Who has not had their suspicions? and there are only two things you can do with suspicion, both equally useless, you can either ask or remain silent. If you ask and force the person to respond, you might perhaps be rewarded with an “It wasn’t me”, but you’ll have to listen to what isn’t said, to the tone, to the shifty look in the eyes, the tremor in the voice, the possibly feigned expression of surprise and indignation; and you’ll never be able to ask the question again. If you remain silent, that question will remain forever virgin and available, although on occasions time itself renders such questions incongruous, almost ineffable, extemporary, as if in the end everything reaches its expiry date or merely makes us smile once it’s been relegated to time past, the whole of the past appears venial and ingenuous. If you remain silent you have to dispel the suspicion and cancel the question, or rather feed the first and prepare the second with extreme care, but what you can’t do is confirm your suspicions, nobody knows anything about an event at which they weren’t present, even confessions can’t be believed; at school people say “It was me” when it wasn’t, people will lie as surely as they will die, incredible though it may seem, you can never know anything ever. Or at least that’s what I believe. That’s why sometimes it’s better not to know even the beginning of something nor to hear the voices telling the story, the voices against which one is so defenceless, those narrative voices that we all know and which go back to the remote or the recent past and uncover secrets that are no longer important but nevertheless influence one’s life or one’s future years, our knowledge of the world and of people; you can trust no one once you’ve heard them, anything is possible, the people we know are as capable as we are of the worst horrors and the greatest atrocities. And everyone is absorbed in this ceaseless talking and ceaseless concealment, only what is unsaid remains untold or unconcealed. But what remains silent becomes a secret and, sometimes, the day arrives when that secret will be told.
I said nothing, I didn’t ask and I still haven’t asked, the more time passes the more unlikely and difficult it will become for me to do so. You let one day go by without saying anything, and then two days and then a week, and the months pile up without your even noticing, and any manifestation of the suspicion is deferred if the latter hasn’t grown meanwhile, perhaps you’re just waiting for that too to become part of the past, to become something venial or ingenuous, something that will perhaps make us smile. For some days afterwards, before going to bed, I used to look out of my study window down at the corner below; but Custardoy wasn’t there on any subsequent night and the next time I saw him was upstairs in my own apartment, just for a moment. My father had arrived around half past eight to have a drink with Luisa and myself before going to some supper or other to which Custardoy had invited him, and that’s why Custardoy the Younger came to pick him up around ten o’clock. He sat down for a few moments, had a quick beer, and I didn’t notice anything, no new familiarity, however minimal, between Custardoy and Luisa; apart from through my father, they’d met each other through him during my absence and my father had always been present on those few occasions, that was all, or so it seemed to me. There was much more familiarity between Ranz and Luisa, they’d often met each other alone, my father had accompanied her on shopping expeditions to buy things for our new home, he’d taken her out to lunch and supper, he’d given her advice (he was a man of taste, an art expert), they clearly liked each other, amused each other. My father talked about Cuba during that visit, but there was nothing unusual in that, indeed, it was a country about which he often spoke, he’d had a lot of contact with it, from his marriage to the two daughters of a Cuban mother to a few unusual transactions which I already knew about. He’d gone there in the December of 1958, just weeks before the fall of Batista: foreseeing what was about to happen (as did the land-owning classes), he’d acquired a lot of jewellery and valuable pictures – at bargain prices – from families who were preparing to flee. Some (a few) he’d kept, others had been sold to Baltimore, Boston or Malibu, or had been auctioned in Europe (the jewels had perhaps been removed from their settings by jewellers in Madrid and some given away as presents). It was something he was proud of and his one regret was that he hadn’t had such foresight again when it came to revolutions and their subsequent crop of wealthy exiles. “When rich people leave the field of battle, they don’t want to leave anything behind for their enemies,” he used to say, that mocking smile playing on his feminine lips. “They’d rather burn or destroy their possessions than leave anything in the hands of their enemies, but the rich know that selling is always a better option.” If he’d gone to Cuba then, you’d imagine that he had contacts and even friends there and that he’d been there before, but his visits to that continent were all jumbled up, the different visits became confused when he talked about them (he himself confused them) – he’d made so many trips there to act as a valuer for one of his respectable North American museums or to one of his fraudulent South American banks – and of all the possible trips he’d made to Cuba, the only one that remained clear to me was the one he made just before the revolution. (On the other hand, you do tend to tell your children things in a disorderly fashion, little by little and not in any particular sequence, according to how old or how interested they are, and for children the past life of their progenitors is, at best, chaotic.) Whatever the truth of the matter, he would have lost touch with any friends in Cuba after 1959 and the much-vaunted end to all privilege, although, oddly enough, I can’t remember him ever having had any dealings with Cuban exiles in Spain. Or perhaps he just hadn’t brought them home with him and so I would never have been introduced to them. He hadn’t been back since and so when Ranz spoke of Cuba now, he didn’t do so as a person in the know.
