I was feeling hopelessly lost, I had to find some way to get out of there, I asked for permission to go to the men’s room and they let me but the other bodyguard came along, the one with the pistol in his armpit, a slow-moving, heavyset guy who was always at my side, in the bars and also in the cars during the trips from one bar to the next. They had dragged me with them that whole night like a package they were guarding, without paying much attention to me, just part of the entourage, amusing themselves from time to time by scaring me, though they hadn’t even made me their primary source of entertainment, they were a somewhat sluggish and not very imaginative group, the same guys must have been getting together almost every night for a long while and they were sick of it. I was a novelty, but the routine did not fail to swallow me up, as it must have swallowed up everything.
And in the fourth place, or was it the fifth (I started having trouble keeping track), they finally got tired of the whole thing and gave up on the evening.
We were a few kilometers outside the city, I didn’t know if it was south or north, east or west. It was a place along a highway, a place of last resort, surrounded by open country, you recognize these places in any part of the world, people go only to drag out the night a little longer, halfheartedly and in seclusion. There were very few people there and even fewer a couple of minutes later, in fact we were on our own, two very tired girls, Pacheco, the heavyset bodyguard, Ricardo and Julio, the manager of the place and a waiter who was serving us, all the waiters seemed to be friends or even employees, maybe Ricardo was the owner of this place, too, or maybe his fat partner was. Ricardo had drunk a lot—who hadn’t—and was dozing off a little, lolling onto the low-cut blouse of one of the women. They were criminals of little standing, whitewashed gangsters, their crimes were not organized.
“Why don’t you get it over with now and we’ll all go to sleep, ¿eh Julito?” Ricardo said with a yawn.
Get what over with, I thought, nothing had started. Maybe the fat one was going to give me some sort of punishment, or maybe they were going to leave me there. But they hadn’t dragged me along with them the whole night for nothing. Or maybe the fat one was going to put me to death, the pessimistic thought always coexists with the optimistic, the daring idea with the fearful, and vice-versa, nothing goes alone and unmixed.
Fat Julio’s white jacket was stained with sweat, he was sweating so profusely that it had soaked through his shirt and even his jacket, the combed-back hair looked grayer and had rebelled over the course of that eternal night, the long ends at the back of his neck had started to curl and were almost in little ringlets. His white skin was pale now, there was intense tedium in his eyes and there was bad nature, too. All at once he stood up in all his great height and said, “Está bien, as you wish.” He put a hand on my shoulder (his was more like a fish, wet and stinking, it almost squelched when it made contact) and added, looking at me, “Anda, muchacho, come with me a while.” And he pointed to a back door with a small window through which vegetation or foliage was visible, it seemed to open onto a little garden or an orchard.
“Where? Where do you want us to go?” I exclaimed in alarm, and my fear was obvious, I couldn’t help it, I was suffering from nervous exhaustion, that was what they called that condition then, un agotamiento nervioso.
The fat man grabbed my arm and jerked me violently to my feet. He twisted it around and immobilized it behind my back. He was strong, but it cost him some effort to manage it, you can always tell.
“Out in back there, to have a little chat, you and I, about mariconas and other things before we all go to bed. You need to sleep, too; it has been a very long day while life, on the other hand, is short.”
The start of that day was lost in remote time. That we had shot some scenes in Acapulco that morning, with Paul Lukas and Ursula Andress, seemed impossible. He had no idea how far away that was.
The others didn’t move, not even to watch, it was the fat man’s private business and there are no witnesses to these things. With his left hand he pushed me toward the back door, with the right he kept up the pressure on my arm, a swinging door that kept swinging, we came out into the open air, a storm was on the way that night and a hot wind had already sprung up and was shaking the bushes and, further back, the trees in a grove or thicket, or so it seemed to me when I stepped out onto the grass and felt the wind for an instant against my face, and then dry grass, without missing a beat the fat man had put me on the ground with a fist to the side, he wasn’t going to waste any time fooling around. Then I felt his enormous weight straddling my back and then something around my neck, the belt or the handkerchief, it had to be the green handkerchief that had been forced to interrupt its work a few hours before and now he was knotting it around my throat this time, the package all tied up at last. It wasn’t only his hand, his whole fat body stank of fish and the sweat was pouring off him, and now there was nothing, no music or rumba or trumpet, only the sound of the wind rising or maybe rushing away from the storm, and the squeaking hinge of the door we had come through, out onto the stage of my unforeseen death in a back yard on the outskirts of Mexico City, how could it be true, you wander into some dive and you don’t imagine that here begins the end and that everything finishes obscurely and ridiculously under the pressure of a crumpled, greasy, filthy handkerchief that’s been used a thousand times to mop the forehead, neck and temples of the person who is killing you, killing me, he is killing me, no one could have foreseen it this morning and everything ends in a second, one, two and three and four, no one intervenes and no one is even watching to see how I die this certain death that is befalling me, a fat man is killing me and I don’t know who he is, only that his name is Julio and that he’s Mexican and without knowing it he has been waiting twenty-two years for me, my life is short and is ending against the dry grass of a back yard on the outskirts of Mexico City, how can it be true, it can’t be, and it isn’t because all at once I saw myself with the handkerchief in my hand—the silk floating—and I ripped it in rage, and I had thrown off the fat man with the strength of my dark back and my desperate elbows that dug into his thighs as hard as they could, perhaps the fat man took too long tying up my throat and his strength deserted him, just as he took too long tying up McGraw in order to send him to hell, you need more than the first impulse to strangle someone, it has to be kept up for many more seconds, five and six and seven and eight and even more, still more, because each of those seconds is counted, and counts, and here I am still, and I’m breathing, one, two and three and four, and now I’m the one who grabs a pick and runs with it raised over my head to dig it into the chest of the fat man who has fallen and can’t get up quickly enough, as if he were a beetle, the dark sweat stains tell me where to strike with the pick, there is flesh there and life there and I must finish both of them off. And I dig the pick in, one and two and three times, it makes a kind of squelch, kill him, I kill him, I am killing him, how can it be true, it is happening and it is irreversible and I see him, this fat man got up this morning and didn’t even know who I was, he got up this morning and never imagined that he would never do it again because a pick is killing him that had been waiting, thrown down in a backyard, for a thousand years, a pick to split open the grassy soil and dig an improvised grave, a pick that may never have tasted blood before, the blood that still smells more like fish and is still wet and welling out and staining the wind that is rushing away from the storm.
