Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

I waited a few days after the funeral before going to see Muriel on my own, a kind of tacit, individual presentation of condolences, and, I suppose, to keep him company for a while, although most of the time he was with other people, because in those circumstances, people do tend to flood in for a short period, never leaving the bereaved person alone for a minute, visiting him, taking him out, trying to distract him and keep him so busy and buzzing with activity that he doesn’t think about the one thing occupying his thoughts, and feels less keenly the absence of the person who has irreversibly absented herself. Then those same people grow weary in unison and leave him alone, as if there were a social expiry date for mourning, two or three weeks at most, and as if they then considered the widow or widower to be in a fit state to get back up and running again and resume her or his normal life and habits, when it is precisely normal life that has ended, never to return. Muriel was clearly deeply affected and doubtless disconcerted, he seemed slightly shrunken and hesitant, as though the loss of Beatriz had uncovered a certain vulnerability, although I didn’t imagine this would last. But when a situation ends, you miss it, even the worst possible situation, even one you’d wished would end countless times. That paradoxical nostalgia doesn’t last very long, but initially you get the same empty feeling as when you’ve achieved an objective that has cost you great effort and patience, closing a deal or getting a job, for example, or finishing a film or putting the long-delayed full stop to a novel.

Muriel probably didn’t even remember the words I’d heard on that night of supplications, just before he ran his hands over Beatriz’s body roughly, crudely, pointlessly, before groping her breasts and grabbing her crotch like someone picking up a handful of earth or a clump of grass or catching a thistle head in the air before blowing it away and leaving it to float, not even noticing where it’s going. ‘When the hell are you going to understand that this is serious and for good, until you die or I do?’ were the words that had vomited forth from his mouth. ‘I just hope I’m the one who’ll carry your coffin, because I could never be sure you wouldn’t rub yourself up against my still warm or already cold corpse, because warm or cold it would be all the same to you.’ Superimposed on that memory, though, was another more concise, more poetic version: ‘I hope to be the one to bury you, the one to see your lifeless body, your deathly pallor.’ His wish had been granted, but the trouble was he didn’t even remember saying those things (we forget more of what comes out of our mouths than what enters our ears), whereas they still reverberated in my mind as they would have in Beatriz’s, possibly right up until the evening when she stopped in that dark, leafy spot on the road; and perhaps she would have said to him in her thoughts, when she was already astride the Harley-Davidson and had her gaze fixed on the target: ‘Now you’ll have to rub yourself up against my corpse.’ Muriel hadn’t gone that far, of course, but he had been visibly shaken when he heard the news and at the cemetery too, and it was clear, in his perplexity, that at first he missed her irritating, uncomfortable presence, irksome and even exasperating at times, the size and the shape and the footsteps of the person who had been his wife both for too many and possibly too few years, because when something ends we almost always feel that it wasn’t enough and could have lasted a little longer.

‘You know sometimes, Juan, I think I can hear the tick-tock of the metronome,’ he told me. ‘Especially when I’m here alone, when the children and Flavia go to bed and the others leave, or when I come back from having supper out with a crowd of people. The fact is that, lately, my friends have obliged me to lead a life of almost obscenely frenetic activity, as if I were at a fiesta or something, and they’ve done so with the very best of intentions, because they don’t want me to be left alone with my thoughts, imagining all too clearly what those thoughts will be. In fact, they have no idea what my thoughts will be, but they’re pretty sure what they’ll be about. It’s absurd of me in a way to agree to all this, since I’m hardly an inconsolable widower. Don’t get me wrong, I am sad. However much you expect it and even though you can do nothing to avoid it; however many warnings there have been and even though you’re not entirely sure you want to avoid it; however much you harden yourself and accept the probable consequences of your …’ he stopped, looking for the right word ‘… your impermeability, nothing prepares you for the event itself. I’m sad because we were together for a long time, and suddenly what resurfaces in my mind are the earliest years, when Beatriz was still almost a child and neither of us knew what the future might hold. But I’m not inconsolable in the sense of having suffered the loss of someone crucial to my life. There’s an element of unreality about it all, and that’s why I think I can still hear the tick-tock of her metronome, as if its echo had not yet faded and I could still hear in my head its music-less music, that beat which had become a permanent background feature here. It’s the same with everything else, as if it took longer for Beatriz’s footsteps or her smell to disappear than for her herself, people are survived by the traces they leave behind, that’s been my experience at least, and it’s perfectly normal, and then those traces will gradually evaporate too. But while they last … They seem to need a bit of extra time before they can leave altogether, time to clean up and collect their things. They’re never given notice so that they can prepare for the move.’

He fell silent, and I didn’t know how to respond, and there probably was no appropriate response.

‘I see,’ I said, just to say something.

That day, he was still looking a little older, but it didn’t last; they soon disappeared, those signs of the old age that would return to stalk and haunt him without ever daring to take full possession of him, to take root in his mind or make any real incursions into his appearance. The dark shadows under his eyes, his lined, weary face, his slight stoop, noticeable even when he was seated, were purely circumstantial, the product of that event for which nothing prepares us however much notice we’re given; the product of shock and corroboration. Then he suddenly sat up and looked at me with his one alert eye.

‘You know she was pregnant.’

I was so taken aback that all I could come out with was a quite nonsensical question, possibly an instinctive attempt to gain a few seconds and recover from that revelation.

‘Who, Beatriz?’

‘Of course, who else? I mean, who are we talking about here, young De Vere?’

‘No, of course not, how could I possibly know? Had she said anything to you?’

‘Not a word. I found out just now from the Doctor. Fortunately, he managed to have a young colleague of his from the hospital carry out the autopsy, the bare minimum, very superficial, which was all that was needed. Enough, though, to detect that pregnancy. But the fact that she said nothing to me is hardly surprising. Needless to say, the child wasn’t mine. The Doctor says that she herself may not have realized either. Although given that she’d had four children, that seems unlikely to me, but who knows? Perhaps she couldn’t believe it, the possibility may not even have occurred to her. Anything is possible.’

‘And do they know how many months gone she was?’ I asked, a touch apprehensively.

‘A couple of months or so.’ Then he fell silent for a few moments and studied his nails as if he suddenly found the situation highly embarrassing. But what he found embarrassing was what he was about to ask: ‘You wouldn’t have any idea whose it might have been, would you?’ I must have blushed a little, but perhaps he, too, was blushing inside and so didn’t notice; or else he attributed my slightly flushed cheeks to what was causing him to blush under the skin, because before I could respond, he felt obliged to explain: ‘As you can imagine, I didn’t care tuppence about what Beatriz got up to. It was none of my business and I certainly never asked any questions, in case she took that as evidence of a certain interest on my part, or even jealousy, who can say? But if she was going to give my children a brother or sister and that child was going to live here, I would obviously feel a certain curiosity. You don’t have any idea, do you?’