Free While the Women are Sleeping by Javier Marías Page B

first, making some attempt to hold on to it. When Elena finished reading, her only remark was: ‘Elena, you have a lovely voice. You will find love with that voice.’
    And it was during these sessions that the ghost of the house first made his appearance. Every evening, while Elena was speaking the words of Cervantes or Dumas or Conan Doyle, or verses by Dario or Martí, she could just make out the figure of a young man of somewhat rustic appearance, a man of about thirty or so, who politely removed his broad-brimmed hat and whose perfectly decent clothes were, nevertheless, full of holes, as if he, or, rather, the short jacket, white shirt and tight trousers that clothed his absent body, had been riddled with bullets. The latter, however, seemed quite unscathed, and his face, barricaded behind a bushy moustache, had a healthy glow. The first time she saw him standing there—leaning his elbows on the back of the chair occupied by her mistress, occasionally playing with the hat he held in his hand, as if listening, rapt, to the words she was reading—she almost cried out with fright, especially when she saw that, although he wasn’t carrying any weapons, he did have a cartridge belt slung across his chest. But the young man immediately raised one finger to his lips and made reassuring signs to Elena, indicating that she should continue and not betray his presence. He had a very inoffensive face, and there was in his mocking eyes a constant, shy smile that occasionally gave way, during certain sombre passages—or perhaps when he was assailed by thoughts or memories of his own—to the alarmed, naive seriousness of someone who cannot quite distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. And so the young woman obeyed, although that first day, she could not help but keep glancing up rather too frequently and staring at a point above the bun on her mistress’s head, so much so that Señora Suárez Alday also kept glancing anxiously up, as if wondering whether some hypothetical hat were awry or whether her halo were not quite bright enough. ‘Whatever’s wrong, child?’ she said, somewhat annoyed. ‘What do you keep looking at?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Elena Vera, ‘it’s just a way of resting my eyes before going back to the text. Reading for such a long time is tiring.’ The young man with the scarf about his neck nodded and raised his hat for a moment in a gesture of approval and gratitude, and her explanation meant that the young woman could thereafter continue the habit and thus at least satisfy her visual curiosity. For, from then on, evening after evening and with very few exceptions, she read for her mistress and for him, without the former ever once turning round or discovering the young man’s intrusive presence.
    He did not appear at any other moment, so Elena never had the opportunity, over the years, of speaking to him or asking who he was or had been or why he was listening to her. She considered the possibility that he might have been the cause of the disappointment in love suffered by her mistress at some time in the past, but her lady never offered any confidences, despite the promptings of all those sentimental or tragic pages read out loud and despite the hints dropped by Elena herself during the slow, nocturnal conversations of half a lifetime. Perhaps the local rumours were false and the lady had no adventures worth telling, which was why she enjoyed hearing about the most remote and foreign and improbable of tales. On more than one occasion, Elena was tempted to take pity on her and tell her what was going on each evening behind her back, to allow her to share this small daily excitement, to tell her of the existence of a man between those ever more asexual, taciturn walls in which there was only the echo, sometimes for whole nights and days together, of their female voices, the lady’s grown ever older and more confused, and Elena’s, each morning, a little weaker and fainter, a little