When I Was Mortal (20 page)

The game was drawn nil-nil and the team was playing badly, they were keen but uninspired. On days like that Szentkuthy was sorely missed, although up until he was injured, he hadn’t exactly shone.

“So, how do you think this is going to end?” I asked.

He looked at me with an air of momentary superiority, probably because I was asking his opinion, but I’ve often noticed that look in recently married men, although he had not yet married. Sometimes it’s the expression of an attempt at respectability that philanderers might make in order to flatter their wives or fiancées when they’ve just got married or are about to do so. Later they abandon it, the attempt.

“Win easy, lose difficult.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant and I sat thinking about it during the second half. If they won, they would do so easily; if they lost, it would be with difficulty; or else, it would be easy for them to win and difficult for them to lose, perhaps that was it, impossible to know. He was in no mood for chatting and I didn’t want to insist. He immediately turned back to his girlfriend, they talked together in Hungarian, almost in a whisper. She was one of those women who attracts the attention of her husband or fiancé by tugging at his sleeve with two fingers or by slipping her hand into his overcoat pocket, I couldn’t explain it any other way, nor should I.

In the second half they won three-nil and, for the most part, the team played very well from then on. So they scarcely missed Szentkuthy. His knee injury was much worse than he had thought at first, much worse than he had thought in February and in March and in April and in May. Or rather he did not respond well to his convalescence after the operation. He had some conflicts with the trainer and at the end of the season, the club sacked him, he moved to a French club, which is where great players go when it looks like they’re not going to be quite as great as expected and won’t be remembered as such. He played for three more years in Nantes, to little effect, we didn’t hear much about him here, journalists soon forget, so much so that news of his death only appeared in any detail in the sporting press which I don’t usually buy, a nephew of mine showed me a cutting. Szentkuthy left Madrid eight years ago, he probably hadn’t played football for five of those years, unless he had done the rounds of the less famous teams in his own country, here hardly anyone knows anything about Hungary. He was thirty-three at the time of his death, a young man with no new goals and with videos that were now old hat could only collect women in his native Budapest, there he would still be an idol, the boy who left and triumphed in a far-off land and who would live for ever off the proud memory of his distant, fast-fading adventures. He’s not alive because he was shot in the chest, and perhaps there was a second when his timid, determined wife’s affirmative will weakened and she hesitated before squeezing the hard trigger with her two frail fingers, although, at the same time, she knew she would do it. Perhaps there was a second when imminence was thwarted and time was marked and became uncertain, and during which Szentkuthy clearly saw the dividing line and the normally invisible wall that separates life and death, the only “might be” and the only “was”
that count, and these are sometimes controlled by the most trivial things, by two feeble fingers that have grown tired of slipping into a pocket or tugging at a sleeve, tired of being beneath the sole of a boot.

I
T 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. Sometimes, however, agreements have been reached, as we know from various documents collected by Lord Halifax and Lord Rymer in the 1930s.

One of the most modest and touching of these cases is that of an old lady living in Rye, around 1910: a suitable place for such enduring relationships, since both Henry James and E. F. Benson lived in Rye for some years and in the same house, Lamb House (each at different times, Benson even became mayor), two writers who most assiduously and successfully occupied themselves with such visits and expectations, or, perhaps, nostalgias. In her youth, this old lady (Molly Morgan Muir was her name) was companion to a wealthy, older lady, to whom, amongst other services rendered, she used to read novels out loud in order to ease the tedium of the older lady’s lack of requirements and of an early, unavoidable widowhood: according to people in the town, Mrs Cromer-Blake 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 harsh and withdrawn at an age when those characteristics in a woman are no longer intriguing or charming or the object of jokes. Boredom made her so lazy that she was barely able to read by herself, in silence, alone, and 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 removed from that house. The lady always listened very silently, utterly absorbed, and only occasionally asked Molly Morgan Muir to repeat a passage or a dialogue to which she did not wish to bid farewell for ever without, first, making some attempt to hold on to it. When Molly finished reading, her only remark would be: “Molly, you have a lovely voice. You will find love with that voice.”

And it was during these sessions that the ghost of the house made his appearance: every evening, while Molly was speaking the words of Stevenson or Jane Austen or Dumas or Conan Doyle, she could just make out the figure of a young man, of rustic appearance, a stable lad. The first time she saw him, standing, leaning his elbows on the back of the chair occupied by the lady, as if he were listening intently to the text she was reading, she almost cried out with fright. But the young man immediately raised a forefinger to his lips and made reassuring signs to her indicating that she should continue and not betray his presence. He had such an inoffensive face, and a constant, shy smile in his mocking eyes that occasionally gave way, during certain sombre passages, to the alarmed, ingenuous seriousness of someone who cannot quite distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. The young woman obeyed, although that first day, she could not help glancing up rather too frequently and looking over the bun on top of the head of Mrs Cromer-Blake, who also
kept glancing up, as if wondering if some hypothetical hat were awry or if her halo were not bright enough. “What’s wrong, girl?” she said, annoyed. “What is it you keep looking at up there?” “Nothing,” said Molly Muir, “it’s just a way of resting my eyes before going back to the text. Reading for such a long time tires my eyes.” The young man with the scarf about his neck nodded and the 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 lady and also for him, without the lady ever once turning round or discovering the young man’s intrusive presence.

