‘Certainly not.’ He reacted at once, his one eye bright with anger, and looked up from his compass. ‘When she showed me the letter, I understood that the radiant smile with which she had greeted me when I went to meet her at the airport, the smile I’d tried to get actresses to emulate, was not one of mere unknowing happiness, blithely unaware of the risk she had run, but the knowing, triumphantly happy smile of someone who has got her own way and seen her performance crowned with success. She had to pay for that, and leaving her would have been too benign a thing to do. She would have recovered sooner or later, and since she was still fairly young, she might have met another man. However, if I was still around, even if only periodically, that would have been impossible. As has proved to be the case.’
‘She still is young, Eduardo, although you don’t want to see that.’
Either he didn’t hear me or he ignored me.
‘I insisted on having separate rooms and closed my door to her for ever. If nothing else, ours had always been a very sexual relationship. But I haven’t touched her since, not for … how old is Tomás now? … eight years. Nor have I gone back to loving her in that easy, celebratory, superficial way in which I always loved her, and which, for her, was enough.’ And yet I had on a few occasions seen them laughing together perhaps without realizing that they were; and after the Hotel Wellington incident, he’d behaved kindly and almost affectionately towards her: we can’t entirely suppress old habits, I suppose, however hard we try. ‘She put on weight, became depressed, began gradually to lose her mind, every day a little more. All her suicide attempts have occurred since then and are doubtless a consequence of that, or were to begin with. She would never even have considered suicide before, she had nothing to complain about. No, there was nothing benign about what I did, but it was just.’ — ‘Forgiveness doesn’t last as long as vengeance,’ I thought or recalled. Or perhaps I only think or recall that now.
‘Yes, but at the cost of staying bound to her. It reminds me of that expression that so perfectly defines us Spaniards: Quedarse uno tuerto por dejar al otro ciego — “To put out your own eye while trying to make another man blind.” ’
He looked at me with a mixture of severity and irony.
‘I was already one-eyed, young De Vere, or hadn’t you noticed?’ And he again tapped on his eyepatch. But this time he didn’t mean this only in the literal sense, he was referring to his own ingenuousness, his good faith, his credulity of twenty or so years ago. ‘Since then, I do as I want, I don’t have to account to anyone or to bother inventing truths. And it’s the same for her, I suppose, I don’t care how she conducts her life, I’ve washed my hands of her; but she does what she wants because she has to, not because she wants to; she does it reluctantly, I oblige her to enjoy a freedom she doesn’t want at all, because she would much prefer to be tied to me. Besides, I haven’t missed anything: I haven’t met anyone else who interested me enough to make me consider running off with her. That’s all over, out of the question. Although who knows, soon …’
‘Soon what?’ The words just slipped out, and my pushiness doubtless prevented me from finding out what he was about to announce, what tempting future beckoned.
‘Nothing.’ He clammed up at once. ‘Just as the past isn’t really any of your business, the future certainly isn’t.’
I didn’t insist, I prudently let it pass. ‘Just as well,’ I thought when I saw the recognizable oval face, the pink smudge behind the glass panes, she obviously didn’t care now if Muriel saw her or not, although he still had his back to her, while I was facing her. ‘It’s best if she doesn’t hear, assuming she can, it’s best if she doesn’t hear him, that poor unhappy woman, sad and affectionate. Poor soul, poor wretch.’
‘But you obviously do care how she conducts her life,’ I said, returning to what he had said earlier, ‘given how terrified you were on that night at the Hotel Wellington.’
‘Ha,’ he said. And after a few seconds, he made the same sound, not so much a laugh as a sign of faint disappointment or superiority: as if he needed to make himself superior to me. ‘Ha. So much for being the memory man. As you yourself said: I don’t care how she conducts her life, but I do care how she conducts her death and I don’t want her to succeed in that. I care a great deal about her dying, about her killing herself. That’s the last thing I want. It would be terrible for my children, and for me as well. Of course if she does succeed one day, there’s nothing I can do about it. But if that does happen, be in no doubt, it will be a real tragedy for me and I will weep for her. As I said, you can’t just put a line through the past to erase it. Even once you’ve decided that you no longer want that past.’
