‘I don’t want to talk or anything, Eduardo. I won’t go on at you. I won’t take up much time, I promise. I just want to embrace you, it’s been ages since I did. That would soothe me, and then I could go to sleep. Please, open the door.’ She said this meekly, sweetly.
‘It’s a trick,’ I thought. ‘He doesn’t know she’s out here with no dressing gown on, nothing, nothing to cover her nightdress, nothing underneath. Or maybe he does and doesn’t care, maybe it no longer affects him.’ It occurred to me that it would be hard to embrace that voluptuous body and do nothing more, not linger or run your hands over it. ‘But then I’m not Muriel,’ I said again. ‘He’s seen it all before, whereas it’s all new to me. The touch of her flesh will be a matter of indifference to him, possibly even tedious or unpleasant, I mustn’t even think about it.’
There was no immediate reply. I thought Muriel must be considering whether to give in to her request, even if only as a quick way of putting an end to the siege. After a few seconds, he spoke and, from what I heard, his tone of voice had a mocking edge to it.
‘No, I’ve already given myself an embrace, thank you. Consider your embrace duly delivered and go back to bed, off you go.’
He wasn’t angry or at least not yet, it was just one of his witty comments. And those last words, ‘off you go’, had sounded kind, almost affectionate, the words of a long-suffering father to an overly anxious, nervous daughter. After all, he was six or seven or eight years her senior, which was, I would say, a normal age difference between couples at the time, or indeed now, but ultimately, all these things count in how couples treat each other, including who has more experience of the world, who has been in the world longest (and this inevitably strikes a paternalistic note), and the nature of the relationship.
‘Don’t be silly, Eduardo. Just one embrace. I’m so on edge tonight, I can’t sleep.’ And when she said this (the first part), Beatriz Noguera gave a little laugh; even though her husband was mocking her, she still found his joke funny. Perhaps that was her curse, her main problem, and one of the reasons why she still loved him so much: he made her laugh and always had. It’s very hard not to stay in love with or be captivated by someone who makes us laugh and does so even though he often mistreats us; the hardest thing to give up is that companionable laughter, once you’ve met someone and decided to stay with them. (When you have a clear memory of that shared laughter and it occasionally recurs, even if only very infrequently and even though the intervals between are long and bitter.) It’s the tie that binds most tightly, apart from sex when that’s still an urgent need and more than sex as that need grows less.
‘No, really, I gave myself a very warm and tender embrace,’ retorted Muriel, still in joking mode. ‘Yours would be quite unnecessary.’ Then his voice changed suddenly, as if, from one moment to the next, he had grown tired of being humorous or had suddenly recalled some injury or source of resentment, and he added sharply: ‘Look, go away and leave me in peace, will you? Aren’t Roy, Rico and all the others enough for you? You’re not exactly in need of more diversions, so why keep pestering me every night? You’ve known for years what I’m going to say. You’ve known for years what my terms are. I made them quite clear. God, you’re a pain. Unbearable. Just listen to yourself, begging and pleading, how do you stand it? And you’re getting a bit long in the tooth to be permanently on heat.’
Beatriz Noguera clearly lacked all dignity and pride, she must have left them behind long ago, and probably had no use for them during the many years Muriel kept referring to. She neither missed them nor had any plans to recover them, they were absent from her life, at least from her married life. For she gave no sharp retort, did not move or leave, she took not a step, nor did she go back to her own room, as would anyone else after receiving such a cruel, emphatic rejection.
‘You’re so certain, aren’t you? And your certainty is so convenient too,’ she answered, ‘that way you can feel free of all responsibilities and all doubts. You know perfectly well that there is no Rico, no Roy or anyone else for that matter, I just go out with them occasionally, and it’s lucky for you I have them to distract me, because I can hardly count on you to do as much, or only when you want to put a good face on things and not turn up with one of your actresses, or whatever they are, at some place where they shouldn’t be seen.’ She did not say this bitterly or reproachfully, it was, rather, an attempt to be persuasive, and she returned at once to her previous line of attack: ‘You’re the only one I’m interested in, you’re the only one I love, surely I don’t need to tell you that, however hard you try to drive me away. And I don’t do this every night, don’t exaggerate. Why shouldn’t I try or at least make an attempt? It costs me nothing. It wasn’t like this before. I didn’t bore you then, and our relationship wasn’t exactly languishing. You suddenly broke it all off, over some stupid thing that happened ages ago. However determined they might be, people don’t just stop desiring or loving each other from one day to the next, it just doesn’t happen. If it did, it would save everyone a lot of problems and dramas. If you could see me now … Go on, just open the door for a moment and look at me. Put your arms around me. And then go back in, if you can.’
