When I Was Mortal (2 page)

“Fewer Scruples” appeared in the free publication
La condición humana
(FNAC, Madrid, 1994). This is one of the two stories I have expanded for this edition, by about fifteen per cent.

“Blood on a spear” was published in instalments by
El País
(27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 August and 1 September 1995). The requirement for this story was that it had to belong more or less to the genre of crime novel or thriller. This is the other story I have since expanded, by about ten per cent.

“In Uncertain Time” was included in the book
Cuentos de fútbol
, ed. Jorge Valdano (Alfaguara, Madrid, 1995). Obviously, the requirement here was that the story should be about football.

Lastly, “No More Love” is published here for the first time, although the story it tells was contained – in compressed form – in an article, “Fantasmas leídos”, in my collection
Literatura y fantasma
(Ediciones Siruela, Madrid, 1993). There the story was attributed to a non-existent “Lord Rymer” (in fact, the name of a secondary character in my novel
Todas las almas
[Editorial Anagrama Barcelona, 1989; English translation:
All Souls
, Harvill, 1992], the hard-drinking warden of an Oxford college), supposedly an expert and an investigator of real ghosts, if that is not a contradiction in terms. I didn’t like the idea that this short story should remain buried alone in the middle of an article and in almost embryonic form, which is why I have expanded it into this new story. It contains conscious, deliberate and acknowledged echoes of a film and of another story:
The Ghost and Mrs Muir
by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, about which I wrote an article in my book
Vida del fantasma
(El País-Aguilar, Madrid, 1995) and “Polly Morgan” by Alfred Edgar Coppard which I included in my anthology
Cuentos únicos
(Ediciones Siruela, 1989). It’s all perfectly above board, and there’s no question of trying to deceive anyone, which is why the main character of the story is called quite plainly “Molly Morgan Muir”.

These twelve stories were written later than those published in my other volume of short stories,
Mientras ellas duermen
(Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 1990). There are still a few scattered elsewhere, written very freely or without any commission: it seems advisable to me, however, that they should either remain in obscurity or else scattered.

November 1995

N
OW THAT I
know my friend Claudia is a widow – following her husband’s death from natural causes – I keep remembering one particular night in Paris six months ago: I had left at the end of a supper party for seven in order to accompany one of the guests home – she had no car, but lived close by, fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes back. She had struck me as a somewhat impetuous, rather nice young woman, an Italian friend of my hostess Claudia, who is also Italian, and in whose Paris flat I was staying for a few days, as I had on other occasions. It was the last night of my trip. The young woman, whose name I cannot now remember, had been invited for my benefit, as well as to add a little variety to the supper table or, rather, so that the two languages being spoken were more evenly spread.

During the walk, I had to continue muddling through in my fractured Italian, as I had during half the supper. During the other half, I had muddled through in my even more fractured French, and to tell the truth I was fed up with being unable to express myself correctly to anyone. I felt like compensating for this lack, but there would, I thought, be no chance to do so that night, for by the time I got back to the flat, my friend Claudia,
who spoke fairly convincing Spanish, would already have gone to bed with her ageing giant of a husband, and there would be no opportunity until the following morning to exchange a few well-chosen and clearly enunciated words. I felt the stirring of verbal impulses, but I had to repress them. I switched off during the walk: I allowed my Italian friend’s Italian friend to express herself correctly in her own language, and I, against my will and my desire, merely nodded occasionally and said from time to time: “
Certo, certo
,” without actually listening to what she said, weary as I was with the wine and worn out by my linguistic efforts. As we walked along, our breath visible in the air, I noticed only that she was talking about our mutual friend, which was, after all, quite normal, since, apart from the supper party for seven that we had just left, we had nothing much else in common. Or so I thought. “
Ma certo
,” I kept saying pointlessly, while she, who must have realized I wasn’t listening, continued talking as if to herself or perhaps out of mere politeness. Until suddenly, still talking about Claudia, I heard a sentence which I understood perfectly as a sentence, but not its meaning, because I had understood it unwittingly and completely out of context. “
Claudia sarà ancora con il dottore
,” was what I thought her friend said. I didn’t take much notice, because we were nearly at her door, and I was anxious to speak my own language again or at least to be alone so that I could think in it.

There was someone waiting in the doorway, and she added: “
Ah no, ecco il dottore
,” or something of the sort. It seems the doctor had come to see her husband, who had been too ill to accompany her to the supper party. The doctor was a man of my age, almost young, and he turned out to be Spanish. That may have been why we were introduced, albeit briefly (they spoke to each other in French, my compatriot in his unmistakably Spanish accent), and although I would have happily stayed there for a
while chatting to him in order to satisfy my longing for some correct verification, my friend’s friend did not invite me in, but instead bade me a hasty goodbye, giving me to understand or saying that Dr Noguera had been there for some minutes waiting for her. My compatriot the doctor was carrying a black case, like the ones doctors used to have, and he had an old-fashioned face, like someone out of the 1930s: a good-looking man, but gaunt and pale, with the fair, slicked-back hair of a fighter pilot. It occurred to me that there must have been many like him in Paris after the Spanish Civil War, exiled Republican doctors.

When I got back to the apartment, I was surprised to see the light still on in the studio, for I had to pass by the door on my way to the guest room. I peered in, assuming that it had been left on by mistake, and was ready to turn it off, when I saw my friend was still up, curled in an armchair, in her nightdress and dressing gown. I had never seen her in her nightdress and dressing gown before, despite, over the years, having stayed at her various apartments each time I went to Paris for a few days: both garments were salmon pink, and very expensive. Although the giant husband she had been married to for six years was very rich, he was also very mean, for reasons of character, nationality or age – a relatively advanced age in comparison with Claudia – and my friend had often complained that he only ever allowed her to buy things to further embellish their large, comfortable apartment, which was, according to her, the only visible manifestation of his wealth. Otherwise, they lived more modestly than they needed to, that is, below their means.

I had had barely anything to do with him, apart from the odd supper party like the one that night, which are perfect opportunities for not talking to or getting to know anyone that you don’t already know. The husband, who answered to the strange and ambiguous name of Hélie (which sounded rather feminine to my
ears), I saw as an appendage, the kind of bearable appendage that many still attractive, single or divorced women have a tendency to graft onto themselves when they touch forty or forty-five: a responsible man, usually a good deal older, with whom they share no interests in common and with whom they never laugh, but who is, nevertheless, useful to them in their maintaining a busy social life and organizing suppers for seven as on that particular night. What struck one about Hélie was his size: he was nearly six foot five and fat, especially round the chest, a kind of Cyclopean spinning top poised on two legs so skinny that they looked like one; whenever I passed him in the corridor, he would always sway about and hold out his hands to the walls so as to have something to lean on should he slip; at suppers, of course, he sat at one end of the table because, otherwise, the side on which he was installed would have been filled to capacity by his enormous bulk and would have looked unbalanced, with him sitting alone opposite four guests all crammed together. He spoke only French and, according to Claudia, was a leading light in his field – the law. After six years of marriage, it wasn’t so much that my friend seemed disillusioned, for she had never shown much enthusiasm anyway, but she seemed incapable of disguising, even in the presence of strangers, the irritation we always feel towards those who are superfluous to us.

“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.