When I Was Mortal (6 page)

Although Custardoy wears a ponytail and long sideburns and has lifts in his shoes (modernity misconstrued, a look considered reprehensible outside of big cities), he was well received: the aunt could flirt stiffly with him and the girl had something to do. After supper, the aunt took Custardoy and her nephew Cámara to see the Goya, which she kept in her bedroom,
Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga
, a distant ancestor bearing not the slightest resemblance to her oblique descendant. “Can you do it?” Cámara asked Custardoy in a low voice. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” said Custardoy and then more loudly: “It’s a good painting, it’s a
shame the background isn’t finished,” and he examined it closely, despite the fact that the light wasn’t good. The same light lit the bed much better. “No one will have visited that bed in ten years,” he thought, “possibly more.” Custardoy is always thinking about the contents of beds.

That night there was a storm and, from his room on the second floor, Custardoy heard the lame dog barking. He remembered the rabbit gin, that wouldn’t be the reason this time, though, but the thunder. He went over to the window to see if the dog was anywhere in sight, and he saw it there, by the rain-drenched sea – pellets falling on a shaken length of cloth – standing there like a tripod and barking at the zigzag lightning, as if he were waiting for each flash. “Perhaps there was a storm on the night when he got caught in the trap,” Custardoy thought, “and now he’s no longer afraid of the lightning.” He had just had that thought when he saw the little servant girl come running up in her nightdress, she was carrying a lead in her hand with which to secure the dog and drag him away. He saw her struggling, her body clearly outlined beneath her drenched clothes, and he heard an anguished voice immediately beneath his own window: “You’re going to get killed, you’re going to get killed!” said the voice. “Nobody sleeps in this house,” he thought. “Apart, perhaps, from Cámara.” He noiselessly opened the window and leaned out a little, not wanting to be seen. He felt the heavy rain on the back of his neck and what he saw from above was an opened black umbrella, Señora Vallabriga waiting anxiously for the return of those two unfinished figures, it was her voice, hers the bare arm that, from time to time, he could see reaching out from beneath the umbrella, as if she wanted to attract or grab both the dog and the little girl, struggling together, the dog with the missing leg could hardly run away or escape, it kept barking at the lightning that lit up its eyes, the reluctant eyes
of a languid boyfriend, and the girl’s body that seemed more adult than it did when clothed – her body suddenly finished and complete. Custardoy wondered who it was that the aunt feared was going to be killed, and he soon found out, when the girl finally reached the door, dragging the dog, and the three of them disappeared, first beneath the umbrella like a cupola and then into the house. He closed the window and, from within, he heard just two more sentences, both spoken by the aunt, the girl must have been rendered speechless: “Look at that little mutt,” she said. And then: “Into bed this minute, my girl, and take that off.” Custardoy heard weary footsteps coming up to his floor and then, when he was once more lying down in bed and when silence had fallen after the final noise of one door closing – just one door – he wondered if perhaps he had been wrong about the bed that guarded the Goya and that no one would visit. He didn’t wonder too long, but he decided that the following morning he would commit an act of betrayal: the report he had to give to Cámara about the possibilities of a forgery would say that it wasn’t worth forging a copy. The young girl who would inherit the Goya had certainly earned it. He would tell Cámara: “Forget it.”

Note:
The character of the servant girl and the implied lesbianism in this mini-story came about because the five obligatory elements imposed by the commission (a veritable Chinese torture) immediately made me think of
Rebecca –
in either Alfred Hitchcock’s or Daphne du Maurier’s version.

W
E WERE STAYING
in the Hotel de Londres and, during our first twenty-four hours in the city we hadn’t left our room, we had merely been out onto the terrace to look at La Concha beach, far too crowded for the spectacle to be a pleasant one. An indistinguishable mass is never a pleasing sight, and it was impossible there to fix on anyone, even with binoculars, an excess of bare flesh has a distinctly levelling effect. We had taken the binoculars with us just in case, one Sunday, we went to Lasarte, to the races, there’s not much to do in San Sebastián on a Sunday in August, we would be there for three weeks on our holidays, four Sundays but only three weeks, because that second day of our stay was a Sunday and we would be leaving on a Monday.

