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

familiar tu, and offered me her body, if not her soul. ‘You can do what you like with me,’ she said, ‘whatever you can imagine or wouldn’t even dare to imagine doing to someone else. If you grant my plea to disinter and cremate your father and allow him to rejoin me, you will never forget me for as long as you live, not even when you die, because I will gobble you up, and you will gobble me up.’ I believe I blushed when I read this for the first time, and for a fraction of a second I toyed with the idea of going straight to Gijón to offer myself to her (I’m drawn to the weird and the dirty in sex). But then I immediately thought: ‘How absurd. I don’t even know her last name.’ That third letter, however, did not end up in the rubbish bin. I still have it hidden away.
    It was about then that Marta underwent a change of attitude. I don’t mean that, from one day to the next, she stopped yawning and became a woman of unbridled passion, but she did begin to show a greater interest in and curiosity about me and my no longer very young body, as if she sensed an infidelity on my part and was on the alert, or as if she herself had been unfaithful and wanted to find out if some newly discovered technique might be possible with me as well.
    ‘Come here,’ she would say sometimes, and she had never made such overtures to me before. Or she would utter a few words, for example: ‘Yes, yes, now.’
    The third letter that had promised so much had left me waiting for a fourth letter even more anxiously than the second irritating letter had left me waiting for the third. But no fourth letter arrived, and I realised that I was beginning to wait for the post each day with growing impatience. I noticed that my heart turned over whenever an envelope arrived bearing no return address, and then my eyes would glance rapidly at the postmark, to see if it was from Gijón. But no one ever writes from Gijón.
    Months passed, and on All Souls’ Day, Marta and I took flowers to my parents’ grave, in which my grandparents and my sister are also buried.
    ‘What will happen to us , do you think?’ I said to Marta, as we breathed in the clean cemetery air from a bench close to our family vault. I was smoking a cigarette, and she was studying her nails, holding her spread fingers some distance from her, like someone urging a crowd to remain calm. ‘I mean, when we die. There’s no room here now.’
    ‘The things you think about.’
    I gazed off into the distance in order to give myself an appropriately dreamy air that would justify what I was about to say, and I said:
    ‘I’d like to be buried. Burial is more suggestive of repose than cremation. My father wanted to be cremated, do you remember, and we didn’t do what he wanted. We should have, I think. It would bother me to think that my wish to be buried were ignored. What do you think? I’m thinking we ought to disinter him. That way, there’d be room for me when I die. You could go to your parents’ vault.’
    ‘Let’s get out of here. You’re beginning to give me the creeps.’
    We set off among the graves, towards the exit. It was sunny. But we had only gone a few steps, when I stopped, looked at the tip of my cigarette and said:
    ‘Don’t you think we should cremate him?’
    ‘Do what you like, but let’s get out of here.’
    I threw down my cigarette and buried it in the ground with my foot.
    Marta refused to attend the ceremony, an emotionless affair of which I was the sole witness. My father’s remains went from being vaguely recognisable in his coffin to being entirely unrecognisable in an urn. It didn’t seem to me necessary to scatter the ashes and, besides, that’s not allowed.
    When I got home, late, I felt quite depressed; I sat down in my armchair without taking off my coat or turning on the light and stayed there, waiting, musing, thinking, perhaps recovering from the responsibility and the effort of having done something I should have done some