons to the hot-air balloon from Around the World in 80 Days or Hitchcock’s silhouetted figure, still less Charles Laughton.

Buah , he said, or was it Bué ? ‘There’s no accounting for taste. I imagine there are some men who like voluptuous women. The ones who only want to get them into bed. The lechers of this world.’ Again that word that had been used before to describe Van Vechten, one of the men who did find Beatriz attractive, in however utilitarian a fashion, or, given his age, perhaps he couldn’t afford to be choosy. But I was nearly forty years his junior. Perhaps I was a bit of a lecher at the time too, it’s not uncommon among young men, beginners don’t have much taste.

‘I think you’re wrong. I think that one day you made a decision and put a veil over your eyes that you’ve chosen not to take off. A distorting veil. But I interrupted you. You were saying she wasn’t a fat cow then, on the contrary.’

‘Quite. I don’t mean she was scrawny, not at all. No, she was always on the voluptuous side, but in proportion. She was striking. She was very pretty and sensual, with those slightly widely spaced teeth of hers. She smiled a lot. And she certainly filled her clothes, but in a good way. To put it bluntly: she was an absolute dish, if that’s an expression you still use nowadays. And, yes, any man would have fancied her then, especially me. She was a real gift in that respect. And since she set the pace, I just let myself be carried along. Looking back, and despite all that, it’s possible that I might not have taken the initiative, or wouldn’t have gone so far as to get engaged. Engaged to be married, you understand. But she was so determined and so strong, and tried so hard to please me … You’ll have noticed that she knows as much if not more about films as I do. She made my interests hers and moulded herself to my tastes and my eccentricities, I sometimes think that this was a task she set herself, a programme, as if, even when she was a girl, she’d said to herself: “I’m not going to let this man be bored in my company. I don’t want him not to be able to share a part of his life with me because he thinks I won’t be interested or won’t be up to understanding it. I don’t want him to find me lacking and to look elsewhere. I don’t want him to exclude me from anything.” She was not only happy to see all kinds of films, from masterpieces to the utter tripe I sometimes dragged her along to — because to get a real grasp of things, you need to see the full range, the old and the new, the good, the bad and the bizarre — she also read all the books I recommended, and quickly overtook me in that regard. The young Beatriz wasn’t the woman you see now, apathetic and unstable, spending hours at the piano without so much as playing a scale. She brimmed with energy and curiosity, she was unstoppable. Of course I’ll never know to what extent she had her own life, or if she merely lived her life through me. She took all the weight, she did all the heavy work demanded by any loving relationship when it’s just starting out, and afterwards too, as it develops.’ He paused very briefly, then added: ‘It wasn’t hard to love her. Another person’s love is inevitably touching. It arouses pity too, like the love of children. So much so that it seems cruel not to accept it, not to welcome it. It’s the kind of pity that melts the heart. Even though there was no passion on my part … not that I missed it at the time, having never experienced it.’

He remained silent for longer this time and fixed his gaze on his beloved painting of the retreating horsemen and the one man turning round, dressed in red and possibly one-eyed, in order to cast a final, stern backward glance at the fallen he was leaving behind and whose deaths he and his men had probably caused: ‘At least remember me .’

‘And what happened then?’ I didn’t want to give him time to have second thoughts, to regret telling me about something that was still no business of mine.

‘She moved here when she was about eighteen, to live with her aunt and uncle, who thought of her almost as a daughter. I’m afraid I was the reason for that move, so that she could be close to me. Or, rather, she reversed the order of her visits, going to Massachusetts once a year to spend two or three months with her father, her solitary, disastrous father, and look after him a little. During those visits, we would write to each other — well, phoning was just unthinkable then, we’re talking about 1959 or 1960 remember. No one could afford it. Then, about six or seven months before the wedding (she had just turned twenty-one, I think), she had to go to America urgently, some serious incident, some grave problem. Her father … I don’t know how much I should tell you about him, Juan, it’s not really up to me …’ He gave a sigh of annoyance, drummed his fingers on his eyepatch, pondered for a few seconds, then opted for indiscretion. ‘Her father was a homosexual. There you are, I’ve said it. He may always have been, and it may not have been a belated discovery, as Beatriz at first believed. Perhaps that’s why his wife left him shortly after Beatriz was born and chose not to accompany him into exile. That may have been part of the reason why he chose exile, who knows? He was a Republican by conviction, but hadn’t done anything very significant during the War and wasn’t, therefore, at risk of being persecuted. But for a man with that problem (and it was an enormous problem then, your generation has no idea) and with a child to take care of, you can imagine what it would have been like for him in Franco’s ultra-religious Spain, with the Church having been given carte blanche. If he’d been found out, they would, for a start, have taken his daughter from him. So he went first to France, then to Mexico and ended up teaching in Massachusetts, thanks to some contacts he had there; he had a thorough knowledge of Spanish literature and was a pretty decent translator from German and English, in fact, you can still find some of his translations in second-hand bookshops. Not that there was much, if any, tolerance of homosexuality in 1940s or 50s America or even in the mid-60s, but it wasn’t like it was here, where all queers were sent to prison — no, almost anywhere was more civilized than here. I don’t know how he coped. A lot of self-imposed abstinence, I suppose, and a few weekend escapes to Boston or New York, where he wouldn’t be noticed (on a campus it was impossible), to visit the odd clandestine or semi-clandestine club and have some fun. There would have been bars like the one Don Murray goes to in Advise and Consent , with men dancing with each other, you’ve seen it, haven’t you?’ I shook my head. ‘You haven’t? You’re mad. What are you waiting for? It’s wonderful. It was made in 1962 and is based on fact, so there must have been something of the sort at the time. Whatever the truth of the matter, poor Ernesto Noguera would have had a much harder time of it having a bit of modest fun in America than Towers did setting up his prostitution racket in the headquarters of the United Nations, because that coincided more or less with the final part of her father’s life.’ He raised one hand to his chin, stroked it repeatedly with his thumb and smiled: despite his humiliating dismissal from the Towers film, and given his excitement about his new project with Palance and hopefully Widmark, his most furious fury must have passed. ‘Harry’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? I’m sure what Lom told us is true, about the worst of his dirty tricks, I mean. What did you think?’