When I Was Mortal Read online

  THE HONEYMOON

  MY WIFE HAD suddenly felt ill and we had rushed back to our hotel room, where she had lain down, shivering and feeling slightly nauseous and feverish. We didn’t want to call a doctor immediately in case it passed off of its own accord and because we were on our honeymoon, and on honeymoon you really don’t want the interference of a stranger, even if it’s for a medical examination. It was probably a minor stomach upset, colic or something. We were in Seville, in a hotel sheltered from the traffic by an esplanade that separated it from the street. While my wife was sleeping (she seemed to fall asleep as soon as I had undressed her and covered her up), I decided to keep quiet, and the best way to do that and not be tempted to make any noise or to talk to her out of sheer boredom was to go over to the balcony and watch the people passing by, the people of Seville, how they walked and how they dressed, how they talked, even though, given the relative distance of the street and the traffic, you could hear only a murmur. I looked without seeing, like someone who arrives at a party from which he knows the only person who really interests him will be absent, having stayed at home with her husband. That one person was with me, behind me, watched over by her husband. I was looking outside, but thinking about what was happening inside, however, I did suddenly pick out one person, and I picked her out because unlike the other people, who walked by and then disappeared, that person remained motionless in one place. It was a woman who, from a distance, looked about thirty, and was wearing an almost sleeveless blue blouse, a white skirt and white high heels. She was waiting for someone, her attitude unmistakably that of someone waiting, because every now and then she would take two or three steps to the right or the left, and on the last step she would drag the stiletto heel of one foot or the other, a gesture of suppressed impatience. On her arm she carried a large handbag, like the bags that mothers, my mother, carried when I was a child, a large black handbag carried on the arm, not slung over the shoulder the way women wear them now. She had strong legs that dug solidly into the pavement each time she returned to the spot where she had chosen to wait after that minimal movement to either side of two or three steps, dragging her heel on the final step. Her legs were so strong that they cancelled out or assimilated her high heels, it was her legs that dug into the pavement, like a knife into wet wood. Sometimes she would bend one leg in order to look behind and smooth her skirt, as if she feared that some crease might be spoiling the line of her skirt at the rear or perhaps she was simply adjusting the elastic of a recalcitrant pair of knickers through the fabric covering them.

  It was growing dark, and the gradually fading light made her seem to me ever more solitary, more isolated and more condemned to wait in vain. Her date would not arrive. She was standing in the middle of the pavement, she did not lean against the wall as those who wait usually do, so as not to get in the way of those passers-by who are not waiting, which is why she had trouble avoiding them, one man said something to her and she responded angrily and threatened him with her voluminous bag.

