Among Strange Victims (16 page)

Marking exam papers bored him, but he occasionally had to laugh at the notions that occurred to his students, whose little brains appeared to be as lost on the paths of contemporary aesthetics as their bodies were on the plains of Castile, rambling without rhyme or reason through the corridors of a department that displayed a portrait of a king in every classroom. (Marcelo, a man who managed to have an opinion about almost everything, didn't care one way or the other about the monarchy. In his younger days, he had been a fervent defender of the Republic, without this—in his megalomania—stopping him from identifying himself with His Majesty, perhaps because the tabloids of the heart had taught him that He too was a man tormented by a multifaceted passion. But after a certain moment, he had lost interest in the king. Now Marcelo was one of those few Spaniards who felt themselves, as he himself expressed it whenever the occasion allowed, “closer to Europe than to his native soil,” and in the subtle clockwork mechanism that kept his convictions ticking, this was sufficient reason for pretending to ignore the Great National Issues.)

The exam papers he was marking were truly pitiful. He had the feeling none of his students had understood, not just the general sense of the module, but even his writing on the whiteboard. The majority limited themselves to repeating, with imbecilic exactitude, odd phrases extracted at random from the list of required reading, out-of-context fragments that could as easily pass for irrefutable maxims as pieces of graffiti scrawled on a bathroom wall. One more original student attempted to explain—without ever coming to the point—why Surrealism and its theoretical consequences led,
unhindered, to the legitimization of female circumcision. (Marcelo predicted for this student a notable future as a newspaper columnist and gave him a top grade: he always tried not to be hard on the most idiotic ones, absolutely convinced they would go far.)

Faced with the flagrant stupidity of the new generations of philosophers he was supposedly educating, Marcelo Valente felt depressed. Who, in that future filled with the derision of thought and cellular phones with an increasing number of functions, would make the effort to understand the greatness, the originality of his essay on Richard Foret? Marcelo had put the last scrap of enthusiasm in his career into this project. Afterwards, it would be all total indifference, the inane repetition of the same old class for thirty years, the acts of homage to this or that departing dean in the university auditorium, the tranquility and shame of knowing yourself to be protected by your tenure and a right to the professorial freedom you do not exercise.

But this would all come later. For now, the project on Foret was taking shape. Individualistic, uncouth, a stranger to the theoretical pretensions of his peers, Richard Foret embodied a version of the avant-garde Marcelo related to the spirit and ambience of his own youth back in the eighties, in a Madrid to which punk had arrived belatedly, violently, hand in hand with heroin and bad taste, to modify the face of Spain forever. Punk was, in a certain sense, Foret's cold vengeance, his raised fist seven decades on, and his posthumous triumph over Surrealist sentimentality and the innocuous eccentricity of Dada. Foret was, moreover, the architect of the Grand Trick, the first avant-garde artist who had managed to gather, in a final act, the dispersed threads of his life and work and weave them together in a gesture that made him immortal: his disappearance.

Foret had spent his last days—of which very little is known—in Mexico and had written letters to his wife, Bea Langley, that indicated a clear loss of reason. Marcelo was convinced he could, for once, set aside the speculative nature of his work for a year and dedicate himself to finding, in Mexico, Foret's unpublished writings and the records of his final months to add the finishing touches to his intellectual biography of the eccentric author and, with this done, compose a paper that would refer to punk as an artistic avant-garde
and interpret Foret's disappearance as the
triple salto mortale
that closes the pages of a text with a paragraph that is not final, but leaves forever open the roads that lead from the life to the work. Marcelo had something like that in mind.

Maybe it wasn't very original or very exciting, but it was a research project like any other, and he had already gotten in touch with Professor Velásquez at the University of Los Girasoles in Mexico to tell him how much he admired his work: his monograph—“with its sparks of brilliance,” as he put it, in a momentary fit of banality—“on the crazy avant-garde artists who ended up in Mexico” and a short chapter on Foret were to some extent along the same lines as his own interests, so he would now have to go there and occupy a pigeon-infested office (the only one available, according to Velásquez) while following to its finale the not completely justified impulse that had led him to fix on Richard Foret as the guiding light of the next year of his life. And he went to Mexico.

B

Beatrice Marjorie Langley. Daughter of Thomas Langley of Birmingham, a robust man with a frank mustache and a perhaps overly ingenuous gaze, a lawyer and humanist who died in London at dusk on the seventh day of 1905.

