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

of my father’s widowhood, but he never spoke to me of this late passion). Nor is there anything unusual about the existence of this correspondence—though I have no idea whether my father replied in the usual way—for there is nothing more commonplace than widowers in sexual thrall to bold, fiery (or disillusioned) women. The declarations, promises, demands, reminiscences, outbursts, protests, exclamations and obscenities (especially obscenities) that fill these letters are conventional enough and remarkable less for their style than for their audacity. None of this would be of any interest if, only a few days after deciding to open the packet and peruse the blue sheets with rather more equanimity than shock, I myself had not received a letter from that woman called Mercedes, of whom I couldn’t say: She’s still alive, because she seems to have been dead from the start.
    Her letter was very proper, and she didn’t presume a relationship with me simply because she had once been on intimate terms with my father, nor was she so vulgar as to translate her love for the father, now that he was dead, into an unhealthy love for his son, who was and is still alive and was and is still me. Seemingly completely unembarrassed that I should know about their relationship, she restricted herself to setting before me an anxiety, a complaint and a demand for the presence of her lover, who, despite his repeated promises, had still not joined her six months after his death: he had failed to meet her in the place or perhaps I should say time agreed. This, in her view, could be put down to one of two reasons: to a sudden, last-minute cooling of his affections at the moment of death that would have caused the deceased to break his promise, or to his having been buried and not cremated (as he had requested), and which—according to Mercedes, who spoke of this as if it were the most natural thing in the world—could prevent or obstruct their eschatological meeting or reunion.
    It was true that despite my fathers request to be cremated, although he had not insisted on it (perhaps because he made this request only at the end, when his willpower was weakened), he had nevertheless been buried alongside my mother, because there was space for him in the family vault, and Marta and I felt it was the appropriate, sensible, convenient thing to do. Mercedes’ letter seemed to me a joke in the very worst taste. I threw it in the rubbish bin and was even tempted to do the same with the old letters too. Like them, the new envelope bore fresh stamps and was postmarked in Gijón. It didn’t smell of anything though. I wasn’t prepared to disinter my father’s remains merely in order to set fire to them.
    The next letter arrived soon afterwards, and in it, Mercedes, as if she could read my thoughts, begged me to cremate my father because she could not go on living (that’s what she said, go on living) in that state of uncertainty. Rather than continue waiting for him for all eternity, possibly in vain, she would prefer to know that my father had decided not to rejoin her. In this letter, she still addressed me with the formal usted. I can’t deny that I was fleetingly moved (that is, while I was reading the letter, not afterwards), but the conspicuous Asturias postmark was too prosaic for me to be able to see it as anything but a macabre joke. The second letter took its place in the rubbish bin as well. My wife, Marta, saw me tearing it up and asked:
    ‘What is it that’s annoyed you so much?’ My gestures must have been somewhat violent. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said and carefully gathered up the pieces so that she wouldn’t be able to put them back together again.
    I waited for a third letter, which, precisely because I did wait for it, took longer than expected to arrive or perhaps time spent waiting just seems longer. It was quite different from the previous letters and resembled those my father used to receive. Mercedes addressed me now with the