When I Was Mortal Read online

  “I suppose you tend to lower your guard a bit.”

  “No, I don’t, but I have a really hard time making sure that I don’t. My colleague, the one who stays with him while I go on ahead, I notice that he lowers his guard much more. I tell him off about it sometimes. He plays portable video games while he’s waiting, he’s a bit of an addict. And you just can’t do that, you see.”

  “Yes, I see. And how does the boss treat you both?”

  “Well, for him we’re invisible, he doesn’t not do anything just because we’re there. I’ve seen him get up to some really disgusting things.”

  “What sort of disgusting things?”

  The bodyguard took my arm and led me over to the betting booths. I felt suddenly embarrassed to be walking along like that with such a tall man. His way of taking my arm was protective, perhaps he didn’t know how to make contact with people in any other way: he was always the protector. He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he said:

  “Well, with women, in the car, for example. In fact, he’s a bit of a dirty old man, got a dirty mind, you know?” He tapped his forehead. “Listen, you’re not a journalist, are you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Good.”

  I bet on number eight and he bet on number fourteen, he was a stubborn man, or else superstitious, and we went back to the stands. We sat down, waiting for the third race to begin.

  “What shall we do about the binoculars?”

  “What if I watch the start and you watch the finish?” he said. “After all, it was my fault.”

  He again took the binoculars from me without first removing them from around my neck, but now we were sitting very close together and there was no need for him to pull on the strap. He looked at the grandstand for a second and then replaced the binoculars on my knees. I looked at his bootees, they seemed so incongruous, they made his very large feet look childish. He got excited during the race, shouting: “Go on, Narnia, move it!” at number fourteen which did not get stuck at the gate, but nevertheless got off to a bad start and only came in fourth. My number eight was in second place, so we both tore up our slips with an appropriately embittered look on our faces: ah, to hell with it.

  Suddenly, I noticed that he looked depressed, it couldn’t be because of the bet.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer at once. He was looking at the floor, at his torn-up tickets, he had his broad chest thrown forward, his head almost between his spread legs, as if he felt sick and was taking precautions in case he had to throw up, so as not to stain his trousers.

  “No,” he said at last. “It’s just that that was the third race, my boss will be about to arrive with my colleague, if they arrive that is. And if they arrive, then it’ll be up to me.”

  “I suppose you have to stay here and keep watch.”

  “Yes, I do. Do you mind keeping me company? Well, if you want to go down to the paddock and place a bet, you go ahead and then come back for the race. I’ll stay here with the binoculars, just in case anything should happen.”

  “I’ll just nip down and place my bet. I don’t need to see the horses.”

  He gave me ten thousand pesetas for the first two past the post, another five thousand for a winner, I went down to place my bets, I was only gone a matter of moments, the queue hadn’t started yet. When I got back to the stand, the bodyguard was still sitting with his head down, he didn’t seem particularly alert. He was stroking his sideburns, absorbed in thought.

  “Has he arrived yet?” I asked, just to say something.

  “No, not yet,” he replied raising first his eyes and then the binoculars to the grandstand. It had become an almost mechanical gesture. “I might not have to do it after all.”

  The man still seemed depressed, he had suddenly lost all his bonhomie, as if a cloud were hanging over him. He no longer chatted to me or paid me any attention. I felt tempted to say that I would prefer to see that race by the track, where I could manage perfectly well without binoculars, and leave him to himself. But I feared for his job. He was sunk in thought, and not at all vigilant, just when he needed to be.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I said, and then, more than anything in order to remind him of the imminence of his task. “If you’re not feeling well, do you want me to watch for you? If you tell me who your boss is …”

  “There’s nothing to watch,” he replied. “I know what’s going to happen this afternoon. It may have happened already.”

  “What?”

  “Look, you don’t get fond of someone who pays you to protect them. Like I said, my boss doesn’t even know I exist, he barely knows my name, I’ve been as invisible as air to him for the last two years, and from time to time he’s bawled me out because I was over-zealous. He gives orders and I carry them out, he tells me when and where he wants me and I go there, at the time and place indicated, that’s all. I take care that nothing happens to him, but I don’t feel fond of him. On more than one occasion, I’ve even thought of attacking him myself just to ease the tension and make myself feel necessary, to create the danger myself. Nothing serious, just rough him up a bit in the garage, do a bit of play-acting, hide somewhere and pass myself off as a mugger in my spare time. Give him a fright. I never imagined that the day would come when we’d have to knock him off for real.”

  “Knock him off? And who’s we?”

  “My colleague and me. Well, either him or me. He might have managed to do it already; I hope so. If he has, the boss won’t appear for this race either, he won’t even have left the house and he’ll be lying on the carpet, or stuffed in the boot of the car. But if he does come, you see, it will mean that my colleague didn’t manage to do it, and then I’ll have to, on the way back from the race course, in the car itself, while my colleague does the driving. With a length of rope, or a single shot once we’re off the road. I really hope they don’t come, I don’t much like him, but the idea of having to kill him myself … It makes me feel ill.”

  I thought he was joking, but until that moment he hadn’t seemed like a man much given to jokes, he’d seemed almost incapable of them, that’s why – I thought fleetingly – he had laughed so much when I made that one rather unfunny remark. People who don’t know how to make jokes are so surprised and grateful when others do.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  He kept rubbing furiously at his sideburns. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and remained staring at me like that.

  “Of course you do, I explained it perfectly clearly. Like I said, I don’t much like him, but I’d be relieved if they didn’t come, if my colleague had already done it.”

  “Why are you doing it?”

