‘Hers is such a woeful bed,’ I thought, ‘that she has to visit other beds, or dispense with beds altogether, so that she doesn’t risk feeling the contrast with her own cold, solitary bed, to which she returns each night. She can’t bear to be still and simply accept her fate, so she seeks out these forays, these adventures. She would far rather be with Muriel, but since he won’t have her, she refuses simply to languish or waste away at home, and in her more animated moments, she looks for substitutes, as almost everyone does, very few of us ever find what we yearn for, or if we do, we don’t hang on to it for very long, and who knows how long she managed to hang on to her happiness.’ We strive to conquer things, never thinking, in our eagerness, that they will never definitely be ours, that they rarely last and are always susceptible to loss, nothing is ever for ever, we often fight battles or hatch plots or tell lies, commit vile deeds or acts of treachery or foment crimes always forgetting that the thing we obtain might not last (it’s a very ancient fault in all of us, to see the present as final and forget that it’s inevitably and infuriatingly transitory), and that once their effect fades or expires, all the battles and plots, the lies and vile deeds, the betrayals and crimes will seem utterly futile to us, or worse, superfluous: such a waste of verve, such a squandering of energy, we might as well have saved ourselves the bother, since nothing much has changed. We are led on by wicked haste and easily surrender ourselves to poisonous impatience, as I once heard Muriel describe it, although whether he was quoting someone else I have no idea. We see no further than tomorrow and see it as the end of time, just as if we were little children believing that our mother’s momentary absence will be definitive and irreversible, that she has abandoned us completely; that if our hunger or thirst is not immediately satisfied, we will remain hungry and thirsty for ever; that if we suffer even the tiniest of scratches, the pain will never end, we don’t even foresee the scab forming; that if we feel safe and protected now, we will feel so for the rest of our life, which we can only conceive of from day to day or hour to hour or five minutes to five minutes. In that respect, we don’t change very much when we’re adults, not even when we’re old and what remains to us of life is so much shorter. The past doesn’t count, it’s time expired and negated, a time of error or ingenuousness and ignorance, which we end up perceiving as merely pathetic, and what ultimately invalidates and overwhelms it is this idea: ‘How little we knew, how stupid we were, how innocent, we had no idea what awaited us and now we do.’ And in that state of present knowledge, we are incapable of bearing in mind that tomorrow we will know something else and today will seem as stupid to us as yesterday or the day before or the day on which we were first thrust into the world, or perhaps this happened in the middle of the night beneath the bored and scornful moon. We go from deceit to deceit and know that, in that respect, we are not deceived, and yet we always take the latest deceit for the truth.
I waited and waited and felt as if I had been waiting a long time. I went into the shop and left again over and over, I browsed around inside without buying anything, avoiding the solicitous assistants as best I could (‘No, thank you, I’m just looking, I’ll come back when I’ve made a decision’). I gazed up at the windows of the building opposite, but saw no one, and it was impossible to know which floor Beatriz had gone to. I was tempted to peer in and ask the porter, but that would have been inappropriate and he would have answered in rude, patronizing tones: ‘What’s it got to do with you, young man, why do you want to know? It’s no business of yours who the lady is visiting. Who sent you, anyway? I’m going to tell Señor Gekoski, Dr Arranz, Señor Mollá, Mr Holmes, Señor Kociejowski, and the Devernes, so that they can take action and know all about your meddling.’ Of course, by threatening me with a name, he would have answered my question. I continued to wait, and the more time passed, the more likely it seemed to me that Beatriz’s meeting was a carnal one; then, a few seconds later, I thought exactly the opposite, it takes longer to talk than it does to have a prearranged fuck, forgive the vulgarity, but it’s best to call a spade a spade.
She did not reappear for nearly an hour, but which of those men had she been with and what had she done? At first, I noticed no change in her attitude or her appearance, although there was perhaps a change in her expression, which seemed to me — how can I put it? — disjointed or blurred, as if one part of her face expressed pleasurable intensity and the other disgust, as if she had just had a thrilling but somehow distasteful experience. She began walking back the way she came. I followed her at a distance, to see where she was going, until she went into a very classy clothes shop on Calle de Ortega y Gasset, or, rather, Lista. And it was while she was walking that I noticed the enormous ladder in her tights, almost a tear, and her skirt, obviously disarranged in the fray, was slightly caught up at the back, despite her efforts to smooth it into place while she walked. I know now and knew then how very easily tights ladder, you only have to brush against something, but it confirmed my suppositions: whoever she had just gone to bed with — well, not bed, of course, but there are always ledges and walls and tables on which to lean — the man had not been as careful as Van Vechten; if you keep your clothes on, they can easily become dirty or torn. When she left the shop, she had changed her tights and her skirt swung freely, any obstacle removed. She must have bought them there and then, and gone into the shop for that purpose.
No one had sent me, contrary to what the porter would have thought had I inquired who Beatriz Noguera was visiting, asked the name of her visitee. No, no one had ordered me to follow her when she went out alone, and at the time, I myself didn’t really know why I was doing it, or felt no need to explain to myself or preferred not to recognize the real reason, despite my naturally reflective nature. That is one of the advantages of youth: you allow yourself to act far more impulsively and obliquely, it makes you feel terribly original somehow — even though this turns out not to be the case at all, and what you’re doing is actually supremely banal — because you’re prepared to take rash, instantaneous decisions, thinking you can get away with a certain degree of eccentricity or irresponsibility or even a touch of feigned madness, or, rather, you’re of an age that allows for that — only a little sporadic madness, because flirting with insanity is never risk-free — without incurring any real consequences, and you rarely do slide into a more serious, more enduring madness; and you are still very close to childhood and adolescence, when you see yourself as a character out of a novel or a comic or a film and try to emulate them; perhaps I was imitating Hitchcock’s creations, suggested by that season of films to which Muriel had taken me, unresisting, and in which there are often long sequences during which no one says a word, no dialogue at all, just people coming and going from one place to another, and yet you sit, eyes glued to the screen, feeling increasingly intrigued and anxious, even when sometimes there’s no objective reason to feel that. The mere act of watching creates that feeling of anxiety, that sense of intrigue. We just have to lay eyes on someone for us to begin to ask questions and fear for their fate.