When I Was Mortal (11 page)

After that, I received only one letter and a telegram. The former I received after some months had passed and in it he said: “I’m not writing because I’ve finally got something to say to you, but simply because time passes and every day leaves me with less to say. Nothing positive. A horrible winter, full of recesses filled by swirling whirlwinds. Sediment and chaos. A dematerializing silence from my publishers. Divorce from Eliane. And a feeling of nausea as regards any creative work. Last week was filled by a coagulating tedium. The night before last was even worse: I was woken by a scream, my own.” And the postscript said: “So I will darken for only a little while longer this my ash-grey matter.”

I didn’t feel particularly worried by this and I didn’t bother to reply because in two weeks’ time I would be going to Paris anyway. That was a little over two years ago. I’d already been in the city for three days, staying as usual with my Italian friend, and I still hadn’t phoned Xavier, wanting to get my business in Paris over with first. On the third day I returned to the house of that Italian friend, the one who had been cruel to him or who had acted in self-defence, and she told me of his voluntary death the day before yesterday. This time he wasn’t too young, this time he didn’t miss; he was a doctor, he was precise; and he avoided all pain. Some days later, I managed to phone his mother, whom I never met. She told me that Xavier had completed
Saturn
two nights before the day he died (his one hundred per cent: he had reached the end of his life when he reached the end of the page). He’d made two copies and had written three letters, which were found on the table next to a glass of wine: a letter to her, a letter to his unsuccessful agent and a letter to Eliane. In the letter to his mother he’d explained the whole ritual: he would read for a while, listen to a bit of music and drink some wine before going to bed. Over the phone she was unable to tell me what music he’d listened to or what he’d read, and I never asked her again, so as not to have to remember that as well. Of the more than one thousand pages of Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
, he’d translated only seven hundred – seventy-two per cent – and the rest still awaits someone to finish the task. I don’t know what happened to his essay on pain.

The telegram I found on my return to Madrid. This is what it said: “
EVERYTHING GOOD GOES NOTHING GOES WELL EVERYTHING BAD COMES BACK YOURS XAVIER
.”

Today I received a letter that reminded me of this friend. It was written by a woman unknown both to myself and to him.

I
WAS SO
strapped for cash that, two days earlier, I’d gone for a screen test for a porn movie and was amazed to see how many other women aspired to one of those roles with absolutely no dialogue, or, rather, only exclamations. I’d gone there feeling shy and embarrassed, telling myself that my daughter had to eat, that it was no big deal and that it was unlikely that the film would be seen by anyone I knew, although I know that everyone always ends up finding out about everything that happens. I doubt, though, that I’ll ever be important enough in future to merit being blackmailed about my past. Besides, there’s quite enough material for that already.

When I saw the queues inside the house, up the stairs and in the waiting room (the screen tests, like the filming, were being held in a three-storey house, somewhere around Torpedero Tucumán, not an area I know), I began to feel afraid that they wouldn’t choose me, when, up until then, my real fear had been that they would, and my real hope that they wouldn’t; that they wouldn’t think I was pretty enough, or well enough endowed. There was no chance of that, I’ve always turned heads, all my life, I’m not exaggerating, it’s true, not that it’s done me much good.
“I probably won’t get this job either,” I thought when I saw all the other female hopefuls. “Unless the film includes a massive orgy scene and they need loads of extras.” There were a lot of girls my age and younger, and older women too, ladies who looked rather too homely, mothers like me probably, but mothers with kids, with irrecoverable waistlines, all wearing rather short skirts and high heels and tight sweaters, like me, badly made up, it was absurd really, if we appeared at all, it would be naked. Some had brought their children, who were running up and down the stairs, the other women clowned around with them when they passed. There were a lot of students there too, in jeans and T-shirts, they would have parents, what would their parents think if their daughters were chosen and they happened to see the film one day; even if it was only going to be sold on video, they do what they like with them after that, they end up being shown on television in the small hours of the morning, and an insomniac father is capable of anything, a mother less so. People are really hard-up and there’s a lot of unemployment: they plonk themselves down in front of the television and watch anything that’s on just to kill time or kill the emptiness, nothing shocks them, when you have nothing, everything seems acceptable, atrocities seem normal and any moral scruples go by the board, and, after all, this kind of filth doesn’t actually do any harm, it can even be quite interesting sometimes. You can learn things.

