When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías Page B

easy. They might make you pay for it.” That’s the sort of thing he wrote. There was more of a sense of continuity, even a kind of progress, in the first category of remarks: “I don’t feel like writing, I don’t feel like working or travelling or thinking or even despairing,” he said and then, in the next letter: “I read so as to give some semblance of being occupied.” Some time afterwards, I thought that perhaps he’d recovered slightly, for he spoke openly – for the first time – of the experiment on which he was engaged: “As for my ethical experiment in endogenous pain, I’m still waiting for the explosion of the time bomb I set ticking at the beginning of summer, but I don’t know the day or the hour it’s due to go off. You see how things are, but don’t waste too much time thinking about it, it’s too pathetic to merit any deep consideration, and if there can be said to be something titanic about all this, the truth is that I feel more like a midget.” I don’t know what I wrote in reply nor if I even asked him about it, for we forget what’s in our own letters the moment we put them in the letter box, or even before that, while we’re still licking the envelope and sealing it down. He continued to give me only the bare outlines of his inactivity: “A bit of medicine, very little wielding of the pen, rather more withdrawal. Dead wet leaves.” I remembered that, on his first and failed attempt, he’d mentioneda period of six months as the time he would need to go without his medication in order to achieve what he was after, and so, with the arrival of winter, I expected that his time bomb would either explode or he’d have to stop the experiment, even if that meant being rushed into hospital again. But that season only contributed to a worsening of his suffering, which he nevertheless still judged to be insufficient: “For two months now I’ve been more dead than alive. I don’t write, don’t read, don’t listen, don’t see. I hear the distant rumble of thunder but I don’t know if the storm is approaching or moving off, whether it’s in the future or in the past. I’ll close now: the vulture is already pecking at my left hemisphere.” I assumed he was referring to the migraine tormenting him.
    Another two months passed by with hardly any news and, at the end of that time, I received a phone call in Madrid from Eliane. After their separation I’d lost all contact with her but I still couldn’t manage to feel surprised, instead I immediately thought the worst. “Xavier asked me to call you,” she said, and since there was no indication as to when that had happened, I wasn’t sure whether he’d asked her to do so before he died or if he’d asked her that very moment, assuming he was still alive. “He suffered a serious relapse and he’s in hospital, possibly for some time, but he can’t write to you for the moment and he didn’t want you to worry too much. He’s been very ill, but he’s better now.” Her words were as acceptably conventional as one would expect in such a phone call, but I did manage to ask her two things, even though that meant obliging a memory, that is, someone who was a memory twice over, to speak: “Did he try to kill himself?” “No,” she replied, “it wasn’t that, but he has been very ill.” “Are you going to go back to him?” “No,” she replied, “that’s not possible.”
    During the final two years of our friendship, Xavier and I wroteand saw each other less frequently, I only went to Paris once and he never again visited Madrid. He often either neglected to answer my letters or took a long time to reply, and everything requires a certain rhythm. There are other things I could say about him, but I don’t want to talk about them now, they’re not things I actually experienced. The last time we saw each other was on a very brief trip I made to Paris. We had lunch at Balzar; he’d got a bit fatter – his chest had filled out