  “It’s a long story. For money, well, not just that, sometimes you have no option, sometimes you have to do things that disgust you, but you have to do them all the same, because it would be worse not to, hasn’t that ever happened to you?”

  “Yes, it has,” I said, “but never anything so drastic.” I glanced at the grandstand, a pointless gesture on my part. “If this is all true, why are you telling me?”

  “It really doesn’t make any difference. You’re not going to tell anyone else, even if you read about it in the paper tomorrow. Nobody likes getting involved in bother; if you go and tell somebody, you’ll get nothing but complications and a lot of trouble. And threats too probably. No one tells anyone anything unless they’re going to benefit in some way. Not even God helps the police, everyone thinks, oh, let them get on with it. And no one says anything. You’ll do the same. I don’t feel like having any secrets today.”

  I picked up the binoculars and looked again at the grandstand, with the lenses on full magnification. It was almost empty, everyone must have gone to the bar or to the paddock, it was still some minutes before the race was due to start. That gesture was all the more useless, because I didn’t even know his boss, although, if I saw him, I might guess who he was by his rich man’s face.
r />   “Is he there?” he asked me fearfully, looking at the track.

  “I don’t think so, there’s hardly anyone. You look.”

  “No, I prefer to wait. When the race is about to start, when they all come in. Will you tell me?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell you.”

  We fell silent. I glanced again at his boots (his feet were very close together now) and he was staring at the cufflinks on his shirt, his wine shirt, his cufflinks in the form of tobacco leaves. Suddenly I found myself hoping that a man was dead, that his boss was already dead. I found myself preferring that option, so that he wouldn’t have to kill him. We started to notice the stand filling up, people were pressing in on us, we had to get to our feet to make room.

  “You have the binoculars,” I said, “we agreed that you would watch the start of the race.” And I handed them to him.

  The bodyguard took them and raised them brusquely to his eyes, with the same gesture that had rendered mine unusable. I saw him focus them on the starting boxes and then, when the horses were under orders, he turned the binoculars towards the grandstand for a few seconds. I heard him counting:

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He hasn’t come,” he said.

  “They’re off,” I said.

  He looked again at the track and when the horses were taking the first bend, I heard him shouting:

  “Go on, Charon, go on! Come on, Charon, come on!”

  Despite his excitement and his joy, he was still clearheaded enough to pass me the binoculars when the horses were reaching the final bend. He was a considerate man, he kept his promise to let me watch the finish. I raised the binoculars to my eyes and I saw that Charon was winning by half a length over Heart So White in second place: the two horses that my companion had bet on that afternoon to win and to come second. I, on the other hand, would have to tear up my tickets once more and throw them to the ground.

  I lowered the binoculars and I was surprised not to hear him shouting and happy.

  “You won,” I said.

  But he obviously hadn’t followed the last part of the race, he obviously didn’t know. He was staring at the grandstand with his own eyes, without the help of binoculars. He was very still. He turned to me without looking at me, as if I were a stranger. I was a stranger. He buttoned up his jacket. His face had grown dark again, almost contorted.

  “There they are, they’ve arrived. They’ve arrived for the fifth race,” he said. “I’m sorry, I must go and join them, he’ll want to give me instructions.”

  He said nothing more, not even goodbye. He had pushed his way through the crowds in a matter of moments and I watched him from behind, a giant figure moving off towards the grandstand. As he walked, he patted his jacket on his right side, the gun in its holster. He had left his binoculars with me. I tore up my tickets but not his winning tickets. I put them in my pocket, he was unlikely to want to claim them, I thought.

  UNFINISHED FIGURES

  I DON’T KNOW whether or not I should talk about what happened recently to Custardoy. It’s the only time, as far as I know, that he’s shown any scruples, or perhaps it was pity. Then again, why not.

  Custardoy is a copier and forger of paintings. He receives fewer and fewer commissions for the latter, better-paid work, because the new forgery detection techniques make fraud almost impossible, at least in museums. A few months ago, however, he got a request from a private individual: a bankrupt nephew wanted to do a switch on his aunt, who owned a small, unfinished Goya, hidden away at her house near the sea. He could no longer afford to wait for her to die, for his aunt had told him that although she was going to leave him the house, she had decided to leave the Goya to a young servant girl whom she had watched grow up. According to the nephew, the aunt was senile.

  Custardoy was prepared to work from photographs and from the report that an expert had drawn up years before, but he asked to see the painting at least once in order to make sure that the trick was feasible, and to that end he was invited by the nephew, who was called Cámara and who rarely visited his aunt, to spend a weekend at the house by the sea. The aunt lived alone with the young servant girl, little more than a child, for whom she bought text books and pencil cases: the girl went to school every morning in Port de la Selva, came back for lunch and spent the rest of the day and night waiting for her mistress to assign her some task. The aunt, whose surname was Vallabriga, spent all day and all evening in front of the television or talking on the phone to faded friends in Barcelona. More than her husband, who had died ten years before, she missed someone whom she had always missed during her marriage, a languid boyfriend from her youth, who went off with another woman – a minuscule, remote obsession. The aunt had a dog with three legs, its back right leg having been cut off after the dog spent a night with it trapped in a gin for rabbits. No one had gone to rescue it, the people round about had taken its howls for those of a wolf. According to her nephew Cámara, the aunt said that the look in the dog’s eyes reminded her of her lost and much-mourned boyfriend. “She’s completely gaga,” added the nephew. Señora Vallabriga used to take long walks by the seashore with the dog and the servant girl, three unfinished figures, the girl because she was still a child, the dog because of its missing leg, the aunt because of her false and her real widowhood.

  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.

  FLESH SUNDAY

  WE 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.