‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said from the floor, giving not the slightest sign either that he was about to get up or that he felt in the least embarrassed by my presence; he regarded my two outstretched hands as if they were a couple of pesky flies buzzing around him. ‘Can’t you see I’m just having a quiet smoke?’ And he brandished his pipe at me, holding it by its bowl. He mostly smoked cigarettes, especially when he was away from home, when he only smoked cigarettes, but in his apartment, he alternated them with his pipe, as though wanting to complete a picture that, otherwise, few of us would see (for he never smoked a pipe during the occasional, mostly spur-of-the-moment parties he threw), to complete that image for his own benefit: eyepatch, pipe, thin moustache, thick hair with a high parting, tailored suit, sometimes a waistcoat; it was as if, unconsciously, he had remained stuck with the image of the male leads from the films of his childhood and adolescence, in the 1930s and 40s, not just the image of Errol Flynn (par excellence, and with whom he shared a dazzling smile), but those of now slightly more nebulous figures, like Ronald Colman, Robert Donat, Basil Rathbone, even the rather longer-lasting David Niven and Robert Taylor; he had a touch of all of them even though they were all quite different. And given that he was Spanish, he occasionally reminded me of certain swarthier actors: the even more distinct and exotic Gilbert Roland and Cesar Romero, especially the former, who also had a large, straight nose.
‘What are you doing lying on the floor, may I ask? Just out of curiosity, you know, not that I disapprove, heaven forfend. I just want to understand your habits, assuming this is a habit.’
He made a face expressive of resigned impatience, as if my reaction were all too familiar and he had often had to give the same explanation to others before me.
‘It’s not so very odd. I often do it. There’s nothing to explain, but, yes, it is a habit of mine. Can’t a person lie down on the floor simply because he wants to and because it suits him?’
‘Of course, Don Eduardo, you can perform acrobatics if the fancy takes you. Why not? Or do a bit of Chinese plate-spinning.’ I slipped in this remark deliberately, to make it clear that his posture was not as normal as he made out, not in a man of a certain age, and a father to boot, because crawling about on the floor was something adolescents or children did, and he had three children still living at home. I wasn’t sure either that what I was thinking of was a particularly Chinese speciality, spinning several plates at a time with each plate balanced on the end of a long, thin, flexible stick and each stick balanced on a fingertip, I have no idea how they do it or indeed why. He obviously knew what I meant though. ‘You have two perfectly good sofas over there,’ I added and pointed behind me, to the living room, because he was lying down in the study. ‘I wouldn’t have found it at all alarming to find you on one of those, even asleep or in a trance. But on the floor, with all the dust … I’m sorry, but it’s not what one expects.’
‘In a trance? Me? In a trance? What do you mean?’ He seemed positively offended, but the flicker of a smile indicated that he was also amused.
‘It was just a manner of speaking. Thinking. Meditating. Or hypnotized.’
‘Me? Hypnotized? Who by? What do you mean “hypnotized”?’ And now he couldn’t suppress a broad but fleeting smile. ‘Do you mean I’d hypnotized myself? In the morning? A quoi bon?’ he concluded in French, such brief incursions into French being not uncommon among the educated members of his own and preceding generations, since it was usually their second language. I had realized from early on that he rather enjoyed my little jokes, for he rarely cut them short, but tended to repeat them back at me, and the only reason he didn’t linger longer was not because he didn’t want to, but so that I didn’t get too cheeky too quickly, an unnecessary precaution, since I admired and respected him greatly. He paused after that sally into French and, to emphasize his words, he again raised his still smoking pipe. ‘The ground or, in this case, the floor, is the safest, firmest and most modest place there is; and, as well as providing the best view of the sky or the ceiling, it’s an ideal spot in which to do some thinking. Besides, there isn’t a speck of dust to be seen,’ he added. ‘You’ll have to get used to seeing me here, because once on the floor you cannot fall over or, indeed, fall any lower, a great advantage when it comes to making decisions, which one should always base on the worst possible hypothesis, if not on sheer desperation and its usual companion, meanness, then there’s no risk of your giving way to sentimentality or being disappointed by whatever decision you happen to take. Anyway, it’s not a problem, so sit down, will you, I need to dictate a couple of things. And I’ve told you before, don’t call me “Don Eduardo”,’ he said, imitating the way I had said it, and he was an excellent mimic. ‘It makes me sound older than I am, like some character out of a novel by Galdós, a writer whose work, by the way, with two possible exceptions, I’ve always loathed, the kind of author you could almost accuse of being a literary despot. Come on, get writing.’
‘You’re going to dictate to me from down there?’
‘Yes, from down here. What’s wrong with that? Can’t you hear me? Don’t tell me I need to take you to an ENT specialist, that would be most unfortunate at your age. How old did you say you were? Fifteen?’ He, too, was much given to jokes and exaggerated remarks.
‘No, twenty-three. Of course I can hear you. You have, as you know, a strong, manly voice.’ I was not always the one to start; whenever Muriel made a joke, I would return it or at least respond in the same playful tone. He again smiled involuntarily, more with his one eye than with his lips. ‘But I won’t be able to see your face if I sit in my usual place. I’ll have my back to you, which would be rude, wouldn’t it?’ When we had business to conduct, I usually sat in the armchair opposite his, with his eighteenth-century desk between us, and he, at that moment, was lying near the door to the living room, behind my usual chair.
‘Well, turn your chair round to face me, then. It’s hardly a major problem, it’s not nailed to the floor.’
He was quite right, and I did as I was told. Now he was lying literally at my feet, perpendicular to them; it was an eccentric arrangement, the boss horizontal on the floor and the secretary — or whatever I was — near enough to give him a kick in the ribs or the thigh if I made the slightest sudden or involuntary or ill-judged movement of my legs. I prepared to write in my notebook (I would type the letters out afterwards on an old machine of his that he had lent me and that still worked well, and I would then give them to him to check and sign).
Muriel, however, did not immediately begin dictating. His rather affable, covertly amused expression of a moment before had been replaced by one of abstraction or preoccupation, or by one of those griefs that you put off because you don’t want to confront or plunge into it and which, nevertheless, always comes back, recurs, grows deeper with each attack, having failed to disappear during the period you were keeping it at bay or far from your thoughts: instead, it has grown in its absence and has not once ceased to stalk your mind surreptitiously or subterraneously, as if it were the preamble to a break-up that will inevitably happen, but which you still cannot even imagine: those feelings of coldness and irritation and boredom towards a much-loved person, feelings that come in waves, that linger, then depart; and with each departure, you try to believe they were pure phantasmagoria — the product of your own unease or a general discontent, or of some other minor annoyances or even the heat — and that they won’t come back. Only to discover, the next time, that each new wave proves more tenacious and enduring, poisoning and oppressing the mind and causing it to doubt and complain a little more. That feeling of disaffection takes a while to appear and still longer to take shape in the mind (‘I don’t think I can stand her any longer, I’ve got to close the door on her, I must’), and even when our consciousness has finally accepted it, there’s still a long way to go before it’s actually put into words and placed before the person about to be abandoned, and who neither suspects nor imagines it — because not even we deceitful, cowardly, dilatory, slow abandoners suspect or imagine it, but come up with all kinds of reasons why we should not: for the avoidance of guilt or to save her pain — the person whose fate it will be to languish incredulously and even pine palely away.