Two men came out of the upstairs room in which they were doing the screen tests, beyond the waiting room, and when they saw the queue, they clutched their hands to their heads and decided to go through it slowly – stair by stair – thinning it out. “You can go,” they said to one lady. “You’re not right, you’re not suitable, there’s no point waiting,” they said to the other matrons, as well as to the young women who looked too timid or too thick, they addressed all of them as “tú”. They even asked
one girl for her identity card right there and then. “I haven’t got it on me,” she said. “Then you can get out, we don’t want any problems with under-age girls,” said the taller man, who the other man called Mir. The shorter one had a moustache and seemed politer and more considerate. They reduced the queue by three quarters, so there were only eight or nine of us left and we all went in, one by one. A girl ahead of me came out a few minutes later crying, I don’t know if it was because they had rejected her or because they’d made her do something humiliating. Perhaps they’d made fun of her body. But if you go in for these things, you must know what to expect. They didn’t do anything to me, just the usual, they told me to take my clothes off, bit by bit at first. Sitting at a table were Mir and the short man and another guy with a ponytail, like a triumvirate, then a couple of technicians, and, standing up, a guy in red trousers, with a face like a monkey, standing there with his arms folded, I don’t know what he was doing there, perhaps he was a friend who had dropped in for the session, a peeping Tom, a sex maniac, he looked like a sex maniac. They shot some video film, had a good look at me, this way and that, in the flesh and on screen, turn around, raise your arms, the usual, obviously I was a bit embarrassed, but I almost felt like laughing when I saw them jotting down notes on index cards, all very serious, as if they were teachers at an oral exam, good grief.

“You can get dressed,” they said then. “Be here the day after tomorrow at ten o’clock. But make sure you get a good night’s sleep, don’t come back with those great dark rings under your eyes, they really show up on screen.” It was Mir who said that, and it was true, I did have rings under my eyes, I’d hardly slept a wink all night, thinking about the screen test. I was just leaving when the guy with the ponytail, who the others called Custardoy, called me back. “Hey,” he said, “just so there aren’t any surprises
or problems and so that you don’t let us down at the last minute: you’ll have to do a bit of French, a bit of Cuban and a fuck, all right?” He turned to the tall man to confirm this: “She won’t have to do any Greek, will she?” “No, not with her, not seeing she’s a novice,” said Mir. The primate uncrossed his arms and crossed them again the other way round, annoyed, God, he looked a sight in his red trousers. I tried to remember quickly; I’d heard those terms, or seen them in sex ads in the paper, perhaps I’d even known what they meant, more or less. No Greek, they’d said, so that didn’t really matter, at least for now. French was obviously a blow job, but Cuban?

“What does Cuban mean?” I asked.

The short man looked at me disapprovingly.

“You know,” he said, and he raised his hands to his non-existent breasts. I wasn’t sure I quite understood, but I only dared ask one other question:

“Have you chosen my partner yet?” I felt like saying “my fellow actor”, but I thought they might think I was taking the piss.

“Yes, you’ll meet him the day after tomorrow. Don’t worry, he’s very experienced and he’ll take the lead.” That was the expression the short man used, as if he were describing a ballroom dance, when it still made sense to say: “I’ll lead.”

