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

the onset of routine – with the levelling out of nights that always happens when nights keep repeating themselves – in order to distract himself for half an hour or three quarters of an hour (doctors are always in such a hurry), because he inevitably became interested in what he was listening to. The doctor would leave without saying goodbye to him and my mother would stay in the bedroom, waiting for my father, she would put on a nightdress and change the sheets, he never found her there in her pretty skirts and stockings. I see now the conversation that began that state of affairs, which, for me, was not a cruel one but a kindly one that lasted my whole life, and, during that conversation, Dr Arranz is sporting the sharp little moustache that I noticed on the faces of lawyers in parliament until the day Franco died, and not only there, but on soldiers and notaries and bankers and lecturers, on writers and on countless doctors, not on him though, he was one of the first to get rid of it. My father and my mother are sitting in the dining room and I still have no consciousness or memory, I am a child lying in its cradle, I cannot yet walk or speak and there is no reason why I should ever have found out: she keeps her eyes lowered all the time and says nothing, he looks first incredulous and then horrified: horrified and fearful, rather than indignant. And one of the things that Arranz says is this:
    “Look, León, I pass a lot of information on to the police and it never fails; basically, what I say goes. I’ve taken a while to get around to you but I know perfectly well what you got up to in the war, how you gave the nod to the militiamen on who to take for a ride. But even if that wasn’t so, in your case, I’ve no need to make anything much up, I just have to stretch the facts a little, to say that you consigned to the ditch half the people in our neighbourhood wouldn’t be that far from the truth, you’d have done the same to me if you could. More than ten years havepassed, but you’d still be hauled up in front of a firing squad if I told them what I know, and I’ve no reason to keep quiet about it. So it’s up to you, you can either have a bit of a rough time on my terms or you can stop having any kind of time at all, neither good nor bad nor average.”
    “And what are your terms exactly?”
    I see Dr Arranz gesture with his head in the direction of my silent mother – a gesture that makes of her a thing – whom he also knew during the war and from before, in that same neighbourhood that lost so many of its residents.
    “I want to screw her. Night after night, until I get tired of it.”
    Arranz got tired as everyone does of everything, given time. He got tired when I was still at an age when that essential word did not even figure in my vocabulary, nor did I even conceive of its meaning. My mother, on the other hand, was at the age when she was beginning to lose her bloom and to laugh only rarely, while my father began to prosper and to dress better, and to sign with his own name – which was not León – the articles and the reviews that he wrote and to lose the look of melancholy in his clouded eyes; and to go out at night with some good tickets while my mother stayed at home playing solitaire or listening to the radio, or, a little later, watching television, resigned.
    All those who have speculated on the afterlife or the continuing existence of consciousness beyond death – if that is what we are, consciousness – have not taken into account the danger or rather the horror of remembering everything, even what we did not know: knowing everything, everything that concerns us or that involved us either closely or from afar. I see with absolute clarity faces that I passed once in the street, a man I gave money to without even glancing at him, a woman I watched in the underground and whom I haven’t thought of since, the features of a postman who delivered some unimportant telegram, the figureof a