"What I'll miss most is your extraordinary etymological knowledge. It never ceased to amaze me. I can still remember my surprise when you explained that the word papirotazo came from papo, jowl, and signified a blow delivered to another's papada or double chin. Really astonishing." He paused for a moment with some satisfaction to observe my embarrassment. Then he tutted and added: "Etymology is such a fascinating subject, it's just a shame that the students - poor undiscerning creatures that they are - forget ninety-five per cent of the marvels they hear, and their bedazzlement at our brilliant revelations lasts only a matter of minutes, at most for the duration of the class. But I will remember it: pa-pa-da, pa-pi-ro-ta-zo." He flexed one of his legs slightly. "Who'd have thought it? Quite fantastic."
I think I probably blushed deeply and, as soon as I could, rushed to the library to consult the dictionary and discover that, in fact, the now famous papirotazo did indeed come from the papo on which in former times the ignominious blow was received. I felt more of an impostor than ever, but at the same time my conscience felt clearer, for it seemed to me that my crazy etymologies were no more nonsensical, no less likely than the real ones. Or, rather, the true etymology of papirotazo struck me as being almost as outlandish as my invented one. Anyway, as the Ripper had pointed out, such ornamental knowledge, whether false, genuine or merely half-true, enjoyed only a very short life span. When true knowledge proves irrelevant, one is free to invent.
I SPENT ENDLESS HOURS walking round the city of Oxford and consequently know almost every corner of it, as well as its outlying villages with their trisyllabic names: Headington, Kidlington, Wolvercote, Littlemore (and, further off, Abingdon and Cuddesdon). I also came to know almost all the faces that peopled it three years ago and two years ago, however difficult it subsequently proved ever to find them again. Most of the time I walked with no set purpose or goal, although I well remember that I spent about ten days during my second teaching term there (Hilary Term as it is called, comprising eight weeks between January and March) walking the streets with a goal that was neither very adult nor - while it lasted - one I cared to admit to myself. It was shortly before I met Clare and Edward Bayes and in fact my interruption or abandonment (yes, abandonment is the word) of that goal came about because of that meeting with Clare Bayes and her husband and not just because, around that time, one windy afternoon in Broad Street, the goal itself was simultaneously achieved and frustrated.
Some ten days before I was introduced to Clare and Edward Bayes and began to get to know them, I was coming back from London — on a Friday - on the last train, which then left Paddington around midnight. It was the train I caught most Fridays or Saturdays on my return from the capital where I had nowhere to sleep unless I stayed in a hotel, a luxury I could only permit myself from time to time. Usually I chose to return home and, if necessary, to travel down again the following morning if something or someone required my presence there – London is less than an hour away on the fast train. The midnight train from London to Oxford, however, was not fast, but any inconvenience this caused me was compensated for by the pleasure of spending another hour in the company of my friends Guillermo and Miriam, a married couple who lived in South Kensington and whose conversation and hospitality formed the final stage of those days spent wandering the streets of London. Catching that last train involved changing at Didcot, a town of which I have never seen more than its gloomy station, and that only after dusk. The second train, which was to transport us with incomprehensible slowness from there to Oxford, would not always be standing ready at its platform for the arrival of the six or seven passengers from London making the connection (British Rail obviously believed any travellers on that train to be inveterate nightbirds who would not in the least mind getting to their beds a little later still) and then I would be forced to wait at the silent, empty station, which, so far as one could make out in the darkness, appeared to be entirely cut off from the town it served and to be surrounded on all sides by countryside, as if it were some rural halt.
In England strangers rarely talk to each other, not even on trains or during long waits, and the night silence of Didcot station is one of the deepest I've ever known. The silence seems even deeper when broken by voices or by isolated, intermittent noises, the screech of a wagon, for example, that suddenly and enigmatically moves a few yards then stops, or the unintelligible cry of a porter whom the cold wakes from a short nap (rescuing him from a bad dream), or the abrupt, distant thud of crates that invisible hands quite gratuitously decide to shift despite the complete absence of any urgency, at a time when everything seems infinitely postponable, or the metallic crunch of a beer can being crushed up then thrown into a litter bin, or the modest flight of a single errant page from a newspaper, or my own footsteps vainly pacing to the edge of the platform and back just to pass the time. A few lamps, placed some yards apart (so as not to squander electricity) timidly light those as yet unswept platforms that resemble the aftermath of some rather pathetic street party. (The women who will sweep them in the morning lie dreaming now in darkest Didcot.) In the hesitant light of each lamp, you can just make out brief stretches of platform and railway lines, just as one lamp lights both my own face framed by the turned-up collar of my navy blue coat and a woman's shoes and ankles whose owner remains engulfed in shadow. All I can see is the shape of a seated figure in a raincoat and the glow of the cigarettes that she, like me, smokes during the wait, even longer than usual that night. The shoes were lightly tapping out a rhythm on the platform, as if the person wearing them could still hear in her head the music she'd perhaps spent the whole evening dancing to; they were the shoes of an adolescent or an ingenue dancer, low-heeled with a buckle and rounded toes. They were very English shoes and kept my eyes swivelled in their direction, making the interminable hour spent in Didcot station more bearable. The butts of our respective cigarettes consorted on the ground. Whilst I flicked mine - using a genuine papirotazo — towards the edge of the platform over which they occasionally failed to fall, she tossed hers in the same direction with an arm movement reminiscent of someone rather feebly throwing a ball. And when she made that movement, her hand entered the beam of light allowing, for a fraction of a second, just the glimpse of a bracelet. I got up from time to time, partly to peer out at the dark rails in the distance and partly in an attempt to see something more of the woman who sat — with her legs now crossed, now uncrossed — smoking and tapping out that unknown rhythm with her illuminated feet. I took two or three steps in her direction and then returned to my place, having managed to see nothing beyond the English shoes and her ankles, made perfect by the penumbra. At last she got up and walked slowly along the platform, just a couple of minutes before the slow, sluggish appearance of the delayed train and the announcement by a slurred, amplified voice (with such a marked Indian accent that a foreigner could only guess at what was being said) of the arrival of the train in Didcot and its subsequent stops: Banbury, Leamington, Warwick, Birmingham (or was it Swindon, Chippenham, Bath, Bristol? I can't be bothered to look at the map; my memory contains both series of destinations and perhaps one has now become confused with the other). She remained standing now, swinging her small bag while she waited. I opened the carriage door for her.
