When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías

before you, she felt like a memory, a blurred and tenuous memory and, as such, harmonious and peaceful, soothing and faintly nostalgic, impossible to grasp. Holding her in your arms must have been like embracing something one has lost, as sometimes happens in dreams. Xavier told me once that he’d been in love with her since he was fourteen years old, I didn’t dare ask how or where they’d met at such a tender age, but then I don’t ask many questions. A single image of the two of them together predominates over all the others. One morning, we visited an open-air market selling flowers and plants; it began to rain really rather hard, but because the excursion had been specially arranged so that Eliane could buy, amongst other things, the first peonies of the year, no one even considered looking for shelter, not that there was any, instead Xavier opened his umbrella and took enormous pains to ensure that not a single drop of rain fell on her as she continued on her meticulous andunalterable course, with Xavier following always a couple of paces behind, holding his waterproof vault above her and getting soaked in the process, like a devoted servant inured to such things. I brought up the rear, umbrella-less but not daring to abandon the cortège, like a servant of a lower rank, less committed and quite unrewarded.
    When she was not with us, he was more forthcoming, much more than he was in his letters too, which were affectionate but restrained, indeed at times they were so intensely laconic that – like the taut skin and the swollen veins on his forehead – they seemed to presage some explosion, an explosion that would take place outside the envelope, in real life. It was during such a meeting, when Eliane was not with us, that he first spoke to me of the violent rages to which he was subject and which I always found so hard to imagine given that, over the thirteen or fourteen years I knew him, I was never a witness to one, although it’s true that we saw each other only infrequently and that his life seems to me now like a defective copy of a book, full of blank pages, or like a city that one has driven through many times before but always at night. Once he told me about a recent visit to Barcelona and how he’d borne in silence for as long as he could his father’s absurd words of advice – his father was separated from Xavier’s mother and had remarried – and how, then, in a sudden fit of rage, he’d started wrecking the house, hurling furniture against walls, tearing down chandeliers, ripping up paintings, demolishing shelves and, of course, kicking in the television set. No one stopped him; he simply calmed down of his own accord after a few cataclysmic minutes. He took no pleasure in telling me this, but neither did he show any regret or sorrow. I met his father in Paris together with his new Dutch wife, who wore a diamond stud in her nose (a woman ahead of her time). His father’s name was Ernest and the only thing he had in commonwith Xavier was the prominent forehead: he was much taller and had black hair with not a trace of grey in it, possibly dyed, he was a vain man, indulgent and easy-going, but slightly disdainful of his own son, whom he evidently didn’t take at all seriously, although that may not have meant much, since he obviously didn’t take anything very seriously. He was like an eternal spoiled child, still keen on riding competitions, skeet shooting and – at the time – leafing through treatises on Hindu philosophy; he was one of those people, increasingly rare nowadays, who seemed to spend his entire life lounging around in a silk dressing gown. Xavier didn’t take his father very seriously either, but he couldn’t treat him with the same disdain, partly because his father irritated him so much, but also because he just hadn’t inherited that particular characteristic.
    It was on another occasion when Eliane was absent, about two or three years after our first meeting, that Xavier