When I Was Mortal (12 page)

“There is something worse,” he said. “And I’m going to tell you about it now. What I used to do before was much worse, not that I’m going to do this for ever, but it’s all right to be going on with until something else turns up, and you have no idea how great it is compared with what I used to do before.”

“What did you used to do, then? Did someone throw knives at you in a circus?”

I don’t know why I said that. I suppose it must have sounded offensive as if the actor Lorenzo must, inevitably, have come from the lowest sphere of the entertainment world. After all, I was only doing what he was doing, and I’d merely lost my job two years ago and had an ex-husband who had disappeared, gone missing, and a daughter to look after. He probably had a daughter too. And besides, they don’t have shows like that now,
that’s old hat, there aren’t even many circuses any more.

“Look, smartypants,” he said, but without sounding in the least reproachful and without intending to wound me, I’m not sure if that was simply because he was very tolerant or because he didn’t know how to. He said it the way children say it at school: “No, smartypants. I was a guardian.”

“A guardian? What do you mean a ‘guardian’? A guardian of what?” That was the last word I’d expected to hear from his lips and I couldn’t conceal my surprise, which may have seemed offensive. I looked him full in the face, a guardian, he looked more like someone out of a spaghetti western.

He touched the brim of his hat uneasily, as if straightening it.

“Well, I mean, I had someone under my guardianship, under my protection. Like being a bodyguard, only different.”

“Oh, a bodyguard,” I said, pulling a face, as if placing him further down the hierarchy. “And what was so bad about that? Were you constantly having to come between your boss and the bullets or something?” I had no reason to get stroppy with him, but I just kept coming out with these impertinent replies, perhaps I was beginning to feel sickened by the idea of soon having to suck him off with no preliminaries, time was moving on. Involuntarily I looked at his crotch, and immediately looked away again. I thought it again using that verb, ‘suck him off’, this modern age is making us all foul-mouthed, or perhaps we don’t much care if we are, or perhaps it’s just poverty: the less money you have, the fewer scruples too. And the older we get, the less life there is, there’s not that long left.

“No, I wasn’t that kind of bodyguard, I’m not a goon,” he said, not at all put out by my sarcasm, but speaking seriously, frankly, transparently. “I had to keep watch over a person who was ill, to stop her harming herself, it’s very difficult. You have to watch them twenty-four hours a day, be alert all the time
and you can’t always manage it.”

“Who was she? What happened to her?”

Loren took off his hat and stroked the top of it with his right forearm, the way cowboys do in films. Perhaps it was a gesture of respect. His hair was thinning.

“She was the daughter of a rich guy, a multimillionaire, unbelievable, one of those businessmen who doesn’t even know how much money he’s got. You’d know his name, but I’d best not tell you. The daughter was crazy, a hysteric with suicidal tendencies, every so often she’d try and kill herself. For weeks at a time, she would lead an apparently normal life and then, suddenly, with no prior warning, she’d slit her wrists in the bath. She was completely nuts. They didn’t want to hospitalize her because that would be too cruel and because the whole world and his wife would end up finding out about it, whereas only a few people, the people who were close to her, knew about the suicide attempts. So they took me on in order to stop it happening, so, yes, I was a bodyguard but not to protect her from others, as a bodyguard would normally do, but to protect her from herself. Her friends took me for a normal bodyguard, but I wasn’t. My job was different, it was more like being a custodian.”

I thought that he probably knew that word because he had taken the trouble to find one that would describe his role. He would have recognized it when he found it.

“I see,” I said. “And that was worse than this. How old was she? Why didn’t they get a nurse to look after her?”

Loren passed the back of his hand under his chin, against the grain, as if he had suddenly realized he wasn’t properly shaven. He was going to have to kiss me everywhere. But he seemed well-shaven enough to me, I was tempted to touch his face myself, but I didn’t dare, he might have taken it for a caress.

“For the same reason, because a nurse is more obvious, what’s
a young girl doing all day with a nurse hanging around? You could understand her having a bodyguard, with her super-rich Daddy. She could lead a normal life, you see, she was going to university, she was twenty years old, she went to parties and to other flash dos, to the psychiatrist as well, of course, but it wasn’t like she was depressed all day or anything, no. She’d be normal for a while, and friendly. Suddenly she’d get an attack and it was always a suicidal one, and you could never tell when it would happen. There were no sharp objects in her bedroom, no scissors, no penknives, nothing, no belts she could hang herself with, no tablets anywhere, not even aspirin; not even high-heeled shoes, her mother was always careful to make sure they weren’t too sharp ever since the time her daughter slashed her own cheekbone with one, they had to give her plastic surgery, you couldn’t tell, but she’d given herself a really nasty gash. She wouldn’t have been allowed to wear the shoes you’ve got on, quite a weapon really. In that sense, they treated her like a prisoner, no dangerous objects allowed. Her father was almost on the point of taking away her sunglasses when he saw
Godfather III
, in which someone kills another man with his glasses, with the sharp part of the arm, honestly, they’d given the guy a full body search and he goes and cuts the other guy’s throat with that. Have you seen
Godfather III
?”

“No I haven’t. I saw the first one.”

“If you like, I can lend you the video,” said Loren amiably. “It’s by far the best of the three.”

“I haven’t got a video. Go on,” I said, fearing that at any moment the door would open to reveal the tall face of Mir or the bony face of Custardoy or the short man’s moustache, in order for us to start filming our scenes. We wouldn’t be able to talk during them, not in the same way, we’d have to concentrate, get on with it.