But on that occasion the way he spoke was out of the ordinary, different, as if Luisa’s presence had already acquired such weight that the tone he used and the solicitude he doubtless displayed when they were alone together prevailed over the usual, more ironic tone, which he’d always used with me both in childhood and in adulthood. And when Luisa left the room for a moment to answer the phone, my father’s way of commenting and talking changed or, rather, was interrupted. As if realizing for the first time that I was there, he began asking me questions about New York, questions he’d asked me upon my return (we’d had lunch together at La Ancha three days after I got back), questions he knew the answers to and was no longer interested in. I was there in front of him, but it was Luisa he was talking to, and the moment she returned, his remarks regained that unusual liveliness, although Ranz has always been a very lively person. Maybe Luisa’s laughter was somehow opportune, maybe she laughed in all the right places (that is, when he intended her to), maybe she listened to him the way he wanted to be listened to or made appropriate comments and asked suitable questions, or maybe she was someone to whom he wanted to tell everything, someone new to whom he could tell his story in sequence and in the proper order, because she was interested from the outset and there was no need to wait for her to grow up. My father told us several anecdotes I’d never heard before, like the one about the Venetian forger of Romanesque virgins carved in ivory which, once he’d added the final skilful touches, he would place in his wife’s capacious bra; the (abundant) secretions from her breasts and the (pungent) sweat from her armpits lent the statuettes a perfect patina. Or the one about the director of a bank in Buenos Aires, who was very keen on art and who refused to believe Ranz was telling the truth and bought a work by Custardoy the Elder from him, a work Ranz had taken there on the orders of a miserly but immensely rich family who’d wanted a good copy of a much-admired Ingres; before Ranz delivered it, the director of the bank saw it in its unframed state in his hotel room (the Plaza in Buenos Aires), he was so taken with it that he wouldn’t even hear of its being a copy; my father explained its origin and its intended owners time and again, he also explained that the original was in Montauban, but the banker was convinced that he was trying to deceive him and that he had, rathe
r disloyally, acquired the masterpiece for other clients and that the painting in Montauban was false. “In that case,” my father had said, still unable to convince him, “if you buy it from me as authentic then you’ll have to pay me the authentic price.” Those words, intended to dissuade, were proof to the banker that he was right. “It was the most money Custardoy ever earned from a single painting,” said my father. “It was a shame for us that there weren’t more obsessive directors of banks and museums like him. It was a shame that, in general, people always trusted me and that we therefore couldn’t use it as a method.” And he added, delighted, laughing along with Luisa: “I never heard from him again, I felt it was better that way. I just hope no one ever accused him of misappropriation of funds.” My father was enjoying himself, as was Luisa, although not as much as he was, the thought occurred to me that she’d be able to get him to tell her anything she wanted and that thought didn’t occur to me by chance, I was thinking too about what she wanted to find out from him and what I, or so I believe, did not, which is not to say that I’d stopped thinking about it, that is to say, that what might be termed a suspicion had been dispelled, I shouldn’t think you could live with several at the same time, which is why you sometimes dismiss a few of them – the most improbable or perhaps the most probable ones; those which haven’t yet been relegated to the past, those on which we might still be obliged to act and which might yet make us afraid and cause us trouble and might change the concrete future – and they feed other suspicions, those which, were the facts to be confirmed, would seem irremediable, and would change only the past and the abstract future. I think I dismissed any suspicions I had about Luisa, but had to feed some as yet unformulated ones about my father, or else it was Luisa who, that same evening, just before Custardoy rang the doorbell, took it upon herself to remind me of them by mentioning them out loud, for in the midst of all the smiles and laughter and the anecdotes that were new to me, she said to Ranz in an admiring tone, addressing him formally as “Usted” as she’s always preferred to do:
“It doesn’t surprise me in the least that you’ve been married so often, simply because you’re such an inexhaustible source of barely credible stories and, therefore, an inexhaustible source of entertainment.” And she added at once, as if to give him the chance to reply to the second part of her statement and not, if he preferred, to make any reference at all to the first part, to what she’d said up until then (it was a sign of respect). “A lot of men think that women just need to feel loved and flattered, even spoilt, when what we want most is to be entertained, that is, we want you to stop us thinking about ourselves too much. It’s one of the reasons we tend to want children. But I’m sure you know that, why else would they have loved you so much?”
