Alongside that good humour, one sensed something voracious and troubling, as if nothing ever entirely pleased him, as if he were one of those people for whom nothing is ever enough, who always want more and who reach a point when they no longer know what more they can want: it’s difficult for them to be more successful, earn more money, more admiration from the people surrounding them, more power or influence in the world they move in. They look around, flail vainly about in search of new goals, and don’t know how to channel all the ambition and energy that continue to beset them, how to raise the siege, to strike camp. You might say that age has betrayed them, has failed to teach them its usual soothing lessons; it neither softens nor makes them slower or meeker, it has too much respect for their personality and doesn’t know what to do with them or else simply doesn’t bother to please, still less satisfy them. They thus become creatures who are barely aware of passing time, and instead time feels to them like a kind of unvarying eternity in which they have lived their entire life and which looks unlikely to disappear or to change in pace, to withdraw from or abandon them: they are time’s hostages or its willing victims; it must be said in their defence that time acts most disloyally in partly failing to fulfil its commitment to them: it merely slowly, little by little, undermines them, but – how I can put it? – without telling them. They are individuals who, if you told them they had a fatal illness and would soon die, would react with immediate and utter incredulity or scepticism – with disdain, in fact – as if to say, more or less: ‘Look, I’m awfully sorry, but it really doesn’t suit me to die right now. I’ve got such a lot to do, and I wasn’t expecting it, it wasn’t part of my short-term plan. If you don’t mind, could we leave it for later on?’ (And that’s perfectly understandable really, because, with the exception of suicides and those who are old and tired of life, who doesn’t want to leave it for later on, however late in the day that ‘now’ presents itself?) Muriel, on the other hand, would never have said that, even though, as I mentioned at the beginning, he shared with Van Vechten a certain immunity to the passage of time, and the years seemed to have little effect on his appearance or perhaps only that of a slow fall of sleet or a faint shadow. However, unlike his friend, there was no voracity or disquiet in him, no vague dissatisfactions, there was, rather, stillness and pause and calm: he merely ignored the passing of time, as if it were so familiar that it wasn’t worth devoting a single minute to bemoaning or pondering it. Or as if all the really important things had happened to him in the past.
In Van Vechten’s search to satisfy his permanent, albeit aimless and directionless greed, nothing could have suited him better than my suggestion, or what he perceived as my temptations, that of being introduced, with the help of a guide or an initiate, into the wild, youthful life of the day. He didn’t really need me, because the times were so effervescent that suddenly everything seemed permissible and normal in contrast to the leaden decades under Franco, although those days had already died a good five years before the dictator’s actual physical disappearance, or perhaps we had merely decisively turned our back on them. People of any age felt free to go anywhere, as though everyone were trying out new habits or perhaps a new youth. Those who, not long before, and because of their age, had felt they weren’t ‘authorized’ to go out several nights a week and stay out into the small hours, now had a sense that nothing prevented them from doing so; more than that, the general buzz and excitement seemed to be urging them to venture into places that would have been deemed inappropriate for someone of their age or position, for someone who had for so many years behaved with a certain dignity and composure. Despite all these possibilities, all these stimuli, it was not the same as having a real twenty-year-old taking you to all the fashionable bars and clubs and introducing you to his friends and, so to speak, giving you permission to approach any girl in his circle as an equal and allowing you the illusion that you were part of a kind of privileged band. It was a time when almost no one slept in Madrid, because after a night on the town, with the exception of students and artists and professional layabouts, every night owl, unlikely though it may seem and at a remarkably early hour, could be found at his or her desk the following morning. I was and so was Van Vechten, who never once missed a day in his consulting rooms, and it was the same with Muriel and Rico and Roy and Beatriz and Gloria when they stayed out late, as they all did now and again; no one could entirely avoid the nocturnal ferment of those anomalous years, which, if you had a bit of money and however wretchedly unhappy you felt, were celebratory despite the political unease and the uncertainties of all kinds. It was not unusual to find traffic jams in various parts of the city in the early hours of a Wednesday or a Monday or even a dull Tuesday. On some nights, our cold, sentinel moon must have blinked its one somnolent eye in disbelief.
