‘What are you doing lying on the floor, may I ask? Just out of curiosity, you know, not that I disapprove, heaven forfend. I just want to understand your habits, assuming this is a habit.’
He made a face expressive of resigned impatience, as if my reaction were all too familiar and he had often had to give the same explanation to others before me.
‘It’s not so very odd. I often do it. There’s nothing to explain, but, yes, it is a habit of mine. Can’t a person lie down on the floor simply because he wants to and because it suits him?’
‘Of course, Don Eduardo, you can perform acrobatics if the fancy takes you. Why not? Or do a bit of Chinese plate-spinning.’ I slipped in this remark deliberately, to make it clear that his posture was not as normal as he made out, not in a man of a certain age, and a father to boot, because crawling about on the floor was something adolescents or children did, and he had three children still living at home. I wasn’t sure either that what I was thinking of was a particularly Chinese speciality, spinning several plates at a time with each plate balanced on the end of a long, thin, flexible stick and each stick balanced on a fingertip, I have no idea how they do it or indeed why. He obviously knew what I meant though. ‘You have two perfectly good sofas over there,’ I added and pointed behind me, to the living room, because he was lying down in the study. ‘I wouldn’t have found it at all alarming to find you on one of those, even asleep or in a trance. But on the floor, with all the dust … I’m sorry, but it’s not what one expects.’
‘In a trance? Me? In a trance? What do you mean?’ He seemed positively offended, but the flicker of a smile indicated that he was also amused.
‘It was just a manner of speaking. Thinking. Meditating. Or hypnotized.’
‘Me? Hypnotized? Who by? What do you mean “hypnotized”?’ And now he couldn’t suppress a broad but fleeting smile. ‘Do you mean I’d hypnotized myself? In the morning? A quoi bon?’ he concluded in French, such brief incursions into French being not uncommon among the educated members of his own and preceding generations, since it was usually their second language. I had realized from early on that he rather enjoyed my little jokes, for he rarely cut them short, but tended to repeat them back at me, and the only reason he didn’t linger longer was not because he didn’t want to, but so that I didn’t get too cheeky too quickly, an unnecessary precaution, since I admired and respected him greatly. He paused after that sally into French and, to emphasize his words, he again raised his still smoking pipe. ‘The ground or, in this case, the floor, is the safest, firmest and most modest place there is; and, as well as providing the best view of the sky or the ceiling, it’s an ideal spot in which to do some thinking. Besides, there isn’t a speck of dust to be seen,’ he added. ‘You’ll have to get used to seeing me here, because once on the floor you cannot fall over or, indeed, fall any lower, a great advantage when it comes to making decisions, which one should always base on the worst possible hypothesis, if not on sheer desperation and its usual companion, meanness, then there’s no risk of your giving way to sentimentality or being disappointed by whatever decision you happen to take. Anyway, it’s not a problem, so sit down, will you, I need to dictate a couple of things. And I’ve told you before, don’t call me “Don Eduardo”,’ he said, imitating the way I had said it, and he was an excellent mimic. ‘It makes me sound older than I am, like some character out of a novel by Galdós, a writer whose work, by the way, with two possible exceptions, I’ve always loathed, the kind of author you could almost accuse of being a literary despot. Come on, get writing.’
‘You’re going to dictate to me from down there?’
‘Yes, from down here. What’s wrong with that? Can’t you hear me? Don’t tell me I need to take you to an ENT specialist, that would be most unfortunate at your age. How old did you say you were? Fifteen?’ He, too, was much given to jokes and exaggerated remarks.
‘No, twenty-three. Of course I can hear you. You have, as you know, a strong, manly voice.’ I was not always the one to start; whenever Muriel made a joke, I would return it or at least respond in the same playful tone. He again smiled involuntarily, more with his one eye than with his lips. ‘But I won’t be able to see your face if I sit in my usual place. I’ll have my back to you, which would be rude, wouldn’t it?’ When we had business to conduct, I usually sat in the armchair opposite his, with his eighteenth-century desk between us, and he, at that moment, was lying near the door to the living room, behind my usual chair.