Yes, I had heard him say something along those lines, and he had put it more elaborately to Beatriz at the door to his bedroom: ‘What is the point of setting the record straight? That’s even worse, because it invalidates or gives the lie to everything that went before, it obliges the deceived person to look at their whole life in a new light, or else deny it. And yet that was your life, and you can’t unlive what you’ve lived. So what do you do? Strike out your whole existence? That’s impossible but neither can you simply discard all those years, which were what they were and can be no other way, and of which there will always be a remnant, a memory, even if it smacks of the phantasmagorical, something that both happened and didn’t happen. And what do you do with something that both happened and didn’t happen?’ His tone had been one of lamentation, not scornful or aggressive, although there was still perhaps a hint of rancour. Beatriz Noguera had immediately adopted that same tone, wishing she could turn back the clock and asking his forgiveness; perhaps knowingly, perhaps sincerely.
Then she opened the door, revealed her presence. She wasn’t barefoot, she was wearing the high heels she almost always wore when she went out and that accentuated her voluptuous figure. When Muriel heard the door open, he got up and turned round, and when he saw her, his one eye glinted. She remained on the threshold with one hand held out, looking at him pleadingly, as if she were asking him to take her hand and lead her into the room, as if she were again calling him ‘my love’. Hearing him say that her death was the last thing he wanted, hearing him say that he would weep for her, must have seemed to her a motive for gratitude, or perhaps for unreasonable hope. However, the gesture he made was unequivocal. A gesture of rejection repeated several times, driving her away, ordering her to leave at once, as if he were scaring off a cat. I felt he was repeating the words he’d been saying to her for eight years: ‘Non, pas de caresses. And no kisses either.’
XI
And he did weep for her, I saw it with my own eyes. He wept for her when he heard the news and wept copiously during the burial at La Almudena cemetery, one sunny Madrid morning; I saw how the irrepressible tears flowed from his speaking eye — not from the silent one, which presumably had no tear duct or maybe the tightly fitting patch acted as a dam — while the gravediggers were finally lowering the coffin into the grave and covering it with the first spadefuls of earth. No one stayed behind to see the last spadefuls nor for the gravestone to be lowered back into place, after it had been removed to make way for the new coffin; there was still room though in the family tomb — presumably for Muriel himself; and their ill-fated son, Javier, who had been resting there for a long time and took up very little space, having died so young, would now be wrapped in his mother’s imaginary embrace. However hard Muriel found it to say goodbye, he didn’t stay behind and was so unsteady on his feet that he had to be supported, and Susana, Tomás and Alicia, who provided that support, didn’t stay behind either, more concerned about their living and temporarily aged father — a sudden ageing that lasted only a day — than about their mother who was now only abundant, inert flesh that would soon be lost, a process which, fortunately, we would not see: we, very sensibly, do not impose witnesses on the dead, but leave them in their deathly pallor to continue dying. Neither Rico nor Roy nor Van Vechten stayed behind, nor Gloria nor Marcela nor Flavia, nor Beatriz’s colleagues at the school where she used to teach her American English, nor the few students who attended as representatives, nor the two or three private students who also came. Still less Muriel’s acquaintances, who came out of obligation or out of vergüenza torera, the bullfighter’s fear of what the public will say if he holds back: maestro Rafael Viana and other gambling pals, the former accompanied by the civil servant Celia, who shot me a veiled and neutral glance; a couple of diplomats and a few people from the film industry, among whom I spotted a wine-producer whom Muriel was trying to cajole into financing his latest project and, very briefly, Jess Franco, who left almost at once, taking short, hurried steps, doubtless hoping to finish shooting half a film in what remained of the day. I was not exactly surprised to see, standing at a discreet distance, the impresaria Cecilia Alemany, who I recognized despite her dark glasses, partly because she was chewing gum, unaware of how inappropriate her mandibular movements were in that place and that context. A brazen woman, as very wealthy women tend to be, and as confirmed by her recent close relationship with my boss. I didn’t stay behind either to see the coffin disappear completely beneath the earth; it wouldn’t have been right and would have seemed strange. However, I promised myself I would visit the grave now and then, although I haven’t done so in all this time, or only once, years later, to accompany the dear departed and to support Susana, who was then the person unsteadiest on her feet.