At night, though, no one came, and it was up to me to take the initiative, to be on hand if she needed me, to distract her or talk to her or sit down with her to watch a film or a series on TV, so that she would feel less keenly her customary nocturnal solitude; my orders now were to tread carefully, but the situation wouldn’t last, only as long as it took her to convalesce, the few weeks it would take for us all to recover from the shock and regain our mutual trust, no state of alarm can be maintained indefinitely. I think I talked to Beatriz more during the ten days that Muriel was away filming in Barcelona than during the whole of the rest of the time I worked for him. We tended to avoid any very personal subjects, any thorny or delicate issues, but, as always, in situations of unexpected closeness, a false, provisional camaraderie soon sprang up, and a feeling of daily normality quickly took root; you only have to condemn two reasonably nice people to spending time in each other’s company for it to come to seem perfectly normal, especially if, for some reason, those exceptional circumstances become permanent; it takes only a couple of days for routines to be established, to the extent of each person always sitting in the same place, in the same armchair if they play chess or cards, on the same side of the sofa if they’re watching TV, and, if they sleep in the same bed for two consecutive nights, that’s quite long enough for each to choose which side he or she will sleep on.
When she went to her room, I would stay up for another hour or so, not feeling tired enough to go to bed myself, and when I did finally go to my own room, I remained, not perhaps with one eye open, as Muriel had ordered, but with some corner of my consciousness watching, in perhaps the same way that the parents of young children have to remain constantly alert, not, of course, that Beatriz was as important to me as that. Nevertheless, I would hear her whenever she left her room, as she briefly did each night, if she went into the living room or the kitchen for a few minutes, doubtless the time it took to smoke one or two cigarettes, before returning to her side of the apartment and closing her bedroom door, then I would go back to sleep, feeling easier, as if she were safer in her room, although probably quite the opposite was true: if she had tried to kill herself again, she would have avoided doing so in any communal areas, where there was a danger that her children or Flavia might find her, where there was more likelihood that someone would stop her or frustrate her in her wish to die by once again arriving just in time.
One night, I heard her clattering around in the kitchen for longer than usual, while she waited for exhaustion or sleep to get the better of her, and this was so close to where I was sleeping that I found it impossible not to listen to and interpret her every movement. She opened and closed the fridge three or four times, lit cigarettes — the repeated sound of a faulty lighter; she poured herself a cold drink — liquid falling into a glass, the clink of ice cubes — a chair or stool scraping on the floor, she would sit down only to stand up a few seconds later, then sit down again, what I couldn’t hear were her footsteps, and I imagined she must be barefoot or wearing the silent slippers that allowed her to pace back and forth outside her husband’s bedroom door without him hearing her, until she decided to announce her presence by rapping on the door with one knuckle. She took no such pains now, perhaps she had forgotten that I was sleeping next door or perhaps she wasn’t bothered about waking me, probably too absorbed in her own thoughts and able to think only of them — insomnia is very selfish. The persistent scraping of a stool or chair — probably only restlessness and nerves, the kitchen being furnished with both stools and chairs — made me imagine a possible danger. ‘I hope she’s not going to climb on to one,’ I thought, ‘then kick it away and hang herself; I hope that’s not what she’s preparing to do,’ and I tried fruitlessly to remember if there was anything on the ceiling to which she could attach a rope or a strip of fabric. This idea had only to cross my mind for me to listen more acutely, to struggle to decipher every sound and to worry whenever there was a longer than usual pause or silence. In the middle of the night everything seems plausible and real.
I realized that as long as Beatriz stayed in the kitchen, I wouldn’t be able to relax, and so I got out of bed. It was already hot in Madrid and I was wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, the kind I’ve worn since I was a young man, having always found so-called Y-fronts unpleasantly macho and even faintly distasteful. I couldn’t and shouldn’t appear dressed like that, I thought — although I would have been justified in doing so, since this was, in a way, my territory — and since I didn’t have a dressing gown, I put on my jeans and a shirt, although without bothering to button the latter up or to tuck it in. I cautiously opened the door of my cubbyhole — I didn’t want to startle her — which Flavia had smartened up a bit since the first time I stayed overnight, making it a little more welcoming, a little less bare; and I saw Beatriz with her back to me, sitting, just as I had thought, on one of the stools in the kitchen, which is where we used to have breakfast, individually and at an hour of our choosing, the only ones who ate together being the children and then only on school days, no one person acted as a kind of agglutinative hub, the family tending to disperse.
