Read Online All Souls by Javier Marías - Free Book Online Page A

who grow dim then blaze into life again later, just for a moment, when they are called, only to be instantly plunged back into the gloom of their obscure, commutable existences, having done their brief duty or revealed the secret suddenly demanded of them. And thus they exist onlyin order that through them, whenever necessary, the child may once more emerge. The little English girl is looking now at the black iron bridge and waiting for a train to cross it, to see the train lit up and reflected in the water, one of those brightly coloured trains, full of light and distant noise that from time to time cross the River Yamuna, the River Jumna that she looks patiently out at from her house high above it while her nanny whispers to her and her diplomat father, in evening dress ready for dinner and with a glass in one hand, watches from behind, from the other end of the garden. It's getting close to the girl's bedtime, but before she goes one more train must pass, just one more, because the fresh image of the passing train and of the river illuminated by its windows (the men on the barges look up at it and grow dizzy) helps her to go to sleep and to come to terms with the idea of spending another day in a city to which she does not belong and which she will only perceive as hers once she has left it and when her only chance to recall it out loud will be with her son or her lover. The three of them wait, the girl, the nanny and the melancholy father, until the mail train from Moradabad that always arrives incalculably late has steamed across the iron bridge, filling its entire length with rickety multi-coloured carriages just distinguishable beneath the sliver of moon; and then, once the swaying lantern on the last carriage is out of sight and she has said goodbye to it, a goodbye that was never spoken in expectation of any response, Clare Bayes gets up, puts on her shoes, stands on tiptoe to kiss her silent father, who smells of tobacco and alcohol and mint, and then disappears at last into the house holding the hand of the nanny who will perhaps sing her to sleep with some trifling song. That was how Clare looked at me and how I looked at her as if we were each the other's vigilant, compassionate eyes, the eyes that look out at us from the past and no longer matter because they've known for a long time how they're obliged to see us: perhaps we looked at each other as if we were each the other's older brother or sister. And although I didn't know her, I knew that I would and that one day I would lie with her on a bed and tell her all the insignificant details - about calle de Génova, calle de Covarrubias and calle de Miguel Ángel - that I confided to her throughout all those months of turbulent, intermittent meetings in my pyramid house in Oxford and in her house, in those dreary hotels in London and Reading and in one hotel in Brighton.
    She looked away. Suddenly, the Warden seemed to wake from his lewd reverie; he waved the gavel energetically and, finding himself the centre of an immense silence (there was not even a murmur now and all the students at the lower tables, having done what justice they could to their miserable suppers, had fled some time before, taking with them the odd knife as compensation), made a vague, scornful gesture then pointed the handle of the gavel at us:
    'What's up with you lot? Haven't you got anything to say to each other or has the cat got your tongues?" And standing up, he pushed away the plate of steak (untouched and bereft of peas) with one grotesque thrust of his hips, uttered some crude Latin phrase without the least pretence now at correct pronunciation, dealt the battered gavel stand one last, furious blow and let out a euphoric cry: "Dessert!"
    At high tables, this is a moment of great solemnity and (plastic) beauty, when all the guests rise and, forming up in line again (a ragged, unsteady and anarchic one this time), progress into another large room, less formal and more welcoming than