I spent more time out on the terrace than did my wife, Luisa, always with my binoculars in my hand, or rather, hanging round my neck so that they didn’t slip from my grasp and fall from the terrace to shatter on the ground below. I tried to focus on someone on the beach, to pick someone out, but there were too many people to be able to remain faithful to anyone in particular, I panned across the beach with the binoculars, I saw hundreds of children, dozens of fat men, scores of girls (none of them topless,
that’s still fairly rare in San Sebastián), young flesh, mature flesh and old flesh, children’s flesh which is not yet flesh and mother’s flesh which is somehow more fleshly for having already reproduced itself. I soon grew tired of looking and went back to the bed where Luisa was lying down, I kissed her a few times, then returned to the terrace, and again peered through the binoculars. Perhaps I was bored, which is why I felt slightly envious when I saw that two rooms down to my right there was a man, also armed with binoculars, who had them trained on one particular spot, lowering them only from time to time and not moving them at all when he was looking through them: he held them up high, motionless, for a couple of minutes, then he would rest his arm and, shortly afterwards, he would raise it again, always in the same position, he didn’t change the direction of his gaze one inch. He wasn’t leaning out, though, he was watching from inside his room, and so I could only see one hairy arm, now where exactly was he looking, I wondered enviously, I wanted to fix my gaze on something too, it’s only when you rest your gaze on something that you really relax and become interested in what you’re looking at, I merely made random sweeps, just flesh and yet more indistinguishable flesh, if, when we finally left the room, Luisa and I went down to the beach (we were killing time until it got a bit emptier, possibly around lunchtime), we would form part of that conglomeration of distant, identical flesh, our recognizable bodies would be lost in the uniformity created by sand and water and swimming costumes, especially by swimming costumes. And that man to my right would not notice us, no one looking down from above – as he and I were doing – would notice us once we formed part of that disagreeable spectacle. Perhaps that’s why, in order not to be seen, in order not to be focused on or marked out, holiday-makers like to take off a few clothes and mingle with other half-naked people amidst the sand and the sea.

I tried to work out where that man, my neighbour, was looking, and I managed to fix on a space that was not small enough for me to rest my gaze on entirely and take an interest in whatever it was that was interesting, but at least in that way, by imitating or trying to guess the direction of his gaze, I could discount most of everything else that lay before me, an entire beach.

“What are you looking at?” my wife asked from the bed. It was very hot and she had placed a wet towel on her forehead, it almost covered her eyes, which were not in the least interested in looking at anything.

“I don’t know yet,” I said without turning round. “I’m trying to see what another man here beside me on a neighbouring balcony is looking at.”

“Why? What does it matter to you? Don’t be so nosy.”

It didn’t matter to me, in fact, but in summer wasting time is what you try hardest to do, if not, you don’t really feel that it’s summer, which is supposed to be slow and purposeless.

According to my calculations and observations, the man to my right had to be looking at one of four people, all fairly close together and lined up in the back row, far from the water’s edge. To the right of these people was a small empty space, to their left as well, which was what made me think that he was looking at one of those four. The first person (from left to right, as they say in photo captions) had her face turned to me or us, for she was sunbathing lying on her back: a youngish woman, she was reading a newspaper, she had the top part of her bikini undone, but hadn’t removed it entirely (that’s still rather frowned upon in San Sebastián). The second person was sitting down, she was older, plumper, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a straw hat, she was smearing suncream on herself: she must be a mother, but her children were nowhere to be seen, perhaps they were playing by
the sea. The third person was a man, possibly her husband or her brother, he was thinner, he was pretending to shiver as he stood on his towel, as if he had just emerged from the sea (he must have been pretending to shiver because the sea would certainly not be cold). The fourth person was the easiest to make out because he was wearing clothes, at least his top half was covered: he was an older man (the hair at the nape of his neck was grey) sitting with his back to us, erect, as if he, in turn, were watching or surveying someone on the shore or some rows ahead, the beach his theatre. I fixed my gaze on him: he was evidently alone, he had nothing to do with the man to his left, the man who was pretending to shiver. He was wearing a short-sleeved, green T-shirt, you couldn’t see if he had swimming trunks on or trousers, if he was fully dressed, most inappropriate on a beach, if he was, that would certainly attract attention. He was scratching his back, scratching his waist, he had a lot of fat around his waist, it must have weighed on him, he was one of those men who have great difficulty getting to their feet, to do so they have to throw their arms forward, with their fingers outstretched as if someone were pulling them. He was scratching his back, almost as if he were pointing to it. I didn’t have time to find out if he would get to his feet like that, with difficulty, nor if he was wearing trousers or swimming trunks, but I did find out that he was the man my neighbour was looking at, because suddenly, with my binoculars fixed at last on his thick waist and his broad back, I saw him collapse, fall forwards in a sitting position, the way puppets fall when the hand holding diem lets go of the strings. I had heard a brief, muffled noise, and I just had time to see that what was disappearing from the balcony to my right was not the arm of my neighbour with the binoculars, but his arm and the barrel of a gun. I don’t think anyone realized what had happened, although the man who had been shivering abruptly stopped, no longer cold.

