Maybe it wasn’t very original or very exciting, but it was a research project like any other, and he had already gotten in touch with Professor Velásquez at the University of Los Girasoles in Mexico to tell him how much he admired his work: his monograph—“with its sparks of brilliance,” as he put it, in a momentary fit of banality—“on the crazy avant-garde artists who ended up in Mexico” and a short chapter on Foret were to some extent along the same lines as his own interests, so he would now have to go there and occupy a pigeon-infested office (the only one available, according to Velásquez) while following to its finale the not completely justified impulse that had led him to fix on Richard Foret as the guiding light of the next year of his life. And he went to Mexico.
B
Beatrice Marjorie Langley. Daughter of Thomas Langley of Birmingham, a robust man with a frank mustache and a perhaps overly ingenuous gaze, a lawyer and humanist who died in London at dusk on the seventh day of 1905.
Beatrice M. Langley. Divorced. Mother of two children whom she abandoned in a boarding school in a country at war, and to whom she writes occasional letters, heavy with guilt, pretending they are having an exciting adventure. Letters that receive no reply other than a brief telegram from the headmistress reminding her it is time to pay the fees.
Bea Langley, formerly Bea Burton, formerly just Bea. Daughter of Elizabeth Langley, née Boyd, Francophile, unhappy, tyrannizer of servants, collector of Chinese porcelain, resident of London.
Beatrice: marked by a name that evokes the pain of a lover who descends into the underworld, a name she scarcely conceals with the “Bea” by which her father, her beloved father, called her as a child.
Bea, with the thin lips, dark eyes, and the wide hips that make her see herself as even tinier than she is. With the impossible hair her mother used to comb with more anger than discipline during her entire childhood, complaining all the while that her daughter, her only daughter, had not inherited the silky hair of the Boyds, but that thick mane — a Langley trait — Bea bore all too happily. “Don’t smile so much, Beatrice, you look stupid.”
Beatriz, the cosmopolitan poet and mediocre depicter of fairy scenes. The woman who would later have a daughter, Ada — indisputably her favorite — with a square jaw, like her dead father. Bea, the Mexican, the Londoner, the Parisian, resident of Buenos Aires, of Brooklyn, the desirable but unattainable woman for whom free love didn’t include allowing the same brutes who, two years earlier, had proposed marriage to her on bended knee to touch her breasts. The liar who would so often say “I’m fine” during the twenties with suspicious conviction; the woman who, in the thirties, would vainly attempt to reinvent herself as a writer of light comedies and would end up, in the forties, writing the only thing she could write, what she should always have known she had to write: the story of her most alive, most dead lover, the story of her most monstrous suffering, of her fall.
Bea, the woman who, in the fifties, would find peace, or at least an attempt at oblivion that was perhaps the product of her years. The woman who has grandchildren she silently watches over each summer in her apartment in Montmartre. The Bea, Beatrice, Beatriz Langley, B. Langley, who will go on signing letters to a defunct lover with all those variants of her name. The one who will tear up the letters. The one who will hide the secret of her frustration in order to write poems dictated by pure, simple reason, the reason of dazzling insufficiency, timid reason.
Three events from her life before 1918 in some way sum up those thirty-three years. The scene is this: 1901; a melancholy, teenage Bea, with thin limbs covered by a fine golden down and painfully budding breasts, is crossing Europe with her father, alighting from the train in the cities he considers essential to the sentimental and artistic education of the child. Elizabeth, the mother, resentfully imagines, from her bedroom with heavy curtains in the high-ceilinged house in London, how the complicit relationship between father and daughter becomes closer as they visit continental castles; a complicity in which she has never been included.
In a small station, the train is scheduled to stop for longer than usual, according to the ticket inspector. It is a large town or minor city in the north of Italy. The father remembers having heard that a very good wine, made from a native strain of grape, is consumed in the region, so he proposes having an early dinner in some trattoria and coming back to the platform before the train departs. But Bea isn’t hungry. She is very quiet and is looking at people with her eyes half-closed, a characteristic she inherited from her mother that makes Mr. Langley nervous. The father leaves her in the care of one of the servants and gives her a stiff-armed wave from the platform; she watches him, undaunted, from the window.
Bea continues looking out the window for a long time. A man and a woman, both elegant and with an English air, are sitting on a station bench with a pair of suitcases before them; they seem to be arguing, although their voices are inaudible to the young girl, who invents an ingenuous love story for them. The woman, watched by the man, suddenly stands and straightens the brim of her hat, which the breeze had disarranged. Bea silently spies on the scene as the woman takes a suitcase in either hand and stamps off down the platform to a distant point on the right of Bea’s line of sight. The man watches the retreating woman, takes off his top hat, and places it at his side on the bench; the man looks at his hat as if it were a friend he is asking what he should do next. Bea believes she understands what is happening: an amorous snub. The woman does not turn her head to see what her forsaken lover is doing. He slowly gets to his feet and pulls out a pistol from some fold in his overcoat: a long, slender gun that makes Bea think of her father’s study, of the leather-bound books, of the curtain rails and the candelabras of her London home.
Beatrice Langley, at the age of sixteen, watches the scene in silence from the safety of her anonymity within the train carriage. The pistol rises in slow motion until the barrel is perfectly horizontal, following the line of the man’s arm. It is an extension of his body, a rigid finger pointing to and condemning the fleeing woman. Bea has to twist around to see — at the end of that line that will soon, following the trajectory of the bullet, cease to be imaginary — the woman moving away, suspecting nothing.
Bea isn’t sure if she heard the shot. It seems to her that a sharp, painful whistle has occupied her head from the moment she saw the pistol to when the man, kneeling on the platform, all his elegance giving way to desperation and pain, is detained by the local police. The woman does not seem so much dead as to have disappeared, as if by magic, among the many folds of her dress, which spills over the platform like an octopus whose insides have been emptied out.
After the bustle has died down and the curious onlookers have moved on, after the corpse has been removed to the morgue, Bea continues to watch, as if hypnotized, the silent dialogue between the top hat, still lying on the bench, and the bloodstain, ten or fifteen yards away.
A
None of the warnings about the ugliness of Los Girasoles had prepared Marcelo Valente for what he would find there. The town was dull to the core of its streetlights; the members of the academic community, perhaps a little more isolated from the real world than he had noted in other such institutions, were in the habit of generating unfounded rumors at lightning speed, and the reigning endogamy was so deeply entrenched that — as Professor Velásquez informed him — he had hardly even arrived before the aesthetics department was abuzz with speculation about the immediate future of his single status. Velásquez gave him a quick, politically incorrect summary of the physical virtues of each of the female professors, laying particularly irritating emphasis on the size of their respective breasts and the fact that he, Velásquez, had been married to two of them. (“But the record’s held by Porter, a miserable little gringo professor who’s been here for six years and has already been married and divorced four times, each to a different member of the female teaching staff,” added Velásquez with an undisguised tinge of jealousy.)