‘How is Beatriz?’ I asked before I left. And mimicking him, I gestured with my head towards the bathroom, the interior of which was outside my field of vision. I had seen very little of Beatriz’s calamitous state, only that initial flash when I first entered the room. Nor did I manage to see her only in her underwear (her bra straps slipping off her shoulders) and, to my shame, I realized that I would like to have seen that, even in those dramatic circumstances, or now that the greatest danger seemed to have passed. Seeing a dead woman is not the same as seeing one unconscious or badly injured, or perhaps it’s not so very different if the woman has only just died and remains unchanged, by which I mean that there hasn’t been time for her to lose her attraction. I did what I could to drive away these thoughts or imaginings or whatever, for while I may have been young, I wasn’t completely heartless. Although most young men’s hearts are, so to speak, on hold.
Then Van Vechten emerged from the bathroom for the first time since we had arrived; he was heavily stained with blood and his sleeves were soaked up to his shoulders, doctors quite often get totally filthy, they must need a very large wardrobe of clothes, that suit, for example, would have to be thrown away, even though he’d removed his jacket early on. It was he who answered my question, being more au fait with the situation:
‘Fortunately, there aren’t that many cuts and they’re not very deep, the pain must have been enough to frighten her, not enough for her to regret doing it, you understand, but to pull her up short, instinctively, involuntarily. And the water wasn’t particularly hot either. I think she probably did it about an hour ago. She’s not in any danger or won’t be once that damned ambulance finally gets here and we can give her a transfusion.’
‘It’s probably stuck in the damned traffic,’ I said — swear words are infectious.
No sooner had I said this than we heard the siren, and the ambulance must have been travelling very fast for, an instant later, it was there outside the hotel. Van Vechten went over to the balcony to check that it was ours.
‘They’re here,’ he said.
‘Did Beatriz manage to find her veins? Did she actually cut them?’ I asked, one foot already out in the corridor, which I saw was still full of guests and commotion, held in check by the fat, hesitant, awkward manager. Yes, I was leaving, preferring not to have to see the stretcher-bearers and all that, and, besides, Muriel had urged me to go back to the apartment.
‘Of course she did,’ answered the Doctor, frowning. ‘What kind of a question is that?’
It’s always a bad thing to have sudden gratitude thrust upon us, it makes us forget all previous affronts or abandon our plan of revenge, it numbs our rancour and blunts our desire for justice; we overlook offences and are prepared to ignore suspicions or to renounce curiosity and suspend our investigations, to shrug our shoulders and appease our feelings by resorting to false justifications for giving up: ‘What does it matter if I forget all about it, so many crimes go unpunished that no one’s going to notice one more, the world won’t be any different. What does it matter if no one remembers?’ It’s always a bad thing to feel indebted to someone who has hurt us or hurt others either close to us or unrelated, sometimes it makes no difference, someone who has behaved in an indecent manner or committed the unspeakable and the unforgivable, the lowest of the low, because that can all be abruptly cancelled out by the feeling that we owe them something really crucial, really important. Offenders sometimes resort to this consciously and deliberately and even calculatingly: ‘I can’t fight on every front, so I’m going to neutralize this particular person who loathes me and has a grievance against me by doing him an unexpected favour, getting him out of a real mess, flattering him and thus confusing him, lending him money when he most needs it, or sending it to him through a third party if he won’t take it from me (that third party will be sure to blab once the money’s spent and it’s too late to reject my gift, and then it’s in my power to increase the beneficiary’s gratitude still further by not asking for the money back), by ensuring that he keeps his job, which is hanging by a thread, by helping one of his children who has got himself into trouble and for whom he cares more than anything else in the world, or by saving the life of a suicidal wife.’
