The reason I can remember and reproduce these lines is that, a few days later, Muriel dispatched me to Bourguignon the florist’s to choose and order some flowers to be sent to an actress, and when I set off to perform this errand, I felt a sudden twinge of curiosity and went into the library of the British Institute in Calle Almagro, which is right next to the florist’s, and there I tracked them down in English. Just as I thought, they were Shakespeare’s (or Edward de Vere’s) words and it was easy enough to find out in which play he had assumed the voice of noisy Rumour. What I couldn’t find, later on, was a Spanish translation that corresponded to the one the Professor had unleashed on us, and so I wondered if it was perhaps his own work, even though English was not the foreign language in which he was most fluent. It had sounded pretty good. In none of the existing translations (there were various then and there are even more now) did I come across the expressions el año grávido and el encorvado oeste (‘the pregnant year’ and ‘the stoop-backed west’) to translate ‘the big year’ and ‘the drooping west’, two images that had particularly struck me. Next time I see him, I’ll have to ask Paco about it, he’s insisted I call him ‘Paco’ for years now, much against my will, and he insists on calling me ‘Juan’ and not ‘young De Vere’. His arguments for this are indisputable: a long time has passed, I’m no longer young, Muriel and Beatriz are both dead, and they were the ones who gave us our respective appellations, and what binds us together is that ‘before’ (which means we should not be ironic or overly formal with each other), having met in an age that is beginning to seem as remote as the Second World War seemed to us then, with the added complication that while we hadn’t personally experienced that War and it had been swallowed up by fiction, 1980 was still for us a recent date and entirely real. Yes, we’re bound together by something troubling, sad and, at the same time, comforting: being survivors, that is, having outlived far too many friends, of whom we become the intermittent wake or the brief memory which is, for a while, transmitted in ever-quieter whispers.
In honour of Professor Rico, I should mention a couple of things. One morning, about three months after that occasion, when I’d stopped seeing Bettina (nothing lasted very long in those effervescent days), I saw them together at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, towards the top of Calle de Alcalá, standing before a painting by Mengs, which, if I remember rightly, is a full-length portrait of an eighteenth-century lady wearing a beret, holding a mask and with a parakeet perched on her shoulder. Muriel had sent me there to the Reproductions Department to buy a print of an etching by Fortuny (‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘it’s called Meditation’), which he wanted as inspiration for some shots in his latest film: a man in a frock coat, breeches and stockings, leaning against a wall, his chin in one hand and his head bowed so low that his elongated bicorn hat covers his face completely, invisible then and forever more. After buying the print, I went for a wander round that small, discreet and somewhat unfrequented museum (The Knight’s Dream is the best thing there), and I saw them some way off, but chose not to approach or to wave; he, I think, would have felt triumphant rather than embarrassed, but she might have felt a little awkward. Rico was giving her a (doubtless prolix) explanation, and Bettina, her lovely eyes fixed on the painting, was listening devotedly, which was surprising in a girl who, when we were going out together, used to jump rapidly from one subject to the next, never focusing on anything for very long. This was probably all down to the magnetic qualities of the Professor, who, while he was speaking, kept running his hand up and down her spine and waist (I imagine this was intended as a fond caress, but there was, too, an element of satisfied or possibly newly reawakened lust), and his hand even ventured as far as the incipient curve of her bottom (possibly covered by nothing but her flimsy skirt), and as she made not the slightest gesture or movement to avoid that hand, it was also clear that the Professor had already explored that territory without the hindrance of any intervening fabric; I didn’t even rule out the possibility that they had woken up together in a hotel room and that Rico, not wishing to get rid of her too abruptly or brusquely, and unable to think of any better way of distracting her, had decided to educate and enlighten her solely because, whoever he was with and whatever the circumstances, he found it hard not to slip into pedantic, didactic mode. He probably continued to lecture even between the sheets or in his bathrobe. I wondered half-heartedly quite when he had managed to obtain her phone number or how he had got in touch with her. I was astonished to see how much could be achieved with a few oblique, appreciative glances and a few lines quoted from memory. I always was impressed by his ability to get his own way.
However, I had to wait ten or twelve years for proof of the accuracy or truth of what he had told us. It was in 1991, I think, while browsing in a couple of shops, either Miessner or Buchholz, that I came across a volume whose title I’ve since forgotten, but which included the name of Edward de Vere, and whose subtitle described him as ‘Lord Great Chamberlain, seventeenth Earl of Oxford and poet and dramatist William Shakespeare’, taking it for granted that they were one and the same. And as if that were not enough, the blurb declared: ‘A fascinating biographical account of the man who was Shakespeare.’ I leafed through a few pages, and since it seemed to me to be a work of pure fiction, I didn’t buy it; novels are such arbitrary, impure things and that book, I felt, was merely a pretentious albeit erudite pastiche. I don’t know if it was the book Rico had referred to years before (although the author was a British university lecturer), but I was pleased anyway to discover that the identification of those two Elizabethan celebrities by some mad scholar in search of notoriety had not been pure invention or fantasy on the part of the Professor. Between him and my father, who proclaimed it to the four winds, they had, of course, given the idea if not to one then to ten scholars. But let it be set down here in fairness to the Professor.
I found out a little more about Edward de Vere, because I took advantage of that visit to the British Institute library to track down Rumour’s boastful words and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in search of that unruly, scheming nobleman, who had died nearly four hundred years before and who, oddly enough, shared both my surname (because it was still mine, even if it began as a fabrication or adulteration) and Muriel’s first name. I read the whole of the long entry to see if he had at least known Shakespeare and, if memory serves me right, there was no mention of their having known each other or of any possible connection. However, one particular sentence caught my eye, and I wrote it down in my notebook, which I still have; and I did this not because it had any relevance to myself, but because I saw a slight parallelism with the strange situation that existed between Muriel and Beatriz. According to the long biographical note, De Vere married Anne, the oldest daughter of Elizabeth I’s Treasurer, Lord Burghley, and the Queen herself attended the ceremony, ‘celebrated with great pomp’, when the bride was only fifteen and the Earl six years older. According to the article, on his return from his travels in Italy, he was temporarily estranged from his wife. On 29 March 1576, five years after the wedding, his father-in-law, Lord Burghley, wrote this about De Vere in his Diary: ‘He was enticed by certain lewd persons to be a stranger to his wife.’ The biography did not go into detail and chastely concluded: ‘Although the quarrel was resolved, their domestic relations were never very cordial thereafter.’ That wife, Anne, died several years later, after a reconciliation that resulted in the birth of three daughters (there had been a first child, born before the estrangement) and after he’d had an affair with another Anne, Anne Vavasour, who gave birth to an illegitimate son; he subsequently married again, a certain Elizabeth Trentham. It occurred to me that perhaps this was Muriel’s problem, that Beatriz Noguera had not died when she should have done or when it would have suited him. The legalization of divorce was expected very soon in Spain, indeed, the law was passed in mid-1981, but it still did not exist when I began working for Muriel and had not existed during the whole of his marriage. And over the centuries, in an anomalous country like ours, many couples who had grown indifferent to or even come to loathe each other had long yearned silently for their spouse to die or had even procured or induced or sought that death, usually even more silently or, rather, in utter secrecy.