  Suddenly she looked up, at the third floor where I was standing on the balcony, and she seemed to fix her eyes on me for the first time. She peered at me, as if she were short-sighted or were looking through grubby contact lenses, she screwed up her eyes a little to see better, it was, it seemed, me she was looking at. But I knew no one in Seville, more than that, it was the first time I had ever been to Seville, on my honeymoon, with my brand-new wife lying ill on the bed behind me, I just hoped it was nothing serious. I heard a murmur coming from the bed, but I didn’t turn round because it was a moan made in her sleep, one quickly learns to distinguish the sounds the person one sleeps with makes in their sleep. The woman had taken a few more steps, this time in my direction, she was crossing the street, dodging the cars, not bothering to look for traffic lights, as if she wanted to get closer quickly in order to find out, to get a better view of me on my balcony. She walked slowly, however, and with difficulty, as if she were unaccustomed to wearing high heels or as if her striking legs weren’t used to them, or as if her handbag threw her off balance or as if she were dizzy. She walked rather in the way that my wife had walked after being taken ill, when she came into the room, I had helped her to undress and put her to bed, I had covered her up. The woman had just crossed the street, now she was closer but still some way off, separated from the hotel by the ample esplanade that set it back from the traffic. She continued looking up at me or at where I was, at the building in which I was staying. And then she made a gesture with her arm, a gesture that neither greeted nor beckoned, I mean it wasn’t the way one would beckon to a stranger, it was a gesture of appropriation and recognition, as if I were the person she had been waiting for and as if her date was with me. It was as if with that gesture of her arm, finished off by a swift flourish of the fingers, she wanted to grab hold of me and say: “Come here,” or “You’re mine”. At the same time she shouted something that I couldn’t hear and from the movement of her lips I understood only the first word and that word was “Hey!” uttered with great indignation as was the rest of the phrase that failed to reach my ears. She continued to advance, she smoothed the rear of her skirt more earnestly now because it seemed that the person who would judge her appearance was there before her, the person she was waiting for could now appreciate the way her skirt fell. And then I did hear what she was saying: “Hey, what are you doing up there?” The shout was very audible now, and I could see the woman better. Perhaps she was older than thirty, she still had her eyes screwed up, but they seemed light in colour to me, grey or hazel, and she had full lips, a rather broad nose, her nostrils flaring vehemently, out of anger, she must have spent a long time waiting, far longer than the time that had elapsed since I had picked her out. She stumbled as she walked, she tripped and fell to the ground, instantly dirtying her white skirt and losing one of her shoes. She struggled to her feet, as if she feared getting her foot dirty too, now that her date had arrived, now that she needed to have clean feet just in case the man she had arranged to meet should see them. She managed to get her shoe back on without putting her foot on the ground, she brushed down her skirt and shouted: “What are you doing up there! Why didn’t you tell me you’d already gone up? I’ve been waiting for you here for an hour!” And as she said that, she repeated the same grasping gesture, a bare arm beating the air and the quick flourish of fingers that accompanied it. It was as if she were saying: “You’re mine” or “I’ll kill you,” as if with that gesture she could grab me and drag me towards her, like a claw. This time she shouted something and she was so close I was afraid she might wake my wife.

  “What’s wrong?” said my wife feebly.

  I turned round, she was sitting up in bed, with frightened eyes, the eyes of a sick person who wakes and cannot see anything and doesn’t yet know where she is or why she feels so confused. The light was off. At that moment, she was a sick woman.

  “It’s nothing, go back to sleep,” I said.

  But I didn’t walk over to her to stroke her hair or calm her down, as I would have done in any other circumstances, because I couldn’t leave the balcony, or even take my eyes off that woman who was convinced she had arranged to meet me. Now she could see me clearly, and I was obviously the person with whom she had made an important date, the person who had caused her to suffer by making her wait and who had offended her with my prolonged absence. “Didn’t you notice I’d been waiting for you here for an hour? Why didn’t you say something?” she was yelling furiously now, standing outside my hotel, beneath my balcony. “Do you hear me, I’m going to kill you!” she shouted. And again she made the gesture with her arm and her fingers, the grasping gesture.

  “What on earth’s going on?” asked my wife again, lying dazed on the bed.

  At that moment, I stepped back and pulled the balcony shutters to, but not before seeing that the woman in the street, with her enormous, old-fashioned handbag and her stiletto heels and her strong legs and her stumbling walk, was disappearing from my field of vision
because she was entering the hotel, ready to come up and find me and meet me. I felt empty inside when I thought about what I could possibly say to my sick wife to explain the interruption that was about to take place. We were on our honeymoon and on honeymoon you really don’t want the interference of a stranger, although I was not, I think, a stranger to the person now coming up the stairs. I felt empty inside and I closed the balcony shutters. I prepared myself to open the door.

  BROKEN BINOCULARS

  For Mercedes López-Ballesteros, in San Sebastian

  ON PALM SUNDAY, almost all my friends had left Madrid, and so I went to spend the afternoon at the races. In the second race, which was not particularly interesting, a man to my left inadvertently jolted my elbow as he abruptly raised his binoculars to his eyes in order to get a better view of the final straight. I was already looking, I already had my binoculars before my eyes, and the sudden blow made me drop them (I always forget to hang them round my neck, and that’s how I pay for it or how I paid on that day, because one of the lenses cracked, the binoculars hit the steps, they didn’t bounce, they just lay there on the ground, still and broken). The man crouched down before I could pick them up, he was the one who first noticed the damage, apologizing as he did so.

