‘I know you, don’t I? I remember those blue, blue eyes and that blond hair. You’ve hardly changed at all. Not a grey hair in sight and not a hint of a bald patch.’
However, Van Vechten, who remained seated and adopted a look of genuine surprise and doubtless genuine malice, responded:
‘No, Señora. You must be confusing me with my father, whom I greatly resemble. As you can see, the people who come here now’ — he paused heartlessly, looking round at me and my group and smugly, arrogantly including himself — ‘are all rather young.’
Dr Van Vechten was anything but inhibited, so much so that my initial fears proved not only unfounded, but ridiculous, namely, that he would find my friendly suggestion that he join me now and then on my nocturnal sorties suspicious and inappropriate. Muriel knew him well, which is why he’d had no qualms about setting me that task, sure that Van Vechten would never judge anything to be gratuitous or unmerited if it brought with it the promise of amusement and pleasure. I had put this down at first to a misjudgement on the part of my boss, to his often unworldly sense of reality. This was not entirely true, however, for I soon realized that he missed almost nothing of what really mattered about people or situations; that beneath his abstracted, even self-absorbed appearance, he noticed and saw far more than he seemed to. Whenever I failed in my attempts to decipher his thoughts, I assumed he must be making plans in his head, imagining future shots and camera moves, and this may have been true, but he still never lost track of the story he was telling or that was being told to him, or of the idea that was troubling him. He had a very distinctive style, but he wasn’t a mere stylist, still less an aesthete, either in his films or in life. He liked to pretend that he knew very little about what was going on around him and preferred to say nothing about what he did notice, but I think he noticed a lot and knew about almost everything.
Van Vechten did indeed have very blue eyes and the kind of blond hair which is still memorable in a country where such hair colour is much more common than people think and admit, albeit less pure and more mixed: here, pale-coloured eyes tend to be greyish or green or reminiscent of various liqueurs or dark blue like Muriel’s one seeing eye, and hair is rarely that insipid or Nordic blond. He really did look like a foreigner, as if his numerous ancestors in Arévalo must have gone more and more frequently to Holland in search of a bride. That’s why he was so instantly recognizable, the veteran whore was probably quite right, although he didn’t at all strike me as a classic whoremonger. His eyes had a bright, youthful glint to them — indeed, they were southern European in their intensity, an intensity that could quickly become obscene and offensive; he had regular, indeed, attractive features (he must have been handsome when young), dazzling and healthy-looking teeth — large, rectangular incisors — a very strong jaw and a rather square face; the only things that slightly spoiled his looks were his rather pointed nose and ears, like an elf’s ears, and his somewhat protruding chin, though not quite a witch’s chin. I once remarked to Muriel that Van Vechten resembled a minor, almost incidental American actor, who appeared in hundreds of films but whose name would be unknown to most cinema-goers: ‘Robert J. Wilke,’ I said with youthful, point-scoring pedantry, and he nodded and replied instantly: ‘Yes, one of the three gunmen who spend almost the whole of High Noon waiting for the train to arrive. But you’re right, well spotted. And oddly enough, I think that as well as appearing in innumerable Westerns, he also appeared on more than one occasion in a doctor’s white coat.’ That is how I had seen Van Vechten when he was screwing Beatriz at the Sanctuary of Darmstadt, both of them standing up and both fully clothed. But Muriel didn’t know that I had that image of the Doctor in my head, his white coat unbuttoned.
Van Vechten’s features suggested a triumphant, expansive nature, as did the way he behaved in public: with enormous confidence, perennial good humour, too perennial not to seem somewhat false — although perhaps suitable for a paediatrician who needed to instil confidence in mothers and children — with undeniable joviality and a constant, welcoming smile, a man who told jokes, clean or dirty depending on the company he was in, and who was always joshing, perhaps too much — as if this were his visiting card — a kind of easy humour that nevertheless seemed to me old-fashioned (but perhaps that was normal, given that we were separated by many calendar years) and which I perhaps unfairly associated with the long, fast-receding Franco era, but it might have been just the same under a completely different regime. When he was a child, someone must have told him: ‘You have such beautiful teeth, Jorgito, you should always smile, whether it seems appropriate or not; that will win you good friends and goodwill; it will help smooth your path.’ He was very tall, almost as tall as Muriel or possibly taller, and very solidly built. That’s why, I think, he was much given to slapping people on the back, to grabbing their arm, which he would then tug or shake in jocular fashion while laughing a strangely mechanical laugh; he was very strong and could doubtless have inflicted harm had he wanted to, indeed, I was sometimes left slightly bruised whenever he gave me a friendly shove or placed one of his huge hands on my shoulder, which felt as if a great paw had fallen from a considerable height and then gripped me with what was intended to be affection, but which felt more like the paw of a lion and provoked in me an immediate urge to shrug it off and free myself from both its weight and grip.
Alongside that good humour, one sensed something voracious and troubling, as if nothing ever entirely pleased him, as if he were one of those people for whom nothing is ever enough, who always want more and who reach a point when they no longer know what more they can want: it’s difficult for them to be more successful, earn more money, more admiration from the people surrounding them, more power or influence in the world they move in. They look around, flail vainly about in search of new goals, and don’t know how to channel all the ambition and energy that continue to beset them, how to raise the siege, to strike camp. You might say that age has betrayed them, has failed to teach them its usual soothing lessons; it neither softens nor makes them slower or meeker, it has too much respect for their personality and doesn’t know what to do with them or else simply doesn’t bother to please, still less satisfy them. They thus become creatures who are barely aware of passing time, and instead time feels to them like a kind of unvarying eternity in which they have lived their entire life and which looks unlikely to disappear or to change in pace, to withdraw from or abandon them: they are time’s hostages or its willing victims; it must be said in their defence that time acts most disloyally in partly failing to fulfil its commitment to them: it merely slowly, little by little, undermines them, but — how I can put it? — without telling them. They are individuals who, if you told them they had a fatal illness and would soon die, would react with immediate and utter incredulity or scepticism — with disdain, in fact — as if to say, more or less: ‘Look, I’m awfully sorry, but it really doesn’t suit me to die right now. I’ve got such a lot to do, and I wasn’t expecting it, it wasn’t part of my short-term plan. If you don’t mind, could we leave it for later on?’ (And that’s perfectly understandable really, because, with the exception of suicides and those who are old and tired of life, who doesn’t want to leave it for later on, however late in the day that ‘now’ presents itself?) Muriel, on the other hand, would never have said that, even though, as I mentioned at the beginning, he shared with Van Vechten a certain immunity to the passage of time, and the years seemed to have little effect on his appearance or perhaps only that of a slow fall of sleet or a faint shadow. However, unlike his friend, there was no voracity or disquiet in him, no vague dissatisfactions, there was, rather, stillness and pause and calm: he merely ignored the passing of time, as if it were so familiar that it wasn’t worth devoting a single minute to bemoaning or pondering it. Or as if all the really important things had happened to him in the past.