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Authors: Javier Marías
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bedroom to bring them breakfast and see their happy faces, she found only a huge snake coiled on the bloody, rumpled bed and not a trace of her dear, unfortunate daughter, so full of promise.
My grandmother, I remember, used to laugh when she told me that macabre tale to which, now that I'm an adult, I may perhaps have added some even more macabre detail (I don't think she said anything about blood or how long the night was); she'd laugh that rather girlish laugh of hers (perhaps the laughter of her ten-year-old — possibly even younger — self, her resolutely Cuban laughter) and fan herself, making light of the story and ensuring that I and my ten-year-old - possibly even younger - self would make light of it too, or maybe any fear the tale could arouse was a uniquely female fear, a fear proper to daughters and mothers and wives and mothers-in-law and grandmothers and nannies, a fear that belonged in the same category as the instinctive singing of women throughout the day and at dead of night, in Madrid and in Havana and everywhere, the song in which boys also share only to forget it once they cease to be boys. I'd forgotten it too, but not entirely, for you can only be said truly to have forgotten something if you can't even remember it when someone requires you to. I hadn't thought of that song for years but Miriam's resigned, abstracted voice didn't need to insist or require in order for it to surface in my memory on my honeymoon with my wife Luisa, who was lying in bed ill and, on that night of mellow moonlight, was seeing the world from her pillow or was perhaps not ready to see it at all.
I returned to her side and stroked her hair and the back of her neck, which were again sticky with sweat, she had her face turned towards the wardrobe, her forehead perhaps, as before, crossed by fine hairs, like false, premonitory lines. I sat down at her right side and lit a cigarette, the end glowed in the mirror, I didn't want to look at myself. Her breathing was not that of someone asleep and I whispered in her ear:
"You'll feel better tomorrow, my love. Go to sleep now."
I sat on our bed on the sheet and smoked for a while, hearing nothing farther from the room next door: Miriam's singing had been both the prelude to sleep and an expression of tiredness. It was too hot, I'd had no supper, I wasn't sleepy, I wasn't even tired, I didn't sing or put out the light. Luisa was awake but not talking to me, she didn't even respond to my good wishes, as if she were angry with me because of Guillermo, I thought, or because of Miriam, and didn't want to show it, best let it dissolve into the sleep that refused to come. I thought I heard Guillermo close the balcony doors, but I was no longer leaning on my balcony and I didn't go over there to check. I tapped the ash on my cigarette too hard, misjudged my aim, and it fell on to the sheet, and before picking it up with my fingers and putting it in the ashtray where it would burn itself out without burning anything else, I watched as it began to make a hole fringed with red on the sheet. I think I let it grow for longer than I should have, I watched it for some seconds, watched how the circle grew and widened, a stain that was at once black and fiery, consuming the sheet.
I'D MET LUISA, through my work, almost a year before, in a way that verged simultaneously on the comic and the solemn. As I've mentioned before, we both work mainly as translators or interpreters (in order to make a living); although I work more than she does, at least on a more regular basis, which in no way implies that I'm more competent at my job, she is, or was judged to be so on the occasion of our first meeting, or perhaps she was merely judged to be generally more reliable.
Luckily we don't just work at the sessions and meetings held by international organizations. Although that does give one the incomparable luxury of having to work for only six months of the year (two months in London, Geneva, Rome, New York
My grandmother, I remember, used to laugh when she told me that macabre tale to which, now that I'm an adult, I may perhaps have added some even more macabre detail (I don't think she said anything about blood or how long the night was); she'd laugh that rather girlish laugh of hers (perhaps the laughter of her ten-year-old — possibly even younger — self, her resolutely Cuban laughter) and fan herself, making light of the story and ensuring that I and my ten-year-old - possibly even younger - self would make light of it too, or maybe any fear the tale could arouse was a uniquely female fear, a fear proper to daughters and mothers and wives and mothers-in-law and grandmothers and nannies, a fear that belonged in the same category as the instinctive singing of women throughout the day and at dead of night, in Madrid and in Havana and everywhere, the song in which boys also share only to forget it once they cease to be boys. I'd forgotten it too, but not entirely, for you can only be said truly to have forgotten something if you can't even remember it when someone requires you to. I hadn't thought of that song for years but Miriam's resigned, abstracted voice didn't need to insist or require in order for it to surface in my memory on my honeymoon with my wife Luisa, who was lying in bed ill and, on that night of mellow moonlight, was seeing the world from her pillow or was perhaps not ready to see it at all.
I returned to her side and stroked her hair and the back of her neck, which were again sticky with sweat, she had her face turned towards the wardrobe, her forehead perhaps, as before, crossed by fine hairs, like false, premonitory lines. I sat down at her right side and lit a cigarette, the end glowed in the mirror, I didn't want to look at myself. Her breathing was not that of someone asleep and I whispered in her ear:
"You'll feel better tomorrow, my love. Go to sleep now."
I sat on our bed on the sheet and smoked for a while, hearing nothing farther from the room next door: Miriam's singing had been both the prelude to sleep and an expression of tiredness. It was too hot, I'd had no supper, I wasn't sleepy, I wasn't even tired, I didn't sing or put out the light. Luisa was awake but not talking to me, she didn't even respond to my good wishes, as if she were angry with me because of Guillermo, I thought, or because of Miriam, and didn't want to show it, best let it dissolve into the sleep that refused to come. I thought I heard Guillermo close the balcony doors, but I was no longer leaning on my balcony and I didn't go over there to check. I tapped the ash on my cigarette too hard, misjudged my aim, and it fell on to the sheet, and before picking it up with my fingers and putting it in the ashtray where it would burn itself out without burning anything else, I watched as it began to make a hole fringed with red on the sheet. I think I let it grow for longer than I should have, I watched it for some seconds, watched how the circle grew and widened, a stain that was at once black and fiery, consuming the sheet.
I'D MET LUISA, through my work, almost a year before, in a way that verged simultaneously on the comic and the solemn. As I've mentioned before, we both work mainly as translators or interpreters (in order to make a living); although I work more than she does, at least on a more regular basis, which in no way implies that I'm more competent at my job, she is, or was judged to be so on the occasion of our first meeting, or perhaps she was merely judged to be generally more reliable.
Luckily we don't just work at the sessions and meetings held by international organizations. Although that does give one the incomparable luxury of having to work for only six months of the year (two months in London, Geneva, Rome, New York
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