I've completely forgotten her face but not her colours (yellow, blue, pink, white, red), yet I know that during the whole of my youth she was the woman who made the greatest and most immediate impact on me, although I also know that, traditionally, in both literature and real life, such a remark can only be made of women whom young men never actually meet. I can't remember now how I got talking to her, nor what we talked about during the less than half-hour journey between Didcot and Oxford. Perhaps we didn't even have a proper conversation but just exchanged three or four casual remarks. On the other hand, I do remember that, although not young enough to be a student, she was still very young and therefore not particularly elegant, and that the collar of her raincoat was open just enough for me to see the pearl necklace (c
ultured or real I couldn't say) which, in the fashion of a few years back, the best-groomed English girls thought the thing to wear even though the rest of their outfit was informal or apparently casual (she herself was neat rather than elegant). The other thing I remember about that woman, with her bobbed hair and forgotten features, was that she looked as if she'd just stepped out of the 1930s. Perhaps to Will the porter all women looked like that on the days he found himself in that particular decade. Anyway, whatever it was we talked about, it was not personal enough for me to ascertain any concrete facts about her. Perhaps her clear eyes finally closed with tiredness and I didn't dare do anything to prevent it. Perhaps during that thirty-minute journey my desire to look at her was stronger than my curiosity or my capacity for conjecture. Or perhaps we spoke only of Didcot, of the dark, cold station we'd left behind and to which we would both have to return. Like me she got off at Oxford but, since I was unable to do any preparatory groundwork, I couldn't even offer to share my taxi with her.
For the next ten days, I walked all over Oxford with the aim or rather with the unconscious hope of meeting her again, which was not that improbable assuming she'd not just gone there on a visit but lived in Oxford. I spent even more time in the streets than usual and with every day that passed her face became more blurred, more confused with other faces, as tends to happen with the things one struggles to remember, with all those images memory shows no respect for (that is, before which memory does not remain passive). It's no wonder, then, that today I can recall none of her features - just an unfinished portrait, an outline drawing with the colours barely blocked in, not painted -despite my having with certainty seen her a second and, I think, a third and possibly even a fourth time. But the one definite sighting I had of her — ten days after that first encounter — occurred on a terribly windy day and was over before I knew it. Coming out of Blackwell's with less than enough time to get to one of my translation classes with the punctilious Dewar, I quickened my step and walked straight ahead into the teeth of the hurricane that had blown up whilst I'd been browsing in the bookshop. About twenty paces further on, outside Trinity, I passed two female figures also in a hurry and with their heads bowed against the wind. Only when I'd taken another four or five steps (and had my back to her) did I realise who it was and turn round. What surprised me most was that she and her friend, who had also walked on four or five steps, had also stopped and turned round. At that distance of eight or nine paces we looked at each other properly. She smiled and shouted, more in order to identify herself than to indicate her recognition of me: "On the train! At Didcot!" I hesitated for a moment as to whether I should approach or not and whilst I hesitated, her friend tugged at her sleeve and urged her to continue on her way. Her skirt swirled about in the wind, as did her short hair. I remember that particularly because during the brief moment in which she stood there on Broad Street and shouted: "On the train! At Didcot!" she had one hand to her hair, holding it off her forehead, and the other to her skirt, holding it down against the elements. "Yes, on the train! At Didcot!" I repeated to indicate that I recognised her too (the hem of my blue coat beating against my legs), but then her odious, tugging friend whose face I did not see was carrying her off, not towards Dewar and the Taylorian, but in the opposite direction. I had no other firm sighting of her that year or the next, after which I left Oxford for Madrid, although not immediately to settle down there, as I now realise I have. What I regret most is that on that second occasion, I didn't manage a glance at her English shoes or her ankles which would doubtless have seemed fragile in the wind. I was too intent on observing the wary flappings of her skirt.