‘Well, turn your chair round to face me, then. It’s hardly a major problem, it’s not nailed to the floor.’
He was quite right, and I did as I was told. Now he was lying literally at my feet, perpendicular to them; it was an eccentric arrangement, the boss horizontal on the floor and the secretary – or whatever I was – near enough to give him a kick in the ribs or the thigh if I made the slightest sudden or involuntary or ill-judged movement of my legs. I prepared to write in my notebook (I would type the letters out afterwards on an old machine of his that he had lent me and that still worked well, and I would then give them to him to check and sign).
Muriel, however, did not immediately begin dictating. His rather affable, covertly amused expression of a moment before had been replaced by one of abstraction or preoccupation, or by one of those griefs that you put off because you don’t want to confront or plunge into it and which, nevertheless, always comes back, recurs, grows deeper with each attack, having failed to disappear during the period you were keeping it at bay or far from your thoughts: instead, it has grown in its absence and has not once ceased to stalk your mind surreptitiously or subterraneously, as if it were the preamble to a break-up that will inevitably happen, but which you still cannot even imagine: those feelings of coldness and irritation and boredom towards a much-loved person, feelings that come in waves, that linger, then depart; and with each departure, you try to believe they were pure phantasmagoria – the product of your own unease or a general discontent, or of some other minor annoyances or even the heat – and that they won’t come back. Only to discover, the next time, that each new wave proves more tenacious and enduring, poisoning and oppressing the mind and causing it to doubt and complain a little more. That feeling of disaffection takes a while to appear and still longer to take shape in the mind (‘I don’t think I can stand her any longer, I’ve got to close the door on her, I must’), and even when our consciousness has finally accepted it, there’s still a long way to go before it’s actually put into words and placed before the person about to be abandoned, and who neither suspects nor imagines it – because not even we deceitful, cowardly, dilatory, slow abandoners suspect or imagine it, but come up with all kinds of reasons why we should not: for the avoidance of guilt or to save her pain – the person whose fate it will be to languish incredulously and even pine palely away.
Muriel rested his hands on his chest, one hand still grasping the now extinguished pipe that he hadn’t bothered to relight. Instead of beginning to dictate, as he had announced he would, he remained silent for a couple of minutes, while I gazed at him interrogatively, pen at the ready, until, fearing the ink would dry up, I replaced the cap. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten what it was he had been about to do, as though a thought or a problem had crossed his mind, or a much-mulled-over dilemma had swept away everything else, apart from me as a possible chance adviser or simply as an ear to listen to his anxieties: from his position on the floor, he kept shooting me doubtful or almost furtive glances, as if he had something on the very tip of his tongue – a few times he opened his mouth and took a breath, then closed it again – something he could not bring himself to say, that is, to have me hear, as though pondering whether or not it would be right to share with me a matter that troubled and disturbed him or even burned him inside. He cleared his throat once, twice. The words were fighting to get out, held in by prudence, a desire for secrecy or, at least, discretion, as if the matter were a delicate one and should not perhaps be aired in public, or even put
into words, because once spoken it would instal itself in the atmosphere and be very hard to expel. I waited without saying anything, without insisting or urging him to speak. I waited confidently and patiently because even then I knew – one learns this early on, in childhood – that the thing one is tempted to say, to tell or ask or propose, almost always bursts out, emerges, as though no force – no restraint or even reason – were strong enough to stop it, for we nearly always lose our battles against our own excitable tongues. (Or the tongue itself is angry, dictatorial.)
‘You, who are from a different generation and will, therefore, see things differently,’ Muriel said at last, still tentatively and cautiously. ‘Yes, you, who are young and from another generation,’ he repeated, thinking he was buying time and might still be able to interrupt himself and say nothing, ‘what would you do if you heard that a friend you’d known most of your life …’ He paused, as if he were about to reject what he had just said and begin again: ‘How can I put it, how can I explain … that a friend of many years’ standing had not always been what he is today? Not as you have known him and as he now is, or as you had always believed him to be?’
