‘Beatriz was there too,’ I said after a few seconds had passed, and once he was no longer pointing at the photo and had lowered his arm and was lying down again; before he did, though, he took the compass out of the back pocket of his trousers and began slowly rubbing it against his cheek (the little box, I mean), as if smoothing a non-existent but always incipient beard, which, one day, he would allow to grow. ‘And for women, for mothers, it tends to be an even greater tragedy. It’s much harder for them to recover, if they ever do. The child developed inside their womb and so they’ve known it for months before it’s even born, isn’t that right?’ I uttered these banalities because I didn’t really know what to say.
‘Yes, unless the mothers are completely stoical,’ he said. ‘Because such mothers do exist, you know, no legend is without its exceptions. But, yes, Javier’s death made her more fragile in a way, left her still more unbalanced. Although not more fragile or more fearful as regards the other children, not at all, rather the reverse: the worst that could happen had already happened and wouldn’t happen again. It almost had the effect of an inoculation, she was much more relaxed about the other children than she’d ever been about Javier. Perhaps because he was the first, perhaps because he was a boy and because we men are said to run more risks, and so she feared for him far more than for any other child. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t those bad presentiments of hers that brought it all about. Panic attracts misfortune and catastrophe. We do sometimes bring about what we most fear because the only way of freeing ourselves from that fear is for the bad thing actually to have happened, for it to be in the past and not in the future or in the realm of possibilities.’ — ‘For it to remain behind,’ I said to myself, those words from Shakespeare had made me think. — ‘However terrible and appalling the past may be, it always seems more innocuous than the future, or at least we’re better able to deal with it. I don’t know, maybe it was that or the realization of how defenceless we are, that there’s no point in taking precautions or protecting ourselves or anyone else, and that it’s therefore absurd to make yourself suffer beforehand; that, regardless of what preventative measures you take, the worst can still happen. It happens and it’s too late. It happens and that’s that. As you’ve seen, she takes her children pretty much for granted now, to the point of suddenly leaving them orphaned.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe Beatriz’s fears could have made her son catch what you say is a very rare illness.’
He didn’t even bother responding, his comment had clearly been literary, not literal, a superstitious explanation for the inexplicable, which is what literature does really, most of the time, more or less. He changed tack:
‘Anyway, now I’ve told you. Let’s see: what other complaints do you have, my poor “no-one-has-ever-told-me-anything” ’ — and he imitated my voice — ‘what else would you like to know? Ah, yes, about my eye. Well, there’s no great mystery, it’s just that I prefer not to talk about or remember it — it makes me sad and makes me seem older too. It was when I was a child, at the beginning of the Civil War. My brother and I were playing on the roof terrace of my parents’ house. A bullet fired by a paco ricocheted off a wall and hit me. I lost an eye, which, at the time, was a real drama. Anyway, I’ve been like this since 1936, and that’s what makes me seem older than I am, I mean, fancy having a war wound at my young age. But, then, saying that I lost an eye during the War does make it sound as if I was old enough to fight, doesn’t it? Anything else?’
I couldn’t help myself and so I missed the opportunity. Few of us can resist the need for an immediate explanation of something someone says to us.
‘What’s a paco?’ I asked, instead of seizing the moment and asking to know more about the Doctor or about Beatriz. Had I been more patient, I could have looked it up in a dictionary later on. According to him, the word was first used to describe the Moroccan snipers during the war in Africa and the word then spread, although it obviously didn’t last very long.
‘That’s what they called the snipers, there were quite a lot during the first weeks and months of the Civil War and they caused a lot of injuries in Madrid, and I’m not saying that just because of my own experience. The word comes from the sound made when they fired, which happened in two stages, the second was either the impact or the echo, I’m not sure: pa-co or, rather, pa-có. There was even a verb paquear. But, of course, there’s no reason why you should know that.’
‘What I don’t understand is what you and your brother were doing up on the roof if there were snipers about.’