Her tone was still cautious, even in those final, slightly challenging words, although they were spoken modestly, more in order to encourage herself than with any real expectation that Muriel would respond. I was nonetheless struck by the fact that she had summoned up the necessary courage and vanity to say them, bearing in mind how disagreeable he could be in his comments, or insults, about her physical appearance: ‘Isn’t it time you lost some weight? Your backside’s the size of a bus!’ he would say for no reason. Or ‘You’re looking more and more like Shelley Winters, not facially, which is something, but otherwise, you’re the spitting image; put a short, blonde wig on you and in a three-quarter shot or from behind, you could get a part as her double.’ He often made cinematographic comparisons, holding his hands as if he were framing a shot, doubtless an occupational habit. She took these very sportingly sometimes — at others, she was almost reduced to tears — and was undaunted, knowing as she did all his references: ‘She can’t have been that ugly, after all, she married two good-looking actors, Vittorio Gassman and Tony Franciosa,’ she would say. Beatriz bore no resemblance at all either to a bus or to the poor, clumsy, albeit excellent actress Shelley Winters, who, broad in the beam as a young woman, and heavy-set in her mature years, almost always played touching characters worthy of our pity. To start with, Beatriz was very tall, almost as tall as her husband and, with heels on, even taller. She was also strongly built and large-boned, which meant that she aroused neither female solidarity nor male compassion, for it was hard to imagine that someone so strong and healthy would ever need any kind of protection or consolation. As for her supposed fatness and her figure, in this — give or take some obvious differences, and bearing in mind that Beatriz had had children — she was more like Senta Berger, an Austrian actress who had been at the peak of her fame in the decade just drawing to a close and in the preceding one, perhaps more because of her green eyes and her prominent bust than because of her talent as an actress, although she hadn’t actually ruined any films either. Perhaps that figure and those breasts would be considered excessive by today’s more parsimonious young men, but, at the time, she was merely regarded as buxom and considered to be a real stunner by most male filmgoers, including me and my friends, who, when she was in her heyday, were young men or boys. For a woman like that, however (almost bursting out, shall we say, not from her clothes, of course, but from her own flesh that completely fills her skin, leaving not a fold or wrinkle), it’s hard to be sure that she isn’t somehow excessive and to accept, fully and unselfconsciously, the way she looks, especially if the person closest to her, the person she most wants to please, is constantly bombarding her with denigratory and sometimes almost ingenious comparisons — there’s no defending oneself against the latter without appearing ridiculous — or with out-and-out insults. (The praise and flattery of other men count for nothing, they neither counteract the insults nor help, vanishing as soon as they are spoken.) I assumed that to have said what she said (‘If you could see me now … Go on, look at me. And then go back in, if you can.’), Beatriz must have spent a long time studying herself in the mirror in her skimpy nightdress, from every angle; she must have persuaded and convinced herself of her own desirability, emboldened perhaps by a couple of drinks; she must have dredged up sufficient pride and self-approval. That takes a lot of willpower or, in her case, a lot of passion or neediness, both of which distort our perceptions and our understanding, and tend to lead to errors when calculating probabilities. I would have said that, in theory, everything was in her favour. I was still not so very far from my boyhood, and as I crouched there, enjoying her figure, I remembered the childish, slightly coarse word we used to describe any beautiful woman, macizo, which means both ‘gorgeous’ and ‘solid’ or ‘well built’ (it’s considered old-fashioned now and rather frowned upon), but it seemed to me then that it fitted her exactly.