Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

‘Do you really think so? Are you serious?’ However precocious in other respects, I was too young to understand that. Young people are overly attached to the truth, the truth that affects them, that is. They themselves are frequently rather less than truthful, but you can’t expect them to question those truths that concern or touch them. They can’t bear to be mocked or taken for fools, when that, in fact, is a minor matter and the common fate of all men and women, without distinction.

‘Yes, I really do. I had, after all, made an effort, a huge effort. I’d taken absolutely seriously the advice of that other woman, whose words you recalled. Hers was a rhetorical, not to say dramatic recommendation, yes, a final theatrical flourish. Quite right, given the abrupt, unexpected nature of that farewell, a way of preserving her dignity. But I took it literally, I saw the sense in it. And so I did exactly as she said, I forgot all about her and me, insofar as that was possible, that is, superficially: a nostalgia for the life you discarded always lingers on in the inner depths of your being, and, during bad times, you seek refuge in it as you might in a daydream or a fantasy. But once I’d made that decision, or on that morning when I left the airport with Beatriz on my arm, as if we were a real couple setting out towards our future, I decided that I would follow that path. “I’m going to love her,” I told myself over and over, “I’m going to be always by her side. I’m going to be faithful to her, I’m not going to fail her or abandon her. I didn’t choose her, but she’s the person who it’s fallen to me to marry. It doesn’t matter, though, I’ll stay by her side, I’ll protect and support her and care for her children, and I’ll love her as if I had chosen her. I’ll forget what was lost along the way, it’s too late to go back and, besides, that path is no longer mine to follow. I will walk this path without looking back and will try not to complain.” That’s what I told myself and repeated to myself endless times, over many years.’

‘And did you keep that promise?’ I asked, although I knew the answer, because I’d heard it that night when Beatriz rapped timidly on his bedroom door with one knuckle: ‘How stupid of me to love you during all those years, love you with all my heart, as long, that is, as I knew nothing,’ he had said, placing his hands on her shoulders, before disdainfully, crudely groping her body, with perhaps a vague or concealed lust he had long since forbidden himself to feel. And after a while, after the groping, she had answered: ‘No, it wasn’t stupid of you. On the contrary, you were quite right to love me during all those years, all those past years … You’ve probably never done anything better.’ Then I felt sure that her eyes must have filled with tears, because that’s the only explanation I could find for Muriel’s surprising reaction. ‘I’ll grant you that,’ he said. ‘All the more reason for me to feel I’ve thrown away my life. A part of my life. That’s why I can’t forgive you.’ And he said this in a gentle, almost regretful voice.

‘Of course I kept my promise, perhaps excessively. As I said, it was easy enough to love her, but without passion. But then passion isn’t essential. And I found it easier still after her revelations about her father, his convalescence and subsequent death, I saw her as helpless and rootless, alone and without a place in the world. It was easy enough to desire her too, until I felt repelled by what she’d done, and it was then that she began to neglect herself. I’m not saying I didn’t have the odd flirtation during those twelve years, because we often spent time apart, when I was filming in America or not so far afield. But they were very few and were just that, occasional flirtations that were never any threat to her and left no mark on me, still less nostalgia. I can barely remember them now. Then the children came along, and that always strengthens ties. Then our oldest child died, and we got through that together. I won’t even attempt to describe what the death of a small child means, there’s far too much cheap, opportunistic literature out there, too many films exploiting that misfortune as a guaranteed way to move people to tears and pity, it’s easy enough in fiction and in autobiography, it’s cynical, indecent. Even Thomas Mann resorted to it, I believe, in his famous Doctor Faustus . Anyway, it’s something you never forget. It’s not just the child you don’t forget, but the person who was by your side, who experienced that misfortune with you, who you watched suffer and struggle to keep afloat, who you sustained and who you yourself clung to so that she could sustain you. You can’t cancel out everything that happened, Juan, even if the origin of it all turns out to have been a lie.’

He broke off, remained sunk in thought. He was no longer looking up, but staring downwards with his one fixed and penetrating eye, as if trying to see right through the wooden floorboards. I didn’t dare go over to the photo of Beatriz and the little boy, which was my first impulse; not that I really needed to, I knew it well and had studied it carefully. I took a moment to glance over at the glass door, where there was not a trace now of the blurred face; perhaps she was hiding behind the door frame or had left, not wanting to hear any more (if she could hear) or not wanting to be discovered there by her old and current love who had so wholeheartedly rejected her (‘I’m so sorry, my love,’ she had said).

‘Why did she tell you after all those years?’

‘Oh, the reason is the least of it. Not long after Tomás was born, we had an argument. There was an actress … She wasn’t important then, none of them were, not even the woman I left for Beatriz, and by the time she reappeared briefly in my life, I had carried out her advice to the letter. And one time cannot supplant another … Anyway, I turned very nasty, you’ve seen me do it, I can be very provoking. And that’s what I did to her on that occasion, and she blurted it out without a thought, without considering the possible consequences. We so often gauge things badly, thinking erroneously that the words we say are less harmful than anything we might do with our hands. So much time had passed, so many things and events had intervened, children, films, our marriage, that she saw her earlier trick as mere childish nonsense, at least that’s what she always says in her defence. I see it too as prehistory, something that our life together should have buried ages ago, beneath the weight of the present, the weight of events, of irreversible time. But the worst thing wasn’t that she told me, but that she actually brought me the letter to show me. She went straight to a shelf, took the letter out of a book and handed it to me. There it was, opened, but still in its stamped envelope, the name and address in my handwriting, I’d written “Express” on it in red pen and tremulously entrusted it to the postal service, taken it to the central post office in Cibeles so that it would get there more quickly. I’d sweated blood over writing it, spent a whole sleepless night, weighed every word, trying to be honest and at the same time not to hurt her, or as little as possible. As far as I was concerned, it had got lost in some limbo and never arrived, and yet there it was, it had travelled all the way to America and come back with her in her suitcases or perhaps in her handbag or already tucked inside the book she had perhaps read during that long flight. It had spent twelve years in her grasp and, what’s more, she had kept it. Why else would you keep something like that — when it would make more sense to destroy it, burn it — if not to show it to me one day, in order to gloat, in order to rub it in, not content with having changed the course of my entire life, with directing my life as a director would an actor, imposing herself on my life and occupying it against my express wishes, which she had known from the start. She must have wanted me to find out one day, must have wanted me, one day, to be undeceived, when deception is sometimes the best state to be in if you’re resigned to your lot. And I was pretty much resigned to my lot. I’d certainly forgotten all about passion, which is not that difficult, given what a rare thing it is.’