I went to see Muriel’s last film when it opened. It wasn’t generally well received, but I liked it. I phoned to tell him so, but he wasn’t in, and then I let the matter slide, because he didn’t exactly need my opinion. He hadn’t managed to make another film until five years after Beatriz’s death; and two years later, seven years after her suicide, I learned that my former boss and maestro had suffered a devastating heart attack while lunching with a group of boorish bankers from whom he was trying to extract a little small change for some new film project. As soon as I heard the news on television, I called Professor Rico, the only one in that circle with whom I’d remained in contact and with whom I’m still in touch today. By then, he was already a member of the Real Academia: his enemy papyruses — or were they mummies? — had all pegged out at a rate of knots and he’d been elected with more than enough votes, almost by acclamation, although he’s since acquired a few more splendid enemies, without whom he cannot live or only at the risk of getting royally bored. He was about to catch a plane to Madrid to attend the funeral, and he told me the hour and the place. That’s the only time I’ve heard a tremor of emotion in his voice. No, I lie, that tremor is always there whenever we speak of Muriel or Beatriz — he’s basically an old sentimentalist — even though it’s ages since they bade farewell to life without first bidding farewell to either of us.
The following morning, I went to La Almudena cemetery and stood before the grave I’d first seen some years before, although to me it felt like only yesterday: time vanishes when you return to a place you rarely visit and where you only go in sorrow or for some other exceptional reason. There were a lot of people and a fair number of journalists, and I kept well to the rear, not daring to push my way to the front. For most of those present I was a stranger, an interloper, an intruder, no one they need say hello to. Some distance away I saw Susana and her siblings with their backs to me, I recognized them at once despite the intervening years and despite how much the two younger ones had grown. Susana looked round now and again, perhaps so as to see how many people had come, how respected her father had been, until on one of those occasions, she spotted me and came running over to me. I was thirty by then and she was twenty-two, but she immediately hugged me hard and wept silently, in the wholehearted way one embraces someone who belonged to old, imperfect but far less sad times, when all those who should have been there still were; then she took my hand and led me over to the front row, along with Alicia and Tomás and Flavia and other people I didn’t know, including Cecilia Alemany, who doubtless found a moment to look at me from behind her dark glasses (she wasn’t chewing gum this time) and wonder indifferently who the hell I was: I don’t think she was much interested in the past of her short-lived and now late husband, and it occurred to me that she would probably now simply shake him off, like someone leaving behind her an episode that had been the fruit of weakness or seduction. During the rest of the ceremony, the lowering of the coffin and the replacement of the gravestone for the last time (no one else would fit in), Susana kept her hand in mine, squeezing my hand hard so as to steady herself, for as I said, she was far unsteadier on her feet than the widow or than anyone else. Or perhaps she clung to my hand like a stubborn child.
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.