Muriel looked up, and his non-pacoed eye regarded me scornfully:
‘Why? Because good little boys never disobey their parents? What kind of a boy were you? We were actually playing at being pacos, with a couple of sticks for rifles. Children always play at being the most dangerous thing they see or hear about. I’ve often wondered if the man who hit me didn’t realize we were children and mistook us for pacos like him and shot to kill. Or perhaps he did realize and fired anyway. People could be real swines then, so who knows? I’ll certainly never know. But we’ve rather strayed off the subject, young De Vere. Let the Doctor go. Abandon your investigations and leave him in peace.’ He was using our nicknames again, the time for seriousness having passed.
I wasn’t best pleased to receive this counter-order. Having obeyed the original order with great reluctance, I was now the one who felt curious; it’s always upsetting not to be able to bring to a successful conclusion some project requiring patience and skill. I suppose that’s why some hitmen warn their clients that there can be no going back. Even though they’ll get paid anyway, they don’t want to feel they’ve wasted valuable time studying the victim’s habits and itineraries, seeing how the land lies and painstakingly preparing the ground. It’s annoying to have all your efforts come to nothing.
‘I can’t just drop him like that, Eduardo,’ I said. ‘He loves coming out and about with me, discovering the new nightlife and meeting young people. As I said before, never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined having access to the girls he’s met thanks to me. Do you really expect me to suddenly stop taking him out, just like that, to tell him he’s no longer welcome? He’d protest, he’d insist, he’d make an almighty scene.’
‘You don’t have to be abrupt about it, you can always make excuses,’ said Muriel. ‘Space things out. Tell him you’re really busy helping me, that the filming has got bogged down what with this Beatriz business, and we’re not at all sure what’s going to happen. Unfortunately, that’s true. I don’t know how much longer Towers will allow me to be absent, he’s practically climbing the walls as it is, and each day that passes is money down the drain. The director on the second unit is going ahead with some action shots in the mountains, but, as you know, there aren’t that many of those; actors hate sitting around doing nothing, they get bored, so something’s got to give. Or tell him you’ve got a steady girlfriend now and that you see each other every night, which means you can’t go hanging around in clubs any more. You could also, for the moment, tell him another truth: tomorrow, or the day after, Beatriz will be coming home and I’m not going to be around very much if I start filming again. I need to go straight to Barcelona, for the scenes in Parque Güell and in a few other locations. I can’t really count on the girls, and Flavia being Flavia, well, she does what she can. Oh, and best to ration any visits from Marcela and Gloria, and ideally, in the circumstances, keep them away altogether — you can imagine the poison and the hysteria they’ll spread. I want you to move in, at least for the first week when I’m away, to watch her, to sleep with one eye open. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll try it again soon, she usually allows some years to pass between attempts, but you never know. Keep her company, talk to her, amuse her, take her out. Don’t let her get depressed, or as little as possible. I’m not sure if the Professor’s going to be around at all, but he certainly won’t be sleeping here. And as for Roy, well, youth makes for better company than middle age. Tell the Doctor you’re looking after Beatriz, he’ll accept that. He’ll be sure to visit, though, but I beg you, please, not to ask him about the past, don’t probe him at all.’ Despite that ‘please’, the tone remained imperative. ‘That’s the last thing he deserves, after what happened a couple of days ago. Don’t even, as I suggested, boast to him about your own lack of scruples; don’t tempt him further. If he did show a lack of scruples on one occasion or on various, I wasn’t there, and I don’t want to know about it. I’m sorry, but when I asked you to do that, I allowed myself to be carried away, to be influenced by others. We should only be concerned with what we have seen with our own eyes, with what directly affects us. We can’t go around handing out punishments, even if the punishment consists only in behaving coldly or withdrawing our friendship from someone who may once have done something bad. It would be never-ending, we’d never have time for anything else.’ He paused for a moment, then concluded: ‘We need to remember that we have all done something bad at some point. Even you, and if you haven’t, you’ve got all the time in the world, far too many years, in fact; that’s the downside of being young. So one day you, too, will do something bad.’