Nor did I see Muriel, who was approaching or already in his fifties, relenting in his pursuit of women, if ‘pursuit’ is the right word. He never seemed to be urgently pursuing anyone, he appeared, rather, distracted, at least in that regard, and adopted a negligent, contemplative attitude. He appeared surprised when he discovered he was being lusted after by some beautiful young upstart or by some more upmarket seductress. On those occasions, however, he never paused to wonder if his suitors wanted something from him — a minor role in a film or the mere allure of his name — nor did he drive them away when this became obvious. He allowed himself to be led and manipulated, or so it seemed, but afterwards would appear indifferent and stoical or wouldn’t even remember — indeed he sometimes said as much, and I’ve already mentioned one such case — having shared a bed with someone who would have liked to have made further visits to his bed — with him inside it of course — or had dared to demand a small favour. Since he had offered nothing, he felt under no obligation, it was up to them what they did, but he certainly hadn’t encouraged them. I never saw him seriously ‘paired up’ with any woman, at most he would go out with the same woman several times if he got on well with her and liked her, usually just as a companion at premieres or cocktail parties, at superficial and usually group outings with other people, I thought he would probably get bored having supper with any of them alone, or having to engage in conversation with them after those occasional rolls in the hay, which I imagined would be rather mechanical, more medicinal than sexual and certainly not passionate. I’m sure he found tedious the young and not-so-young, be they upstarts or aristocrats, who had never heard of Zero Mostel or Andy Devine or Eugene Pallette or Sydney Greenstreet, to mention other overweight actors to whom, on his angry or overly jocular days, he might have compared Beatriz, nor would they have heard of Baudelaire, with or without his giantess. On the other hand, with those women he genuinely admired or found interesting or fascinating, like Cecilia Alemany, not only were they few and far between, he didn’t usually stand much chance, for they belonged to other worlds where he was just a pauper at the gate or, at best, an intriguing artist who might bring a little sparkle or glamour to the supper table. And perhaps he allowed himself to praise them and tell them he adored them precisely because they were mere chimera. It sometimes occurred to me that Muriel would probably have had one or two or three women in his life, to whom he would have given himself unreservedly, but who were so important and intelligent, so fine, that he found it hard to take seriously almost any other woman who approached him. I was convinced that one of those two or three — if there had been two or three — would have been the Beatriz of earlier days, the one who had lived in America and whom he had married, the willing, optimistic, cheerful Beatriz who was still there, the Beatriz who had not yet gone half-mad, who was not yet utterly wretched. Or, how can I put it, cast adrift.
Professor Rico was quite a lot younger than Muriel and had not yet reached the age when nothing can be healed, although it was fast approaching. Even though he was getting on for forty, he was still childishly and verbally lewd and opinionated and arrogant, and therein lay much of his wit and charm (for those who could see them, because some people couldn’t stand him), and these qualities brought him quite a few conquests, theoretical or hypothetical ones at least, as I’ve explained. He might have been the sort to engage in the kind of masculine calculations I mentioned before (‘How many women etc. etc. …’), except that he would have made a mental notch on his gun as soon as he saw that a seduction was a sure thing, as soon as he was certain that, as he had occasionally declared with touching glee — or, rather, complacency — ‘that woman could be mine at the click of my fingers, it’s obvious, indubitable’, which was his reason for not always feeling it necessary to allow the seduction to reach its inevitable conclusion or ‘to finish the job’, although this was more Van Vechten’s way of putting it than Rico’s.
No, it seemed to me that almost no one around me had lost any of their eager desires — perhaps it was the unexpected, agitated nature of the times — least of all the celebrated paediatrician, the oldest member of the group — he was about ten years older than Muriel, nearly twenty years older than Beatriz or Rico and almost forty years older than me. And although, as I said, he looked more like a fifty-year-old and was still strong and agile, it still seemed incomprehensible and incongruous that I should invite him to go out with me and my friends. However, it proved easy enough to persuade him, he certainly didn’t play hard to get, he didn’t resist or turn up his nose; he was a pushover, fertile ground. Such was his keenness, such was his sorrow at missing out on that easy-going, permissive age, such was his desperation when he imagined what was slipping past him because of a mere incompatibility of dates (which is something that, as long as we live, we still think can be remedied, if not turned on its head), he was over the moon when I invited him to go with me, first, to bars and, later, to discotheques and live-music venues. The latter were full of people of various ages, where you could talk despite the decibels and even sit down now and then, and so he wouldn’t feel so very out of place, especially since some of those venues were old haunts of his, which had come back into fashion with a new, enthusiastic clientele, generally ignorant of the past and utterly different from the clientele who had frequented them during their various antediluvian phases. This was the case, I think, with El Sol in Calle Jardines or, later on, the Cock in Calle de la Reina, or, of course, Bar Chicote, in Gran Vía, which, if I’m not mistaken, had been open since before the Civil War and is, inevitably, mentioned by Hemingway in some of his articles and his more touristy novels. Afterwards, during the post-war years, it had first been taken over by discreet, fairly classy whores, by bullfighters, actors, singers, footballers, actresses and, later, by high-ranking civil servants in Franco’s government, businessmen with close links to the regime and even the occasional party-mad minister; the first group were eager to meet the second group, and the second group to meet the first, and the club provided the ideal meeting place. I wondered if Van Vechten had been a regular during those seemingly endless years, when he was officially on good terms with the victors (well, in the 1940s he was one of them, something people always forgot) and benefited from his contacts; if he had joined the rich and powerful in partaking of Bar Chicote’s famous cocktails and occasionally glanced over at the stools where any women on their own used to sit, leaning on the bar, carefully seated in half-profile (so as not to offer only a monotonous view of female posteriors) and pretending to chat with each other, until they were invited to join a group at a table. Around 1980, you would still see the occasional elderly, absent-minded woman, who, perhaps seeing the place so lively again after a long period of decay, again sat down on her bar stool of yesteryear, thinking that the good old days had somehow miraculously been restored and the clocks turned back. In fact, one of those veteran ladies once came over to our table, where she stood staring at Van Vechten, then said very sweetly: