Free When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías Page B

However, we first met in neither of those two cities, but in Barcelona, and before that meeting, I had previously read a book of his sent to me by a Madrid publishing house I used to work for as a reader (work, as is usually the case, that was poorly remunerated). There was little likelihood of this novel, or whatever it was, ever being published and I can remember almost nothing about it, except that it revealed a certain inventiveness with words, a strong rhythmic sense and a broad culture (for example, the author knew the word “wrack”) but apart from that it was more or less unintelligible, at least to me. Were I a critic, I would have described him as out-Joycing Joyce, though he was less puerile, or perhaps senile, than the later Joyce, to which his own work bore only a remote resemblance.Nevertheless, I recommended the book for publication and expressed my qualified regard for it in my report. His agent subsequently phoned me (for this writer, whose true vocation seemed to be to remain forever unpublished, nonetheless had an agent) to arrange a meeting to coincide with a trip his client would be making to Barcelona, where his family lived and where, fifteen or sixteen years ago, I too was living.
    His name was Xavier Comella and I never did ascertain whether the business to which he sometimes referred vaguely as “the family business” was in fact the chain of clothes shops of the same name in Barcelona (selling mainly sweaters). Given the iconoclastic nature of his writing, I was expecting some wild, bearded individual, some kind of visionary with a penchant for pendants and vaguely Polynesian clothes, but he wasn’t like that at all. The man who emerged from the exit of the Metro at Tibidabo, where we’d arranged to meet, was only slightly older than myself, I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time, and much better dressed (I’m a very neat person myself, but he was wearing a tie – with a small knot – and cufflinks, unusual in men of our age and particularly so then); and he had an extraordinarily old-fashioned face, a face – like his writing – straight out of the interwar period. He wore his slightly wavy, blondish hair combed back, like a fighter pilot or a French actor in a black-and-white movie – Gérard Philipe or the young Jean Marais – and his sherry-brown eyes had a small dark fleck in the white of the left one, which gave his gaze a wounded look. He had good, robust teeth and a well-defined jaw so firm it gave the impression of being permanently clenched. His very prominent cranium, the bones of which were clearly visible beneath the smooth brow, always seemed on the point of exploding, not because of its unusual size, but because the taut skin over the frontal bone seemed incapable of containing it, or perhaps that was just the effect of the twovertical veins at his temples that seemed somehow too protuberant, too blue. He was good-looking, genial and, moreover, extraordinarily polite, especially for a man of his age and given the rather boorish times we lived in. He was one of those men you know you will never be able to confide in, but one in whom you can confidently trust. He had a studiedly foreign, or rather, extraterritorial look about him that only emphasized his estrangement from the times he’d been born into, a look acquired no doubt during the seven or eight years he’d spent out of Spain. He spoke Spanish with the attractive pronunciation of Catalans who have never actually spoken much Catalan (with soft c’s and z’s, soft g’s and j’s) and with the slight hint of a stammer at the beginning of sentences, occasionally stumbling over the first three or four words, as if he had to perform some minor mental act of translation. He could speak and read several languages, including Latin, in fact he mentioned that he’d been reading Ovid’s
Tristia
on the plane from Paris, and he said this without a trace of pedantry but rather with the satisfaction of one who