He kept his eyes lowered until he noticed a change in the light. Only then did he dare to look up to see that the window was clear. He got to his feet and went over to check the display again. On the pavement lay a shattered beer bottle. But there, safe and sound, awaiting their distinguished bibliophile purchasers, were Salmagundi, £350, Oliver Twist, £300, La Chute, £600, Room, £2,000, Epigram of Fealty, £500, and to, £50,000. He gave a sigh of relief, picked up the typescript of Watt and clasped it to him. It had been typed by Beckett himself, who had never trusted anyone else with the task. Perhaps he should withdraw it from display, it was after all worth £50,000. He carried it back to his desk to consider the matter and there, for a moment, allowed himself an absurd thought. A copy of An Epigram of Fealty bearing John Gawsworth’s signature would be worth twice as much. A thousand pounds, he thought. Lawson looked up, but the window was still empty.
(1989)
a kind of nostalgia perhaps
It is quite possible that the main aim of ghosts, if they still exist, is to thwart the desires of mortal tenants, appearing if their presence is unwelcome and hiding away if it is expected or demanded. There have, however, been instances of pacts made between ghosts and mortals, as we know from various documents collected by Lord Halifax and Lord Rymer in England and by Don Alejandro de la Cruz in Mexico.
One of the most modest and touching of these cases is that of an old lady living in Veracruz, around 1920, when she was not an old lady, but a young girl who knew nothing of such visitations and waitings — or are they perhaps a kind of nostalgia? In her youth, this old lady had been the companion of a wealthy widow of advancing years, to whom, among other services rendered, she used to read in order to ease the tedium of her mistress’s lack of visible needs and preoccupations, and of a premature widowhood for which there was no remedy: for, according to people in that port city, Señora Suárez Alday had suffered the occasional illicit disappointment in love after her brief marriage, and it was probably this — rather than the death of her slightly or entirely unmemorable husband — that had made her seem curt and withdrawn at an age when such characteristics in a woman are no longer considered intriguing or charming or a fit topic for teasing. Boredom made her so lazy that she was barely able to read by herself, in silence and alone, so she had her companion read out loud to her details of affairs and feelings which, with each day that passed — and they passed very quickly and monotonously — seemed more and more alien to that house. The lady always listened very intently, utterly absorbed, and only occasionally asked her companion (Elena Vera by name) to repeat a passage or a piece of dialogue to which she did not wish to bid farewell forever without, first, making some attempt to hold on to it. When Elena finished reading, her only remark was: ‘Elena, you have a lovely voice. You will find love with that voice.’
And it was during these sessions that the ghost of the house first made his appearance. Every evening, while Elena was speaking the words of Cervantes or Dumas or Conan Doyle, or verses by Dario or Martí, she could just make out the figure of a young man of somewhat rustic appearance, a man of about thirty or so, who politely removed his broad-brimmed hat and whose perfectly decent clothes were, nevertheless, full of holes, as if he, or, rather, the short jacket, white shirt and tight trousers that clothed his absent body, had been riddled with bullets. The latter, however, seemed quite unscathed, and his face, barricaded behind a bushy moustache, had a healthy glow. The first time she saw him standing there — leaning his elbows on the back of the chair occupied by her mistress, occasionally playing with the hat he held in his hand, as if listening, rapt, to the words she was reading — she almost cried out with fright, especially when she saw that, although he wasn’t carrying any weapons, he did have a cartridge belt slung across his chest. But the young man immediately raised one finger to his lips and made reassuring signs to Elena, indicating that she should continue and not betray his presence. He had a very inoffensive face, and there was in his mocking eyes a constant, shy smile that occasionally gave way, during certain sombre passages — or perhaps when he was assailed by thoughts or memories of his own — to the alarmed, naive seriousness of someone who cannot quite distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. And so the young woman obeyed, although that first day, she could not help but keep glancing up rather too frequently and staring at a point above the bun on her mistress’s head, so much so that Señora Suárez Alday also kept glancing anxiously up, as if wondering whether some hypothetical hat were awry or whether her halo were not quite bright enough. ‘Whatever’s wrong, child?’ she said, somewhat annoyed. ‘What do you keep looking at?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Elena Vera, ‘it’s just a way of resting my eyes before going back to the text. Reading for such a long time is tiring.’ The young man with the scarf about his neck nodded and raised his hat for a moment in a gesture of approval and gratitude, and her explanation meant that the young woman could thereafter continue the habit and thus at least satisfy her visual curiosity. For, from then on, evening after evening and with very few exceptions, she read for her mistress and for him, without the former ever once turning round or discovering the young man’s intrusive presence.
He did not appear at any other moment, so Elena never had the opportunity, over the years, of speaking to him or asking who he was or had been or why he was listening to her. She considered the possibility that he might have been the cause of the disappointment in love suffered by her mistress at some time in the past, but her lady never offered any confidences, despite the promptings of all those sentimental or tragic pages read out loud and despite the hints dropped by Elena herself during the slow, nocturnal conversations of half a lifetime. Perhaps the local rumours were false and the lady had no adventures worth telling, which was why she enjoyed hearing about the most remote and foreign and improbable of tales. On more than one occasion, Elena was tempted to take pity on her and tell her what was going on each evening behind her back, to allow her to share this small daily excitement, to tell her of the existence of a man between those ever more asexual, taciturn walls in which there was only the echo, sometimes for whole nights and days together, of their female voices, the lady’s grown ever older and more confused, and Elena’s, each morning, a little weaker and fainter, a little less lovely, a voice that, contrary to her mistress’s predictions, had not brought her love, not at least of the permanent, tangible kind. But whenever she was about to give in to that temptation, she would suddenly remember the young man’s discreet, authoritative gesture — one finger on his lips, repeated now and then with a slightly teasing look in his eyes — and so she kept silent. The last thing she wanted was to make him angry. Perhaps ghosts got as bored as widows did.