I get them mixed up, the bars I used to go to in 1980 and those I went to shortly before and shortly afterwards, but in addition to the places I mentioned earlier, I think I took Van Vechten to the Dickens, El Café and Rock-Ola, to certain street cafés in Recoletos and to the Universal (on second thoughts, no, that was probably later), and to various discotheques, where, of course, I spent far too many hours, whether with him or on my own, I can’t for the life of me remember, places like Pachá and Joy Eslava and others whose names escape me, one near the river (La Riviera?) and another next door to Chamartín station, and another in Calle Hortaleza and yet another in Fortuny or Jenner or Marqués del Riscal (Archy perhaps?), times and people tend to get confused, alcohol doesn’t exactly clear the head, although cocaine does for as long as its effects last, but not a posteriori; someone would offer you a line of coke now and then and you took it just to be able to keep going a little longer and sustain the bellowed conversations that you somehow kept up in a losing battle with the surrounding hubbub. I didn’t go to all those places with the Doctor, and I only did so for a short time, getting rid of him as soon as my mission was complete. One place I definitely did take him to was an updated, refurbished nightclub called Pintor Goya (the name it was given in its antiquated origins), in the street of the same name, that is, Goya.
Just as on that earlier poker night, when his simultaneously chilling and greedy eyes had been repeatedly drawn to Celia and her friend, so now they were drawn to women of almost any age (those places were fairly ‘intergenerational’ at the time, within reasonable limits), and even to the transvestites who were beginning to display themselves provocatively and brazenly on the Paseo de la Castellana near Calle Hermanos Bécquer, and who gradually spread out, eventually invading all the adjacent territory too. I always found their popularity odd, and the fact that their clients were mainly heterosexuals, many of them, apparently, married men: however convincing the transvestites were as women, you would have to go through a whole mental process, a form of self-deceit, that I find hard to comprehend, to convince yourself that they really were women, and that, in the middle of a transaction, you weren’t going to be put off by the sudden appearance of certain inappropriate and dissuasive genitals. Whenever we drove past the transvestites in Dr Van Vechten’s flash car, he, I recall, was always adamant that they couldn’t possibly be men on hormone treatment or who had undergone surgery, or perhaps half one thing and half another. He would glance at them out of the corner of his eye while he was driving and make as if to turn to me or to my friends.
‘What do you mean? How can they possibly be men? They’re obviously women, and I should know. Look at those breasts, those legs. You’re having me on.’ And he would smile his becoming smile, half-amused, half-bewildered.
‘Look, Jorge, most of them are too tall. Were women ever that tall when you were young?’ I would say. He had insisted I call him ‘Jorge’ and not ‘Dr Van Vechten’. ‘Their legs are too muscular. Their tits are too hard. Some of them have suspiciously large hands. And most take at least a size eight in shoes. More importantly, if you look closely, they all have an Adam’s apple.’
‘How can I look closely from this far away and
travelling at this speed?’ On the long home straight of the Castellana, late at night, you could go like a bullet, although he always slowed down slightly when he reached the transvestite zone, for they clearly aroused in him, at the very least, great curiosity. ‘I can’t see a single Adam’s apple from here. Don’t talk nonsense, they’re clearly women and pretty spectacular ones at that. The race has improved over the years, that’s why they’re tall. Or perhaps they’re foreign – for example, there was a real stunner of a mulatta back there. You’re all mad, and you want to drive me mad too.’ His remarks betrayed the fact that he came from a much earlier generation. And he occasionally used very dated expressions; no one of my age would have used the word ‘stunner’.
‘Well, spend a night with one of them, then. You just have to stop the car and pick one up. If you don’t just settle for a blow-job, it won’t take you long to find out. And, as I understand it, it won’t cost you much either. Then come and tell me all about it, about the nasty shock you get, I mean.’