Beatrice M. Langley. Divorced. Mother of two children whom she abandoned in a boarding school in a country at war, and to whom she writes occasional letters, heavy with guilt, pretending they are having an exciting adventure. Letters that receive no reply other than a brief telegram from the headmistress reminding her it is time to pay the fees.

Bea Langley, formerly Bea Burton, formerly just Bea. Daughter of Elizabeth Langley, née Boyd, Francophile, unhappy, tyrannizer of servants, collector of Chinese porcelain, resident of London.

Beatrice: marked by a name that evokes the pain of a lover who descends into the underworld, a name she scarcely conceals
with the “Bea” by which her father, her beloved father, called her as a child.

Bea, with the thin lips, dark eyes, and the wide hips that make her see herself as even tinier than she is. With the impossible hair her mother used to comb with more anger than discipline during her entire childhood, complaining all the while that her daughter, her only daughter, had not inherited the silky hair of the Boyds, but that thick mane—a Langley trait—Bea bore all too happily. “Don't smile so much, Beatrice, you look stupid.”

Beatriz, the cosmopolitan poet and mediocre depicter of fairy scenes. The woman who would later have a daughter, Ada—indisputably her favorite—with a square jaw, like her dead father. Bea, the Mexican, the Londoner, the Parisian, resident of Buenos Aires, of Brooklyn, the desirable but unattainable woman for whom free love didn't include allowing the same brutes who, two years earlier, had proposed marriage to her on bended knee to touch her breasts. The liar who would so often say “I'm fine” during the twenties with suspicious conviction; the woman who, in the thirties, would vainly attempt to reinvent herself as a writer of light comedies and would end up, in the forties, writing the only thing she could write, what she should always have known she had to write: the story of her most alive, most dead lover, the story of her most monstrous suffering, of her fall.

Bea, the woman who, in the fifties, would find peace, or at least an attempt at oblivion that was perhaps the product of her years. The woman who has grandchildren she silently watches over each summer in her apartment in Montmartre. The Bea, Beatrice, Beatriz Langley, B. Langley, who will go on signing letters to a defunct lover with all those variants of her name. The one who will tear up the letters. The one who will hide the secret of her frustration in order to write poems dictated by pure, simple reason, the reason of dazzling insufficiency, timid reason.

Three events from her life before 1918 in some way sum up those thirty-three years. The scene is this: 1901; a melancholy, teenage Bea, with thin limbs covered by a fine golden down and painfully budding breasts, is crossing Europe with her father, alighting from
the train in the cities he considers essential to the sentimental and artistic education of the child. Elizabeth, the mother, resentfully imagines, from her bedroom with heavy curtains in the high-ceilinged house in London, how the complicit relationship between father and daughter becomes closer as they visit continental castles; a complicity in which she has never been included.

In a small station, the train is scheduled to stop for longer than usual, according to the ticket inspector. It is a large town or minor city in the north of Italy. The father remembers having heard that a very good wine, made from a native strain of grape, is consumed in the region, so he proposes having an early dinner in some trattoria and coming back to the platform before the train departs. But Bea isn't hungry. She is very quiet and is looking at people with her eyes half-closed, a characteristic she inherited from her mother that makes Mr. Langley nervous. The father leaves her in the care of one of the servants and gives her a stiff-armed wave from the platform; she watches him, undaunted, from the window.

Bea continues looking out the window for a long time. A man and a woman, both elegant and with an English air, are sitting on a station bench with a pair of suitcases before them; they seem to be arguing, although their voices are inaudible to the young girl, who invents an ingenuous love story for them. The woman, watched by the man, suddenly stands and straightens the brim of her hat, which the breeze had disarranged. Bea silently spies on the scene as the woman takes a suitcase in either hand and stamps off down the platform to a distant point on the right of Bea's line of sight. The man watches the retreating woman, takes off his top hat, and places it at his side on the bench; the man looks at his hat as if it were a friend he is asking what he should do next. Bea believes she understands what is happening: an amorous snub. The woman does not turn her head to see what her forsaken lover is doing. He slowly gets to his feet and pulls out a pistol from some fold in his overcoat: a long, slender gun that makes Bea think of her father's study, of the leather-bound books, of the curtain rails and the candelabras of her London home.

Beatrice Langley, at the age of sixteen, watches the scene in silence from the safety of her anonymity within the train carriage.
The pistol rises in slow motion until the barrel is perfectly horizontal, following the line of the man's arm. It is an extension of his body, a rigid finger pointing to and condemning the fleeing woman. Bea has to twist around to see—at the end of that line that will soon, following the trajectory of the bullet, cease to be imaginary—the woman moving away, suspecting nothing.