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

child I saw on a beach, when I too was a child. I relive the long minutes I spent waiting at airports or those spent queuing outside a museum or watching the waves on a distant beach, or packing my bags and later unpacking them, all the most tedious moments, those that are of no account and which we usually refer to as dead time. I see myself in cities I visited a long time ago, just passing through, with a few free hours to stroll around them and then wipe them from my memory: I see myself in Hamburg and in Manchester, in Basle and in Austin, places I would never have gone to if my work hadn’t taken me there. I see myself too in Venice, some time ago, on honeymoon with my wife Luisa, with whom I spent those last few years of peace and contentment, I see myself in the most recent part of my life, even though it is now remote. I’m coming back from a trip and she’s waiting for me at the airport, not once, all the time we were married, did she fail to come and meet me, even if I’d only been away for a couple of days, despite the awful traffic and despite all the activities we can so easily do without and which are precisely those that we find most pressing. I’d be so tired that I’d only have the strength to change television channels, the programmes are the same everywhere now anyway, while she prepared me a light supper and kept me company, looking bored but patient, knowing that after that initial torpor and the imminent night’s rest, I would be fully recovered and that the following day, I would be my usual self, an energetic, jokey person who spoke in a rather low voice, in order to underline the irony that all women love, laughter runs in their veins and, if it’s a funny joke, they can’t help but laugh, even if they detest the person making the joke. And the following afternoon, once I’d recovered, I used to go and see María, my lover, who used to laugh even more because my jokes were still new to her.
    I was always so careful not to give myself away, not to woundand to be kind, I only ever met María at her apartment so that no one would see me out with her anywhere and ask questions later on, or be cruel and tell tales, or simply wait to be introduced. Her apartment was nearby and I spent many afternoons there, though not every afternoon, on the way back to my own apartment, that meant a delay of only half an hour or three quarters of an hour, sometimes a little more, sometimes I would amuse myself looking out of her window, the window of a lover is always more interesting than our own will ever be. I never made a mistake, because mistakes in these matters reveal a sort of lack of consideration, or worse, they are acts of real cruelty. I met María once when I was out with Luisa, in a packed cinema at a première, and my lover took advantage of the crowd to come over to us and to hold my hand for a moment, as she passed by without looking at me, she brushed her familiar thigh against mine and took hold of my hand and stroked it. Luisa could not possibly have seen this or noticed or even suspected the existence of that tenuous, ephemeral, clandestine contact, but even so, I decided not to see María for a couple of weeks, after which time and after my refusing to answer the phone in my office, she called me one afternoon at home, luckily, my wife was out.
    “What’s wrong?” she said.
    “You must never phone me here, you know that.”
    “I wouldn’t phone you there if you’d pick up the phone in your office. I’ve been waiting a whole fortnight,” she said.
    And then, making an effort to recover the anger I had felt a fortnight before, I said:
    “And I’ll never pick up the phone to you again if you ever touch me when Luisa is there. Don’t even think of it.”
    She fell silent.
    You forget almost everything in life and remember everything in death, or in this cruel state which is what being a ghost is.But in life I forgot and so I started seeing her again now and then, thanks to that