The lights were already on in the kitchen, and so the light from my door when I opened it didn’t warn Beatriz of my presence, locked as she was inside her own head. She wasn’t wearing a dressing gown either, even though Muriel was away and there was no one she could tempt with her rather short nightdress, when she was standing it came only to mid-thigh and was identical to the one I’d seen on that now distant night, except that it wasn’t white or cream, but a very pale blue — perhaps she had bought two or three, thinking it was a flattering style. I assumed that the heat had made her leave her room so very lightly dressed, that and her self-absorbed state and her sense of being alone even in an apartment where five other people were sleeping, employees and children, but perhaps we counted for little in her insomnia. Seated as she was, I couldn’t tell whether, as on that night of prowling and pleading, she was wearing any knickers, although obviously, and as is only natural, she wasn’t wearing a bra, well, who would go to sleep in a piece of clothing that controls and constricts; I’ve never in my life met a woman who kept her bra on in bed. I was surprised that the first thing my eyes noticed or tried to discover was whether she had anything on underneath her silk nightdress; or, rather, it didn’t surprise me, but I silently reproached myself for a second, after all, you can’t control your own gaze, it lives a quite separate existence to our instructions and our vetos, or that’s the excuse we use to allow it to disobey us. I realized, moreover — and this was immediate — that I didn’t care that my gaze should have become so uninhibited, as if Muriel’s absence had given me — however irresponsibly, however inappropriately — the freedom to look at anything I wanted, including his wife. That sudden visual incontinence of mine didn’t make much sense really, given how little he cared about Beatriz physically and how violently he rejected her. But we feel more in charge of a place when the owner isn’t there, as if we had temporarily replaced or usurped him. That’s why every servant who has ever lived immediately lounges on the sofas, rolls around on the beds, uncorks the wine bottles and dives into the swimming pool as soon as he sees his employer vanish, or at least he secretly fantasizes about doing such things without being noticed, especially since it would be his job to erase all trace of rebellion. And I was, after all, a kind of servant, albeit in disguised form. I was aware that my brazenness also had something to do with the fact that Beatriz had recently tried to commit suicide; we take strange liberties with someone who might have killed herself: ‘Well,’ we say to ourselves, ‘she’s escaped the worst, fate has smiled on her; this period of time is a gift, and she can’t really complain; she tried to make whatever happens from now on not happen, decided not even to expect it to happen, never to experience it.’ And what I thought there in the kitchen, or what flashed through my mind, although certainly not in such a clearly formulated way, was this: ‘If it weren’t for me, that body would be rotting in a grave, beneath the earth, or reduced to a mere heap of unrecognizable ash, never to be looked at by anyone again; in a way her survival, or part of it — a few minutes or a few hours — belongs to me and I’ve earned the right to enjoy looking at her as much as I want.’ Some cultures believe that if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for whatever happens to them afterwards, for ensuring that the extra time you’ve granted them is neither tragic nor a torment; other cultures believe that you become not that person’s owner exactly, but something like a usufructuary, and the saved person places herself at the disposal of her saviour, entrusts or surrenders herself to him. All of a sudden, I had the conceited thought that if Beatriz was glad to be still alive, then she was in my debt; if she regretted it, though, she would consider herself my creditor. She was holding a glass of whisky in one hand and, in the other, an unlit cigarette, and there were already two cigarette ends in the nearby ashtray. Her bandaged wrists contrasted with the bare arms revealed by her sleeveless nightdress, because her skin was quite dark, which is why it was so worrying when she did occasionally turn terribly pale.