Javier Marías - Thus Bad Begins

I’ve been married to Susana for so long now that she’s older than her mother ever came to be and I am more or less the age reached by Muriel, who survived his wife by seven years; more or less the same number of years, seven or eight, that separated him from her, and me from Susana, so in total, he lived about fifteen years longer than Beatriz. She seemed mature to me in 1980, like a painting in comparison with me, when I was twenty-three and she was forty-two or possibly forty-one — I never knew exactly — but she was about two decades older than me, which is a lot for a mere callow youth. Now, on the other hand, Beatriz seems very young in retrospect, and not just too young to have died, but too young for everything. It wasn’t, therefore, so very odd that she should still have nurtured hopes and that, on the nights when she was defeated, she would temporarily abandon the field in order to gather renewed strength and valour and withdraw to her room, thinking: ‘Not tonight, no, not tonight, but later perhaps. My pillow will receive my tears and I will learn how to wait just as the insistent moon waits. A time will come when his offensive groping will, out of inertia, slide into a different territory, where it will suddenly become yearning or irresistible caprice or primitive desire, for nothing can be driven away like that by pure mental effort, by a punitive decision, not for ever or not entirely — such things are mere suspensions of activity, mere postponements. He might come back one day or one night, and, besides, who can resist being wanted and loved?’ As far as I know, he never did go back either by day or night, but I can’t be sure.

Yes, she was young when she killed herself, and fertile enough to be expecting another baby, that’s what Muriel told me, that’s what Van Vechten told him, that’s what the young colleague at Van Vechten’s hospital told him; so all of that is merely a rumour that stopped with me, never even reaching the drooping west, or his daughter Susana, not through me at any rate, and it’s best that it stays in the orient. Over the years, I’ve often remembered the whisper that Muriel transmitted to me in the form of a rhetorical question (‘You know …’). And I often shamefacedly congratulate myself — in one aspect, but only one — that Beatriz did kill herself and that the child was not born, and had perhaps not even developed enough for its future, distracted mother to notice. I don’t know which man was the cause of that new shoot, if it was Dr Van Vechten himself in the Sanctuary of Darmstadt or Dr Arranz in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca or some other lover she visited on her Harley-Davidson, in El Escorial or the Sierra de Gredos or in Ávila. I often stubbornly tell myself that there must have been a third man, just to share out the responsibility. But I can’t deny that the new shoot could also have been my work on one hot, insomniac night in Calle Velázquez, which would have been very bad luck, of course, but then neither of us took any precautions. Whenever that nightmare possibility crosses my mind, I shudder and cannot help but feel glad — rather despising myself as I do, but I can take it — that that projected being did come to nothing, because it might have spent its whole existence as an impostor, unaware of its own imposture, or would have prevented all the good things that came later in my life and, I think, in Susana’s life too, and our daughters would not exist. Had that child, a girl say, emerged into the world, it would have been a half-sister to my wife, a kind of stepdaughter, both my daughter and my sister-in-law, and the children I’ve had with Susana would have been both her sisters and her cousins, and it’s usually at that point that I stop these ramblings, because the whole hypothetical chain of relationships makes me dizzy, but also because it evokes the dreadful thought that my marriage to Susana would then have been almost impossible. (How little it takes for what exists not to have existed.) Nothing could have been proved at the time, and Beatriz might have kept quiet about the identity of the father, if she had managed to deduce it or know for certain. However, there’s no getting away from the fact that I once had sex with the grandmother of my daughters, that is, with the person who would have been my mother-in-law had she lived long enough. But who can possibly know who is going to be what in the course of a lifetime, and we shouldn’t hold back because of conjectures or predictions that are beyond our grasp, we only have what we know today and never what we might know tomorrow, and yet we do sometimes give ourselves over to such prognostications.

For many years, the memory of that night remained very dim. It was as if that tenuous story had never happened, for as long, that is, as Susana was young and, despite her striking resemblance to her mother, as long as her youth kept at bay the image of her mother, the image I had known personally, not so much the one in those old photos that had led me to think — although it wasn’t only the photos that led me to think this: ‘She must have been very alluring, I can understand why Muriel would have wanted her at his side day and night, I’m sure I would have too. Even if only for her sheer carnality, which counts for a lot in a marriage. But I wasn’t Muriel then, nor am I now.’ However, since Susana has grown older, that memory has taken on colour, it slips into my bed and troubles my sleep. She has come more and more to resemble the Beatriz I knew when I was twenty-three, although I certainly don’t see her as fat and she isn’t fat at all, indeed, I’ve noticed only very tiny changes in her — but then I’m biased — since, at Muriel’s funeral, she appeared to me as a grown woman, newly and fully formed and with the same intimidating, explosive body, in full bloom now and no longer the adolescent girl I’d forbidden myself to look at — another inanimate representation — and I didn’t look at her, while she perhaps, without my noticing, couldn’t keep her eyes off me, the young man who spent so much time in her home, like one of those very stubborn girls determined to see her childhood dreams come true, until she reaches a certain age or sees those dreams crushed for ever. Muriel once said that the other person’s enthusiasm helps a lot, persuades and carries you along. And another person’s love is always more touching and provokes more pity than the love you yourself feel.

Of course I never saw the forty-something Beatriz as fat, it was my boss who insisted on that or who had decided to compare her with the most rotund of film stars simply in order to wound her. Lately, though, when I’m making love with Susana, I’ve found that remote image slipping into my mind to trouble and disturb me, to almost paralyse and strike me dumb. The past has a future we never expect, and just as, on that distant night, Beatriz’s unexpectedly youthful face — her face embellished as happens with many women in that state of semi-oblivion — momentarily suggested that of her daughter, the same features and the same candid expression, so now the daughter leads me back to the mother at the most inopportune of moments, and even becomes overlaid by that scene watched from the top of a tree in the Sanctuary of Darmstadt, which now I find utterly repellent (fortunately, I can drive that scene away at once, it’s gone in a flash). What is perhaps most regrettable (or, perhaps, disquieting because impossible to assimilate) about these intersecting images is that I am now that older man who, in our youth, appears in our unconscious mind and whispers mysteriously to us, like a ghost from the future: ‘Remember this experience and note every detail, experience it with me in mind and as if you knew it would never happen again except in your memory, which is my memory; you won’t be able to preserve the excitement or relive it, but you will recall the sense of triumph and, more especially, the knowledge: you will know that this happened and you always will; grasp it firmly, take a long look at this woman and keep that image safe, because later on, I will ask you for it and you will have to offer it to me as consolation.’