The exhaustion ends then, as well, there’s no longer fatigue or haze and perhaps not even consciousness, or there is but without mastery or control or order, and as you spring into flight and begin to count and look back you think: “I have killed a man, I have killed a man and it’s irreversible and I don’t know who he was.” That is unquestionably the verb tense you think of it in, you don’t say to yourself “who he is” but inexplicably and already “who he was” and you don’t wonder whether it was right or wrong or justified or if there was some other solution, you think only of the fact: I have k
illed a man and I don’t know who he was, only that he was named Julio and they called him Julito and he was Mexican, and he was once in my native city staying in the Castellana Hilton and he had a green handkerchief, and that’s all. And he knew nothing about me that morning, and he never learned my real name and I will never know anything more about him. I won’t know about his childhood or what he was like then or if he ever went to high school as part of his scanty education which did not include the study of English, I’ll never know who his mother is or whether she’s alive and they’ll bring her the news of the unexpected death of her fat Julio. And you think about this even though you don’t want to because you have to escape and run now, no one knows what is it to be hunted down without having lived it and unless the pursuit was active and constant, carried out with deliberation and determination and dedication and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but catch up with you and settle the score. No one knows what it is to be hunted down like that for five nights and five days, without having lived it. I was twenty-two years old and I will never go back to Mexico, though Ricardo must be nearing seventy now and the fat man has been dead for centuries, I saw him. Even today I stretch my hand out horizontally and look at it, and say to myself, “Five.”
Yes, it was best not to think and to run, run without stopping for as long as I could hold out now that I no longer felt hazy or fatigued, all my senses wide awake as if I had just risen from a long sleep, and as I went deeper into the thicket and was lost from sight and the first rumblings of thunder began, I could distinctly make out, through the wind, the sound of the venomous footsteps setting off with all the urgency of hatred to destroy me, and Ricardo’s voice shouting through the wind, “I want him now, I want him dead and I will not wait, bring me the son of a bitch’s head, I want to see him flayed and his body smeared with tar and feathers, I want his carcass, skinned and butchered, and then he will be no one and this hatred that is exhausting me will end.”
Copyright © 1996 by Javier Marías
English translation copyright © 1999, 2010 by Esther Allen
First published in Spain in 1996 as Mala Indole
Published by arrangement with Mercedes Casanovas Agencia Literaria, Barcelona
Bad Nature first appeared in English in Granta in 1999.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published as a Pearl (NDP1165) by New Directions in 2010
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marías, Javier.
[Mala indole. English] Bad nature, or With Elvis in Mexico / by Javíer Marias ; translated by Esther Allen.
p. cm.
“A New Directions Pearl.”
eISBN 978-0-8112-1964-8
1. Presley, Elvis, 1935-1977—Fiction. I. Allen, Esther, 1962– II. Title.
PQ6663.A7218M3513 2009
863'.64—dc22
2009039623
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
THE NEW DIRECTIONS PEARLS
César Aira, The Literary Conference
Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing
Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial
F. Scott Fitzgerald, On Booze
Nikolai Gogol, The Night Before Christmas
Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende
Javier Marías, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico
Yukio Mishima, Patriotism
Victor Pelevin, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids
Joseph Roth, The Leviathan
Tennessee Williams, Tales of Desire
Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp
Robert Walser, The Walk
Javier Marías
“One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize.”
––Orhan Pamuk
“Sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive.”
––San Francisco Bay Guardian
“The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature.”
––The Boston Sunday Globe
Javier Marías is widely considered Spain’s greatest living writer and has been translated into 38 languages. His nine books with New Directions have been admired as “superb” (Review of Contemporary Fiction), “fantastically original” (Talk), “dazzling” (The Times Literary Supplement, London), and “brilliant” (Virginia Quarterly Review).
Translator of Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and José Marti, Esther Allen is a professor at Baruch College (CUNY), and directs the work of the PEN Translation Fund Award.
Javier Marías, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico
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