The Man of Feeling by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online Page B

will go back to being that from now on) before that trip to Madrid. I felt afraid and waited and thought during rehearsals, in hotel rooms, on my walks around cities, in trains and in the few planes I traveled on, in foyers and in bars, as I read scores and studied roles, and (sometimes) during performances, indeed, I remember how, during one performance of Turandot in Cleveland, even when I myself was involved and was singing in that unmistakable voice of mine which was already beginning to make a big impression, heralding that final blossoming in Naples that provided me with my sobriquet, I was thinking intently about Berta and me and about how I didn't love her. I used to think so much that I even made my few conversations, especially with Berta but also with other people, a mere verbal extension of my thoughts when I was alone; I used to think so much that I grew bored with myself. It was, moreover, an unreflecting form of thought, unguided, fluctuating, with no goal, no starting point, unbearable; and I had been finding it totally unbearable for some time—and that is not just one more characteristic of the pessimist, it is the main characteristic: being unable to bear that for which there is no remedy or, rather, being unable to bear the only thing that is possible—when I found the salvation and miracle of that unexpected Madrid friendship, which very soon—indeed, at once—was not restricted to the hours I will term "musical": it spread out to fill all the hours of the day, from the leisurely, not too early breakfast taken in the hotel dining room, to the quick or not so quick lunch in some restaurant near the Teatro de la Zarzuela, to the walks, visits, and shopping expeditions around the city, even to several suppers stolen from Señor Manur or, rather—it would be more accurate to say—indifferently yielded up to us. Dato, Natalia Manur and me. We became an inseparable threesome, without the principle of inseparability or the principle of cohesion becoming in any way visible or capable of being put into words, without the profound attraction that Natalia Manur had for me and I for her even aspiring to be so. For the curious thing about those days was that Dato, the apparently indispensable conduit, turned out, in reality—the reality was those breakfasts, lunches, walks, visits, shopping trips and suppers—to be entirely dispensable and neutral: a continuous presence, not just taken for granted but perhaps necessary, yet somehow barely noticeable. With Natalia Manur (or more likely with her and me), Dato was entirely different from the way he had shown himself to be in the hotel bar, as if—again that same suspicion—he were taking advantage of my enthusiasm and my initiative to give his own a rest, or perhaps he remained scrupulously in the background in order to allow me to shine, to let me make myself known. Sometimes, as we were walking along the suffocating, filthy, chattering streets, he would walk a few paces ahead or hang back on the old excuse of tying his shoe lace or looking in a shop window that would be of no interest to Natalia and me (a shop selling buttons, an ironmonger's, not even a tobacconist's or a grocer's), but we usually caught up with him or waited for him to catch up with us, as if not just the fluency of our conversations, but also our very existence there before each other, the possibility of seeing each other, depended on or required the impetus of that small figure who had brought us together. When we were sitting at a table, as we so very often were, he tended to keep silent as if he really were just an extra or part of our retinue, and he barely passed any comment at all except on the wine and the food. He also (as befits both a subaltern and a gentleman) dealt with the waiters. He was the one who asked for or chose a table, the one who offered us the menu when we were absorbed in talk, the one who, in the presence of the man taking note, would invite Natalia Manur and me,