When I Was Mortal (9 page)

There was rarely any ambiguity in what he said and he hastened to clear up what he judged to have been a misunderstanding. “I suffer, more or less continually, from depressive melancholia,” he said. “I’m on medication all the time. That keeps it under control, but if I stopped taking the medication, I would almost certainly kill myself. I already tried to do so once, before I came to live in Paris. It wasn’t that any particular misfortune had befallen me, I was just in such terrible mental pain that I couldn’t bear to go on
living. That could happen to me again at any moment and would happen were I to stop taking the medication. At least that’s what they tell me and I imagine they’re probably right, after all, I’m a doctor too.” He wasn’t being melodramatic, he spoke about it quite dispassionately, in the same tone in which he’d told me about everything else. “What happened?” I asked. “I was staying at my father’s country house in Gerona, near Cassá de la Selva. I aimed a rifle at my chest, holding the rifle butt between my knees. My hands started shaking, I lost my grip, and the bullet embedded itself in a wall instead. I was too young,” he added, by way of an excuse, and gave me an amiable smile. He was a very considerate man and insisted on paying the bill.

We began writing to each other and met whenever I visited Paris. I went there, in order to get over some upset or other, only a few months after our first meeting. I used to stay with an Italian friend, a woman whom I’ve always found amusing and who has, therefore, always been a source of consolation to me. At the time, the company of Xavier Comella simply interested and entertained me, later it became something that demanded repetition, as happens with those people one comes to count on, even in their absence.

At the time, Xavier was living in his father-in-law’s house with his wife Eliane, who was French by birth but Chinese in appearance. She was almost depressingly delicate in the way oriental women are who pride themselves on their refinement, and she was certainly refined. Her fantastic colour sense, so highly praised by her husband, was not deployed on any canvas, but in interior design, although it seemed to me that, up until then, she’d worked mainly on the houses of friends and acquaintances rather than for actual clients, as well as on the design of the
restaurant owned by her father, Xavier’s father-in-law, a restaurant I never visited but which, according to Xavier, was “the finest Chinese restaurant in France”, not that that’s saying very much. When he was with his wife, the natural attentiveness of this man who was in the process of becoming my friend became so exaggerated that, at times, it proved positively irritating: he would ask me not to smoke because cigarette smoke made her feel sick; in cafés we always had to sit out on the covered terraces both to avoid the cigarette smoke and because the air circulated more freely there; we also had to sit so that her back was to the pavement, because the sight of the traffic made her dizzy; we could never go anywhere, not even to a cinema that was even half full, because Eliane was afraid of crowds, nor of course could we ever go to a cellar bar or a night club because that gave her claustrophobia; we also had to avoid any large open spaces, such as the Place Vendôme, because she suffered equally badly from agoraphobia; she couldn’t walk or remain standing for any longer than it takes for the lights to change and, if there was a queue at the theatre or a museum, even if it was only for a matter of minutes, Xavier would have to accompany Eliane to the nearest café and deposit her there – having first checked that there was no other threat to her safety (this took some time since the threats were so various) – in order that she could wait, seated and safe. What with one thing and another, by the time he got back to me in the queue to keep me company in my slow advance, I’d already got the tickets and we had to go back and find her. By then, of course, she would have ordered some tea and we would have to wait while she drank it. On more than one occasion the show began without us or we were obliged to go round the museum at lightning speed. Going out with the two of them together was rather trying, not only because of all these obligations and inconveniences, but also because adoration is never
a pretty sight, still less so when the person doing the adoring is a person for whom one feels a certain regard. It inspires a sense of shame, of embarrassment and, in the case of Xavier Comella, it was like being present at a display – albeit partial – of the most deeply felt corner of his private life, something we can tolerate only in ourselves – just as we can only bear the sight of our own blood, our own nail clippings. And it was perhaps all the more embarrassing because, when you met Eliane, you could understand, or at least imagine, why he felt that way. It wasn’t that she was an extraordinary beauty, nor was she exactly talkative (of course, she never asked for or complained about anything because that would have been out of keeping with her refined nature, neither was it necessary: Xavier was a solicitous and punctilious interpreter of her every need). My memory of her is of an utterly vague figure, but her principal charm – which was considerable – probably lay in the fact that, even when she was there before you, she felt like a memory, a blurred and tenuous memory and, as such, harmonious and peaceful, soothing and faintly nostalgic, impossible to grasp. Holding her in your arms must have been like embracing something one has lost, as sometimes happens in dreams. Xavier told me once that he’d been in love with her since he was fourteen years old, I didn’t dare ask how or where they’d met at such a tender age, but then I don’t ask many questions. A single image of the two of them together predominates over all the others. One morning, we visited an open-air market selling flowers and plants; it began to rain really rather hard, but because the excursion had been specially arranged so that Eliane could buy, amongst other things, the first peonies of the year, no one even considered looking for shelter, not that there was any, instead Xavier opened his umbrella and took enormous pains to ensure that not a single drop of rain fell on her as she continued on her meticulous and
unalterable course, with Xavier following always a couple of paces behind, holding his waterproof vault above her and getting soaked in the process, like a devoted servant inured to such things. I brought up the rear, umbrella-less but not daring to abandon the cortège, like a servant of a lower rank, less committed and quite unrewarded.

