He gave an ironic or amused smile.
‘So everyone has a mistress, do they? Since it seems to me that you’ve less experience of life than you have of books or films, what do you know about such things? Not that it really matters, I just happened to notice.’ It took only a second for him to recover his air of seriousness or concern, or was it anxiety or sadness, or even perhaps a degree of suppressed or postponed anger, postponed perhaps until his fears were confirmed. And he added: ‘You’ll find out eventually, but this is the last thing I’m going to tell you today about this discomfiting, distasteful story, a story I wish I’d never heard; as I said, what I was told about my friend Van Vechten has nothing to do with any deaths, not at least with any actual, physical deaths, either to his credit or to his shame, I’m not sure which is the right word here. It’s nothing that bad, but it is, in a way, more disappointing, more depressing, more banal and more contemptible. More incongruous.’ He had searched around for another more conclusive, all-embracing adjective, but had encountered only that one, as if by chance. He himself seemed surprised by his choice. He shook his head then as though the memory of the story made him shudder. ‘Any benefits and favours gained won’t haunt his memory or gnaw at his conscience or have left any mark, since nothing irreparable occurred, and so he can wash his hands of it, as if it had never happened. So he won’t be worried in the slightest, always assuming it did happen. What stops me simply dropping the matter, rejecting it as frankly unbelievable and not even worth considering, is that, according to what I’ve been told, the Doctor behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman or possibly more than one. Call me old-fashioned or whatever you like, but that, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low.’ He paused briefly, stood up, looked at me with his marine eye as though it could see straight through me or had gobbled me up with one glance, then moved on, in search of something more resistant to his dark gaze; there was such anger in his one blue eye that I felt a flicker of fear, not for myself but just to see that eye grow suddenly so dark, so pitiless; he pointed at me with the stem of his pipe as if I were Van Vechten and his pipe were an accusatory implement or perhaps a knife with which one might cut up a piece of fruit, with no intention, as yet, of using it for any other purpose. ‘Do you understand? That’s as low as one can go.’
II
I was astonished by these words. Not because they jarred with the general character I attributed to Muriel, who had captivated me right from the start, ever since he put me through a brief examination before taking me on, or, rather, chatted to me and asked a few questions, just to see if he liked me. In his comments and conversations and in his attitude towards most people, he seemed to me one of the most upright, charming, fair-minded men I had ever met or have met since. There was even a kind of ingenuousness — almost innocence — about him, unusual for someone approaching his fifties, a well-travelled, restless man, who, while he’d made some really good films, had nevertheless had to lower himself, with no great fuss — that is, resignedly — to make some distinctly bad ones, at least from his point of view (‘To what base occupations one is sometimes reduced: you must be prepared for that, Juan,’ he said to me once); someone who had to put up with producers — all of them bandits to a greater or lesser degree — and movie actors and actresses — almost without exception, puerile and spiteful or, which comes to the same thing, cruel and hard as nails, or so he said; someone who spent long periods of time immersed in the pragmatic world of advertising in order to raise lots of money very fast and so allow him to maintain his old family fortune more or less intact; someone who devoted much of his time to seeking exotic sources of funding for the projects that really interested him, a process that involved mixing with the fairly brutal or, at best, surly and cunning people who inhabit the business world — that is, the one real, universal world — and others with whom he had little or nothing in common: he was often called on to have lunch or supper or go to nightclubs or out drinking with uncouth property developers and ignorant secretaries of state, with the loud-mouthed presidents of football clubs or dull producers of milk products, with excitable shoemakers from Elda, canners of tuna and clams from Villagarcía de Arosa or curers of ham from Salamanca, even breeders of fighting bulls — a lot of people are completely crazy about the idea of films in general, rather than about the actual films — all of whom he tried to persuade or, rather, cajole into investing, and he himself recognized that he had no real talent for the task, although he had, over the years, acquired a certain expertise. He also occasionally received and entertained various foreigners who were passing through Madrid and who, he had been told by someone in the know, were interested in dipping a toe in the film industry and putting money into some film or other: from semi-retired sly old foxes or hyenas, who had a whole backlist of co-productions behind them and couldn’t kick the habit, to the semi-fascistic patrons of Formula 1; from German cigarette manufacturers with an artistic streak to shady Italian property developers (if those two adjectives are not surplus to requirements); from Scotch whisky distillers who didn’t know what to do with their excess money and wanted to please a mythomaniac wife who, at the end of that very long and winding road, hoped to sign up or have supper with Sean Connery, to the representative of the adviser of the secretary of some uppity Arab sheikh (here, just one of the adjectives is surplus to requirements) bound for Marbella.