I
OFTEN USED
to pretend I believed in ghosts, and I did so blithely, but now that I am myself a ghost, I understand why, traditionally, they are depicted as mournful creatures who stubbornly return to the places they knew when they were mortal. For they do return. Very rarely are they or we noticed, the houses we lived in have changed and the people who live in them do not even know of our past existence, they cannot even imagine it: like children, these men and women believe that the world began with their birth, and they never wonder if, on the ground they tread, others once trod with lighter steps or with fateful footfalls, if between the walls that shelter them others heard whispers or laughter, or if someone once read a letter out loud, or strangled the person he most loved. It’s absurd that, for the living, space should endure while time is erased, when space is, in fact, the depository of time, albeit a silent one, telling no tales. It’s absurd that life should be like that for the living, because what comes afterwards is its polar opposite, and we are entirely unprepared for it. For now time does not pass, elapse or flow, it perpetuates itself simultaneously and in every detail, though to speak of “now” is perhaps a fallacy. That is the second
worst thing, the details, because anything that we experienced or that made even the slightest impact on us when we were mortal reappears with the awful concomitant that now everything has weight and meaning: the words spoken lightly, the mechanical gestures, the accumulated afternoons of childhood parade past singly, one after the other, the effort of a whole lifetime-establishing routines that level out both days and nights – turns out to have been pointless, and each day and night is recalled with excessive clarity and singularity and with a degree of reality incongruous with our present state which knows nothing now of touch. Everything is concrete and excessive, and the razor edge of repetition becomes a torment, because the curse consists in remembering
everything
, the minutes of each hour of each day lived through, the minutes and hours and days of tedium and work and joy, of study and grief and humiliation and sleep, as well as those of waiting, which formed the greater part.

But, as I have already said, that is only the second worst thing, there is something far more wounding, which is that now I not only remember what I saw and heard and knew when I was mortal, but I remember it in its entirety, that is, including what I did not see or know or hear, even things that were beyond my grasp, but which affected me or those who were important to me, and which possibly had a hand in shaping me. You discover the full magnitude of what you only intuited while alive, all the more as you become an adult, I can’t say older because I never reached old age: that you only know a fragment of what happens to you and that when you believe yourself capable of explaining or recounting what has happened to you up until a particular date, you do not have sufficient information, you do not know what other people’s intentions were or the motivations behind impulses, you have no knowledge of what is hidden: the people closest to us seem like actors suddenly stepping out in front of
a theatre curtain, and we have no idea what they were doing only a second earlier, when they were not there before us. Perhaps they appear disguised as Othello or as Hamlet and yet the previous moment they were smoking an impossible, anachronistic cigarette in the wings and glancing impatiently at the watch which they have now removed in order to seem to be someone else. Likewise, we know nothing about the events at which we were not present and the conversations we did not hear, those that took place behind our back and mentioned us or criticized us or judged us and condemned us. Life is compassionate, all lives are, at least that is the norm, which is why we consider as wicked those people who do not cover up or hide or lie, those who tell everything that they know and hear, as well as what they do and think. We call them cruel. And it is in that cruel state that I find myself now.