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

the rabbit gin, that wouldn’t be the reason this time, though, but the thunder. He went over to the window to see if the dog was anywhere in sight, and he saw it there, by the rain-drenched sea – pellets falling on a shaken length of cloth – standing there like a tripod and barking at the zigzag lightning, as if he were waiting for each flash. “Perhaps there was a storm on the night when he got caught in the trap,” Custardoy thought, “and now he’s no longer afraid of the lightning.” He had just had that thought when he saw the little servant girl come running up in her nightdress, she was carrying a lead in her hand with which to secure the dog and drag him away. He saw her struggling, her body clearly outlined beneath her drenched clothes, and he heard an anguished voice immediately beneath his own window: “You’re going to get killed, you’re going to get killed!” said the voice. “Nobody sleeps in this house,” he thought. “Apart, perhaps, from Cámara.” He noiselessly opened the window and leaned out a little, not wanting to be seen. He felt the heavy rain on the back of his neck and what he saw from above was an opened black umbrella, Señora Vallabriga waiting anxiously for the return of those two unfinished figures, it was her voice, hers the bare arm that, from time to time, he could see reaching out from beneath the umbrella, as if she wanted to attract or grab both the dog and the little girl, struggling together, the dog with the missing leg could hardly run away or escape, it kept barking at the lightning that lit up its eyes, the reluctant eyesof a languid boyfriend, and the girl’s body that seemed more adult than it did when clothed – her body suddenly finished and complete. Custardoy wondered who it was that the aunt feared was going to be killed, and he soon found out, when the girl finally reached the door, dragging the dog, and the three of them disappeared, first beneath the umbrella like a cupola and then into the house. He closed the window and, from within, he heard just two more sentences, both spoken by the aunt, the girl must have been rendered speechless: “Look at that little mutt,” she said. And then: “Into bed this minute, my girl, and take that off.” Custardoy heard weary footsteps coming up to his floor and then, when he was once more lying down in bed and when silence had fallen after the final noise of one door closing – just one door – he wondered if perhaps he had been wrong about the bed that guarded the Goya and that no one would visit. He didn’t wonder too long, but he decided that the following morning he would commit an act of betrayal: the report he had to give to Cámara about the possibilities of a forgery would say that it wasn’t worth forging a copy. The young girl who would inherit the Goya had certainly earned it. He would tell Cámara: “Forget it.”
    Note:
The character of the servant girl and the implied lesbianism in this mini-story came about because the five obligatory elements imposed by the commission (a veritable Chinese torture) immediately made me think of
Rebecca –
in either Alfred Hitchcock’s or Daphne du Maurier’s version.

FLESH SUNDAY
    W E WERE STAYING in the Hotel de Londres and, during our first twenty-four hours in the city we hadn’t left our room, we had merely been out onto the terrace to look at La Concha beach, far too crowded for the spectacle to be a pleasant one. An indistinguishable mass is never a pleasing sight, and it was impossible there to fix on anyone, even with binoculars, an excess of bare flesh has a distinctly levelling effect. We had taken the binoculars with us just in case, one Sunday, we went to Lasarte, to the races, there’s not much to do in San Sebastián on a Sunday in August, we would be there for three weeks on our holidays, four Sundays but only three weeks, because that second day of our stay was a Sunday and we would be leaving on a Monday.
    I spent more time out on the