I knew they didn’t charge much because a transitory friend of mine at the time, Comendador, who was five or six years older than me, had taken to paying for their services now and then. He had always been heterosexual, and he still was, and even had a girlfriend he was madly in love with. He tried to give me details of those ambiguous encounters, but I always stopped him in his tracks, preferring not to know. He saw them as very attractive women, I’m sure, but he also knew that they weren’t. I found this all very odd.
Van Vechten said nothing for a few moments (this was one of several such conversations), as if hesitating. He glanced over at the pavement, at the road, then back at those apparently real women wearing skirts or very short shorts and with their breasts almost exposed, eyeing them lustfully. The strange thing is that his hesitation appeared not to be related to the problem of their uncertain or deceiving gender, but to something else.
‘No, certainly not, I’ve never paid for sex in my life,’ he said at last, dismissing the possibility. ‘And I’m not going to start now.’
This was presumably true, and from what I saw he didn’t seem to be the kind of man who went with prostitutes. Perhaps he had never needed to, perhaps his height and his blond hair, his captivating teeth and his pale blue eyes, which, in certain lights, took on a watery quality, had been enough to dissipate or conceal the repellent quality I saw in him – I’m not quite sure how to describe it: a combination of conceit, a kind of exaggerated, jokey warmth and sheer ruthlessness, which, however vague, was there on his face – and which, it seemed to me, could not have gone unnoticed by women, now and in the past – it was something intrinsic and nothing to do with age. Of course, I’ve often been wrong about this and have seen remarkable women fall in love with and give or surrender themselves to truly nauseating men, and he wasn’t quite that bad. And even though he no longer looked young, he was, as I said, very well preserved. This, however, was not enough to explain why some of my female acquaintances or friends not only didn’t avoid him or exclude him from their nocturnal excursions, they happily chatted to him, sometimes while sitting slightly apart from the others, I mean, it wasn’t that they were all talking together and including him in the conversation – he was there, after all, and with me as his visiting card – but they ended up talking only to him. Seeing the women laugh, I would think that perhaps he was regaling them with the string of ancient jokes he sometimes trotted out, or perhaps it was his air of sophistication and his ability to flatter – the young are so sensitive to this that you often only have to administer a good dose of it to get whatever you want from them, in almost any area.
I observed Van Vechten constantly, for this was, in part, the task Muriel had set me and I wanted to be useful to him, and, on two or three occasions, I saw the Doctor and a young woman heading towards the toilets of whatever bar or club we happened to be in. I made a mental note of how long they were away, and, on each occasion, it didn’t seem to me that they would have had time to do anything more than snort a line of coke or something of the sort (cocaine wasn’t as commonplace as it became years later, but it was beginning to be sold and to lose its alarming image, and Van Vechten had more than enough money and could use it as bait, as flattery, to make him look like one of us), not even time for a quick blow-job. That was the expression I used when I was with him, along with other still cruder ones. They did not come naturally to me (I’ve always been rather polite), but that is what Muriel had ordered me to do, along with other things I found still harder to follow: ‘Show off. Boast … Don’t worry about seeming vulgar or even disrespectful when talking about women, be as vulgar and disrespectful as you like, exaggerate … Reveal yourself as vile and unscrupulous and watch his response, whether he’s sympathetic and even of a like mind, whether he urges you on or disapproves.’ All this was unknown territory to me or went against my nature, but I forced myself to do it, as if I were an actor in a film Muriel was directing blind and at a distance, an actor who – and it frustrated and pained me that he wouldn’t see me play the part – would receive neither congratulations nor applause. Soon, I was blithely boasting about supposed exploits that had never happened and talking about women as if they were objects, as if they were as interchangeable as melons, artichokes, watermelons, bags of flour or parcels of meat. At first, hearing me talk so cynically, Van Vechten would look at me wide-eyed – his eyes were positively glacial then – and listen to me part-condescending and part-surprised, as though he had already sussed out my basically respectful nature and couldn’t quite square my current attitude with the impression he’d had of me at Muriel’s apartment, at suppers and occasional outings and poker games, when talking to Beatriz and her children and Flavia, with whom I was usually exquisitely polite, and even with the insidious Marcela and Gloria, from whom I did my best to conceal my antipathy.
