When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías

nationality and to have his qualifications validated, he had to work as a nurse and, subsequently, in a clinic (“men and women, old people and adolescents, like so much plumbing: I go there to arbitrate amongst the horrors and the trivia”). He almost joined Médecins du Monde or Médecins sans Frontières, organizations that would have sent him off to Africa or to Central America for a while, with all expenses paid but with no salary, which would have meant returning with empty pockets. Now that he couldn’t spend all his free time writing, the pace at which he was able to work towards his famous one hundred per cent had slowed considerably. He didn’t much like talking about Eliane, he preferred to talk about other women, young and not so young, amongst them my Italian friend to whom I’d introduced him some years before. According to his version of events, she’d been very cruel to him; according to her version, she’d simply acted in self-defence. It seems that after spending one night together, he’d left her house only to return a few hours later with his luggage, all set to move in. She threw him out in high female dudgeon. I listened to both versions and offered no opinion, merely regretting that it had happened.
    He was now no longer an unpublished author but, as expected,his novel didn’t sell in Spain and was reviewed almost nowhere. When I went to Paris, we used to arrange to have supper or lunch at Balzar or at Lipp, and that didn’t change, but now he allowed me to pay for him whereas before, he’d always imposed the law of hospitality: you’re a stranger and you’re in my city. He still dressed well – I remember he often wore a particularly smart raincoat – as if that were something his breeding would not allow him to give up; it was, perhaps, the only characteristic he’d inherited from his father. Now, however, the colours he wore were not so splendidly coordinated, as if that had always been dependent on Eliane’s exquisite taste in anything to do with adornment. He mentioned her only once in a letter: “From the severed root with Eliane furious lightning shoots sprout forth, draining away half my life.” We didn’t see each other for two years and when I saw him again after that time, his physical appearance had changed somewhat and, with his usual tact, he forewarned me: “I’m not only worn out mentally, I’m also in terrible physical shape. A witness to this is the galloping alopecia that obliges me to wear a cap to protect me from the ill-tempered autumns we get in this part of the world.” He’d had to move to a largely North African quarter. On one of my trips to Paris, I phoned him but got no reply, although I knew he was in town. Thinking that perhaps his phone had been cut off, I caught the Metro and arrived at his remote and unfamiliar new house, or rather, what turned out to be a room, tiny and sparsely furnished, a final desolate stopping place. But, in fact, all I remember of that scene was the look of happiness on his face when he opened the door to me. On his desk was a glass of wine.

    Things improved for him somewhat while I was away, travelling to Italy rather than to Paris. Xavier had at last found the perfectjob for his purposes, although, accordingly, it earned him little money: he got a job as a locum in a hospital, working more or less only when he wanted or needed to. As long as he worked a certain minimum number of hours per month, he could then increase those hours depending on how energetic he was feeling and on how much money he needed and this freed him to hurry impatiently on towards the completion of his literary work. I never really understood this impatience, bearing in mind that, since
Vivisection
, nothing else of his had been published. His novel
Hecate
, the book entitled
The Edgeless Sword
, his
Treatise on the Will
, the poems he sometimes sent me, none of these was ever successful in finding a publisher. I remember two lines from one of his