When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías

Author:Javier Marías [MarÍas Javier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141973623
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Blood on a Spear

For Luis Antonio de Villena

I SAID GOODBYE for ever to my best friend without knowing that I was, because the following night, after far too long a delay, he was found lying on his bed with a spear through his chest and with a strange woman by his side, also dead, but without the murder weapon impaled in her body, because the weapon was one and the same and they must have first stuck it in her, then pulled it out again in order to mingle her blood with that of my best friend. The lights were all on and the television too, and had doubtless remained so for the whole of that day, my friend’s first day without life or the world’s first day without his worldly presence in it after thirty-nine years, the light bulbs incongruous in the harsh morning sun and perhaps less so against the stormy afternoon sky, but Dorta would have hated all that waste. I don’t quite know who pays the bills for the dead.

He had a great bulge on his head from an earlier blow, it wasn’t just a swelling or, if it was, it encompassed the whole of his forehead, the skin tight over his elephantiasic cranium, as if he had become Frankensteinized in death, a small bald spot on his hairline that hadn’t been there before. That blow must have knocked him out, but it would seem that he didn’t entirely lose consciousness, because his eyes were open and he had his glasses on, although the man who had then stuck the spear in him might have put them on afterwards, as a joke, you don’t need glasses when you know for certain that you’re never going to see ever again: here you are, four-eyes, maybe these will help you find the road to hell more easily. He was wearing the bathrobe he always used as a dressing gown, he bought a new one every few months and this latest one was yellow, he should have avoided that colour, as bullfighters do. He had his slippers on, the rigid, hard-soled variety that Americans wear, a kind of moccasin cut low on the instep, with no embellishments and with a very flat heel, you feel safer if you can hear your own footsteps. His two bare legs emerged from amongst the folds of his bathrobe, and, although he was a hairy man, I saw that his shins were hairless, some people do lose the hair on their legs there from the constant rubbing of their trousers, or from their socks if they wear long socks, sports socks they call them, and he always wore them, I never once saw a strip of bare skin when he crossed his legs in public. Enough blood had flowed for enough hours – with the lights on and busy witnesses on the TV screen – to soak the bathrobe and the sheets and to ruin the wooden floor. The bed, with no

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