But one quickly gets used to anything and one idea can easily be replaced by another. I suppose he assumed I was putting on a front when at work and that my true self was the one I displayed when out and about, and he soon became accustomed to my coarse, contemptuous language and my predatory behaviour, although the word ‘behaviour’ is misleading, for I continued to behave towards my women friends and girlfriends and with any new ones (one was always meeting new people in the welcoming night of that new age) as I always had – if I hadn’t, my female friends old and new would have been astonished – but later, I would discuss them all with Van Vechten as if I were a callous swine and regale him with unsavoury adventures and dirty tricks that had sometimes never happened or, if they had, had not been perpetrated in such a utilitarian, exploitative manner, certainly not with the degree of lying and indifference or deceit on my part that I described. It wasn’t so much my behaviour that was disdainful and vicious, as my description of it. I heeded Muriel’s advice: ‘There’s nothing like boasting about your own exploits to get others to tell you theirs, however ancient; it never fails.’ And Muriel was right, it rarely does fail.
VI
* * *
Some people take pleasure in deceit and trickery and pretence and have enormous patience when it comes to weaving their web. They’re capable of living through the long present with one eye fixed on a vague future, which will arrive when it arrives or only when they decide that it should at last become the present, and then, immediately afterwards, the past. Sometimes they put off or postpone the moment when they will take their revenge, if revenge is what they’re after, or when they achieve their goal, assuming they had one, or when their plan finally reaches fruition, if a plan is what they’ve been hatching; and sometimes they wait for so long that nothing comes of it at all and the whole thing decays inside their imagination. There are those who live their whole lives in a state of continuous secrecy and concealment, and who also have the patience never to destroy their web. Curiously, they never tire of this or miss transparency, simplicity or clarity, miss being able to lay their cards on the table, look someone straight in the eye and say: ‘This is what I want and
that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t want to confuse or fool you any more. I’ve lied and pretended and have been lying and pretending for a long time, almost since I met you. It was necessary or I felt obliged to do it, I was obeying orders or my happiness depended on it, or so I thought. I was weak or being loyal to others, I was afraid of losing you for ever or was persuaded to behave as if I was. You were too important to me or I didn’t care about you at all, I regretted having to deceive, it went against my conscience or I found it really easy, for me you were everything or you were nothing, but it doesn’t matter, not now. I feel really bad and I’m exhausted. It takes endless work to silence the truth or to tell lies, maintaining them is a titanic task and remembering which are which even more so. The fear of putting my foot in it, of contradicting myself without realizing it, of being caught out, unwittingly going back on my word, or lowering my guard, it’s utterly draining. My guilt has eased, it’s not so great as to stop me trying, and so I’m going to tell you the truth. My lie began a long time ago, things are as they are and there’s no alternative now, no going back. At this point, the truth doesn’t exist and has been replaced; all that matters is what we have experienced since. Maybe that distant deceit has become the truth. Nothing is going to change very much because you know what was once the truth and no longer is. And I need to rest.’
Yes, there are some fortunate people who never feel tempted to say this, to put things right and to confess. I’m not one of them, alas, because I do have a secret that I’ll never be able to tell to a living soul, still less to those who have since died. You convince yourself that it’s only a small secret, that it doesn’t really matter and doesn’t affect your life in the least, these things happen, youthful indiscretions, things you do without thinking and that are basically insignificant, so what need is there to know them? And yet not a day passes without my remembering what I did and what happened in my youth. It isn’t and wasn’t anything very grave, I don’t think anyone was hurt, but it’s best, just in case, to keep silent, for our own sake, for mine, perhaps for the sake of my daughters and, above all, my wife. And when I tell that secret here (except that here is not reality), you will all have to keep my secret and keep silent too, you mustn’t go broadcasting it from the orient to the drooping west, making the wind your post-horse, as if it had become something trivial that belonged to you and each of you were a tongue on which rumour rides. Please, say not a word if others ask to hear my story. They will do so only to amuse themselves or to accumulate useless information, which they will forget as soon as they have indifferently scattered it further afield and a little further.