Free When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías Page A

like the one Dr Arranz wore in his day, not a slim moustache, though, but soft and thick and with a few grey hairs. He’s middle-aged, as I was and as perhaps Luisa was, although she always seemed young to me, just as my parents or Arranz never did. They are in the living room of an unfamiliar apartment, his apartment, a ramshackle place, full of books and paintings and ornaments, a very mannered apartment. The man is called Manolo Reyna and he has enough money never to have to dirty his hands. It is the afternoon and they are sitting on a sofa, talking in whispers, and at that moment I am visiting María, two weeks before my death on the return from a trip, and that trip has still not begun, they are still making their preparations. The whispers are clearly audible, they have a degree of reality which seems incongruous now, not with my current non-tactile state, but with life itself, in which nothing is ever quite so concrete, in which nothing ever breathes quite so much. There is a moment, though, when Luisa raises her voice, like someone raising their voice to defend themselves or to defend someone else, and what she says is this:
    “But he’s always been so good to me, I’ve nothing to reproach him with, and that’s what’s so difficult.”
    And Manolo Reyna answers slowly:
    “It wouldn’t be any easier or any more difficult if he had made your life impossible. When it comes to killing someone, it doesn’t matter any more what they’ve done, it always seems an extreme response to any kind of behaviour.”
    I see Luisa put her thumb to her mouth and bite it a little, a gesture I’ve so often seen her make when she’s uncertain, or, rather, before making a decision. It’s a trivial gesture and it’s unseemly that it should also appear in the midst of a conversation we were not party to, the one that takes place behind our backsand mentions us or criticizes us or even defends us, or judges us and condemns us to death.
    “Well, you kill him, then; you can’t expect me to do anything that extreme.”
    Now I see that the person standing next to my television set – still on – and wielding the black thing is not Luisa, nor even Manolo Reyna with his folkloric name, but someone contracted and paid to do it, to strike me twice on the forehead, the word is assassin, in the war a lot of militiamen were used for such purposes. My assassin hits me twice and does so quite dispassionately, and that death no longer seems to me just or appropriate or, of course, compassionate, as life usually is, and as mine was. The black thing is a hammer with a wooden shaft and an iron head, a common-or-garden hammer. It belongs in my apartment, I recognize it.
    There where time passes and flows, a lot of time has gone by, so much so that no one whom I knew or met or pitied or loved remains. Each one of them, I suppose, will return unnoticed to that space in which forgotten times past accumulate, and they will see only strangers, new men and women who, like children, believe that the world began with their birth and there’s no point asking them about our past, erased existence. Now Luisa will remember and will know everything that she did not know in life or at my death. I cannot speak now of nights and days, everything has been levelled out without resort to effort or routine, a routine in which I can say that I knew, above all, peace and contentment: when I was mortal, all that time ago, in that place where there still is time.

EVERYTHING BAD COMES BACK
For the night doctor
,
who did not want to remain fictitious
    T ODAY I RECEIVED a letter that reminded me of a friend. It was written by a woman unknown both to myself and to that friend.
    I met him fifteen or sixteen years ago and – for no other reason than that he died – stopped seeing him two years ago, not that we ever saw each other with any frequency, given that he lived in Paris and I in Madrid. Although he visited my city only rarely, I used to visit his quite often.