I didn’t assume she was referring to me, on the contrary. I told Luisa a lot of barely credible stories, although up until then I’d said nothing to her about “Bill” and Berta, which she would have found most entertaining; but that story was mine as well, which was perhaps why I didn’t say anything. I’d said nothing about Guillermo and Miriam either until Luisa mentioned it and I realized that the story belonged to her too, and the day we met, in interpreting the words of the two leaders, I’d omitted or changed some of the things they said (in particular the things said by the Spanish leader) and which had seemed to me misguided or unsuitable or reprehensible. On that occasion, however, my censorship hadn’t affected Luisa, who understood as much if not more than I did in both languages; she was the “net”. Keeping silent and speaking are ways of intervening in the future. It seemed to me that the virtue Luisa was attributing to my father was shared by Custardoy the Younger: when he was in the right mood, he’d amuse my father by telling him incredible stories, during my childhood and adolescence he’d told me innumerable stories, more recently one about Ranz and my Aunt Teresa and another woman to whom I’m not related, a story, in a way, about myself (perhaps that story was mine too; perhaps Luisa would like to hear Custardoy the Younger tell it).
Ranz’s laughter didn’t freeze on his lips, he merely laughed for rather longer than was necessary or natural, as if to gain time and to decide which part of Luisa’s words he would reply to and how (or whether he would reply to it all or to none of it). He laughed when there was no longer any reason to, even the untranslatable and the uncensorable have their limits, indeed perhaps their meaning lies somewhere between those limits.
“They didn’t love me that much,” he said at last, in a very different tone to his usual one, as if he were still uncertain. If it had been my words he was replying to, he wouldn’t have hesitated or prolonged his laughter for a second (both things were a sign of respect, respect for Luisa). “When they did, I didn’t deserve it,” he added and the phrase wasn’t said in the least coquettishly: I knew him too well not to be able to tell the difference.
Luisa was brave enough to insist, a little less respectfully (or perhaps it was her way of warning me that her investigation was now underway and that nothing would stop it now, whatever my thoughts on the subject: if I didn’t take charge, the story could become hers, as Ranz had already begun to be. Perhaps it was another sign of respect, respect for me, to have waited for me to be present in order to begin her enquiries, as if she were warning me: “From now on I’ll take no notice of your views on this particular subject”).
“But according to what I’ve heard, apart from the woman who would have been my mother-in-law, you were married to her sister too. That can’t be easy, to be loved by two sisters. And how many other women loved you before that I wonder.”
Luisa’s tone was light, jokey and mocking, the tone you often use with old people when you want to cheer them up and raise their spirits, a teasing, affectionate tone, which Ranz himself used, with others and about himself, perhaps in order to raise his own spirits. However, for a moment the tone of his reply wasn’t like that. He shot me a fervent glance, as if to confirm that the information received by Luisa had come from me and must therefore be the same information. There was nothing strange about that, it was only natural: on the shared pillow you tell everything about everyone else. But I didn’t react. Then he said:
“Don’t you believe it, little sisters often take a fancy to whatever their older sister has. I’m not saying that was how it was in my case, but there’s nothing very unusual about it, on the contrary.”
“And before?” Luisa asked again, and it was clear that she wasn’t expecting him to tell her anything just then, at least nothing substantial, Ranz was about to go out to supper, it was more as if she were preparing the ground and forewarning him of something that would take place in the concrete or indeed the immediate future. I was surprised as much by her own insistence as by my father’s reaction. I could remember the day when he almost threw me out of a restaurant for asking him about the past (“I want to eat in peace and today, not on a day that took place forty years ago”), a less distant past than the one Luisa was asking him about. Ranz looked at me again, as if doubting that I was the source of that information, not even sure that there was one. Again I gave no sign. He recovered his usual tone of voice and replied, making an exaggerated gesture with the hand holding his cigarette:
“Before? ‘Before’ happened so very long ago, I can’t even remember it.”