The young man did not linger or appear at any other moment, so Molly Muir 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 illicit disappointment in love suffered by her lady at some time in the past, but her lady never offered any confidences, despite the insinuations made by all those pages read out loud and by Molly herself during the slow, nocturnal conversations of half a lifetime. Perhaps the rumour was false and the lady had nothing worth telling, which was why she asked to hear about the most remote and foreign and improbable of tales. On more than one occasion, Molly was tempted to be kind and to tell her what was going on each evening behind her back, to allow her to share her 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 feminine voices, the lady’s grown ever older and more confused, and Molly Muir’s, each morning, a little less beautiful, weaker and more fugitive, and which, contrary to the predictions, had not brought her love, at least
not a love that would stay, that could be touched. But whenever she was about to give in to that temptation, she would suddenly remember the young man’s discreet gesture – his forefinger 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.

When Mrs Cromer-Blake died, Molly stayed on in the house, and for a few days, saddened and disoriented, she stopped reading: the young man did not appear. Convinced that the young country lad wanted to have the education he had doubtless lacked in life, but also fearful that this was not the case and that his presence had been mysteriously linked with the old lady alone, she decided to go back to reading out loud in order to call him back, and she read not only novels, but books on history and the natural sciences. The young man took some while to reappear – perhaps ghosts go into mourning, for they have more reason to than anyone else – but he finally did, perhaps drawn by the new material, which he continued listening to with the same close attention, not standing up this time, leaning on the back of the chair, but comfortably seated in the now vacant armchair, sometimes with his legs crossed and holding a lit pipe in his hand, like the patriarch he never became.

The young woman, who was growing older, spoke ever more confidingly to him, but without ever getting a reply: ghosts cannot always speak nor do they always want to. And as that unilateral trust grew, so the years passed, until one day the boy failed to appear, nor did he appear in the days and weeks that followed. The young woman, who was now almost old, was worried at first like a mother, fearing that some grave accident or misfortune might have befallen him, without realizing that things only happen to mortals, that those who are not are safe. When she understood this, her worry turned to desperation: evening
after evening, she would stare at the empty armchair and curse the silence, she would ask sorrowful questions of the void, hurl reproaches into the invisible air, she wondered what mistake or error she could have made and she searched eagerly for new texts that might arouse the young man’s curiosity and make him come back, new disciplines and new novels, and she awaited avidly each new instalment of Sherlock Holmes, for she put more faith in his skill and lyricism than in any other scientific or literary bait. She continued to read out loud every day, to see if he would come.

One evening, after months of desolation, she found that the bookmark she had left in the Dickens she was patiently reading to him in his absence was not where she had left it, but many pages ahead. She carefully read the pages he had marked, and then, bitterly, she understood and she suffered the disappointment that comes in every life, however recondite and still that life might be. There was a sentence in the text that said: “And she grew old and lined, and her cracked voice was no longer pleasing to him.” Lord Rymer says that the old lady became as indignant as a rejected wife, and that, far from accepting this judgement and falling silent, she addressed the void most reproachfully: “You are unfair. You do not grow old and you want pleasant, youthful voices, you wish to contemplate firm, luminous faces. Don’t think I don’t understand you, you’re young and you always will be. But I have educated and amused you for years, if, thanks to me, you have learned many things, including how to read, it was not so that now you could leave me offensive messages via the very texts I have always shared with you. Bear in mind that when the old lady died, I could easily have read in silence, but I didn’t. I know that you can go in search of other voices, nothing binds you to me and it’s true that you’ve never asked me for anything, so you owe me nothing. But if you have any notion of gratitude, I ask you to come at least once a week to listen to me and to have patience
with my voice, which is no longer a beautiful voice and no longer pleases you, because now it will never bring me love. I will try hard and continue reading as well as I can. But do come, because now that I’m old, it is I who need you to amuse me, to be here.”

According to Lord Rymer, the ghost of the eternal rustic youth was not entirely lacking in understanding and he listened to reason or else understood what gratitude meant: from then on, until her death, Molly Morgan Muir awaited with excitement and impatience the arrival of the day chosen by her impalpable, silent love to return to the past of his time in which, in fact, there was no past and no time, the arrival of each Wednesday. And it is thought that that was what kept her alive for many more years, that is, with a past and a present and a future too or perhaps it was just nostalgia.