When she was not with us, he was more forthcoming, much more than he was in his letters too, which were affectionate but restrained, indeed at times they were so intensely laconic that – like the taut skin and the swollen veins on his forehead – they seemed to presage some explosion, an explosion that would take place outside the envelope, in real life. It was during such a meeting, when Eliane was not with us, that he first spoke to me of the violent rages to which he was subject and which I always found so hard to imagine given that, over the thirteen or fourteen years I knew him, I was never a witness to one, although it’s true that we saw each other only infrequently and that his life seems to me now like a defective copy of a book, full of blank pages, or like a city that one has driven through many times before but always at night. Once he told me about a recent visit to Barcelona and how he’d borne in silence for as long as he could his father’s absurd words of advice – his father was separated from Xavier’s mother and had remarried – and how, then, in a sudden fit of rage, he’d started wrecking the house, hurling furniture against walls, tearing down chandeliers, ripping up paintings, demolishing shelves and, of course, kicking in the television set. No one stopped him; he simply calmed down of his own accord after a few cataclysmic minutes. He took no pleasure in telling me this, but neither did he show any regret or sorrow. I met his father in Paris together with his new Dutch wife, who wore a diamond stud in her nose (a woman ahead of her time). His father’s name was Ernest and the only thing he had in common
with Xavier was the prominent forehead: he was much taller and had black hair with not a trace of grey in it, possibly dyed, he was a vain man, indulgent and easy-going, but slightly disdainful of his own son, whom he evidently didn’t take at all seriously, although that may not have meant much, since he obviously didn’t take anything very seriously. He was like an eternal spoiled child, still keen on riding competitions, skeet shooting and – at the time – leafing through treatises on Hindu philosophy; he was one of those people, increasingly rare nowadays, who seemed to spend his entire life lounging around in a silk dressing gown. Xavier didn’t take his father very seriously either, but he couldn’t treat him with the same disdain, partly because his father irritated him so much, but also because he just hadn’t inherited that particular characteristic.