That was when the doorbell rang and while Luisa was getting up to go and answer it, while she was walking to the door to greet Custardoy the Younger (“It’ll be Custardoy,” my father said while she walked down the corridor, out of sight), she still had the time or presence of mind to say: “Well, think back, because I’ll ask you about it again some other day and then you can tell me, one day when we’re on our own.”
Custardoy simply drank his beer and seemed unusually laconic during the short time he was in our apartment, like me perhaps or perhaps like someone in love. His metal-tipped shoes made hardly any noise, doubtless like the shoes “Bill” wore, whose feminine sound I’d heard on the marble floor at the post office but not on the asphalt outside
in Berta’s street when he came out and got into his taxi, as if his shoes had also agreed to keep his secrets.
How many things are left unsaid in the course of a lifetime or a story, sometimes without our meaning or choosing to do so? I’d kept silent not only about all the things I’ve mentioned above, but about the feelings of unease and the presentiments of disaster that have afflicted me ever since I got married, over a year ago. They’re not so strong now and perhaps, one day, they’ll disappear altogether, for a time. I hadn’t mentioned those feelings to Luisa, to Berta or to my father, and certainly not at work or, needless to say, to Custardoy. People in love often choose to keep silent, even people who are infatuated. The people who keep silent are those who’ve found something that they might lose, not those who’ve lost something or are about to get it. Berta had talked endlessly about “Bill”, for example, and about “Jack” and “Nick”, whilst they had no physical reality, no face, and while she still hadn’t got them (we talk about promises, not about the present but about the future, both concrete and abstract; also about losses, as long as they’re not too recent). But then she fell silent. After my four long hours of wandering about, of shopping and anxiety and waiting, I found her in her dressing gown, still up and not in her room. She was alone again, but I noticed that she was still disguising her limp, that is, she hadn’t yet settled back into her customary solitude, nor into the trust she felt towards me, not so easily, not so soon. I didn’t switch on the light that she’d switched off only minutes before as a signal to me to say “Come up” because it wasn’t necessary: she was lying on the sofa in front of the television, the light from which was bright enough, she was replaying “Bill’s” brief video, now that she could complete the image with her newborn memory of him, now that she at last knew what went with the triangle of pale blue bathrobe, above and below. When I came into the room without switching on the light, the voice that resembled that of a preacher or a crooner, that saw-like voice, was saying again in English from the screen: “You women care about faces. Eyes. That’s what you say. Men care about the face and the body. Or the body and the face. That’s how it is.” Berta stopped the video when she saw me. She got up and kissed me. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you’ve had to wait ages.” “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I bought some milk, we’d run out, I’ll put it straight in the fridge.” I went to the fridge and took the milk out of the bag as well as all the other things I’d bought, the Japanese book, the newspaper, the soundtrack from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, I always do that, just as, when I get back from a trip, the first thing I do is unpack my suitcase and put everything away in its proper place and the suitcase away in its cupboard, in order to forget that I’ve been away, to forget everything about the trip, as quickly as possible, so that peace appears to be restored. I threw the bag in the rubbish bin, in order to forget about my purchases and my wanderings. I went back into the living room with my booty in my hand, Berta wasn’t there, but the television was still on, a programme full of canned laughter that had replaced the video once it had finished. I heard her moving about in her bedroom, she’d be airing it, making the bed or changing the sheets, given my prompt return, she wouldn’t have had time to do so. But that wasn’t what she was doing, not changing the sheets anyway, because when she came out she wasn’t carrying a pile of bed-linen in her arms, instead she had her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown, a salmon-pink silk dressing gown, with nothing on underneath I think, perhaps she preferred to sleep with the smell of “Bill” still on the sheets; when you want to hold on to certain smells they always seem to evaporate too quickly. She no longer smelled of Trussardi, when she walked past me, she smelled of Guerlain, I saw the bottle (the opened box) on the table where we usually left the mail and on which I had left my newspaper, my book and my record: the bottle whose purchase I had witnessed. It was the only physical trace of “Bill” in the apartment. “How did it go?” I asked, I couldn’t not ask, everything was more or less in order, although there are always things that need tidying up. “Fine. How about you? What have you been doing all this time? You must be exhausted, you poor thing.” I gave her a quick rundown of my wanderings, but said nothing of my fears, I showed her my purchases, but didn’t talk to her about my long wait. I didn’t know whether I should ask her any more questions, she seemed to have acquired a modesty she hadn’t had in the previous weeks or that same evening when she’d asked if I had any condoms (I’d seen them amongst the rubbish, two of them, when I threw away the plastic bag, which had covered them up, they’d no longer be visible on my next visit, the speed with which forgetting takes place, sometimes you don’t have to do anything to speed it up, the new covers the old in exactly the same way as happens in a rubbish bin, each new minute not only substitutes those that have passed, it negates them). My supper with her friends, with Julia, seemed so long ago, and Berta seemed to have forgotten all about it, she didn’t even ask me about them and I didn’t feel inclined to mention them in the brief chat that we could and usually did have before going to bed, however late it was. It was very late and even though it was a Saturday, it was time we went to bed, to sleep, to forget everything in dreams, or, in Berta’s case, to cling on to her memory. But I wanted to know at least something, this was both my story and not my story (I had the right to know and I risked nothing). I’d spent hours wandering about beneath the invisible sky above the avenues and the reddish sky above the streets, on three occasions I’d waited on the marble floor of Kenmore Station, I’d followed his metallic footsteps as far as the Plaza, I’d let him see me, I’d made a video, I did perhaps deserve to know something without having to wait for time to pass. “Come on then, tell me about it,” I said. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. She was barefoot and yet she wasn’t limping, her eyes looked dreamy or perhaps just sleepy. She seemed calm, like someone engaged in an unhurried meditation and upon whom that meditation weighs but lightly. Her smile was hesitant, foolish, the smile of someone remembering things in a vague, indulgent way. “But he is Spanish, isn’t he?” I said. “Yes, he is Spanish,” she replied, “we knew that.” “What’s his name? What does he do?” “His name’s Bill, which suits him, and he hasn’t told me what he does. We didn’t talk about that.” “Tell me a bit more about him, what he’s like? Did you like him? Were you disappointed? Were you afraid? He was horrible in that video,” and I indicated the programme with the canned laughter, which I could still hear even with the sound down. “I’m not sure yet,” Berta replied, “that will depend on what happens next.” “Have you arranged to see each other again?” “Yes, I suppose so. We know each other’s mailbox numbers and he can call me, I’ve given him my phone number.” Berta was being laconic, like a person in love who doesn’t want to share, who hides things, stores them away; she couldn’t be in love, it was ridiculous, perhaps she was infatuated or perhaps she didn’t want to talk about it just then, when he’d just left after more than four hours in his company, or rather, four plus four, since they’d arranged to meet at half past eight. Perhaps she wanted to think about it on her own, about what had happened, to reinforce the memory which, now that Bill had left, would already have begun the slow process of disappearing, and which must have been why she’d put on the video which I had interrupted. “Tomorrow perhaps,” I thought, “perhaps she’ll feel more like talking about it tomorrow, the truth is that it’s not that important to me, in fact my mission is over, I had to take seriously what she took seriously, to help her reach the person she wanted to reach and perhaps to win him. That’s all. Besides, my stay here’s almost over, I’ll be gone in a week and I may not be back for another year, and that will be when she tells me everything as if it were something that belonged to the past, something venial and ingenuous that we’ll laugh about and which we’ll experience rather as if we weren’t the people who’d participated in it or made it happen, something that can perhaps be told in its entirety, from beginning to end, not like now, when it’s still happening, and we don’t know
