When I Was Mortal Read online

  “What’s wrong? Still awake?” I said, relieved finally to be able to express myself in my own language.

  “Yes, I feel really ill. The doctor’s coming.”

  “At this hour?”

  “He’s a night doctor, he’s on call. I often have to get him out at night.”

  “But what’s wrong? You didn’t mention anything to me.”

  Claudia dimmed the lamp that stood by the armchair, as if she wanted the room to be in darkness before she replied, or else did not want me to catch some involuntary expression on her face, for our faces, when they speak, are full of involuntary expressions.

  “It’s nothing, women’s problems. But it really hurts when I get it. The doctor gives me an injection to ease the pain.”

  “I see. And couldn’t Hélie learn to do that for you?”

  Claudia gave me an unequivocally wary look and lowered her voice to answer that question, though she hadn’t lowered it to answer the others.

  “No, he can’t. His hands shake too much, I don’t trust him. If he gave me the injection I’m sure it wouldn’t do me any good, or else he’d just get all mixed up and inject something else into me, some poison. The doctor they usually send is very nice and, besides, that’s what they’re there for, to come to people’s apartments in the early hours of the morning. He’s Spanish by the way. He’ll be here any moment.”

  “A Spanish doctor?”

  “Yes, I think he’s from Barcelona. I assume he has French nationality, he must have in order to practise here. He’s been here for years.”

  Claudia had changed her hairstyle since I left the apartment to walk her friend home. Maybe she had merely let her hair down prior to going to bed, but it looked to me as if she had done her hair specially, rather than undone it at the end of the day.

  “Do you want me to keep you company while you wait or would you rather be alone if you’re in pain?” I asked rhetorically since, having found her still up, I wasn’t prepared to go off to bed without satisfying my desire to have a chat and a rest from those other abominable languages and from the wine drunk during the evening. Before she had a chance to reply, I added: “Your friend’s very nice. She said her husband was ill; the local doctors are in for a busy night.”

  Claudia hesitated for a few seconds and it seemed to me that she again looked at me warily, but said nothing. Then she said, this time without looking at me:

  “Yes, she’s got a husband too; he’s even more unbearable than mine. Hers is young, though, just a bit older than her, but she’s had him for ten years now and he’s just as mean. Like me, she doesn’t earn very much with her job, and he even rations out the hot water. Once he used his old bath water to water the plants, which died soon after. When they go out together, he won’t even buy her a coffee, they each pay for themselves, so that sometimes she goes without and he has a full afternoon tea. She doesn’t earn that much, and he’s one of those men who thinks that the person who earns less in a marriage is inevitably taking advantage of the other. He’s obsessed with it. He monitors all her phone calls, he’s fitted the phone with a device that stops her calling anywhere outside of the city, so that if she wants to speak to her family in Italy she has to go to a public phone box and use coins or a card.”

  “Why doesn’t she leave him?”

  Claudia didn’t reply at once:

  “I don’t know; for the same reason I don’t, although my situation isn’t as bad as hers. I suppose it’s true that she does earn less, I suppose she does take advantage of him; I suppose they’re right, these men who are obsessed with the money they spend or manage to save with their low-earning wives; but that’s what marriage is about, everything has its compensations and it all evens out in the end.” Claudia dimmed the light still further, so that we were sitting in almost complete darkness. Her nightdress and dressing gown seemed to glow red, an effect of the growing dark. She lowered her voice still further, to the point where it became a furious whisper. “Why do you think I get these pains, why do you think I have to call a doctor out to give me a sedative? It’s just as well it only happens on nights when we give suppers or parties, when he’s eaten and drunk and enjoyed himself. When he’s seen that others have seen me. He thinks about other men and about their eyes, about what others don’t know about, but take for granted or assume, and then he wants to make it reality, not just taken for granted or assumed or unknown. Not imaginary. Then it isn’t enough for him just to imagine it.” She fell silent for a moment and added: “That great lump of a man is sheer torment.”

  Although our friendship went back a long way, we had never exchanged this kind of confidence. Not that it bothered me, on the contrary, there’s nothing I like more than being privy to such revelations. But I wasn’t used to it with her, and I may have blushed a little (not that she would have seen me) and I answered awkwardly, perhaps dissuading her from continuing, the exact opposite of what I wanted:

  “I see.”

  The doorbell went, a feeble ring, just loud enough to be heard, the way you ring at the door of a house where people are already alerted or expecting you to call.

  “It’s the night doctor,” said Claudia.

  “I’ll leave you then. Goodnight, and I hope you feel better soon.”

  We left the studio together, she went into the hall and I in the opposite direction, towards the kitchen, where I thought I might read the newspaper for a while before going to bed, for at night the kitchen was the warmest room in the house. Before turning the corner of the corridor that would take me there, though, I paused and looked back towards the front door that Claudia was opening at that very moment, obscuring with her salmon-coloured back the figure of the doctor who had just arrived. I heard her say to him in Spanish: “Buenas noches,” and all I could see, in the doctor’s left hand, sticking out from behind my Italian friend’s body, was a bag identical to that carried by the other doctor to whom I had been introduced at the door by her friend – also Italian – whose name I can’t remember. The doctor must have come by car, I thought.

