While the Women are Sleeping by Javier Marías Read Free Book Online

find a man utterly different from the one I first met and identical to the current me (scruffy, demoralised, shiftless, boorish, a blasphemer and a pervert) whom I will, however, possibly find just as awful as the Xavier de Gualta I met the first time. As regards the other possibility, that’s even worse: I might find the Gualta I first met, unchanged: impassive, courteous, boastful, elegant, devout and successful. And if that were the case, I would have to ask myself, with a bitterness I could not bear, why, of the two of us, had I been the one to abandon and renounce my own biography?
    (1986)

one night of love
    My sex life with my wife, Marta, is most unsatisfactory. My wife is neither very lascivious nor very imaginative, she never whispers sweet nothings and usually yawns whenever I happen to be in the mood. That’s why I occasionally go to prostitutes, but even they have grown increasingly nervous as well as increasingly expensive, and monotonous too, not to mention unenthusiastic. I would much prefer it if my wife, Marta, were more lascivious and imaginative and that I could be satisfied with her alone. I was happy on the one night when she did satisfy me.
    Among the things my father left me when he died is a packet of letters that still gives off a faint whiff of cologne. I don’t believe the sender actually perfumed the letter herself, but rather, I assume that, at some point in his life, my father kept the letters near a bottle of cologne that one day spilled onto them. You can still see the stain, and so the smell is clearly that of the cologne my father both used and didn’t use (given that the contents were spilled), and not that of the woman who sent him the letters. Moreover, the smell is characteristic of him, a smell I knew very well, that never changed and which I’ve never forgotten, the same throughout my childhood and adolescence and a good part of my youth, an age in which I am still installed or have not yet abandoned. That is why, before age diminished my interest in things amorous or passionate, I decided to read the letters he bequeathed to me and about which, up until then, I had felt no curiosity at all.
    The letters were written by a woman who was and still is called Mercedes. She wrote in black ink on blue paper. Her handwriting is large and maternal, made with rapid strokes of the pen, as if she no longer aspired to making an impression, doubtless aware that she had already caused an impression that would last forever. It’s as if the letters had been written by someone who had already died when she wrote them, like letters from beyond the grave. I can’t help thinking that it was some kind of game, one of those games of which children and lovers are so fond, and that consist basically in pretending to be what you’re not, or, put another way, in giving each other fictitious names and creating fictitious lives, afraid perhaps (this applies to lovers, not children) that their overpowering feelings will destroy them if they admit that they, with their real lives and names, are the people having those feelings. It’s a way of blunting the most passionate and most intense of emotions, pretending that the whole thing is happening to someone else; it’s also the best way of observing it, of being an aware spectator. Yes, experiencing it and, at the same time, being aware of it.
    The woman who signed herself Mercedes had opted for the fiction of sending her love to my father after she had already died, and so convinced was she of the eternal place and time she occupied while writing them (or so sure that the addressee would accept this convention) that she appeared entirely unconcerned by the fact that she had to entrust her envelopes to the post-box or that they bore the normal stamps and postmarks of the city of Gijón. They were all dated, and the only thing missing was a return address, but that is more or less obligatory in any semi-clandestine affair (the letters all belong to the period