Given this succession of confused and vacuous questions, he was clearly still struggling. Muriel was rarely confused, on the contrary, he prided himself on being very precise, although sometimes, in his search for precision, he did have a tendency to ramble. Depending on my response, he still had time to retreat (‘Oh, don’t worry, let’s just let the matter drop’ or ‘No, no, forget it’ or even ‘No, it’s best you know nothing about it, it’s not your business and, besides, it’s an unpleasant affair; you wouldn’t be able to help me and you wouldn’t understand either’). And so I decided to wait and adopted an expression of intense interest, as if I were on tenterhooks waiting for him to speak and there was nothing in my life that interested me more; but when he continued to say nothing – entangled in his own tangled thoughts – I realized that it was up to me to give him a verbal cue and, before he could withdraw entirely, I asked boldly:
‘What do you mean? Some kind of betrayal? An act of treachery against yourself?’
I saw that he could not allow my mistaken interpretation to pass, even though it was an interpretation of a mist, a darkness, a mere nothing, and I thought he would have no option but to continue, at least a little.
He put his pipe in his mouth, chewed the end and spoke from between clenched teeth, as if not wanting me to be able to hear too clearly what he had to say. As if what he was saying were, perhaps, pure bluff.
‘No, that’s the problem. If it were, I would know how to confront him, how to deal with the situation. If it affected me directly, I would have no hesitation in going to him and demanding an explanation. Or if it turned out to be something truly unforgivable, a casus belli, I would simply never speak to him again. But that isn’t the case here. The matter doesn’t concern me at all, it has nothing to do with me or with our friendship, and yet …’ He did not complete his sentence, and withdrew into himself again, finding it hard to admit what he believed to be the truth.
I did not believe what I said next, but I either thought or sensed that it would help to draw him out, because, as soon as someone begins to tell or to insinuate something – something delicate or salacious or forbidden, some presumably grave matter, about which he is unsure whether or not he wants to speak – we immediately do our best to draw him out. It’s almost a reflex reaction, largely for our own amusement, for what used to be called ‘sport’.
‘Why don’t you just ignore it, then? Why not let it pass? It might not be true, a mere calumny or a simple mistake. After all, if it doesn’t actually concern you, why get involved? Or you could, of course, ask him about it, ask him to confirm or deny it. If you’re really good friends, then he’d tell you the truth, wouldn’t he?’
Muriel removed the pipe from his mouth and raised his free hand to his cheek, although I couldn’t say whether his cheek was resting on his hand or his hand on his cheek, it’s hard to know when someone’s lying on the floor. He turned his wise eye towards me; up until then, it had been staring at the ceiling, at the higher shelves in the library, at a painting by Francesco Casanova hanging on the wall of his study: he was very proud to be the owner of an oil painting by someone who was not only the younger brother of the famous Giacomo, but also Catherine the Great’s favourite painter, as he told me more than once (‘Catherine the Great of Russia,’ he explained, as if doubting my historical knowledge, not entirely wrongly). He looked at me, trying to judge how genuine or how ingenuous my interest was, if I really wanted to find a solution or was merely being kind or, worse still, was eager for gossip. He must have given provisional approval to my response, because after several inquisitive seconds that made me very nervous and during which I myself was tempted to examine my conscience, he said:
‘Not necessarily. No one would readily admit to something like that, anyone would deny it to whoever asked them, to a friend, an enemy, a stranger, a judge, not to mention his wife or his children. What would he say if I asked him? Was I mad? Who did I take him for? Didn’t I know him better than that? He’d say these were malicious lies or the product of some vile settling of accounts by a spiteful, devious person who harboured an implacable grudge against him, the kind of grudge that never dies. No, he would demand to know who had come to me with such a story. And I would doubtless have to lose his friendship, on his insistence not mine. And then he would be the disappointed party. Or would feel justifiably insulted if it turned out to be false.’ He paused for a moment, perhaps in order to imagine the absurd scene, that plea for sincerity. ‘No, don’t be silly, Juan. There are many occasions on which a No is the only possible answer and such a No clarifies nothing, is useless. It’s the answer one would get whether it was true or not. A Yes can be useful sometimes, but a No almost never, especially when the subject under discussion is something ugly or shameful or when it’s a matter of getting what you want at all costs or of saving your skin. It’s of no value in itself. Accepting it is an act of faith, and the faith is ours not that of the person saying No. Besides, faith is a fickle, fragile thing: it stumbles, recovers, grows stronger, cracks. And is lost. Belief can never be trusted.’