This wasn’t the case with Van Vechten of course, because he didn’t even know about the resentment and suspicions harboured by his friend of so many years, still less that his friend had embarked on a secret and potentially hazardous investigation into possible facts about his past — as secret as it was erratic, as befits an amateur — using a young employee who had no idea what he was looking for and was, therefore, very much working in the dark. That night, he had helped spontaneously and disinterestedly, as would any doctor, and he would doubtless have done the same for anyone, even a complete stranger who had locked herself in a bathroom with a razor — Vic Damone’s Asian girlfriend, for example, had Van Vechten been at that party in 1961 — and, it goes without saying, the wife of a great friend of his, a wife whom he occasionally fucked, because, given what I’d seen at the Sanctuary of Darmstadt, that was the only correct verb to use, there was no lying with, no making love to, they weren’t even lovers, or so it seemed to me, or only technically speaking. Muriel knew nothing of all that, because, among other reasons, he didn’t care what Beatriz got up to, but what seemed so extraordinary was that he should care so much about losing her or saving her, for he had seemed genuinely anguished, distraught, at times looking as deathly pale or even more so than the hotel manager, Señor Gómez-Antigüedad, as if he couldn’t live without that woman who so infuriated him and whom he made so very unhappy, even haring like a mad thing down Calle Velázquez, he who never ran anywhere. And because of these new or renewed feelings of gratitude towards Van Vechten, he halted my investigation: the result of the Doctor’s perfectly routine intervention at the Hotel Wellington was that, two days later, when Beatriz was in hospital, still under observation and medical care, and during one of the brief periods when Muriel was not at her bedside and had come home to rest a little, his reward to the Doctor was to cancel all his previous orders to me, to cancel my mission, if that isn’t too grand a term for it.
‘Listen, young De Vere, I have something to say to you.’ He was once again lying full-length on the floor in the living room, and whenever he did this, I was more and more convinced that it was his way of avoiding having to look me straight in the eye, a way of preventing me from accurately reading the expression on his face, which is difficult when someone is not on the same level as you, that’s why kings always insist on having an elevated throne and why the same effect is still sought by the rich and powerful, many of whom wear lifts in their shoes or a wig. And although he opted to descend to a lower level, it provided him with a similar degree of opacity. ‘You saw how well the Doctor behaved a couple of nights ago. And that isn’t the first favour I owe him either, he’s done me a number of favours over the years; and although he couldn’t save the child, he did everything in his power to do so. He did save Beatriz, and it isn’t right that I should repay him with suspicions and machinations, by asking someone to spy on him. It doesn’t matter if what I was told is true. Even if it were, other things are more important, namely, our friendship and what he has done for me and my family in the past. I would be an ingrate, an avenger, a fanatic, if I were to withdraw my friendship over something that doesn’t even concern me, when he has done so many good things for the people who do concern me.’ — ‘Perhaps one of those good things is that he distracts you and occasionally rids you of Beatriz’s presence,’ I thought suddenly, ‘and you know all about it, Muriel, and may even have encouraged it’; in my thoughts I addressed him as tú, for the mind tends to be less formal than the tongue. — ‘What happened the night before last has forced me to remember and reflect. So just leave it be, forget all about it, ignore my orders, there’s no need for you to take him to any more nightclubs, still less to draw him out and observe him, just drop the whole thing. If he did once do something vile, that’s a matter for those he harmed, it’s not up to me to investigate or make some decision. It’s not even my business. I allowed myself to be carried away by a mere rumour.’ I had wanted to interrupt him several sentences ago, but realized this was not yet the right moment, that he had paused only in order to continue or to finish what he had to say. He again fixed his eye on the Casanova painting (on that possibly one-eyed horseman listening to his possible victims outside the painting, where the viewer was standing, all of them pleading: ‘Remember us’), although determining its exact trajectory belonged in the realm of divination. And he added: ‘In fact, anything you’re told, anything you didn’t personally witness, is pure rumour, however wrapped up in oaths it comes, all swearing the story to be true. And we can’t spend our lives listening to rumours, still less acting in accordance with their many fluctuations. When you give that up, when you give up trying to know what you cannot know, perhaps, to paraphrase Shakespeare, perhaps that is when bad begins, but, on the other hand, worse remains behind.’