  “Sorry,” he said. And then: “Oh no, what bad luck, they’re broken.”

  I saw him crouched at my feet and the first thing I noticed was that he was wearing cufflinks, a rare sight nowadays, only the very vulgar or the very ancient dare wear them. The second thing I noticed was that he had a gun in a holster strapped to his right side (he must have been left-handed), as he bent down his jacket gaped open at the back and I saw the butt of the gun. Now that’s an even rarer sight, he must be a policeman, I thought. Then, as he got up, I realized that he was a very tall man, a whole head taller than me; he must have been about thirty and he had sideburns, straight but much too long, another old-fashioned touch, I wouldn’t have noticed them fifteen or even a hundred years ago. Perhaps he wore them to frame and add volume to his head, which was long and rather small, he looked like a matchstick.

  “I’ll pay for any repairs,” he said, embarrassed. “Here, I’ll lend you mine for the moment. It’s only the second race.”

  The second race had, in fact, finished. We didn’t know who had won, so I didn’t dare tear up my betting slips, which I held in my hand as we all do, only to tear them up and immediately throw them to the ground if we’ve lost, and thus instantly forget our mistaken forecast. At that moment, I was also holding my broken binoculars (I’d bought them on a plane not long before, in mid-flight) as well as the other man’s undamaged ones, he had handed them to me at the same time as he had announced that they were mine to borrow, I had taken them mechanically so that they too did not crash onto the steps. When he saw that I had my hands full, he relieved me of the betting slips and put them in the breast pocket of my jacket and gave it a little pat, as if to say that they were now in safekeeping.

  “But if you give me yours, what are you going to do?” I said.

  “We can share them, if you don’t mind us watching the races together,” he said. “Are you on your own?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “The only thing is,” the man added, “we’d have to watch all the races from here. I’m on surveillance duty, and this is my post today. I can’t move from here.”

  “Are you a policeman?”

  “Bloody hell, no, I’d starve. I know a few though. Besides, do you think I could dress the way I do if I was a policeman? Look at me.”

  And as he said that, the man stretched out his arms and took a step back, his hands outspread as if he were a magician. The fact is that (to my taste) he was extremely badly, albeit expensively, dressed: a double-breasted suit (but with the jacket open, as I said) in an unlikely greenish-grey colour, undoubtedly difficult to find; the shirt, which seemed overly starched for the times, was, I fear, wine, not an ugly colour in itself, but inappropriate in such a tall man; his tie was an incomprehensible swarm (birds, insects, repellent Mirós, cats’ eyes), in which the predominant colour was yellow; the oddest thing were his shoes: they weren’t lace-ups or moccasins, they were like children’s ankle-high bootees, he must have thought them very modern, and the rest he would imagine was semi-classic. His cufflinks weren’t too bad, possibly by Durán, very shiny and in the shape of a leaf. He was not a discreet man, nor original, he had simply never been taught how to coordinate his clothes.

  “I see,” I said, not knowing what to say. “So what have you got to watch?”

  “I’m a bodyguard,” he said.

  “Oh, and who are you guarding?”

  The man took the binoculars that he had just lent me and peered through them at the grandstand which was a short distance away (you didn’t really need magnifying lenses to see it). He handed them back to me. He seemed relieved.

  “He hasn’t arrived yet, there’s still time. If he does come, he won’t get here until the fourth race, to say hello to his friends. Like everyone else, he’s only really interested in the fifth race, and he can’t waste a moment, I mean, you probably came early just to pass the time. He, on the other hand, will be doing deals over the phone or taking a nap so as to have a clear head. I came early, just to see how things are going this afternoon, to check that things aren’t getting heavy here and to take any necessary steps.”

  “Heavy? What do you mean? What could possibly happen here?”

