Read Online When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías - Free Book Online

Arranz holding the spoon in his reassuring, steady hand, mistress of metallic objects, nothing could happen while he was listening to your chest or peering at you with his torch fixed on his forehead. After his brief visit and his two or three jokes – sometimes my mother would lean in the doorway waiting until he had finished examining me and making me laugh, and she would laugh too – I would feel even more at ease and would begin to fall asleep listening to their chatter in the nearby lounge, or listening to them listening for a while to the radio or playing a game of cards, at a time when time barely passed, it seems impossible because it’s not that long ago, although from then until now enough time has elapsed for me to live and die. I hear the laughter of those who were still young, although I couldn’t see them as young then, I can now: my father laughed the least, he was a handsome, taciturn man with a look of permanent melancholy in his eyes, perhaps because he had been a republican and had lost the war, and that is probably something you never recover from, having lost a war against your compatriots and neighbours. He was a kindly man who never got angry with me or my mother and who spent a lot of time at home writing articles and book reviews, which he tended to publish under various pseudonyms in the newspapers, because it was best not to use his own name; or perhaps reading, he was a great francophile, I mainly recall novels by Camus and Simenon. Dr Arranz was a jollier man, with a lazy, teasing way of talking, inventive and full of unusual turns-of-phrase, the kind of man children idolize because he knows how to do card tricks and comes out with unexpected rhymes and talks to them about football – then it was Kopa, Rial, Di Stefano, Puskas and Gento – and he thinks up games that will interest them and awaken their imaginations, except that, in fact, he never has time to stay andplay them for real. And my mother, always well-dressed despite the fact that there wasn’t much money in the home of one of the war’s losers – there wasn’t – better dressed than my father because she still had her own father, my grandfather, to buy her clothes, she was slight and cheerful and sometimes looked sadly at her husband, and always looked at me enthusiastically, later, as you get older, not many people look at you like that either. I see this now because I see it all complete, I see that, while I was gradually becoming submerged in sleep, the laughter in the living room never came from my father, and that, on the other hand, he was the only one listening to the radio, an impossible image until very recently, but which is now as clear as the old images which, while I was mortal, gradually grew dimmer, more compressed the longer I lived. I see that on some nights, Dr Arranz and my mother went out, and now I understand all those references to good tickets, which, in my imagination then, I always thought of as being clipped by an usher at the football stadium or at the bullring – those places I never went to – and to which I never gave another thought. On other nights, there were no good tickets and no one mentioned them, or there were rainy nights when there was no question of going for a walk or to an open-air dance, and now I know that then my mother and Dr Arranz would go into the bedroom when they were sure I had gone to sleep after having been touched on my chest and on the stomach by the same hands that would then touch her, hands that were no longer warm, but urgent, the hand of the doctor that calms and probes and persuades and demands; and having been kissed on the cheek or the forehead by the same lips that would subsequently kiss the easy-going, low voice – thus silencing it. And whether they went to the theatre or to the cinema or to a club or merely went into the next room, my father would listen to the radio alone while he waited, so as not to hear anything, butalso, with the passage of time and