THE SHOES CLARE BAYES wore were never English, always Italian, and I never once saw a low heel or buckle or a rounded toe on any of them. When she came to my house (which was not that often) or when we managed to end up together at her house (even less often) or we met in a hotel in London or Reading or even Brighton (though we only went to Brighton once), the first thing she would do was to ease her shoes off at the instep and then with a kick, one for each shoe, send them ricocheting against the walls, as if she were the owner of innumerable pairs and cared nothing for their ruination. I would immediately pick them up and put them where we couldn't see them: the sight of empty shoes always makes me imagine them on the feet of the person who has worn them or might wear them, and seeing that person by my side - with their shoes off - or not seeing the person at all upsets me terribly (that's why, whenever I look at the window of some old-fashioned shoeshop with its rows and rows of shoes, I automatically see it filled by a multitude of cramped, uncomfortable figures). Clare had the habit - apparently acquired during her childhood years spent in Delhi and Cairo - of going barefoot when indoors (fortunately in England almost everywhere is carpeted) and so my most vivid memory of her legs is not the memory shared perhaps by many others, that of strong, slightly muscular calves, as seen when poised above their high heels, but rather that of two slender legs, almost boyish in their movements, as seen when barefoot. She would lie on my bed or her bed or on a hotel bed and smoke and talk for hours, always with her skirt still on, but pulled up to reveal her thighs, the dark upper part of her tights or just her bare skin. She was not circumspect in her gestures and would frequently ladder her tights, often scorching them by briefly, unconsciously brushing against them with the cigarette she waved around with an abandon uncommon in England (and learned perhaps in the southern lands of her childhood), a gesture accompanied by the tinkling of the various bracelets adorning her forearms, bracelets she sometimes neglected to take off (it was little wonder that sometimes real sparks flew from them). Everything about her was expansive, excessive, excitable; she was one of those beings not made for time, for whom the very notion of time and its passing is a grievance, and one of those beings in need of a constant supply of fragments of eternity or, to put it another way, of a bottomless well of detail with which to fill time to the brim. More than once, for that very reason, because of that endless drawing out of whatever we had begun, we ran the risk of her husband, Edward Bayes, glimpsing with his own eyes the retreating back or the wake of the very thing he surely knew about and was continually trying to reject or perhaps forget. Consequently, I was always the one who had to interrupt Clare's interminable ramblings and comments, her chronic logorrhoea, her eternalising of the contents of each moment as she lay back on the bed, smoking, gesticulating, pontificating, crossing and uncrossing her legs, folding them beneath her, extolling or railing against her past and her present, jumping from one plan for her immediate future to the next, without ever actually bringing any of them to fruition. I was the one who had to set the alarm clock or keep an eye on the watch on the bedside table and decide it was time to part, or (in Oxford) keep one ear open for the city's obsessive bells chiming the hour, the half hour and the quarter hour, then inconsiderately pealing out again as evening fell; I was the one who had to hurry her along, look for the shoes I'd put away after her arrival, smooth her skirt and make sure it was on straight, remind her not to forget her umbrella or the brooch impaled in the carpet or the ring left by the washbasin or the bag containing the strange collection of purchases she always brought with her wherever we met, even if it was on a Sunday (and, if we were at her house, I was the one who had to empty the ashtray, help her change the sheets, open the window and rinse my glass). Clare always carried all manner of things with her and would spread them out wherever she arrived as if she planned to spend the rest of her life there, even on occasions when we had less than an hour to spend together between our respective classes. (I still have one pair of earrings that I never did manage to expel from my house.) Fortunately, by upbringing, she was incapable of going out into the street without her makeup on, and her hair was a mane of artificially tangled curls on which my caresses or any prolonged, intense contact with a pillow made little impact. Thus, whilst I did not have to comb her hair before we said goodbye, I did have to check that her face bore no sign of the private eternity she'd erected an
d maintained during the time spent in my company, that her face was not flushed, her eyes not too soft, that all signs of joy were obliterated (in Oxford the distances are so short they barely give one time to change colour). To achieve all this I had simply and briefly to rehearse with her the intellectual exercise that underpins all adultery, that is, help her in the invention of seamless stories for the benefit of Edward Bayes and to ensure she didn't contradict herself when telling them, although she herself considered the exercise unnecessary and bothersome (her expression darkened whenever we said goodbye because of my insistence on it). She was careless and frivolous and smiling and forgetful and, had I been Edward Bayes, or so I thought then, it would not have taken much scheming or effort on my part to ascertain her every thought, her every move. But I wasn't Edward Bayes and perhaps if I had been, Clare's activities and intentions would have seemed utterly impenetrable to me.
Perhaps I wouldn't have wanted to know about them, or would have been content simply to imagine them. At any rate, I was the one who, at the closing of each passionate parenthesis, had to put everything in order and almost propel her out of my pyramid house (with each floor narrower than the last), drag her from the hotel we were staying at or else free myself from her momentary, last-minute tendency to cling (grief for the ending of time) and, on the rare occasions I dared set foot in her house in Edward Bayes' absence, neutralise her rasher impulses. (Adultery is hard work.)