  They closed the front door and walked down the corridor without seeing me, with Claudia in front, and then I headed for the kitchen. There I sat down and poured myself a gin (ridiculous, mixing drinks like that) and opened the Spanish paper I had bought that afternoon. It was from the previous day, but for me the news was still fresh.

  I heard my friend, and the doctor go into the children’s room, the children were spending the weekend with other children in someone else’s house. The room was immediately opposite the kitchen, on the other side of a broad corridor, so, after a few moments, I moved the chair I was sitting on so that I could just see the door of the room out of the corner of my eye. The door was ajar, they had switched on a very dim light, as dim, I said to myself, as the one that had lit the studio while she and I were talking and she was waiting. I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t hear anything either. I went back to reading my newspaper, but, after a while, I looked up again because I sensed a presence in the doorway of the door that stood ajar. And then I saw the doctor, in profile, holding a syringe in his left hand. I only saw him for an instant, and since he was standing against the light, I couldn’t see his face. I noticed he was left-handed: it was that moment when doctors and nurses raise the syringe in the air and press down the plunger, just a little, to make sure that the liquid comes out and there’s no danger of any blockage or, more seriously, no danger of injecting air. That’s what the nurse, Cayetano, used to do in my house when I was a child. After performing this action, the doctor stepped forward and again disappeared from my field of vision. Claudia must have been lying down on one of the children’s beds, which was probably where the light was coming from, too faint for me but sufficient for the doctor. I assumed he would inject her in the bottom.

  I returned to my newspaper and a long time passed, too long, before either she or the republican doctor were once again framed in the doorway. Then I had the vague feeling that I was being nosy and it occurred to me that p
erhaps they were actually waiting for me to go to my room in order to come out and say goodbye. It also occurred to me that, immersed as I had been in reading an article about some sporting controversy, they might have quietly slipped out of the room without my noticing. Trying not to make any noise so as at least not to wake old Hélie, who would have been asleep for some time, I got up to go to bed. Before leaving the kitchen with my newspaper under my arm, I switched off the light, and that switching off of the light and my momentary stillness (the moment before taking a first step down the corridor) coincided with the reappearance in the doorway of the two figures, that of my friend Claudia and that of the night doctor. They paused on the threshold, and from my place in the darkness, I saw them peering in my direction, or so I thought. During that moment, what they saw was the extinguished kitchen light, and since I remained motionless, they probably assumed that I had gone off to my room without their noticing. If I allowed them to believe such a thing, if I, in fact, remained there motionless after seeing them, it was because the doctor, again standing against the light, once more raised the syringe in his left hand, and Claudia, in her nightdress and dressing gown, was clinging onto his other arm as if to instil him with courage by her touch or else restore his composure by her breathing. Thus, arm in arm, bound together by what was about to happen, they moved out of the children’s room, and I lost sight of them, but I heard the door of the master bedroom opening, the bedroom in which Hélie would be sleeping, and I heard it close. I thought that perhaps, immediately after that, I would hear the doctor’s footsteps, he having left Claudia in her room in order to leave the house, now that his medical mission had been fulfilled. But that isn’t what happened, the penultimate thing I heard that night was the closing of the master bedroom door, which the night doctor had also entered, very quietly and holding a syringe in his left hand.

  With great care (I took off my shoes), I walked down the corridor to my room. I undressed, got into bed and finished reading the newspaper. Before turning out the light, I waited a few seconds and it was in those brief seconds of waiting that I at last heard the front door and Claudia’s voice saying goodbye to the doctor in Spanish: “See you in a fortnight then. Goodnight, and thanks.” The truth is that I still felt like speaking a little more of my own language on that night on which I had twice missed the opportunity of doing so with my compatriot the doctor.

  I was going back to Madrid the following morning. Before leaving, I had time to ask Claudia how she was, and she said she was fine, that the pains had gone. Hélie, on the other hand, was indisposed after the various excesses of the previous night and said he was sorry not to be able to say goodbye to me himself.

  I spoke to him on the phone after that (that is, he picked up the phone on one occasion when I called Claudia from Madrid in the months that followed), but the last time I saw him was when I left his apartment that night, after the supper for seven, to walk the Italian friend, whose name I cannot remember, back to her apartment. Precisely because I cannot remember her name, I do not know if the next time I go to Paris, I will dare to ask Claudia how she is, because now that Hélie is dead, I wouldn’t want to run the risk of finding out that perhaps she too has become a widow since my departure.

  THE ITALIAN LEGACY

  Lo stesso

  I HAVE TWO Italian women friends, who both live in Paris. Until a couple of years ago, they had never met, they had never seen each other, I introduced them one summer, I was the link and I’m afraid to say I still am, although they have not seen each other since. From the time that they met, or rather, saw each other and became aware that I knew both of them, their lives have changed far too rapidly and not so much in parallel as consecutively. I don’t know if I should stop seeing the one in order to liberate the other, or change the nature of my relationship with the other in order to have the first one disappear from her life. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know if I should say anything.

