I kissed her hand as if she were a cardinal or a bishop, I had little experience of ecclesiasticals, but had observed that with some of them, you were expected to plant a kiss on the big purple ring they wore — and if that isn’t theatrical, I don’t know what is — and besides, that nun from some remote time or place deserved no less: she had been very kind, despite her grating voice. In a few strides I had reached the street door. I looked left and right, but luckily saw no one else and only hoped that neither Beatriz nor Van Vechten had come over to the window during the few minutes I had stood talking to the nun at the foot of the tree. I strode rapidly off down the street, but stopped short when I had gone barely twenty paces, because I spotted Beatriz in the distance, the sway of her skirt was unmistakable, although now it swayed with rather less ease, since it had, needless to say, become somewhat creased. She had been very quick and had clearly allowed Van Vechten neither caresses nor words (Non, pas de mots, she might have said, had she been in a novel), she had obviously departed unnoticed while I was still talking to the old lady. She was about to go into the nearby Museo Lázaro Galdiano, on the opposite side of a broad street. This time, I did not go after her, doubting that yet another lover would be waiting for her inside.
And yet when I followed Beatriz again a few days later, during that same period when Muriel was away from Madrid, I did think there might be a second lover. On that occasion, Beatriz had again gone out for a walk and at a similar hour. She walked for a while along Calle Velázquez where she lived, or where we (in a sense) lived, for I was spending more and more time at the apartment, whether intentionally or by chance, I’m not sure; when she reached Lista — the name we madrileños gave, and still give, to what is officially Calle de Ortega y Gasset, as it appears on maps and in guides — she turned right and walked the short distance to Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca. I saw her go in through the high doorway of one of the houses in the square. I allowed a few minutes to pass before going over to read the small metal plaques — there were a few of them, mostly brass — screwed into the wall beside the door, so that they could easily be seen from the street, perhaps as a discreet advertisement for companies that had their headquarters in the building in question or for professionals with a certain prestige or reputation or for those aspiring to that and trying their luck and making their way. There were seven plaques beside that particular door: three were rather cryptic, ‘Meridianos’, ‘221B BS’ and ‘Gekoski’, but I presumed they were the names of companies. The same would be true of ‘Marius Kociejowski. Middle Eastern Travel’, but at least it told you what he did (broad, but specific; he was not, I presumed, a mere travel agent). I was struck by the fact that there were two more or less Polish surnames on the plaques, or so they seemed to me, there weren’t as many Poles in Madrid then as there would be a decade or more later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the Poles who arrived then tended not to be businessmen. I knew ‘Deverne Films’, a very influential and successful film distributor, which also owned various cinemas, and, after all, who didn’t know the vast logo that regularly filled cinema screens, announcing: ‘Deverne Films presents …’? Muriel, I recall, had dealings with the family, as, no doubt, did all directors. In fact, a few months before, I had accompanied Muriel to a meeting in a café with the company’s founder and one of his sons, who although not yet thirty, was already very much part of the firm. The distributors were involved in film production, advancing initial funding so that a film could be made and, assuming they liked the finished product, reserving the distribution rights or else making money by selling it off to another distributor. The two remaining plaques were more run of the milclass="underline" ‘Juan Mollá. Lawyer’, said one, and the last was equally terse: ‘Dr Carlos Arranz. Medical Consultant’.
I crossed Calle Príncipe de Vergara and waited outside a shop called La Continental, which sold all kinds of things for the home: furniture, crockery, artefacts, all in excellent taste. (At least I think that was the shop: I’m not sure now if it existed then, and it certainly doesn’t now; and yet that is the shop that has remained lodged in my memory, perhaps because, later on, I spent a lot of time there with my wife, choosing items for our apartment, with me occasionally glancing across at No. 2 and thinking back to that day.) I could go inside to pass the time, while keeping a close eye on the doorway for when Beatriz re-emerged, I wanted at least to know how long she would spend in there, not that any activity requires a great deal of time, how long a meeting lasts doesn’t really tell you anything. I couldn’t help but speculate while I waited: I didn’t think she would have gone to see the lawyer or the doctor, although that couldn’t be discounted. The name ‘221B BS’ made me suspect that it was a detective agency; I couldn’t help associating that strange name with 221B Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson lived and received their various intriguing commissions. It seemed more likely to me that Beatriz would be visiting them: unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people’s lives as a distraction from their own. She could have been visiting Gekoski or Meridianos, whatever they were, or Marius K and his journeys to the Middle East, or someone else, who had no plaque. However, I inclined towards Deverne Films, after all, they were in the same line of work as her husband and she would probably know them. I hadn’t paid much attention to that conversation in the café, but I did notice the founder’s handsome son, Miguel Deverne, a young man not much older than me, but who was dressed with surprising aplomb in suit and tie and even wearing cufflinks, which I thought very old-fashioned. He was a friendly man, with a warm, ready laugh, any woman would have found him attractive, even a woman in her forties, especially if she had spent painful, frustrating years being rejected by her husband.
The sight of Beatriz and Van Vechten a few days before had revealed a new active aspect of her personality, or had perhaps shrouded or contaminated my view of her, if I can put it like that (the truth is that I had seen nothing, only her face and her closed eyes), and now I imagined her in that same pose all the time, which was both inappropriate and unfair, since at home she always behaved discreetly and even timidly sometimes — especially in Muriel’s presence, as if she were apologizing for her very existence — he had managed to cow her, to diminish her, despite her robust build and stature, to make her feel she was in the way, as if she were something imposed by custom or by a commitment made long ago, which, precisely because it was now old, could no longer be questioned; she even seemed somewhat apologetic with me too, and for months hardly dared to speak to me because I so clearly belonged to her husband’s world, and he was someone she dreaded, possibly even feared. And so it seemed to me that regardless of who she was seeing in Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca, the meeting was sure to be of a sexual nature, however much I kept telling myself that this wasn’t necessarily the case, that she might well have an appointment with the lawyer, Mollá, to discuss a possible divorce when divorce eventually became legal; or with Dr Arranz about some problem or symptom or out of pure hypochondria, and that the doctor could well be a psychiatrist or psychologist — the plaque didn’t specify what field he was in — and it would have come as no surprise to discover that Beatriz was going to a therapist to unburden herself or to learn to cope better with her sorrow; she could be hiring a private investigator to look into some incident or individual from the past or present (she might want to probe into the origin of her misfortune), or be planning a trip to Egypt or Syria; she could be interceding on Muriel’s behalf, trying to get the distributors to take on a project of his that was otherwise hanging by a thread; she could be doing business with Gekoski, which sounded to me like the name of a dodgy auctioneer or an upmarket pawnbroker, if such things still exist. And yet despite all this hypothesizing, I still kept imagining a repetition of the scene with Van Vechten. It even occurred to me, in my meanderings, that she might be prostituting herself to help her husband — unconditional love does not exclude paradox and, as the word ‘unconditional’ indicates, such love is capable of anything — and she had gone there to offer her body to the founder of the company, Deverne, who would be in his sixties or older and would be unlikely to turn his nose up at the chance.