He usually returned from those evenings and encounters exhausted and chastened, and pretty much empty-handed, his usual complaint being: ‘You have to speak to fifteen people in order for just one of them to write you a cheque or express an apparently genuine or at least half-credible interest. Then the cheques might bounce and their declared interest vanish. And if that’s the case, they’ll put you off with a lot of lame excuses, so it’s best to assume from the start that any show of interest will lead nowhere.’ Sometimes, he returned from these meetings in a state of almost comic humiliation and frustration, by which I mean that he tried to make it seem comic; once he had recovered, he could see the funny side of his frustrations and humiliations, and had both a highly developed sense of the absurd and the ability to take a few knocks. Hoping to dazzle and impress — as I said, he was a touch ingenuous — the shrewd, refined owner of a fashion boutique, who had deigned to receive him in her office, he decided to play the intellectual card and launch into some pedantic, historical anecdote about the Second World War, but before he had even completed the first paragraph (admittedly one with various subordinate clauses), she interrupted him with a sympathetic but firm smile: ‘That’s hardly relevant now and, besides, my time is not like this piece of chewing-gum.’ Muriel was completely taken aback (as well as somewhat in awe of this attractive, elegant, educated woman, who was, of course, very well dressed), because there was no chewing-gum in sight, not even an empty packet on the desk or the merest whiff of mint or strawberry. True, the office was so pleasant and so highly perfumed that no other odour could possibly have survived, and at first, Muriel felt as if he were floating helplessly in the air, drunk or even drugged. ‘What chewing-gum? What are you talking about?’ he asked with genuine curiosity. ‘This chewing-gum, although it could be any gum,’ and with that, she drew a piece of gum out of her mouth between thumb and forefinger — my boss hadn’t noticed that she was chewing anything, she was so distinguished and cultivated, that she must have kept it glued to the roof of her mouth or to her gums while they were talking — and she stretched it out like a long tongue; it came so close that Muriel thought she was about to stick one end of it to his nose and he recoiled despite the coarse sensuality of her gesture, which, on reflection, did not displease him in the least, I think it even rather excited him and he regretted retreating instead of allowing himself to be joined to her by that pink gum or, which comes to the same thing, by her saliva. ‘You see how far it will stretch,’ added the owner of the boutique, Cecilia Alemany by name, who had amassed a fortune in a matter of years, and she wasn’t yet thirty-five. ‘Well, my time won’t stretch that far. So get to the point, my dear man, and make it snappy.’ And with one quick, skilful curl of her tongue, she rolled the long, flexible substance back into her mouth, she probably blew bubbles too, and it would have been a treat to see them, since she was clearly a real artist. Muriel admitted that this gummy threat had left him stammering and embarrassed, almost unable to speak, and that the rest of his spiel (with no subordinate clauses this time) had been one incoherent sentence after another, a mess. His admiration for Cecilia Alemany had only grown as a consequence, and he now considered her to be not only a terrific businesswoman who wouldn’t put up with any nonsense or with any smooth-talkers, but also a demigoddess, even though he knew he would never get a single penny out of her for any of his projects, whether cheap or expensive, and that she must have thought him little more than a parasite. What he had found most humiliating — and fascinating too — wasn’t her cutting short his erudite, intellectual preamble, but that she had called him ‘my dear man’, as if he were a labourer she had met down a lane. Whenever she appeared on television or in the newspaper, he would gaze at her enraptured, and a smile would appear on his lips as he listened to what she had to say or else read the relevant article, and he would murmur: ‘Ah, Cecilia Alemany, what a remarkable woman. Who wouldn’t want to be the object of her esteem rather than of her utmost scorn? Needless to say, there’s almost no one alive who would deserve her esteem, myself included; I had a rare opportunity, but, like a peasant, like a fool, I failed to seize it.’