‘But find out what, Eduardo? I don’t understand. It’s as plain as day that he’s the sort who’ll try it on with anyone, with the slightest encouragement and even without. He’s always looking to see how the land lies, with any woman worth pursuing that is, because he never gives the ugly or the asexual a second glance, which is not to say that he isn’t open to offers. Anyone can tell he’s a man with his eye on the main chance, and if there were no witnesses about, he’d be quite likely to overstep the mark. Compared to him, Professor Rico — to mention another friend of yours with very keen antennae — is a respectful, delicate herbivore. A contemplative. But you must know this better than I, given that you’ve known the Doctor most of your life. What is it that you want me to discover or coax from him? It’s hard to draw someone out if you don’t know what he’s got to tell you. Could you give me a bit more guidance, tell me more precisely what it is you’re looking for?’
Muriel drummed his nails on his bulky Bakelite or whatever eyepatch, cric cric cric, a pleasant sound, which I longed to imitate with my own fingers. Then he suddenly turned his one intense, dark blue eye on me with all the intimidating penetration of which he was sometimes capable, as if he were compensating for the immutable opacity of the other eye. He hadn’t looked at me until then. He seemed to ponder his answer for a few seconds, tempted to grant my wish. In the end, he let out a long sigh, perhaps frustrated that he must deny me any further information or help, or perhaps irritated by my faulty memory.
‘No, I mustn’t. As I said before, if I start voicing my suspicions, if I start revealing the story I’ve been told and which might or might not be true, I could be doing him an irreparable injustice. The Doctor is a great friend of mine, remember, whom I wouldn’t wish to harm without good reason. Or at least without a hint of certainty, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms; without more proof. As I explained, he would never tell me about something so very shameful; he’s told me other things, that is, I know a few things that he definitely wouldn’t want to be proclaimed to the four winds, but not this. Because he’d be ashamed if I knew. He knows me well and knows that I’m the very opposite of a puritan and not at all strait-laced, but that there are certain indecencies I cannot tolerate.’ (I remembered he had used the corresponding adjective when he had spoken more explicitly before: ‘According to what I’ve been told,’ he had said, ‘the Doctor behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman or possibly more than one.’ And he had, to my astonishment, concluded: ‘That, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low. Do you understand? That’s as low as one can go.’) ‘With you it would be different, if you gave him the chance. He could tell you, because he hardly knows you.’ He fell silent. He looked at me still more intensely and with something bordering on curiosity, as if he were suddenly seeing me for the first time, or had just realized the truth of what he went on to say: ‘Even I don’t really know you.’ Then he averted his eye and fixed it once more on the ceiling or on the painting, and, still lying flat on the floor, started stroking his chin with that silver pillbox. What he said next was spoken in an indolent tone, as though it were almost too obvious to be put into words. ‘But then neither do you. You’re not quite fully formed.’
To him this was an obvious thing to say, but to me it was a surprise and even rather troubling. Probably no one ever is quite fully formed, still less the young, and that’s how we adults tend to see them, incomplete, indecisive, confused, like an unfinished painting or a half-written or half-read novel — there’s not a great deal of difference — in which anything could happen, well, not perhaps anything — but too many things — one or more characters could die or none at all; and one of them might kill someone and then he would be both formed and finished, or so it would seem in the eyes of a stern author or reader; what we are told in a book could be totally gripping or not at all, in which case the passage from page to page becomes a torment and the finger turning the page grows weary and stops, it doesn’t wait until the final page, after which there is nothing, even if, on the contrary, the finger wants to remain indefinitely in that world and with those invented people. It’s the same with people’s lives; some, however filled with troubles and vicissitudes, arouse in us so little curiosity that we can barely stand to hear about them, yet other lives, for some reason, prove hypnotic, even though there appears to be nothing very special about them, or the best part remains hidden and is mere supposition.
But each individual believes he is fully formed in each and every phase of his existence, that he has a specific character subject only to minor variations, and considers himself to be prone to certain actions and immune to others, when the truth is that, as children or youths, most of us have not been tested, we have not yet found ourselves at a crossroads or faced with a dilemma. Maybe we never are fully formed, but begin unwittingly to configure and forge ourselves from the moment we first hove into view as a tiny dot on the ocean, one that gradually grows in size until we form a definite shape to be either avoided or approached, and as the years pass and events enfold us, we accept or reject the options offered to us or allow others to do so on our behalf (or is it just the air itself?). It doesn’t matter who makes the decision, everything is horribly irreversible and, in that sense, everything evens out: the deliberate and the involuntary, the accidental and the planned, the impulsive and the premeditated, and, ultimately, who cares about the whys, still less about the wherefores?
When I look at my own daughters, they don’t seem very formed to me, but, given their young age, that’s only natural; on the other hand, they doubtless consider themselves to be fully formed, as almost fixed entities, just as I did when I was twenty-three and before that too, I suppose; we pay so little attention to the changes that take place in us that we forget how they happened and forget them entirely once we’ve been through them. I had finished my degree with good marks and without any mishaps; and even though it was entirely thanks to my parents and their long friendship with Muriel that I had instantly found employment with a remarkable person, whom I admired almost unreservedly and whose approval and trust contributed to my seeing myself in a highly favourable light, I couldn’t help but feel proud as well, convinced that my boss must have seen something in me, that he had, at the very least, taken a liking to me, given that he had employed me and kept me on; I sometimes even had the flattering sense that he occasionally forgot about my family connections and about how he had come to give me the job, that I was the son of those old friends from his youth, the De Veres, of whom he remained very fond, even though they were now more often in touch by letter or only very infrequently, since my parents were usually living in some far-flung place and I was seldom with them. After all, I was very well read, had seen a lot of paintings and even more films; I had a considerable store of knowledge and was doubtless a pedantic young man, although I kept my pedantry to myself when it was inappropriate, for example, when I went out at night with my friends or with girls; I was fluent in one foreign language and spoke another reasonably well, and I knew that in my own language I had access to a wide vocabulary, far wider than that of most of my contemporaries, which meant I could comfortably take part in the conversations held by Muriel and his circle, who were older and wiser than me (at least in theory), although on those occasions I tended to listen and not intervene too much, and their talk often descended from the heights and meandered about in some very low territory, accompanied by loud guffaws; I had spent time abroad, whenever my parents included me in their prolonged and varied diplomatic postings, although they usually preferred me to stay in Madrid and to continue my education at the same school, wanting me to put down some deeper roots, at least that was the excuse they used for leaving me here in term-time, and even when there were no more terms, in the care of my aunt and uncle, Julia and Luis; they were happy for me to grow up alongside my cousins Luis and Julia, who have been like half-siblings to me, since I have no siblings of my own. No one has ever kept a very close watch on me, and for the most part — except when my parents were visiting or during the vacations, although they didn’t always come even then, often taking the opportunity to travel on their own — I was left alone in the family home under the negligent eye of various nursemaids or housekeepers or whatever you might call them, who never stayed long enough to become attached to me or to wield any real authority over me. From adolescence on, I was accustomed to never really having to answer to anyone very much, to returning home at odd hours and choosing where I slept, in my parents’ apartment or at my aunt and uncle’s place or, on some nights, at neither: this was in my early youth, from the time, let’s say, when I became an undergraduate at seventeen.