Free The Man of Feeling by Javier Marías Page A

that, at its close, I would have to return to Berta's undesired side and to continue losing myself indefinitely in various hotel rooms and to continue shading away into nothing in various other cities and on other journeys with no real point of reference, far from Natalia (whom I would no longer see every day, whom I would perhaps never see again), while the Manurs and Dato would return to Belgium to their ordinary lives of which—I realized—I knew absolutely nothing. I still knew nothing of any substance about Hieronimo Manur, the banker from Flanders, but even more amazing—I realized—was that I knew nothing of substance about Natalia Manur either, about his wife of many years and my companion of seven days. (That may be why I have not yet told you anything about her, about all the things I learned at the time and have found out since.) During our long conversations—with the imperturbable, taciturn Dato as constant witness—we talked about many things, but never about her, that is, never about her history or past or life. I had had occasion to observe her person minutely and with growing (but unthinking) passion: her unhurried gestures (as if, when she moved, space became somehow denser and more resistant), her facial expressions that had grown so un-Spanish (free of anger and indifference), her grave, sorrowful voice that sounded at times as if it were emerging from a cloud of smoke, her prolonged silences, like absences, before she replied to my sudden questions on an endless variety of topics, her liquid, dreaming eyes, the interminable strides taken by her long legs, the look on her face which was perpetually indefinable or dissolving into melancholy, and her occasional laughter too that revealed large, perfect, very white teeth: an African smile. Likewise she had been able to introduce me to her tastes: her taste in food, at the numerous lunches and suppers we had shared and in the occasional patisserie; her taste in clothes, when I went shopping with her a couple of times and watched her touching fabrics with wise fingers and repeatedly appearing from and disappearing into changing rooms, while Dato and I awaited her judgements, only pretending to offer our opinions; her taste as a collector, at an important auction that was held during that period and in which she—via Dato's sharp, ghostly hand, which rose like a stiletto in response to her desires— made off with two paintings (one Diaz de la Peña and a very small Paret), the centenary edition of Flaubert's complete works and a beautiful penknife designed by Ravilious, with a mother-of-pearl blade and a silver handle, which, given its large size, looked like nothing so much as an iridescent dagger. But I knew nothing at all about her history or past or life, apart from the scant information vouchsafed to me in Dato's self-absorbed and fragmentary complaint during the first and only opportunity I had had to talk to him alone (too soon for my curiosity to have learned how to direct its questions) and from the enthusiastic remarks which, rarely and only in passing, she made about her brother, Roberto Monte, that recent emigre to South America. (She seemed to admire him so much that on more than one occasion I wondered if I were not unwittingly merely standing in for him in the city of Madrid; for we had barely spent a minute apart since the day we met, exactly, according to Dato, as she and Monte used to do when they got together; and, like her brother—I thought—I too had introduced her to a few fleeting people who would not see her again without my being there, although they were not from Madrid and were only the waning Hörbiger, the presumptuous Volte, the irresponsible Priés and the bellicose conductor.) After a week of being unconditionally present, I still had no idea, therefore, about the nature of the ills afflicting Natalia Manur and which Dato claimed to know so well, nor why it was so illogical—according to him— that she should have no