It was on another occasion when Eliane was absent, about two or three years after our first meeting, that Xavier told me about the death of their newborn child, possibly, I can’t quite remember, strangled by its own umbilical cord, but no, it wasn’t that, because I recall now one of his extremely rare remarks on the subject (he hadn’t even told me they were expecting a baby): “It’s much worse for Eliane than it is for me,” he said. “I don’t know how she’s going to react. The worst thing is that the child did actually live, so we can’t just forget about it, we’d already given it a name.” I didn’t ask him what that name was, so that I wouldn’t have to remember it too. Years later, talking about something else entirely – but perhaps not thinking about that something else – he wrote to me: “There is nothing more repellent than having to bury something that has only just been born.” He had still not separated from Eliane – or Eliane from him – when he spoke to me one day about a literary project of his that would require an experiment. He said: “I’m going to write an essay on pain. I thought at first that I’d make it a strictly
medical treatise and entitle it
Pain, Anaesthesia and Diathesis
, but I want to go beyond that. What really interests me about pain is its mystery, its ethical nature and how to describe it in words, all of which is easily within my grasp. I’ve decided that in a few days’ time I’ll stop taking the medication for my depression and see what happens, see how long I can bear it, and simply observe the process of my mental pain, which always ends up taking on various physical manifestations, the worst of which are the excruciating migraines. The term ‘migraine’ always seems to be taken rather lightly, doubtless because of that old joke about headaches and dissatisfied wives, but it actually describes one of the greatest sufferings known to man. There is a possibility that if I want to stop the experiment at some point, it might already be too late, but I can’t not do this research.” Xavier Cornelia had continued to write – novels, poetry and an epistemology, as well as what he called “night watches”. Of all this work, the only piece we’d finally managed to get accepted for publication, by the Madrid publishing house that had brought us together in the first place, was his novel
Vivisection
, a much longer book than the one I’d read. Nevertheless, owing to endless delays, it had still not seen the light of day, and he was now working on a translation of Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
, commissioned by the same publishing house, who had chosen him for the task partly because of his profession. He was, therefore, still an unpublished author and, from time to time, he would despair, decide that he wanted to remain unpublished and cancel contracts only to have them drawn up all over again at a later date. Fortunately, his publisher was a patient man, both kindly and prepared to take risks, a combination almost unknown in the publishing world. “Aren’t you curious to see your book in print?” I asked. “Of course I am,” he replied, “but I can’t wait. Besides,” he added, with his usual precision, “once I’ve finished the essay on pain, I’ll have
completed sixty per cent of my work.” I said: “The day we met, you told me that without the medication you’d probably kill yourself and, if that happened, you’d only have completed fifty per cent, perhaps less, depending on the percentage you give your essay. And fifty per cent really isn’t very much, is it?” He gave that delayed laugh of his and said, slipping into the oddly naive idiom he occasionally resorted to: “Honestly, the things you come out with …” I didn’t feel particularly worried, since I’d always believed that he was exaggerating when he described the more dramatic and spectacular incidents in his life.

Over the following months, his letters became even more austere than usual and his childish writing more of a hasty scribble. Only at the end of those letters would he add a few words about himself or his state of health or about how his experiment was going: “At the present time, the maximum speed at which we are travelling towards the future remains insufficient and we grow old not with respect to the future but with respect to our past. My future perfect can’t wait to arrive, my past perfect is unstoppable.” Or: “I’ve always lived with the fear that one day I would have to fall silent, for good. As you see, my friend, I’m more of a coward than ever.” But shortly after that, he wrote: “Every day I grow more invulnerable inside and more combustible outside.” And later on again: “The most heroic quality in man is not perhaps to live or to die but to endure.” And in the letter following that: “What will they think of us? What do we think of ourselves? What will you think of me? I don’t want to know. But the questions provoke a slight feeling of depression. That’s all.” “As I said to you in the course of our conversation outside the Jardin du Luxembourg,” he said once, referring to the work he was about to embark upon, “my way into the subject entails provoking a relapse into endogenous colic and when the meandering route followed by my first seventy
commentaries leads you at last to the final one, you will understand the reason why, especially if you remember what I told you about the exceptional circumstances of my illness. This new descent into Hades is a touch foolish and I’d be the first to reproach myself with that, but why fish for tuna when you could be catching shark?” And later: “I’m not ill
again
. It’s a continuation of the same illness.” He had to abandon the experiment sooner than expected. He’d estimated that it would take six months to reach crisis point but, after only a month, he had to be hospitalized for two weeks, unable to carry on without his medication and still without enough material to start writing. I know that both his family and his doctors rebuked him sharply.