Now I was back again in the waiting room, waiting for filming to begin, waiting with my partner, to whom I’d just been introduced, he shook my hand. We’d sat down on the rather narrow sofa, so small that he, at once, moved to a matching armchair in order to be more comfortable. The tall guy and the short guy and the one with the ponytail and the technicians were filming with another couple (I hoped the sex maniac wouldn’t be there, he frightened me with his bulbous eyes, his flattened nose and his hideous trousers). In films, so I’ve heard, everything takes for ever
and everything’s always running late, and so they told us to wait and get to know each other. That was absurd. “I don’t know this man from Adam and yet, in a few minutes from now, I’ll be sucking him off,” I thought and I couldn’t help thinking it in those precise words. “What’s the point of our getting to know each other a bit and having a chat.” I hardly dared look at him, I did so out of the corner of my eye, a rather unfortunate attack of modesty. When they introduced me to him, they had said: “This is Loren, your partner.” I would have preferred it if they’d called him my “co-star”, but I suppose that would have been a bit pretentious. He was about thirty, he was wearing trousers and a hat and cowboy boots, actors are always so Americanized, even if they only appear in porn movies. That’s how a lot of them start, he might make it big one day. He wasn’t at all bad-looking, despite appearances, an athletic sort, the type that goes to the gym a lot, he had a slightly hooked nose and grey eyes, calm and cold; he had a nice mouth, but that wasn’t perhaps what I would have to kiss, that nice mouth. He seemed completely unfazed, he was sitting with his legs crossed like a cowboy and was leafing through a newspaper, he didn’t take much notice of me. He had smiled at me when we were introduced, he had gaps between his teeth which gave his face a rather child-like look. He’d taken off his hat then, but had immediately put it back on again, perhaps he would keep it on during the filming. He offered me some liquorice sweets, but I declined, he sucked two at a time, perhaps it would be best if we didn’t kiss after all. On his wrist he wore a strap made out of leather or elephant skin, very tight. I wouldn’t call it a bracelet exactly. I suppose he looked modern, I felt suddenly very old-fashioned in my tight skirt, my black tights and my heels, I don’t know why the hell I put on the highest heels I’ve got, perhaps, if they noticed them, they’d want me to keep them on, a lot of men like to see women like that, naked and in high heels,
it’s all a bit infantile that imagery, him with his hat on and me in my high heels. I realized that I was pulling my skirt down a bit, because it had ridden up while I was sitting, and that struck me as ludicrous. Not even my co-star was taking any notice of my thighs, and he was right, in a little while, there would be no skirt, no nothing.

“Excuse me,” I said then, “you’ve done this kind of work before, haven’t you?”

He looked up from the newspaper, but didn’t put it down, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to start a proper conversation, or, rather, as if he was sure that he didn’t.

“Yes,” he said, “but not that much, two, no, three times, a little while ago. But don’t worry, you forget about the camera straight away. They told me it was your first time.” I was grateful to him for putting it like that, rather than calling me a novice as tall, bald Mir had done. “Don’t get embarrassed, that’s fatal, just follow me and try and enjoy it as much as you can, and take no notice of the others.”

“Easier said than done,” I replied. “I hope they’re patient if I get nervous. I am a bit nervous.”

The actor Lorenzo gave me his gap-toothed smile. He was reading the sports pages. He seemed very sure of himself, because he said:

“Look, you won’t even notice that they’re filming. I’ll take care of that.” He said it more ingenuously than proudly, that wasn’t what was worrying me, but it did worry me that it didn’t even occur to him that it wouldn’t be the people watching who would be the main cause of my nervousness on the set.

“Right,” I said, not daring to doubt him, perhaps intimidated. “But there’ll be breaks won’t there? For the different takes and so on? And what happens then? What do you do in between?”

“Nothing, you can put on a dressing gown if you like and
have a Coca-Cola. Don’t worry,” he said again. “There are worse things. And there’s bound to be a few lines of coke if you need it.”

“Oh, so there are worse things, are there?” I said a little irritated by his excessive lack of concern. “I obviously just haven’t come across them yet; go on tell me one.” He finally put the newspaper down and I added hastily: “I’m not saying that because of you. I didn’t mean you, you do understand that, don’t you? I’m just doing it for the money, but you’re not going to tell me that it’s still not a pretty awful thing to have to do. Well, I don’t know about you, but it is for me.”

Loren ignored my attempts not to offend him and focused on what I had said before. He looked at me with his calm eyes, but he seemed slightly irritated now, as if he had been provoked and as if he were someone who had no capacity for feeling provoked, and didn’t know what tone of voice to use. His grey eyes were slightly wide-set too, quite far from his hooked nose, that seemed to draw his lips upwards, the kind of nostrils that always look as if their owner has a cold.