‘Give Mercedes a ring and tell her I won’t be coming in this morning after all. Tell her to get on with whatever needs doing. And then sit down. This is going to take a while.’
I phoned from the desk in the office, right there. Meanwhile, he went over to the door separating his side of the apartment from the corridor and carefully pulled it to: it was a high door with two leaves that had become warped so that they never quite clicked shut; the lower half was painted white, while the upper half was made of frosted panes of glass framed in white wood, typical of those old Madrid apartments.
‘Where do you want me to sit?’ I asked absurdly, to make his job easier, just in case he had a preference.
‘Wherever you like,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lie on the floor, in keeping with your possible opinion of me, if you’re of the view that Beatriz is right and that I have fallen very low. That it was all ridiculous, a piece of childish nonsense.’ He said this with a faint smile, which seemed to me somewhat forced. It can’t have been easy to start talking about what he was going to talk to me about, or perhaps he was reluctant to revisit those distant events, or still felt so embittered by them that they had extinguished any underlying joviality in his character. ‘Don’t go thinking you’re the first person she’s told this to, her women friends can’t stand the sight of me, my sister-in-law, for example. Beatriz genuinely believes it, so either she’s an idiot or I’m very wicked. You might incline to the latter view. But she’s not normally an idiot and I’m not naturally wicked. One of us has changed.’ And once he was lying down on the floor, one arm under his head as a pillow (when he was already staring up at the ceiling or at the topmost shelves of the library or at the painting by Casanova, and at me out of the corner of his one half-closed eye), to my surprise, he added: ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to witness those embarrassing scenes these past months. And you’re quite right, I should have been more careful, more discreet. It took me no time at all to get used to having you around and I’ve come to think of you as an extension of myself.’
This was the same diagnosis Beatriz had made on that insomniac night. She had added: ‘Which is both good and bad.’
‘Don’t worry, it wasn’t so very terrible.’ I felt obliged to play down the importance of those scenes. He had unexpectedly apologized and that only increased my feeling of betrayal and baseness, at least nominally. I’d had sex with his wife in his absence and couldn’t apologize for that, if, indeed, I needed to, given that he didn’t want her in his own bed. That’s the trouble with secrets, one can never ask forgiveness.
‘Beatriz, as you know, was largely brought up in America. But she often spent whole summers here as well as the occasional school term, living with her aunt and uncle, and that’s how we first met, when she was almost an adolescent and I was a young man. And when she was a young woman and I a slightly older young man, we got engaged. I suppose it was inevitable that she would fall in love with an older friend of her cousins; with a Spaniard, like her father, rather than with an American. And that she would have the patience to wait until she’d grown up enough to be noticed and to win my heart. Yes, although I’m a few years her senior, which mattered more then than it does now, that is the right expression. Girls are very determined and stubborn, and tend to want to see their childhood dreams come true. Until they reach a certain age or until they see them crushed for ever. That wasn’t the case with us. As soon as she reached adolescence, which she did very early, I began to look at her differently, and the other person’s enthusiasm does tend to persuade and carry you along, and I’ve almost always been the passive type. It wasn’t hard to love her. Besides, Beatriz wasn’t the great fat cow you know now. On the contrary.’
At the risk of revealing my secret — when you’ve something to hide, you’re afraid to utter even the most innocent of words — I broke in, driven by an urge to do her justice and defend her — which I was finally in a position to do — more than by a need to justify to myself my carnal baseness on that insomniac night and my occasional visual baseness on other nights.
‘You do exaggerate, Eduardo, you do blow things up out of all proportion. It’s hard to believe that you don’t intend to wound her when you come out with things like that. How can you possibly describe Beatriz as a fat cow? Or a cask of amontillado.’ It had probably never occurred to him that I might remember his insults, but it was time he realized that I’d memorized nearly all of them. ‘She’s still a very attractive woman, whom many men would find desirable. As you well know.’
Muriel laughed unexpectedly. He was doubtless amused to be reminded of his own wounding insult, with its incidental homage to Poe. I preferred not to remind him of other outrageous comparisons to the hot-air balloon from Around the World in 80 Days or Hitchcock’s silhouetted figure, still less Charles Laughton.
Buah, he said, or was it Bué? ‘There’s no accounting for taste. I imagine there are some men who like voluptuous women. The ones who only want to get them into bed. The lechers of this world.’ Again that word that had been used before to describe Van Vechten, one of the men who did find Beatriz attractive, in however utilitarian a fashion, or, given his age, perhaps he couldn’t afford to be choosy. But I was nearly forty years his junior. Perhaps I was a bit of a lecher at the time too, it’s not uncommon among young men, beginners don’t have much taste.
‘I think you’re wrong. I think that one day you made a decision and put a veil over your eyes that you’ve chosen not to take off. A distorting veil. But I interrupted you. You were saying she wasn’t a fat cow then, on the contrary.’
‘Quite. I don’t mean she was scrawny, not at all. No, she was always on the voluptuous side, but in proportion. She was striking. She was very pretty and sensual, with those slightly widely spaced teeth of hers. She smiled a lot. And she certainly filled her clothes, but in a good way. To put it bluntly: she was an absolute dish, if that’s an expression you still use nowadays. And, yes, any man would have fancied her then, especially me. She was a real gift in that respect. And since she set the pace, I just let myself be carried along. Looking back, and despite all that, it’s possible that I might not have taken the initiative, or wouldn’t have gone so far as to get engaged. Engaged to be married, you understand. But she was so determined and so strong, and tried so hard to please me … You’ll have noticed that she knows as much if not more about films as I do. She made my interests hers and moulded herself to my tastes and my eccentricities, I sometimes think that this was a task she set herself, a programme, as if, even when she was a girl, she’d said to herself: “I’m not going to let this man be bored in my company. I don’t want him not to be able to share a part of his life with me because he thinks I won’t be interested or won’t be up to understanding it. I don’t want him to find me lacking and to look elsewhere. I don’t want him to exclude me from anything.” She was not only happy to see all kinds of films, from masterpieces to the utter tripe I sometimes dragged her along to — because to get a real grasp of things, you need to see the full range, the old and the new, the good, the bad and the bizarre — she also read all the books I recommended, and quickly overtook me in that regard. The young Beatriz wasn’t the woman you see now, apathetic and unstable, spending hours at the piano without so much as playing a scale. She brimmed with energy and curiosity, she was unstoppable. Of course I’ll never know to what extent she had her own life, or if she merely lived her life through me. She took all the weight, she did all the heavy work demanded by any loving relationship when it’s just starting out, and afterwards too, as it develops.’ He paused very briefly, then added: ‘It wasn’t hard to love her. Another person’s love is inevitably touching. It arouses pity too, like the love of children. So much so that it seems cruel not to accept it, not to welcome it. It’s the kind of pity that melts the heart. Even though there was no passion on my part … not that I missed it at the time, having never experienced it.’