It was about then that Marta underwent a change of attitude. I don’t mean that, from one day to the next, she stopped yawning and became a woman of unbridled passion, but she did begin to show a greater interest in and curiosity about me and my no longer very young body, as if she sensed an infidelity on my part and was on the alert, or as if she herself had been unfaithful and wanted to find out if some newly discovered technique might be possible with me as well.
‘Come here,’ she would say sometimes, and she had never made such overtures to me before. Or she would utter a few words, for example: ‘Yes, yes, now.’
The third letter that had promised so much had left me waiting for a fourth letter even more anxiously than the second irritating letter had left me waiting for the third. But no fourth letter arrived, and I realised that I was beginning to wait for the post each day with growing impatience. I noticed that my heart turned over whenever an envelope arrived bearing no return address, and then my eyes would glance rapidly at the postmark, to see if it was from Gijón. But no one ever writes from Gijón.
Months passed, and on All Souls’ Day, Marta and I took flowers to my parents’ grave, in which my grandparents and my sister are also buried.
‘What will happen to us, do you think?’ I said to Marta, as we breathed in the clean cemetery air from a bench close to our family vault. I was smoking a cigarette, and she was studying her nails, holding her spread fingers some distance from her, like someone urging a crowd to remain calm. ‘I mean, when we die. There’s no room here now.’
‘The things you think about.’
I gazed off into the distance in order to give myself an appropriately dreamy air that would justify what I was about to say, and I said:
‘I’d like to be buried. Burial is more suggestive of repose than cremation. My father wanted to be cremated, do you remember, and we didn’t do what he wanted. We should have, I think. It would bother me to think that my wish to be buried were ignored. What do you think? I’m thinking we ought to disinter him. That way, there’d be room for me when I die. You could go to your parents’ vault.’
‘Let’s get out of here. You’re beginning to give me the creeps.’
We set off among the graves, towards the exit. It was sunny. But we had only gone a few steps, when I stopped, looked at the tip of my cigarette and said:
‘Don’t you think we should cremate him?’
‘Do what you like, but let’s get out of here.’
I threw down my cigarette and buried it in the ground with my foot.
Marta refused to attend the ceremony, an emotionless affair of which I was the sole witness. My father’s remains went from being vaguely recognisable in his coffin to being entirely unrecognisable in an urn. It didn’t seem to me necessary to scatter the ashes and, besides, that’s not allowed.
When I got home, late, I felt quite depressed; I sat down in my armchair without taking off my coat or turning on the light and stayed there, waiting, musing, thinking, perhaps recovering from the responsibility and the effort of having done something I should have done some time ago, of having fulfilled a wish (someone else’s wish), while, in the background, I could hear distant sounds of Marta taking a shower. After a while, my wife, Marta, emerged from the bathroom wearing her pink robe and with her hair still wet. She was lit from behind by the light from the still steamy bathroom. She sat down on the floor at my feet and rested her damp head on my lap. After a few seconds, I said:
‘Shouldn’t you dry yourself off? You’re making my coat and trousers wet.’
‘I’m going to make all of you wet,’ she said and revealed that she was naked beneath her bathrobe. We were both now lit by the distant light from the bathroom.
That night, I was happy because my wife, Marta, was both lascivious and imaginative, whispering sweet nothings to me, and she didn’t yawn once, in short, I was satisfied with her alone. I’ll never forget that. It hasn’t happened since. It was a night of love. No, it hasn’t happened again.
A few days later, I received the long-awaited fourth letter. I still haven’t dared to open it, and sometimes I feel tempted simply to tear it up and never read it. This is partly because I think I know and fear what the letter will say; unlike the previous three addressed to me, it smells slightly of cologne, a cologne I have not forgotten and that I know well. I haven’t experienced another night of love, which is why, precisely because it hasn’t happened again, I sometimes have the odd sense that, on that one night, I betrayed my father or that my wife, Marta, betrayed me with him (perhaps because we gave each other fictitious names and created lives that were not our own), although the truth is that on that night, in our apartment, in the dark, lying on her bathrobe, only Marta and I were there. Just Marta and me.
I haven’t experienced another night of love nor have I ever again felt that she alone could satisfy me, and so I still go to prostitutes, who are increasingly expensive and increasingly nervous. Perhaps I should try transvestites. Not that I really care, it doesn’t worry me and won’t last, although it might for a while. Sometimes I find myself thinking that, when the time comes, it would be easiest and most convenient if Marta were to die first, because that way I could bury her in the place in the vault that was left vacant. That way, I wouldn’t have to explain why I’ve changed my mind, because now I would prefer to be cremated; in fact, under no circumstances do I want to be buried. On the other hand — I surprise myself thinking — I don’t know that I would gain much from that because my father will have taken his place, my place, next to Mercedes, for all eternity. When I’m cremated — I surprise myself thinking — I’ll have to bump off my father, although I don’t know how you can bump off someone who’s already dead. Sometimes I wonder if the letter I haven’t yet opened says something quite different from what I imagine and fear, whether it offers me a solution, whether she perhaps expresses a preference for me. Then I think: ‘How absurd. We’ve never even met.’ I look at the letter, sniff it, turning it over in my hands, and always end up hiding it away again, still unopened.
(1989)
lord rendall’s song
For Julia Altares
who has not yet discovered me
James Ryan Denham (1911–1943), born in London and educated at Cambridge, was one of the ill-starred talents of the Second World War, The son of a well-to-do family he embarked on a diplomatic career that took him to Burma and India (1934–1937). His known literary work is scant and hard to come by consisting of five now unobtainable books, all published in private editions, since it would seem he never considered this activity to be anything more than a hobby. He was a friend of both Malcolm Lowry whom he had met at university and of the famous art collector Edward James, and he himself came to own a fine collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French paintings.
His last book, How to Kill (1943), from which this story, ‘Lord Rendall’s Song’, is taken, was the only one he tried to publish in a commercial edition; however, at the time, with the country still at war, he was unable to find a publisher willing to accept it, partly because of the depressing effect it was felt the book might have on civilians and soldiers alike and partly because of the oddly erotic undertone present in some of the stories. Before that, Denham had published a book of poetry, Vanishings (1932), another volume of short stories, Knives and Landscapes (1934), a short novel, The Night-Face (1938), and Gentle Men and Women (1939), a series of sketches of famous people, among them Chaplin, Cocteau, the dancer Tilly Losch and the pianist Dinu Lipatti, Denham died when he was thirty-two years old, killed in action in North Africa.