“Anyway, I had to be around her all day and sleep with one eye open, I had the room next to hers, her room and mine were joined by a connecting door to which I had the key, you know, like you get in hotels sometimes, the house was enormous. But, of course, there are countless ways you can hurt yourself, if someone really wants to kill themselves, they’ll do it in the end, just like a murderer, if someone wants to kill someone, they’ll end up doing it however well protected their victim is, even if it’s the Prime Minister, even if it’s the King, if someone is determined to kill and they don’t care about the consequences, they’ll kill whoever they like, there’s nothing you can do about it, they’ve got nothing to lose if they don’t care what happens afterwards. Look at Kennedy, look at India, there’s hardly a politician left alive there. Well, it’s the same thing with someone who wants to murder herself, attempted suicides just make me laugh. The princess would throw herself headfirst down the escalator in a big department store and we’d pick her up with a great gash in her forehead and her legs all grazed, it was just lucky I was there. Or she’d hurl herself against a display cabinet, against a shop window in the middle of the street, you’ve no idea what that’s like, covered in cuts and with hundreds of glass splinters stuck in her, absolute madness, and howling with pain, because if you don’t manage to kill yourself, it really hurts. They couldn’t lock her up either, that wouldn’t have cured her. I got used to seeing danger everywhere, that’s the real horror, seeing the whole world as a threat, nothing is innocent and everything is against you, I saw enemies in the most inoffensive things, my imagination had to anticipate hers, I had to grab her arm every time we were going to cross the street, make sure she didn’t go near any high windows, be very careful in swimming pools, move her out of the path of any workman walking past carrying a pole because she might try and impale herself on it, well, that’s how I came to see things, she was capable
of anything, you start to distrust everything, people, objects, walls.” – “That’s how I used to be when my daughter was small,” I thought, “I’m still a bit like that even now, I’m never completely at ease. I know what that’s like. Yes, it is horrible.” – “Once, she tried to throw herself under the horses’ hooves in the final straight at the races, luckily, I managed to grab her by the ankle when she was just about to step onto the track, she took advantage of the fact that I was placing the bets and she slipped away from me, God, the panic I went through until I found her, she was already running towards the horses.” The actor Lorenzo made only a verbal pause, not a mental one, I could see that he was still thinking about what he was telling or going to tell. “I can assure you, that was much worse than this, terrible tension, constant anxiety, especially after I’d fucked her, I fucked her twice: well, connecting door, me having the key, the nights spent always half-awake and jumpy, it was sort of inevitable. Besides, whilst I was there with her there was no danger, nothing could happen to her while I was on top of her with my arms around her, with me on top of her she was safe, you see.” – “Sex is the safest place,” I thought, “you control the other person, you keep them immobilized and safe.” It had been a long time since I’d been in that safe place. – “But of course, you screw a woman a couple of times and you get fond of her. Well, not that fond, I’ve got a girlfriend too, and not because you have to, but it’s different, you’ve touched her, you’ve kissed her and you don’t look at her the same any more, and she treats you affectionately too.” I wondered if I would treat him affectionately after the session awaiting us. Or if he would get fond of me because of that. I didn’t interrupt. “So apart from the tension involved in the work, there was also the worry, not to say panic, I didn’t want anything to happen to her, that was the last thing in the world I wanted. In short, it was a real bummer; beside that, this is a breeze.”

“Bummer” and “breeze”, you hear those words less and less, they sounded almost funny.

“Yes,” I said. “What happened, did you get fed up?” I asked, not expecting him to answer in the affirmative. In fact, he’d already told me what had happened, by the way he stopped to think before telling me the rest.

Loren put his hat back on and breathed hard out of those damp nostrils, as if he were gathering strength before doing something that required an effort. The brim of his hat covered his cold, grey eyes, his face was now just nose and lips, the nice lips that I would not kiss, there are no kisses on the mouth in porn movies.

“No, I lost my job. I failed. The princess slit her throat in the kitchen of her house three weeks ago, in the middle of the night, and I didn’t even hear her leave the bedroom, what do you think of that? I was left with no one to look after. A disaster, a complete disaster.” For a moment, I was seized by the thought that perhaps the actor Lorenzo was just acting in order to distract me and ease my nerves. I thought for a moment about my little girl, I’d left her with a neighbour. He stood up, paced round the room, at the same time hitching up his jeans. He stopped by the closed door through which we would soon have to pass. I thought he was going to punch it, but he didn’t. He just said irritably: “When are we going to bloody well get started, I haven’t got all day.”

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 bedspread on it because of the heat, had not been disturbed, the sheets hadn’t been turned down. He appeared pale in the photos, as all corpses do, with an unusual expression on his face, because he was a jolly man, always laughing and joking, and his face seemed serious, rather than terrorstruck or stupefied, with a look of bitterness, or perhaps – more surprising still – mere displeasure or annoyance, as if he had been obliged to do something not particularly momentous, but against his inclinations. Since dying always seems momentous to the person if he knows that he’s
dying, one could not discount the possibility that they had stuck the spear in him while he was still stunned from the previous blow, so he wouldn’t have been aware of what was happening, and that might explain why he didn’t react when they plunged the weapon into the breast of the unknown woman and pulled it out again. The spear was his, brought back some years ago as a souvenir from a trip to Kenya which he had hated and from which he had returned complaining, as he usually did from trips abroad. I’d often seen it, planted nonchalantly in the umbrella stand, Dorta had always intended to hang it up somewhere, one of those ornaments that catch your fancy when you see it in someone else’s hands and which you like rather less when you get it home. Dorta didn’t collect such objects, but, from time to time, he gave in to a capricious impulse, especially in countries he knew he would never go back to. Those who disliked him saw a certain irony in the manner of his death, for he was very keen on pointed, metal walking sticks, of which he had quite a few. Not very original, rather pedantic.