  Initially, they had nothing in common, apart from a considerable mutual interest in books and, therefore, their respective libraries, each created with patience, devotion and care. The friend I had known longest, Giulia, was an amateur: the daughter of a former ambassador, a misino (i.e a neo-fascist), she was married and had two children, she rented out a few apartments that she owned in Rome, she lived off the rent and did not work, she could devote almost all her time to her passion, reading, and her social life was limited to inviting writers to her house in a pale emulation of French salonnières of the eighteenth century such as Madame du Deffand (what more can one expect nowadays?). My more recent friend, Silvia, on the other hand, was a professional: she edited a series for a publisher, she was slightly younger, single, with no assets, and she scraped a living writing for Italian newspapers – interviews and articles on books; she didn’t invite anyone to her house, but instead went out and met writers in cafés, in cinemas, sometimes for supper. As for me, despite being a foreigner to them and a foreigner in the city, Silvia would meet me somewhere and Giulia would invite me home. When Giulia invited me home, her husband used to go out for a few hours because he hated all things Spanish. He was an older man, twenty years older than his wife, and a writer himself (albeit of treatises on engineering), in possession of a precarious fortune of which Giulia made only moderate use. Then one summer, her husband had to go away for a considerable period, for professional reasons. From the kitchen window, Giulia began to notice a young man who lived a few floors below. She always saw him sitting down, with his glasses on, but without his shirt, apparently studying. Later, they passed on the stairs, and by the time her husband returned they had become lovers, they would leave letters in each other’s mail boxes, with no return address on the back. Only a month later, her husband asked for a divorce and left the apartment. The neighbour came and went up and down the stairs.

  It was then that my other friend, Silvia, announced to me that she was getting married. One of those older writers with whom she used to go out to the café or to the cinema had become so much a part of her life that she couldn’t do without him. He was twenty years older than her, very intelligent (she said), he wrote treatises on Islam, he had something of a reputation and a personal fortune inherited from his first wife, who had died ten years before. The only thing that alerted me then was the fact that, as Silvia laughingly told me, he hated all things Spanish, and so, when I visited Paris, she would perhaps have to continue meeting me in cafés and cinemas. It occurred to me that his hatred might have Moorish roots.

  Meanwhile, Giulia, the first friend, devoted herself to leading the kind of life with the false student (his glasses made him look younger, he was a man of thirty-something, the same age as her, and had a good job as a psychologist with a big multinational) which, given his age and character, her husband had never wanted or been able to lead: not only in summer, like a large part of the world’s population, but during every vacation period, they set off on complicated journeys to far-away places: in the space of nine months they visited Bali, Malaysia and, finally, Thailand. It was in Thailand that, for no known reason, the psychologist or false student fell ill, and his case provoked such interest amongst the hospital doctors that even the Queen’s doctor dropped in to have a look at him. No one knew what he had, but after fifteen anxious days, he recovered and was able to return to Paris.

  It was more or less then, that, unexpectedly (only months, not years, had passed since her marriage), Silvia, during a time when her Islamic husband was immobilized due to a fall down the stairs in their new conjugal home (so many houses in Paris still do not have a lift), she happened to meet in a cinema (to which this time she went alone) a young man of her own age for whom, after a few more weeks of cinemas and cafés and marital immobility, she had conceived such a passion that she had no option but to propose a quickie divorce and to acknowledge her mistake (that is, her impatience or her weakness or her submission to habit, or her resignation). The young man was rather richer than the old writer: he was deputy director of a canning f
actory for mussels and tuna and was constantly visiting far-off countries in order to make acquisitions or to carry out murky deals. Silvia went with him to China and then Korea and later to Vietnam. It was in this latter country that, for no known reason, the deputy director of the canning factory fell gravely ill and had to postpone his many deals during the two unplanned-for weeks that it took him to recover.

  I had never spoken to Giulia about Silvia or to Silvia about Giulia, because neither of them is interested in other people’s lives and it seems impolite to entrust to other ears things which, in principle, were intended only for mine. Now, however, I have my doubts, because this summer, I visited Giulia in Paris and her situation has taken a rather worrying turn: ever since, three months ago, she and the false student or psychologist decided to live in the same apartment, he has turned out to be a very nasty piece of work indeed: he hates books now and has forced Giulia to get rid of her library; he beats her, he’s violent; and recently, while she was pretending to be asleep, she has twice seen him standing at the foot of the bed stroking a razor (once, she says, he was sharpening it on a strap like an old-fashioned barber). Giulia trusts that it will be a passing phase, a consequence of the enigmatic illness contracted in Thailand or some upset caused by the unbearable heat of this never-ending summer. I hope so, but given that Silvia and her canner are thinking of moving in together, perhaps I should speak to her now, even if only so that she can save her library and try to persuade her man to change to an electric razor.