how it will turn out.” But I knew I couldn’t go to bed without asking her two things, at least two. “Did he have condoms with him?” I asked. In the shadows it seemed to me that Berta blushed, she was looking at me with a flushed face she definitely hadn’t worn when she asked me for them, nor – or, at least, so I believe, for I only saw her through the camera lens – when I was filming her. “I don’t know,” she said, “I didn’t give him the chance to offer, I got mine out first, the ones you gave me. Thanks, by the way.” And that “Thanks” was spoken with a distinct blush. “And what about Miriam? Did you get a chance to ask him about her?” Berta was no longer interested in that, she’d forgotten all about it, she made a face as if to say: “Why bring that up after all this time?” The name “Miriam” must have got lost at some point near the beginning of their date and had thrown up no new information. “Yes, I did,” she said, “I mentioned the name, as being that of a friend in Spain. But it didn’t seem to mean anything to him, so I didn’t insist. You did say that I shouldn’t make a big thing of it.” Now she didn’t ask me what that was all about or what I suspected or knew (she didn’t say to me “Come on, out with it” or “Explain yourself” or “Tell me everything”), too much time had passed, erasing my imaginings, my idea. She was lying down on the sofa again, she must be tired after that long night of getting to know him and of disguising her lameness. I looked at her long-toed feet on the sofa, they were pretty feet, very clean, for “Bill’s” benefit – they hadn’t stood on the asphalt – I felt like touching them. I’d touched them before, a long time ago (had I reminded her of that, she would have pulled that face that meant: “Why bring that up after all this time?”), they were still the same feet, even after the accident, how many steps must they have taken, how often would they have been touched in the past fifteen years? Perhaps, only a short time before, “Bill” had touched them, perhaps while they were talking, having first driven me out into the street, but what had they talked about, they hadn’t discussed his visible arena, what then, maybe they’d talked about me, maybe Berta had told him my whole story just to talk about something, on the pillow we betray and denigrate others, we reveal their greatest secrets and offer the only opinion that flatters the listener, which is the disparagement of everyone else: everything outside that territory becomes unnecessary and secondary if not despicable, it’s there that one so often abjures friendships, past as well as present loves, as Luisa would have denied and decried me had she shared a pillow with Custardoy, I was far away in another country on the other side of the ocean, my memory vague, my head absent, leaving no trace on the pillow for eight weeks, she would have got used to sleeping across the bed, there was no one there for some time, and it’s easy to deny the importance of someone who isn’t there, with a remark, just as it was easy for Guillermo to speak with such indifference of his sick wife on another continent, when he thought no one else was listening, in a hotel room in Havana beneath the mellow moon and with the balcony doors ajar, to speak of killing her or at least of letting her die: “I’m letting her die,” he’d said. “I’m doing nothing to help her. I’m pushing her towards death.” And later on: “I take away from her the little will to live that she has. Don’t you think that’s enough?” But Miriam didn’t think it was enough, she’d spent too long waiting, and waiting is the one thing guaranteed to bring on despair and wild talk, it corrodes and makes one say things like: “I’ll get you” or “You’re mine” or “I’ll see you in hell” or “I kill you”. It’s like a vast piece of cloth with no stitching, no ornament, no folds, like an invisible, reddish sky with no angles to limit it, an undifferentiated, immobile whole in which one cannot see the weave and there is only repetition, but not the repetition that occurs after some time has passed, which is not only tolerable but pleasant, not only tolerable but necessary (you can’t accept that certain things are not going to be repeated), but a continuous, uninterrupted repetition, an unending whistle or a constant levelling out of what is happening. Nothing is ever enough when you’re waiting, something needs to be ripped asunder with a sharpened blade or burned with a lighted cigarette or a flame, nothing is ever enough after the disparagement and the abjuration and the disdain, afterwards you can only allow yourself the next inevitable step, the suppression, cancellation or death of the person expelled from the territory delineated by the pillow. The mellow moon, the balcony doors ajar, the bra cutting into the flesh, the damp towel, the concealed tears in the bathroom, the hair or the lines across the forehead, the sleeping woman and the woman about to go to sleep, the soft singing of someone still hoping: “You must kill her,” Miriam had said. And Guillermo had replied, forswearing his sick wife on the other side of the ocean and like a weary mother who’ll say the first thing that comes into her head, it’s easy to condemn someone verbally, nothing happens, everyone knows that you’re not responsible for what you say, even though at times the law punishes people for it, the tongue in the ear, the tongue doesn’t kill, it commits no act, it can’t: “All right, all right, I will, but for the moment just keep doing that with your hand.” And later on, she’d insisted, in a neutral, but not a faint tone: “If you don’t kill her, I kill myself. Then you get one woman’s death on your hands, either her or me.”