  “Probably nothing, but someone always has to go on ahead. And someone else stays behind with him, of course. I’m usually the one who goes on ahead. For example, if we’re going to a restaurant or a casino, or we stop to have a beer at a roadside bar, I always go in first to see the way the land lies. You never know when you go into a public place, two guys might be beating the hell out of each other at that very moment. It doesn’t happen very often, but you never know, a waiter might have spilled some wine, and an awkward customer might be giving him a hard time. I wouldn’t want my boss to see that or have him mixed up in a mess like that. Before you know it, bottles are flying. During the day a lot more bottles go flying about in Madrid than you might imagine, knives come out, people hit each other, people can be very thin-skinned. And if, in the middle of all this, someone with a bit of money turns up, then everyone stops and thinks: ‘Let the rich man pay.’ The ones doing the fighting are quite capable of coming to some instant agreement and laying into the man with the dosh: ‘To hell with the rich.’ You have to keep a very sharp eye out.”

  The man raised a finger to his eye.

  “Really?” I said. “Is your boss that rich, then? Is it so obvious?”

  “It’s written all over his face, he’s got the face of a rich man. Even if he didn’t shave for three days and dressed like a beggar, you could tell from his face he was rich. I wish I had that face. Whenever we go into an expensive shop, I go first, as usual. And despite the fact that I’m well dressed, as soon as the assistants see me they pull a face or ignore me, pretend they haven’t seen me, they start serving other customers who they hadn’t taken a blind bit of notice of before or they start rummaging around in drawers as if they were stocktaking. I don’t say a word, I just check that everything’s all right and then I go back to the door to open it for the boss and let him in. And as soon as they see his face, the assistants abandon their other customers and the drawers they were rummaging in to come and serve him, all smiles.”

  “Isn’t it just that they recognize your boss because he’s famous, if he’s as rich as you say he is?”

  “Possibly,” said the bodyguard, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. “He is getting quite well known. He’s in banking, you know. I won’t tell you who with, but he is. But listen, why don’t we go down to the paddock for a bit, it’ll be time to start betting on the third race soon.”

  So we did and, on the way, we finally tore up our tickets and threw them to the ground, huh, when we saw that we had lost. I passed a philosopher who’s there every Sunday, as well as Admira
l Admira (with his predestined and incomplete surname) and his lovely and undeserved wife, who both nodded to me without saying a word, as if they were embarrassed to see me in the company of that rather gigantic individual, I only came up to his shoulder. I was now wearing his binoculars round my neck and carrying my own broken pair, mine are small and powerful, his were enormous and very heavy, the strap cut into my neck, but I couldn’t run the risk of dropping them as well. While we were watching the horses walking round the paddock, I sensed that the bodyguard was about to ask me what I did, and since I didn’t feel like talking about myself, I got in first and said:

  “What do you think of number fourteen?”

  “He looks good,” he said, which is what those who know nothing about horses always say. “I think I might bet on him.”

  “I don’t think I will, he looks a bit highly-strung to me. He might even get stuck at the starting gate.”

  “Really, do you think so?”

  “Having a rich man’s face counts for nothing here.”

  The man burst out laughing. It was a spontaneous laugh, without the slightest forethought, the laugh of an unpolished man, the laugh of a man who does not stop to worry about whether or not it is appropriate to laugh. What I’d said wasn’t that funny. Then, without asking my permission, he grabbed his binoculars and looked quickly through them at the grandstand, which you couldn’t actually see from the paddock. It hurt my neck, the man pulled too hard on the strap.

  “So, has he arrived yet?” I said.

  “No, luckily he hasn’t,” he said, going by instinct, I assume.

  “Does he give you a lot of work? I mean, do you often have to intervene, intervene seriously I mean, when it’s dangerous.”

  “Not as much as I’d like, really, it’s very stressful this job, but at the same time, very inactive, you have to be permanently on the alert, you have to anticipate trouble, on a couple of occasions I’ve grabbed hold of really distinguished people who were just going up to my boss to say hello. I’ve pinned their hands behind their backs and overpowered them, for no reason at all, they’ve even been on the receiving end of a few expert blows. I got hauled over the coals for it too. So you have to be very careful and not anticipate too much. You have to guess people’s intentions, that’s what you have to do. Not that anything much ever happens, and it’s difficult to stay alert if you have the feeling that it’s not really necessary.”