When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online Page A

moments and I watched him from behind, a giant figure moving off towards the grandstand. As he walked, he patted his jacket on his right side, the gun in its holster. He had left his binoculars with me. I tore up my tickets but not his winning tickets. I put them in my pocket, he was unlikely to want to claim them, I thought.

UNFINISHED FIGURES
    I DON ’ T KNOW whether or not I should talk about what happened recently to Custardoy. It’s the only time, as far as I know, that he’s shown any scruples, or perhaps it was pity. Then again, why not.
    Custardoy is a copier and forger of paintings. He receives fewer and fewer commissions for the latter, better-paid work, because the new forgery detection techniques make fraud almost impossible, at least in museums. A few months ago, however, he got a request from a private individual: a bankrupt nephew wanted to do a switch on his aunt, who owned a small, unfinished Goya, hidden away at her house near the sea. He could no longer afford to wait for her to die, for his aunt had told him that although she was going to leave him the house, she had decided to leave the Goya to a young servant girl whom she had watched grow up. According to the nephew, the aunt was senile.
    Custardoy was prepared to work from photographs and from the report that an expert had drawn up years before, but he asked to see the painting at least once in order to make sure that the trick was feasible, and to that end he was invited by the nephew, who was called Cámara and who rarely visited his aunt, to spenda weekend at the house by the sea. The aunt lived alone with the young servant girl, little more than a child, for whom she bought text books and pencil cases: the girl went to school every morning in Port de la Selva, came back for lunch and spent the rest of the day and night waiting for her mistress to assign her some task. The aunt, whose surname was Vallabriga, spent all day and all evening in front of the television or talking on the phone to faded friends in Barcelona. More than her husband, who had died ten years before, she missed someone whom she had always missed during her marriage, a languid boyfriend from her youth, who went off with another woman – a minuscule, remote obsession. The aunt had a dog with three legs, its back right leg having been cut off after the dog spent a night with it trapped in a gin for rabbits. No one had gone to rescue it, the people round about had taken its howls for those of a wolf. According to her nephew Cámara, the aunt said that the look in the dog’s eyes reminded her of her lost and much-mourned boyfriend. “She’s completely gaga,” added the nephew. Señora Vallabriga used to take long walks by the seashore with the dog and the servant girl, three unfinished figures, the girl because she was still a child, the dog because of its missing leg, the aunt because of her false and her real widowhood.
    Although Custardoy wears a ponytail and long sideburns and has lifts in his shoes (modernity misconstrued, a look considered reprehensible outside of big cities), he was well received: the aunt could flirt stiffly with him and the girl had something to do. After supper, the aunt took Custardoy and her nephew Cámara to see the Goya, which she kept in her bedroom,
Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga
, a distant ancestor bearing not the slightest resemblance to her oblique descendant. “Can you do it?” Cámara asked Custardoy in a low voice. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” said Custardoy and then more loudly: “It’s a good painting, it’s ashame the background isn’t finished,” and he examined it closely, despite the fact that the light wasn’t good. The same light lit the bed much better. “No one will have visited that bed in ten years,” he thought, “possibly more.” Custardoy is always thinking about the contents of beds.
    That night there was a storm and, from his room on the second floor, Custardoy heard the lame dog barking. He remembered