‘What on earth has he been told about this dubious friend of his – or, rather, this friend who suddenly appears to be dubious – what can he have said or done?’ I wondered, or thought. ‘After half a life of utter clarity.’ Or perhaps that isn’t what I thought, but only how I remember it now that I’m no longer young and am more or less the same age as Muriel was then or perhaps older; it’s impossible to recover the inexperience of your inexperienced youth once you’ve moved on considerably; once you’ve understood something, it’s impossible to not understand what you once didn’t understand, ignorance doesn’t return, not even when you want to describe a time during which you either basked in or were the victim of ignorance, and never trust anyone who tells you something with a falsely innocent look on his face, feigning the lost innocence of childhood or adolescence or youth, or who adopts the gaze – the icy, frozen gaze – of the child he no longer is, and the same is true of the old man who speaks out of the years of his maturity rather than out of the old age that now dominates his entire vision of the world, his knowledge of other people and of himself; even the dead – could they speak or whisper – would distort the truth, putting themselves in the shoes of the foolish, unfinished living beings they once were, pretending they hadn’t yet entered the realm of death and metamorphosis and had no knowledge of what they had once been capable of doing and saying, given that they have done and said everything and there is no possibility now of surprise or emendation or improvisation, that account is closed, never to be opened again … ‘He said, “No one would readily admit to something like that”, so it must be something very murky, some very dirty linen indeed, but what? Some “spiteful, devious person”, yes, he said that too, and I assumed he meant a woman, although those two adjectives could easily be applied to a
man as well, after all, why not, and yet when he said them, I instantly imagined a woman as the source of the information … He’s wondering whether or not to tell me what it’s about, this thing he has so painfully discovered. He’s afraid that if he confides in me, it will seem still more real or more certain, that the more he speaks about it, the more validity he’ll be giving it, the more he’ll be condemning his friend, and it’s only natural that he would prefer not to do that. But nor can he dismiss out of hand what he has heard, or perhaps the matter so worries and troubles him that he can no longer keep it to himself, it stalks his thoughts day and night, but he doesn’t know who he can speak to about it without making the matter seem even more significant, even more serious. Perhaps he sees me as the least important of his acquaintances, precisely because of my youth, my inexperience and my complete inability to move in his world of the fully adult. And if I were to decide to blab about it, my voice lacks weight and credibility. That’s why he has chosen me, because of my insignificance,’ I thought. ‘Telling me is the closest he can get to telling no one. He’ll feel safer with me than with anyone else, I can be dismissed and never seen again, I can almost be cancelled out, sooner or later I will be a mere empty space. That means I can also inquire, probe, draw him out. I have no resonance, I bring no consequences.’
‘I can’t really give you an opinion, Don Eduardo, I mean, Eduardo,’ I said, correcting myself, and that ‘Eduardo’ grated on my ears, sounded horribly disrespectful, ‘if you don’t tell me a little more. You asked what I would do, but since I don’t know what the problem is, I can’t really answer. And since you say that even if you went to see your friend, you still couldn’t be certain he would tell you the truth, that he would deny the whole thing and that his No would be of no use to you … Well, I really don’t know what you should do. Put pressure on the person who told you the story, try to get them to withdraw it, to retract? Although it seems unlikely, doesn’t it, that someone would go back on what he’d said once he’d taken the step of uncovering something ugly that showed someone else in such a bad light? You could try to glean more through third parties, to test out the truth of what you’ve been told. Only you can know if that would work, it often doesn’t. It seems to me that it all depends on what that something is, and how far it can coexist with your friendship and how far you can live with the shadow it casts. As I said, you could just forget it, suppress it, let it go. If it’s impossible to know the truth, then I suppose we’re at liberty to decide for ourselves what the truth is.’